[EL] ELB News and Commentary 9/23/20

[Rick Hasen]

“How Republicans Are Trying to Use the Green Party to Their Advantage”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115608>
Posted on September 22, 2020 9:51 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115608> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NYT:<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/us/politics/green-party-republicans-hawkins.html>

With Mr. Trump trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr. in most national and swing-state polls, Republicans are again trying to help third parties that may appeal to Democratic voters and siphon off votes from Mr. Biden. This is taking place alongside a broader pattern of disinformation and skepticism by the president and his allies that has sown confusion<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/24/us/politics/trump-2020-election-voting-rights.html> and undermined confidence in the election<https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/08/16/us/election-trump-vs-biden>.

Supporters of the president have also been trying to advance the candidacy of Kanye West, the billionaire hip-hop artist,<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/us/politics/kanye-west-president-2020.html?searchResultPosition=3> confident that he can cut into Mr. Biden’s vote total. Democrats have portrayed the effort as a “dirty trick” and exploitative of Mr. West, who has bipolar disorder.

Republican efforts to aid the Green Party are not new. In 2016, a billionaire backer of President Trump, Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, provided support to Jill Stein, the Green candidate, according to people with knowledge of the strategy, who said the effort was done with the knowledge of some officials at the Trump campaign and its chairman at the time, Paul Manafort. (Mr. Manafort was subsequently convicted<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/us/politics/paul-manafort-trial-verdict.html> of eight counts in an unrelated financial fraud trial.)

It was not clear if Mr. Marcus’s support, which has not been previously reported, included bolstering the party’s effort to get on the ballot or funding a social media campaign, or if it went toward some other purpose.
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Posted in ballot access<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=46>, chicanery<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>


“Pennsylvania Law and the 2020 Presidential Election (Virtual)” Sept. 29<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115606>
Posted on September 22, 2020 9:41 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115606> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

This seems<https://www.pressandjournal.com/stories/pennsylvania-law-and-the-2020-presidential-election-virtual,102232> like a great event:

A panel of nationally-recognized, independent election law experts will join Professor Dan Mallinson for a public discussion of how Pennsylvania’s election laws could affect the 2020 voting process and potential legal challenges.

The panelists will focus, in particular, on the currently pending proposals to modify Pennsylvania’s Election Code. Informed by their insights into the policies on these issues in other states and their experience with election law and policy, the panel will discuss the key provisions of proposals offered by Governor Wolf and the General Assembly and offer their views on these issues, along with how to best reduce the chance for post-election litigation. The panel will also discuss the legal and procedural problems that may arise under the current state laws.

Election Law Professors:
· Richard Pildes, Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law, New York University School of Law
· Edward Foley, Charles W. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law; Director, Election Law at Ohio State, The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law
· Michael Morley, Assistant Professor of Law, Florida State University College of Law

This event is non-partisan, will be open to the public, and will seek a statewide audience.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“FBI warns against foreign disinformation regarding election results”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115603>
Posted on September 22, 2020 5:15 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115603> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

CNN:<https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/22/politics/fbi-warning-foreign-disinformation-2020-election-results/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_allpolitics+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Politics%29>

The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned the public Tuesday<https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/200922.aspx> that foreign actors might spread disinformation about the results of the 2020 election and encouraged voters to be patient with delayed results.”

The increased use of mail-in ballots due to COVID-19 protocols could leave officials with incomplete results on election night,” the agencies said in a statement, highlighting the possibility that “foreign actors and cybercriminals” could use disinformation to “exploit the time required to certify and announce elections’ results.

“The warning follows news of a CIA assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his top aides “are aware of and probably directing Russia’s influence operations” aimed at interfering in the 2020 election, according to a Washington Post report<https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/22/politics/2020-election-cia-putin-russia-operation-biden/index.html> published Tuesday. President Donald Trump<https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/candidate/trump> and several top Republican allies have recently sought to cast China as the greatest threat to the election, even as evidence continues to emerge suggesting Russia is already interfering, as FBI Director Christopher Wray explicitly told House lawmakers last week.

The statement released Tuesday advised Americans to get information from “trustworthy sources” like official government election websites. The warning also said that Americans, when dealing with reports of problems with voting or results, should “verify though multiple reliable sources” and think twice before sharing unverified material on social media.
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Posted in chicanery<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>, Election Meltdown<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=127>


“America’s Electorate is Increasingly Polarized Along Partisan Lines About Voting by Mail During the COVID-19 Crisis,<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115601>
Posted on September 22, 2020 5:10 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115601> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has just published a new paper, “America’s Electorate is Increasingly Polarized Along Partisan Lines About Voting by Mail During the COVID-19 Crisis<https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/09/21/2008023117>,” by Mackenzie Lockhart, Seth J. Hill, Jennifer Merolla, Mindy Romero, and Thad Kousser.  The abstract, part of University of California’s New Electorate Project<http://newelectorateproject.org/>, is here:

Are voters as polarized as political leaders when it comes to their preferences about how to cast their ballots in November 2020 and their policy positions on how elections should be run in light of the COVID-19 outbreak? Prior research has shown little party divide on voting by mail, with nearly equal percentages of voters in both parties choosing to vote this way where it is an option. Has a divide opened up this year in how voters aligned with the Democratic and Republican parties prefer to cast a ballot? We address these questions with two nationally diverse, online surveys fielded from April 8 to 10 and June 11 to 13, of 5,612 and 5,818 eligible voters, respectively, with an embedded experiment providing treated respondents with scientific projections about the COVID-19 outbreak. We find a nearly 10 percentage point difference between Democrats and Republicans in their preference for voting by mail in April, which had doubled in size to nearly 20 percentage points in June. This partisan gap is wider still for those exposed to scientific projections about the pandemic. We also find that support for national legislation requiring states to offer no-excuse absentee ballots has emerged as an increasingly polarized issue.
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Posted in absentee ballots<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=53>


Twenty (Republican-led) States File Amicus Brief Urging 9th Circuit to Stay District Court Order Easing Missing Signature Cure Provisions for Absentee Ballots<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115598>
Posted on September 22, 2020 5:01 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115598> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

The states make an argument<https://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/arizona-stay-amicus.pdf> on the merits under Anderson-Burdick balancing and argue it is too late to make changes to election rules under the Purcell Principle<https://ir.law.fsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2542&context=lr>.

I expect Purcell to be invoked more and more as we proceed from here.
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Posted in absentee ballots<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=53>


Watch Archived Video of UCI Event, “Are U.S. elections rigged, broken or dependable? Lessons from Canada and Australia Offer Insights for Improvement” (featuring Yasmin Dawood, Graeme Orr, and me, with Victoria Jones)<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115594>
Posted on September 22, 2020 3:09 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115594> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Watch<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqzDtWmVHTw&feature=youtu.be>:

This webinar, recorded on September 21, 2020, covers international perspectives relevant to the upcoming U.S. Presidential Election.

Co-sponsored by The UCI Office of Global Engagement, UCI Law and the Jack W. Peltason Center for the Study of Democracy, this webinar is intended as a resource for UCI faculty, staff and students and the general public.

Discussion topics include:

-Voting challenges in a pandemic

-Differences in how national elections are run in the U.S. compared to in Canada and Australia

-How elections could be improved with restructuring The event features discussion by international and UCI leaders and a question and answer session.

Speakers include:

Moderator – Victoria Jones, Chief Global Affairs Officer

-Rick Hasen, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law

-Yasmin Dawood, Canada Research Chair in Democracy, Constitutionalism, and Electoral Law, and Associate Professor of Law and Political Science, University of Toronto Faculty of Law

-Graeme Orr, Professor – Law of Politics and Electoral Law, The University of Queensland, Australia
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Posted in comparative election law<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=107>, election administration<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>, Election Meltdown<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=127>, The Voting Wars<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>


Greg Sargent: “Donald Trump Jr. is actively helping his father corrupt the election”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115592>
Posted on September 22, 2020 1:49 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115592> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Greg Sargent sounding the alarm:<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/22/donald-trump-jr-is-actively-helping-his-father-corrupt-election/>

Trumpworld’s various claims of fraud in mail balloting have been debunked by fact checkers<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/04/attorney-general-barrs-false-claims-about-voting-by-mail/?itid=lk_inline_manual_11>, Republican elections officials<https://www.nytimes.com/article/mail-in-vote-fraud-ballot.html>, and even Trump’s own intelligence officials<https://www.npr.org/2020/08/26/906262573/theres-no-evidence-supporting-trump-s-mail-ballot-warnings-fbi-says>. But the president’s son has now explicitly declared that millions of late-counted ballots will be fraudulent.

An interesting two-tiered dynamic has developed here. Even as Trump, his son, and other propagandists keep making such claims, Democrats are quietly winning court battles that are disabling ways that Republicans will concretely seek to get them invalidated and thus suppress those votes.

For instance, state courts have now ruled in Pennsylvania<https://www.npr.org/2020/09/17/914160122/pennsylvania-supreme-court-extends-vote-by-mail-deadline-allows-drop-boxes>, Wisconsin<https://apnews.com/0a1dd66665dff0f338c1afe23f920f66> and Michigan<https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/09/18/absentee-ballot-mail-michigan-election-2020-usps/3492609001/> that mail ballots that are postmarked before Election Day but arrive after will still be counted (the length of each extension varies by state). That’s big: It eliminates a key way that numerous mail ballots, if held up by postal delays, might get tossed out in three swing states that will help decide the election.

So you might be tempted to think that even if Trump rages that late ballots must not count, they will be counted anyway. And to some degree, it doesn’t matter what the president says about the votes — what matters is who wins in the electoral college.

But election law expert Rick Hasen notes that this is still a dangerous development, especially when you consider various legal possibilities.
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Posted in fraudulent fraud squad<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8>


“NC voters who make mistakes on mail-in ballots will now have an easier way to fix them”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115590>
Posted on September 22, 2020 1:31 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115590> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

News & Observer:<https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/election/article245921540.html>

People who mess up their mail-in ballots will have an easier time fixing them in order to make sure their vote doesn’t get thrown out, under a deal to resolve a lawsuit against North Carolina.

The N.C. State Board of Elections announced Tuesday that it has tentatively reached a settlement with a political group representing retirees that had sued over the state’s various rules for mail-in voting<https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/2020/08/2020.08.10-NC-Alliance-for-Retired-Americans-v.-State-Complaint.pdf>.

In addition to creating new rules making it easier for people to fix issues on their mail-in ballots, the settlement would also extend the amount of time after the election that absentee ballots could come in after the election is over and still be counted.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“Republican Party seeks to reverse Georgia absentee deadline ruling”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115588>
Posted on September 22, 2020 1:27 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115588> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

AJC<https://www.ajc.com/politics/republican-party-seeks-to-reverse-georgia-absentee-deadline-ruling/IQHNAWE5YFBNTFQGYTUEGAB5WI/>:

The Republican National Committee is getting involved in an appeal over absentee ballot deadlines in Georgia, making it the 20th state<https://www.protectthevote.com/> where the Republican Party is fighting election lawsuits.

The RNC and the Georgia Republican Party filed a motion Monday urging the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a judge’s order<https://www.ajc.com/politics/judge-extends-georgia-deadline-to-return-absentee-ballots/OEETBUYMWJASHCW3YMVCKTPPYI/> that absentee ballots should be counted if they’re postmarked by Election Day and received at election offices within three days afterward.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Eleanor Ross invalidated a state law requiring all absentee ballots to be received by county election officials by 7 p.m. on Election Day.
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Posted in absentee ballots<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=53>


Arkansas: “Lawsuit Filed to Protect Absentee Ballots”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115586>
Posted on September 22, 2020 1:24 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115586> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Arkansas Times:<https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2020/09/22/lawsuit-filed-to-protect-absentee-ballots>

A lawsuit was filed in federal court today<https://lawyerscommittee.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/002-Complaint.pdf> to ensure that the expected surge of absentee ballots in November doesn’t lead to mass disqualifications of ballots because of the election day signature check and inability of voters to correct minor errors.
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Posted in 19th Amendment<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=128>


“Michigan lawmakers aiming to appeal allowances for delayed ballots”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115584>
Posted on September 22, 2020 1:22 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115584> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Detroit News<https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/09/22/michigan-lawmakers-aiming-appeal-allowances-delayed-ballots/5865667002/>:

The Michigan Legislature is working to appeal a court ruling that would require local clerks to count late absentee ballots postmarked by Nov. 2 and received within 14 days of the Nov. 3 election.

Court of Claims Judge Cynthia Stephens said Tuesday she would reconsider a request from Republican lawmakers who want to appeal her ruling, even after Stephens denied an earlier request from the GOP-controlled chambers for intervenor status in the lawsuit filed by the Michigan Alliance for Retired Americans.

In her Tuesday ruling, Stephens noted the Legislature’s position had changed because the defendants named in the case — Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Attorney General Dana Nessel — announced they would not appeal her decision.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


Pennsylvania Republican Legislators File Pa. Supreme Court Document Teeing Up SCOTUS Review of Extension of PA Voting Rules [Link to Brief]<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115580>
Posted on September 22, 2020 11:16 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115580> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

The brief<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dqqasjda3x1OH-BtOnEXpXN-MVxgLghp/view> (courtesy of John Kruzel) makes two arguments:

First, the decision violates federal law, which establishes “the Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November” as a single Federal Election Day, which falls on November 3rd this year. 2 U.S.C. § 7; see also 2 U.S.C. § 1; 3 U.S.C. § 1. These provisions mandate holding all elections for Congress and the Presidency on a single day throughout the Union. However, Footnote 26 and page 63 of this Court’s Slip Opinion extend Election Day past November 3, 2020. It does this by forcing election officials to accept ballots received after election day even if these ballots lack a legible postmark. This permits ballots to be both voted and counted after election day, extending the General Election past November 3, 2020. This clearly violates 2 U.S.C. § 7….

Second, the decision violates the Elections Clause, Article I, § 4 cl. 1 of the United States Constitution, by seizing control of setting the times, places, and manner of federal elections from the state legislature. Although this Court has the final say on the substantive law of Pennsylvania, the Elections Clause of the United States Constitution vests the authority to regulate the times, places, and manner, of federal elections to Pennsylvania’s General Assembly, subject only to alteration by Congress, not this Court. U.S. Const. Art. I, § 4. The General Assembly has not delegated authority to alter these regulations to the Pennsylvania Judiciary, yet this Court’s decision fundamentally changes the policy decisions inherent in the General Assembly’s duly enacted election laws. This Court has substituted its will for the will of the General Assembly and this substitution usurps the authority vested in the General Assembly by the Elections Clause. U.S. Const. Art. I, § 4.

Kruzel<https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/517587-gop-will-ask-supreme-court-to-limit-mail-voting-in-pennsylvania-in?rnd=1600797517> in The Hill:

Republicans plan to ask the Supreme Court to review a major Pennsylvania state court ruling that extended the due date for mail ballots in the key battleground state, teeing up the first test for the Supreme Court since the death of its liberal leader Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg<https://thehill.com/people/ruth-ginsburg>.

The GOP legal strategy, which was revealed in a pair of court<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ybdZhrDUMjbS5nC_AB_TCvZrh7FWQ8t7/view> documents<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dqqasjda3x1OH-BtOnEXpXN-MVxgLghp/view> filed overnight and Tuesday morning, has not been previously reported.

The development comes after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court dealt Republicans a major blow last week in a bitterly partisan election lawsuit that could help determine whether President Trump<https://thehill.com/people/donald-trump> or Democratic nominee Joe Biden<https://thehill.com/people/joe-biden> takes the Keystone State, which Trump won in 2016 by just over 44,000 votes.

The expected petition to the Supreme Court comes just days after Ginsburg’s death from cancer last Friday injected further uncertainty into a chaotic 2020 presidential contest that is on track to be the most intensely litigated election cycle in U.S. history.

“This could be a big first test for the post-RBG Supreme Court and where it will stand on election issues,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert and law professor at the University of California Irvine. “There’s little reason to believe that the conservative-liberal divide will disappear with Justice Ginsburg’s death.”

Update: Here<https://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/rpp-stay.pdf> is a brief of the Republican Party of Pa. seeking a stay.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


The President’s Son Baselessly Suggests That Election Officials Will “add millions of fraudulent ballots that can cancel your vote and overturn the election.”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115578>
Posted on September 22, 2020 10:49 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115578> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

This is deeply disturbing<https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/with-bogus-claim-of-millions-of-fraudulent-votes-don-jr-recruits-army-for-trump>, and has been part of one of my very greatest concerns about the integrity of the election: that Trump will be ahead in preliminarly vote totals (not including millions of mail-in ballots) in a state like Pennsylvania key to an electoral college victory. He could try to prematurely claim victory and claim without evidence that later-counted mail-in ballots are fraudulent.

This is so dangerous:

Trump Jr. wasn’t talking about an armed security force, at least not yet: No, he was recruiting volunteers for Trump’s Election Day Operations team, according to a website he boosted in the video.

Campaign spokesperson Erin Perrine, in another video on the site, warned that Democrats “will be up to their old dirty tricks on Election Day to make sure that President Trump doesn’t win. Therefore, she said, the campaign wanted to “cover every polling place in the country with people like you.”

Trump took it a step further, accusing the “radical left” of “laying the groundwork to steal this election from my father.”

“They are planting stories that President Trump will have a landslide lead on election night but will lose when they finish counting the mail-in ballots,” he said. “Their plan is to add millions of fraudulent ballots that can cancel your vote and overturn the election. We cannot let that happen.”
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Posted in Election Meltdown<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=127>, fraudulent fraud squad<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8>


RT, Part of Russian State Media, Uses Deep Fake Technology to Create Parody Video of Trump Losing Election and Going to Work for RT<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115576>
Posted on September 22, 2020 10:12 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115576> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

This is something.<https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1308453064223805440?s=20>
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


Trump Administration Wants Supreme Court to Hear Census Apportionment Case in December<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115574>
Posted on September 22, 2020 10:06 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115574> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Motion to expedite<https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-366/154593/20200922102043363_Trump%20v.%20NY%20Mot.%20Expedite.pdf>.
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Posted in census litigation<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=125>, Supreme Court<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>


“The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite; Disinformation campaigns used to require a lot of human effort, but artificial intelligence will take them to a whole new level.”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115572>
Posted on September 22, 2020 10:04 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115572> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Renee DiResta<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/future-propaganda-will-be-computer-generated/616400/> for The Atlantic:

In the past, propaganda needed human hands to write it. Eager to create the illusion of popularity, authorities in China began hiring people in 2004 to flood online spaces with pro-government comments. By 2016, members of the “50-cent party”—after the amount that its members were said to be paid per post—were putting up an estimated 450 million social-media comments a year. Similar comment armies, troll factories, and fake-news shops in the Philippines, Poland, Russia, and elsewhere have attempted to manipulate public opinion by flooding online spaces with fake posts. One 2018 “opinion-rigging<http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2018/04/19/2018041901474.html>” operation in South Korea spearheaded by a popular blogger used a combination of human commenters as well as an automated program to post and boost comments critical of a particular politician. Seoul police noted the volume<https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2020/04/356_248587.html> of two days of activity: “They manipulated about 20,000 comments on 675 news articles, using 2,290 different IDs from January 17 to 18.” In the quaint early days of social-media manipulation, such efforts were limited by human constraints. That will soon no longer be the case.

Writing tweets, comments, and entire articles for a fake media outlet is time consuming. The GU agents who ran “Alice Donovan” and the imaginary ISMC team got sloppy. They plagiarized others’ writing and recycled their own; the stolen profile photos cemented investigators’ conviction that they were fake. In many other influence operations, the need to produce high volumes of text content means that researchers regularly observe<https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/19/twitter-bans-bots-spreading-pro-saudi-messages.html> repetitive phrasing from manipulative accounts. Advances in AI-generated content will eliminate those tells. In time, operators far less sophisticated than the Russian government will have the ability to robo-generate fake tweets or op-eds. The consequences could be significant. In countries around the world, coordinated propaganda campaigns in print as well as social media have sown social unrest, pushed down vaccination rates<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/health-experts-dont-understand-how-information-moves/611218/>, and even promoted ethnic violence. Now imagine what happens when the sources of such postings are untraceable and the supply is essentially infinite.
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Posted in cheap speech<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=130>


Ohio: “Voters’ groups say poor face 90-minute travel time to deliver ballots to Cuyahoga County’s lone drop box”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115570>
Posted on September 22, 2020 9:22 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115570> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Cleveland Plain Dealer<https://www.cleveland.com/politics/2020/09/voters-groups-say-poor-face-90-minute-travel-time-to-deliver-ballots-to-cuyahoga-countys-lone-drop-box.html>:

 Voting-rights advocates say it could take some Cuyahoga County residents as long as 90 minutes in travel time to cast an absentee ballot at the county’s only drop box.

Attorneys for the League of Women Voters and the NAACP of Ohio this week cited the difficulties of low-income residents as part of a filing in U.S. District Court in Cleveland that seeks multiple drop boxes in each county in Ohio. They say several boxes would prevent delays by the mail system and allow residents to vote without fears caused by the pandemic.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


Maine Supreme Court Rejects Voter Referendum to Reverse Use of Ranked Choice Voting for President in Maine; to SCOTUS Next?<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115568>
Posted on September 22, 2020 8:26 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115568> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

The decision is here<https://www.courts.maine.gov/opinions_orders/supreme/lawcourt/2020/20me113.pdf>, and it presents a federal constitutional question about the qualifications of ballot circulators. At least in theory, this could be appealed to the Supreme Court.
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Posted in alternative voting systems<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=63>, Supreme Court<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>


The Likely Issue in the Trump Campaign’s Supreme Court Petition out of PA<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115566>
Posted on September 22, 2020 8:22 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115566> by Richard Pildes<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=7>

I expect the main constitutional issue the Trump campaign will raise in this petition to be the argument that the PA Supreme Court unconstitutionally interfered with the state legislature’s power in Art. II, Sec. 1, cl. 2 of the Constitution. That provision states the “legislature” in each state may direct the “manner” by which a state appoints its electors to the Electoral College. The petition will argue, I expect, that when the PA Supreme Court held that the state constitution required PA to accept absentees up to 5 days after Election Day, when the enacted state election law requires those absentees to be received by 8 pm on Election Day, the state court (and the state constitution, in essence) unconstitutionally interfered with “the legislature’s” power to direct the method of selecting electors.

This is potentially a huge issue — perhaps, in fact, the single most important legal issue that could arise before the election. If the Supreme Court were to take the case and accept this argument, it would mean that there would be federal constitutional oversight over how state courts apply any state law (either through statutory interpretation or, as here, through interpretation of the state constitution) governing voting in the presidential election. This is an argument that three Justices of the Supreme Court endorsed in Bush v. Gore (CJ Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Thomas).

Not having seen the petition, I have no prediction about whether the Court would choose to hear the case — assuming I’m right about the central issue it will raise.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>
--
Rick Hasen
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