While voters across the nation lined up at the polls and ballots piled up inside election offices, the justices of the Supreme Court weighed three decisions this week that regulated the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots in three crucial battleground states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.
The trio of rulings — the first which broke in favor of state Republicans, and the second and third in favor of state Democrats — likely signal the end of the high court’s intervention before Tuesday, but they might not be the last decisions the court makes that could decide the fate of the election. If the margin of victory is razor-thin in a decisive state, all eyes could be on the heavily conservative court.
“We would need a super-close election that comes down to one or more of these battleground states making the difference in who wins the election,” said Josh Douglass, a professor of election and constitutional
The ruling in the Pennsylvania case, which refused — for now — a fast-tracked plea from Republicans to block a three-day extension of the deadline for receiving absentee ballots, left open the possibility of later action by the court. Pennsylvania officials issued guidance to county boards to “securely segregate” any ballots received after Election Day, allowing them to be identified in case of future legal action.
Ballots arriving after but postmarked before Election Day also are being put aside in Minnesota, where a federal appeals court suggested Thursday that those votes would likely be thrown out. The last-minute change could invalidate thousands of ballots cast in good faith, but delayed while in transit by an overburdened postal system. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told reporters Thursday that nearly 400,000 mail-in ballots requested still have not been returned. He is considering filing an appeal to the US Supreme Court.
Should these cases come before the court again post-election, opinions from conservative justices — namely Justice Samuel Alito and Trump-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh — suggest they would vote to throw the ballots out. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined the Court on Tuesday, did not participate in this week’s decisions because she did not have time “to fully review the parties’ filings,” but she has not indicated she will recuse herself from future election cases that come before the court.
But election experts emphasize that for those segregated ballots to be relevant again they would need to be dispositive, meaning greater than the margin of victory and therefore decisive in determining the winner of the presidential election.
The main question at play in Pennsylvania, where polls currently show Democratic challenger Joe Biden in the lead, revolves around whether election officials should count ballots received within three days of Election Day, even if they did not have a legible postmark. Such conditions will likely only apply to a small pool of voters.
“This is a fight about an increasingly small percentage of people. Don’t get me wrong, to every single one of those people affected by these circumstances, this fight matters, but it is unlikely to be a deciding factor,” said Justin Levitt, an election law expert at Loyola Law School.
Of course, we need not look too far back in history to find a scenario wherein a handful of votes and a Supreme Court ruling dictated the fate of the election. Back in 2000, the contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore boiled down to 537 votes out of six million cast in the battleground state of Florida. In a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court justices ruled to halt a recount of 61,000 ballots that the voting machine had missed, effectively granting Bush the presidency. Douglass, the election expert from the University of Kentucky, dubbed the series of events in Florida as “the perfect storm.”
“I get why people are super anxious about it this year. Every time you get a black swan event it immediately becomes more salient so you think it happens more often,” said Levitt, referencing the theory coined by risk engineer Nassim Nicholas Taleb, wherein an unpredictable situation occurs that is beyond what is normally expected and has potentially severe consequences.
“But that’s not how probability works,” Levitt continued. “If Vegas has a payout for a natural royal straight flush and one lands at your table, get up and walk away. It’s not going to happen again. It is easy to think that there is another one coming. And it is possible, but it is exceedingly unlikely.”
That does not mean that Tuesday will not be preceded by a wave of litigation, which typically occurs after every presidential election, and could be heightened this year amidst a pandemic that has upended many normal voting procedures. In 2016, lawsuits called for election recounts in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, all of which Donald Trump won by less than 1 percent and could have tipped the electoral balance in Hillary Clinton’s favor. But the challenges were dropped shortly thereafter.
“There’s a big difference between a really close election, like 2016, and really, really, really close election, like 2000,” argued Levitt.
But Trump is particularly litigious and harbors an affinity for using lawsuits as cudgels and publicity stunts. Before entering office, he had been involved in 3,500 lawsuits, the majority of which he or his company had initiated. If his campaign decides to pursue litigation surrounding, say, an allegation of election fraud, which he has nodded to in passing several times during the election cycle, then they will need to go far beyond a talking point or a Tweet, according to election experts.
“It is one thing to talk in broad generalities about an election being ‘fraudulent’ or ‘rigged,’ and very different to be able to actually bring that case in a granular precinct-by-precinct, state-by-state way,” echoed Ben Ginsberg, the election lawyer who led the Bush campaign’s legal strategy in 2000, during an online event hosted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Four tech companies with a combined market value of $5 trillion — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Facebook — reported their latest earnings after the market closed on Thursday. The DealBook newsletter compiled some of the big numbers in the filings:
$64.7 billion: Apple’s revenue rose just 1 percent, but that beat expectations as analysts were expecting a decline because of the delayed release of the new iPhone. Sales of services helped cover the shortfall.
197 percent: Amazon’s quarterly profit nearly tripled, to $6.3 billion. Bonus stat: The company also added almost 250,000 employees in the period, surpassing more than a million workers for the first time.
2.54 billion: The number of people using one or more apps in Facebook’s family — Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and its core app — rose 15 percent.
$5 billion: Advertising revenue at Google’s YouTube unit set a record, rising 30 percent, bolstered by stay-at-home viewing.
Stocks fell on Friday, dropping for the fourth time in the past five days in a retreat that has added up to Wall Street’s worst week since March, as rising pandemic cases, new shutdowns and a sell-off in large technology stocks all dragged the major benchmarks lower.
The S&P 500 fell 1.2 percent, bringing its loss for the week to 5.6 percent. That’s its biggest weekly drop since the week through March 20, when stocks plunged 15 percent before they began to rebound after the Federal Reserve and lawmakers in Washington stepped in to bolster the economy. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 6.5 percent this week. …
In the stock market on Friday, big technology stocks led the retreat even after many of them reported a jump in profit. Twitter was the worst-performing stock in the S&P 500, dropping 21 percent, after its user growth fell short of expectations. Apple fell more than 5 percent, after it said a delay in the release of the iPhone 12 led to a drop in iPhone sales.
Facebook and Amazon were also sharply lower. Alphabet was the only one of the four tech giants that reported results on Thursday to gain, climbing more than 3 percent after reporting a rise in advertising on Google and YouTube. The Nasdaq composite fell 2.5 percent. …
Harrison and Graham had their final debate. Watching Graham raise the question of whether he would vote for Barrett which is a simple question to answer given her past. I can see why he bypassed it and instead answered Graham on his pivoting from saying one thing with voting in an election year for a Justice to saying it is acceptable to appoint a Justice to the court days before an election when the Garland appoint was months before the election in 2016. Harrison called Graham a liar in response.
Some key comments.
“I thought justice was supposed to be blind,”
++++ “I’m not Nancy Pelosi. Don’t look like her — don’t believe everything Nancy Pelosi believes,” he said.
+++++
Later in the debate, Harrison returned to the same theme.
“My son, last night he woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning said something was spooky under his bed. I wonder if Nancy Pelosi is under Senator Graham’s bed because every time he’s talking about her,” he said. “I know it’s Halloween, but, senator, come on now. Let’s talk about South Carolina and how we can improve the state that we live in.”
++++
“You can’t give anyone a lesson on telling the truth. You said hold the tape, use my words against me. Senator, you have constantly lied to people here in South Carolina. You have lied about term limits. You have lied . . . about the Supreme Court.”
++++
Finally, someone who will fight back. I hope Harrison wins.
The Supreme Court could decide the election, but only if an unlikely scenario unfolds. Here’s why.
via @BostonGlobe – October 30
While voters across the nation lined up at the polls and ballots piled up inside election offices, the justices of the Supreme Court weighed three decisions this week that regulated the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots in three crucial battleground states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.
The trio of rulings — the first which broke in favor of state Republicans, and the second and third in favor of state Democrats — likely signal the end of the high court’s intervention before Tuesday, but they might not be the last decisions the court makes that could decide the fate of the election. If the margin of victory is razor-thin in a decisive state, all eyes could be on the heavily conservative court.
“We would need a super-close election that comes down to one or more of these battleground states making the difference in who wins the election,” said Josh Douglass, a professor of election and constitutional
The ruling in the Pennsylvania case, which refused — for now — a fast-tracked plea from Republicans to block a three-day extension of the deadline for receiving absentee ballots, left open the possibility of later action by the court. Pennsylvania officials issued guidance to county boards to “securely segregate” any ballots received after Election Day, allowing them to be identified in case of future legal action.
Ballots arriving after but postmarked before Election Day also are being put aside in Minnesota, where a federal appeals court suggested Thursday that those votes would likely be thrown out. The last-minute change could invalidate thousands of ballots cast in good faith, but delayed while in transit by an overburdened postal system. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told reporters Thursday that nearly 400,000 mail-in ballots requested still have not been returned. He is considering filing an appeal to the US Supreme Court.
Should these cases come before the court again post-election, opinions from conservative justices — namely Justice Samuel Alito and Trump-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh — suggest they would vote to throw the ballots out. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined the Court on Tuesday, did not participate in this week’s decisions because she did not have time “to fully review the parties’ filings,” but she has not indicated she will recuse herself from future election cases that come before the court.
But election experts emphasize that for those segregated ballots to be relevant again they would need to be dispositive, meaning greater than the margin of victory and therefore decisive in determining the winner of the presidential election.
The main question at play in Pennsylvania, where polls currently show Democratic challenger Joe Biden in the lead, revolves around whether election officials should count ballots received within three days of Election Day, even if they did not have a legible postmark. Such conditions will likely only apply to a small pool of voters.
“This is a fight about an increasingly small percentage of people. Don’t get me wrong, to every single one of those people affected by these circumstances, this fight matters, but it is unlikely to be a deciding factor,” said Justin Levitt, an election law expert at Loyola Law School.
Of course, we need not look too far back in history to find a scenario wherein a handful of votes and a Supreme Court ruling dictated the fate of the election. Back in 2000, the contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore boiled down to 537 votes out of six million cast in the battleground state of Florida. In a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court justices ruled to halt a recount of 61,000 ballots that the voting machine had missed, effectively granting Bush the presidency. Douglass, the election expert from the University of Kentucky, dubbed the series of events in Florida as “the perfect storm.”
“I get why people are super anxious about it this year. Every time you get a black swan event it immediately becomes more salient so you think it happens more often,” said Levitt, referencing the theory coined by risk engineer Nassim Nicholas Taleb, wherein an unpredictable situation occurs that is beyond what is normally expected and has potentially severe consequences.
“But that’s not how probability works,” Levitt continued. “If Vegas has a payout for a natural royal straight flush and one lands at your table, get up and walk away. It’s not going to happen again. It is easy to think that there is another one coming. And it is possible, but it is exceedingly unlikely.”
That does not mean that Tuesday will not be preceded by a wave of litigation, which typically occurs after every presidential election, and could be heightened this year amidst a pandemic that has upended many normal voting procedures. In 2016, lawsuits called for election recounts in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, all of which Donald Trump won by less than 1 percent and could have tipped the electoral balance in Hillary Clinton’s favor. But the challenges were dropped shortly thereafter.
“There’s a big difference between a really close election, like 2016, and really, really, really close election, like 2000,” argued Levitt.
But Trump is particularly litigious and harbors an affinity for using lawsuits as cudgels and publicity stunts. Before entering office, he had been involved in 3,500 lawsuits, the majority of which he or his company had initiated. If his campaign decides to pursue litigation surrounding, say, an allegation of election fraud, which he has nodded to in passing several times during the election cycle, then they will need to go far beyond a talking point or a Tweet, according to election experts.
“It is one thing to talk in broad generalities about an election being ‘fraudulent’ or ‘rigged,’ and very different to be able to actually bring that case in a granular precinct-by-precinct, state-by-state way,” echoed Ben Ginsberg, the election lawyer who led the Bush campaign’s legal strategy in 2000, during an online event hosted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Big Tech earnings, by the numbers
NY Times – October 30
Four tech companies with a combined market value of $5 trillion — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Facebook — reported their latest earnings after the market closed on Thursday. The DealBook newsletter compiled some of the big numbers in the filings:
$64.7 billion: Apple’s revenue rose just 1 percent, but that beat expectations as analysts were expecting a decline because of the delayed release of the new iPhone. Sales of services helped cover the shortfall.
197 percent: Amazon’s quarterly profit nearly tripled, to $6.3 billion. Bonus stat: The company also added almost 250,000 employees in the period, surpassing more than a million workers for the first time.
2.54 billion: The number of people using one or more apps in Facebook’s family — Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and its core app — rose 15 percent.
$5 billion: Advertising revenue at Google’s YouTube unit set a record, rising 30 percent, bolstered by stay-at-home viewing.
Big Tech meltdown and rising virus cases lead S&P 500 to worst week since March
Stocks fell on Friday, dropping for the fourth time in the past five days in a retreat that has added up to Wall Street’s worst week since March, as rising pandemic cases, new shutdowns and a sell-off in large technology stocks all dragged the major benchmarks lower.
The S&P 500 fell 1.2 percent, bringing its loss for the week to 5.6 percent. That’s its biggest weekly drop since the week through March 20, when stocks plunged 15 percent before they began to rebound after the Federal Reserve and lawmakers in Washington stepped in to bolster the economy. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 6.5 percent this week. …
In the stock market on Friday, big technology stocks led the retreat even after many of them reported a jump in profit. Twitter was the worst-performing stock in the S&P 500, dropping 21 percent, after its user growth fell short of expectations. Apple fell more than 5 percent, after it said a delay in the release of the iPhone 12 led to a drop in iPhone sales.
Facebook and Amazon were also sharply lower. Alphabet was the only one of the four tech giants that reported results on Thursday to gain, climbing more than 3 percent after reporting a rise in advertising on Google and YouTube. The Nasdaq composite fell 2.5 percent. …
Harrison and Graham had their final debate. Watching Graham raise the question of whether he would vote for Barrett which is a simple question to answer given her past. I can see why he bypassed it and instead answered Graham on his pivoting from saying one thing with voting in an election year for a Justice to saying it is acceptable to appoint a Justice to the court days before an election when the Garland appoint was months before the election in 2016. Harrison called Graham a liar in response.
Some key comments.
“I thought justice was supposed to be blind,”
++++
“I’m not Nancy Pelosi. Don’t look like her — don’t believe everything Nancy Pelosi believes,” he said.
+++++
Later in the debate, Harrison returned to the same theme.
“My son, last night he woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning said something was spooky under his bed. I wonder if Nancy Pelosi is under Senator Graham’s bed because every time he’s talking about her,” he said. “I know it’s Halloween, but, senator, come on now. Let’s talk about South Carolina and how we can improve the state that we live in.”
++++
“You can’t give anyone a lesson on telling the truth. You said hold the tape, use my words against me. Senator, you have constantly lied to people here in South Carolina. You have lied about term limits. You have lied . . . about the Supreme Court.”
++++
Finally, someone who will fight back. I hope Harrison wins.