| Subject: [EL] Electionlawblog news and commentary 11/12/10 |
| From: Rick Hasen |
| Date: 11/12/2010, 5:47 AM |
| To: Election Law |
Reply-to: "rick.hasen@lls.edu" |
Walter Shapiro writes
at Politics Daily.
See this
report from "The Bay Citizen" (as reprinted in the NY
Times Bay area edition). More on the Oakland race from Fairvote
(and here).
The latest
from AP. It is hard from the article to understand exactly what
the "vote fraud" claim is.
Meanwhile, Nate Silver does
the math.
See this
Jonathan Bernstein item at Salon.
A thought experiment: The Miller-Murkowski battle is exactly
the same, raising exactly the same legal issues as it does now.
But one of the two candidates is a Democrat, the other is a
Republican, and control of the Senate rests on resolution of the
misspelled votes.
Eugene Volokh, linking to my Slate piece, nicely summarizes
the difficult questions raised by this case. Just imagine how
much heat this question would raise, and how everyone's motives
would be questioned, if something more than the single Senate
seat depended on how the question of counting misspelled votes
was resolved.
Following up on this
post a reader points me to page 2 of The
Guide to Judiciary Policy, which lists the judicial
canons. It explains that the canons apply to "United States
circuit judges, district judges, Court of International Trade
judges, Court of Federal Claims judges, bankruptcy judges, and
magistrate judges." Justices of the Supreme Court are not
listed. There still could be an ethical question with a Justice
appearing at a fundraiser, particularly for a political group.
But it does not appear that Canon 4 is binding on a Justice.
Alaska Division of Election's phonetic
approach to voter intent. Fortunately for those who want
finality, it now appears that Murkowski will have enough ballots
even not counting the reasonable challenges to misspellings to
be declared the winner.
More on the counting from the
NY Times, the
LA Times, and AP.
-- Rick Hasen William H. Hannon Distinguished Professor of Law Loyola Law School 919 Albany Street Los Angeles, CA 90015-1211 (213)736-1466 (213)380-3769 - fax rick.hasen@lls.edu http://www.lls.edu/academics/faculty/hasen.html http://electionlawblog.org