[EL] Rick's Compromise more news 4/9/20

Thu Apr 9 16:39:19 PDT 2020

Marty asks an important question - why not option 2?  My response is that other states have different issues.   In Alabama, where I’ve done a lot of work, no-excuse voting was adopted but later repealed With the full support of the black legislators.  Supporters of white candidates  - paid black person -tracked the ballot requests and followed the letter carriers’ vehicles.  They approached each ballot recipient and, by any means necessary, persuaded the voters to do the right(wing) thing.  That is not uncommon in areas oh high poverty in the Deep South and, from what I read, in the Rio Grande and other places like Bladen County NC.  

Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 9, 2020, at 5:18 PM, Marty Lederman <Martin.Lederman at law.georgetown.edu> wrote:
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> In between (1) "mail-in ballots sent to any voter who requests one" and (2) "mail-in ballots automatically delivered to all registered voters," Rick proposes a middle ground:  (3) The state invites all voters to request a ballot, and sends them to all who request it.
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> Given the rest of Rick's column--especially his representation that there's been very little fraud in those states that use Option 2 (ballots sent to everyone), I'm not sure I see the substantive virtues of Rick's compromise, which would only interject yet another administrative step into the process, with very little payoff.
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> But I think most of us will agree that Rick is right that states ought to at least opt for process #3.  If so, what's the argument for Congress not requiring states to do so?
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>> On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 4:59 PM Rick Hasen <rhasen at law.uci.edu> wrote:
>> “Trump is wrong about the dangers of absentee ballots”
>> Posted on April 9, 2020 1:49 pm by Rick Hasen
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>> I have written this oped in the Washington Post. Some excerpts:
>> President Trump has recently come out against expanding voting by mail, despite the fact that he regularly votes by mail himself. He tweeted that it has “Tremendous potential for voter fraud and, for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” Given that expanded mail-in voting is going to be an inevitable piece of the November election because of the coronavirus pandemic, it is important that Americans understand what risks come from voting by mail and what can be done about those risks before November, so that voters can have confidence that the election can be fairly conducted, in part, through mail-in balloting….
>> According to the well-constructed News21 database, absentee-ballot ballot fraud made up 24.2 percent of all reported prosecutions of election crimes between 2000 and 2012. But the total number of cases was just 491 — during a period in which literally billions of votes were cast. While certain pockets of the country have seen their share of absentee-ballot scandals, problems are extremely rare in the five states that rely primarily on vote-by-mail, including the heavily Republican state of Utah.
>> Election design requires tradeoffs. Many states offer absentee balloting because they realize that the tremendous convenience to voters outweighs the small risk of fraud. Now, of course, the covid-19 pandemic has radically elevated the risk of gathering at polling stations, making mail-in balloting a crucial alternative….
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>> o begin with, states need to be prepared to thwart and prosecute any attempts to tamper with ballots. The federal government dragged its feet on investigating the North Carolina case, despite being tipped off by state election officials well before the 2018 election.
>> Next, states should send an application for an absentee ballot to every voter listed on voting rolls. They should not send the ballot itself until a voter requests one, since voting rolls in many states unfortunately are not accurate enough. Voters should also be allowed to request absentee ballots online.
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>> States should also prevent the unlimited collection of absentee ballots by private individuals — sometimes pejoratively referred to as “ballot harvesting.” North Carolina prohibited unlimited collection, but that ban was not enforced and collection allowed the actual ballot tampering that took place. I favor Colorado’s system which allows one person to collect no more than 10 ballots. There are some voters who need assistance getting their votes to the U.S. mail or to a state collection box, such as some on Native American reservations or those who are elderly or disabled. States should also ensure that ballot collection limitations do not put additional burdens on minority voters, as a federal court recently found happened in Arizona.
>> Finally, we should not forget that absentee ballots are more likely to be rejected than ballots cast in person, often because of voter error that cannot be corrected as it can in person. Absentee voters should be told if their ballots are being rejected for technical reasons — such as a purported mismatched signature — and have the chance to cure the problem and have their ballot counted.
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>> “Liberals contend they were shut out of Wisconsin Supreme Court election deliberations”
>> Posted on April 9, 2020 1:31 pm by Rick Hasen
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>> Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.
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>> “Trump’s wild claims of voter fraud blow back on campaign aide”
>> Posted on April 9, 2020 1:19 pm by Rick Hasen
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>> Politico:
>> Days before President Donald Trump deceptively called vote-by-mail “corrupt” and damaging to Republicans, his campaign hired an operative tied to a 2012 absentee ballot scheme that sent a Florida Democratic operative to jail.
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>> The plot involving Giancarlo Sopo — who has never been charged with wrongdoing — was highlighted in a report on election fraud that Trump’s campaign blasted out Wednesday to support his wild vote-by-mail attacks. Sopo joined the Trump campaign April 1.
>> “The national news media routinely and condescendingly dismiss any concerns about voter fraud, including state vote-by-mail provisions,” the campaign wrote in an email highlighting the Heritage Foundation report, a document that was used by the president’s voter fraud task force, which failed to turn up proof of widespread voter fraud.
>> The email, in addition to exposing an uncomfortable incident in a staffer’s past, highlights the exaggerated nature of the president’s attacks on voting by mail. The absentee ballot scheme involving Sopo wasn’t technically voter fraud, it was caught by authorities, and it never would have resulted in illegally cast ballots even if it hadn’t been stopped.
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>> “America might survive coronavirus. But will the election?”
>> Posted on April 9, 2020 12:54 pm by Rick Hasen
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>> MIT Technology Review.
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>> “McCarthy hits ‘disgusting’ Democratic push for mail-in-voting”
>> Posted on April 9, 2020 12:20 pm by Rick Hasen
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>> Politico reports.:
>> House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said it’s “disgusting” that Democrats are pushing to include money for mail-in voting in the next coronavirus relief bill, dismissing the idea as unnecessary despite the pandemic.
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>> “You want to hold up the bill because you want to change election law for November, because you think that gives you some political benefit?” McCarthy told reporters during a press call Thursday. “That’s disgusting to me. … Stop worrying about politics. Worry about what’s in front of us. And that’s the health of the nation … and our economy.”…
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>> Democrats counter that it’s precisely a public health issue: The virus could spread even further if in-person elections are carried out as usual this fall.
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>> “We have a different value system about what voting means to a democracy. And clearly, we want to remove all obstacles to participation,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters on her own call later Thursday. “No surprise that [McCarthy] might dismiss opening doors of participation as something that is a plus, especially in a time of pandemic.”
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>> “No halt to culture wars during coronavirus outbreak”
>> Posted on April 9, 2020 12:14 pm by Rick Hasen
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>> AP:
>> A partisan fight over voting in Wisconsin was the first issue linked to the coronavirus to make it to the Supreme Court. Efforts to limit abortion during the pandemic could eventually land in the justices’ hands. Disputes over guns and religious freedom also are popping up around the country.
>> The virus outbreak has put much of American life on hold, but the nation’s culture wars seem immune from the pandemic.
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>> And in a country deeply divided over politics, some liberals are accusing conservatives of using this crisis to advance long-held goals, especially in the areas of access to abortion and the ballot box. Conservatives have complained about restrictions on church services and gun shops.
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>> “Some Georgia absentee ballot request forms list wrong return address”
>> Posted on April 9, 2020 12:08 pm by Rick Hasen
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>> AJC:
>> About 60,000 Georgia voters recently received absentee ballot request forms with the wrong return mailing or email address.
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>> Election officials said Wednesday that the absentee ballot requests will be delivered to their correct destinations, even if voters send them to the erroneous pre-printed addresses.
>> The misprints occurred among absentee ballot request forms mailed to Georgia’s 6.9 million active voters by the secretary of state’s office last week, an effort to encourage voting away from precincts during the coronavirus pandemic.
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>> “Trump condemns vote-by-mail, but the Florida GOP is counting on it to win”
>> Posted on April 9, 2020 12:07 pm by Rick Hasen
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>> Politico reports.
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>> Henry Weinstein and I Discussed Voting in the Age of Covid 19, and My New Book Election Meltdown
>> Posted on April 9, 2020 11:59 am by Rick Hasen
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>> Listen to the UCI Law Talks podcast.
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>> This is Ironic: Anti-Campaign Finance Regulation Group “Citizens United” Asks the FEC for More Regulation (against the “Bloomberg Loophole)
>> Posted on April 9, 2020 11:53 am by Rick Hasen
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>> See here.
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>> “Candidates Implore Courts to Loosen Signature Requirements to Get on Mass Ballot”
>> Posted on April 9, 2020 11:43 am by Rick Hasen
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>> Boston Globe reports.
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>> New Hampshire State Court Strikes Down Voting Domicile Law Aimed to Deter Student Voting as Violation of State Constitution
>> Posted on April 9, 2020 11:40 am by Rick Hasen
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>> You can find the ruling at this link.
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>> “Coronavirus pandemic realigns US democracy”
>> Posted on April 9, 2020 11:33 am by Rick Hasen
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>> Listen to KCRW’s To the Point:
>> But despite the coronavirus, bitter partisanship was alive and well this week in Wisconsin. The U.S. Supreme Court sided with Republican legislators and refused the Democratic governor’s last-minute demand to postpone the presidential primary.  
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>> Angry voters took a risk anyway, says Politico national correspondent Natasha Korecki. “Some of their faces were practically bandaged to keep them safe.  And it rained, and it was a hail storm, and they had umbrellas, and they were standing there … like something I’ve never seen before.” 
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>> UC Irvine law professor Rick Hasen calls this a bad sign, as red and blue states prepare to hold November’s presidential elections. Hasen is  also author of “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy.”
>> He defines the basic issue: “Republicans tend to believe that making it easier for people to register and vote helps the Democratic Party.”   
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>> Because of coronavirus restrictions, democrats want to revise voter ID, extend early voting, and make mail-in voting easier. Hasen notes, “We were already on track for the largest amount of election litigation … probably in the country’s history. COVID-19 is going to add, I think, tremendously to the burden on the courts.” 
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>> He adds, “In both the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court on the same day, the courts divided along partisan ideological lines. That is really a bad sign for November.” 
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>> “The Supreme Court Fails Us; The five conservative justices refused to extend the deadline for absentee ballots in Wisconsin in the middle of the pandemic. “
>> Posted on April 9, 2020 11:29 am by Rick Hasen
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>> Linda Greenhouse NYT column.
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>> Posted in Supreme Court
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>> How Many Votes Did The Supreme Court’s Decision in WI Affect
>> Posted on April 9, 2020 10:47 am by Richard Pildes
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>> I have put together some numbers and a framework for starting to assess this question (the numbers are taken from the Wisconsin Election Commission’s website today).
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>> As of now, it appears that the State managed to send out 12,216 fewer absentee ballots than were requested.  Let’s assume that 100% of those would have been sent out in enough time that they could have been postmarked and returned by April 13th, had the Supreme Court not reversed the district court on this issue. 
>> For those voters who did request and received an absentee ballot, about 81% of those ballots were actually returned.  If we use that same return rate, that means as a starting point we can expect that 9,894 more absentee ballots would have been returned (and I’ll assume there would have no problem with any of those ballots, such as not being valid because they lacked the required witness signature or for other reasons). 
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>> But that’s not the number of votes that the Supreme Court’s decision prevented, in effect, from being cast, because some of those who did not receive their requested ballot showed up to vote in person.  If you read the local papers in WI, there are many interviews with voters in line on Tuesday who put themselves in that category (and who faced the health risks associated with voting in person).
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>> There is no way at the moment to estimate reliably the percent of these voters who were engaged enough to request a ballot and then showed up in person when that ballot didn’t arrive.  I’ll use a figure of 20%.  If that’s in the ballpark, it would mean the number of “lost votes”  would be 81% of 9,894 or 8,014 votes – that is, based on these assumptions, the Court’s decision means that 8,014 persons who would otherwise have voted, had the April 13th deadline remained in place, could not.
>> For those interested in speculating about the partisan effects, let’s make an extreme assumption that these votes would have broken 70% to 30% in favor of one party.   That’s a massive landslide, certainly unlikely in WI, and not the way the rest of the absentee ballots are likely to break out (if we had demographic information on those who did not receive requested absentee ballots, we could make a more grounded estimate).  Using that extreme scenario, that would mean the disfavored party (I’ll say the Democrats) would have gotten 3,206 more votes had the Supreme Court affirmed the district court.
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>> If we think those ballots would have broken 55% to 45% for the Democrats, which is probably closer to realistic, that would mean 801 fewer Democratic votes than if the April 13th deadline had been in place  [these numbers don’t actually change much even if we unrealistically assume that none of these 9,894 voters showed up in person – in a 55/45 split, that would mean 989 fewer votes for the Democrats]
>> To put that in the context of the overall vote, my guess as of now is that total turnout in WI will be between 1.1 M and 1.3 M votes. 
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>> These numbers might need to be tweaked as we get more information, of course.
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>> [In another post, I will look at how that turnout level compares to what we would have expected under normal circumstances]
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>> On Wisconsin Voting, Which is The Onion and Which is a Real Voter in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel?
>> Posted on April 9, 2020 9:30 am by Rick Hasen
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>> “People died for my right to vote, so if I have to take a risk to vote that’s what I have to”
>> “People died for our right to vote, so it’s only fair we die exercising it.”
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>> Posted in Uncategorized
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>> -- 
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>> Rick Hasen
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>> Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science
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>> UC Irvine School of Law
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>> 401 E. Peltason Dr., Suite 1000
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>> Irvine, CA 92697-8000
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>> 949.824.3072 - office
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>> rhasen at law.uci.edu
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>> http://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/
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>> http://electionlawblog.org
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> 
> -- 
> Marty Lederman
> Georgetown University Law Center
> 600 New Jersey Avenue, NW
> Washington, DC 20001
> 202-662-9937
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