[EL] ELB News and Commentary 5/21/17

Sun May 21 09:57:39 PDT 2017

“Status Check: Where Voting Rights Cases Stand With The Supreme Court”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92653>
Posted on May 21, 2017 9:52 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92653> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NPR Weekend Edition:<http://www.npr.org/2017/05/21/529364506/status-check-where-voting-rights-cases-stand-with-the-supreme-court?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social>

The high Court decided not to hear a case on North Carolina’s restrictive voting law. But other cases are moving forward. NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks to Richard Hasen, law professor at UC Irvine.
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Posted in redistricting<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=6>, Supreme Court<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>, Voting Rights Act<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=15>

Supreme Court Could Announce Monday Whether It is Taking Up McCain-Feingold Soft Money Case<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92651>
Posted on May 21, 2017 9:50 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92651> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

It was listed<https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docketfiles/16-865.htm> for last Thursday’s conference. I suspect that it will be at least one more conference before we get an announcement.

As noted<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92109> when the Trump Administration surprisingly supported the constitutionality of the soft money rules, I still think the Court is fairly likely to take the case. From a post of mine on this case<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=88945> the day before the election and before Justice Gorsuch was confirmed:

Back in August I wrote at NLJ<http://www.nationallawjournal.com/id=1202734808860/OpEd-The-McCainFeingold-Act-May-Doom-Itself> about Republicans’ third attempt to overturn McCain-Feingold’s limits on how much political parties can raise from donors for election related advertising and other things. I wrote that if the Republicans would be successful in getting a three-judge court, that would put the Supreme Court in a position where, because of technical procedural reasons, it would almost certainly take the case. When I wrote that in August, Justice Scalia was still on the Court, and I said there was a good chance that the Roberts Court, if confronted with the soft money rules, could well overturn them, killing the second part of McCain-Feingold. (The Court killed the first part, the limit on corporate and labor union independent spending, in Citizens United).

Well today the three judge court ruled unanimously ruled,<https://t.co/tAQJ54CKFu> and rightly so, that it is bound by the Supreme Court’s earlier decision in the McConnell case upholding the soft money rules.

So the issue is perfectly teed up through appeal to the Supreme Court. But…

No more Justice Scalia means that Court is likely evenly divided at best on the question. So little prospect now the ban would be overturned.

If we get a ninth Justice things could change. A Clinton-appointed Justice would almost certainly vote to uphold the limits, while a Trump-appointed Justice would almost certainly vote to strike them down.
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Posted in campaign finance<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>, Supreme Court<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>

Same Ultra-Right Campaign Mega-Donors Bankroll Fomenting Campus Unrest<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92649>
Posted on May 21, 2017 9:20 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92649> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NYT:<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/us/college-conservative-speeches.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=sectionfront>

The speeches are a part of the group’s mission of grooming future conservative leaders — Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, a White House adviser, are among its alumni — and its long list of donors has included the television game show host Pat Sajak, the novelist Tom Clancy, the billionaire brothers David H. and Charles G. Koch, and the Amway billionaires Richard and Helen Devos, who gave $10 million to endow the Reagan Ranch near Santa Barbara, Calif., which the foundation runs as a preserve. (Their daughter-in-law, Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, is not a donor, the group says.)

Over the past two years, armed with a $16 million infusion from the estate of an orthodontist in California, Robert Ruhe, the organization has doubled its programming, including campus speeches. In 2016 that meant 111 speakers on 77 campuses. On the group’s website, it boasted of “dispatching” 31 speakers to colleges last month alone.

In that time, the speakers have gotten edgier, more in-your-face and sometimes even meanspirited. Among them is Ann Coulter, whose canceled speech<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/us/berkeley-ann-coulter-speech-canceled.html> last month at the University of California, Berkeley, led the foundation, which was covering most of her $20,000 fee, to sue the college, arguing that it had violated the First Amendment in its failure to provide a suitable time and place for the event.

The resulting clashes on university campuses, including protests and efforts to block speeches, have raised free speech questions. And at Berkeley, even liberals who oppose Ms. Coulter’s viewpoints said her speech should have been allowed to proceed.
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Posted in chicanery<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>

“‘Kris Kobach Came After Me for an Honest Mistake’; Trump’s pick to investigate his theories about voter fraud has a record of targeting older conservatives.”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92646>
Posted on May 21, 2017 9:12 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92646> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Politico:<http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/21/kris-kobach-voter-fraud-investigation-prosecution-215164>

When Kris Kobach, Kansas’ aggressive secretary of state, convinced the state legislature to give him prosecutorial power to pursue voter fraud, he said it was necessary to root out tens of thousands of undocumented aliens who were voting as well as tens of thousands more who he claimed were voting in two states.

Two years later, Kobach has produced exactly nine convictions. Most of them were not illegal immigrants but rather older registered Republicans. Who Kobach targeted, and the controversial homegrown computer program he used to find them, matter even more now that he has been selected by President Trump to lead a commission on voter fraud. Kobach’s boss has claimed on numerous occasions, without evidence, that millions of illegal ballots cost him the popular vote. Kobach, despite his sweeping pronouncements to Kansas politicians, hasn’t found anything resembling a fraud of that proportion….

In August of 2012, Wilson, a 66-year-old entrepreneur, went to vote in Goodland, Kansas, a small town near the Colorado border. When Wilson was asked where he lived, he said he owned homes in both Kansas and Colorado. When he was asked where he voted, he answered that he voted in local elections in both states. An election official told him to fill out a provisional ballot, so he did. When he went to the clerk’s office to update his address and vote in 2014, he again filled out a provisional ballot at the direction of the clerk.

“I’d vote for president in one state, and local issues in both places,” he told POLITICO Magazine. He said he’d been doing this ever since his property tax bill on a hotel he owned in Goodland had doubled in one year in 2004.

Because they were provisional ballots, they were never actually counted. But that didn’t matter to Kobach who in 2015, after a local prosecutor’s decision not to open a case, charged Wilson with three felonies and seven misdemeanors. Kobach alleged that Wilson had voted unlawfully going back to 2010 and that he had committed perjury by signing Kansas’s voting registration form, which stipulates citizens verify they will vote only once.

Wilson, who voted for Trump last November, spent 18 months fighting Kobach and the charges against him. He went through two lawyers and, he says, nearly $50,000 in legal fees before pleading guilty to three misdemeanor counts of voting without being qualified and two misdemeanor counts of falsely swearing to an affidavit. He was fined $6,000 fine, and another $158 in court costs. “Kris Kobach came after me for an honest mistake,” Wilson said. “Damn right, I’m upset.”
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Posted in chicanery<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>, The Voting Wars<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>

“It’s not over: The FEC is on the job with messy 2016 reporting by Trump campaign and JFCs”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92644>
Posted on May 19, 2017 9:14 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92644> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Open Secrets:<https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/05/fec-is-on-the-job-with-messy-2016-reporting-by-trump/>

Take the campaign’s September monthly report, covering Aug. 1-31, 2016. It has gone through four iterations. The first version, filed by the Sept. 20 deadline, was 25,625 pages long. But when it was amended for the first time — eight days after the election, and after an FEC request for more information — it came it at more than twice that length. The original report had failed to correctly identify hundreds of contributions that were routed to the campaign through the two JFCs.

Many of those contributions were illegal — for instance, they were made by LLCs that were ineligible to donate to candidates or parties. The same report was amended twice more, including this week, about nine months after the donations came in.

In fact, a week ago (May 12), the Trump campaign filed more than 189,000 pages of amended FEC reports — five reports in all, covering the months of July and September and including the post-general (Oct. 20-Nov. 28) and year-end (Nov. 29-Dec.31) periods….

Besides the mysterious degree of sloppiness shown by Trump’s operation in its FEC filings, there’s another lesson in the tussle between his organizations and the FEC: Whatever we and others may say about the FEC’s general failure to operate as a campaign finance enforcement agency (and there’s a heap of evidence for that argument), its Reports Analysis Division — which reviews every report that comes in the door and follows up with detailed questions about things that don’t look right — is definitely on the job.

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Posted in campaign finance<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>, federal election commission<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=24>

“The GOP is running its anti-abortion playbook against voting rights — and it’s working”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92642>
Posted on May 19, 2017 9:05 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92642> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Ian Millhiser<https://thinkprogress.org/gop-anti-abortion-playbook-voting-rights-aa0ccac3304e> for Think Progress.
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Posted in Supreme Court<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>, The Voting Wars<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>, Voting Rights Act<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=15>

“Alabama Legislature approves bill that would restore ‘many’ felons’ voting rights”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92640>
Posted on May 19, 2017 4:11 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92640> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Good news<http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2017/05/alabama_legislature_approves_b.html> from Alabama.
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Posted in felon voting<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=66>

“A Test of American Democracy; In attempts to undermine democracy, state lawmakers have set their sights on the courts.”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92637>
Posted on May 19, 2017 3:26 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92637> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Alicia Bannon and Nathaniel Sobel at TAP.<http://prospect.org/article/test-american-democracy>

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Posted in campaigns<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>, judicial elections<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=19>, The Voting Wars<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>

Wisconsin State Supreme Court Candidate Tweets Message Against Voter ID<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92635>
Posted on May 19, 2017 11:01 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92635> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Hmmm….<https://twitter.com/patrickdmarley/status/865626558207107073>
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Posted in Uncategorized<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>

Politifact: “No, thousands of dead people are not registered to vote in North Carolina”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92633>
Posted on May 19, 2017 10:57 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92633> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Politifact North Carolina:<http://www.politifact.com/north-carolina/statements/2017/may/18/chain-email/no-thousands-dead-people-are-not-registered-vote-n/>

A chain email has begun circulating in North Carolina that claims widespread irregularities in the state’s voter rolls.

The email caught our attention with its subject line, “PROOF !! North Carolina has the world’s oldest voters !”

It says there are thousands of registered voters in North Carolina who are 110 or more years old, including one person who is a whopping 219 years old.

Though tongue-in-cheek, the implication is clear – that many dead people are still actively registered, perhaps allowing others to commit voter fraud by casting ballots in their names….

T

he chain email’s most eye-popping claim is about that 219-year-old voter. It’s also the first mistake the email makes. It refers to that person as a male, but a list of voters included in the email clearly shows he is really a she.

There’s more intrigue: In 2012, when Breitbart wrote about super-old voters in North Carolina, it didn’t mention anyone over 200. We wondered if this woman only recently decided – nearly a century since being eligible to vote – that now was the time to finally register.

So we asked Pat Gannon, the spokesman for the North Carolina State Board of Elections. He said the state database does appear to show 5,391 people over 110 – a few more than the email mentioned, even – but that there are several honest explanations.

For the 219-year-old, he said, it amounts to just plain human error when a clerk was entering the person’s information.

“The ‘219-year-old’ voter was inadvertently given a birth date of 1797 instead of 1979, according to our research,” Gannon wrote in an email. “We’ve also determined that the voters that show up as 118, 120 and 154 years old do so because of data entry errors. Their dates of birth will soon be corrected in our database.”
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Posted in election administration<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>, The Voting Wars<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>

More Details on How Kobach is Assembling Fraudulent Fraud Squad Voting Commission<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92631>
Posted on May 19, 2017 10:45 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92631> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Anniston Star<https://www.annistonstar.com/news/merrill-says-he-will-have-say-in-trump-s-voter/article_bfe9450a-3c5f-11e7-976c-afa4f042ea4e.html>:

Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill says he will have some say in who gets selected to serve on a federal election fraud panel led by Vice President Mike Pence….

Merrill said he knew about the plan to form a panel since last February after the National Association of Secretaries of State sent a team of secretaries of state to meet with Pence.

According to Merrill, the team included three secretaries of state: Connie Hudson of Indiana, Kris Kobach of Kansas and Tom Schedler of Louisiana.

Kobach contacted Merrill in early April, he said, and that’s when he was told he would have influence in selecting people who would serve as members of the panel.
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Posted in chicanery<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>, fraudulent fraud squad<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8>, The Voting Wars<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>

Devastating 2 Minute ACLU Video on Trump/Kobach Claims of Massive Voter Fraud in 2016 Elections<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92628>
Posted on May 19, 2017 9:50 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92628> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Watch.<https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/865603794578530304>
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Posted in fraudulent fraud squad<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8>, The Voting Wars<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>

Talking Voting Rights after Shelby County, Especially NC Cert Denial, in Daily Journal Podcast<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92626>
Posted on May 19, 2017 9:38 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92626> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Listen.<http://www.dailyjournal.com/public/pubmain.cfm?shCenFileName=war&shNewsType=war&selOption=war&NewsId=957512&pubdate=05/19/2017>

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Posted in Supreme Court<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>, The Voting Wars<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>, Voting Rights Act<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=15>

“North Carolina Is Already at Work on Its Next Voter Suppression Law”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92624>
Posted on May 19, 2017 8:52 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92624> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Kirk Ross at The Progressive<http://progressive.org/dispatches/north-carolina-is-already-at-work-on-its-next-voter-suppress/>.
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Posted in election administration<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>, The Voting Wars<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>

“How Jeff Sessions could determine the state of democracy in Texas”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92622>
Posted on May 19, 2017 8:00 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92622> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Reveal:<https://www.revealnews.org/article/how-jeff-sessions-could-determine-the-state-of-democracy-in-texas/>

Federal judges have ruled four separate times this year that Republican leaders in Texas rigged election systems to discriminate against minority voters, which potentially could land the entire state under federal oversight.

Under what’s known as preclearance, local and state governments with a history of discrimination cannot change their voting procedures without approval from officials in Washington. However, the man who would be in charge of that oversight, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has been one of the leading opponents<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeff-sessions-voting-rights-act_us_587520a2e4b099cdb0ffc2c1> of the law Texas officials broke, the Voting Rights Act.

“I don’t think we can expect there’s going to be very aggressive enforcement under Sessions,” said University of California, Irvine law professor Richard Hasen, who runs the influential Election Law Blog<http://electionlawblog.org/>.

If Texas is put into preclearance, the internal workings of the Justice Department will play a crucial role in the health of the state’s democracy.
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Posted in Department of Justice<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=26>, The Voting Wars<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>, Voting Rights Act<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=15>

--
Rick Hasen
Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science
UC Irvine School of Law
401 E. Peltason Dr., Suite 1000
Irvine, CA 92697-8000
949.824.3072 - office
949.824.0495 - fax
rhasen at law.uci.edu<mailto:rhasen at law.uci.edu>
http://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/
http://electionlawblog.org<http://electionlawblog.org/>
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