"Foley faces uphill battle in election challenge"

The Connecticut Post offers this report<http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Foley-faces-uphill-battle-in-election-challenge-801389.php>. (http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Foley-faces-uphill-battle-in-election-challenge-801389.php)

Posted by Rick Hasen at 04:55 PM<http://electionlawblog.org/archives/017867.html>

         According to the above article, cited by Rick and relying extensively on our Ned Foley, the chances of the Republican gubernatorial candidate getting relief in Connecticut are pretty small.

         Still, there are questions of at least academic interest raised by what seems to have happened in Bridgeport in this election.  According to an editorial entitled "Yankee Panky" in today's Wall Street Journal, insufficient ballots were printed so that blank ballots had to be photocopied in city offices on election day.  The Journal points to questions thus raised about the custody of these ballots (though it does not say how many such photocopied ballots there were).  The editorial also states Bridgeport failed to meet the Wednesday deadline for reporting results and on Thursday produced hundreds of ballots that had not previously been counted.  (Given the 6,000 vote margin for Democrat Dan Malloy over Republican Tom Foley, these hundreds of ballots could not have been decisive, whatever the story behind them.)  The editorial suggests other possible irregularities, but the passage I want to point to is this:

          "The current count in [Bridgeport] shows Mr. Foley receiving fewer than half as many votes as the GOP candidate received in 2006, while Democratic votes increased by almost 60%.  Mr. Foley was leading by 8,409 votes before the Bridgeport votes were counted."

           In 2006, Republican Vern Buchanan defeated Democrat Christine Jennings in a close Florida congressional race in which there was a serious apparent anomaly in the returns from Democratic-leaning Sarasota County.  Some 18,000 electronic ballots contained no vote in the House race.  Election law scholars and political scientists did an excellent job of scrutinizing that election.  The conclusion reached independently by many scholars (including in a good article in the Election Law Journal) was that the missing votes resulted from a regrettable design of the voting screen that made it easy to overlook the House election.

           The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is capable of hyperbole.  Still, the figures contained in the above quotation, especially given the Democratic tide in 2006 and the Republican tide in 2010, seem to bear scrutiny.  I hope that some of our scholars who are qualified for such research will scrutinize the Bridgeport results with the same care they devoted to the 2006 Sarasota results, whether or not candidate Foley succeeds in getting the Connecticut courts to look into the matter.

            The link for the WSJ editorial is as follows.  However, the full text seems to be for subscribers only.
http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Foley-faces-uphill-battle-in-election-challenge-801389.php

             Best,

             Daniel H. Lowenstein
             Director, Center for the Liberal Arts and Free Institutions (CLAFI)
             UCLA Law School
             405 Hilgard
             Los Angeles, California 90095-1476
             310-825-5148



_______________________________________________
election-law mailing list
election-law@mailman.lls.edu
http://mailman.lls.edu/mailman/listinfo/election-law