[EL] ELB News and Commentary 11/20/19

[Rick Hasen]

“Sondland acknowledges there was a ‘quid pro quo’ involving Ukraine”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=108143>
Posted on November 20, 2019 7:15 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=108143> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

WaPo:<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sondland-was-there-a-quid-pro-quo-the-answer-is-yes/2019/11/20/34741e3c-0b92-11ea-8397-a955cd542d00_story.html>

Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified Wednesday more bluntly than he had before that President Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, sought to condition a White House invite for Ukraine’s new president to demands that his country publicly launch investigations that could damage Trump’s political opponents.

“I know that members of this committee have frequently framed these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a ‘quid pro quo?’” Sondland said in sworn testimony. “With regard to the requested White House call and White House meeting, the answer is yes.”

Trump’s U.S. Ambassador to the European Union also told the House Intelligence Committee that while he never knew for sure if the White House had frozen nearly $400 million in security assistance as part of the pressure campaign against Ukraine, he operated as if that was the case.

“In the absence of any credible explanation for the hold, I came to the conclusion that the aid, like the White House visit, was jeopardized,” Sondland said. “My belief was that if Ukraine did something to demonstrate a serious intention” to launch the investigations Trump wanted, “then the hold on military aid would be lifted.”
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Posted in chicanery<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>


DOJ to Pay More than $9 Million in Attorneys Fees in Census Litigation Cases<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=108141>
Posted on November 20, 2019 7:00 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=108141> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Wow.<https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2019/11/19/these-attorneys-beat-trumps-census-citizenship-question-in-court-doj-agreed-to-pay-them-millions/> Lying is expensive.
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Posted in census litigation<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=125>


Will North Carolina State Court Have Nate Persily Draw New Congressional Districts for the State after NCGA Redrew Maps to Create Slightly Less Egregious Partisan Gerrymander?<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=108139>
Posted on November 20, 2019 6:57 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=108139> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

The issue is teed up<https://twitter.com/gercohen/status/1196887952422514689> for the court:
[cid:image002.jpg at 01D59F72.E3EE96D0]<https://twitter.com/gercohen>
<https://twitter.com/gercohen>
Gerry Cohen at gercohen<https://twitter.com/gercohen>

<https://twitter.com/gercohen/status/1196887952422514689>


Dueling motions in 3-judge state court Harper v Lewis #ncpol<https://twitter.com/hashtag/ncpol?src=hash> US House redistricting case: defendants ask summary judgement, and for case be dismissed as moot after new plan enacted: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9lQD-I7OVcPMFRaODgwT3Jsd2dFZGYycDQyaXhNa1M1Zk5V/view …<https://t.co/uep4IIjE5u> / plaintiffs ask court to review remedial plan https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5beeefdbf407b4c074e45ec6/t/5dcf1ecbd251b529c9204ec3/1573854923782/Plaintiffs+Brief+on+Remedial+Process.pdf …<https://t.co/jsDuPiYd6s>
<https://t.co/uep4IIjE5u>
[cid:image003.png at 01D59F72.E3EE96D0]<https://t.co/uep4IIjE5u>
LD Motion for Summary Judgment and Supporting Memorandum of Law (2).PDF<https://t.co/uep4IIjE5u>
drive.google.com<https://t.co/uep4IIjE5u>

<https://twitter.com/intent/like?tweet_id=1196887952422514689>
2<https://twitter.com/intent/like?tweet_id=1196887952422514689>
12:28 PM - Nov 19, 2019<https://twitter.com/gercohen/status/1196887952422514689> · Raleigh, NC<https://twitter.com/search?q=place%3A161d2f18e3a0445a>
Twitter Ads info and privacy<https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175256>
<https://twitter.com/gercohen>
See Gerry Cohen's other Tweets<https://twitter.com/gercohen>

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Posted in redistricting<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=6>


“The Signature of Gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=108137>
Posted on November 20, 2019 6:51 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=108137> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Andrew Chin, Gregory Herschlag, and Jonathan Mattingly have posted this draft<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3477091&dgcid=ejournal_htmlemail_u.s.:constitutional:law:rights:liberties:ejournal_abstractlink> on SSRN (forthcoming, South Carolina Law Review). Here is the abstract:

In recent years, the U.S. mathematical community has been directing unprecedented attention to the problem of partisan gerrymandering, aided by computational advances and spurred by litigation challenging the spate of extreme partisan redistricting that followed the 2010 census. As North Carolina scholars who have been involved in the landmark Rucho v. Common Cause litigation, we have written this Article with the threefold aim of explaining how the expert analysis of North Carolina’s congressional map was performed, how it was used to substantiate the plaintiffs’ claims at trial and on remand, and crucially, how it may serve to address the justiciability concerns that have long attended the Supreme Court’s partisan gerrymandering jurisprudence and have represented the legal context for our work.
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Posted in redistricting<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=6>


“The Andrew Goodman Foundation Files Lawsuit Against the State of Wisconsin for Restricting the Voting Rights of Students”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=108135>
Posted on November 20, 2019 6:49 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=108135> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Release:<https://andrewgoodman.org/news-list/the-andrew-goodman-foundation-files-lawsuit-against-the-state-of-wisconsin-for-restricting-the-voting-rights-of-students/>

The Andrew Goodman Foundation is suing the 6 members of the Wisconsin Elections Committee for restrictions imposed on the use of student IDs for voting. The law requires that a student ID include the issuance date, an expiration date of no more than 2 years from the date of issuance, and a signature. A voter who wishes to use a student ID must also independently prove current enrollment. No other forms of permissible identification are subject to these onerous requirements. The legal challenge was filed today in federal court and argues that these restrictions are intentionally designed to discriminate against student voters in violation of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which outlaws denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of age.

From 2012 to 2016, the state of Wisconsin, on average, had the largest decreases along with Georgia and Mississippi in student voting rates according to the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement by the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University.  This data is consistent with a more general study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison that analyzed 2 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties and concluded that 16,800 to 23,250 voters in Dane and Milwaukee counties were deterred from casting ballots in the 2016 elections because of Wisconsin’s restrictions on eligible forms of identification….

Click here<https://andrewgoodman.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/AGF-Voter-ID-Lawsuit-Wisconsin.pdf> to read the complaint.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“How bad ballot design can sway the result of an election”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=108133>
Posted on November 20, 2019 6:47 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=108133> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

The Guardian:<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/19/bad-ballot-design-2020-democracy-america>

An election’s outcome can potentially be flipped by bad ballot design – not just the misalignment of rows, but also choices as seemingly minor as the order of candidates’ names, which disproportionately favors<https://asiapolmeth.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/polmeth/files/fukumotofukumoto.pdf> those at the top of the ballot. Since 2000, some aspects of ballot design have improved, partly thanks to better technology and organizations like the Center for Civic Design<https://civicdesign.org/>, a not-for-profit whose goal is to “make every interaction between government and citizens easy, effective, and pleasant”.

This problematic ballot (left) was meant to say ‘Vote for One’ in each category, but voters thought they were supposed to only select one candidate in total on the ballot. A clearer version is the Charlotte County ballot (right).

In its field guide<https://civicdesign.org/fieldguides/designing-usable-ballots/> for designing usable ballots, the center lists 10 principles for election officials. Some are fairly obvious – use clear, simple language and one sans-serif font that’s at least 12-point in size – while others are more nuanced. For example, the designers recommend against text centered on the page, which forces the eye to hunt for the following line, and against party emblems (icons, which we process 60,000 times faster<https://electiontools.org/tool/civic-icons-and-images/> than written text, should be used only to help voters navigate the ballot). Other recommendations include avoiding color when communicating important information (not all voters see color clearly).
Unfortunately, not all jurisdictions have heeded these principles. In 2018, another county in Florida, Broward, placed the Senate race at the bottom of the first column of the ballot, underneath the instructions in English, Spanish and Creole. According to Whitney Quesenbery, a co-director of the Center for Civic Design, this design probably created problems for two types of voters: “rushers” and “skippers”.
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Posted in election administration<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>


CPI Releases Model Legislation Tracker to See Who Is Trying to Push Identical Legislation Across State Legislatures<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=108131>
Posted on November 20, 2019 6:45 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=108131> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

This is neat:<https://publicintegrity.org/federal-politics/state-politics/copy-paste-legislate/model-legislation-tracker-copy-paste-legislate/>

Earlier this year, the Center for Public Integrity<http://www.publicintegrity.org/>, USA TODAY<http://www.usatoday.com/> and the Arizona Republic<https://www.azcentral.com/> analyzed model statehouse bills<https://publicintegrity.org/topics/federal-politics/state-politics/copy-paste-legislate/> to take the first nationwide accounting of how prolific<https://publicintegrity.org/inside-publici/model-legislation-statehouse-bills/> copycat legislation has become.
Today, the news organizations publicly released a new model legislation tracker<http://model-legislation.apps.publicintegrity.org/> that goes deeper, identifying copycat legislation by comparing statehouse bills to each other — and making that information accessible to the public.

The tool<http://model-legislation.apps.publicintegrity.org/> developed by Public Integrity reveals model bills — some previously unidentified — that impactnearly every aspect of American life, from who can grow hemp or breed puppies, to what can be called “milk” or “meat” for purchase at your local grocery stores.
Using the new model legislation tracker<http://model-legislation.apps.publicintegrity.org/>, Public Integrity retrieved nearly 1.2 million bills across all 50 states and compared their text to identify when two bills in different states have common language.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“A Trump Administration Plan that Could Boost Corporate ‘Dark Money’ in Elections”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=108129>
Posted on November 19, 2019 8:16 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=108129> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy writes<https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/trump-administration-plan-could-boost-corporate-dark-money-elections>.
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Posted in campaign finance<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>


--
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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