[EL] ELB News and Commentary 10/15/18

[Rick Hasen]

“Now for Rent: Email Addresses and Phone Numbers for Millions of Trump Supporters”
Posted on October 14, 2018 7:15 pm by Rick Hasen

NYT:

Early in his presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump dismissed political data as an “overrated” tool. But after he won the Republican nomination, his team began building a database that offers a pipeline into the heart of the party’s base, a comprehensive list including the email addresses and cellphone numbers of as many as 20 million supporters.

Now, consultants close to the Trump campaign are ramping up efforts to put that database — by far the most sought-after in Republican politics — to use, offering it for rent to candidates, conservative groups and even businesses.

It is an arrangement that has the potential to help the Republican Party in key midterm races, while providing a source of revenue for President Trump’s campaign and the consultants involved.

It has also set off concerns about diluting the power of one of Mr. Trump’s most potent political assets, while raising questions about whether his team is facilitating the sort of political profiteering that he disparaged during his campaign…

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump’s campaign, which is not known for its adherence to political norms, quietly signed a contract with a newly formed Virginia-based company called Excelsior Strategies to market the emails and cellphone numbers — what is known in the political industry as first-party data.

Excelsior is offering the chance to email Mr. Trump’s supporters at a rate of $35 per 1,000 addresses — or more if the renter also wants to push posts into the Facebook timelines of supporters — according to interviews and marketing emails obtained by The New York Times. The firm has also explored the possibility of clients’ being able to send text messages directly to the phones of Mr. Trump’s supporters, according to the marketing emails and interviews.

Posted in Uncategorized

 

 
“A senator snatched a student’s phone while being asked about Georgia voter registration uproar”
Posted on October 14, 2018 7:07 pm by Rick Hasen

WaPo:

This is evidently what an unnamed Georgia Tech student had in mind Saturday when he approached Perdue and began asking about Kemp, while recording video on his cellphone.

“Hey, so, uh, how can you endorse a candidate — ”

That was as far into the question as the student got. Before he could continue, Perdue snatched the phone out of the student’s hands, as evidence shows in a video suddenly turned erratic.

YDSA Georgia Tech at YDSAGT

Today @sendavidperdue visited Tech to campaign for Kemp. A student tried asking a simple question about @BrianKempGA ‘s racist scheme to threaten voter registrations from black people, but before he could even finish the question, Perdue stole his phone.

1:27 PM – Oct 13, 2018

·         7,318

·         6,745 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

“No, I’m not doing that. I’m not doing that,” the senator can be heard saying in the cellphone recording.

“You stole my property,” the student tells Perdue. “You stole my property.”

Posted in Uncategorized

 

 
“Crackdowns on potential voter fraud fuel worries about ballot access in November”
Posted on October 14, 2018 9:33 am by Rick Hasen

WaPo:

Nine months after President Trump was forced to dissolve a panel charged with investigating voter fraud, GOP officials across the country are cracking down on what they describe as threats to voting integrity — moves that critics see as attempts to keep some Americans from casting ballots in November’s elections.

In Georgia, election officials have suspended more than 50,000 applications to register to vote, most of them for black voters, under a rigorous Republican-backed law that requires personal information to exactly match driver’s license or Social Security records.

In Texas, the state attorney general has prosecuted nearly three dozen individuals on charges of voter fraud this year, more than the previous five years combined.

And in North Carolina, a U.S. attorney and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued subpoenas last month demanding that virtually all voting records in 44 counties be turned over to immigration authorities within weeks — a move that was delayed after objections from state election officials.

Voting rights advocates said Republicans are seizing on sporadic voting problems in an effort to disenfranchise voters of color.

Posted in Uncategorized

 

 
Missouri: “Voter ID ruling has election authorities worried about confusion at polls”
Posted on October 14, 2018 9:31 am by Rick Hasen

Missourian:

As the Nov. 6 general election approaches, a new shake-up regarding voter identification laws has election authorities across Missouri — including in Boone County — on their toes.

Cole County Judge Richard Callahan on Tuesday blocked provisions of the voter ID law that require people with a non-photo ID to sign an affidavit before casting a ballot. Callahan issued the ruling in a lawsuit filed against the state by Priorities USA.

Although an affidavit requirement could be reasonable, the one used for voters who present an ID without a photo is “contradictory and misleading,” Callahan ruled.

“The affidavit plainly requires the voter to swear that they do not possess a form of personal identification approved for voting while simultaneously presenting to the election authority a form of personal identification that is approved,” Callahan wrote.

After the ruling, the office of Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft emailed county clerks to let them know it would appeal the ruling and seek a stay, Boone County Clerk Taylor Burks said.

With little to no other guidance, election authorities are left to figure out what the ruling means, Burks said.

Posted in election administration, voter id

 

 
“Hawley vs. McCaskill: A sideshow battle of billionaire donors”
Posted on October 13, 2018 1:29 pm by Rick Hasen

The St. Louis-Post Dispatch reports.

 

Posted in campaign finance

 

 
“4 Women Indicted in North Texas Voter Fraud Ring”
Posted on October 12, 2018 3:23 pm by Rick Hasen

NBC DFW:

Four women who are accused of targeting elderly voters in 2016 were indicted on 30 felony counts of voter fraud and arrested following an investigation by the office of the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The defendants were members of an organized voter fraud ring and were paid to target elderly voters in certain northern Fort Worth precincts in a scheme to generate large number of mail ballots, then harvest those ballots for specific candidates in 2016, the office’s news release said….

The scheme was conducted when applications for mail ballot were proliferated in targeted precincts. When ballots were mailed out by election offices, the fraudsters attempted either to intercept the ballots or to “assist” elderly voters in voting their ballots to ensure votes were cast for the fraudsters’ choice. In most cases, the voters do not even know their votes have been stolen, the news release said.

The fraudulent applications were generated through forged signatures, some of which were obtained through deception, and by altering applications and resubmitting them without the knowledge of the voters, the news release said. Many of the voters were forced to cancel their mail ballots so they could vote in person and some were forced to receive primary ballots for the political party supported by the harvesters, though it was not the party the voters supported.

Posted in chicanery

 

 
“Federal Court Ruling in Georgia Shows Judges Have a Role to Play in Election Security”
Posted on October 12, 2018 1:08 pm by Richard Pildes

At the Lawfare blog, Jessica Marsden has a report on the recent decision of the federal district court in Georgia concerning whether insufficiently secure voting machines, which are prone to hacking, might violate the constitutional right to vote.  Here are a couple excerpts from Marsden’s report on the decision:

Last month, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia recognized that the risk of election hacking is of constitutional significance—and that courts can do something about it. In Curling v. Kemp, two groups of Georgia voters contend that Georgia’s old paperless voting machines are so unreliable that they compromise the plaintiffs’ constitutional right to vote. In ruling on the voters’ motion for preliminary injunction, Judge Amy Totenberg held that the plaintiffs had demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits—in other words, Georgia’s insecure voting system likely violated their constitutional rights. While the court declined to order relief in time for the 2018 elections, the ruling suggests that Georgia may eventually be ordered to move to a more secure voting system. . .

The court further held that these serious security flaws and vulnerabilities in Georgia’s voting system implicate the constitutional guarantee of the right to vote. The right to vote is not satisfied simply by filling out a ballot or making selections on a touchscreen. As Totenberg recognized, voters have a “fundamental right to cast an effective vote (i.e., a vote that is accurately counted).” She concluded that, because of their security flaws, Georgia’s DRE machines do not fulfill that guarantee, in violation of plaintiffs’ due process and equal protection rights.

Posted in Uncategorized

 

 
Americans Learn the Russian Trick of Spreading Disinformation via Social Media
Posted on October 12, 2018 6:58 am by Rick Hasen

Sheera Frenkel for the NYT:

What Right Wing News did was part of a shift in the flow of online disinformation, falsehoods meant to mislead and inflame. In 2016, before the presidential election, state-backed Russian operatives exploited Facebook and Twitter to sway voters in the United States with divisive messages. Now, weeks before the midterm elections on Nov. 6, such influence campaigns are increasingly a domestic phenomenon fomented by Americans on the left and the right.

“There are now well-developed networks of Americans targeting other Americans with purposefully designed manipulations,” said Molly McKew, an information warfare researcher at the New Media Frontier, a firm that studies social media.

Politics has always involved shadings of the truth via whisper campaigns, direct-mail operations and negative ads bordering on untrue. What is different this time is how domestic sites are emulating the Russian strategy of 2016 by aggressively creating networks of Facebook pages and accounts — many of them fake — that make it appear as if the ideas they are promoting enjoy widespread popularity, researchers said. The activity is also happening on Twitter, they said.

Posted in campaigns, social media and social protests

 

 
“Adelson drops tens of millions more to save the GOP Congress”
Posted on October 12, 2018 6:54 am by Rick Hasen

Politico:

Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson is pumping tens of millions of dollars more into Republican Party coffers in an 11th-hour push to save their congressional majorities, according to two senior Republicans familiar with the donation.

The contributions were made to a pair of GOP super PACs tied to congressional Republicans, Senate Leadership Fund and Congressional Leadership Fund. They are expected to be reported in public filings with the Federal Election Commission by Oct. 15.

The figures would almost certainly make Adelson, a close ally of President Donald Trump, the biggest GOP donor of the 2018 election cycle. Even before his most recent contributions, the 85-year-old mogul and his wife Miriam had given $25 million to the Senate super PAC and $30 million to the House super PAC.

Posted in campaign finance, campaigns

 

 
“Arkansas Supreme Court upholds revised voter ID law”
Posted on October 12, 2018 6:50 am by Rick Hasen

AP:

Arkansas’ highest court on Thursday upheld a voter ID law that is nearly identical to a restriction struck down by the court four years ago.

The 5-2 decision from the Arkansas Supreme Court means the law, which requires voters to show photo identification before casting a ballot, will remain in effect in this year’s midterm election. Unlike the measure struck down in 2014, the law approved last year allows voters to cast provisional ballots without a photo ID if they sign a sworn statement confirming their identities.

Posted in The Voting Wars, voter id

 

 
“What Stands in the Way of Native American Voters?”
Posted on October 12, 2018 6:48 am by Rick Hasen

CPI: 

Between 2008 and 2016, Sioux County averaged a voter turnout rate of 39.5 percent, the lowest among North Dakota’s 53 counties, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of data from the North Dakota secretary of state’s office. Two other counties whose populations are majority Native American have the second- and third-lowest turnout in the state over the same period.

Standing Rock is one of six communities the Center for Public Integrity is profiling this month on the eve of a critical midterm election that will decide the balance of power in Washington. These communities are connected by their profound needs and sense of political abandonment at a time when President Donald Trump’s administration has declared the nation’s war on poverty “largely over and a success.”

There are many reasons why residents of Standing Rock don’t vote: the pressures associated with poverty, a sense of disenfranchisement and apathy, a lack of trust in government and politicians driven by unjust treatment of Native Americans over generations.

This election brings a new complication: The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to stay a lower court ruling allowing the state’s voter identification requirements to go into force for the November election.

Posted in Voting Rights Act

 

 
“Georgia’s held-up voter registrations reinforce black Americans’ fears about voting rights”
Posted on October 12, 2018 6:44 am by Rick Hasen

The Fix reports.

Posted in The Voting Wars

 

 
“Complaints of Voter Suppression Loom Over Georgia Governor’s Race”
Posted on October 11, 2018 8:35 pm by Rick Hasen

NYT:

The office of Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state and the Republican nominee for governor in November’s election, has stalled more than 53,000 voter applications, according to a recent report from The Associated Press. The list includes a disproportionately high number of black voters, the report said, which is stirring concern among nonpartisan voting rights advocates and supporters of Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate, who is vying to be the first black woman in the country to be elected governor….

Mr. Kemp’s secretary of state office has denied the accusations of intentional voter suppression, and said the reason for the backlog was shoddy voter registration work by liberal groups.

In a fund-raising email late Wednesday night, Mr. Kemp said to supporters that all 53,000 Georgians now on the pending voting lists will still be able to vote on Election Day, if they meet all the state’s other identification requirements. He tried to frame the backlash to The Associated Press report as partisan bickering….

But Democrats say that even if the voters on the list turn out to be eligible to vote, the “pending” status could lead to longer lines and confusion at polling places and might discourage some voters from casting their ballots.

Posted in The Voting Wars

 

 

Rick Hasen 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20181014/89d68f83/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.png
Type: image/png
Size: 2021 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20181014/89d68f83/attachment.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image002.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 3507 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20181014/89d68f83/attachment.jpg>