[EL] ELB News and Commentary 7/25/20

[Rick Hasen]

Scheduled to Be Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” Taking About the Fairness and Legitimacy of the 2020 Election<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113449>
Posted on July 25, 2020 1:36 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113449> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Tune in<https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/1287099994374275073> at 11 am eastern, and especially about the role of the media. See recommendations 5 and 6 of our Fair Elections During a Crisis<https://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/2020ElectionReport.pdf> report:
[cid:image001.png at 01D66288.EAD94470]
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Posted in Election Meltdown<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=127>


“U.S. Warns Russia, China and Iran Are Trying to Interfere in the Election. Democrats Say It’s Far Worse.”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113447>
Posted on July 25, 2020 1:31 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113447> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NYT:<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/us/politics/election-interference-russia-china-iran.html>

American intelligence officials issued a public warning on Friday that China was “expanding its influence efforts” in the United States ahead of the presidential election, along with Russia and Iran, but Democrats briefed on the matter said the threat was far more urgent than what the administration described.

The warning came from William R. Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, in a statement 100 days before Americans go to the polls. “We’re primarily concerned with China, Russia and Iran — although other nation-states and nonstate actors could also do harm to our electoral process,” the statement said….

Mr. Schiff, who is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Friday on MSNBC that he had been “urging Bill Evanina and others in the intelligence community to level with the American people about what’s going on.” He said the warning gave “a false sense of equivalence between what Russia is doing, what China is doing, what Iran is doing.”

Mr. Schiff and the other three authors of the letter have been briefed <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/us/politics/russian-interference-trump-democrats.html> extensively on the intelligence, and thus are prohibited from violating classification rules by describing what they have seen.

But Mr. Schiff, a frequent target of harsh criticism from Mr. Trump because he was the Democrats’ manager in the impeachment trial in the Senate, added, “I think that our adversaries, in particular the Russians, are going to amplify the false messages that the president is putting out about, ‘Well, you can’t trust absentee ballots,’ even though that’s how the president votes.”

Some intelligence officials expressed surprise at the lawmakers’ letter and insisted they were not trying to play down the threat of interference from Moscow or signal that China was a greater challenge. They said Mr. Evanina’s statement was meant to be the beginning of a series of public statements, according to an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
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Posted in campaigns<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>, chicanery<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>


“A 2020 Question 100 Days Out: Will the Elections Be Free and Fair? President Trump baselessly rages about voter fraud, while Joe Biden warns of foreign interference.”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113445>
Posted on July 25, 2020 1:28 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113445> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NYT reports.<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/us/politics/2020-election-voter-fraud-interference.html>
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Posted in Election Meltdown<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=127>, The Voting Wars<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>


“Anatomy of an Election ‘Meltdown’ in Georgia”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113443>
Posted on July 25, 2020 1:26 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113443> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NYT deep dive<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/us/politics/georgia-election-voting-problems.html>:

Elections workers described a cascade of failures as they struggled to activate and operate Georgia’s new high-tech voting system. Next came a barrage of partisan blame-throwing: The Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, accused the liberal-leaning Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta, of botching the election, while Democratic leaders saw the fiasco as just the latest episode in Republicans’ yearslong effort to disenfranchise the state’s minority voters.

Six weeks later, as the political calendar bends toward November and the presidential campaigns look to Georgia as a possible battleground, the faults in the state’s balky elections system remain largely unresolved. And it has become increasingly clear that what happened in June was a collective collapse.
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Posted in election administration<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>, Election Meltdown<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=127>


“As Concerns About Voting Build, The Supreme Court Refuses To Step In”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113441>
Posted on July 25, 2020 1:21 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113441> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Emmet Witkovsky-Eldred and Nina Totenberg for NPR<https://www.npr.org/2020/07/25/895185355/as-concerns-about-voting-build-the-supreme-court-refuses-to-step-in>:

Voting rights advocates are batting 0-4 at the U.S. Supreme Court so far this year. A record number of election-related lawsuits are piling up in courts around the country as concerns mount about the safety of voting in person because of the coronavirus and the availability and reliability of voting by mail. With a pandemic raging and uncertainty brewing, some fear the Supreme Court’s chilly attitude toward election lawsuits may add yet another obstacle to a free and fair election this November.
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Posted in Supreme Court<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>, The Voting Wars<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>


More Legal Challenges to Ranked-Choice Voting<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113422>
Posted on July 25, 2020 10:36 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113422> by Richard Pildes<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=7>

Ever since Maine voters approved the use of ranked-choice voting, the system has been under legal attack. Here’s a story about the latest lawsuit.

The Fulcrum:<https://thefulcrum.us/voting/maine-ranked-choice-voting-2646794034>

The latest suit argues that allowing ranked-choice voting in this fall would deny many voters full participation in the election. The argument is based largely on a study of the 2018 elections by Nolan McCarty, a Princeton University professor.

The study claims many voters were hurt because they did not understand how ranked-choice voting works and did not choose and rank enough candidates.

So, the argument goes, after the first round of ballot counting if no candidate has a majority, then the candidate receiving the lowest number of votes is eliminated and the second choice of those voters is applied in the second round of counting. (That’s how Golden won despite trailing in the initial count.)

But if the voter did not make a second or subsequent selection, then their ballot is “exhausted” and, in effect, does not count, the suit argues.

The Ninth Circuit already rejected this argument in Dudum v. Arntz
640 F.3d 1098 (9th Cir. 2011). Of course, in the more common system in which each voter casts a single vote, the votes of all those voting for the losing candidate “do not count” either. Or if a voter chooses not to vote in a particular race, their ballot is also “exhausted” for that race.

Alaska and Massachusetts have ranked-choice voting on the ballot this fall. For a legal defense of ranked-choice voting against these attacks, see this article of mine, co-authored with Michael Parsons, titled The Legality of Ranked-Choice Voting.<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3563257>
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“Arizona Democratic Party headquarters fire now an arson investigation”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113419>
Posted on July 24, 2020 5:10 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113419> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NBC News<https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/valley/arizona-democratic-party-headquarters-catches-on-fire/75-83fc2c47-b0cb-439a-a709-6e6fb6caba9e> reports.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


Race-Blind Redistricting and Partisan Representation<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113413>
Posted on July 24, 2020 11:24 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113413> by Nicholas Stephanopoulos<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=12>

Yesterday<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113372> I summarized my forthcoming work<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3658671> with Jowei Chen on the implications of race-blind redistricting for minority representation. Today I’ll talk about our partisan representation findings: how the major parties would be affected if district lines were drawn on a non-racial basis.

To investigate this question, we ran one more round of simulations for each state. As before, we instructed the algorithm to ignore partisanship and to match or beat the enacted plan in terms of equal population, compactness, county splits, and municipality splits. But this time, we also instructed the algorithm to exactly match the existing number of minority opportunity districts in the enacted plan. In combination, these two simulation sets allow us to estimate the partisan effects of race-blind redistricting. The new simulation set ignores party but not race. The original simulation set ignores party and race. The difference between the two simulation sets thus represents the impact of switching from race-conscious to race-blind redistricting, while keeping every other factor constant.

To illustrate, consider another southern state in our dataset: Georgia. There are 118 Republican districts in the enacted state house plan (using 2012 data). In the 1000 race-conscious simulations, which exactly match the enacted plan’s 52 African American opportunity districts, there are anywhere from 107 to 116 Republican districts, with a median and mode of 111 Republican districts. And in the 1000 race-blind simulations, which ignore race altogether, there are anywhere from 111 to 124 Republican districts, with a median and mode of 117 Republican districts. So switching from race-conscious to race-blind redistricting results in about six more Republican districts: a sizable increase.
[cid:image003.png at 01D66288.EAD94470][cid:image004.png at 01D66288.EAD94470]

A few other southern states (Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas) exhibit the same pattern. What’s going on here is that the race-blind simulations contain fewer opportunity districts than the race-conscious simulations. These eliminated opportunity districts, which almost always elect Democrats, are being replaced by non-opportunity districts, which usually elect Republicans thanks to these states’ conservative white populations. But in most states in our dataset, there isn’t a big partisan difference between the race-conscious and the race-blind simulations. Outside the deep South, in particular, Democrats and Republicans do about the same whether the lines are drawn race-consciously or race-blindly.

Our findings challenge the conventional wisdom about the relationship between minority and partisan representation. A common view is that Republicans benefit when more opportunity districts are created because these districts inefficiently overconcentrate minority Democrats. A corollary of this argument is that Democrats should be advantaged by a reduction in the number of opportunity districts. Yet we find no evidence for this proposition. The race-blind simulations do generally reduce the number of opportunity districts compared to the race-conscious simulations (and the status quo). But Democrats don’t do better in the race-blind simulations than in the race-conscious simulations. Instead, they fare about the same in most places—and notably worse in the deep South. At least in that part of the country, the conventional wisdom is the opposite of reality.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


Wisconsin: “Bipartisan Group To Promote In-Person And Mail-In Voting During Pandemic”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113411>
Posted on July 24, 2020 10:34 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113411> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

WPR<https://www.wpr.org/bipartisan-group-promote-person-and-mail-voting-during-pandemic>:

A bipartisan coalition of high-level Wisconsin politicians has launched an initiative to educate voters about in-person and mail-in voting during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The initiative, VoteSafe WI, supports both in-person voting and absentee voting by mail for the August partisan primary and November general election. Voting by mail has been recently criticized by some Republicans, including President Donald Trump<https://www.npr.org/2020/06/22/881598655/fact-check-trump-spreads-unfounded-claims-about-voting-by-mail>.

Wisconsin saw a record number of voters cast mail-in absentee ballots in its April election. About 62 percent of all ballots were cast by mail.

Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul and former Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen are leading the group.

Van Hollen, who served as Wisconsin’s attorney general from 2007-2015, often focused on efforts to prevent voter fraud<https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94862567> while in office.

Speaking on a call with reporters Tuesday morning, Van Hollen said there has been a lot of “confusion” about voting by mail in recent years, but he believes the public should have confidence in the system.

“In Wisconsin, we have an extremely secure system,” he said.

Van Hollen said a major part of the initiative’s aim is to educate voters about how to vote by mail.

“We need to make sure people understand that, and many people don’t,” he said.

More of this please.
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Posted in absentee ballots<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=53>, election administration<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>


“Facebook ignored racial bias research, employees say”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113409>
Posted on July 24, 2020 8:32 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113409> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NBC News<https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-management-ignored-internal-research-showing-racial-bias-current-former-n1234746>:

In mid-2019, researchers at Facebook began studying a new set of rules proposed for the automated system that Instagram uses to remove accounts for bullying and other infractions.

What they found was alarming. Users on the Facebook-owned Instagram in the United States whose activity on the app suggested they were Black were about 50 percent more likely under the new rules to have their accounts automatically disabled by the moderation system than those whose activity indicated they were white, according to two current employees and one former employee, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk to the media.

The findings were echoed by interviews with Facebook and Instagram users who said they felt that the platforms’ moderation practices were discriminatory, the employees said.

The researchers took their findings to their superiors, expecting that it would prompt managers to quash the changes. Instead, they were told not share their findings with co-workers or conduct any further research into racial bias in Instagram’s automated account removal system. Instagram ended up implementing a slightly different version of the new rules but declined to let the researchers test the new version.

It was an episode that frustrated employees who wanted to reduce racial bias on the platform but one that they said did not surprise them. Facebook management has repeatedly ignored and suppressed internal research showing racial bias in the way that the platform removes content, according to eight current and former employees, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss internal Facebook business.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“All Your Most Paranoid Transfer of Power Questions, Answered”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113407>
Posted on July 24, 2020 8:30 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113407> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Ben Jacobs<https://gen.medium.com/all-your-most-paranoid-transfer-of-power-questions-answered-5db70d32373> for Gen.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“With November Approaching, Election Officials Still Face Safety, Security Questions”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113404>
Posted on July 24, 2020 7:58 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113404> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Pam Fessler<https://www.npr.org/2020/07/24/894736356/with-november-approaching-election-officials-still-face-safety-security-question?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=politics&utm_term=nprnews&utm_source=twitter.com> for NPR.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“8 Big Reasons Election Day 2020 Could Be a Disaster”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113402>
Posted on July 24, 2020 7:54 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113402> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Garrett Graff deep dive<https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/07/24/2020-election-disaster-perfect-storm-372778> for Politico.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


Watch Archived Video of Meaty and Interesting July 23 Conversation: 10th Annual UCI Law Supreme Court Term in Review<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113400>
Posted on July 24, 2020 7:44 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113400> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Watch here<https://www.law.uci.edu/news/videos/supreme-court-review-2020.html>:

This lively discussion reviewed the Supreme Court’s key cases decided in the October 2019 term, drawing a large audience for the virtual presentation, recorded via Zoom. Moderated by Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science Richard Hasen<https://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/index.html>, the all-star panel of Supreme Court jurists, journalists and legal scholars included Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law, Berkeley Law; Ariane de Vogue, Supreme Court Reporter for CNN; Rachel Moran<https://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/moran/index.html>, Distinguished Professor of Law, UCI Law; Michael T. Morley, Assistant Professor, Florida State University College of Law; and Kate Shaw, Supreme Court Contributor for ABC News and Professor of Law, Cardozo Law.

Thank you to our sponsor, TorkLaw.
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Posted in Supreme Court<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>


“Month-long vote count in Pennsylvania is another warning for November”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113398>
Posted on July 24, 2020 7:41 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113398> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NBC News reports.<https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/month-long-vote-count-pennsylvania-another-warning-november-n1234794>
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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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