[EL] ELB News and Commentary 11/29/17

Tue Nov 28 19:36:17 PST 2017

Montana Secretary of State Backs Off Earlier Unsubstantiated Claims of Voter Fraud<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=96162>
Posted on November 28, 2017 7:28 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=96162> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
Montana Public Radio:<http://mtpr.org/post/stapleton-now-says-no-evidence-voter-fraud>
Montana’s secretary of state said Tuesday that he’s looked into whether there was election fraud during this May’s special election and hasn’t seen any evidence showing a coordinated effort to cast mismatched, or illegal, signatures on ballots.
Secretary of State Corey Stapleton raised the issue of potential voter fraud in August<http://mtpr.org/post/county-election-officials-secretary-state-clash-over-election-security>. At a meeting with state lawmakers, he said that just because it hasn’t happened in Montana before doesn’t mean it’s not happening now.
But in a Tuesday afternoon phone conference with clerks, Stapleton said that after examining results from a survey of illegal ballots from the May 25 special election, he now believes Montana has a healthy election system that could use some improvement.
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Posted in fraudulent fraud squad<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8>

Alabama: “Secretary of state says some voters wrongly told they are not registered”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=96160>
Posted on November 28, 2017 7:08 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=96160> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
AL:com:<http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2017/11/some_alabama_voters_being_wron.html>
The Alabama Secretary of State’s office said today it has learned that some voters are receiving erroneous messages telling them that they are not registered to vote when, in fact, they are registered.
Two organizations that are contacting voters said they are not sending erroneous message.
Secretary of State John Merrill’s office sent out a press release about the erroneous messages today. Some erroneous messages are coming from people who claim to be members of the NAACP and of Open Progress, the secretary of state’s office said.
The Alabama NAACP said in a press release today that it used a database from the Voter Action Network System to notify voters that it believed were not registered.
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Posted in election administration<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>

Trump Continues Claiming, Without Any Evidence, He Lost the Popular Vote Because of Widespread Voter Fraud<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=96157>
Posted on November 28, 2017 6:53 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=96157> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
From this eye-popping NYT story <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/us/politics/trump-access-hollywood-tape.html?_r=1> on the President’s lies:
Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the “Access Hollywood” tape are part of his lifelong habit of attempting to create and sell his own version of reality. Advisers say he continues to privately harbor a handful of conspiracy theories that have no grounding in fact.
In recent months, they say, Mr. Trump has used closed-door conversations to question the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He has also repeatedly claimed that he lost the popular vote last year because of widespread voter fraud, according to advisers and lawmakers.
One senator who listened as the president revived his doubts about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate chuckled on Tuesday as recalled the conversation. The president, he said, has had a hard time letting go of his claim that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States. The senator asked not to be named to discuss private conversations.

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Posted in fraudulent fraud squad<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8>

The Measure of a Metric, Part Three<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=96154>
Posted on November 28, 2017 6:51 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=96154> by Nicholas Stephanopoulos<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=12>
Yesterday<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=96137> I pointed out that the efficiency gap complies with a series of criteria that, Eric McGhee and I argue in a forthcoming article<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3077766>, can be used to evaluate measures of partisan gerrymandering. To determine if the same is true of other metrics, we simulated several thousand more district plans, allowing the major parties’ vote shares to vary between 25% and 75%. The below charts show how often partisan bias (on the left) and the mean-median difference (on the right) violate the principle that if a party wins more seats with the same votes, a measure should indicate a larger advantage for this party. Party vote share is on the x-axis; the frequency of violations of this principle is on the y-axis.
[http://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/a-300x199.png]
In competitive jurisdictions, where the statewide vote is close to split, partisan bias and the mean-median difference perform reasonably well. They infrequently show a party scoring the same (or worse) while winning more seats with the same votes. But in uncompetitive jurisdictions, where one party predominates statewide, violations of the principle rise sharply. By the time one party earns 60% of the statewide vote, partisan bias and the mean-median difference produce counterintuitive results about half the time.
To see if this analysis has real-world implications, we constructed a series of regression models. The dependent variable in each case is the average ideology of a state’s House members in a given term. The key independent variable is a measure of partisan gerrymandering: the efficiency gap, partisan bias, or the mean-median difference. And we ran separate models for each metric and for competitive elections (closer than 55%-45% statewide) and uncompetitive elections (further apart than 55%-45%).
The below chart displays the results of these models. Each point indicates the impact on a congressional delegation’s average ideology of increasing a particular gerrymandering metric by one standard deviation. It is apparent that in competitive electoral settings, all three measures have large and statistically significant effects. If a swing state’s efficiency gap, partisan bias, or mean-median difference becomes more pro-Democratic (or pro-Republican), the state’s delegation becomes more liberal (or conservative) on net. But in uncompetitive environments, only the efficiency gap remains statistically significant. It continues to show that gerrymandering influences congressional representation. Partisan bias and the mean-median difference, on the other hand, wrongly suggest that gerrymandering in safe states has no impact on delegations’ ideological makeups.
[http://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/b-300x219.png]
The conclusion we draw from these studies is that in the competitive states where most recent partisan gerrymandering lawsuits have been filed (e.g., North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin), all of the common gerrymandering metrics can and should be used. But if scholars or litigants want to analyze gerrymandering in uncompetitive states, they should not use partisan bias or the mean-median difference. These measures frequently violate the seat-vote principle in these settings, and are no longer connected to the substantive value—the quality of representation—that gerrymandering offends.
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Posted in Uncategorized<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>

“Ethics group demands investigation into vice chair of Trump’s election commission”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=96151>
Posted on November 28, 2017 11:04 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=96151> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
Washington Examiner:<http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ethics-group-demands-investigation-into-vice-chair-of-trumps-election-commission/article/2641856>
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington on Tuesday asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Kris Kobach is improperly getting a financial benefit by serving as vice chairman of the Trump administration’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
According to the complaint<https://s3.amazonaws.com/storage.citizensforethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/27230141/DOJ-Kobach-11-28-17.pdf>, Kobach has been paid for writing columns for Breitbart News. One of those was written in his official capacity with the election commission, which alleged serious voter fraud in New Hampshire.
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Posted in fraudulent fraud squad<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8>

Unanimous En Banc DC Circuit Rejects Challenge to Separate Federal Campaign Contribution Limits in Primary and General Election Campaigns<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=96149>
Posted on November 28, 2017 8:23 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=96149> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
This one always struck me as a weird challenge, and today, per Judge Srinivasan, the D.C. Circuit, sitting en banc, unanimously rejected the argumen<https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4311368/11-28-17-Holmes-v-FEC-Opinion.pdf>t:
Congress’s choice of a per-election structure thus is not a “prophylaxis-upon-prophylaxis”—a second anti-corruption measure layered on top of the base limits. Instead, the per election  structure is an essential ingredient of the base limits themselves—the first layer of prophylaxis. Unlike in McCutcheon, then, there is no warrant for attempting to ascertain whether the per-election timeframe of the $2,600 base limit itself combats corruption. Rather, it is enough if that base limit as a whole (of which its time period is an integral element) prevents the appearance or actuality of corruption in a manner satisfying the closely drawn standard.
I think it is very unlikely that the Supreme Court would want to take this case, which does not challenge the constitutionality of a $2,600 contribution limit itself.
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Posted in campaign finance<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>

--
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
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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