[EL] ELB News and Commentary 2/18/19

Sun Feb 17 21:11:14 PST 2019

“N.C. election officials will consider fate of congressional seat at Monday hearing”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103653>
Posted on February 17, 2019 9:08 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103653> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

WaPo reports<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/nc-election-officials-will-consider-fate-of-congressional-seat-at-monday-hearing/2019/02/16/efaae308-313f-11e9-813a-0ab2f17e305b_story.html?utm_term=.23e1a74b5cd9>.
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Posted in campaigns<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>, chicanery<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>

Why is Georgia about to buy ANOTHER set of problematic voting machines?<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103651>
Posted on February 17, 2019 9:06 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103651> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
View image on Twitter<https://twitter.com/MarilynRMarks1/status/1097046640312094720/photo/1>
[View image on Twitter]<https://twitter.com/MarilynRMarks1/status/1097046640312094720/photo/1>
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Marilyn Marks at MarilynRMarks1<https://twitter.com/MarilynRMarks1>

<https://twitter.com/MarilynRMarks1/status/1097046640312094720>

I was worried enough about why GA officials want to throw good money after bad on electronic voting machines. But then I read this op-ed by @flemingbarrya<https://twitter.com/flemingbarrya> full of falsehoods and distortions to promote insecure, costly unauditable machines. Why? [❓] [❓] [⁉️] [🤔]

https://coaltionforgoodgovernance.sharefile.com/d-s7457ab1fc0f4294b …<https://t.co/ySzKPwtvAv>
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12:14 AM - Feb 17, 2019<https://twitter.com/MarilynRMarks1/status/1097046640312094720>
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133 people are talking about this<https://twitter.com/MarilynRMarks1/status/1097046640312094720>

Twitter Ads info and privacy<https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175256>
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>

California State Court Holds City of Santa Monica Election System Violates California Voting Rights Act and CA Constitution; Orders District Elections on July 2 2019<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103649>
Posted on February 17, 2019 8:54 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103649> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

You can find the 71-page statement of decision at this link<https://www.scribd.com/document/399874266/Pico-Neighborhood-Association-v-City-of-Santa-Monica>.

Given the findings of both CVRA liability as well as intentional racial discrimination in using an at-large voting system in violation of the California Constitution, a path forward on appeal seems difficult for the City of Santa Monica, which has spent millions of dollars to keep its system of elections and avoid the creation of districts.

It is possible that Santa Monica will continue to argue on appeal that the CVRA violates the United States Constitution as an impermissible race-based voting law, an argument which could appeal to the conservatives on the Supreme Court should the Court ever take the case. But the independent finding that Santa Monica’s conduct showed intentional racial discrimination which also violated the California Constitution may make this less than an ideal case for the Supreme Court to consider the constitutional question.

In any case, any appeals would next begin in the CA Court of Appeals and then potentially the CA Supreme Court before reaching SCOTUS.
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Posted in Voting Rights Act<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=15>

North Carolina: “This session might be the best chance in the next decade to end gerrymandering”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103647>
Posted on February 17, 2019 8:21 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103647> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Will Doran:<https://www.heraldsun.com/news/politics-government/article226205125.html>

Now might be the best chance to end gerrymandering in North Carolina, at least for another decade, a bipartisan group of legislators said Wednesday when they introduced a bill to do just that.

Their proposal would end North Carolina’s decades-long practice of allowing whichever political party controls the state legislature to draw the lines used to elect state legislators and members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Instead, the bill would create a committee of non-politicians who would be in charge of drawing the lines with help from legal and technical experts.
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Posted in redistricting<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=6>

North Carolina: “Republicans won’t appeal ruling striking down 4 districts”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103645>
Posted on February 17, 2019 8:19 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103645> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

WRAL<https://www.wral.com/republicans-won-t-appeal-ruling-striking-down-4-districts/18195577/>:

A key North Carolina GOP lawmaker says Republicans won’t appeal a ruling by state judges that the General Assembly violated a constitutional prohibition against mid-decade redistricting because it unnecessarily changed four House districts in 2017.
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Posted in redistricting<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=6>

“Plenty of NC politicos hired McCrae Dowless; they just don’t want to talk about it”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103643>
Posted on February 17, 2019 8:13 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103643> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

WRAL reports.<https://www.wral.com/plenty-of-nc-politicos-hired-mccrae-dowless-they-just-don-t-want-to-discuss-it/18192471/>
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Posted in chicanery<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>

“Laboratories of Democracy Reform: State Constitutions and Partisan Gerrymandering”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103641>
Posted on February 17, 2019 8:04 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103641> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Sam Wang, Richard Ober, & Ben Williams have posted this draft<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3335622> on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Despite multiple opportunities to address the issue, the Supreme Court has declined to take action on partisan gerrymandering. Here we argue that the Court has successfully laid out several intellectual paths toward effective regulation – but that the best route for applying such reasoning goes not through federal law, but state constitutions. In Gill v. Whitford, 138 S.Ct. 1916 (2018), Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kagan proposed differing theories for justiciable tests for partisan gerrymandering. Chief Justice Roberts described how a claim of individual harm to a voter could lead to a valid claim in a single district. Justice Kagan described how a claim of associational harm could be advanced at a statewide level. We propose that Roberts’ and Kagan’s theories can be used to bring partisan gerrymandering challenges in state court, with claims based on state constitutions and not the U.S. Constitution. We argue that such a federalist approach offers the most promising route to remedying partisan gerrymandering in America. All fifty state constitutions contain rights and protections which could be used to bring a partisan gerrymandering claim. These include analogues of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, guarantees of pure, free, and fair elections, and redistricting-specific guarantees such as geographic compactness. Because each of these protections involves either individualized or associational harms, the Roberts and Kagan opinions offer state courts persuasive guidance for how to analyze their own constitutional provisions to a partisan gerrymandering claim. Advancing such claims on a state by state basis allows courts to adapt the reasoning to local circumstances. Taken together, our arguments describe a federalist approach for eliminating partisan gerrymandering, a major bug in American democracy.
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Posted in redistricting<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=6>

“Potential privacy lapse found in Americans’ 2010 census data”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103638>
Posted on February 17, 2019 7:57 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103638> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

AP:<https://www.detroitnews.com/story/tech/2019/02/16/census-privacy/39069757/>

An internal team at the Census Bureau found that basic personal information collected from more than 100 million Americans during the 2010 head count could be reconstructed from obscured data, but with lots of mistakes, a top agency official disclosed Saturday.

The age, gender, location, race and ethnicity for 138 million people were potentially vulnerable. So far, however, only internal hacking teams have discovered such details at possible risk, and no outside groups are known to have grabbed data intended to remain private for 72 years, chief scientist John Abowd told a scientific conference.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>

11th Circuit, on 2-1 Vote, Explains Why It Rejected Stay of District Court Order Requiring Florida Voters Have a Chance to Cure Rejected Absentee Ballots with Mismatched Signatures<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103636>
Posted on February 15, 2019 1:41 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103636> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

You can find the 83 pages of opinions at this link<http://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/201814758.pdf>.
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Posted in absentee ballots<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=53>, The Voting Wars<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>

“Unqualified Ambassadors” (New Piece on Connection of Ambassadorships to Campaign Contributions)<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103633>
Posted on February 15, 2019 12:20 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103633> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Ryan Scoville has posted this draft<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3333988> on SSRN (forthcoming Duke Law Journal). Here is the abstract:

In making appointments to the office of ambassador, U.S. presidents often select political supporters from outside the ranks of the State Department’s professional diplomatic corps. This practice is aberrational among advanced democracies and a source of recurrent controversy in the United States, and yet its merits and significance are substantially opaque: How do political appointees compare with career diplomats in terms of credentials? Are they less effective in office? Do they serve in some countries more than others? Have any patterns evolved over time? Commentators might assume answers to these questions, but actual evidence has been in short supply. In this context, it is difficult for the public to evaluate official practice and hold accountable those who wield power under the Appointments Clause.

This Article helps to correct for the current state of affairs. Using a novel dataset based on a trove of previously unavailable documents that I obtained from the State Department through four years of requests and litigation under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Article systematically reveals the professional qualifications and campaign contributions of over 1900 ambassadorial nominees spanning the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, along with the first two years of Donald Trump. In doing so, the Article substantially enhances the transparency of the appointments process and exposes developments of concern: not only are political appointees on average much less qualified than their career counterparts under a variety of congressionally approved measures, but also the gap has grown along with the size of their campaign contributions to nominating presidents, resulting in a significant number of questionable appointments to ambassadorships involving major U.S. partners. In short, it appears that campaign contributions may be generating an increasingly deleterious effect on the quality of U.S. diplomatic representation overseas. The Article concludes by exploring potential legal reforms, including Senate rule amendments and statutory measures to regulate qualifications and enhance transparency.
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Posted in campaign finance<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>, campaigns<https://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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