[EL] Harris County election problems

Thu Mar 5 05:55:26 PST 2020

It’s worth noting that in Texas, the political parties, not the county officials, select the number and locations of polling places for their respective primaries. 

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> On Mar 4, 2020, at 11:33 PM, Rick Hasen <rhasen at law.uci.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
> “The Supreme Court’s Pro-Partisanship Turn”
> Posted on March 4, 2020 8:29 pm by Rick Hasen
> I have posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming, Georgetown Law Journal Online). Here is the abstract:
> The United States Supreme Court’s conservative majority has taken the Court’s election jurisprudence on a pro-partisanship turn which gives political actors freer range to pass laws and enact policies that can help entrench politicians (particularly Republicans) in power and insulate them from political competition. The trend on the Supreme Court is unmistakable whether it reflects the Court majority’s cynical view that American politics is “sordid, partisan and unfair” or more crassly a self-interested reality of Republican-appointed Justices doing the bidding of the Republican Party.
> 
> 
> This Article focuses not on the majority’s motivations but instead upon three subtle doctrinal tools the Court has developed to further the pro-partisanship turn and allow Republican party entrenchment. These doctrinal tools take the Court much farther than it went in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court decision holding that federal courts cannot consider constitutional claims against partisan gerrymandering. Indeed, this doctrinal subtlety has allowed much of this pro-partisanship turn to remain unnoticed in the broader legal community. The results nonetheless may block nonpartisan election reform and depress minority voting rights, especially in the “race or party” racial gerrymandering cases in which courts hold predominant racial motivations in redistricting are impermissible but predominant partisan motivations are permissible.
> 
> Analysis of these subtle doctrinal moves not only lays bare a profound shift in the Court’s election law cases that likely will hurt minority voting rights; it also illustrates the power of Supreme Court Justices to move doctrine subtly while avoiding controversy that would accompany more forthright judicial declarations.
> 
> 
> First, Chief Justice John Roberts, sometimes in majority opinions for the Court, has exhibited what appears to be a false naivete about what social scientists and, by extension, courts, can know about voters’ political behavior. From calling political science tests of partisan gerrymandering “sociological gobbledygook” to misrepresenting the plaintiffs’ arguments in the 2019 Rucho partisan gerrymandering case as a call for proportional representation to proclaiming in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder case killing off a key part of the Voting Rights Act that “things have changed in the South,” Roberts has consistently ignored or belittled social science evidence about voting behavior in ways that give political actors freer rein to enact laws and policies in their self-interest.
> 
> 
> Second, the Court’s new burden-shifting “presumption of good faith” has put a large thumb on the scale in favor of legislative self-interest and against findings of minority vote dilution. Coupling the Supreme Court’s 2018 voting rights decision in Abbott v. Perez with Rucho, lower courts must assume good faith even when self-interested legislators and other political actors enact laws or policies which preserve their own power. The Court has expanded the realm of good faith to include some self-interested actions, such as what the Court in Rucho called “constitutional political gerrymandering.”
> 
> 
> Third, the Court has allowed government actors to reenact laws or policies only slightly different from laws or policies that lower courts have found to be discriminatory by coming up with new, nondiscriminatory reasons to support them. As in Abbott, the courts allow such “animus laundering” to remove the apparent discriminatory taint of the original action while letting the government enact substantially the same policies without penalty. A recent Fifth Circuit case on Texas’s voter identification law provides a classic example of animus laundering. Further, the Supreme Court’s recent Department of Commerce case concerning inclusion of a citizenship question on the 2020 census case shows the length to which many of the Justices are willing to go to ignore evidence of discriminatory intent and pretext and provide a cleansing of discriminatory taint.
> 
> 
> These three Supreme Court tools—willful ignorance of political reality, the presumption of legislative good faith, and animus laundering—give self-interested government actors the ability to make partisan gerrymandering, racial gerrymandering, restrictive election laws, and minority vote dilution easier. Further, as explained in Part V, the combination of the presumption of good faith and animus laundering provides a path for the Court to get out of the difficult “race or party” box in the racial gerrymandering cases by having courts recast racial agendas as partisan agendas, and then treating the partisan agendas as constitutionally permissible.
> 
> <image001.png>
> Posted in redistricting, Supreme Court
>  
>  
> “L.A. County supervisors want answers to widespread voting problems”
> Posted on March 4, 2020 8:18 pm by Rick Hasen
> LAT:
> Inadequate staffing, poor communications and balky technology turned election day in Los Angeles County into an anxious quagmire for many voters, whose complaints triggered calls Wednesday by one member of the Board of Supervisors for a “forensic autopsy” on what went wrong.
> 
> Voters reported waiting four hours and longer in some locations to cast their ballots. Some bounced from one polling place to the next, searching in vain for shorter lines. At one polling station, a worker said she wept in frustration while desperate voters scratched out their choices on write-in ballots — written in languages they did not speak.
> 
> “This is a disgrace,” one voter, who did not leave a name, complained to The Times. He added that the electronic check-in system was “nothing but an unholy mess.”
> 
> The messy outcome was a painful comedown for the county supervisors and elections chief Dean Logan, who invested $300 million in the effort after prior elections left votes uncounted and voters missing from the official rolls.
> 
> Officials had pledged that the electronic Voting Solutions for All People, or VSAP, system would be easier, more transparent and more secure. They expressed no serious reservations before Tuesday’s election, which included state and local races and the presidential primary.
> 
> Supervisor Janice Hahn introduced a motion at a Board of Supervisors meeting Wednesday ordering voting officials to report back within 45 days on the excessive wait times and staffing and technical problems. The motion also demands that officials come up with ways to solve the voting problems before the Nov. 3 general election.
> 
> <image001.png>
> Posted in election administration
>  
>  
> Texas: “Harris County’s cascade of election day fumbles disproportionately affected communities of color”
> Posted on March 4, 2020 8:16 pm by Rick Hasen
> Texas Tribune:
> Not even 24 hours later, a university forged during segregation would instead become the epicenter of the challenges and complications often faced by communities of color when they attempt to make themselves heard in Texas. Too few voting machines — and technical failures of aging equipment. Insufficient training of election workers. A shoddy system reporting incorrect wait times that routed voters to crowded locations. Long lines that only grew — initially wrapping through a campus library and eventually out into a courtyard — as voters rushed to jump in line before polls closed.
> 
> Wait times for voters in the queue, students and other residents of Houston’s Third Ward extended past the four-hour, then five-hour, then six-hour marks. The last voters at the polling place on campus would ultimately spend nearly an entire workday waiting in line to cast their ballots, almost five hours after polls closed.
> 
> The excessive wait times were not limited to college campuses or even to the Houston area. But Texas Southern University easily saw the worst of it as a result of a sort of perfect electoral storm in which state voting policy ran into local political disputes that were then met by an unexpected surge in Democratic voters — all at the expense of voters in a predominantly black community.
> <image001.png>
> Posted in election administration
>  
>  
> “Lawyer warned Georgia county on dumping new voting system”
> Posted on March 4, 2020 8:12 pm by Rick Hasen
> AP:
> A Georgia county has opted to ditch the state’s new voting machines and switch to hand-marked paper ballots during early voting for the March presidential primary, despite a warning from the county’s attorney that the decision could result in litigation that’s tough to defend in court.
> 
> The Athens-Clarke County Board of Elections voted 3-2 on Tuesday to mothball the new machines after less than two days of using them in early voting ahead of Georgia’s presidential primaries. The board ordered poll workers to switch to paper ballots marked by hand starting Wednesday.
> 
> Board Chairman Jesse Evans said concerns that bystanders at the polls could see the choices voters made on the new system’s touchscreens rendered it impossible to guarantee ballot secrecy.
> 
> <image001.png>
> Posted in election administration
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>  
> “Daughter of late GOP redistricting expert releases trove of documents”
> Posted on March 4, 2020 8:08 pm by Rick Hasen
> CBS News reports.
> <image001.png>
> Posted in Uncategorized
>  
>  
> “Sick: Trolls Exploit Coronavirus Fears for Election Fun”
> Posted on March 4, 2020 12:16 pm by Rick Hasen
> Daily Beast:
> Accounts from self-identified supporters of Bernie Sanders’ candidacy also joked that Biden voters, who tend to be older and presumably more at risk of serious illness from coronavirus, should stay away from polling places. In tweets now deleted by Twitter, pro-Sanders accounts wrote that “Biden supporters are urged to remain indoors” and  “warning that everyone over age 60 that #coronavirus has been reported at ALL polling locations for #SuperTuesday.” 
> The misinformation spanned the political spectrum, with conservative trolls spreading misinformation about the risk of catching the virus in California polling places and Biden voters being at risk. “Biden supporters should stay away from public places during this time of Wuhan sickliness. Like polling places. Please stay home,” Michael Berry, a conservative Texas talk show host tweeted. 
> <image001.png>
> Posted in chicanery
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>  
> “‘Rigged’ rhetoric makes a comeback after Trump’s comments and Sanders’s losses — and gives Russia just what it wants”
> Posted on March 4, 2020 12:14 pm by Rick Hasen
> Aaron Blake for WaPo.
> <image001.png>
> Posted in campaigns
>  
>  
> “Trey Trainor’s nomination to the FEC will only make matters worse”
> Posted on March 4, 2020 9:59 am by Rick Hasen
> Issue One:
> In response to the news that Senate Republicans will hold a confirmation hearing next week for Federal Election Commission (FEC) nominee Trey Trainor, Issue One Executive Director Meredith McGehee released the following statement:
> 
> “It is unacceptable that the watchdog for our federal elections has been without a quorum to conduct even the most basic business for more than six months. But reopening the Federal Election Commission with a nominee who does not think we should enforce the nation’s campaign finance laws will only make matters worse.
> 
> “The best way to protect our elections — and increase public confidence in them — is for the president to nominate, and the Senate to confirm, individuals who will put their constitutional oaths to uphold the law above personal ideological views. Anything short of that will only continue the dysfunction at the FEC.”
> 
> <image001.png>
> Posted in federal election commission
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>  
> -- 
> 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
> http://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/
> http://electionlawblog.org
>  
>  
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