[EL] more news and commentary 11/16/20

[Rick Hasen]

Trump’s Legal Path to Overturn the Election Results Appears 100 Percent Dead<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118703>
Posted on November 16, 2020 9:01 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118703> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

With an overwhelming number of losses and withdrawals<https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/16/politics/lawsuits-michigan-pennsylvania-wisconsin-georgia/index.html> of cases, there is no path for the Trump campaign to overturn the results in a single state, much less states making up more than 36 electoral college votes.

It’s over. Trump may still say he has won the election. But there is no path. Even the two key federal cases in Pennsylvania do not involve nearly enough votes to overturn the results there even if they were successful (and I don’t expect them to be).

There is no path. Rudy Giuliani can say what he wants and the President can keep declaring that he’s won, but there’s no plausible legal way this election gets overturned.

We are not talking three Hail Marys anymore.<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/trump-needs-three-consecutive-hail-mary-passes/617063/> We are talking done.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


True the Vote Voluntarily Dismisses Lawsuit Targeting Michigan Counties with Large Numbers of African American Voters [Update: Bopp Dismisses Wisconsin Suit Too]<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118698>
Posted on November 16, 2020 8:16 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118698> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Details:<https://twitter.com/sbagen/status/1328368437589143552>

Yesterday’s coverage<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118669>.

Update: Here’s the Wisconsin dismissal<https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/2020/11/Notice-of-Voluntary-Dismissal-E.D.-Wis..pdf>.

And now <https://twitter.com/Nedfoley/status/1328378558591488002> a PA dismissal.

CNN<https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/16/politics/lawsuits-michigan-pennsylvania-wisconsin-georgia/index.html>: Lawsuits that tried to disrupt Biden’s wins in four states are withdrawn
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“Claims of voter fraud are common. It’s the fraud that’s rare.”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118696>
Posted on November 16, 2020 7:16 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118696> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NYT reports.<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/us/politics/voter-fraud-claims.html>
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Posted in fraudulent fraud squad<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8>


“As a G.O.P. Playbook on Voter Fraud Falls Flat, Some Ask: What’s Next?”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118694>
Posted on November 16, 2020 7:14 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118694> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Michael Wines<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/14/us/republican-voter-restrictions-absentee.html?searchResultPosition=1> for the NYT:

It was an election where Republican charges of fictitious voter fraud took center stage before, during and after the count, backed by a barrage of lawsuits intent on making it harder to cast or tally votes.

Yet by its end, Americans had cast ballots at a rate not seen in a century. A Democrat was elected president. And Republicans drew surprising support from Black and Latino voters — the very groups the party historically targeted with restrictive voting laws in state after state.

That a strategy Republicans long relied on largely fell flat, experts say, can be explained by the partisan divisions that drove record turnout, by self-inflicted wounds on the part of President Trump and by a pandemic that turned a gradual trend toward voting early — by mail or in person — into a stampede.

Some of those factors may be one-offs. But aspects of this election — especially the shift from Election Day voting to mail ballots, and the party’s surprising gains with some racial groups — raise questions of whether the Republican strategy of voter restrictions served the party’s interests as it once did. Also unclear is whether the changes in how people voted this year, in the middle of a pandemic, reflect long-term changes pointing to higher turnouts or factors unique to the 2020 vote.

“Stereotypes die hard<https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/06/02/in-changing-u-s-electorate-race-and-education-remain-stark-dividing-lines/>, and this Republican idea that if more people vote it benefits Democrats was at some level more true in the past,” said Norman Ornstein, a scholar of American politics and democracy at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “It was certainly true when Republicans believed that white working-class voters were Democrats. But it’s a ridiculous stereotype now.”

Mr. Ornstein is a relentless critic of Mr. Trump and the Republican Party’s increasingly authoritarian bent. And nobody expects party leaders to quickly abandon a strategy that has served its interests from North Carolina to Texas to North Dakota. Republicans have argued that measures like voter identification laws, purges of voter rolls and limits on mail ballots are necessary to combat fraud, but ballot fraud is so rare that the rules often accomplish little more than suppress legal turnout. Even so, such strategies have long been part of American politics and are not going away.

“As long as the Republican Party is going to depend on whiter, older and more rural electorate,” said Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, “they’re going to make it harder for some people to register and vote.” Assertions of fraud, he said, fire up loyalists, increase political contributions and delegitimize Democratic victories.

“Already,” Dr. Hasen said, “Biden is going to come into office with millions of people believing falsely that he cheated his way into the presidency.”

But the election also highlighted how trying to place limits on casting a ballot might actually motivate voters to turn out. And even ignoring the toxic effects on democracy, some experts say, this was an election in which the results suggested that the Republican voting playbook may no longer be as effective as before.
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Posted in fraudulent fraud squad<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8>


“Why Obama Fears for Our Democracy”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118692>
Posted on November 16, 2020 7:11 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118692> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

The Atlantic:<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/why-obama-fears-for-our-democracy/617087/>

Two issues that run deeper for Obama than Trump’s personal deficiencies concern the changes he sees in the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement. “I did not believe how easily the Republican establishment, people who had been in Washington for a long time and had professed a belief in certain institutional values and norms, would just cave” to Trumpian populism, he said.

He traces the populist shift inside the Republican Party to the election that made him president. It was Sarah Palin, John McCain’s 2008 running mate, he said, who helped unleash the populist wave: “The power of Palin’s rallies compared with McCain’s rallies—just contrast the excitement you would see in the Republican base. I think this hinted at the degree to which appeals around identity politics, around nativism, conspiracies, were gaining traction.”

The populist wave was abetted by Fox News and other right-wing media outlets, he said, and encouraged to spread by social-media companies uninterested in exploring their impact on democracy. “I don’t hold the tech companies entirely responsible,” he said, “because this predates social media. It was already there. But social media has turbocharged it. I know most of these folks. I’ve talked to them about it. The degree to which these companies are insisting that they are more like a phone company than they are like The Atlantic, I do not think is tenable. They are making editorial choices, whether they’ve buried them in algorithms or not. The First Amendment doesn’t require private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there.”

He went on to say, “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.”
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Posted in cheap speech<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=130>


11/17 Ash Event: “Voting in the Extraordinary 2020 Elections: What Worked for Voters, What Didn’t?”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118690>
Posted on November 16, 2020 7:04 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118690> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

RSVP details<https://ash.harvard.edu/event/voting-extraordinary-2020-elections-what-worked-voters-what-didn%E2%80%99t>:

Date:

Tuesday, November 17, 2020, 12:00pm to 1:15pm

Location:

Virtual Event (Registration Required)

While it is way too early for a ‘retrospective’ given just how extraordinary this year’s election has been, we do now know a lot about the voting processes up to and including Election Day. The 2020 elections were a dramatic interplay of major procedural changes brought about as a result of COVID-19, multiple attempts to limit and discourage voting and a strong pushback against them, and extraordinary efforts to mobilize citizens to vote.  The Ash Center is glad to bring four deeply immersed leaders in these areas to share what they saw and what they know:
·         David Becker, Executive Director and Founder, Center for Election Innovation & Research
·         Alexis Anderson-Reed, CEO, State Voices
·         Kristen Clarke, President, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
·         Chiraag Bains, Director of Legal Strategies, Demos
·         Miles Rapoport (Moderator), Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy, the Ash Center
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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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