Tag Archives: Voter Registration

Election Security

In an announcement that should be a surprise to nobody, U.S. intelligence services have concluded that Russia is continuing its interference in American elections to benefit its puppet-in-chief currently occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.   And, of course, the Republican response to this news has been to downplay its significance.

Securing our elections from foreign interference is important, but not easy.  There are three significant aspects to election security:  vote counting, registration records, and disinformation.

The easiest of the three to secure is vote counting.  And there are several steps to it.  Some states and jurisdictions follow some of these practices, but all need to follow all of them. Continue Reading...

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Election Law — Supreme Court Edition

While we are still waiting for the decision on the two partisan and one racial gerrymander cases (with less than two weeks to go in the term), we did receive two opinions related to the election process.  The first case — Husted vs. A. Phillip Randolph Institute — was a 5-4 decision on the validity of Ohio’s process for verifying the address of voters and correcting their voter rolls by, in theory removing the voters who had moved or died.  The second case — Minnesota Voters Alliance vs Mansky — was a 7-2 First Amendment case on wearing political apparel into the precinct on election day.

As the close vote indicates, the issue in Husted was more significant and more controversial.  The basic conflict is that federal election law both requires states to take efforts to improve the accuracy of the voter registry and forbids states from removing a voter solely because they did not vote.  Ohio basically has a three-step process:  Step one — not voting in a cycle (a two-year period); Step 2 — a verification notice sent to voters who did not vote in the last cycle; step 3 — not voting in two cycles (a four-year period) after failing to verify their address.   The majority — in an opinion written by Justice Alito — found that the Ohio procedure was consistent with federal law because failure to vote was not the only reason for the removal of the voter.  The main dissent, by Justice Breyer, critiques Step 1.  According to Justice Breyer, Step 2 and Step 3 comply with the “confirmation process” authorized by federal law that states are to use if they believe that a voter may have changed their address.  However, Justice Breyer interprets federal law as requiring that the election authority have a reason — other than the failure to vote — to believe that a voter has moved.  Justice Breyer argues that common sense and census data reveals that Ohio’s method is likely to result in the removal of a significant number of voters who have not changed address.  In a separate dissent, Justice Sotomayor notes that these overly aggressive purges tend to eliminate voters from vulnerable populations — minorities and the poor who already vote infrequently — thereby suppressing their votes.  Even aside from federal law on voter registration, this disparate impact may violate the Equal Protection Clause and Voting Rights Act.   While not discussed in these opinions, my hunch is that Ohio makes no effort at outreach to notify voters that these notices are coming and that they need to respond.  That lack of outreach and simple experience of recent Republican efforts to make voting more difficult confirms Justice Sotomayor’s theory that this law has nothing to do with complying with the federal requirement that states make efforts to improve the accuracy of voter registration information.

Not surprising for a First Amendment case, the majority opinion in Mansky is written by Chief Justice Roberts.  The Minnesota law at issue bans the wearing of political apparel in the polling place.  While finding that polling places are “non-public forums” for the purpose of First Amendment law (meaning that the government can ban speech),  the majority finds a problem with the way that Minnesota has written its law.  The essential problem is that Minnesota law does not define what qualifies as political apparel (unlike many other states with similar laws).   While the state election authority has attempted to give local election authorities some guidance on this issue, even that guidance is somewhat ambiguous.  This lack of clarity was made abundantly clear during the oral argument in Mansky during which the only conclusion that could be drawn about the current state of the law in Minnesota is that the definition of political falls into the “I know it when I see it” category.  Given the broad discretion that the law appears to place in election judges and the lack of clear notice to the voter, the majority found that, as currently written, the law is not reasonable. Continue Reading...

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2020 Democratic Convention — Unity and Reform Commission — Part 1

While, in one sense, it is very early to talk about who will be President of the United States on January 21, 2021, there are many people who think that process has a lot to do with results.  And the drafting of the rules for 2020 have already started.

On the Republican side, there is no public effort to re-write the rules.  Unlike the Democratic Party, the Republican party has the basic rules (which are less detailed than the Democratic Party rules) for allocating delegates to the national convention within the actual Rules of the Republican Party and require a supermajority of the Republican National Committee to change those Rules.

The Democrats, however, keep the rules for delegate selection separate from the party by-laws.  So every cycle, the rules and by-laws committee drafts those rules and submits them to the full Democratic National Committee for approval.  The starting point for these rules is the rules from the previous cycle.  However, because no rules are perfect, most contested campaigns lead to complaints about the rules.  These complaints in turn have, in most of these cycles, caused the party to appoint a commission to study whatever rules were seen as being a problem in the last cycle and make recommendations. Continue Reading...

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Supreme Court 2017-18 Term Preview: Part II (November Arguments)

In Part I of this year’s Supreme Court preview, we took a look at the ten cases set for argument during the first two weeks of October.  Currently, for it’s six-day November argument session (which actually begins on October 30), the Supreme Court has eight cases.

Unlike October in which seven cases have the potential to generate headlines or impact elections or major policy issues, November looks a lot less intense.  The first week is one of those technical weeks that matter mostly to the parties and the attorneys who practice in an area — two cases dealing with the procedure for federal habeas practice (the review of state court decisions by the federal courts), one case deals with bankruptcy issues, and one case deals with the tolling of state law claims while a related federal claim is pending.  The second week starts with another two technical cases — another bankruptcy issue and a case on the disclosure requirements for companies that have publicly traded stocks and bonds (focusing mostly on when an incomplete disclosure is misleading).

The last two cases — set for November 7 and November 8 — respectively are the big political cases of the November argument session.  The first case (Patchak) involves what appears to be a growing trend — Congress passing laws to deal with pending cases.   In this case, after federal courts had found that plaintiff’s had raised colorable claims (i.e. ones that, if true, would entitle him to relief), Congress passed a law directing that the courts to dismiss the case.  While Congress does have some authority to change the laws governing certain types of claims or the procedural rules that apply to claims, the rules are a little bit less clear when Congress tries to direct the judgment in a specific case.  Adding to the complicating factors, the case involves the U.S. government taking land into trust for a tribe.  While the merits of whether the land properly belongs to the tribe is technically not the issue at this stage of the case, that may play some role in the analysis. Continue Reading...

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Voter Registration and Early Voting

Vote by JessIn the United States, unlike most major democracies, election law is primarily set by the state.  Additionally, elections are run by local officials — usually elected in partisan elections.  For those involved in elections (candidates, supporters, and voters),  there are two significant consequences to this aspect of American democracy.  First, every state has its own rules and timetables for registering to vote and for voting.  Second, even within those rules, local officials have a lot of discretion that can influence the results of elections.

To win, campaigns need to do two things.  First, they need to communicate a message that connects to potential voters.  Second, they need to get those potential voters to vote.  The messaging part is like the tip of the iceberg.  It occurs above the surface.  At this time of the cycle, advertisements are a rising tide.  Depending upon where you live and what races are competitive, political ads are slowly becoming more and more omnipresent (ultimately peaking in the week before the election when ads for consumer goods will all but disappear from the air).  But political ads are run out of the campaign headquarters and involve the local activist very little.  It is the part beneath the surface — the get out the vote campaign — that requires a good field operation and local effort.

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A “Rigged” Election

animated flag glitterFor several weeks, Donald Trump has been spouting a lot about how, if he loses, it will because the election was “rigged.”  As discussed further below, in the sense of fraud and phony votes, it is almost impossible to rig an election.  However, as in the Republican primary, to the extent that the election is rigged in the sense of the rules favoring a certain candidate, the rules are almost certainly rigged in favor of Donald Trump.

The first and biggest way that the rules are rigged in favor of Donald Trump is the  electoral college.  As folks may remember from high school history or government class, a vote for a candidate for president is actually a vote for a slate of electors supporting the candidate.  Those electors then vote in December for the candidate on whose slate they ran.  A candidate needs to win 270 of the 538 electors to win.  Each state has a number of electors equivalent to the state’s representation in Congress — it’s House seats plus its Senate seats.  Because every state has two Senate seats,  the electoral college is weighted in favor of small states.  (If you have two House seats, you have twice as many electoral votes as House seats.  If you have fifty House seats, you only have four percent more electoral votes than House seats.)  Of the twenty-one smallest states (those with four or fewer House seats), Republicans have won twelve of the twenty-one states in the past four elections.  Of the nine states that have gone Democratic in one or more of the last four elections, four are considered swing states.

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