[EL] ELB News and Commentary 2/8/19

Thu Feb 7 20:20:38 PST 2019

“Texas’ election chief defends sharing flawed noncitizen list”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103541>
Posted on February 7, 2019 8:14 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103541> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

AP<https://www.kxnet.com/news/politics/texas-election-chief-defends-sharing-flawed-noncitizen-list/1762345664>:

Texas’ election chief on Thursday defended giving prosecutors a list of 95,000 potential noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls before vetting the information, which turned out to wrongly include scores of people who were naturalized before casting legal ballots.

Secretary of State David Whitley deflected sharp questions from Texas lawmakers over whether his office made mistakes in his first public comments since his office in January called into question the citizenship of tens of thousands of voters since 1996. Nearly 58,000 of those voters were said to have cast a ballot at least once, but those numbers quickly unraveled .

Within days, local officials found that the list wrongly included scores of naturalized citizens, setting off accusations from Democrats and Latino rights groups of attempted voter suppression and launching another heated voting rights battle in Texas.
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Posted in The Voting Wars<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>

North Carolina: “New board gets private preview of Congressional race probe”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103538>
Posted on February 7, 2019 7:58 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103538> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

AP<http://www.dailyjournal.net/2019/02/07/us-election-2018-north-carolina-4/>:

A  reconstituted North Carolina elections board received a private preview Thursday of what investigators uncovered in their probe of absentee ballot irregularities in the country’s last unresolved congressional race.

Chairman Bob Cordle said the new five-member State Board of Elections received a “full briefing” on findings in the 9th Congressional District race. The members met behind closed doors with attorneys and investigators for nearly four hours.

Cordle said the findings will be released publicly at a hearing Feb. 18. He said the board will vote at the hearing’s close on whether to certify the 9th District results, order a new election or take some other step….

Whatever decision the board makes could be superseded by the U.S. House, where Democrats in the charge of the chamber have suggested they may review the election no matter what action the state board takes. The U.S. Constitution says the House is the judge of the elections and qualifications of its members.
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Posted in chicanery<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>, recounts<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=50>

The Impact of Partisan Gerrymandering on Political Parties — Part I<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103535>
Posted on February 7, 2019 6:57 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103535> by Nicholas Stephanopoulos<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=12>

In her concurring opinion in Whitford<https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-1161_dc8f.pdf>, Justice Kagan suggested that partisan gerrymandering might be unconstitutional not just because it dilutes the votes of a party’s supporters but also because it burdens their associational rights. “Members of the ‘disfavored party’ in the State,” she wrote, “may face difficulties fundraising, registering voters, attracting volunteers, generating support from independents, and recruiting candidates to run for office.” Since Whitford, plaintiffs in several gerrymandering cases have accepted Justice Kagan’s invitation to mount associational challenges. They have introduced testimony and other evidence from voters, candidates, and party officials that their associational activities have indeed been inhibited.

What these litigants haven’t done, though, is test the overall validity of Justice Kagan’s claim. They haven’t analyzed whether, as a general matter (as opposed to in a particular state), parties victimized by gerrymandering incur the injuries alleged by Justice Kagan. In a paper<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3330695> that Chris Warshaw and I just posted, we investigate precisely this issue. Today, I’ll describe our data and methods. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about our findings and their implications.

To capture the extent of gerrymandering, first, we use five separate measures of partisan advantage: the efficiency gap, the mean-median difference, the declination, partisan bias, and an aggregate of all these metrics. Through this inclusive approach, we’re able to bypass the ongoing debate<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3077766> about the measures’ respective strengths and weaknesses. We calculate the five metrics for congressional and state house elections from 1972 to 2016. This large dataset covers the vast majority of redistricting since the one person, one vote revolution of the 1960s.

Second, we use the following four variables to operationalize the associational harms that Justice Kagan cited in Whitford:
1.      Contesting seats: The difference between the parties’ respective shares of contested seats. This is a measure of “recruiting candidates to run for office.”
2.      Candidate quality: The difference between the aggregate quality of each party’s candidates (where incumbents and challengers who have previously held elected office are considered high-quality). This is also a measure of “recruiting candidates to run for office.”
3.      Campaign contributions: The share of total campaign contributions received by each party’s candidates. This is a measure of “fundraising.”
4.      Vote share: Each party’s mean vote share across all districts. This is a measure of “generating support from independents.”

Lastly, we run a series of difference-in-difference and dynamic panel models to evaluate the impacts of partisan advantage on these variables. All of these models include fixed effects for states and years; the latter also lag the outcome variables. The models thus compare different years within the same state and estimate how parties’ associational activities are affected when partisan advantage is relatively high or low for that state.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>

“Massachusetts Lawmakers Consider Restoring Voting Rights, but Organizers Are Not Waiting”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103532>
Posted on February 7, 2019 12:48 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103532> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Daniel Nichanian<https://www.appealpolitics.org/2019/massachusetts-lawmakers-consider-restoring-voting-rights-but-organizers-are-not-waiting/> for The Appeal.
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Posted in felon voting<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=66>

“Amendment 4 is already changing Tampa’s electorate. Here’s how:”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103530>
Posted on February 7, 2019 12:38 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103530> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Tampa Bay Times<https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2019/02/07/amendment-4-is-already-changing-tampas-electorate-heres-how/>:

That’s when voters approved Amendment 4, a ballot measure that restored the right to vote to most people who had served out sentences for felony convictions. What would 1.2 million potential new voters mean to perhaps the purplest big state?

But an earlier test for Amendment 4 comes on March 5 in Tampa. It’s the election for the mayor and city council.

Monday marked the deadline to register to vote in the city’s election. That gave ex-felons in Tampa just 27 days to register if they intended to vote.
Newly-released data on registrations in January show us what

Amendment 4 meant, at least so far: crowds of people registered to vote, and those crowds are older, blacker and more Democratic.

When the law took effect, supervisors of elections’ offices were as busy as they get before statewide general elections<https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2019/01/10/amendment-4-leads-to-massive-daily-registration-numbers-for-a-non-election-year/>, despite it being January in an off-year. In Tampa, 426 people registered to vote that week, about 2.5 times as many as the weekly average in the months before.

At the beginning of 2019, 22 percent of Tampa voters were black. But on Jan. 8, the first day of Amendment 4, the black share of those registering to vote skyrocketed to 47 percent. For the entire week, black people made up 35 percent of new registrations.
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Posted in felon voting<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=66>

“NRA Chief Wayne LaPierre Targeted in Congressional Inquiry Into Illegal Campaign Coordination”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103528>
Posted on February 7, 2019 12:35 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103528> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

The Trace<https://www.thetrace.org/2019/02/nra-congressional-inquiry-illegal-coordination/>:

A joint congressional inquiry is demanding that National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre<https://raskin.house.gov/sites/raskin.house.gov/files/Raskin-Whitehouse%20Letter%20to%20NRA%20Letter%202.6.19%20%281%29.pdf> hand over internal documents showing whether the NRA made “illegal, excessive, and unreported in-kind donations” to the campaigns of Donald Trump and several GOP Senate candidates.

The probe, led by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, and Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, is based on a series <https://www.thetrace.org/rounds/nra-scheme-to-evade-campaign-finance-law/> of investigative reports<https://www.thetrace.org/2019/01/nra-coordinated-ad-efforts-with-gop-senate-campaigns/> published by The Trace laying out evidence that the NRA and its vendors used apparent shell companies to evade rules prohibiting coordination between outside groups and the campaigns they support.
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Posted in campaign finance<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>, campaigns<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>

Potentially Bad News for Trump and Trump Organization: SDNY Still Investigating Michael Cohen for Campaign Finance Crimes<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103526>
Posted on February 7, 2019 9:19 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103526> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Potentially a big deal here<https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1093557584110473216>:
[https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/680842593048002560/s4jbWhqz_bigger.jpg]<https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw>
<https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw>
southpaw at nycsouthpaw<https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw>

 · 11h<https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1093556292147392513>
<https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1093556292147392513>

Replying to @nycsouthpaw<https://twitter.com/_/status/1093554100053176321>

What we won’t be getting, of course, is the juiciest stuff—uncharged third parties.
[View image on Twitter]<https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1093556292147392513/photo/1>
[https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/680842593048002560/s4jbWhqz_bigger.jpg]<https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw>
<https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw>
southpaw at nycsouthpaw<https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw>

“In particular, the Government represents that aspects of its investigation remains ongoing, including those pertaining to or arising from Cohen’s campaign finance crimes.”

A bad sentence for Individual 1 and the Trump Org execs who hatched the related accounting shenanigans pic.twitter.com/YCZGPyIINy<https://t.co/YCZGPyIINy>
<https://twitter.com/intent/like?tweet_id=1093557584110473216>
146<https://twitter.com/intent/like?tweet_id=1093557584110473216>
9:10 AM - Feb 7, 2019<https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1093557584110473216>
Twitter Ads info and privacy<https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175256>
[View image on Twitter]<https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1093557584110473216/photo/1>
<https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1093557584110473216>
58 people are talking about this<https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1093557584110473216>

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Posted in campaign finance<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>, campaigns<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>, chicanery<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>

--
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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