Richard Hasen

He'd have to get Congress to do it.

The potential payout raised questions from some about whether the president was trying to buy votes, but says election law expert Rick Hasen, it's likely legal.

I think if a state actually tried to prosecute Trump, which seems very unlikely, that the courts would say that his activity is protected by the First Amendment because, uh, it's a campaign promise.

It's really not that much different from saying, "If you vote for me, I'll pass Medicare for all," or, "If you vote for me I'll cut your taxes by 20%." Politicians make these kinds of things all the time, so long as they're public and they're given to every voter, uh, it's just part of campaign rhetoric.

I think this means a quick trip to the Eighth Circuit and then back to Kavanaugh if necessary.

That's Rick Hasen's opinion.

Mm-hmm.

On the Missouri mess, Derek Muller, there's like five different pieces on the Election Law Blog that opened last night.

Now, thanks to the Lake and Riley Act, if they're immigrants, they can be indefinitely detained and then deported.

This is why UCLA election law professor Rick Hasen told National Public Radio last month that immigrants... are not voting.

We've seen the stats.

It's 0.0000832% of the voting rolls containing an immigrant accidentally.

You've got folks who don't know what they're working on now that apparently is going to continue with ICE, HSI, doing these reviews in different states and other immigration components of the department meddling in a space they don't belong.

Miles Taylor, Rick Hasen, and Miles, you say there could be more coming from this whistleblower.

We'll see what comes.

Thanks so much.

All right.

The Purcell principle, as UCLA professor Rick Hasen, whose name we hear all the time, has dubbed it, is the idea, you know it, but here it is as he states it, the idea that as Election Day draws nigh, federal courts should refrain from using their equitable authority to rule in ways that might increase voter confusion.

It's named after a remarkably, if typically cryptic, unsigned opinion respecting a grant of an emergency application that the supreme court handed down in october 2006 and it has become deeply controversial over the last five years as the justices has wielded in ways that at least appear to be inconsistent along any axis other than whether the intervention favors democrats or republicans and he says parenthetically i make and defend this argument in detail in Chapter 6 of The Shadow Docket, one of his books.

If anything, the court's inconsistency has been on even sharper display this term, given its enthusiastic invocations of Purcell to block district court rulings in the Texas and Alabama redistricting cases, state cases though, state action is what's at odds there, while refusing to apply Purcell's to itself, the Supreme Court itself, including in that Alabama case where the district court's intervention was only necessary because of the Supreme Court's post-Calais decision to vacate and remand the earlier injunction in that case.

in the meantime, as Leah mentioned, we're gonna really focus today on the Supreme Court and the election executive order that Trump is trying to implement.

So regular listeners will recall that we talked to election law expert and our friend Rick Hasen about the absentee ballot/election executive order when the government first filed its stay application at the Supreme Court During that conversation, Rick and Leah accurately predicted what the Supreme Court would do.

So today we're just gonna-

We have their number.

So [laughs] fire up YouTube if you want a little bit more depth and spice.

Um, and we also wanted to shout out other people really doing democracy's work, providing speedy, accurate coverage and translation of what the Supreme Court has done in this case and so many others.

And that includes Chris Geidner at Lawdork, who did a great write-up on Monday night, our friend Steve Vladeck, who you will hear from later on this episode, at One First Street, and also our friend Sherrilyn Ifill, who's got a just totally indispensable Substack, who wrote up a response to the court's order Monday as well.

Yeah, and she wrote something that I just wanted to underscore.

That was before the post office finalized its new rules for mail-in voting, which it has now done.

Joining us to talk about it is Rick Hasen.

He's professor of law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the UCLA School of Law.

Thanks very much for speaking to us again.