In the November election, a variety of dead candidates won.  In the California 28th Senate District, the Democratic candidate Jenny Oropreza was dead.  Her name could not be removed from the ballot.  Presumably this gave the Republican a distinct advantage in the election.  After all, who would vote for a dead candidate?  Not so fast.

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen sent a letter to registered voters in the district:

“Jenny Oropreza name is on the ballot.  You have the right to vote for her.  If you do and she wins, there will be a special election called.  You will then be able to thoughtfully consider who will represent you in the Senate in the next four years.”

How nice of her. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg in California.  All sorts of other shenanigans took place and Hot Air has a story on them here.

This is what every state should do to get their redistricting plan approved.  Georgia goes to court for approval of citizenship verification plans.  There are multiple advantages to going directly to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to get voting changes approved.  The two main advantages are that it is cheaper and is more likely to result in approval.  There are other advantages which are discussed here.

NPR has this lengthy report on why the nomination for James Cole for Deputy Attorney General has stalled.  Except for one problem – they never report why the nomination for James Cole has stalled.

The answer is that Senator John Cornyn is furious about the lack of aggressive enforcement of military voting protections by the Voting Section at the Justice Department.  Either NPR didn’t do the research necessary for a thorough report, or, didn’t want to link DOJ’s failures to enforce military voting rights with the Cole nomination. 

Whatever the reason for NPR’s omission, Election Law Center has covered it here, here, here,here, here, here and here.  Maybe Carrie Johnson at NPR will do a follow up.  Maybe not.

So Chris Christie likes the Four Seasons?  Small potatoes compared to other matters.  More here.

One of the few states where Democrats survived the November 2 Tsunami was Illinois.  They will still be in charge of redistricting.  The Chicago Tribune has this piece:

“Illinois lawmakers are preparing to change a few ground rules for the once-a-decade process when they redraw district boundaries, a high-stakes exercise in power politics that puts careers on the line.

Two ideas could get a hearing this week when lawmakers return to the Capitol for the fall session. One is aimed at opening what’s been a secretive, backroom process by requiring several public hearings around the state. A second is designed to keep ethnic and cultural communities like Chinatown in cohesive voting blocs rather than splitting them into so many districts that their voices are diminished.”

If this happened, this is a federal crime.  One may not pose as another and vote in a federal election.  The Troy Record editorial argues that voter identification requirements would not have allowed this to happen:

“A Troy voter, Paul Worobey, went to the polling place this past Election Day and noticed someone signed his wife’s name but knew it wasn’t his wife’s signature because, in addition to it not being her handwriting, she didn’t vote on that Election Day or any other for that matter.”

Lets see if the FBI contacts Paul Worobey, or Troy election officials, to follow up on this report.  Maybe they don’t know about it.  Perhaps someone will call the FBI in Albany to report it at 518-465-7551.  Or, perhaps someone will call the Election Crimes Branch in Washington D.C. at 202-514-1421 and report this, or ask if they already know about it.

Someone better also alert Tova Wang, let her know her report about the absence of voter fraud on November 2 might need to be updated also.

Fox News report  on bogus voter vouching by Students Organizing for America in Minnesota.  If this is accurate, Minnesota desperately needs to change their laws.  Somebody alert Tova Wang; maybe she will want to amend her report.

Real Clear Politics has this broad redistricting preview.   I’ll take issue with the part about South Carolina:

South Carolina – Gains a district. Republicans have some votes to spare here, so expect a new Republican district. The only potential problem is if the Republicans have to draw an additional minority-majority district.

First of all, this assessment rather ignores where the population is growing in the state.  Greenville and Charleston are the two places where population is growing.  Jim Clyburn’s sixth Congressional district is in the area with the smallest, or negative, growth.  So it is not possible that South Carolina will need a second majority minority district.  The real question is whether you can even draw a single majority minority Congressional district in 2011, and not violate Shaw v. Reno.   The SC-6 already has constitutionally suspect tentacles that grab pockets of BPOP in Columbia and Charleston.  If you add a 7th seat in SC, those tentacles will travel an even more constitutionally suspect path.  Moreover, the upstate and coast will see greater density of population while the Pee Dee will see a relative decline in population.  This doesn’t bode well for keeping Clyburn in a single majority minority district, much less adding a second. 

The New York Times has this piece  on redistricting in North Carolina after the Tsunami of November 2.  One casualty of the Tsunami may well be former Redskins QB turned Congressman Heath Shuler.  He won his reelection on November 2, but may well be redistricted out by a state government turned entirely Republican.

From the piece:

“It also means that Republicans will hold the pencil when districts are redrawn next year.
Gerrymandering, Republicans say, was the reason behind the defensive stand by North Carolina’s House Democrats, who were able to bear the national Republican tidal wave and keep seven of their eight seats and the majority among the state’s delegation. (In the other chamber, Senator Richard M. Burr, a Republican, easily won re-election.)   When the new district lines are drawn, said Larry Ford, chairman of the Republican Party in Rutherford County, ‘Heath Shuler is toast.’”

The big question in 2011 is whether the Department of Justice, which must preclear any redistricting plans in North Carolina, will leverage their power to protect democrats like Heath Shuler.  For the first time ever, democrats will be in charge of the Justice Department redistrcting review.  Let me be specific, democrats will be in charge of the political offices that review the work of “career” employees.  This highlights a message every state subject to Section 5 needs to hear loud and clear:

Go straight to U.S. District Court to have your plans approved.

Again, go straight to U.S. District Court to have your plans approved.

I and others will be writing in more detail about why this is the most economical, and the choice most likely to result in a plan that most closely resembles what the GOP legislatures wanted in the first place.  The best advice that attorneys can give to their clients regarding redistricting plans is to go straight to U.S. District Court to have your plans approved.

The chief reason to go to court is that the states and jurisdictions will have a genuinely neutral decisionmaker (judges) in charge of the process.  The second reason this is better is that all of the review will be conducted in the open with established rules of discovery and process.  Think that DOJ isn’t capable of mischief in a redistricting review?  Suggest you read the Johnson v. Miller cases from Georgia, particularly the District Court opinion.

Any Republican legislature or governor that submits redistricting plans to the DOJ is inviting mischief in the review process.  Again, I along with others will be writing in greater detail about this in the months ahead.  For now, recognize there are better options than submitting a redistricting plan to the DOJ, especially with so many Blue-Dogs on the bubble.

H/T to DP for the story.

More at the Washington Post on the November 2 electoral tsunami.  The devastation is becoming more clear with time. The impacts on election law ranging from voter ID to redistricting cannot be overstated.  One can’t but think this disaster wouldn’t have happened if Hillary had been elected instead.:

Money quote on Texas:
 
Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka, who has followed state politics for three decades, called the results of the midterm elections in the Lone Star State “an annihilation bordering on political genocide.” Democrats may not be a factor in state politics for a decade, he wrote in a column for the magazine’s December edition.
 
Key excerpt:
 
Republicans picked up at least 675 state legislative seats Nov. 2. As with the increases in the House, that gain is the biggest any party has made in state legislative seats since 1938 and is far larger than the GOP’s tally in its 1994 landslide. Given the distribution of those gains, Republicans have the power to work their will in the states in ways they can’t begin to think about doing in Washington.
Before the midterm elections, Democrats controlled 27 state legislatures outright. Republicans were in charge in 14 states, and eight states were split. (Nebraska, which has a single legislative chamber, is officially nonpartisan). Today, Republicans control 26 state legislatures, Democrats 17, and five have split control. In New York, officials are still determining who is in charge in the state Senate. Republicans control seven more legislatures outright than they did after 1994 and the most since 1952.
Add the results in the gubernatorial races, and the picture brightens even more for the Republicans. Before the midterms, Republicans controlled the governor’s mansion and both legislative chambers in only nine states. Today it is 21 states. Democrats are in full command in 11 states, down from 16, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).
 
The changes came in some unlikely places. The NCSL says on its Web site that Alabama’s legislature is in Republican hands for the first time since Reconstruction. Republicans hold the North Carolina Senate for the first time since 1870 and the Minnesota Senate for the first time ever.