[EL] ELB News and Commentary 12/28/20

[Rick Hasen]

Louie Gohmert Sues Mike Pence in Lawsuit Asking Court to Give Pence “Exclusive Authority” To Decide Which Electoral College Votes to Count at Jan. 6 Congressional Session (No, This Won’t Work)<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120074>
Posted on December 28, 2020 7:53 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120074> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

But here’s <https://electioncases.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Gohmert-v-Pence.pdf> the complaint.
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Posted in Election Meltdown<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=127>, electoral college<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=44>


“Georgia election admins battle Covid and conspiracies ahead of Senate runoffs”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120072>
Posted on December 28, 2020 7:37 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120072> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Politico reports.<https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/28/georgia-election-covid-conspiracies-senate-runoffs-451149?nname=playbook&nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&nrid=0000014e-f109-dd93-ad7f-f90d0def0000&nlid=630318>
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


Pennsylvania: “Presidential election hostilities may fuel fight over courts”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120070>
Posted on December 28, 2020 7:28 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120070> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

AP:<https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-donald-trump-legislature-primary-elections-constitutions-18d17653d83c903b3b0249ef3a9e2639>

The angst, anger and hostility over Pennsylvania’s presidential election result will flow past New Year’s Day.

Republicans who control the state Legislature could use the first weeks of 2021 to fast-track a constitutional amendment that would remake the Democratic-majority state Supreme Court after Republicans and President Donald Trump accused the court of acting illegally or, baselessly, conspiring to steal the election.

That prospect is propelling a constellation of liberal groups, good-government groups, labor unions and others to organize against the proposed amendment, and stoking fears of an expensive public campaign fueled by dark money for control of the battleground state’s highest court.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“Forget the conspiracy theories — here are the real election security lessons of 2020”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120068>
Posted on December 27, 2020 1:00 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120068> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Politico<https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/27/election-security-lessons-2020-450356?nname=playbook&nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&nrid=0000014e-f109-dd93-ad7f-f90d0def0000&nlid=630318>:

The foreign cyberattacks that so many intelligence officials feared didn’t upend the 2020 elections — but this year’s contests nonetheless showed how much the nation still needs to do to fix its security weaknesses.

Paper trails protected the integrity of the votes in closely watched states, thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid, but many counties still lack that protection. States mostly rejected the riskiest voting technology — internet balloting — but a few embraced it. And a pandemic-ravaged nation managed to vote safely and reliably, but election offices are still woefully short of money and staff.

Perhaps most of all, this year also exposed the United States’ vulnerability to election threats from within, as President Donald Trump and other leading Republicans promoted discredited conspiracy theories to try to nullify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

“The big picture lesson from 2020 is that ensuring an accurate result isn’t enough,” said J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer science professor and leading election security expert. “Elections also have to be able to prove to a skeptical public that the result really was accurate.”

Restoring that trust starts — but doesn’t end — with improving the election technology, policy specialists say.
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Posted in Election Meltdown<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=127>, voting technology<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=40>


“Some Republicans plan to challenge Biden’s Electoral College victory. Here’s what happened when Democrats challenged Bush”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120066>
Posted on December 27, 2020 12:55 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120066> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

CNN:<https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/27/politics/electoral-college-objection-bush-boxer/index.html>

When Congress met to tally the results of the 2004 presidential election, then-Sen. Barbara Boxer stood alone on the Senate floor to object to President George W. Bush’s reelection victory in Ohio over Democrat John Kerry, forcing the House and Senate to vote for only the second time in a century on whether to reject a state’s Electoral College votes.

It’s the same scenario that could play out next month with President Donald Trump<https://www.cnn.com/specials/politics/president-donald-trump-45> publicly urging his supporters in Congress to object to President-elect Joe Biden’s<https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/candidate/biden> victory in battleground states that expanded mail-in voting amid the coronavirus pandemic.

A group of House Republicans is preparing to object, and they need at least one senator to join them to force the chambers to vote on the matter<http://www.cnn.com/2020/12/07/politics/electoral-college-vote-timeline/index.html>. While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has privately urged Senate Republicans to steer clear, several senators have declined to rule out taking part, and incoming GOP Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has left open the possibility he will join the effort.

Democrats and even some Republicans are warning against a challenge, despite the precedent laid by Boxer. In an interview with CNN, Boxer said that the circumstances are totally different this year, when Trump and his allies are seeking to overturn a national election result, than when she joined with then-Ohio Democratic Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones to object to Kerry’s loss.
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Posted in electoral college<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=44>


“Despite smooth election, GOP leaders seek vote restrictions”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120064>
Posted on December 27, 2020 11:47 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120064> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

AP:<https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-trump-voting-rights-elections-82cd5b52e924b818bb8d8db80edba44b>

Changes to the way millions of Americans voted this year contributed to record turnout, but that’s no guarantee the measures making it easier to cast ballots will stick around for future elections.

Republicans in key states that voted for President-elect Joe Biden already are pushing for new restrictions, especially to absentee voting. It’s an option many states expanded amid the coronavirus outbreak that proved hugely popular and helped ensure one of the smoothest election days in recent years.

President Donald Trump has been unrelenting in his attacks on mail voting as he continues to challenge the legitimacy of an election he lost. Despite a lack of evidence and dozens of losses in the courts, his claims of widespread voter fraud have gained traction with some Republican elected officials.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“Get ready, Georgia: More election drama expected after Senate runoffs”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120062>
Posted on December 26, 2020 8:51 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120062> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

AJC:<https://www.ajc.com/politics/get-ready-georgia-more-election-drama-expected-after-senate-runoffs/QLGVE463RVHKTEVD7ZO3MLS5VY/>

Georgia’s extraordinarily thin partisan divide set the stage for rampant misinformation, lawsuits and fights over election integrity after the presidential election.

With control of the Senate on the line Jan. 5, elections officials are bracing for a new round of drama — especially if the races are as close as polls, analysts and the campaigns suggest they will be.

President Donald Trump has warred<https://www.ajc.com/politics/a-gop-civil-war-rattles-georgia-republicans-at-inconvenient-time/KTI47IWGSNEI7E7K5KQUBT4JDE/> with state leaders and elections officials for weeks following his narrow defeat here, even though flipping Georgia wouldn’t be enough to reverse Joe Biden’s White House victory.

Imagine, though, an equally tight margin in the twin runoffs, which have attracted unprecedented spending and attention with the fate of Biden’s legislative agenda at stake. Gabriel Sterling, the state’s voting system manager, is preparing for such a drawn-out scenario.

“Even if there’s a blowout election, I think we’ll have people saying: ‘Well, obviously it was stolen. We have close elections in this state,’ ” Sterling said. “So no matter what direction you go, that’s going to happen.”

He’s not alone. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution interviewed more than a dozen state officials, voting rights experts and party leaders who are quietly gearing up for a tortured election aftermath even while the U.S. Senate runoff campaigns are in full swing.

Their message: Brace yourselves, Georgia voters. These races might not be settled for weeks.
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Posted in Election Meltdown<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=127>


Front-Page NYT: “Trump’s Fraud Claims Died in Court, But the Myth of Stolen Elections Lives On”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120060>
Posted on December 26, 2020 8:47 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120060> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NYT:<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/us/politics/republicans-voter-fraud.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage>

President Trump’s baseless and desperate claims of a stolen election over the last seven weeks — the most aggressive promotion of “voter fraud” in American history — failed to get any traction in courts across seven states, or come anywhere close to reversing the loss he suffered to Joseph R. Biden Jr.

But the effort has led to at least one unexpected and profoundly different result: A thorough debunking of the sorts of voter fraud claims that Republicans have used to roll back voting rights for the better part of the young century.

In making their case in real courts and the court of public opinion, Mr. Trump and his allies have trotted out a series of tropes and canards similar to those Republicans have pushed to justify laws that in many cases made voting disproportionately <https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/magazine/voting-rights-act-dream-undone.html> harder<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/us/politics/voter-id-laws-supreme-court-north-carolina.html> for Blacks and Hispanics, who largely support Democrats.

Their allegations that thousands of people “double voted” by assuming other identities at polling booths echoed those that have previously been cited as a reason to impose strict new voter identification laws.

Their assertion that large numbers of noncitizens cast illegal votes for Mr. Biden matched claims Republicans have made to argue for harsh new “proof of citizenship” requirements for voter registration.

And their tales about large numbers of cheaters casting ballots in the name of “dead voters” were akin to those several states have used to conduct aggressive “purges”<https://www.npr.org/2012/09/16/161145248/many-texans-bereaved-over-dead-voter-purge> of voting lists that wrongfully slated tens of thousands of registrations for termination.

After bringing some 60 lawsuits, and even offering financial<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/11/texas-dan-patrick-voter-fraud-reward> incentive for information about fraud, Mr. Trump and his allies have failed to prove definitively any case of illegal voting on behalf of their opponent in court — not a single case of an undocumented immigrant casting a ballot, a citizen double voting, nor any credible evidence that legions of the voting dead gave Mr. Biden a victory that wasn’t his.

“It really should put a death knell in this narrative that has been peddled around claims of vote fraud that just have never been substantiated,” said Kristen Clarke, the president of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonprofit legal group, and a former Justice Department attorney whose work included voting cases. “They put themselves on trial, and they failed.”

Yet there are no signs that those defeats in the courts will change the trajectory of the ongoing efforts to restrict voting that have been core to<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/magazine/trump-voter-fraud.html> conservative politics since the disputed 2000 election, which coincided with heightened party concerns that demographic shifts would favor Democrats in the popular vote.
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Posted in chicanery<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>, fraudulent fraud squad<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8>


“A modest and timely proposal”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120058>
Posted on December 26, 2020 8:39 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120058> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Jack Santucci:<https://www.voteguy.com/2020/12/09/a-modest-and-timely-proposal/>

Democrats are fundamentally disadvantaged when it comes to winning U.S. House majorities. This is because their votes concentrate in population-dense areas. Independent redistricting cannot fix this. On all this, read Rodden (2019)<https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/jonathan-a-rodden/why-cities-lose/9781541644250/> and McGann, Smith, Latner, and Keena (2016)<https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316534342>.

Depending on the outcome of Georgia’s two Senate runoffs, Democrats may be in a unique position to fix their “geography problem.” Unified government would make it possible to adopt a modest form of proportional representation.

If Democrats do not do this, they are likely to lose the House again in 2022. That will mean a return to gridlock — and all that it entails for Democrats’ brand.

Here is one plan going forward…
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Posted in alternative voting systems<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=63>


“Judge: “What’s going on here?” NY-22 county BOE timestamps ballots day after election”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120056>
Posted on December 26, 2020 8:35 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120056> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

WBNG reports.<https://wbng.com/2020/12/22/judge-whats-going-on-here-n-22-county-boe-timestamps-ballots-day-after-receiving-them/>
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


Nevada: “Judge rejects request for new Clark County Commission election sought by Stavros Anthony amid narrow loss to Ross Miller”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120054>
Posted on December 26, 2020 8:33 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120054> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

The Nevada Independent reports.<https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/judge-rejects-request-for-new-clark-county-commission-election-sought-by-stavros-anthony-amid-narrow-loss-to-ross-miller>
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>



--
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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