Bloomberg may have gotten himself into hot water with that stunt of paying off the debts of felons so they can vote. He may be breaking the law by offering somethjng of value in exchange for a vote for a certain candidate.
Snopes says it’s true, and at the bottom of the page they have the source documentation from the Florida Attorney General listing the possible violations of Florida law.
I believe the question of criminality would revolve around whether he did this with the expectation of the voters voting one way. And apparently those felons vote 92% Democrat, and there is an E-mail from Bloomberg or one of his aides that points this out.
How could that possibly be an exchange for a certain vote? In no way is it conditional upon anything. Further, it’s responding to a poll tax, a wholly immoral requirement for voting that would be unconstitutional with a court that wasn’t in the GOP pocket.
People who actually understand the law believe the question of criminality would revolve around whether he did this with a payment contingent upon a specific arrangement with the voters to vote one way.
I did say I’m not a lawyer and was unsure of the legality. But certainly the document I linked to listed the statutes that he might be guilty of violating.
Since you are apparently a lawyer, perhaps you could look at them and give us your opinion.
I’m not a lawyer either, but I took a few minutes and found an interesting omission in the letter’s statement of Florida 104.061 (which is actually a quote from a previous opinion of the Florida Sec of State, Elections Division) and the actual statute. I will post them both here - see if you can spot the difference:
As you can see, the omitted part requires that the gift be intended to “buy” a vote or “corruptly influence” a vote. Not just to simply make it possible (or even encourage) them to vote. In fact, the rest of the quote makes that clear - the payment of incentive must be designed in a way that would influence a person to vote in a particular way before it would be an offense.
Florida 104.012 just doesn’t apply, as far as I can tell, so I’m not sure why it was cited at all.
AIUI, Bloomberg’s money went to a nonprofit whose purpose is to help former felons pay their fines and restitution. I don’t know if that makes a difference or not.
I have to think that Bloomberg had a bunch o’ lawyers help him work out the details of this plan (he can certainly afford them). I really doubt he’d stumble into so obvious an illegality, if it is one at all.
Biden +7 in PA and +5 in Florida from NYTimes/Siena, an A+ pollster on 538, is the best evidence that he remains in good shape after the debate.
Of course the debate has now been overshadowed by Trump’s illness. Hard to know how it will play out but my guess is it will hurt him a bit with a constant drip-drip of negative stories of more people falling sick including less important in the White House and the total lack of basic precautions by Trump and his entourage.
Ugh…not really. During the midterms elections in 2018, I wanted to work with a local business to give a small free gift to anyone that voted, regardless of who they voted for. It only took me a few minutes to find out it would be illegal.
But I don’t think Bloomberg - and the charity he is working with - are requiring anyone to vote at all as a condition of their fines being paid off. They CAN vote now, but they don’t have to. The FFRC, the organization that works to restore voting rights in Florida, has been around a while.
Yes, that’s the other law. It says you can’t give anything that can be exchanged for money (other than things like buttons, signs and pins). So a small gift can be exchanged for money, but paying fines cannot.
Also your other point makes this perfectly legal as well. Paying the fine is not an inducement to vote, and there is no requirement that you vote in order to get your fine paid.
Reuters poll out today showing Biden surging to a 51-41 lead. NBC/WSJ poll has it a 14(!) point margin, 53-39, including a Biden lead of 62-35 among senior voters.
These are not good numbers for a party whose candidate, campaign manager and national committee chairperson have all just tested positive for Covid. That’s an awful lot of “shy Trump voters” answering the phones.
I’ve got no evidence to back it up but I suspect that trying to jam through Coney Barrett’s nomination is backfiring. It might even be costing the GOP more than Trump’s batshittery itself. My sense is that people view the Courts as one of the few institutions left that’s capable of being salvaged as an apolitical institution - the military being another. Trump and McConnell trying to rig the judiciary in such an obvious and transparent manner is probably making the few centrists left a little squeamish. I’d like to think that, anyway.
In NYT cross tabs, whites without a BA are the only group that approves of Trump naming the new judge to SCOTUS 54 to 43, and in that poll they already lean Trump 57 to 33 …
The only question in terms of election impacts is if it activates the base more than it repels, well everyone else.
I’d have to check to see if I remember correctly, but ISTR that Al the Pal Dixon (D) of IL lost his bid for renomination after voting for Clarence. Not entirely the same thing, but there can be repercussions.
The NYT has a tracker that compares today’s polling with an adjustment that matches the errors from 2016. This swings most of the close states back in favor of Trump but Biden has a big enough lead in PA that he still wins it by 2 points. In the end Biden wins with 280 EVs.
New Marist poll (A+) has Biden up 10 in Wisconsin. Along with various good recent polls for him in Pennsylvania (and in Florida), things are looking up for Biden. But of course we’re not out of the woods yet, and complacency is not an option.
One slightly worrying trend is a rise in Trump’s “favorable” numbers (now north of 44%, in FiveThirtyEight’s aggregate). I think this includes recent enough data that it’s likely some sympathy toward his being ill — and that many of these folks are “I feel a little sorry for him…but I ain’t gonna vote for him (again).” But it could also reflect a smattering of morons who were actually impressed by the bad-parody-of-an-Alpha-male debate fiasco.
I seem to have read from Nate Silver that, historically, polls have erred in both directions. IIRC, he wrote that there is a not negligible chance that pollsters are undercounting Biden voters this time around after making corrections to their 2016 methodologies.
But I think the NYT is doing the right, or at least interesting, thing here. They’re projecting a worst case scenario, that the polling is off the same way it was four years ago. If Biden is ahead under those cautious circumstances, Trump is toast.
BTW, it took Fox the better part of the day yesterday before they got around to publishing the horrendous (for Donald) NBC/WSJ and Reuters polls, and then it was mostly to elicit pushback from Republican bigs to decry their accuracy. And apparently, a huge percentage of Trump supporters in the story’s comments are regularly polled, multiple times, and every one of them lies to the pollster in order to destroy its credibility.