[EL] ELB News and Commentary 9/8/20

Mon Sep 7 19:53:57 PDT 2020

Sept. 8 UCI Law Event: “Two Months to Election Day – Are We Prepared?”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=114425>
Posted on September 7, 2020 7:50 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=114425> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

[Bumping to the top]

Looking forward to this<https://calendar.law.uci.edu/event/60_days_from_election_day_-_are_we_prepared#.X0VJ1tNKiEt> (free registration required):

This webinar brings together experts in elections and election law to consider whether the United States is prepared to run a fair, safe, and legitimate election process in the midst of the pandemic. Among the topics for discussion are the role of absentee balloting, social media and election misinformation, and voter confidence in the election process.

This event is presented in conjunction with the UCI Jack W. Peltason Center for the Study of Democracy.Panelists__________________________________________________
·         Julia Azari<https://www.marquette.edu/political-science/directory/julia-azari.php>, Associate Professor and Assistant Chair, Marquette University
·         Mindy Romero<https://cid.usc.edu/mindy-romero>, Founder and Director, Center for Inclusive Democracy
·         Martin Wattenberg<https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=2541>, Professor of Political Science, UC Irvine
·         Moderated by Rick Hasen<http://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/>, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science, UCI Law
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>

“In Texas, Republicans fight voting by mail expansion while encouraging their voters to use it”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=114861>
Posted on September 7, 2020 7:49 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=114861> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Texas Tribune:<https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/04/texas-republicans-vote-by-mail/>

As states across the country scramble to make voting safer in a pandemic, Texas is in the small minority of those requiring voters who want to cast their ballots by mail to present an excuse beyond the risk of contracting the coronavirus at polling places. But the ongoing attempts by the White House to sow doubt over the reliability of voting by mail has left Texas voters in a blur of cognitive dissonance. Local officials are being reprimanded by the state’s Republican leadership for attempting to proactively send applications for mail-in ballots, while the people doing the scolding are still urging their voters to fill them out.

What was once a lightly used and largely uncontroversial voting option in Texas — one even Republicans relied on — is now the crux of the latest fight over who gets to vote and, equally as crucial in a pandemic, who has access to safe voting….

Some Texas Republicans quietly express frustration that party leaders are casting doubt on a system that they have worked for years to cultivate. West and other prominent Texas Republicans have floated unsubstantiated concerns that increased mail-in voting creates opportunities for widespread voter fraud. In interviews with multiple Republican operatives and attorneys who have worked on campaigns in the state, all suggested privately that the modernized system precludes such a scenario. None of these Republicans would go on the record, for fear of alienating colleagues.

There are some documented cases of fraud in mail-in voting in Texas. But like voter fraud overall, it remains rare.
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Posted in absentee ballots<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=53>, fraudulent fraud squad<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8>

“How Trump’s Billion Dollar Campaign Lost Its Cash Advantage”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=114859>
Posted on September 7, 2020 7:42 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=114859> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NYT:<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/07/us/politics/trump-election-campaign-fundraising.html>

Five months later, Mr. Trump’s financial supremacy has evaporated. Of the $1.1 billon his campaign and the party raised from the beginning of 2019 through July, more than $800 million has already been spent. Now some people inside the campaign are forecasting what was once unthinkable: a cash crunch with less than 60 days until the election, according to Republican officials briefed on the matter.

Brad Parscale, the former campaign manager, liked to call Mr. Trump’s re-election war machine an “unstoppable juggernaut.” But interviews with more than a dozen current and former campaign aides and Trump allies, and a review of thousands of items in federal campaign filings, show that the president’s campaign and the R.N.C. developed some profligate habits as they burned through hundreds of millions of dollars. Since Bill Stepien replaced Mr. Parscale in July, the campaign has imposed a series of belt-tightening measures that have reshaped initiatives, including hiring practices, travel and the advertising budget.

Under Mr. Parscale, more than $350 million — almost half of the $800 million spent — went to fund-raising operations, as no expense was spared in finding new donors online. The campaign assembled a big and well-paid staff and housed the team at a cavernous, well-appointed office in the Virginia suburbs; outsize legal bills were treated as campaign costs; and more than $100 million was spent on a television advertising blitz before the party convention, the point when most of the electorate historically begins to pay close attention to the race.

Among the splashiest and perhaps most questionable purchase was for Super Bowl ads that cost $11 million — more than the campaign has spent on TV in some top battleground states — a vanity splurge that allowed Mr. Trump to match the billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg’s buy for the big game.

There was also a cascade of smaller choices that added up: The campaign hired a coterie of highly paid consultants (Mr. Trump’s former bodyguard and White House aide has been paid more than $500,000 by the R.N.C. since late 2017); spent $156,000 for planes to pull aerial banners in recent months; and paid nearly $110,000 to Yondr, a company that makes magnetic pouches used to store cellphones during fund-raisers so that donors could not secretly record Mr. Trump and leak his remarks.

Some people familiar with the expenses noted that Mr. Parscale had a car and driver, an unusual expense for a campaign manager. Mr. Trump has told people gleefully that Mr. Stepien took a pay cut when the president gave him the job.
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Posted in campaign finance<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>, campaigns<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>

“In Year of Voting by Mail, a Scramble to Beef Up In-Person Voting, Too”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=114857>
Posted on September 7, 2020 7:29 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=114857> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NYT<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/07/us/politics/vote-in-person-covid.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage>:

Unnerved by the difficulties of voting amid a pandemic and faced with both the political static injected by President Trump and the limits on expanding voting by mail, state and local authorities across the country are racing to rethink and reinforce the polling sites where tens of millions of people are still expected to cast their ballots.

For all of the attention on voting by mail, perhaps four in 10 votes — 60 million ballots — are likely to be cast in person this fall, either early or on Election Day. Overall turnout could well reach 150 million for the first time, up from 137.5 million in 2016, according to Barry C. Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center<https://www.elections.wisc.edu/> at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Against the backdrop of Mr. Trump’s relentless criticism of voting by mail, the breakdowns at the Postal Service and the relatively high rate of rejections of mailed-in ballots, election officials and activists in both parties are amping up efforts to hire and train poll workers; integrate stadiums, arenas and malls into their voting options; and come up with contingency plans if there’s a surge in coronavirus cases in the fall.

A major area of concern is finding younger people who are able to replace older ones most susceptible to the ravages of Covid-19 at a time when 58 percent of the nation’s poll workers are 61 or older.

“Everyone’s focusing on the rate of voting by mail, which is going to easily double what it was in 2016 — somewhere north of 80 million ballots,” said Paul Gronke<https://blogs.reed.edu/paul-gronke/>, an expert on in-person voting at Reed College in Portland, Ore. “But people aren’t paying attention to what might happen if there’s a spike in the pandemic or a shortage of poll workers and there’s a last-minute reduction in in-person voting.”

“In some of our minds, the nightmare scenario isn’t about voting by mail,” he said. “It’s a meltdown at the polling places.”
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Posted in election administration<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>

“Racial tensions roiling US pose target for election meddling”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=114855>
Posted on September 7, 2020 7:26 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=114855> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

AP:<https://apnews.com/bb93b567f39655e0ab11bae609a15907?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top>

The tensions coursing through the United States over racism and policing are likely targets for adversaries seeking to influence the November election, lawmakers and experts warn — and there are signs that Russia is again seeking to exploit the divide.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>

“Polling place bottleneck delays could begin soon after they open”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=114853>
Posted on September 7, 2020 7:22 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=114853> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Steven Rosenfeld reports.<https://www.yahoo.com/news/polling-place-bottleneck-delays-could-170914656.html>
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>

Useful and Helpful Content Over at Healthy Elections<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=114851>
Posted on September 7, 2020 7:19 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=114851> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Check out these posts at healthyelections.org<https://healthyelections.org/>:

Arizona’s 2020 Elections in the Wake of the Coronavirus<https://www.lawfareblog.com/arizonas-2020-elections-wake-coronavirus> (July 31, 2020)

The 2020 California Special Elections<https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-07/California%20Special%20Elections%20Memo(3).pdf> (June 17, 2020)

Florida Election Policies and Readiness<https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/Florida%202020%20Elections%20in%20the%20Wake%20of%20COVID-19.pdf> (July 22, 2020)

A Quantitative Dive into Florida’s 2020 Voting Trends<https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-06/Florida%20Election%20Memo.pdf> (June 24, 2020)

The June 2020 Georgia Primary Election<https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/georgia_primary_memo.pdf> (July 28, 2020)

Iowa’s 2020 Primary in the Wake of the Coronavirus<https://www.lawfareblog.com/iowas-2020-primary-wake-coronavirus> (August 31, 2020)

Kentucky Election Policies and Readiness<https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/KY%20Memo.pdf> (July 10, 2020)

The 2020 Minnesota Primary<https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/Minnesota%20State%20Primary%20Memo.docx-2.pdf> (August 6, 2020)

Nevada’s June 9 Primary in the Wake of the Coronavirus<https://www.lawfareblog.com/nevadas-june-9-primary-wake-coronavirus> (August 27, 2020)

New Hampshire’s 2020 Elections in the Wake of COVID-19<https://www.lawfareblog.com/new-hampshires-2020-elections-wake-covid-19> (August 5, 2020)

The 2020 New Mexico Primary<https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-07/new_mexico_state_primary_memo.pdf> (July 17, 2020)

New York’s Primary Election: Challenges in the Lead-Up to November<https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-09/NY%20Primary%20Memo%20.pdf> (August 23, 2020)

North Carolina’s 2020 Election Preparations<https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/NC%20Battleground%20State%20Memo%20%28Draft%29.pdf> (August 27, 2020)

A Quantitative Dive into North Carolina’s 2020 Voting Trends<https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/North%20Carolina%20Memo(1).pdf> (July 19, 2020)

A Quantitative Dive into Ohio’s 2020 Voting Trends<https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/Ohio%20Election%20Memo(1).pdf> (July 27, 2020)

Ohio’s 2020 Elections in the Wake of COVID-19<https://www.lawfareblog.com/ohios-2020-elections-wake-covid-19> (August 6, 2020)

A Quantitative Dive into Pennsylvania’s 2020 Voter Trends<https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/Pennsylvania%20Memo.pdf> (August 20, 2020)

Pennsylvania Election Readiness Update<https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-09/PA%20Readiness%20Memo.pdf> (August 17, 2020)

Pennsylvania Election Policies and Readiness<https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-07/Pennsylvania%20Pre-%20and%20Post-Mortem%20Memo.pdf> (June 25, 2020)

The 2020 South Carolina Primary<https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-07/south_carolina_state_primary_memo_np_edits_adb_edits.docx.pdf> (July 20, 2020)

Texas 2020 Elections: Preparations and Considerations<https://www.lawfareblog.com/texas-2020-elections-preparations-and-considerations> (August 14, 2020)

A Quantitative Dive into Wisconsin’s 2020 Voting Trends<https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/Wisconsin%20Election%20Analysis%20Version%202(1).pdf> (August 6, 2020)

Wisconsin’s 2020 Primary in the Wake of COVID-19<https://www.lawfareblog.com/wisconsins-2020-primary-wake-covid-19> (August 10, 2020)

Rehearsal for November: An Analysis of Sixteen August State Elections<https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/august_primaries_memo.pdf> (August 25, 2020)
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Posted in election administration<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>

--
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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