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By: Caiti Anderson

There is no state quite like New York and not many election laws quite like New Yorks, either. As one example, only New York and six other states permit fusion voting. On a fusion ballot, a candidate can be listed as candidate for more than one party. Fusion voting, as noted the 1997 Supreme Court decision of Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party, had its heyday during the Gilded Age. Political parties, rather than governmental entities, distributed their own ballots to voters but did not affirmatively tell voters what other parties endorsed the same candidate(s) they supported. Thus, Candidate Smith could be supported by both the Granger and Republican parties, but those who voted the Granger ballot would not necessarily know from the ballot the Granger party handed them that the Republican Party also supported Smith.

All of this changed with the contentious election of 1888, when Democratic President Grover Cleveland lost to Republican Benjamin Harrison, even though Cleveland won the popular vote by 0.8%. Harrison carried Indiana, his home state, but only through ballot chicanery: the Republican Party passed out its ballots en masse and paid men to illegally cast additional ballots. After the scandal emerged, it was too late Harrison was president, and America was angry.

The Progressive movement latched onto this populist anger and pushed through a series of election reforms at the turn of the nineteenth century. As state and local governments began to print their own ballots, the fusion ballot steadily lost support.

New York, however, has maintained the fusion ballot status quo. Although it occasionally comes under attack as an unfair practice, others laud its ability to grant a greater voice to third parties. Nevertheless, as the 2016 election shows its boon to third parties seems more like a benefit to the Democratic and Republican parties.

Figure 1

Figure 1 is a partial copy of aNovember 2016 New York absentee ballot. As you can see, three presidential candidates (Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Gary Johnson) appear on the ballot more than once.

Fusion voting in a presidential election is more complicated than other races because of the Electoral College. When voting for a presidential candidate, a voter is actually voting for an elector to the Electoral College, not the candidate herself.

Figure 2

Lets look at Hillary Clinton (Figure 2). She appears as the candidate for the Democratic, Working Families, and Womens Equality parties. Because these parties submitted identical lists of Electoral College delegates to the New York State Board of Elections, each of these candidate slots offer an opportunity to vote for the same elector for Clinton. Thus, a vote for Clinton under the Womens Equality ticket is, in essence, the same as voting for her under the Democratic ticket the vote will be aggregated towards the same elector count. The same is true for Donald Trump appearing as the Republican and Conservative parties nominee.

Gary Johnson, on the other hand, has a major problem.

New Yorks definition of a political party is one that received at least 50,000 votes in the most recent gubernatorial election. Only political parties have automatic access to the ballot, meaning that, in essence, only the Democratic and Republican parties are automatically qualified to be on the ballot. Independent parties must submit petitions with 15,000 signatures in order to qualify for the presidential ballot.

Gary Johnsons Libertarian Party obtained the necessary signatures to put Johnson on the presidential ballot and submitted the list of Electoral College delegates to the State Board. After this, however, the Independence Party also endorsed Johnson, but submitted a different list of Electoral College delegates than the Libertarian Party. Because of this, Johnsons vote totals for the Libertarian and Independence parties will not be aggregated.

Figure 3

Say, for example, Johnson won 30% of the vote under the Libertarian Party and 5% under the Independence Party, while Clinton won 34%, Trump won 29%, and Jill Stein won 2%. Johnson would have the majority of the votes at 35%, but Clinton would have the most electors and would win New York.

As unlikely as the scenario seems (Clinton has a >99% chance of winning New York at the time of publication), it is important for New Yorkers to take a hard look at the merits of fusion voting. Although fusion voting supposedly helps third parties, it seems to only help those third parties who support major party candidates meaning it ultimately helps major parties. Maybe it is time to recognize the real value of fusion voting in New York: the ability of placing ideas on the ballot.

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New York, Fusion Voting, and Gary Johnson Whats an ...

So far, five Republican senators have said they cannot vote for the Affordable Care Act repeal as written: Mr. Heller, whose concerns are with the bills benefit cuts, and four hard-line conservatives who say the bill is too generous.

Mr. Heller did not rule out ultimately voting for a version of the bill, leaving the battle for 50 votes ahead of a Senate showdown still very alive. But his denunciation of one of the pillars of Mr. Trumps agenda gave fresh hope to Democrats that they may be able to torpedo the measure.

Strikingly, there has been little in the way of advertising from the right pushing Republicans to support the bill. But Mr. Hellers criticism infuriated allies of Mr. Trump. America First Policies, a super PAC aligned with the White House, was gearing up to spend $1 million worth of advertising in Nevada aimed at making the senator change his mind, said a person familiar with the groups plans.

Mr. Hellers quick denunciation offered a morale boost to the Democratic Party after a trying few days of recriminations about why they lost a special congressional election in Georgia on Tuesday, the latest in a series of demoralizing defeats they have suffered this year.

A comparison of the Senate health care bill with the Affordable Care Act.

Its an all-hands-on-deck moment, said Anna Galland, the head of MoveOn.org, an advocacy group firmly on the liberal wing of the party. We are unified out of urgent, building-is-burning-down necessity. And health care is by far our top priority.

Even Hillary Clinton, who has been increasingly outspoken after a period of postelection restraint, blasted on Twitter: Forget death panels. If Republicans pass this bill, theyre the death party.

Scrambling to halt or at least slow the Senates repeal effort, a range of Democratic and progressive leaders said Friday that they intended to intensify pressure on Republican lawmakers.

Liberal groups have already organized protests against the bill, and Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, plans to lead a campaign-style tour this weekend through West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio, three states with Republican senators that also expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Planned Parenthood, which would be defunded under the Senate bill, has been running television ads targeting Mr. Heller, as well as Senators Jeff Flake of Arizona, also up for re-election next year, and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia.

And in recent days, potential Democratic challengers have stepped forward against both Mr. Heller and Mr. Flake, the two Republicans most likely to face tough races in 2018. In Nevada, Representative Jacky Rosen has signaled she is likely to run against Mr. Heller, and Randy Friese, an Arizona state representative and trauma surgeon, said he was leaning toward challenging Mr. Flake. Mayor Greg Stanton of Phoenix, who is a Democrat, is also believed to be considering a campaign.

Senate Republicans crafted their bill behind closed doors, drawing considerably less news attention than House Republicans, who formally drafted their version of the legislation in open sessions. But Democrats believe the coming week represents their best and perhaps final chance to thwart repeal of the health law.

This is the one opportunity we have to shine a light on this legislation, and we will do it day and night, said Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, projecting the bills passage a jump ball.

The Senate Democratic campaign arm, which Mr. Van Hollen leads, plans to increase its spending this week on internet ads focused on the health measure in Nevada and Arizona, as well as Texas and Florida, which also have Senate races in 2018. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is just one of a series of liberal groups that are airing spots online and on television and radio to pressure up-for-grabs Senate Republicans into opposing the overhaul.

Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, two centrist Republicans who at times defy their party, are also facing lobbying to vote no.

Mr. Heller may best reflect the tensions within the larger Republican Party. He is a popular but vulnerable lawmaker from a purple state that is full of rural conservatives but is increasingly shaped by a rising minority population in and around Las Vegas, its population center. And while Mr. Heller has called for repealing the Affordable Care Act a promise that thrills the Republican base he has also, like many of his colleagues, consistently reassured voters that their health coverage would improve under a Republican alternative.

A number of Mr. Hellers colleagues who fit that broad description could face backlash, in 2020 or beyond, if they vote for a bill that proves deeply unpopular as a matter of law. Along with Mr. Sandoval, several other Republican governors have voiced similar criticism of the bill, including Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, Larry Hogan of Maryland and John Kasich of Ohio.

Mr. Kasich shares a home state with Senator Rob Portman, a Republican who was just re-elected to a second term in November, and has not yet taken a stance on the legislation.

Standing with Mr. Heller, Mr. Sandoval offered a robust case for protecting those who have received insurance under the Medicaid expansion an effort that could prompt some Senate Republican hard-liners already uneasy about the bill to walk away. These are our friends. These are our families. These are our neighbors, Mr. Sandoval said of the 210,000 Nevadans who obtained Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act. These are folks who are worth fighting for.

The health debate is not playing out just in the Capitol and in those states that are home to swing senators. In Virginia, where a coming election for governor in November is the Democrats next electoral priority, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam castigated his Republican opponent this week for failing to take an unequivocal stance on the Senate bill.

Mr. Northam, who won his partys nomination for governor in a contested primary this month, attacked the legislation as immoral and expressed incredulity that Ed Gillespie, the Republican nominee, said he needed more time to study it.

If they do repeal the Affordable Care Act, its literally going to put hundreds of thousands of Virginians at risk of losing their coverage, Mr. Northam said, adding, I dont think they have a clue what theyre doing in Washington right now.

Mr. Northam, a pediatric neurologist, said health care would be one of the central themes of his campaign, warning, Everybody should be worried.

The bill is also expected to face resistance from mayors, including some Republicans, during a meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors in Miami Beach this weekend. Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans, the incoming president of the organization, said the Republican bill was a nonstarter that plainly fell short of the standards Mr. Trump and Republicans set for themselves.

Jonathan Martin reported from Washington, and Alexander Burns from New York. Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from Washington.

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A version of this article appears in print on June 24, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Key G.O.P. Senator Says He Opposes Health Care Bill.

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Republican Senator Vital to Health Bill's Passage Won't Support It - New York Times

The national controversy surrounding attempts to shut down controversial speakers on college campuses entered a new phase this week, with the Senate Judiciary Committee holding a hearing, Free Speech 101: The Assault on the First Amendment on College Campuses. But even as they held that hearing, Republican legislators in the Wisconsin State Assembly advanced legislation that would severely punish such protestsand pose its own threat to free speech in the process.

Under the bill, University of Wisconsin students could face a disciplinary hearing if they receive two or more complaints about disruptive conduct during a speech or presentation, The Washington Post reports. If a student is found responsible for interfering with the expressive rights of others, the bill would require that the student be suspended for a minimum of one semester. A third violation would result in expulsion. Anyone who feels their expressive rights are violated can file a complaint.

State Representative Jesse Kremer says he sponsored the legislation as a response to situations when the free-speech rights of students were taken away by disruptions. People are still allowed to protest and disagree, he told the newspaper. Its that the person in a forum has the right to get their point across without being disrupted.

But a critic of the bill suggested that its punitive approach to protest was itself a threat to free speech rights. Our colleges and universities should be a place to vigorously debate ideas and ultimately learn from one another, State Representative Lisa Subeck, a Democrat, told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Instead, this campus gag rule creates an atmosphere of fear where free expression and dissent are discouraged.

For years, I have been a staunch critic of activists who shut down invited speakers with whom they disagree, whether through force or sustained chanting and disruption. And I agree with the premise that students who repeatedly engage in that sort of behavior should be punished. Denying members of an academic community the ability to host controversial speakers, or to hear hotly contested ideas, jeopardizes the core missions of undergraduate education and knowledge generation.

Administrators at many institutions of higher education have been derelict in protecting those missions from censorious student activists with authoritarian tendencies. Whats more, recent, prominently reported shut-downs of speakers like Charles Murray and Heather Mac Donald have caused faculty and students hoping to avoid the shutdown of their next event to shy away from speakers who might be controversiala chilling effect that could be reversed by clearly communicating that denying others the right to speak will no longer be tolerated on college campuses.

But I had several misgivings about the Wisconsin bill as originally drafted that went beyond my general aversion to state legislators trying to micromanage student life at public universities, especially ones that havent themselves experienced a rash of shutdowns.

The original language was based on model legislation from the Goldwater Institute. Its features were described as follows by Wisconsins legislative analyst in the official summary:

The policy must include a range of disciplinary sanctions for anyone who engages in violent, abusive, indecent, profane, boisterous, obscene, unreasonably loud, or other disorderly conduct that interferes with the free expression of others. In addition, the policy must provide that in disciplinary cases involving expressive conduct, students are entitled to a disciplinary hearing under published procedures that include specified rights. Also, the second time that a student is found responsible for interfering with the expressive rights of others, the policy must require the student to be suspended for a minimum of one semester or expelled.

I objected most to the language that requires punishment not just when student protesters prevent an event from happening, or disrupt it in a way that denies others free speech, but when there is mere interference with another persons speech or expression. Should a protester be punished for briefly interrupting a speech with a sign, then leaving voluntarily when asked? How about loudly booing a speaker or interrupting and talking over a speaker during a question and answer session? I have been disrupted while speaking to college students, but never in a way that denied me the ability to express myself or stopped the event in question. There was never a need to bring formal discipline into those situations.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education recommended that Wisconsin mandate sanctions only for substantial, material disruptions of free speech, and avoid defining minimum sanctions in statutes, because not all disruptions are equal in their severity, and sanctions should be proportional to the offense. Like zero-tolerance-for-weapons policies that result in expelling grade-school students for water guns or butter knives in a lunch pale, this bill seemed to risk unreasonable outcomes by denying college administrators discretion to exercise judgment and common sense.

That input seems to have significantly improved the final bill. As the amendment report puts it:

The bill requires that the Board adopt a policy that includes a range of disciplinary sanctions for certain individuals who engage in violent, abusive, indecent, profane, boisterous, obscene, unreasonably loud, or other disorderly conduct that interferes with the free expression of others.

The amendment modifies the types of conduct for which disciplinary sanctions must be established. Specifically, the amendment provides that there be disciplinary sanctions for violent or other disorderly conduct that materially and substantially disrupts the free expression of others.

Many mere disruptions to a speech, like booing a particular line in a speech, or disrupting a speakers words while walking out of a talk in disgust, should themselves be considered protected expression by principled advocates of free speech. The amended language seems much less likely to punish or chill protected speech, although the words disorderly conduct remain a bit too vague for my taste.

The amended version of the bill also declares that a student who is subject to a disciplinary hearing has the right to counsel in all circumstances, no matter the nature of the potential penalty, rather than only when they are facing suspension or expulsion.

But minimum penalties are retained. And the amended version also fails to resolve my next biggest concern: that any person be permitted to make a report that another person has violated the bills provisions and that a formal investigation and disciplinary hearing be conducted if two or more reports are made regarding the same persons violation.

If I know academia, the potential for abuse, absurd outcomes, and chilled expression is greatly exacerbated by giving everyone the right to file a complaint on a whim.

This power to initiate formal proceedings may well exacerbate two pernicious trends in campus life: 1) the evolution of a culture where harassing innocents with the filing of frivolous complaints is a common feature, forcing victims into time-consuming administrative investigations, often with opaque rules and rampant due process violations; 2) administrative bloat that flows from hiring staff to investigate complaints, carry out hearings, adhere to bureaucratic rules, and demonstrate compliance.

Both trends should be of concern to conservatives.

The administrative bloat would likely remain in Wisconsin for years after the trend of speech disruptions by student activists fades away and other campus problems loom larger. This is how bureaucracies become cumbersome and sclerotic over time.

Republicans may be correct in concluding that speech is being shut down often enough on college campuses to warrant a legislative response, especially if public university administrators are repeatedly failing to punish students who shut down events. But if legislators intervene, they should do so with more precision and restraint than is demonstrated by the counterproductive activists that spurred them to action.

As a governor I would certainly veto the Goldwater Institutes model legislation, despite my sympathy for its main goal. The Wisconsin legislation comes closer to the mark in its amended state, and is a better model for Republicans in other states to follow, if they must insert themselves into campus life at all. But the provisions Ive criticized in the Wisconsin bill should still be significantly improved, and easily can be.

Perhaps it would still be an improvement on the status quo in a public university system where administrators were standing idly by as activists shut down multiple speakers or routinely prevented fellow students from expressing themselves. That may describe life on some campuses in 2017, but I see no evidence that it describes life at the University of Wisconsin, or reason to believe it will anytime soon. And that makes this a bill likely to do more harm than good.

Excerpt from:
Wisconsin Republicans Consider Cracking Down on Campus ... - The Atlantic

Kevin DrumJun. 22, 2017 10:25 PM

Heres a story for you. My mother grew up in a Republican family.1 When Herbert Hoover was on the radio, everyone listened. But later she became a Democrat. What happened?

Well, she went off to college. But not some bleeding heart lefty bastion. She went to USC, which was even more Republican in 1950 than it is now. She didnt get indoctrinated by a bunch of fuzzy liberal professors.

So what caused the switch? I asked her once, and she said that during her college years she came to the conclusion that Republicans were just mean. So she became a Democrat.

This struck me because Ive long used the exact same word in the privacy of my own thoughts. I can write a sophisticated critique of conservative ideology as well as the next guy, but the truth is that it mostly boils down to a gut feel that Republicans are mean. Ive never said this out loud because it sounds so kindergarten-y, but there it is. I think Republicans are mean, just like my mother did.

But now our time has come. Donald Trump started it, with his contention that Paul Ryans health care bill was mean. Today, Barack Obama picked up the ball, writing on Facebook about the fundamental meanness at the core of this legislation. And then Chuck Schumer weighed in with a big red poster calling the Senate health care bill meaner.

So thats that. Its now OK to ditch the ten-dollar words and just spit it out. Republicans are mean.2

1Ive never figured out what the deal was here. My grandfather was very much a working-class guy, an electrician for Western Union. But he hated FDR. I dont know why.

2The weird thing about this is that I live in Orange County and I know lots of conservatives. For the most part, they arent mean. But put em together in a single political party, and its all torches and pitchforks.

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Republicans Are Mean - Mother Jones

President Donald Trump said he hopes House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi does not step down from her post.

In an appearance on "Fox & Friends" that aired on Friday, Trump said he would like Pelosi to stay right where she is because she has an "extraordinary record against her."

"It would be a very, very sad day for Republicans if she steps down. I would be very disappointed if she did," Trump said.

The comment came after some Democrats on Thursday called for Pelosi to step down in the wake of special election losses this year, including a high-profile race in Georgia on Tuesday.

Republican Karen Handel beat Democrat Jon Ossoff in the race for the Georgia seat vacated by Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, dashing Democratic hopes to pull off an upset in the runup to the 2018 midterm elections.

The two campaigns and outside groups supporting and opposing the candidates shelled out at least $36 million, including more than $22 million from Ossoff's campaign.

Pelosi, speaking to reporters on Thursday, said she's confident she has the support in her caucus.

The Associated Press and CNBC's Jacob Pramuk contributed to this report.

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'It would be a very, very sad day for Republicans' if Nancy Pelosi steps down, Trump says - CNBC