Justice Kavanaugh Caught Cherry-Picking Line from a Law Review Article That Contradicted His ...
Justice Kavanaugh Caught Cherry-Picking Line from a Law Review Article That Contradicted His Conclusion
https://lawandcrime.com/awkward/justice-kavanaugh-caught-cherry-picking-line-from-a-law-review-article-that-contradicted-his-conclusion/
The controversy surrounding the party-line confirmation and swearing in of Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court was further compounded on Monday evening when the courts conservative justices sided with Republicans in Wisconsin, ruling that the critically important swing state can only count absentee ballots that arrive by Election Day. While the court did not provide a majority opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaughs 18-page concurrence was widely criticized for embracing unsubstantiated partisan talking points, misstatements of fact, historical misrepresentations, and incorrect citations.
But most glaring error critics identified in Kavanaughs opinion concerned his Trumpian justification for why most states do not accept mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day. Kavanaugh a cherry-picked quote whichin the context of the whole law review articleultimately contradicted his actual point.
Those States want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election. And those States also want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter, he wrote.
Kavanaugh then quoted from a law review article titled How to Accommodate a Massive Surge in Absentee Voting by New York University Law Professor Richard Pildes to bolster his point.
Under The Radar
(3,401 posts)Iliyah
(25,111 posts)he is after all a republican.
C_U_L8R
(44,990 posts)He deserves all the ridicule that's coming his way.
DarthDem
(5,255 posts)This is conservative legal scholarship, I suppose.
Pantagruel
(2,580 posts)Unrolled thread here
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1321033036104896513.html
1. In response to the President's claim that we "must have final total" election results *on* Election Day, here's a #thread on how and why presidential elections *actually* work under state and federal law and why, in fact, we've *never* had final results *on* Election Day.
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2. Let's start at the beginning. A U.S. presidential election is actually 51 *different* elections (50 states + DC), in which each jurisdiction votes for presidential *electors.* It's the *electors* who vote for President and they don't meet until *41 days* after the election:
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3. Why 41 days? To give states time to finish counting. Although Election Day is fixed by law, Congress has allowed states to set their own rules about when they count ballots including whether and to what extent to allow mail-in ballots, and by when those ballots must arrive.
4. And even for in-person ballots, it's usually not possible for states to *finish* counting *on* Election Day, especially since many state's laws don't allow *any* counting of ballots until all of the polls have closed (which happens sometime on the evening of Election Day).
5. Plus, if it's *really* close, states generally provide for automatic (and, in some cases, requested) *recounts* (like Florida in 2000), which have to take place before final results can be certified.
That's why *no* state requires certification of results *on* Election Day.
6. Indeed, only *one* state (Delaware, of course) has a certification deadline that's less than one week after Election Day.
Every other state waits at least a week and some *require* waiting far longer to officially certify their election results.
Election results certification dates, 2020 - Ballotpedia
https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results_certification_dates,_2020
7. Federal law not only recognizes this variation; it *encourages* it.
Under the "safe harbor" provision of the Electoral Count Act of 1887, a state's results will be deemed conclusive so long as they are certified within *five weeks* of Election Day:
law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/3/5
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3 U.S. Code § 5 - Determination of controversy as to appointment of electors
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/3/5
8. On election night, what we hear are *projections* that the media makes based upon evolving vote tallies and exit polls.
And when those projections give one candidate a majority in the Electoral College, those media groups "call" the election. But *NONE* of that is "official."
9. So when President Trump says we "must have final total" on November 3, he's just lying, both as a matter of historical practice and state and federal law. *Hopefully,* the results are clear enough by bedtime next Tuesday that the election is called for a particular candidate.
10. But if the media isn't able to call it Tuesday, that's not because of some nefarious plot; it's simply because the results are sufficiently close in the right number of states that it isn't yet clear who won and won't be until those states finish counting all legal ballots.
Thekaspervote
(32,709 posts)usajumpedtheshark
(672 posts)Midnight Writer
(21,717 posts)Silver Gaia
(4,541 posts)AZ8theist
(5,410 posts)How can you "flip" an election that hasn't been determined yet?
(I'm paraphrasing....)