[EL] ELB News and Commentary 10/28/17

[Rick Hasen]

“Talking Points Brought to Trump Tower Meeting Were Shared With Kremlin”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=95729>
Posted on October 27, 2017 3:06 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=95729> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
NYT:<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/us/politics/trump-tower-veselnitskaya-russia.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fpolitics&action=click&contentCollection=politics&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0>
Natalia V. Veselnitskaya arrived at a meeting at Trump Tower<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/trump-russia-email-clinton.html> in June 2016 hoping to interest top Trump campaign officials in the contents of a memo she believed contained information damaging to the Democratic Party and, by extension, Hillary Clinton. The material was the fruit of her research as a private lawyer, she has repeatedly said, and any suggestion that she was acting at the Kremlin’s behest that day is anti-Russia “hysteria.”
But interviews and records show that in the months before the meeting, Ms. Veselnitskaya had discussed the allegations with one of Russia’s most powerful officials, the p<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/world/europe/russia-donald-trump-jr-kompromat-yuri-chaika.html>rosecutor <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/world/europe/russia-donald-trump-jr-kompromat-yuri-chaika.html> g<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/world/europe/russia-donald-trump-jr-kompromat-yuri-chaika.html>eneral<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/world/europe/russia-donald-trump-jr-kompromat-yuri-chaika.html>,<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/world/europe/russia-donald-trump-jr-kompromat-yuri-chaika.html> Yuri Y. Chaika<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/world/europe/russia-donald-trump-jr-kompromat-yuri-chaika.html>. And the memo she brought with her closely followed a document that Mr. Chaika’s office had given to an American congressman two months earlier, incorporating some paragraphs verbatim.
The coordination between the Trump Tower visitor and the Russian prosecutor general undercuts Ms. Veselnitskaya’s<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/world/europe/natalia-veselnitskaya-donald-trump-jr-russian-lawyer.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FRussia&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=collection> account that she was a purely independent actor when she sat down with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, then the Trump campaign chairman. It also suggests that emails from an intermediary to the younger Mr. Trump promising that Ms. Veselnitskaya would arrive with information from Russian prosecutors were rooted at least partly in fact — not mere “puffery,”<http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/07/11/donald-trump-jr-hannity-interview-email-chain-russian-lawyer-meeting> as the president’s son later said<http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/07/11/donald-trump-jr-hannity-interview-email-chain-russian-lawyer-meeting>
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Posted in Uncategorized<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


Trump DOJ Brief, Supporting Texas in 5th Circuit Voter ID Appeal, Supports Voter ID Generally as Legitimate Policy Choice<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=95726>
Posted on October 27, 2017 2:49 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=95726> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
Read the brief.<http://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/doj-5th-veasey.pdf>

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Posted in The Voting Wars<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>


“Candidate Disclosure and Ballot Access Bills: Novel Questions on Voting and Disclosure”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=95724>
Posted on October 27, 2017 2:39 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=95724> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
Danielle Lang has posted this draft <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3051416> on SSRN (forthcoming, UCLA Law Review).  Here is the abstract:
For nearly a half century prior to the current administration, U.S. presidents and most serious candidates for the presidency have released their tax returns for public inspection. The practice of presidential tax disclosure serves several key functions. It provides the public with important insights into the president’s or presidential candidate’s potential conflicts of interest, particularly with respect to personal conflicts of interest related to reform of the tax system. It also instills public confidence in the honesty, integrity, and transparency of a presidential administration. Yet, despite repeated calls throughout the 2016 election cycle and since his election and inauguration, from advocates and ordinary citizens alike, and sustained public support for disclosure, President Donald Trump has not released his tax returns. President Trump’s refusal to comply with this well-established norm has exposed a gap in our regulation of presidential elections.
Legislators in at least twenty-three states have released at least forty bills seeking to force presidential candidate tax return transparency. These laws would hinge access to the state presidential ballot on voluntary disclosure. Ballot access laws requiring presidential candidate disclosure, even in just a few states, would reinforce the disclosure norm and leave future candidates in the position of abandoning entire states (and thus harming their popular vote totals) in order to evade transparency.
This Essay addresses whether these state ballot access measures pass constitutional muster and concludes that they do. These ballot access measures are not unlawful additional substantive qualifications for the presidency but rather procedural requirements akin to other state laws requiring the filing of petition signatures or filing fees. The Essay further posits that several key drafting choices would strengthen their likelihood of success in the nearly inevitable court challenges they would face. While several academics and practitioners have opined recently about this issue in the public sphere, there has not yet been any robust legal analysis of these proposals, which raise novel questions at the intersection of disclosure and ballot access law. This Essay begins to fill that gap.
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Posted in campaigns<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>


38 Ideas for Fixing American Democracy<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=95722>
Posted on October 27, 2017 2:33 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=95722> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
WaPo.<https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/lifestyle/magazine/how-to-fix-american-democracy/?utm_term=.6e31dd7f3e2a>
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Posted in Uncategorized<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>
Ohio Voter Purge Case Switched to January Calendar<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=95720>
Posted on October 27, 2017 2:27 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=95720> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
<https://twitter.com/lawrencehurley>
 <https://twitter.com/lawrencehurley> https://twitter.com/lawrencehurley/status/924023293732179969


NEW: Supreme Court has taken Ohio voting purge case off its November calendar because petitioners had to switch lawyers
2:21 PM - Oct 27, 2017<https://twitter.com/lawrencehurley/status/924023293732179969>
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Posted in Supreme Court<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>


Texas Files Supreme Court Brief in State Redistricting Case<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=95718>
Posted on October 27, 2017 2:25 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=95718> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
Read it here.<https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/files/epress/files/2017/ABBOTT_et_al_v_PEREZ_et_al-JURISDICTIONAL_STATEMENT.PDF>
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Posted in Uncategorized<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“How corporations are still playing politics more than a century after President Theodore Roosevelt and the Tillman Act”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=95716>
Posted on October 27, 2017 2:23 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=95716> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
Michael Beckel <https://www.issueone.org/corporations-still-playing-politics-century-president-theodore-roosevelt-tillman-act/> for Issue One:
For instance, last year in Nevada, the app-based ride-sharing company Uber sponsored campaign mailers and e-mail messages to its riders and drivers urging the reelection of Republican Assemblyman Derek Armstrong, as veteran journalist Jon Ralston reported.
Meanwhile, at the federal level, roughly three-dozen publicly traded companies donated to super PACs ahead of the 2016 election, according to research by the Committee on Economic Development. About a dozen of these were Fortune 500 companies.
The most prominent of these corporate super PAC donors? Oil giant Chevron, which has donated $7.75 million to super PACs focused on electing Republicans to Congress since the Citizens United decision in 2010, including roughly $1 million so far this year.
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Posted in campaign finance<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>, campaigns<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>


--
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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