Walter Olson
Number eleven in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy:
New York City’s Democratic primary Tuesday has put a spotlight on ranked choice voting. As I often say, RCV has no intrinsic tilt toward left or right, but tends to improve the fit between voters’ overall preferences whatever they may be and the pick. While leftist candidate Zohran Mamdani has vigorously pursued an RCV-flavored campaign by seeking alliances and second choices, his critics (mostly standard liberals) are also prepared to strategize its use, as in this New York Times opinion piece; On a personal level, however, Mamdani’s chief opponent, Andrew Cuomo, “has taken no publicly visible actions to make common cause with any other candidate.” Is this a less-than-sound strategy, behavior that typifies a certain kind of candidate (compare Sarah Palin in Alaska), or maybe both? [Sam Wang] In a New Yorker discussion, Errol Louis doesn’t care for how RCV can encourage weak candidates to stay in rather than drop out, while Brian Lehrer counters, “The real nightmare scenario we’re looking at is in the fall election, where there is not ranked choice voting, and it’s winner take all, no matter what small percentage of the vote they get.” “There are no federal databases that identify voters,” and any attempt by a federal official to match federal data with state voter databases would run into privacy-law hurdles. Unfortunately, reporting on DOGE/Social Security voter fraud claims continues to leave much to be desired. [Justin Levitt] Prosecutors may not want to touch the question of whether Elon Musk’s offer to pay swing-state residents to sign a petition—provided they were registered voters—did or did not violate laws against paying for voter registration. A new lawsuit claiming nonpayment could potentially shed light. [Reuters, CNBC] “The accused allegedly collected mail-in ballots completed by voters, brought them to Mendez campaign headquarters, destroyed the ballots that did not contain votes for Mendez in Paterson’s 3rd Ward council race, and replaced them with bogus ballots for Mendez.” Indictment tends to reinforce the truism that local races are the main site of vote count misconduct and that ballot harvesting creates vulnerabilities. [Paterson Press via Rick Hasen, Election Law Blog] More details on the Millbourne, Pennsylvania scandal mentioned in this space in March. [George Stockburger/WHTM, Carter Walker/VoteBeat]
