[EL] ELB News and Commentary 2/18/21

[Rick Hasen]

“In wake of 2020 election, Democratic senators urge Biden to expand voting rights protections”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120907>
Posted on February 18, 2021 7:39 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120907> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

WaPo:<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-wake-of-2020-election-democratic-senators-urge-biden-to-expand-voting-rights-protections/2021/02/17/0ef97cb4-7140-11eb-93be-c10813e358a2_story.html>

A group of Democratic senators sent President Biden a letter Wednesday urging him to use his executive powers to expand voting-rights protections and step up enforcement of campaign-finance violations as part of an effort to turn the page on what they say was former president Donald Trump’s disregard for these priorities.

At least 20 senators, led by Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), asked Biden to take nearly a dozen steps to improve ballot access and address bad actors, including greater efforts to help eligible Americans to register to vote and beefed-up policing of election-related crimes by the Department of Justice, the Federal Election Commission and the Internal Revenue Service.

“In some ways, the 2020 election showed the resiliency of our democracy,” the senators wrote in a letter to be sent to Biden on Wednesday, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. “Still, we saw widespread voter suppression strategies, especially targeting communities of color, and record levels of dark money spent to unduly influence voters.”…

The senators’ specific proposals include: expanding protections under the Voting Rights Act to curtail voter suppression by state and local governments; pushing the Justice Department and FEC to give higher priority to prosecuting voting-rights and campaign-finance violations; expanding ballot access for incarcerated voters and those with disabilities; requiring states to do more to assist with voter registration, particularly among Native Americans, naturalized citizens, veterans and the elderly; strengthening sanctions against foreign actors that interfere in U.S. elections; and reinstating disclosure requirements to the IRS for donors to nonprofits that do issue advocacy and are known as 501(c)(4)s
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“It might just be game over for the Iowa caucus”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120905>
Posted on February 18, 2021 6:56 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120905> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Politico:<https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/18/iowa-caucus-469735?nname=playbook&nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&nrid=0000014e-f109-dd93-ad7f-f90d0def0000&nlid=630318>

The siege of Iowa and New Hampshire has begun.

The two states with privileged places on the presidential primary calendar are finding their roles more threatened than ever before — most recently in the form of a bill introduced in Nevada this week<https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/15/nevada-democrats-presidential-caucuses-469069> to move that state’s nominating contest to the front of the line in 2024.

On its own, the Nevada encroachment would mean little. For years, Iowa and New Hampshire have successfully defended their one-two position from states eager to jump ahead. But the combination of Iowa’s botched 2020 caucus and increasing diversity in the Democratic Party’s ranks has made the whiteness of Iowa and New Hampshire all the more conspicuous, putting the two states on their heels and throwing the 2024 calendar into turmoil.“There’s no reason in the world that those states should go forward so early, because they’re not representative of what 90 percent of the country’s all about,” said former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat who remains influential in party politics. “America looks different than it did 50 years ago, when these traditions were put in place, and the Democratic electorate looks really different.”

He added, “It’s no longer palatable, as far as I’m concerned, for those states to take precedence over states like South Carolina and Nevada.”
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Posted in primaries<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=32>


“A quarter of Trump’s 6,081 Facebook posts last year featured misinformation or extreme rhetoric”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120903>
Posted on February 18, 2021 6:51 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120903> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

WaPo:<https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/18/trump-facebook-misinformation/>

Nearly a quarter of former president Donald Trump’s 6,081 Facebook posts last year contained extremist rhetoric or misinformation about the coronavirus, the election or his critics, according to a new analysis by the left-leaning group Media Matters for America.

The analysis found that Facebook did effectively nothing to limit or block the vast majority of his problematic posts, which together were shared and liked<https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/30/trump-twitter-domestic-disinformation/?itid=lk_inline_manual_4> more than 927 million times, according to the group, which based its analysis on data from Facebook-owned analytics tool CrowdTangle.

The research demonstrates in stark numbers just how many times Trump came up to the line of Facebook’s rules — if not crossed them — but was given a pass by the company.

Facebook appended labels to 506 of Trump’s 1,443 problematic posts, mostly with a generic label<https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/03/facebook-political-ads/?itid=lk_inline_manual_7>, such as “See Election Results,” which provided links to authoritative information but did not provide users with any indication of whether the post was false or misleading. Of the 506, just one was labeled false and another was labeled partly false, while the rest received more generic labels, Media Matters said.

In all of 2020, The Washington Post counted the removal by Facebook of just seven posts by Trump and his campaign, four of which were for copyright-related <https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/18/business/trump-video-twitter-manipulated-media/index.html> issues. Trump and his campaign shared an account.

Facebook spokesman Andy Stone pointed out that not all forms of misinformation related to the election or covid-19 were banned by the company, and that Facebook removed Trump’s posts in the handful of instances where executives found that they violated the social network’s policies. In instances when Trump and others claimed election fraud, for example, the company chose to affix a label<https://about.fb.com/news/2020/10/preparing-for-election-day/> directing people to information about the election and voting methods instead of removing the content.
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Posted in cheap speech<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=130>


“The racial burden of voter list maintenance errors: Evidence from Wisconsin’s supplemental movers poll books”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120898>
Posted on February 17, 2021 12:14 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120898> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

New from Gregory Huber, Marc Meredith, Michael Morse, and Katie Steele, in Science Advances<https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/8/eabe4498>. Abstract:

Administrative records are increasingly used to identify registered voters who may have moved, with potential movers then sent postcards asking them to confirm their address of registration. It is important to understand how often these registrants did not move, and how often such an error is not corrected by the postcard confirmation process, because uncorrected errors make it more difficult for a registrant to subsequently vote. While federal privacy protections generally prevent researchers from observing the data necessary to estimate these quantities, we are able to study this process in Wisconsin because special poll books, available via public records requests, listed those registrants who were identified as potential movers and did not respond to a subsequent postcard. At least 4% of these registrants cast a ballot at their address of registration, with minority registrants twice as likely as white registrants to do so.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“The COVID States Project #39: Public attitudes towards the storming of the Capitol building”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120896>
Posted on February 17, 2021 11:46 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120896> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

New <https://osf.io/3qfs9/> from the Covid States Project:

Two-thirds of respondents believe that the election was conducted fairly, while one-third believed that it was not. However, this aggregate pattern obscures enormous partisan gaps. Fully 96% of Democrats reported that the election had been conducted fairly, compared with only 30% of Republicans (see Figure 1).

Overall, 59% disagree and 29% agree with the statement, “If votes were fairly counted, Donald Trump would have won the 2020 election.” Among partisans, however, 89% of Democrats disagree, versus only 18% of Republicans and 65% of Republicans agree (see Figure 2).,,,

Interestingly, while most respondents overall felt the elections were conducted fairly, many nonetheless voiced a variety of concerns about specific election integrity issues. Such concerns arose among all partisan groups, but Democrats and Republicans emphasized quite different issues (see Figure 3). Majorities of Democrats and Republicans were worried about measures that would reduce voting (voter suppression and intimidation), with Democrats somewhat more concerned (by 7-8 points). Democrats and Republicans were about equally concerned regarding foreign country interference (62% vs 61%). The big differences between Democrats and Republicans emerged with regard to the integrity of the votes that were cast. Republicans were much more worried than Democrats about mail-in voter fraud (80% vs. 32%), illegal votes from non-citizens (79% vs. 33%), and inaccurate or biased vote counts (79% vs 36%).
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Posted in cheap speech<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=130>


“Why So Few Absentee Ballots Were Rejected In 2020”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120894>
Posted on February 17, 2021 10:28 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120894> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

538<https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-so-few-absentee-ballots-were-rejected-in-2020/>:

It was the nightmare scenario<https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-rejected-ballots-could-be-a-big-problem-in-2020/> for the 2020 election: With so many more people than usual casting absentee ballots<https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-absentee-voting-looked-like-in-all-50-states/>, observers feared that a significant share of ballots<https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2020/10/08/rejected-mail-ballots-projected-major-factor-2020-election/3576714001/> would be rejected<https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-ap-top-news-oh-state-wire-az-state-wire-mi-state-wire-881c098ab2847dea9d87604bab9568d6> for not following proper procedure. One study<http://www.dartmouth.edu/~herron/VBM_experience.pdf>, for instance, showed that first-time mail voters, who are less familiar with the rules of absentee voting, were up to three times more likely to have their votes rejected, and at least 550,000 absentee ballots<https://www.npr.org/2020/08/22/904693468/more-than-550-000-primary-absentee-ballots-rejected-in-2020-far-outpacing-2016> went uncounted during last spring and summer’s heavily vote-by-mail<https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/weve-had-56-statewide-elections-during-the-pandemic-heres-what-we-learned-from-them/> primary elections.

But those fears did not come to pass. According to data collected by FiveThirtyEight from state election offices, not only did absentee-ballot rejection rates not rise, but rejected ballots were actually less of a problem than they were in 2016.

From the 27 states, plus Washington, D.C., where we were able to obtain data, only 297,347 out of 47,999,299 absentee ballots cast in the 2020 general election were rejected — a rejection rate of 0.6 percent. And in 20 of the 23 jurisdictions that provided data for the last two presidential elections, the 2020 rejection rate was lower than 2016’s. (Data is not yet available in the remaining states but will eventually be released as part of the 2020 Election Administration and Voting Survey.)…

One reason for this is obvious: Voters heeded election officials’ exhortations to send back their absentee ballots as early as possible<https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/usps-mail-in-ballot-guidelines-2020-election/>. Ubiquitous reminders in the media and saturation coverage of problems at the U.S. Postal Service<https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-the-post-office-became-a-political-football/> likely helped, too. But states by and large also proactively changed their election policies<https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/how-to-vote-2020/> to prevent ballots from getting tossed due to lateness. Several states extended their deadlines so that ballots could arrive after Election Day (as long as they were properly postmarked), including Massachusetts. Michelle Tassinari, the director of the commonwealth’s Elections Division, told FiveThirtyEight that this was a big reason for the Bay State’s improvement.

Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser with the Democracy Fund, also applauded states for giving voters ways to return their ballots other than mailing them back (which, of course, can take several days). “Those return options made the difference in many ballots not coming back late.” Indeed, according to preliminary findings from the Survey of the Performance of American Elections<http://electionlab.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2020-12/How-we-voted-in-2020-v01.pdf>, 45 percent of mail ballots were dropped off in person in 2020, up from 29 percent in 2016. In large part, this was because of increased access to ballot drop boxes<https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/more-states-are-using-ballot-drop-boxes-why-are-they-so-controversial/>. At least 38 states plus Washington, D.C., offered drop boxes in the 2020 general election, up from about 13 that did so before 2020. According to Tassinari, this was another secret to Massachusetts’s success. “We encouraged every city and town to get drop boxes, and some municipalities even had multiple drop boxes,” she said. “For instance, the City of Worcester had them in all the fire stations.”

Some states also implemented reforms to speed up the USPS’s ability to process ballots. “More states used intelligent mail bar codes [on their ballot envelopes] that allowed the postal service to know where ballots were and make sure they were processed in a timely manner,” explained Patrick. Massachusetts was one of those states: Election officials applied for 351 separate postal permits for special envelopes with bar codes pre-addressed to the 351 city and town clerks across the commonwealth — “a difficult, exhausting process,” Tassinari told us, but one that was worth it in the end. Instead of having to be hand-stamped, Tassinari explained, the envelopes could be processed automatically, leading to faster delivery.

Ballot lateness wasn’t the only problem that got better in 2020. Some states also cut into the second-most common reason absentee ballots tend to get rejected: voter error, such as a missing or invalid signature on the ballot envelope. For example, 15 states plus Washington, D.C., began offering voters the ability to “cure,” or fix mistakes on, their absentee ballots, according to Amber McReynolds and Grace Beyer of the National Vote at Home Institute. (That’s on top of the 17 states that already allowed ballot-curing before 2020.) State data suggests that this prevented thousands of ballots from being rejected. In Kentucky, which temporarily changed its election laws last year to allow ballot curing, 2,933 ballots were cured, leaving only 1,197 that were rejected. In Georgia, a state that had a cure process previously, 2,777 ballots were cured, cutting the number of ballots that were eventually rejected to 7,604.
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Posted in absentee ballots<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=53>


“Democracy Is Weakening Right in Front of Us; Is technopessimism our new future?”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120892>
Posted on February 17, 2021 9:59 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120892> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Tom Edsall<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/opinion/digital-revolution-democracy-fake-news.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage> in the NYT:

A decade ago, the consensus was that the digital revolution would give effective voice to millions of previously unheard citizens. Now, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, the consensus has shifted to anxiety that online<https://spark.adobe.com/make/learn/top-social-media-sites/> behemoths<https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/> like Twitter, Google, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook have created a crisis of knowledge — confounding what is true and what is untrue — eroding the foundations of democracy.

These worries have intensified in response to the violence of Jan. 6, and the widespread acceptance among Republican voters of the conspicuously<https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-campaign-files-more-election-challenges-in-wisconsin-michigan-11606849219> false claim<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/us/politics/republicans-voter-fraud.html> that Democrats stole the election.

Nathaniel Persily<https://law.stanford.edu/directory/nathaniel-persily/>, a law professor at Stanford, summarized the dilemma in his 2019 report, “The internet’s Challenge to Democracy: Framing the Problem and Assessing Reforms<https://storage.googleapis.com/kofiannanfoundation.org/2019/02/a6112278-190206_kaf_democracy_internet_persily_single_pages_v3.pdf>,” pointing out that in a matter of just a few years

the widely shared utopian vision of the internet’s impact on governance has turned decidedly pessimistic. The original promise of digital technologies was unapologetically democratic: empowering the voiceless, breaking down borders to build cross-national communities, and eliminating elite referees who restricted political discourse.

Since then, Persily continued:

That promise has been replaced by concern that the most democratic features of the internet are, in fact, endangering democracy itself. Democracies pay a price for internet freedom, under this view, in the form of disinformation, hate speech, incitement, and foreign interference in elections.

Writing separately in an email, Persily argued that

Twitter and Facebook allowed Trump both to get around legacy intermediaries and to manipulate them by setting their agenda. They also provided environments (such as Facebook groups) that have proven conducive to radicalization and mobilization.
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Posted in cheap speech<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=130>


“Lawsuits arrive for networks and lawyers who backed Donald Trump; Dominion and Smartmatic allege that conspiracy theories involving their products are defamatory”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120890>
Posted on February 17, 2021 9:39 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120890> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Smart Steve Mazie<https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/02/17/lawsuits-arrive-for-networks-and-lawyers-who-backed-donald-trump> in The Economist:

The First Amendment grants plenty of room for robust debate; plaintiffs seeking damages for defamatory statements face an appropriately steep climb. On the rare occasions when libel or slander claims stick, the defamed entity is typically the only compensated party. These voting-technology suits may offer a wider public benefit: curbing the spread of disinformation that destabilises democracy itself.
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Posted in cheap speech<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=130>


“The Case Against Restricting Voter Access”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120888>
Posted on February 17, 2021 9:25 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120888> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

New report<https://www.rstreet.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Final-Short-100-voting-access.pdf> from R Street:

The United States has endured the most contentious post-election period in modern history, as former President Donald Trump challenged the results of an election that President Joe Biden won by 7 million votes nationwide—albeit by slim majorities in several swing states (Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin) that propelled him to a 306-to-232 Electoral College victory.

The former president and his supporters filed no fewer than 61 lawsuits challenging various aspects of the vote, attempted to sway legislatures to discard certified electoral votes and even attempted to convince Congress (and the vice president) to refuse to certify some states’ electors. The Trump team succeeded only in one lawsuit involving a negligible number of Pennsylvania votes. Nevertheless, this sustained campaign to overturn the election results has had a notable and deleterious effect on public trust in the nation’s election system.

The latest polls found that more than three-quarters of Republican voters did not trust the final vote outcome. Trump’s allegations were wide-ranging and often farfetched. Despite the lack of evidence, some election skeptics seem to place more faith in unfounded social-media assertions than in the decisions made by state election officials, the courts and even the federal Department of Justice, which found no serious instances of election fraud. Now, numerous Republicans at the national and state levels are proposing a variety of post-election voting reforms, seemingly in response to former President Trump’s unsubstantiated postelection claims of rampant voter fraud. While some proposed reforms merit serious deliberation, efforts to repeal no-excuse absentee voting and ban ballot drop boxes will do little—if anything—to improve election integrity and deserve more scrutiny.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“Yes, California Requires Signature Verification For Mail-In Ballots And Newsom Recall Petitions”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120886>
Posted on February 17, 2021 7:02 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120886> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Politifact California<https://www.capradio.org/162622>:

After Republicans seeking to recall California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said they had reached<https://www.cbsnews.com/news/newsom-recall-rnc-pledge-250000/> the number of signatures necessary to trigger a special election, one conservative influencer falsely claimed that the organizers have faced hurdles that voters in November’s election did not.

“So California is requiring signature verification for Gavin Newsom’s recall, but didn’t require it for the mail in ballots. How strange,” said actor Kevin Sorbo, who starred as “Hercules” in a TV series about the mythological hero, in a tweet<https://archive.is/MUDKM> sent to hundreds of thousands of followers.
[cid:image002.png at 01D705C9.F02C4F00]

A screenshot of Kevin Sorbo’s tweet making false claims about California’s election laws.

In fact, California did require signature verification for mail-in ballots for the 2020 election, as PolitiFact reported<http://article/> in the months leading up<https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/jun/03/answering-questions-about-vote-mail-california-tru/> to Election Day. Several election<https://twitter.com/Sam_Mahood/status/1361498176822284288?s=20> officials<https://twitter.com/CASOSvote/status/1361388630158155776?s=20>, experts<https://twitter.com/AmberMcReynolds/status/1361414521911349248?s=20>, journalists<https://twitter.com/johnmyers/status/1361371171627798531?s=21> and<https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1361489472844558336?s=20> fact-checkers<https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1361383920755957761?s=20> debunked Sorbo’s Feb. 15 tweet soon after it was posted.

But the tweet still circulated widely, picking up thousands of retweets and likes. It was further amplified on the platform by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee<https://archive.is/rPDjZ> and Rudy Giuliani<https://archive.is/R4pR3>.
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Posted in fraudulent fraud squad<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8>


Feb. 18 Event: “Moving Forward or Moving Backward: Election Legislation in the States”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120884>
Posted on February 17, 2021 6:51 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120884> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

This Ash Center<https://ash.harvard.edu/event/moving-forward-or-moving-backward-election-legislation-states> event looks great:

Date:

Thursday, February 18, 2021, 4:00pm to 5:00pm

Location:

Virtual event, registration required

The 2020 elections hinged, in dramatic ways, on widely varying state laws and state election procedures. Major changes were made in light of the pandemic, to expand options for mail-in and early voting and to Election Day itself. These changes engendered strong support and strong opposition, and were one reason for the record turnout of 160 million voters. Now, state legislatures are in session all around the country. Will the changes adopted in 2020 be made permanent? Will voting options be expanded further? Or will states seek to roll back voting opportunities as a result? Join us for a discussion with leading state election experts and state legislators to see where things stand, and where they might go.

Panelists include:
·         Dale Ho, Director of the Voting Rights Project, ACLU
·         Nan Grogan Orrock, State Senator, Georgia
·         Wendy Underhill, Director of Elections and Redistricting, National Conference of State Legislatures
·         Miles Rapoport (Moderator), Senior Practice Fellow of American Democracy, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


#NY22: “As a results of mistakes made in congressional race, Oneida County Elections Commissioners will resign”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120882>
Posted on February 16, 2021 5:21 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120882> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

The latest fallout<https://www.localsyr.com/battle-for-the-22nd/as-a-results-of-mistakes-made-in-congressional-race-oneida-county-elections-commissioners-will-resign/?fbclid=IwAR1XfXV99m_PWGko15nevblrjsYm2qOtXmQ-cZcQg6CPa02cB2VzxEScYu0>.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


Tom Coleman and John Danforth: “Opinion: Congress must invoke the 14th Amendment to stop Trump from running again”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120880>
Posted on February 16, 2021 5:20 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120880> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

WaPo oped:<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/16/14th-amendment-disqualify-trump-congress/>

The Senate impeachment trial has provided further proof of what can no longer be denied: Former president Donald Trump poses an existential threat to American democracy. The harrowing evidence shows that Trump incited and supported the violent insurrection at the Capitol that aimed to prevent the peaceful transition of power and resulted, tragically, in multiple deaths. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) confirmed these facts in his statement following the Senate vote.

Such anti-democratic conduct should disqualify Trump from ever holding future public office. While conviction by the Senate would have been the best and quickest route to disqualification, because that failed, Congress can — and must — pursue an alternative path to protecting our republic from a future Trump presidency: Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“Study: How Online Propagandists Targeted The 2020 Election”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120878>
Posted on February 16, 2021 5:17 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120878> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Steven Rosenfeld<https://www.nationalmemo.com/online-propaganda>:

Partisan disinformation to undermine 2020’s presidential election shadowed every step of the voting process last year but took an unprecedented turn when the earliest false claims morphed into intricate conspiracies as Election Day passed and President Trump worked to subvert the results, according to two of the nation’s top experts tracking the election propaganda.

At the general election’s outset, as states wrapped up their primaries and urged voters to use mailed-out ballots in response to the pandemic, false claims began surfacing online—in tweets, social media posts, text messages, reports on websites, videos and memes—targeting the stage in the electoral process that was before voters. These attacks on the nuts and bolts of voting, from registration to the steps to obtain and cast a ballot, began as “claims of hacking and voter fraud… [that] honed [in] on specific events,” said Matt Masterson<https://fsi.stanford.edu/people/matt-masterson>, who helped lead the Department of Homeland Security’s election security team<https://www.cisa.gov/election-security>.

“This is a lot of what we talked about with you at CISA<https://www.cisa.gov/> [the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] in the lead-up [to Election Day], anticipating that were there were problems experienced, and then in the contested elections, those would be used to blow out of proportion or lie about what was actually taking place,” Masterson said, speaking to the nation’s state election directors in early February at a winter 2021 conference<https://www.nased.org/2021-winterconf>.

But as November 3’s Election Day approached and the vote-counting continued afterward in presidential battleground states, Masterson and a handful of teams working inside<https://www.cisa.gov/election-security> and outside<https://www.eipartnership.net/> of government to trace and track disinformation, and to urge online platforms and sources to curb their false content, saw an unexpected development. The narrowly focused threads that attacked earlier steps in the process of running elections swapped out purported villains and protagonists and became a full-blown conspiratorial tapestry attacking the results.

“They all got combined into one big narrative… one large lie to try to undermine confidence in the election,” said Masterson, whose presentation at the National Association of State Election Directors<https://www.nased.org/2021-winterconf>‘ (NASED) meeting traced this evolution.

“Misinformation is the frontier in election security and election integrity,” said Aaron Wilson<https://www.rsaconference.com/experts/aaron-wilson>, senior director for election security at the Center for Internet Security<https://www.cisecurity.org/>, which tracked 209 cases of misleading or deliberately false attacks on voting, at the same NASED forum….

Masterson’s and Wilson’s presentations were some of the most detailed analyses yet tracing the evolution of propagandistic attacks on 2020’s voting process and election administration. The Stanford Internet Observatory<https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/content/io-teaching>, where Masterson is a fellow, will release a full report—including naming the biggest purveyors of 2020 election disinformation, both the platforms and their highest-volume users—later this winter.
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Posted in cheap speech<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=130>, chicanery<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>


Biden Administration Reverses Position Before Supreme Court in Arizona Voting Rights Act Case (Brnovich), But Does Not Say Plaintiffs Should Win<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120875>
Posted on February 16, 2021 5:05 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120875> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

From the letter<https://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/Brnovich-letter1.pdf>:

The Department has now concluded that, although it does not disagree with the conclusion in that brief that neither Arizona measure violates Section 2’s results test, the Department does not adhere to the framework for application of Section 2 in vote-denial cases set forth in the brief. In light of the approaching oral argument, however, the United States does not seek to make a further substantive submission in these cases. Instead, we have concluded that the most appropriate course under the circumstances is to notify the Court that the previously filed brief does not represent the current views of the United States.

Oral argument is March 2.

I have written an analysis of the case that will appear soon SCOTUSBlog.
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Posted in Supreme Court<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>, Voting Rights Act<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=15>


“Republican Efforts to Restrict Voting Risk Backfiring on Party”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120872>
Posted on February 16, 2021 8:53 am<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=120872> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Bloomberg<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/republican-efforts-to-restrict-voting-risk-backfiring-on-party>:

Republican lawmakers in battleground states are rushing to enact stricter voting laws that Democrats worry could dampen Black and Hispanic turnout, but the moves could end up backfiring because of the changing face of the GOP coalition.

The flurry of legislation includes attempts to impose voter ID requirements and roll back pandemic-related expansion to mail-in access, steps that may inadvertently limit the participation of many of the older, rural and blue-collar voters that Republicans now depend on.

State legislatures across the country are considering more than a hundred bills that would increase voter ID requirements, tighten no-excuse vote-by-mail, and ban ballot drop boxes, among other changes.

That’s more than three times the number of bills to restrict voting that had been filed by this time last year, according to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice<https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-2021>.

This flood of legislation comes despite research showing that voter ID laws passed over the last decade not only don’t hamper minority turnout, but may even boost it by motivating angry Democrats and spurring stronger get-out-the-vote efforts.

Nick Stephanopoulos, a Harvard professor who studies voting laws, said that the suburban, college-educated voters moving toward the Democratic Party are the least likely to be affected by new restrictions, since they have the resources to overcome them and tend to be regular voters already.
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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
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rhasen at law.uci.edu<mailto:rhasen at law.uci.edu>
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http://electionlawblog.org<http://electionlawblog.org/>



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