Government
State courts are fielding sky-high numbers of lawsuits ahead of the midterms – including challenges to voting restrictions and to how elections are run
Most of the election-related lawsuits now before state courts focus on fine details of election procedures. This can be a costly, time-consuming process…
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The run-up to Election Day is often a contentious time.
In recent years, it has also become a litigious time – parties increasingly turn to courts to resolve disputes about the rules for voting.
This year, our research shows a significant uptick of those lawsuits occurring in the state court system and challenging every step of the election process — from whether candidates or ballot initiatives qualify to appear on the ballot, to what address information must be completed in order to accept mailed ballots. It also extends to specific procedures for county clerks or poll watchers as voting occurs.
This surge in state litigation yields a mixed picture. As scholars of state courts and constitutions, we have studied the crucial role of state courts in safeguarding elections and democracy.
State courts have made important rulings – for example, protecting voting and rejecting extreme partisan gerrymandering – rooted in state constitutions’ distinctive democracy provisions.
But the current volume of state election litigation also has the potential to derail the safeguards that state courts can provide. When every aspect of an election becomes a lawsuit, negative effects may follow – including destabilizing elections, overwhelming already strained courts and imposing significant costs on states.
The numbers
In 2020, election litigation reached a new record high, with hundreds of lawsuits filed around the presidential election.
But experts like law professor Rick Hasen observed that it was too soon to know if the 2020 spike in lawsuits was a trend or an aberration. One potential explanation was that the pandemic and former President Donald Trump’s polarizing candidacy fueled the 2020 spike and that lawsuits would decrease in future years.
Two years later, a different picture is emerging.
The total volume of preelection litigation has dropped somewhat – a smaller drop than one might expect in a nonpandemic, nonpresidential election. Litigation in federal court has dropped precipitously, falling to less than half of its 2020 presence, our research shows.
But in state courts, rather than decreasing, preelection lawsuits have increased. Some of the rise is due to expected conflict surrounding the post-2020 redistricting process. Of greatest interest, we see a continuation or increase in conflict over “electoral mechanics” – lawsuits challenging the who, what, where and how of voting, even when there is no novel virus throwing an unforeseen wrench in those mechanics.
We emphasize that these numbers are provisional as of mid-October, and they are only estimates – and likely undercounts. State courts are notoriously difficult to research; there is no central clearinghouse of state lawsuits or decisions. Our tallies are based on searches in the legal database LexisNexis. Our full methodology and tallies are posted on our website.
State courts and their role in democracy
Rising interest in state courts does have potential upsides. State courts serve as a crucial line of defense for free and fair elections.
As one of us has explained elsewhere in work with legal scholar Jessica Bulman-Pozen, all 50 state constitutions include explicit pro-democracy provisions – a “democracy principle,” as a shorthand – including many clauses with no express federal counterpart.
Those resources make state courts more promising venues for protecting democracy than the U.S. Supreme Court has been of late. The court’s recent decisions have limited the avenues for protecting democracy, including by refusing to hear partisan gerrymandering claims and by limiting the reach of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting.
In contrast, recent state court decisions across the country have applied the democracy principle.
For example, state courts have upheld laws permitting voting by mail, imposed new remedies against extreme partisan gerrymandering and preserved the people’s ability to amend their state constitution.
A closer look at this year’s cases – so far
Yet these significant pro-democracy decisions are only part of the bigger litigation picture, the most salient feature of which is its sheer volume.
The largest number of lawsuits involve whether a candidate can properly appear on the ballot. Such “ballot access” lawsuits are long-standing and typically involve candidates sparring over whether they or an opponent have satisfied requirements for petition signatures, residency or other paperwork requirements.
The next-largest categories, and we think the most concerning, encompass election administration and absentee voting – often challenging mechanical, even picayune matters.
In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, for example, multiple suits contest whether mailed ballots can be counted if they omit part of the voter’s address or the date, as well as the permissibility of “ballot curing” – allowing clerks to contact voters to correct technical errors on their mailed ballot.
In Arizona, the Republican National Committee and state affiliate have filed two lawsuits against Maricopa County – and its Republican leadership – arguing that the county has failed to explain why it did not hire an equal number of Democratic and Republican election workers.
In Michigan, two cases filed by Republicans challenge rules governing poll watchers, including their ability to use cellphones. In Ohio, a secretary of state candidate argues election observers should be given access to the software and source code for voting machines.
Finally, another major slice of cases involves ballot initiatives, a means of direct lawmaking by voters. Some of these, like a prominent unsuccessful challenge to the formatting of Michigan’s abortion initiative, attempt to keep a measure off the ballot. Others debate burdens on the ballot initiative process.
Sharp partisan divides partly drive the rise in litigation and yield some rough patterns. As legal scholar Derek Muller has noted, the overall rise in election litigation “is emphatically bipartisan.” Both parties have been active in redistricting and ballot access cases.
But when it comes to the administration of elections, the parties have tended to press different claims. Democrats and their allies have tended to challenge new voting restrictions. A network of litigants on the right has focused more on whether certain votes can be counted. Steve Bannon has vowed to “adjudicate every battle” in an effort to “take over the election apparatus.”
Pitfalls of so many lawsuits
This hyperlitigation has downsides.
First, an election litigation deluge may undermine voter confidence in the electoral system. Litigation over every detail of the election process lays the groundwork for false narratives or subsequent challenges to the validity of an election.
And while courts that serve as a backstop on key elections questions may enhance voters’ trust in elections, some scholars fear that a barrage of lawsuits alleging impropriety in elections may undermine that trust. Moreover, by inserting courts into election administration, hyperlitigation can dovetail with efforts to sow doubt in the courts’ legitimacy.
These challenges to the logistical aspects of elections align with a broader strategy to subvert the electoral system by overwhelming it – including through “sham audits,” mass challenges to voter eligibility and frivolous election-related open records requests.
The chaos may be the point.
The flood of election litigation also results in hefty financial costs to state governments. Pennsylvania spent over US$3.3 million in 2020, a presidential election year, litigating election-related cases. It expects to spend at least as much or more this year.
Similarly, Montana’s secretary of state has spent more than 10 times its budget on election litigation in 2022.
Finally, hyperlitigation burdens the state court system, which hears over 90% of all cases filed each year and is already straining from pandemic-induced backlogs. Fulton County, Georgia, for example, has accumulated approximately 200,000 cases during the pandemic, and states including North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are also navigating substantial backlogs. High volumes of election litigation impede courts already overstretched in performing their critical public functions.
Although scholars have proposed ways to reduce election litigation, the trend is likely to persist, at least in the short term. State courts do have a necessary role to play in safeguarding democracy. But at current levels, election litigation presents serious problems as well as solutions.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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Government
Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study
Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study
Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
People with inadequate…
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Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
People with inadequate iron levels in their blood due to a COVID-19 infection could be at greater risk of long COVID.
A new study indicates that problems with iron levels in the bloodstream likely trigger chronic inflammation and other conditions associated with the post-COVID phenomenon. The findings, published on March 1 in Nature Immunology, could offer new ways to treat or prevent the condition.
Long COVID Patients Have Low Iron Levels
Researchers at the University of Cambridge pinpointed low iron as a potential link to long-COVID symptoms thanks to a study they initiated shortly after the start of the pandemic. They recruited people who tested positive for the virus to provide blood samples for analysis over a year, which allowed the researchers to look for post-infection changes in the blood. The researchers looked at 214 samples and found that 45 percent of patients reported symptoms of long COVID that lasted between three and 10 months.
In analyzing the blood samples, the research team noticed that people experiencing long COVID had low iron levels, contributing to anemia and low red blood cell production, just two weeks after they were diagnosed with COVID-19. This was true for patients regardless of age, sex, or the initial severity of their infection.
According to one of the study co-authors, the removal of iron from the bloodstream is a natural process and defense mechanism of the body.
But it can jeopardize a person’s recovery.
“When the body has an infection, it responds by removing iron from the bloodstream. This protects us from potentially lethal bacteria that capture the iron in the bloodstream and grow rapidly. It’s an evolutionary response that redistributes iron in the body, and the blood plasma becomes an iron desert,” University of Oxford professor Hal Drakesmith said in a press release. “However, if this goes on for a long time, there is less iron for red blood cells, so oxygen is transported less efficiently affecting metabolism and energy production, and for white blood cells, which need iron to work properly. The protective mechanism ends up becoming a problem.”
The research team believes that consistently low iron levels could explain why individuals with long COVID continue to experience fatigue and difficulty exercising. As such, the researchers suggested iron supplementation to help regulate and prevent the often debilitating symptoms associated with long COVID.
“It isn’t necessarily the case that individuals don’t have enough iron in their body, it’s just that it’s trapped in the wrong place,” Aimee Hanson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge who worked on the study, said in the press release. “What we need is a way to remobilize the iron and pull it back into the bloodstream, where it becomes more useful to the red blood cells.”
The research team pointed out that iron supplementation isn’t always straightforward. Achieving the right level of iron varies from person to person. Too much iron can cause stomach issues, ranging from constipation, nausea, and abdominal pain to gastritis and gastric lesions.
1 in 5 Still Affected by Long COVID
COVID-19 has affected nearly 40 percent of Americans, with one in five of those still suffering from symptoms of long COVID, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Long COVID is marked by health issues that continue at least four weeks after an individual was initially diagnosed with COVID-19. Symptoms can last for days, weeks, months, or years and may include fatigue, cough or chest pain, headache, brain fog, depression or anxiety, digestive issues, and joint or muscle pain.
Government
Walmart joins Costco in sharing key pricing news
The massive retailers have both shared information that some retailers keep very close to the vest.
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As we head toward a presidential election, the presumed candidates for both parties will look for issues that rally undecided voters.
The economy will be a key issue, with Democrats pointing to job creation and lowering prices while Republicans will cite the layoffs at Big Tech companies, high housing prices, and of course, sticky inflation.
The covid pandemic created a perfect storm for inflation and higher prices. It became harder to get many items because people getting sick slowed down, or even stopped, production at some factories.
Related: Popular mall retailer shuts down abruptly after bankruptcy filing
It was also a period where demand increased while shipping, trucking and delivery systems were all strained or thrown out of whack. The combination led to product shortages and higher prices.
You might have gone to the grocery store and not been able to buy your favorite paper towel brand or find toilet paper at all. That happened partly because of the supply chain and partly due to increased demand, but at the end of the day, it led to higher prices, which some consumers blamed on President Joe Biden's administration.
Biden, of course, was blamed for the price increases, but as inflation has dropped and grocery prices have fallen, few companies have been up front about it. That's probably not a political choice in most cases. Instead, some companies have chosen to lower prices more slowly than they raised them.
However, two major retailers, Walmart (WMT) and Costco, have been very honest about inflation. Walmart Chief Executive Doug McMillon's most recent comments validate what Biden's administration has been saying about the state of the economy. And they contrast with the economic picture being painted by Republicans who support their presumptive nominee, Donald Trump.
Image source: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Walmart sees lower prices
McMillon does not talk about lower prices to make a political statement. He's communicating with customers and potential customers through the analysts who cover the company's quarterly-earnings calls.
During Walmart's fiscal-fourth-quarter-earnings call, McMillon was clear that prices are going down.
"I'm excited about the omnichannel net promoter score trends the team is driving. Across countries, we continue to see a customer that's resilient but looking for value. As always, we're working hard to deliver that for them, including through our rollbacks on food pricing in Walmart U.S. Those were up significantly in Q4 versus last year, following a big increase in Q3," he said.
He was specific about where the chain has seen prices go down.
"Our general merchandise prices are lower than a year ago and even two years ago in some categories, which means our customers are finding value in areas like apparel and hard lines," he said. "In food, prices are lower than a year ago in places like eggs, apples, and deli snacks, but higher in other places like asparagus and blackberries."
McMillon said that in other areas prices were still up but have been falling.
"Dry grocery and consumables categories like paper goods and cleaning supplies are up mid-single digits versus last year and high teens versus two years ago. Private-brand penetration is up in many of the countries where we operate, including the United States," he said.
Costco sees almost no inflation impact
McMillon avoided the word inflation in his comments. Costco (COST) Chief Financial Officer Richard Galanti, who steps down on March 15, has been very transparent on the topic.
The CFO commented on inflation during his company's fiscal-first-quarter-earnings call.
"Most recently, in the last fourth-quarter discussion, we had estimated that year-over-year inflation was in the 1% to 2% range. Our estimate for the quarter just ended, that inflation was in the 0% to 1% range," he said.
Galanti made clear that inflation (and even deflation) varied by category.
"A bigger deflation in some big and bulky items like furniture sets due to lower freight costs year over year, as well as on things like domestics, bulky lower-priced items, again, where the freight cost is significant. Some deflationary items were as much as 20% to 30% and, again, mostly freight-related," he added.
bankruptcy pandemic trumpGovernment
Walmart has really good news for shoppers (and Joe Biden)
The giant retailer joins Costco in making a statement that has political overtones, even if that’s not the intent.
Share this:
As we head toward a presidential election, the presumed candidates for both parties will look for issues that rally undecided voters.
The economy will be a key issue, with Democrats pointing to job creation and lowering prices while Republicans will cite the layoffs at Big Tech companies, high housing prices, and of course, sticky inflation.
The covid pandemic created a perfect storm for inflation and higher prices. It became harder to get many items because people getting sick slowed down, or even stopped, production at some factories.
Related: Popular mall retailer shuts down abruptly after bankruptcy filing
It was also a period where demand increased while shipping, trucking and delivery systems were all strained or thrown out of whack. The combination led to product shortages and higher prices.
You might have gone to the grocery store and not been able to buy your favorite paper towel brand or find toilet paper at all. That happened partly because of the supply chain and partly due to increased demand, but at the end of the day, it led to higher prices, which some consumers blamed on President Joe Biden's administration.
Biden, of course, was blamed for the price increases, but as inflation has dropped and grocery prices have fallen, few companies have been up front about it. That's probably not a political choice in most cases. Instead, some companies have chosen to lower prices more slowly than they raised them.
However, two major retailers, Walmart (WMT) and Costco, have been very honest about inflation. Walmart Chief Executive Doug McMillon's most recent comments validate what Biden's administration has been saying about the state of the economy. And they contrast with the economic picture being painted by Republicans who support their presumptive nominee, Donald Trump.
Image source: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Walmart sees lower prices
McMillon does not talk about lower prices to make a political statement. He's communicating with customers and potential customers through the analysts who cover the company's quarterly-earnings calls.
During Walmart's fiscal-fourth-quarter-earnings call, McMillon was clear that prices are going down.
"I'm excited about the omnichannel net promoter score trends the team is driving. Across countries, we continue to see a customer that's resilient but looking for value. As always, we're working hard to deliver that for them, including through our rollbacks on food pricing in Walmart U.S. Those were up significantly in Q4 versus last year, following a big increase in Q3," he said.
He was specific about where the chain has seen prices go down.
"Our general merchandise prices are lower than a year ago and even two years ago in some categories, which means our customers are finding value in areas like apparel and hard lines," he said. "In food, prices are lower than a year ago in places like eggs, apples, and deli snacks, but higher in other places like asparagus and blackberries."
McMillon said that in other areas prices were still up but have been falling.
"Dry grocery and consumables categories like paper goods and cleaning supplies are up mid-single digits versus last year and high teens versus two years ago. Private-brand penetration is up in many of the countries where we operate, including the United States," he said.
Costco sees almost no inflation impact
McMillon avoided the word inflation in his comments. Costco (COST) Chief Financial Officer Richard Galanti, who steps down on March 15, has been very transparent on the topic.
The CFO commented on inflation during his company's fiscal-first-quarter-earnings call.
"Most recently, in the last fourth-quarter discussion, we had estimated that year-over-year inflation was in the 1% to 2% range. Our estimate for the quarter just ended, that inflation was in the 0% to 1% range," he said.
Galanti made clear that inflation (and even deflation) varied by category.
"A bigger deflation in some big and bulky items like furniture sets due to lower freight costs year over year, as well as on things like domestics, bulky lower-priced items, again, where the freight cost is significant. Some deflationary items were as much as 20% to 30% and, again, mostly freight-related," he added.
bankruptcy pandemic trump
When Military Rule Supplants Democracy
Redefining Poverty: Towards a Transpartisan Approach
The Digest #187
Students lose out as cities and states give billions in property tax breaks to businesses − draining school budgets and especially hurting the poorest students
Biden to call for first-time homebuyer tax credit, construction of 2 million homes
GBPINR: Analysis and Projections for 2024
Is the United States overestimating China’s power?
Biden defends immigration policy during State of the Union, blaming Republicans in Congress for refusing to act
Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study
Jack Smith Says Trump Retention Of Documents “Starkly Different” From Biden
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