Voting By Mail & Social Media Promote FBI Arrests

0:00When you're running a business, the best days are the ones where priorities stay on track. For midsize and large companies, risk can affect multiple parts of the organization at once, from property and liability to cyber and regulatory challenges. At that level, managing risk becomes an ongoing discipline. At the Hartford, the focus is on helping businesses manage risk before it turns into something more disruptive. And when losses do happen, that work is paired with insurance coverage shaped by years of underwriting, risk engineering, and claims experience. Learn more at thehartford.com slash risk mitigation.

0:34Policies provided by Hartford Fire Insurance Company and its property and casualty affiliates, Hartford, Connecticut. As industries evolve faster than ever, companies need an environment that accelerates strategic growth, and Michigan delivers on that promise. From emerging startups to global enterprises, Michigan offers what executives value most, a resilient, innovative ecosystem, Diverse communities that attract top talent and a quality of life that supports work-life balance. With our unified Team Michigan approach, businesses scale faster and compete at the highest level. Michigan, pure opportunity.

1:07Seize your opportunity at michiganbusiness.org. Whatever your goal, trade show giveaways, client gifts, or team gear, 4imprint has the promo products to match. With thousands of options, from apparel and drinkware to tech and totes, it's easy to find the right fit for your brand and budget with standout choices at every price point. And with their 360 degree guarantee, you can be 4imprint certain your order will show up just right, right on time. Explore more at 4imprint.com. 4imprint, 4certain. This is Bloomberg Law with June Grosso from Bloomberg Radio. mail-in ballots are corrupt mail-in ballots you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots and we as a republican party are going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots we're going to start with an executive order that's being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they're corrupt and And you know that we're the only country in the world, I believe, I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the world that uses it.

2:17In fact, more than 30 countries, including the U.K., Canada and Australia, use mail-in voting. But President Trump has complained for years about mail-in voting leading to fraud without any evidence. And in an interview with Fox's Sean Hannity, Trump pointed as validation to comments by Vladimir Putin. Russia's authoritarian leader. You know Vladimir Putin said something one of the most interesting things he said your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting he said mail-in voting every election he said no country has mail-in voting it's impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections and he said that to me it was very interesting because we talked about 2020 he said you won that election by so much.

3:06Trump says he'll sign an executive order targeting mail-in ballots and voting machines, which he also claims are, quote, highly inaccurate. He's trying to prevent Republicans from losing control of Congress during the midterms in several other ways. There's the widely publicized demand that Texas Republicans redraw their congressional map to create five new GOP seats. And in March, he signed an executive order now put on hold by federal courts that would require documented proof of citizenship to vote. My guest is constitutional law professor Rick Peldes of NYU Law School. Rick, under the Constitution, what roles do the president, Congress, and the states play in elections?

3:55So let's start with the president, actually. So the president has no power constitutionally to dictate to the states how they conduct national elections. The Constitution gives states the power to regulate the way in which our national elections are held. And the Constitution also gives Congress the power to decide to sort of supplant the states in that role. But the president has no power constitutionally to dictate how states conduct elections. What could Congress do? Let's say Congress agrees with President Trump. What could Congress do to change the way elections are held? I think that begins to get us into the more significant questions, in a sense.

4:41So even if the president doesn't have the power to do this, once he puts the marker out there on this by issuing the executive order, then the question becomes, you know, what's going to happen in the states and what's going to happen in Congress? Congress, in theory, does have the power to determine issues like the appropriate use of absentee ballots in national elections. Congress could require absentee ballots to be provided. It could determine the conditions under which they can be used. And I think, in theory, it probably could ban their use. There might be some constitutional challenges individual voters would bring.

5:18But fundamentally, the Supreme Court has recognized extremely broad power in Congress to regulate national elections under the elections clause. Now, you know, whether Congress would actually do this, I'm, I'd say, fairly skeptical about because, number one, of course, as long as we have the filibuster, the Democrats are going to oppose this and it won't get through the Senate. But number two, the Republicans have for a very long time been very much against nationalizing the election process. There will certainly be some Republicans, I would imagine, who would go along with the president. But I think there might well be pushback from within the Republican Party on going down this route at the national level.

6:01Election administrators, including in red states, are not going to be happy about a change like this because it means the election process will be more complicated for them to run because it would increase the number of people who would turn to in-person voting. So in theory, Congress could regulate in this area, but I don't know what the politics will be about that. I think then the question is, what will happen in red states that are run by legislators and governors who are sympathetic to the president's agenda? And will we see significant changes going on in red states about the use of absentee ballots.

6:39And let's say Congress does pass a law like that. What would a challenge look like from the blue states? So if Congress were to ban absentee ballots altogether, I can imagine individual voters who cannot be in the jurisdiction on Election Day or during the early voting process, if a state has early voting, who say, I just can't exercise my right to vote at all, in effect, because I just, for whatever reason, cannot be in the jurisdiction during those days. I could imagine they might bring a challenge under the federal constitution and sort of right to vote constitutional doctrine. They would argue that this ban would impose a severe burden on their voting rights.

7:24So I suspect that would be the form the challenge would take. And I think the voters who would have the strongest case would be the voters in that category I just described, people who just physically can't be in the jurisdiction during any of the days on which voting takes place. I don't know whether they would win that constitutional challenge, but that's what I would envision. Yeah, I mean, the military votes by mail for that reason. Also, Republicans poured tens of millions of dollars last year into convincing their voters that ballots by mail are safe, and Trump himself has voted by mail.

8:01Now, what about voting machines? Trump wants to go from voting machines to paper ballots with watermarks. Well, I don't understand exactly what he has in mind yet about that. So we do overwhelmingly vote on paper ballots already. The question then is how those ballots are counted. And typically, you know, that's where machines come into the picture. So if you vote on what's called an optical scan machine, you fill in the bubbles on your ballot, you then enter the ballot into the machine that tabulates the vote. So I doubt he means, I'm a little low to speculate. If he means that voting should be done on a paper ballot, most of our voting already takes place that way.

8:52If he means that the vote should be somehow counted by hand rather than counted by a machine whose accuracy has been validated. And by the way, we also do audits after the tabulation to make sure the machines are accurately counting the ballots. If he means to get rid of machines for counting the ballots, it's very hard to conceive of what that would mean and how that could possibly be done because it would mean, hand counting millions of ballots, which would introduce huge delays in the counting process. And we know counting by hand is actually much less accurate than using the machines to count the ballots.

9:34So it's really unclear to me what he even has in mind about voting machines. I guess we need to see what the order actually ends up saying. What's really going on here? Is it an attempt to give the Republicans an advantage in the midterms because Democrats supposedly do better with mail-in voting than Republicans? Or is it a power grab or something else? It's a little hard for me to speculate about, you know, what exactly is going on. He's obviously had an issue about mail-in ballots for quite a while. He made a big issue of this in the run-up to the 2020 election. I think the view is that that ended up hurting him in the election because many Republicans then decided not to vote by absentee ballot.

10:20And whether those people voted in other ways or not, you know, we don't know for sure. I'm sure that this statement by him is causing consternation among other elected Republican officials who probably think it's not in their interest to abandon absentee voting. But, you know, for whatever reason, he has a bee in his bonnet about this issue. And he lacks the power to do anything directly about it. But we'll see if Congress ends up doing anything. Yeah, a federal judge has all he Trump issued an executive order in March that would require proof of U.S. citizenship to vote and ban the counting of valid mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, and a federal judge has already blocked that order, at least temporarily.

11:06So does that indicate how other challenges might fare? Well, I think there's little doubt that an executive order that purported to tell the states that they could not use absentee ballots would be blocked by the federal courts. Again, I'm a little hesitant to speculate too much until we see the actual order and what the order actually entails and how it's designed and what powers it asserts. But he doesn't have the power to dictate to states that they cannot use absentee ballots or can only use them under certain conditions. So I don't have much doubt that an order that did that would be struck down, put on hold by the by the court.

11:50Trump and Republicans have tried to reshape elections in other ways over the years with tougher voter ID laws, restricting access to the polls, the fights over voter rolls and the counting of ballots, and now pressuring Republican states to redraw their maps with Texas about to do that to get five more Republican seats for the midterms. Does all this cause the public to have less confidence in the integrity of our elections? I think that having a stable framework for our elections, which is what we had and took for granted for many years in the recent past, you know, certainly helps promote confidence in the process.

12:36I think when the political parties and the candidates are continually fighting over voting policy, changing the rules in one direction or the other that they think, you know, is in their partisan interest. I think that certainly undermines public confidence in the process. It creates a sense that the rules are being rigged by one side or the other for their own self-interested reasons. And I don't think that's, you know, overall healthy for the democratic process. Rick, are there any persistent problems with mail-in voting? When we have had problems in the voting system with fraud. It has been in the absentee ballot area.

13:17It's not a huge number of cases, but we have had some just recently in New Jersey in the 2022 elections. There were criminal convictions for fraud that some, actually, I think it was a city council member, was engaged in and pled guilty to. So I don't want to say there's never fraud in the absentee ballot process. It does happen occasionally, but it's very rare and there are safeguards against it with the way ballots have to be validated and the like. Coming up next on the Bloomberg Law Show, I'll continue this conversation with NYU Law Professor Rick Pildes. The Republican-controlled Texas legislature is poised to vote soon on that redistricting plan.

14:01You're listening to Bloomberg. This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Now with ChatGPT work. I'm Carol Masser. Globetrotters hunting for airfare bargains are in for a rude awakening, as the days of stumbling across a cheap seat on a popular flight could soon disappear. Bloomberg's Juan Ha reports that airlines from Delta to Virgin Atlantic are adopting artificial intelligence to change seat prices more quickly by weighing dozens of variables in real time, helping capture more revenue while shrinking pricing gaps that once allowed travelers to find bargain fares. Machine learning models can more accurately forecast demand by analyzing historical booking patterns, seed inventory, and seasonal trends, while also continuously tracking competitors' fares and capacity changes to update prices in near real time.

14:52The technology could lead to higher fares on busy routes as airlines pack flights closer to capacity, but may also result in lower fares on off-peak and lower-demand routes. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChachiPT. Put ChachiPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChachiPT.com today by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro Plans. This message is brought to you by Apple Card, Shave Ice by the Beach, A Trip to the State Fair, and a Throwback Flick at the local drive-in. They're more than just items to check off the summer bucket list. They're also opportunities to earn 2 % daily cash back when you use your Apple Card with Apple Pay.

15:36Apply for Apple Card now and use in minutes with Apple Pay. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at AppleCard.com. Whether you're planning a big tech event, launching a new campaign, or just stocking up on team gear, finding the right promotional products makes all the difference. 4imprint offers thousands of options. from on-trend apparel and premium drinkware to tech, totes, and giveaways, so you can find the right fit for any audience, purpose, or budget. You can customize it all, your logo, your message, your look, and many items come with no setup charge to help you save.

16:11And if you're really watching the bottom line, you'll find standout choices at every price point so you can make a real impact while staying on budget. Plus, you'll get expert help, fast turnaround times, and their 360-degree guarantee, so you can be 4imprint certain your order will arrive on time and look exactly right. Whatever your goal, 4imprint makes it easy to find your perfect promo match. Explore the possibilities today at 4imprint.com. 4imprint. 4certain. I've been talking to constitutional law professor Rick Pildes of NYU Law School. Turning to what's become a redistricting battle, The Republican-controlled Texas legislature is poised to vote soon on that redistricting plan that resulted from President Trump asking them to get five more GOP seats for the midterm elections.

17:03I take it that, though it's very unusual, there's no legal impediment to mid-decade redistricting. We've had very little mid-decade redistricting in American history, certainly modern American history. The last time this happened in a way that went to the Supreme Court actually was also from Texas in the early 2000s. I actually filed an amicus brief in that case urging the court to hold that the federal constitution precluded mid-decade redistricting. The Supreme Court didn't agree with that position. But we're in a world in which control of the House rests on such a fine margin, kind of election after election, which is a very important part to understand as a backdrop to all of this.

17:46And so it leads the political parties to fight over every single inch of terrain. And so various kinds of, you know, norms that have been around for a while, just, you know, are breaking under that pressure, which is what's happening with the constraints against mid-decade redistricting. And the Pandora's box that opens up is not only, you know, If they can do it once, they could just adjust their districts every couple of years to try to maximize partisan advantage throughout the decade. And, of course, it's going to trigger retaliatory mid-decade redistricting. And it's another example of the kind of tactics that, at the end of the day, really undermine public confidence in the legitimacy of the process.

18:31gerrymandering is bad enough when it happens once a decade. But if we move down a path towards sort of perpetual redistricting for partisan advantage thinking, it's all the worse. So none of these things really promote the integrity of the process from the perspective of voters. What's the argument that the Constitution prohibits mid-decade redistricting? Well, the argument was that the Supreme Court has said that partisan gerrymandering or excessive partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, but that the court can't develop judicial standards that are appropriate to manage that problem. But as a prophylactic measure against partisan gerrymandering, a per se rule against mid-decade redistricting doesn't require the court to wrestle with, you know, exactly how much gerrymandering is too much.

19:26It's a way of imposing at least some constraint on partisan gerrymandering. And that's sort of the argument. This is an area where you can do something without having to address the difficulty of coming up with standards for what a fair map is. just a per se rule that unless a court orders mid-decade redistricting, the Constitution should limit it. But as I said, that's not the law. And even more so, the Supreme Court has said that partisan gerrymandering is not something that the federal courts can address. So that's where we are. And the court is most likely going to address the issue of racial gerrymandering in the next term.

20:07Thanks so much for joining me, Rick. That's Professor Rick Pildes of NYU Law School. This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Now with ChatGPT work. I'm Carol Masser. Globetrotters hunting for airfare bargains are in for a rude awakening as the days of stumbling across a cheap seat on a popular flight could soon disappear. Bloomberg's Juan Ha reports that airlines from Delta to Virgin Atlantic are adopting artificial intelligence to change seat prices more quickly by weighing dozens of variables in real time, helping capture more revenue while shrinking pricing gaps that once allowed travelers to find bargain fares.

20:47Machine learning models can more accurately forecast demand by analyzing historical booking patterns, seat inventory, and seasonal trends, while also continuously tracking competitors' fares and capacity changes to update prices in near real time. The technology could lead to higher fares on busy routes as airlines pack flights closer to capacity, but may also result in lower fares on off-peak and lower-demand routes. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com today by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro Plans.

21:29Whether you're planning a big tech event, launching a new campaign, or just stocking up on team gear, finding the right promotional products makes all the difference. 4imprint offers thousands of options, from on-trend apparel and premium drinkware to tech, totes, and giveaways, so you can find the right fit for any audience, purpose, or budget. You can customize it all, your logo, your message, your look, and many items come with no setup charge to help you save. And if you're really watching the bottom line, you'll find standout choices at every price point so you can make a real impact while staying on budget.

22:02Plus, you'll get expert help, fast turnaround times, and their 360-degree guarantee. So you can be 4imprint certain your order will arrive on time and look exactly right. Whatever your goal, 4imprint makes it easy to find your perfect promo match. Explore the possibilities today at 4imprint.com. 4imprint. 4certain. Let's talk about healthcare for a second. It doesn't always work the way people expect it to. If you've ever waited on a prescription refill or had a hard time getting the care you needed, you know the feeling. The system should just work better for everyone. That's exactly what the people at Optum are trying to do every day.

22:39They're a healthcare company linking patient care and pharmacy services and using data and technology to drive the whole system so care is connected, not complicated, for patients and providers. Things like making it easier to get care that looks at the whole person, from primary care doctors to mental health support and even in-home care, and then using technology to make sure they all work together. Technology designed to help doctors spend less time on busy work and more time with their patients. And those prescriptions? Optum is working to bring costs down, save patients money, and make it easier to get refills.

23:13Little by little, Optum is helping make healthcare work as one for everyone. Head to business.optum.com to see how. You may remember the story or you may have even seen the viral video of the now-famous D.C. resident who threw his Subway sandwich at an ICE officer, apparently after cursing about the federal takeover of the city. In addition to being fired from his job in the criminal division of the Justice Department, Sean Charles Dunn, a decorated Air Force veteran, has been charged with felony assault on a federal officer for throwing the sandwich. You can now also see a video of the rearrest of Dunn in a SWAT-style raid as more than a dozen federal agents with guns drawn converged on his apartment where he peacefully surrendered.

24:06That's because the White House has posted a professionally edited dramatic video of the arrest entitled Nighttime Routine, Operation Make D.C. Safe Again edition. Joining me is national security expert Bradley Moss, a partner at Mark's Aid. Brad, the White House is sending social media teams to go along with law enforcement and videotape FBI arrests. Does this violate the suspect's constitutional rights? The Supreme Court, about 20-something years ago, possibly 30-something years ago at this point, had addressed the idea of embedding media with law enforcement in the context of doing work. And the Supreme Court had basically overturned the policy, saying it was violative of people's First Amendment, Fifth Amendment, and Fourth Amendment protections.

25:00After all, you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. I mean, there was no legitimate basis to have news media embedded with law enforcement for that purpose. What we're seeing here with these social media influencers embedded with the FBI or whichever federal law enforcement agency is conducting these particular raids is even greater abuse of the process. in the sense that it's not even pretending to be about news gathering or objective journalism. This is straight up political hackery. These are social media influencers. These are media players with a very explicit partisan agenda designed not to gather facts, but to push the White House's specific narrative about what is transpiring.

25:47This entire process, as far as I'm concerned, is at least unethical, if not likely also illegal. What would be some of the possible legal challenges? You're almost certainly going to see at some point various pretrial motions for, you know, pretrial publicity issues tied to the inclusion of these social media influencers being embedded and publicizing this. There's going to be various actions taken by defense attorneys claiming their clients' privacy rights and constitutional rights were violated by use of these embedded individuals, how that will play out remains to be seen. I don't think the cases necessarily are thrown out simply based off that, but it is entirely possible it will cause some problems with prosecution of these cases.

26:38And if that does start occurring, if the courts start pushing back by way of these pretrial rulings, I think you'll see a shift in the policy from most of the agencies and from the White House, if for no other reason than it'd be undercutting their ability to do what they say they're trying to do, which is to identify, arrest and convict criminals. Could it also become part of the evidence of the defense at trial, perhaps demonstrating, you know, bad conduct by the arresting officers or that the defendant was being targeted in some way? Yes, all of it would be discoverable. All of it would be potentially exculpatory information that would have to be turned over to the criminal defendants and their counsel.

27:27All of it could be brought up, not only from a factual standpoint, depending on what the, you know, various footage shows, but also simply if there's a, you know, political or vindictive prosecution pretrial motion brought, this would all be information that these defendants would be entitled to obtain and to use in their own defense, which is why normally we don't do this. You know, you especially don't do it with these types of individuals following along in the cars because it poses so many problems for the ultimate actual prosecution of the crimes. And also, does it run against the Justice Department's policy to insulate criminal investigations from political influence?

28:13Yes. But of course, as we're seeing with everything in the Trump administration, policies, norms, customs mean nothing. Those are all, you know, the restrictions of the deep state and the weak people who didn't really want to fight, you know, crime and just wanted to look, you know, politically correct. So they don't care about any of that. The entirety of the actions and the entire purpose for promoting it in this way is to push completely partisan propaganda and to utilize these institutions of the state in order to push that propaganda, not necessarily even for a particular political party, but for one person, Donald Trump.

28:55The White House is owning it. A White House spokesman told Reuters that this is not a standard law enforcement posture because this is action directed by the president, deeming what is necessary and appropriate under the law. Yeah, well, unfortunately for Donald Trump, he doesn't decide what the law is, at least not in our current form. We'll see what the courts ultimately decide to just completely bend the knee and succumb to him. But at least at the moment in this constitutional republic, he is not the law. The courts decide what the law is. I mean, the FBI has allowed the media to do ride alongs.