Tag Archives: Texas

Election Night Preview — Part Six (Post-Midnight Eastern)

By tmess2 | Published November 3, 2024

Prior to Midnight, the polls will have closed in forty-eight states and the District of Columbia.  All that is left to close are Hawaii and Alaska.  Hawaii closes at midnight Eastern (7;00 p.m. local).  Polls close at 8:00 p.m. local time in Alaska.  For most of the state, that is midnight Eastern.  But the Aleutian Islands are in a separate time zone and will close at 1:00 a.m. Eastern.

In Hawaii, the first big chunk of returns will be the early votes, but those are not reported until all polling places have actually closed.  As such, it may be an hour or more before results are released.  The release of results will be a little bit slower than Alaska.

The biggest race out of these two states is the congressional seat for Alaska, currently held by Democrat Mary Peltola.  One factor that will delay a projection in this race is that Alaska uses ranked-choice voting.  The Republicans in Alaska have pretty well demonstrated that they do not know how to run a race with ranked choice voting.  Thus, rather than running two strong candidates and having the candidates encourage their supporters to rank the other candidate second, the Republicans have had their second candidate withdraw.  Not having two candidates attacking Representative Peltola is a strategic mistake.  But because the Republicans have cleared the field, it is unlikely that there will be many votes for the remaining candidates on the ballot.  A good rule of thumb for ranked choice voting is that a candidate who finishes in second on first preferences is unlikely to have a net gain more than 1% for every 2% of the vote that went to the eliminated candidates.  Representative Peltola received a majority of the vote in the primary, but that is now guarantee that she will get a majority of the first preference votes in the general election.  It is entirely possible that we will not know the winner until after all counts are voted and preferences are applied, but the history of ranked choice voting in Australia is that, in most races, there is a clear winner with a sufficiently large margin in first preferences that the second-placed candidate can’t realistically catch-up. Continue Reading...

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Election Night Preview — Part Two — Prime Time Hour One (8:00 to 8:59 p.m. Eastern)

By tmess2 | Published October 28, 2024

While there are some significant states that close before 8:00 p.m. Eastern, that time marks when election coverage truly kicks off.  Aside from the realities of the broadcast networks that as for two basic reasons.  First, as discussed last weekend, vote counting is slow.  Since people in line when the polls “close” can still vote, it takes some time to actually shut down a polling place (both in getting the last people processed and out and in the procedures to secure the election materials after the polling place closes).  And then the counting usually have to be transported to some central location for the local election authority.  Thus, the first hour of returns tend to be the results of early voting and absentee ballots (in those states which release those separately from the election day returns) and a handful of smaller counties.  It is only in the second and third hour of counting that you start getting the rest of the smaller counties and the first returns from the really big counties.  Second, not every state closes at 7:00 p.m., local time, and a good chunk of the states are not in the Eastern time zone.  Only two states (Indiana and Kentucky) close at 6:00 p.m. local time.   While 7:00 p.m. is one of the more popular local times to close, only nineteen states close then (and only five of those are in the Eastern time zone).  Four states (Arkansas, North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia) close at 7:30 p.m. local time.    The most popular poll closing time is actually 8:00 p.m. when twenty-two jurisdictions close their polls.  You have two states (Tennessee and Nebraska) which despite being split in two time zones have opted to have all the polls close at the same real time (meaning in the eastern part of the state, the polls close at 8:00 p.m. local time while in the western part of the state, the polls close at 7:00 p.m. local time).  Lastly, two states (New York and North Dakota) close at 9:00 p.m. local time.

So when 8:00 p.m. Eastern time rolls around, you have polls closing in the ten jurisdictions wholly in the Eastern time zone that close at 8:00 local time.  You also have the polls in the western part of Florda closing at what is 7:00 p.m. local time in that part of Florida to finish out Florida.  You have the polls closing at 8:00 p.m. local time in the part of Michigan in the Eastern time zone (all but the Western part of the Upper Peninsula), You have the polls closing simultaneously at either 8:00 p.m. local time or 7:00 p.m. local time in Tennessee.  You have all of the polls closing at 7:00 p.m. local time in Alabama, Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri, and Oklahoma.  And you have polls closing at 7:00 p.m. local time in the eastern parts of Kansas, South Dakota, and Texas.  Of those last three states, only South Dakota is roughly evenly divided geographically between Central and Mountain time and only tiny slivers of Kansas and Texas are in the Mountain time zone.  In short, you go from approximately ten jurisdictions being closed, to the majority of almost thirty jurisdictions being closed.  For all intents and purposes, election night starts at 8:00 p.m. Eastern.

As the hour starts, we should have already had some expected projections from the early states.  And the early news is more likely to be bad news than good news, but it is expected bad news that should not cause people to panic.  Barring a miracle, by 8:00 p.m. Eastern, the networks and the AP will have projected Donald Trump the winner in Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, and West Virginia.  They will also have projected the Republicans as winning two Senate seats (Indiana and West Virginia) to one for the Democrats (Vermont) for a gain of one although it is possible that the Virginia Senate seat might also be projected before 8:00 p.m.  And most of the early House seats projected will be Republican with a couple of seats gained in North Carolina. Continue Reading...

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Super Tuesday Week

By tmess2 | Published March 2, 2024

Tuesday is Super Tuesday — the first Tuesday of the primary cycle in which any state can hold a primary contest.  As most states use state-run primaries, there will be a large number of states on Tuesday.

But, before Super Tuesday, several states that are using party-run contests will be holding Republican contests as the “window” for the Republicans opened yesterday.  (The “window” for Democrats opens on Tuesday.)  As discussed last week, one of the contests today is the second half of the Republican’s Michigan two-step with the Republican state convention which will be allocating the “district” level delegates.  In addition to Michigan, today will see events in Missouri and Idaho.

The Missouri Republican rules are somewhat ambiguous.  It looks like they are doing a traditional caucus with a 15% threshold and an unspecified winner-take-all kicker at local option.  But rather than allocating delegates based on today’s vote (which is what the national rules appear to require), they are merely binding the delegates chosen today to vote the same preference at the district conventions (which should effectively have the same result).  Missouri is using a caucus because our current Secretary of State repeatedly lied and claimed that the state-run primary was nonbinding (when the rules of both party made the primary binding) and a repeal of the primary was slipped into an omnibus election bill which passed despite the unanimous opposition of Democratic legislature).  The Democrats will be holding a party-run primary in three weeks with a mail-in option. Continue Reading...

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Georgia Runoff

By tmess2 | Published December 4, 2022

The last election of 2022 will conclude on Tuesday with the runoff election for U.S. Senator in Georgia.    While there are still some races that will go to recounts, all of the statewide and congressional races seem to be outside the margin at which a recount could make a difference.  (There are three races with margins between 500 and 600 votes — Arizona Attorney General, California Thirteenth District, and Colorado Third District.  In the Minnestoa Senate recount in 2008, the net swing from the original results to the recount results was 450 votes with an additional 87 votes gained in the election contest.  The closest of the three races going to recount is 511.   While other recounts have resulted in bigger swings, they were in races with bigger margins and Minnesota remains the largest swing that changed the results of a race.

The significance of the Senate race is not quite as big as it was in 2021 due to the Republicans apparently taking the House (but the Republican’s inability to reach a consensus on the next Speaker will be the subject of a future post) and the fact that the Democrats already have 50 seats.  But the result still matters for five key reasons.

First, the additional seat will alter the composition of committees.  With a 50-50 Senate, the committees are evenly divided.  While the rules currently allow a bill or nomination to proceed to the Senate floor on a tie vote, a 51-49 Senate would result in the Democrats having a majority on the committees. Continue Reading...

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The Midterms — Preview (Part 2)

By tmess2 | Published October 30, 2022

The first states with polls to close are mostly in the Eastern Time Zone.  In the early states, we have two governor’s races (Georgia and Florida), four Senate races (Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio), and seven House seats (1 in North Carolina, 3 in Ohio, and 3 in Virginia) that could be close.  There are also several seats that are likely to flip solely because of the new maps (4 flipping red in Florida, 1 flipping red in Georgia, and 2 flipping blue in North Carolina).

But the big closing time is 7 p.m. Central ST.  The remaining polls will close in Florida, and most of the polls will close in Kansas, Michigan, South Dakota, and Texas.  And all of the polls will close in Alabama (except for a very small portion that closed an hour earlier), Connecticut, Delaware, D.C., Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.  In short, when added to the states that close before 7 p.m., the polls will be closed in roughly half of the country by 7:01 p.m. (Of course, polls closed merely means that individuals need to be in line to vote at 7 p.m.  Because there are typically people in line to vote, voting might actually continue in some urban precincts for a very long time after 7 p.m. which will delay counting in those areas.)

Starting with Alabama, there are no races that are likely to be close at the state or federal level.  If the Supreme Court follows the Voting Rights Act, Democrats will probably pick up an additional seat in 2024, but the current maps which a district court correctly held violated the Voting Rights Act is in place for the 2022 election, and the 6-1 Republican advantage will remain in place for the next Congress.  There are a lot of propositions on the ballot in Alabama, the most significant of which requires changes to election law to be adopted at least six months prior to a general election. Continue Reading...

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Redistricting 2022

By tmess2 | Published January 29, 2022

The legislative part of redistricting is almost complete.  Only nine states are still in the process of drafting the “first” set of maps.  (Tw of those nine states are my home state of Missouri and the neighboring state of Kansas.  In both states, the maps are through one house of the legislature and are under consideration in the second house.)  In three states (Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), the first set of maps defaulted to the courts when the legislatures and the governors were unable to agree on the new maps.

But in the remaining states, the maps have been adopted.  And that means that the battle over the maps has moved to the courts.  At this point, I am aware of three states in which we have rulings about the new maps.  Two of them are no surprise, or, at least, not much of a surprise.  In Ohio, the Ohio Supreme Court found that the map passed by the Ohio legislature violated the Ohio Constitutions rules on redistricting which bars drawing a map which unduly favors one political party or unduly splits political subdivisions.  In North Carolina, the North Carolina Supreme Court has under review an initial decision upholding the maps drawn by the North Carolina legislature.  The North Carolina Supreme Court will hear arguments on February 2.  Right now, it looks more likely than not that the North Carolina Supreme Court will strike down the map in that state.

The surprise on the list might be Alabama.  Alabama was not on the list of states that we looked at last year.  The failure to do so caused us to miss a change in demography within the state.  For the last several cycles, there has been one minority-majority district in western Alabama (the Seventh District).  In previous decades, the consensus was that — even though approximately one-quarter of the state is African-American — the minority population was too dispersed to creeate a second district that would either be a minority-majority district or close enough to qualify as an influence district.   (Part of the theory of the case is that the new districts dilute the influence of African-Americans in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act or is a racial gerrymander in violation of the Equal Protection Clasue.)  After the last census, however, it appears that by placing Birmingham in one district (the Seventh District) and Montgomery in a separate district in the southern part of the state, you could get two minority-majority districts (or at least two districts that would qualify as influence districts).  For now, the panel of judges hearing the Voting Rights Act case has ordered that Alabama will not be allowed to use the new maps pending a final decision (and has given Alabama thirty days to submit replacement maps or the court will draw maps for this election cycle).  Alabama has asked the Supreme Court to put this ruling on hold, and the Supreme Court has asked the plaintiffs for a response by February 2. Continue Reading...

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Senate Bill 8 and the Supreme Court

By tmess2 | Published October 31, 2021

This week, the Supreme Court will take up issues related to Texas’s new abortion law — Senate Bill 8.  There are several key things to know about this case.

First, this case has been expedited.  The Supreme Court turned down the request for a stay and granted review on the  “merits” on October 22.  The  Supreme Court ordered the parties to file the written arguments on the merits by October 27.  The Supreme Court will be hearing argument on November 1, just ten days after granting review.  By contrast, the “normal” schedule set forth in the rules (which is typically condensed somewhat for cases in which review is granted between October and January) establishes a minimum of 115 days between the grant of review and argument.  This expedited hearing, probably represents a compromise between the Justices that wanted to reinstate the trial court’s stay of the law and those that wanted to take this case in the ordinary course of Supreme Court review.

Second, the Supreme Court permitted the parties to bypass the Court of Appeals.  While the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (covering Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas) has issued rulings on the stay entered by the trial court, it has not yet ruled on the merits of the case.  The Rules of the Supreme Court permit parties to ask to bypass the appellate court (a petition for certiorari before judgment), but the Supreme Court rarely grants that request.  Again, this decision probably represents a compromise between those that wanted to grant the stay (which would have been in effect until the Fifth Circuit decided the case) and those that wanted things to proceed in the ordinary course of review.   It may also reflect the view that the Supreme Court has of the Fifth Circuit.  There are several circuits known for their tendencies in litigation.  There are three or four perceived to be ultra liberal with the Supreme Court needing to frequently correct them.  The Fifth Circuit has the same reputation for being ultra conservative and has been frequently reversed on abortion cases.  Given this reputation, the Supreme Court may have decided that there was no need to see what the Fifth Circuit would write. Continue Reading...

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The Texas Abortion Law and the Supreme Court

By tmess2 | Published September 5, 2021

As is typically the case with legal news, it is very possible to follow the main stream media and get a very inaccurate perception of what is happening in the courts.  This misreporting isn’t intentional, it’s just that most reporters are not lawyers and thus miss the details that matter.  This past week, the United States Supreme Court denied a stay application related to a new Texas statute that bars abortion after the sixth week of a pregnancy and allows private individuals to enforce that bar by filing a civil case against anybody who aided the woman in getting the abortion — with the remedy being a $10,000.00 payment from the defendant to the person bringing the case.  Given the news coverage, I have three comments.

First, most of the impact of the law will come from its nuisance value.  The actual age of a fetus is an estimate.  Barring some other method that gives a more accurate estimate, gestational age is estimated based on a woman’s last menstrual period (which assumes a regular menstrual cycle and not all women have a regular cycle).    Even the woman herself may not know the exact date of conception (unless she only had sex once since her last period).    And in the early stages of pregnancy (and most abortions occur in the first trimester), it is impossible for the average person to know the gestational age of the fetus by simply looking at the woman.  So unless the woman tells her friend who is driving her to the doctor’s office that she is ten weeks pregnant, the friend will have no idea that the gestational age is beyond six weeks.  While I haven’t read the full statute, it seems at first glance that it will be hard for plaintiffs to win.  But, particularly for abortion providers, the new statute will mean that they are regularly in court with significant legal expenses and average people might be reluctant to help their friends given the expense of defending against these claims.

Second, the empowering of private citizens to bring claims on behalf of the government is not new.  The exact way that these cases will work might have some new wrinkles, but there is an established legal procedure known as qui tam (a shortened title for a latin phrase that translate as “he who sues in this matter on behalf of the king as well as for himself”).  As the reference to the king in the translation hints, this procedure is quite old.  Usually, in the U,S., qui tam statutes involve allowing those with inside information to bring fraud claims on behalf of the government.    If certain legal requirements are met, the successful qui tam plaintiff splits the recovery with the government.  Even without the precedent of qui tam, however, it is clear that any legal claim is state action for the purpose of constitutional law which is why libel suits are restricted by the First Amendment. Continue Reading...

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Redistricting — Texas

By tmess2 | Published May 9, 2021

Texas is up first on the list of first looks at redistricting.  This look at Texas will feature some issues that are going to be recurring throughout this discussion and one issue that will impact Texas the most but might come into play in some other states.

The first issue is that we do not yet have the actual precinct and block level counts from the 2020 census.  That means that this first look is based on the 2019 estimates.  And, of course, estimates are not necessarily exact (as the state level numbers for 2020 showed).  While the far right is upset about the national numbers and want to raise sinister suggestions that something happened behind the scenes to fudge the real numbers, it is equally likely that the previous administration was fudging the numbers in the estimates.  What is most likely is that certain steps by red state governments and anti-government rhetoric led to an undercount of certain groups in red states in 2020 when the Trump Administration was running the Census.  So, we have to expect that there will be some unexpected deviations within states when we get the numbers in November.

The second issue is the Donald Trump had a big impact on voters.  There are various ways to measure partisan lean in a state.  Most involve taking a composite of recent state-wide elections.  The software that I am using is currently based on the 2012 through 2016 elections.  In Texas, in 2012, both Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Mitt Romney carried the state by around 16%.  In 2014, Senator Cornyn carried the state by about 27% and other Republicans were winning by around a 22% margin.  In 2016, Donald Trump won by around  9%.   In 2018, however, Senator Cruz only won by 2%.  While Governor Greg Abbott won by around 13% with the other state-wide Republicans ranging between 3% and 11%.  Finally, in 2020, President Trump only won by 6% and Senator Cornyn won by around 10%.   In other words, what my software is showing as a 60-40 state based on the 2012-16 results is actually something more like a 54-46 state.  And a good chunk of that swing was in suburban districts which probably went from something like 60-40 to very close to 50-50.  Overall, there were three congressional districts (Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth) in which the Republican House candidate beat the 2012-16 Republican composite numbers in their district, and in some districts the Republican underperformed by around 10%. Continue Reading...

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Redistricting 2021 — The Numbers

By tmess2 | Published May 1, 2021

On Monday, four days ahead of its latest target date and almost four months behind the statutory date, the Census Bureau released the national and state-level results from the Census including the apportionment numbers that determine how many representatives each get.  As can be expected, there are multiple different tables summarizing the data in different ways for us number geeks.

The bottom line table shows the apportionment population (both those living in the state and those residing overseas — like military personnel — who call that state home), the number of representatives that each state is getting, and the change in representation.   We will get back to the change in a minute, but the big level number is that the apportionment population is slightly over 331 million.  As such, the average size (mean) of each congressional district is just under 761 thousand.  Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming have fewer people than the average congressional district.  While the apportionment formula does not work for calculating the population needed for the first representative, even Wyoming has enough population to be entitled to three-quarters of a representative.

If, D.C. and Puerto Rico were states, Puerto Rico would be just ahead of Utah (which has four representatives) and just behind Connecticut (which has five representatives) and D.C. would be between Vermont and Alaska.  Given that Puerto Rico is only slightly larger than Utah (which was not close to getting a fifth representative and far enough behind Connecticut, Puerto Rico would be due for four representatives.  If  both were states, the five states that would lose a representative would have been Oregon, Colorado, and Montana (all of which gained a seat), California (which lost a seat), and Minnesota (which barely avoided losing a seat).  The chart of priority values that allows us to consider the impact of adding Puerto Rico and D.C. also shows that Minnesota barely held onto its last seat and New York barely lost its seat.  Apparently, given the formula, Minnesota would have lost that seat if it had 24 fewer people, and New York would have kept its seat if it had 89 more people.  (The disparity in numbers is caused by the fact that the two states have different number of seats. Continue Reading...

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