[EL] A Note of Thanks, And a Blog Slowdown, as I Complete My “Cheap Speech” Book Manuscript and Contemplate the Future of the Election Law Blog and Election Reform Work

Tue Nov 24 10:11:25 PST 2020

Thank you, Rick.  Especially here in Pennsylvania, your work has been a
lifeline for those of us scrambling to keep up with the local chaos and
beat back a storm of misinformation while maintaining some view of the
bigger picture.

On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 10:36 AM Rick Hasen <rhasen at law.uci.edu> wrote:

> A Note of Thanks, And a Blog Slowdown, as I Complete My “Cheap Speech”
> Book Manuscript and Contemplate the Future of the Election Law Blog and
> Election Reform Work <https://electionlawblog.org/?p=119034>
>
> Posted on November 24, 2020 7:34 am
> <https://electionlawblog.org/?p=119034> by *Rick Hasen*
> <https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
>
> This election season has been a challenge to American democracy, one that
> was even more severe than I anticipated in Election Meltdown
> <https://www.amazon.com/Election-Meltdown-Distrust-American-Democracy/dp/0300248199/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=hasen+election+meltdown&qid=1565015345&s=digital-text&sr=1-1-catcorr>.
> That book came out in February, the day of the Iowa caucus debacle, and
> things declined from there. In February, I convened a group of leading
> thinkers in law, politics, tech, and media to discuss the threats to the
> integrity of the election, in a conference called, Can American Democracy
> Survive the 2020 Elections?
> <https://www.law.uci.edu/events/election-law/election-2020/>The question
> was not meant rhetorically.
>
> Some the participants in that conference participated in a private meeting
> after to begin to hammer out recommendations to assure a fair and safe 2020
> election. That conference turned out to be the last big conference I
> attended before COVID shut down in-person gatherings. The group continued
> to deliberate about recommendations online, even as some of its members
> contracted the virus. The recommendations had to be reworked given COVID.
>
> In late April, we released our report, Fair Elections During a Crisis
> <https://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/2020ElectionReport.pdf>,
> and the report had some key recommendations which got a fair bit of
> attention and traction, including the key idea needed to be prepared that
> because of COVID, the election could be too early to call for a number of
> days, and in the meantime there could be unsubstantiated claims of voter
> fraud and disinformation, and an attempt to undermine American democracy.
> That meant that social media companies had an important role to play in
> combatting disinformation. It also called for election administrators and
> Congress to assure that Americans had safe mail-in and in-person voting
> options in November.
>
> Over the last few months, Donald Trump’s attack on the integrity of the
> election system, and the willingness of many in the Republican party to go
> along with completely unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and vote
> rigging, have put the system under tremendous strain. That’s why it was so
> important that we had as fair and clean an election as possible. I am in
> awe and grateful to the state and local election administrators of both
> parties who engaged in Herculean effort to make our election fair. I am
> profoundly disappointed that some Republican legislators and others acted to
> make it harder to vote
> <https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/elj.2020.0646> even during a
> pandemic, and that some courts, including the Supreme Court, have engaged
> in new jurisprudence which made voting harder than it needed to be during
> the pandemic, and, as I wrote yesterday in the Times
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/opinion/trump-election-courts.html?referringSource=articleShare>,
> will present new voting rights challenges in the future.
>
> As someone who has been out in public explaining the complex rules
> surrounding our elections and the litigation that inevitably accompanies
> disputes in American life, I want to express my appreciation to the
> community of election law scholars and political scientists who worked
> tirelessly to assure that the public got fair and accurate information, and
> who debated and discussed issues in good faith despite some ideological
> disagreements. It is really easy to make errors in the midst of election
> disputes, and I made fewer mistakes because of this rich and generous
> community.
>
> And I want to express my great appreciation for courts that have held up
> the rule of law, again despite the usual ideological agreements. When our
> norms have been challenged, our laws have held—barely, but held.
>
> I’m now going to step back from the blog to complete work on my book
> manuscript, Cheap Speech
> <https://www.law.uci.edu/news/press-releases/2020/hasen-craig-newmark-grant.html>,
> that is considering questions of how do deal with the flood of
> misinformation and disinformation about elections that will pervade the
> process going forward. I’m way behind now because of what has transpired
> over the last few months.
>
> I’ll still blog the most important developments, but I plan to write much
> less in this space for the rest of the year. I also plan to take some time
> to think about the future of ELB. I’ve been running this blog since 2003:
> it is a labor of love but a tremendous amount of work. I need to consider
> the most sustainable model going forward.
>
> I also would like to find time to consider long term election reform. As I
> wrote
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/opinion/sunday/voting-rights.html> in
> the New York Times in August:
>
> *Beyond triage for 2020, longer term change requires bolder thinking. We
> need a new social movement, that may take a generation or more, pushing a
> constitutional amendment protecting the right to vote. It would guarantee
> all adult citizens the right to vote in federal elections, establish a
> nonpartisan administrative body to run federal elections that would
> automatically register all eligible voters to vote, and impose basic
> standards of voting access and competency for state and local elections.*
>
> *Talking of a constitutional amendment in the current polarized atmosphere
> may sound like a pipe dream when Congress cannot pass even basic voting
> rights protections, like restoring the part of the Voting Rights Act that
> the Supreme Court destroyed. But the current situation is untenable.*
>
> *We need a 28th Amendment for voter equality around which people can
> organize and agitate. Organization could emulate the battle
> <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3501114> for passage
> of the 19th Amendment, which bars gender discrimination in voting. It took
> more than a generation for that amendment to pass, and along the way
> activists for equal women’s suffrage got state legislatures to bolster
> voting rights and the public to change its attitudes about voting.*
>
> *It has been 100 years since passage of the 19th Amendment and 150 since
> the passage of the 15th Amendment barring racial discrimination in voting.
> Despite those accomplishments, every national election features endless
> angst and litigation over assuring people the right to vote, which puts
> special burdens on those who already face the greatest barriers. We need to
> bring that struggle to an end and press forward toward a new voting rights
> amendment that would assure that our representatives truly reflect the will
> of the people.*
>
> Thank you for reading, and Happy Thanksgiving!
>
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> <https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=https%3A%2F%2Felectionlawblog.org%2F%3Fp%3D119034&title=A%20Note%20of%20Thanks%2C%20And%20a%20Blog%20Slowdown%2C%20as%20I%20Complete%20My%20%E2%80%9CCheap%20Speech%E2%80%9D%20Book%20Manuscript%20and%20Contemplate%20the%20Future%20of%20the%20Election%20Law%20Blog%20and%20Election%20Reform%20Work>
>
> 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
>
> http://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/
>
> http://electionlawblog.org
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Jessie Allen
AssociateProfessor
University of Pittsburgh School of Law
3900 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
412-624-2175
http://blackstoneweekly.wordpress.com/
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