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President Trump tweeted that, unlike Florida, Nevada is incapable of managing a vote-by-mail election.
Claim: Nevada has no mail-in ballot infrastructure. Fact check: False
Aug 06 2020
Nevada has ZERO infrastructure for Mail-In Voting. It will be a corrupt disaster if not ended by the Courts. It wil… https://t.co/WkSC3J1bx5— Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump)1596625719.0
The Nevada Legislature passed a bill, signed by Gov. Steve Sisolak on Monday, that will send a mail-in ballot to every active registered voter in the state. Trump has voiced opposition to this bill and claimed the state lacks the infrastructure for running such an election. And the Trump campaign launched a lawsuit on Wednesday against Nevada to prevent this measure from going into effect for the election.
But Nevada does have infrastructure in place for mail-in voting. The June primary was held almost entirely through mail-in voting. Over 98 percent of the 491,654 ballots cast in the primary were submitted through mail-in voting, and the election saw very high voter turnout. Additionally, over 10,000 primary ballots were rejected because they were incorrectly submitted, demonstrating the states ability to weed out improper ballots. Through the CARES Act, Nevada received $4,500,000 to help pay for the cost of setting up infrastructure and hiring personnel to count mail-in ballots.
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Sen. Roy Blunt (right) speaks with Sen. Lamar Alexander prior to the start of the Rules Committee hearing on election preparations.
Bipartisan accord in the Senate for more election cash, but how much?
Jul 23 2020
A bipartisan consensus has become clear in Congress that states need more federal help, and quickly, or else their elections in November risk becoming dangerously unhealthy, inefficient and unreliable — mainly because they might not be ready to deliver and count the torrent of mail ballots requested by voters anxious about the coronavirus.
All the witnesses made essentially that point Wednesday in a Senate hearing. And they had a clearly receptive ear from Roy Blunt of Missouri, who convened the session as the Republican leadership's point person on election funding.
But Blunt did not reveal how much he was willing to include in the next pandemic economic relief bill, negotiations on which have gotten off to a scattershot start in Congress this week. Republicans have been fighting among themselves about much the economic rescue package should cost and which of President Trump's expensive ideas to include.
<p>"Voters in this country must be able to cast a ballot safely and securely and without putting their health at risk — both this fall in the general election and in the remaining primary elections leading up to the general election," Blunt said, adding that he was "trying to identify the right amount of new money" both needed and politically possible.</p>
<p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>That was a clear signal GOP leaders will include money for elections in the legislation — knowing much of it will be spent to support expanded voting, which the president insists without evidence will assure "the most corrupt election in our nation's history," as he tweeted this week.</p>
<p>"We need to prepare for an unprecedented flood of mail-in ballots by ensuring the Postal Service has sufficient funding and makes no detrimental changes to their operation that could have a negative impact on elections this fall," Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said at the hearing — raising an issue that is separate from aid to the states, but if unaddressed has the potential to cripple the election. </p>
<p>One witness was Rick Steam, the Republican elections director in St. Louis County, the most populous jurisdiction in Blunt's state. He said 45 percent of votes in local elections in June were cast by mail, quadruple the usual share, and that he's expecting an even bigger vote-by-mail burst in the August primaries and the November presidential contest. </p>
<p>Temporary workers had to be hired to process the deluge last month, he said, and his budget does not anticipate such hiring for two more elections this year.</p><p>Congress delivered $400 million to the states in March to smooth their elections, but only if they provided a 20 percent match. The witnesses — including two GOP secretaries of state, Tre Hargett of Tennessee and Mac Warner of West Virginia — pleaded for Congress to release those strings.</p><p>Voting rights groups and election officials say another $3.6 billion would be needed to cover all the unanticipated costs. The House has approved that money in its version of the economic rescue bill now being negotiated.</p><p>Election officials could use the cash to pay for postage, paper and printing of absentee ballots. It's now too late to buy automated mail sorting systems in time for November, so the money could also be used to hire more human tabulators like the crew in St. Louis.</p><p>"Without additional mandates from the federal government or through the courts, we feel good about where we are financially," Hargett testified about the situation in Tennessee, which has strict excuse requirements that hold mail voting to a minimum. "However, if a court decision were to require us to do absentee no-excuse or universal vote-by-mail, that would be a game changer for us." </p>
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Vows on Hill and in court to stop Trump from keeping immigrants out of House count
Jul 22 2020
Democrats and civil liberties groups are threatening legislation and lawsuits to prevent President Trump from excluding undocumented immigrants from the population counts used to apportion House seats for the next decade.
The president directed the government on Tuesday to provide the states with census numbers that exclude millions of people living in the country illegally — setting up a potential balance of powers fight as well as a constitutional dispute over whether congressional districts should be drawn based on numbers of people, as has been the long-standing practice, or only citizens.
Civil rights groups gave notice in federal court Wednesday that they would fight Trump's effort. The American Civil Liberties Union readied a separate lawsuit. The House Oversight and Reform Committee announced it would convene an emergency hearing next week and may write a bill to thwart the president. And Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed that Democrats "will vigorously contest the president's unconstitutional and unlawful attempt to impair the census."
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The Census Bureau is in the middle of its once-a-decade head count, among the most important and extensive bureaucratic undertakings of a functioning democracy. The results will not only determine how many of the 435 House seats shift to the fastest growing states at the expense of other places, but it will also provide numbers for drawing election lines at the state, county and city level. The numbers will also determine the distribution over the next decade of $1.5 trillion in federal spending that's allocated by demographic formula.
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More than 62 percent of households have responded, and census takers last week started appearing at the homes where residents haven't responded. The bureau this week mailed out 34 million postcards to households reminding them to answer the census questionnaire as required by law.
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"It is the policy of the United States to exclude from the apportionment base aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status," Trump said in a memorandum Tuesday. It said that states with undocumented immigrants should not be given more representatives as this would only encourage them to continue to harbor such people.
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If Trump gets what he wants, which could end up requiring the Supreme Court to disregard the consensus understanding of the Constitution, the effect would be more seats shifting to Republican states instead of Democratic ones.
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"The Constitution requires that everyone in the U.S. be counted in the census," Dale Ho, the voting rights chief at the ACLU, said in a statement. "President Trump cannot pick and choose. He tried to add a citizenship question to the census and lost in the Supreme Court. His latest attempt to weaponize the census for an attack on immigrant communities will be found unconstitutional. We'll see him in court, and win, again."
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Last year, Trump's effort to put a citizenship question on the census was <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-966_bq7c.pdf" target="_blank">derailed by the high court</a>, making it difficult to determine how many undocumented immigrants are in he country.
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In a statement accompanying his memorandum, however, Trump noted that federal agencies "have been collecting the information needed to conduct an accurate census and inform responsible decisions about public policy, voting rights, and representation in Congress."
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Under that <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-collecting-information-citizenship-status-connection-decennial-census/" target="_blank">executive order</a>, which civil rights groups are already fighting in federal court, agencies are to provide the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, with data and records that could be used to separate citizens and noncitizens.
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The president's latest move, "if carried out, could upend the balance of power," said Sean Moulton, a senior policy analyst at the <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/project-on-government-oversight" target="_self">Project on Government Oversight</a>. "This move by the White House to ignore a significant percentage of the population and summarily redefine how we apportion representative power in this country is inappropriate and potentially unconstitutional."
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Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland said Trump's action highlights his "inexhaustible contempt for our constitutional system and the rule of law. The U.S. Constitution requires 'an actual enumeration' of the 'whole number of persons' in the country for 'apportioning representatives among the states in Congress.'"
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As evidence that his action is legal, Trump cited a unanimous 1992 Supreme Court decision that found the Commerce Department could apportion members of the military serving overseas at their home of record: "Congress has provided that it is 'the president's personal transmittal of the report to Congress' that 'settles the apportionment' of representatives among the States, and the president's discretion to settle the apportionment is more than ceremonial or ministerial and is essential "to the integrity of the process."
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Groups in favor of less immigration praised the decision.
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"The process of including illegal aliens in the census count for the purpose of reapportionment, as it has been practiced in recent decades, is fundamentally unfair to law-abiding Americans, and the president should be applauded for taking long overdue action to safeguard their interests and constitutional rights," said Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
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However, the courts have rejected <a href="https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/486/564/1753930/" target="_blank">attempts by FAIR</a> to remove undocumented immigrants from apportionment. The Supreme Court already struck down Trump's attempt to add a citizenship question to the census because it was added with the intention of undercounting undocumented immigrants and lowering the amount of funds and representatives these areas have.
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