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      Former Ohio Speaker Householder Faces Sentencing in Bribery Scheme

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      Larry L. Householder, former speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, awaits sentencing on Thursday after being convicted of participating in a racketeering conspiracy that resulted in a bailout for two struggling nuclear power plants.It is, federal prosecutors say, perhaps the biggest public corruption scandal in Ohio’s history, a three-year conspiracy in which one of Ohio’s biggest corporations funneled some $60 million to one of the state’s most powerful politicians in exchange for a $1.3 billion bailout.And those investigators say they are only coming to the end of Act I.On Thursday, the former Republican speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, Larry L. Householder, will be sentenced in federal court in Cincinnati for violating racketeering and bribery laws.The outlines of the charges have been known since his arrest, with four other men, three years ago: FirstEnergy Corporation, a Fortune 500 electric utility based in Akron, funneled the $60 million though various nonprofit entities. In return, Mr. Householder rammed a law through the state legislature that gave the company the bailout for two troubled nuclear power plants. Prosecutors have recommended a sentence of up to 20 years.But, as described early this year in a 26-day trial, the alliance between the utility and Mr. Householder, 64, was far more than a bribery scandal. Among other things, prosecutors and experts say, it was an almost cinematic example of how the dark money that pervades both state and federal politics slithers unseen from donor to beneficiary.It is also a cautionary tale about how state legislatures — second-rung political bodies that are often run by part-time politicians, but increasingly dealing with issues of national importance — are at least as prone to manipulation by special interests as their Washington counterparts.David DeVillers, who oversaw the federal investigation as the U.S. attorney in Cincinnati until early 2021, said in an interview that the gusher of dark money was crucial to the plot and an issue well beyond Ohio.“Any time you have a supermajority, whether it’s Republicans or Democrats, and industries that are based on passing laws like marijuana or sports gambling or energy, it’s a formula for corruption,” he said.In a memorandum on sentencing last week, Mr. Householder’s lawyer, Steven L. Bradley, said that his client had not admitted wrongdoing, and that Mr. Householder genuinely believed that the legislation enacting the bailout “was an important piece of legislation, which is why he advocated and voted for it.” The blare of publicity and the ignominy of conviction, Mr. Bradley wrote, had left Mr. Householder “a broken man.” In an email, Mr. Bradley said he plans to “vigorously pursue an appeal with the hope of winning a new trial.”Mr. Householder, a onetime insurance agent from an impoverished rural county in southeast Ohio, had been House speaker from 2001 to 2004. He left his legislative seat because of term limits and faced a federal corruption investigation after leaving the post then, but was not charged.After returning to the legislature in 2016, Mr. Householder secretly spent millions in 2018 to support Republican candidates for 21 seats in the State House — more than a fifth of the 99 seats — who would back his insurgent campaign to again become House speaker. He spent more millions on a media campaign to push the nuclear bailout law to passage, and then tens of millions on a scorched-earth crusade to undermine a ballot initiative that threatened to undo it.By the time he was arrested in July 2020, Mr. Householder was soliciting secret contributions from others seeking legislative favors — and plotting to change the State Constitution’s term limits clause to extend his tenure by 16 years.At each step, a web of political action committees and dummy nonprofit organizations called 501(c)(4)s, after their place in the federal tax code, ensured that money fueling the schemes could not be traced to Mr. Householder or FirstEnergy.“The scope of the conspiracy was unprecedented,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memorandum. “So was the damage it left in its wake, both in terms of its potential financial harm to Ohioans and its erosion of public trust.”In a wiretap disclosed during the trial, a lobbyist charged in the affair, Neil Clark, boasted to undercover F.B.I. agents about his handiwork.“I spent close to $20 million in the last eight weeks, $20 million,” he said. “FirstEnergy got $1.3 billion in subsidies, free payments.”He later added: “So what do they care about putting in $20 million a year for this thing?”FirstEnergy sought a bailout for two nuclear power plants, including this one in North Perry, Ohio.Amy Sancetta/Associated PressFirstEnergy had sought state subsidies for two nuclear power plants on the shore of Lake Erie for years when Mr. Householder returned to the State House in 2016. The company claimed that renewable energy and cheaper fuels had made both plants unprofitable.Mr. Householder left little doubt that he wanted his old job as speaker back. After his 2016 election, FirstEnergy’s chief executive at the time, Chuck Jones, invited him to fly on the company’s private jet to attend the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump.Over several days of socializing at high-end restaurants, prosecutors said, they discussed a deal: Mr. Householder needed money to regain the speaker’s post when its occupant left office in 2018. The company needed a legislative solution to its nuclear power woes.What began with a handshake became a multimillion-dollar political operation, with the money laundered through nonprofit groups allowed by the tax code to conceal donors’ names.“They can give as much or more to the (c)(4) and nobody would ever know,” the lobbyist, Mr. Clark, told Mr. Householder in another wiretapped conversation. “So you don’t have to be afraid.”Chuck Jones in 2015, when he was FirstEnergy’s president and chief executive.Phil Masturzo/Akron Beacon Journal, via Associated PressNeil Clark, a lobbyist, was also charged in the affair.Jonathan Quilter/The Columbus Dispatch, via USA Today NetworkWeeks later, Mr. Householder established a 501(c)(4) called Generation Now. Other nonprofits, both new and old, were rolled into the scheme: a PAC called Hardworking Ohioans, two new nonprofits and many more.Rivers of anonymous money — most, but not all, from FirstEnergy — began to flow. In one typical transaction, Generation Now shunted $1 million of FirstEnergy donations to the newly formed Coalition for Growth and Opportunity, whose only reported officer was a Kentucky lawyer who oversaw other nonprofits. The Coalition for Growth and Opportunity donated $1 million to its separate PAC, which spent it on media campaigns supporting Republicans friendly to Mr. Householder and opposing unfriendly ones.And so it went: At least $3 million spent in 2018 to elect Republicans backing Mr. Householder’s speaker ambitions. Nearly $17 million more in 2019 on a successful media campaign supporting House Bill 6, the legislation bailing out FirstEnergy nuclear plants.Clean energy advocates and the natural gas industry opposed the $1.3 billion measure, which propped up two unrelated coal-fired plants and solar energy projects besides the $1 billion nuclear subsidy. And when they began collecting signatures for a ballot initiative to overturn the bailout, FirstEnergy devoted another $38 million to quash that effort.The money paid for a private detective and bullies to disrupt signature gatherers, as well as a saturation advertising campaign claiming that China was “quietly invading our energy grid” with the help of opponents of the bailout.Backers considered it money well spent. When House Bill 6 became law in July 2019, Mr. Jones, the FirstEnergy chairman, sent a picture of Mount Rushmore to Samuel C. Randazzo, then the chairman of the state Public Utilities Commission. Supplanting the mountain’s four presidents were faces of the two men and executives at FirstEnergy and another utility.Below that, prosecutors said, was an all-capital-letters caption that extolled their political clout with a common sexual vulgarity.Meanwhile, Mr. Householder’s Generation Now nonprofit was already plowing new ground. In a wiretapped conversation in 2018, Mr. Householder said he was “expecting big things in (c)(4) money from payday lenders,” an industry that has lobbied federal and state officials against regulating high-interest loans to the poor.For some, the cost of exposure has been heavy.FirstEnergy fired its top executives. Later, it paid $234 million in fines to federal agencies and surrendered another $115 million in ill-gotten gains after admitting to large-scale fraud.Mr. Clark, the lobbyist, died by suicide in 2021 after publishing a book that alleged a lifetime of dirty deals in state politics.Federal prosecutors say their inquiry is continuing, although they have not said where it might lead.F.B.I. agents removing items from the home of Samuel C. Randazzo, then the Ohio Public Utilities Commission chairman, in 2020.Adam Cairns/The Columbus Dispatch, via Associated PressIn what was, in effect, a plea bargain with federal prosecutors, FirstEnergy confessed that it had given Mr. Randazzo $4.3 million “to further FirstEnergy Corp.’s interests” on nuclear and other issues in 2019, weeks before Gov. Mike DeWine named him to head the state Public Utilities Commission.Mr. Randazzo, who denies wrongdoing, has not been charged.Court filings and related lawsuits have referred to Governor DeWine and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, who have said they were unaware of the illegal payments. Both supported House Bill 6, and Mr. DeWine benefited from hundreds of thousand of dollars in get-out-the-vote support from FirstEnergy during his 2018 election campaign. The company also donated $75,000 to his daughter’s failed bid for a local elective office.FirstEnergy, meanwhile, faces investigation by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission and shareholder lawsuits.And in the five states where it owns electric utilities, utility commissions are likely to require tens of millions of dollars in refunds to customers, in part involving scandal-related spending.On Wednesday, the company said in a statement that it “has accepted responsibility for its actions related to House Bill 6 and has taken significant steps to put past issues behind us.”“Today we are a different, stronger company with a sound strategy and focused on a bright future,” it added.Mr. DeVillers, the former U.S. attorney, said that nonprofits like those central to the FirstEnergy scandal have been largely ignored by law enforcement. Enforcement of restrictions in the federal tax code on 501(c)(4) groups has been lax.Dave Anderson, the communications director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group that follows the energy industry, said that might now change.“This is a case that really illustrates how they can be used for criminal malfeasance,” he said, referring to nonprofits. Now, he said, lawyers who told clients that 501(c)(4) groups are safe conduits for secret cash may be “holding their breath and thinking, ‘Maybe the convictions will be thrown out.’” More

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      Virginia Primary Elections 2023: Live Results

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      Source: Election results and race calls are from The Associated Press.Produced by Michael Andre, Neil Berg, Matthew Bloch, Irineo Cabreros, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Lindsey Rogers Cook, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Tiff Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Martín González Gómez, Will Houp, Aaron Krolik, Jasmine C. Lee, Ilana Marcus, Charlie Smart and Isaac White. Editing by Wilson Andrews, William P. Davis, Amy Hughes, Ben Koski, Allison McCartney and Christine Zhang. More

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      Texas Passes Bills Targeting Elections in Democratic Stronghold

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      The bills’ passage was the culmination of a Republican effort to increase oversight of voting in Harris County, which includes Houston.The LatestThe Texas Legislature gave final approval on Sunday to a new round of voting bills to increase penalties for illegal voting and expand state oversight of local elections specifically in Harris County, which includes Houston, where Democrats have become dominant.The measures, which now head to Gov. Greg Abbott to sign, include a bill that would upend elections in Houston a few months before the city’s mayoral race in November by forcing the county to change how it runs elections and return to a previous system.That bill, known as Senate Bill 1750, was crafted so that it applies only to Harris County. So was another bill, Senate Bill 1933, that would give broad new powers to the secretary of state, appointed by the governor, to direct how elections are run in the county if there are complaints and to petition a court to replace the top election officials when deemed necessary.Election workers organized paperwork from each polling location at NRG Arena in Houston, Texas, in November.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesWhy It Matters: Harris County could tilt the power balance in Texas.Harris County, the state’s most populous county, has become a reliable Democratic stronghold.The passage of the bills marked the culmination of a monthslong effort by Texas Republicans to contest some of that dominance. They highlighted Election Day problems last November in Harris County as justification for challenging results that favored Democrats and call into question the way the Democratic-led county runs its elections.“It was a stated intention of some of the folks in the Legislature to take action against Harris County election administration,” said Daniel Griffith, the senior policy director at Secure Democracy USA, a nonpartisan organization focused on elections and voter access.Senate Bill 1750 eliminates the appointed position of elections administrator, which has been in place in Harris County only since late 2020. If the bill becomes law with the governor’s signature, the county must return to its previous system of running elections, in which the county clerk and the county tax collector-assessor split responsibilities. Both positions are currently occupied by elected Democrats.“The Legislature’s support for S.B. 1750 and S.B. 1933 is because Harris County is not too big to fail, but too big to ignore,” State Senator Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican and sponsor of several election bills, said in a statement. “The public’s trust in elections in Harris County must be restored.”Another bill, Senate Bill 1070, removes Texas from an interstate system for crosschecking voter registration information run by a nonprofit, the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC. The system has been the target of conservative attacks in several states in part because it requires states using it to also conduct voter outreach when new voters move in from out of state. The Texas measure bars the state from entering into any crosschecking system that requires voter outreach.Yet another bill, House Bill 1243, increases the penalty for illegal voting from a misdemeanor to a felony.The measures that passed were opposed by Democratic representatives and voting rights groups. But advocates of greater access to the polls were relieved that other, more restrictive measures put forward and passed in the State Senate — including one that would have required voters to use their assigned polling place instead of being able to vote anywhere in the county, and another that would have created a system for the state to order new elections under certain circumstances in Harris County — failed in the Texas House.“Those haven’t moved and that’s definitely a good thing,” Mr. Griffith said.What’s Next: a lawsuit and a microscope on upcoming elections.The bills invite new scrutiny of elections, especially in Harris County, where officials would be expected to revamp their system just months before important elections.Under the new legislation, future complaints about the functioning of elections in the Democratic-run county could create the real possibility that the secretary of state, a former Republican state senator, could step in and oversee elections as early as next year, as the county votes for president.The bills, said Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston, “create more problems than they allegedly solve.”Top officials in Harris County have vowed to go to court to challenge both measures aimed at the county once the laws go into effect (Sept. 1, if the governor signs), meaning the fight over elections in the county remains far from over. More

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      Texas Republicans Push New Voting Restrictions Aimed at Houston

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      The bills propose limits on polling places, tougher penalties for illegal voting and a way for the Republican-led state to order new elections in its largest city.HOUSTON — Across Harris County, an emerging Democratic stronghold in reliably red Texas, roadside signs posted last November urged harried drivers to vote Republican. A celebrity furniture salesman, beloved by many Houstonians, cut ads with the Republican candidate for the top county administrator’s post.The 2022 races for local judges and county leaders were among the hardest fought and most expensive yet seen in the sprawling county of 4.8 million, which includes Houston, as Republicans looked to capitalize on crime concerns to make headway in the state’s largest urban area.But they fell short.Now, the county is in the cross hairs of the Republican-dominated state Legislature, which is trying to exert more control over voting there. Lawmakers are pushing dozens of new election bills, including limits on polling places, felony penalties for illegal voting and a mechanism for the state to order new elections when voting problems occur in Texas counties with more than 2.7 million people, a category that includes only Harris County.At the same time, more than a dozen election challenges have been filed by losing Republican candidates in the county who have argued that significant problems at a limited number of polling places on Election Day, including insufficient supplies of ballot paper, were enough change the outcomes of races. While local leaders acknowledge issues, evidence has not been presented that they affected the results.Still, the two-front fight, both in the courts and in the State Capitol, highlighted just how important it is for Republicans to keep Harris County in play and not let it become another strongly blue urban center along the lines of Austin or Dallas. As recently as 2014, the party controlled the county, whose Republican top official was re-elected in a landslide. But it has been moving left ever since.“I tell people, we could be the reason we lose Texas, just because of our size,” said Cindy Siegel, the chair of the county Republican Party, sitting in her office under a painting of George W. Bush with smoke rising from Lower Manhattan after Sept. 11, 2001.“We’re the wall,” she added. “And they say, so goes Texas, so goes the country. So Harris County is the battleground.”Harris County, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island, includes the reliably Democratic city of Houston.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesThe election bills aimed at the county are part of a broad effort by Republican state leaders to increase their control over Texas’ Democratic-run urban areas. They include bills prohibiting local governments from adopting certain local ordinances, including over worker pay or hours, and allowing for the removal of elected local prosecutors who refuse to enforce certain laws, such as those banning abortion. The approach mirrors those in other red states with large blue cities, such as Tennessee and Florida.Republican lawmakers in Texas passed an overhaul of election rules just two years ago in a bitter fight with Democrats. They returned to the subject this session in large part to address the results in Harris County in November.The election there provided a contentious backdrop because there were real issues during the vote. Some polling places opened late, while others struggled with enough paper to accommodate the two-sheet ballot printouts needed for the county’s huge list of races. The local district attorney, a Democrat, opened an investigation last year.“The legislative push is to make sure that this never happens in any county in Texas,” said Senator Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican and the sponsor of several of the bills. “I believe the lack of ballot paper is voter suppression.”But county officials said the election bills do not address the issues that arose in Harris County. Instead, they said, the proposed laws could dampen turnout by limiting voting options and would give a partisan secretary of state, an official appointed by the governor, the power to overturn results and order a new vote if ballot paper issues arose again.Christian Menefee, the Harris County attorney, said the election challenges appeared to try to lay the groundwork for giving Republicans more control over the elections in a Democratic county. “It is a solution in search of a problem that’s not widespread,” he said.“As a Black man whose grandfather paid a poll tax, this whole ordeal is infuriating,” said Mr. Menefee, a Democrat. “It’s a complete misuse of the word disenfranchisement from people who, by the way, are still working to disenfranchise folks.”The scale of the problems on Election Day — which featured new voting machines and a lengthy ballot that required two pages of paper per voter — remain a matter of dispute, both in court and before the Legislature. But they do not appear to have affected the vast majority of the county’s 782 polling locations.Election workers organized ballot machines and results at NRG Arena in Houston on Election Day in 2022.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesAt a hearing before a State House committee in March, the head of the secretary of state’s elections division said that despite logistical problems, the 2022 election “was one of the best elections we’ve seen” in several years in Harris County, though he acknowledged it was a low bar given the roundly criticized primary election earlier in the year.Republicans have said the November results were indeed affected because, they have argued, the ballot issues arose in precincts where their voters turn out in large numbers. Democratic county officials have said the problems occurred in other areas as well and were limited in scope: A postelection report by the election administrator, Clifford Tatum, found that 68 polling places reported running out of paper on Election Day, and 61 said they later received additional paper.County officials have resisted releasing documents and other information about the handling of voting issues on Election Day in response to public information requests, citing the ongoing litigation. Among Senator Bettencourt’s election bills is one that would remove the “litigation exception” for requests for certain election records.With that backdrop, the State Senate has advanced more than a dozen election bills, explicitly or implicitly aimed at Harris County, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island that includes not only the reliably Democratic city of Houston but also some of its more moderate suburbs.The county since 2016 has shifted ever more firmly into the Democratic column in presidential races and local ones as well, as formerly conservative neighborhoods and growing Houston suburbs have grown more diverse and trended blue. The political make-up of the five-member commissioners court, which administers the county, has gone from a three-two Republican majority in 2014 to a four-one Democratic majority now.Republicans are hoping, if not to reverse that trend, then at least to keep the contests close and, sometimes, winnable.“The Texas Legislature will ensure that there are consequences for Harris County’s failure to run elections,” said Senator Mayes Middleton, a Houston-area Republican and the sponsor of the bill to allow the secretary of state to order new elections in certain cases of ballot paper problems. “Disenfranchising voters is unacceptable,” Mr. Middletown said, in a statement.Also of concern to Democrats and advocates of expanding access to the polls is another bill, which passed the State Senate last month, that would limit voters to their assigned polling place. Some counties, including Harris County, currently allow voters to cast a ballot anywhere in the county.“It’s definitely one of the most damaging,” said Katya Ehresman, the voting rights program manager at the advocacy group Common Cause Texas, because by limiting voters’ options it could decrease turnout. The bill, like others that have made it through the Senate, must still pass the more moderate, Republican-controlled State House.In the last election, voters whose polling places ran out of paper were able to go to another location in the county, though some gave up without voting.Twenty-one Republican candidates have filed election challenges, including Alexandra del Moral Mealer, who lost the Harris County judge race by 18,000 votes.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesMany of the legal challenges to the November election in Harris County involve voters who were unable to cast ballots.Leila Perrin said she had gone to vote in a more conservative section of West Houston shortly before the polls closed on Election Day and encountered a chaotic scene. “I went to get out of my car, and these people were leaving and they said, ‘Don’t bother,’” she recalled. “I said ‘Why?’ And they said, ‘They don’t have any paper ballots.’”Ms. Perrin, 72, had planned to vote against the top county official, the Democratic county judge Lina Hidalgo. So she drove to another polling site nearby and found the same situation. By then it was 10 minutes before the polls closed. “So I just went home. I was furious,” she said.Twenty-one Republican candidates have filed election challenges including Ms. Perrin’s favored candidate, Alexandra del Moral Mealer, who lost to Ms. Hidalgo by 18,000 votes. The first trial is set to begin in June.Some voters also found themselves unable to vote in predominantly Democratic precincts temporarily on Election Day, though no Democratic candidates have filed challenges. For example, voters were turned away from one such location that did not open for hours. All polls in the county were ordered to stay open an extra hour under an emergency court order, but then voting was halted by the Texas Supreme Court after an appeal from the Republican attorney general.“Issues don’t mean conspiracies,” said Representative John Bucy, a Democratic member of the Texas House elections committee. “Our elections are run effectively in the state of Texas. Nothing is perfect, but they’re effective.”At a hearing of the elections committee last month, an election judge in Harris County said he had run out of paper by 6 p.m. on Election Day despite flagging the issue several times during the day.“We had about 40 people in line, most of whom left to find another polling place,” said the judge, Christopher Russo. Those who stayed would be able to vote, he said he told them, but he could not guarantee how long it would take to get the paper.“I finally received ballot paper at 9:05 p.m.,” he said. By that time, only four people remained in line. More

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      How to Police Gerrymanders? Some Judges Say the Courts Can’t.

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      A North Carolina court, following the lead of the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled that courts don’t have the ability to determine if a political map is legal, giving legislators a free pass.WASHINGTON — Courts decide vexing legal matters and interpret opaque constitutional language all the time, from defining pornography and judging whether a search or seizure is unreasonable to determining how speedy a speedy trial must be.And then there is the issue that some judges increasingly say is beyond their abilities to adjudicate. It was on display again last week, in North Carolina.The North Carolina Supreme Court said that it could find no way to determine when even egregious gerrymanders — in this case, lopsided partisan maps of the state’s General Assembly and its 14 congressional districts — cross the line between skewed but legal and unconstitutionally rigged. In addition, the justices said, any court-ordered standard “would embroil the judiciary in every local election in every county, city and district across the state.”The effect was to give the Republican-led legislature carte blanche to draw new maps for 2024 elections that lock in G.O.P. political dominance, even though the state’s electorate is split almost evenly between the two major parties.Under its current court-ordered map, North Carolina now elects seven Democrats and seven Republicans to the U.S. House. Maps drawn by the Republican legislature could mean 10 Republicans to four Democrats, or possibly 11 to three. Without judicial review, the only remedy is to vote the dominant party out using maps drawn to keep them in power.The 5-to-2 decision, which fell along party lines in a court led by Republicans, pointedly threw out a ruling by a Democrat-led court only a few months earlier that said such lines could — and should — be drawn. In that respect, the North Carolina ruling reinforced what seems to be a hardening partisan divide between jurists who believe unfair political maps should be policed and ones who do not.The U.S. Supreme Court also split along partisan lines in 2019 when it ruled 5 to 4, after decades of dithering, that it could not devise a legal standard to regulate partisan gerrymandering, though it suggested that state courts could.It is hard to separate party allegiance from jurists’ positions, said Paul M. Smith, the senior vice president of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan advocacy group that litigates voting rights issues.“One explanation would be that the courts decide cases about elections based on who will be helped,” he said. “On some days, I’m cynical enough to believe that.” Whether that consciously figures in court decisions, though, is less easy to say, he added.Nate Persily, a Stanford Law School professor and expert on election law and democracy, said that any standard for judging partisan gerrymanders has to be above reproach.“The response is always going to be that you’re picking winners and losers,” he said. “Unless we come up with some sort of clear mathematical test, I respect the argument that judges’ political preferences might creep into the process.” Passing judgment on a legislature’s constitutional authority to set political boundaries can be a fraught exercise. In 1962, one U.S. Supreme Court justice, Charles Evans Whittaker, who had heard the historic redistricting case Baker v. Carr, suffered a nervous breakdown during the court’s deliberations and skipped the final vote.But some say that just because it is hard to create fair district lines does not mean it cannot be done.“I think that’s intellectually dishonest and intellectually lazy,” Rebecca Szetela, a political independent and a member of the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, said in an interview. “We had a commission made up of 13 randomly selected voters of varying educational backgrounds, and somehow we were able to come up with fair standards.”The Michigan commissioners drew their first set of maps after the 2020 election, following orders not to give any party a “disproportionate advantage.” They relied on several statistical metrics to meet that standard. But overall, they decided that an acceptable range for the statewide ratio of votes to seats won would fall within five percentage points of their calculation of the state’s political preferences: 52 percent Democratic, 48 percent Republican.In practice, Ms Szetela said, the maps hewed closely to the calculated partisan divide. Still, some experts say that it is impossible to construct a standard that will be reliably fair. Daniel H. Lowenstein, an election-law expert at UCLA School of Law, said that would-be regulators of partisan gerrymanders by and large know little of how politics really works. He said that he picked up such an education during the 1970s while working in the California Secretary of State office, and later while running the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission.“There’s nothing in the Constitution that says elections have to be fair,” he said, “and that’s a good thing, because different people all have different concepts of what it means to be fair.”Peter H. Schuck, professor emeritus of law at Yale wrote a detailed analysis on the topic, “The Thickest Thicket,” in 1987. “I just don’t see any objective criteria that would be authoritative in assessing whether a gerrymander ought to be upheld or not,” he said. A few other state courts have set standards for partisan gerrymandering and applied them. Pennsylvania was the first state to strike down partisan gerrymanders in 2018, and the Alaska Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision last month stating that gerrymandered State Senate seats violated the State Constitution’s equal protection clause.Many voting rights advocates say the same computer-driven advances that enable today’s extreme gerrymanders also make it possible to easily spot them.In particular, software programs can now generate thousands and even millions of maps of hypothetical political districts, each with small variations in their borders. Using statistical measures, those maps can be compared to a map being contested to gauge their partisan slant.In actual court cases, the technique has shown that some gerrymandered maps produce more lopsided partisan outcomes than 99 percent and more of the hypothetical ones.Measures of partisanship have improved, as social scientists employed data analytics to tease out the partisan impact of map changes. One yardstick, called the efficiency gap, gauges how much the votes of one party are wasted when its voters are disproportionately packed into one district or carved up among several. Another, partisan bias, measures the effectiveness of a gerrymandered map by calculating how many seats the same map would give each party in a hypothetical election where voters were split 50-50. There are many others, and each has its shortcomings. For example, voters sort themselves geographically, with a lopsided share of Democrats packed in cities and Republicans in rural areas, for reasons that have nothing to do with partisan skulduggery. And some metrics are useful only in particular situations, such as in states where party support is closely divided.In a 2017 hearing in a Wisconsin partisan gerrymander case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called such metrics “sociological gobbledygook.” But if so, much of American jurisprudence carries the same label, said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard University law professor who has been a leading advocate of standards to judge partisan gerrymanders.“In any voting rights case, people have to calculate racial polarization, which is a far more complex calculation than the efficiency gap,” he said. “You have to calculate the compactness of districts. You have to estimate voting patterns for minority voters and white voters.”“Tests involving some matter of degree are just ubiquitous in constitutional law,” he added, and nothing makes a partisan gerrymander case any different.Mr. Stephanopoulos and others also say that drawing a line between permissible and illegal political maps is not all that difficult. Courts make similar judgments in lawsuits claiming racial bias in redistricting, he noted. After the one-person, one-vote ruling in 1964, judges quickly set a limit — 10 percent — on how much political districts could deviate from the new requirement to have substantially equal populations.Some gerrymandering yardsticks have already been suggested. For example, a political map might be assumed constitutional unless measures of partisanship uniformly argued against it. At that point, the body that drew the map would have to demonstrate another compelling reason for the way boundaries were drawn.Critics like Professor Lowenstein argue that any dividing line between unfair and fair maps will have an unwanted consequence: Every subsequent map may be drawn to extract as much partisan gain as possible, yet fall just short of the legal standard for rejection.“The ultimate question,” Professor Schuck said, “is how crude a fit should a court be willing to accept?”Then again, he pointed out, the U.S. Supreme Court and the North Carolina Supreme Court have answered that question: Future political maps, they have ruled, can be as crude as their makers want them to be.“Declining to apply a rule is still going to validate or invalidate what politicians have done,” he said. “There’s no total innocence, no virginity, as it were.” More

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      A Fake Craigslist Ad Costs a New Hampshire Man His Right to Vote

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      By violating the state’s election laws, a man who included a candidate’s phone number in a false Election Day ad has lost his right to vote.On the day of a special election in New Hampshire in April 2021, Michael Drouin posted a fake advertisement on Craigslist offering a free trailer and listed the phone number of Bill Boyd, a candidate for a state House seat.Mr. Drouin thought he was playing a harmless practical joke, but it was no laughing matter to Mr. Boyd, a Republican, who told the police that he received dozens of texts and phone calls in under an hour on the morning of April 13, 2021, before he shut off his phone.Mr. Drouin was indicted in November 2022 on a felony charge of interference with election communications. On Monday, Mr. Drouin, 30, of Merrimack, N.H., pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of creating a false document, an election law offense, admitting that he knowingly interfered with Mr. Boyd’s ability to use his cellphone on Election Day.The charge is a misdemeanor, not a felony, but it still cost him his right to vote in the state. People who are convicted of a willful violation of the state’s election laws lose their right to vote under the New Hampshire Constitution.Mr. Drouin told investigators in October 2021 that the false advertisement “was a joke” and that he “meant no harm,” according to a police affidavit in support of an arrest warrant. He also denied that it had anything to do with the special election, calling it “bad timing” and claiming to be a Republican like Mr. Boyd.Mr. Drouin was a registered Democrat when he spoke to the police, but investigators noted that he switched his party affiliation to Republican in February 2022.The state attorney general’s office said the stunt could have interfered with Mr. Boyd’s success in the election, which he went on to win, and which was held to fill the seat of the Republican House speaker, Richard Hinch, who died in December 2020 of complications related to Covid-19.Mr. Drouin would have faced a maximum penalty of seven years in prison and a fine of up to $2,000 if he had been convicted of the felony charge. After he pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor, he was ordered to pay a $250 fine and complete 250 hours of community service, the New Hampshire Department of Justice said in a news release. He was also given a 90-day jail sentence that was suspended for two years, allowing him to walk free on the condition of his good behavior.Matthew Conley, an assistant state attorney general, said in an email that Mr. Drouin has the right to petition the state to request that his voting rights be restored.Mr. Drouin initially denied that he created the ad. He later acknowledged having posted it, but told investigators that it was meant as a joke and that he did not think it was a “big deal at the time,” according to the affidavit. He told the police that he ultimately realized he had made a mistake and that he would invite Mr. Boyd out to dinner and did not want to “get hooked in the court system.”Mr. Boyd, who was elected to a full term in November, said he “experienced distress with my phone going on and off” on the day of the 2021 special election, WMUR-TV reported. He said he needed access to his phone to help get voters get rides to the polls, and to be in touch with his father in an assisted living facility and his sister, who he said had health problems.“I have not received a verbal apology at any point during this particular process,” Mr. Boyd said in court, according to WMUR, nor had he heard anything from Mr. Drouin that “would indicate any level of remorse.”Mr. Boyd told investigators that he received a message from Mr. Drouin on Facebook in October 2021. In it, Mr. Drouin wrote that “it was terrible timing with the election, and it’s been bothering me ever since.”“I should have had more consideration,” he added.In court on Monday, WMUR reported, Mr. Drouin said his lawyers had advised him against further contact with Mr. Boyd. More

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      in Elections

      Ex-Prosecutor in ‘Rust’ Case Suggested Role ‘Might Help’ Her Campaign

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      Andrea Reeb, part of the team that charged Alec Baldwin with manslaughter, wrote in an email in June that the case could help her campaign for the state legislature.When Andrea Reeb was hired last June as a prosecutor investigating the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of the film “Rust,” she emailed the district attorney in charge of the case that an announcement of her role “might help” her campaign for a seat in the state legislature.Ms. Reeb, a former district attorney who was a Republican candidate for the state’s House of Representatives, wrote to Mary Carmack-Altwies, the Santa Fe County district attorney who chose her for the case, that she did not plan to inform the press about her appointment.“At some point though,” Ms. Reeb went on in the email, “I’d at least like to get out there that I am assisting you … as it might help in my campaign lol.”Since then, Ms. Reeb won her election and, as the special prosecutor on the case, was part of the team that brought involuntary manslaughter charges against the actor Alec Baldwin, who was holding the gun that discharged on the “Rust” set on Oct. 21, 2021, killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.Last week, Ms. Reeb stepped down from the role of special prosecutor, after lawyers for Mr. Baldwin had argued that her simultaneous work for two different branches of state government — serving as a lawmaker and a prosecutor — violated New Mexico’s constitution.Correspondence between Ms. Reeb and Ms. Carmack-Altwies, which was released Tuesday in response to a request under the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act, shows that Ms. Reeb had discussed her legislative campaign early on in her work on the “Rust” case. On June 9, as Ms. Carmack-Altwies discussed with Ms. Reeb bringing her onto the case, Ms. Reeb wrote, “I also won’t talk to the press and will leave that all to you Mary.” Then she made the suggestion that an announcement might help her campaign.In her response to Ms. Reeb’s email, Ms. Carmack-Altwies did not mention the campaign, but said, “I am intending to either introduce you or send it in a press release when we get the investigation!”The district attorney’s office and Ms. Reeb did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.Ms. Reeb later entered into a contract that stipulated that she would bill $125 per hour for her work on the “Rust” case.In a court filing on Tuesday, a lawyer for Mr. Baldwin, Luke Nikas, described the report of the email as “yet another troubling development” and wrote that “Representative Reeb’s prosecution of this case against Mr. Baldwin to advance her political career is a further abuse of the system and yet another violation of Mr. Baldwin’s constitutional rights.”In January prosecutors announced that they would file involuntary manslaughter charges against Mr. Baldwin and the armorer on the film set, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, including a charge punishable by five years in prison. Lawyers for Ms. Gutierrez-Reed and Mr. Baldwin maintained that their clients were not guilty.Last month prosecutors downgraded the charges after Mr. Baldwin’s lawyers argued that prosecutors had erred by charging them under a law that had not yet been enacted at the time of the shooting. Under the current charges, if convicted, he and Ms. Gutierrez-Reed face the possibility of a maximum of 18 months in prison.A lawyer for Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, Jason Bowles, said in a statement Tuesday that Ms. Reeb’s comments from last June paint a “troubling picture of a prosecution that worried less about the law and facts than they did about wanting the limelight for personal political purposes.”After lawyers for Mr. Baldwin challenged the appointment of Ms. Reeb, prosecutors initially defended her continued role in the case. But she stepped down March 14, a couple of weeks before a judge was set to rule on whether she should be disqualified.Mr. Baldwin, who has said that he had no reason to believe there were live rounds on the film set when the gun went off, has pleaded not guilty in the case. A lawyer for Ms. Gutierrez-Reed has said she also intends to plead not guilty.A judge is scheduled to determine in May whether the charges against both defendants should move forward. More