[EL] ELB News and Commentary 1/9/19

[Rick Hasen]

"Los Angeles County agrees to purge up to 1.5 million voters from its rolls in settlement"<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103119>
Posted on January 9, 2019 6:49 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103119> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Wash. Times:<https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jan/7/los-angeles-county-agrees-purge-voter-rolls-judici/>

Los Angeles County has agreed to conduct a purge of its voting rolls, in a move that could strip perhaps 1.5 million inactive voters from the lists of those eligible to cast ballots.

The county made the deal in a settlement last week with Judicial Watch<https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/judicial-watch/>, a conservative public interest firm, saying that under a recent Supreme Court<https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/supreme-court/> ruling, it has a duty to remove names of people who appear to have either died, moved from the county or lost interest in voting.

The county committed to mailing hundreds of thousands of voters already deemed inactive to see whether they are still eligible voters, and to removing names of people who don't respond to notices and who miss two subsequent federal elections. The county also agreed to try to weed out dead people still on the rolls.
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Posted in election administration<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>, NVRA (motor voter)<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=33>


"Citizenship question on census would impair accuracy, expert says in SF court"<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103117>
Posted on January 9, 2019 6:38 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103117> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Bob Egelko reports<https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Witness-in-SF-court-says-Trump-administration-13515355.php?utm_campaign=email-premium&utm_source=CMS%20Sharing%20Button&utm_medium=social> for the SF Chronicle.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


"AP Exclusive: NC election fraud probed long before 2018 race"<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103115>
Posted on January 8, 2019 4:51 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103115> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

AP:<https://apnews.com/7b7db7e729f24f10aee34b6d0bff3315>

 Long before accusations of absentee ballot fraud<https://apnews.com/5cd9a4f8aa9c45c89bdcdede4ebeb73d> in a small North Carolina county cast doubt on the results of a heated 2018 congressional race, a state elections investigator spent weeks probing whether the man at the center of the current scandal was among a group buying votes.

That 2010 investigation was one of at least a half dozen instances over the last nine years that prosecutors and elections officials received complaints of serious elections irregularities in Bladen County, a rural locale of 35,000 people that has long had a statewide reputation for political chicanery by both Republicans and Democrats. The state's ongoing criminal investigation into 2018 voting irregularities has focused on Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr., a local political operative and convicted felon.

Marshall Tutor, who retired in March after 15 years as an investigator for the N.C. Board of Elections, told The Associated Press his office first fielded accusations nearly a decade ago that Dowless, now 62, was among a group giving voters cash to fill out ballots the way he directed.
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Posted in campaigns<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>, chicanery<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>


"How a little-known Democratic firm cashed in on the wave of midterm money"<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103113>
Posted on January 8, 2019 3:16 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103113> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

WaPo:<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-a-little-known-democratic-firm-cashed-in-on-the-wave-of-midterm-money/2019/01/08/f91b04bc-fef5-11e8-862a-b6a6f3ce8199_story.html?utm_term=.3586a3099c0b>

The solicitations piled into voters' email accounts - sometimes multiple times a day. And they carried alarming messages, often in blaring capital letters.

"We're on the verge of BANKRUPTCY."

"Our bank account is ALMOST EMPTY!"

"Trump is INCHES away from firing Robert Mueller."

The catastrophic language yielded a fundraising bonanza for clients of Mothership Strategies, a little-known and relatively new digital consulting firm that raked in tens of millions of dollars from a tide of small donations that flowed to Democrats during the 2018 midterm elections.

The firm's ascendancy as one of the highest-paid vendors of the election since its launch four years ago speaks to how lucrative the explosion of small-dollar donations has been for a group of savvy political consultants who saw the wave of cash coming - and built a business model to capitalize off it.

But its lightning-quick rise also has sparked consternation in Democratic circles, where Mothership is sometimes derided as the "M-word" because of its aggressive and sometimes misleading tactics, such as claiming in fundraising appeals that President Trump is preparing to fire the special counsel. Some critics call its approach unethical, saying the company profits off stoking fear of Trump and making the sort of exaggerated claims they associate with the president.
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Posted in campaign finance<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>, campaigns<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>


"Supreme Court declines to intervene in Virginia redistricting dispute"<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103111>
Posted on January 8, 2019 12:25 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103111> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Amy Howe<http://www.scotusblog.com/2019/01/supreme-court-declines-to-intervene-in-virginia-redistricting-dispute/> for SCOTUSBlog:

Today the Supreme Court rejected a request<https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/010819zr_m6io.pdf> by Virginia legislators to put lower-court proceedings in a case challenging the legislative districts drawn for the state's House of Delegates as the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering - that is, the idea that legislators relied too much on race when drawing the maps - on hold until the justices rule on the case. Today's order means that a federal district court's efforts to create a new map, with the assistance of a voting-rights expert appointed by the court, for the state's elections in November can move forward, even as the Supreme Court prepares to hear oral argument and eventually issue a decision that could prompt changes in that map.

The court's order came in Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill<http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/virginia-house-of-delegates-v-bethune-hill/>, which will likely be argued in March. The case is on its second trip to the Supreme Court: In 2017, the justices concluded that a lower court had applied the wrong legal standard when it rebuffed the challengers' claims that 12 districts were the result of racial gerrymandering. Although the justices upheld one of the 12 districts, it sent the case back to the lower court for it to take another look at the remaining 11 districts.

In June of last year, the lower court struck down the districts as unconstitutional. It concluded that race was indeed the main factor dictating the boundaries for the districts, and that the legislature had not shown that it needed to try to have the exact same percentage of African-American adults in each of the "vastly dissimilar" districts at issue to comply with federal voting-rights laws.

The state's House of Delegates appealed to the Supreme Court in September, and the justices announced in November that they would review the case - including the question whether the House of Delegates has a legal right, known as standing, to take the case to the Supreme Court.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


"Donald Trump Was Just Handed a Chance to Supercharge Voter Suppression in 2020"<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103108>
Posted on January 8, 2019 11:50 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=103108> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

I have written this piece<https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/01/donald-trump-voter-suppression-plan-2020.html> for Slate. It begins:

In a short unpublished opinion<https://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/dnc-3d-appeal.pdf> so far garnering only slight media attention<https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/07/democrats-republicans-elections-ballots-poll-watching-1086046>, the United States Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit decided on Monday what may be one of the most consequential cases poised to affect the 2020 elections. The circuit upheld a district court decision<http://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/consent-order.pdf> ending a court order in effect since 1982 barring the Republican National Committee from engaging in "ballot security" measures designed to intimidate minority voters from voting at the polls. With Trump having taken over<https://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/trump-republican-party-takeover-states-237075> the RNC for the 2020 elections and with this consent decree no longer standing in his way, we should be concerned about a new wave of voter suppression coming from the Republican Party during the upcoming election.
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Posted in The Voting Wars<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>


--
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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