news of the day 10/7/03

NPR Report on Recall Voting Issues

Click here. One reader notes that the NPR report states that Orange County elections officials will be holding their tallies until they have official results, perhaps on Wednesday. The reader suggests nefarious purposes, though county officials say they will wait because they are using a new voting system and want to make sure they produce accurate results.

"I expect we will know the outcome, probably, within a day or two"

The words of California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley in this Los Angeles Times article.

"Daniel Weintraub: Facts and fiction about the California recall election"

Agree with his opinions or not, Daniel Weintraub has offered the best political coverage of the recall at his California Insider blog. Here is his final Sacramento Bee column before the recall.

Polls are open

They will remain open until 8 pm California time. Expect the first reports after 8 pm to reflect absentee ballots that were cast relatively early in the voting process, and therefore not necessarily representative of the later ballots that will be counted. The Sacramento Bee offers this useful guide to televised recall coverage.

The Supreme Court and Election Law: Court Intervention in the Political Process Continues

Today's Washington Post preview of the Supreme Court's upcoming term quotes the national legal director of the ACLU stating "potentially the big issue of the term is going to be the Supreme Court's impact on the political system." This term, the Court will decide the McCain-Feingold case and a potentially very important case on partisan gerrymandering, Veith v. Jubelirer.

This term is not much different from other terms over the last 40 years at the Supreme Court. I offer a critical examination of the history of the Supreme Court's intervention in the political process in The Supreme Court and Election Law: Judging Equality from Baker v. Carr to Bush v. Gore. The book's scheduled publication date is November 1, but NYU Press has just posted the book's Table of Contents and Introduction. The introduction includes the following statistics:

In the period 1901–1960, the Court decided an average of 10.3 election law cases per decade with a written opinion. During the period 1961–2000, that number jumped to 60 per decade. Figure I-1 shows the trend. The numbers are equally dramatic in Figure I-2, which displays the percentage of election law cases on the Court’s docket. In the 1901–1960 period, on average only 0.7 percent of cases the Court decided by written opinion were election law cases. During the 1961–2000 period, that percentage increased seven and one-half times to an average 5.3 percent of cases.
(footnote omitted)

Will Absentee and Provisional Ballots Delay the Results of the Recall Election?

The New York Times Tuesday offers Officials Warn of Absentee Vote Factor in Recall Election. This article echoes the concerns I expressed in this September 29 post. Monday's Times featured Voters Face Intricate Ballot and, Indeed, Chads as well as an interactive graphic, Inside the Recall: A Look at the Voting Process.

"Wanted: A Legible Voting Ballot;Why it's time to redesign the ballot design process."

Jessie Scanlon offers this interesting piece (along with proposed ballot designs) at Slate. Thanks to a number of readers for directing me to this piece.

-- 
Rick Hasen
Professor of Law and William M. Rains Fellow
Loyola Law School
919 South Albany Street
Los Angeles, CA  90015-1211
(213)736-1466
(213)380-3769 - fax
rick.hasen@lls.edu
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http://electionlawblog.org