[EL] ELB News and Commentary 4/12/18

Thu Apr 12 08:14:25 PDT 2018

Plaintiffs Falsely Named by PILF and J. Christian Adams as Non-Citizen Voters Sue for Defamation And Violation of Federal Laws Barring Voter Intimidation<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=98648>
Posted on April 12, 2018 8:12 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=98648> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Read the complaint in LULAC v. PILF.<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4436534-Richmond-LULAC-v-PILF.html>

See this thread<https://twitter.com/JessicaHuseman/status/984447386868178944> from Jessica Huseman.
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Posted in chicanery<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>

“Was Facebook’s Work With the Trump Campaign Illegal?”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=98646>
Posted on April 12, 2018 7:45 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=98646> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Daniel Weiner for Slate.<https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/was-facebooks-work-with-the-trump-campaign-illegal.html>
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Posted in campaign finance<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>

“The National Enquirer, a Trump Rumor, and Another Secret Payment to Buy Silence”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=98644>
Posted on April 12, 2018 7:44 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=98644> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Ronan Farrow<https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-national-enquirer-a-donald-trump-rumor-and-another-secret-payment-to-buy-silence-dino-sajudin-david-pecker> for the New Yorker:

Late in 2015, a former Trump Tower doorman named Dino Sajudin met with a reporter from American Media, Inc.<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/03/the-national-enquirers-fervor-for-trump>, the publisher of the National Enquirer, at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. A few weeks earlier, Sajudin had signed a contract with A.M.I., agreeing to become a source and to accept thirty thousand dollars for exclusive rights to information he had been told: that Donald Trump<https://www.newyorker.com/tag/donald-trump>, who had launched his Presidential campaign five months earlier, may have fathered a child with a former employee in the late nineteen-eighties. Sajudin declined to comment for this story. However, six current and former A.M.I. employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared legal retaliation by the company, said that Sajudin had told A.M.I. the names of the alleged mistress and child. Reporters at A.M.I. had spent weeks investigating the allegations, and Sajudin had passed a lie-detector test, during which he testified that high-level Trump employees, including Trump’s head of security, Matthew Calamari, had told him the story…..

McDougal is now suing A.M.I. Her complaint states that she was not aware that A.M.I. consulted with Cohen during her negotiations with the company, as was later reported by the Times, and argues that A.M.I. was attempting to “illegally influence the 2016 presidential election.” (A.M.I.’s lawyers, in a response, argued that the company’s actions were protected by the First Amendment and that it was being unfairly penalized for its editorial decision not to run a story.) Stephanie Clifford is suing Cohen<https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/does-stormy-daniels-have-a-case-against-donald-trump> for defamation and for a release from her nondisclosure agreement. Her suit alleges that Cohen’s payment was a violation of campaign-finance law, because it suppressed speech “on a matter of public concern about a candidate for President.” (Cohen has said that Clifford’s story is false and that he made the payment with his own money to protect Trump and his family. Trump has said that he did not know of the payment.)

A nonprofit watchdog organization and a left-leaning political group have filed formal complaints<https://www.apnews.com/41091faf417445359a85a0e902df4337> requesting that the Justice Department, the Office of Government Ethics, and the Federal Election Commission examine whether the payments to Clifford and McDougal violated federal election law, since Trump did not include them on his financial-disclosure forms. Federal election law bars individuals from making contributions of more than five thousand four hundred dollars to a candidate during an election cycle.

Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, said of the payment to Sajudin, “As with the payment to Stormy Daniels and the McDougal matter, there’s certainly enough smoke here to merit further investigation. However, there are questions of both fact and law that would be relevant before concluding that there’s a likely campaign-finance violation.” One question would be whether the intent was to help the campaign. The timing, months after Trump announced his Presidential candidacy, could be “good circumstantial evidence” of that. Hasen added that the cases involving A.M.I. raised difficult legal questions, because media companies have various exemptions from campaign-finance law. However, he said, “If a corporation that has a press function is being used for non-press purposes to help a candidate win an election, then the press exemption would not apply to that activity.”
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Posted in Uncategorized<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>

“A Way to Eliminate One Form of Russian Election Hacking”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=98642>
Posted on April 11, 2018 2:27 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=98642> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

John Porter and Rob Richie:<http://www.insidesources.com/way-eliminate-one-form-russian-election-hacking/>

As revealed in February indictments by Robert Mueller, Russian operatives weaponized an antiquated rule of American democracy: the loophole that allows candidates to win all of a state’s electoral votes with less than 50 percent of the vote. Under our “plurality voting” laws, Donald Trump could win key battlegrounds if anti-Trump voters failed to consolidate behind Hillary Clinton.

The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman tweeted about Mueller’s indictments that a “big aspect of the Russian meddling was encouraging voting for a third-party candidate.” One Russian ad urged progressives to “choose peace” and vote for Green Party nominee Jill Stein as “the only way to take our country back.” The ad declared, “Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote.”

But for those with a preference between Trump and Clinton, it was due to our election method. Democratic consultant David Axelrod commented that “if Russians sought to redirect alienated HRC (Clinton) voters to third parties, as indictment alleges, it was a shrewd ploy.” Indeed, Stein ultimately won more votes than Trump’s victory margins in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which collectively had enough electoral votes to decide the presidency.

The Russians aren’t alone in manipulating this election method vulnerability. A ProPublica investigation revealed that allies of Democratic Senator Jon Tester in 2012 spent big money to boost a Libertarian as the “real conservative” in Montana. Tester ultimately won by 3.7 percent, with 6.6 percent going to the Libertarian. As Republicans take on Tester this year, a Republican activist has been exposed trying to secure the Green Party nomination to take votes away from Tester.

Such appalling tactics will remain “shrewd” as long as we maintain plurality voting. Fortunately, there’s a proven solution to the “plurality hack”: ranked choice voting. Voters rank their choice of candidates in order of preference, and ballots are counted in a series of “instant runoffs.” If a candidate wins a majority of first choices, that candidate wins, just like in any election. If not, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and their ballots go to the candidate ranked by the voter next on the ballot. This process continues until a candidate wins a majority.
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Posted in alternative voting systems<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=63>

--
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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