Can I photograph strangers voting at a polling station? Can a photo of strangers voting in a polling station be taken and put on Facebook if their ballot is not showing how they voted. Specifically in Texas ?
According to Texas law, Election code 61.014(b): A person may not use any mechanical or electronic means of recording images or sound within 100 feet of a voting station. However, the punishment appears to be only this: The presiding judge may require a person who violates this section to turn off the device or to leave the polling place.
The direct answer is &quot;no&quot; and the indirect answer is &quot;yes&quot;, that is, your way of putting the matter diverges significantly from how the Bill of Complain puts the matter. The claim is that the defendant states violated the Electors Clause, the Equal Protection Clause, and the Due Process Clause. Texas claims that there is an injury in fact, citing various SCOTUS rulings e.g. Wesberry v. Sanders which says that No right is more precious in a free country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws under which, as good citizens, we must live. Other rights, even the most basic, are illusory if the right to vote is undermined See the argument in the brief for more legal rhetoric. There can be no question that one state can sue another; equally clearly, the plaintiff must show actual harm and not just annoyance. New Jersey v. New York is a case involving a question of equity, not the federal constitution, but there is no legal principle to the effect that one state cannot sue over a constitutional harm rather than an equitable harm. See the brief p. 65 ff. The court does not require that there be exact precedential analogs (otherwise, Roe v. Wade would have turned out differently), what's required is simply that there be reasonable logical steps: SCOTUS gets to decide what is reasonable (or it can decline to decide).
The situation in Texas is unclear. It is worth mentioning Texas as a state where the law may require statutory authorization in order to copyright state documents. Although the statute does not explicitly state such as a requirement, it can be inferred from an attorney general opinion. At a bare minimum, the Department of Health, the State Preservation Board, the Water Development Board, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and county governments all have statutory authority to hold copyrights. In your specific case, there's an additional complication. Something is only a work of the State of Texas if one of the following is true: 1) it was created by a government employee as part of their job duties, or 2) it was a work for hire. It's quite likely that neither of the above is true for a student newspaper, rendering the question of Texas-owned copyrights irrelevant.
I am presuming at this point that no one is &quot;the President elect&quot; in the eyes of the Constitution until the electoral college votes in December. In the 20th amendment, the beginning of the sentence is : If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died... So, that means January 20th, according to section 1 of the same amendment. At that time, not only have the electors already voted since at least a month, but Congress supposedly has certified the election of the dead guy and his running mate 14 days prior. That's the time when someone is or isn't president-elect in regards to this amendment. That's for your first sentence. Now for the rest, and taking your example of the 2020 election, if Biden had died between November and December, the options available to the Electors in each state are different. Some will be able to vote for someone else than Biden for president, possibly someone named by the DCCC, but many Electors in different states will not have that option. The way I see it, there's two options. Either there are no (or almost no) faithless Electors, then the Biden/Harris ticket gets certified on January 6th (what could possibly go wrong 👀), then pursuant to the 20th amendment Harris gets sworn in as the President on January 20th. Or, a lot of the Electors who can legally be faithless, get faithless, then the democratic electoral votes are split, no ticket gets to 270, which triggers a contingent election by the House of Reps (and the Senate selects the VP). Who they elect is anyone's guess. So, if you allow me a bit of presumption as to what you meant, you seemed to imply that Electors voting for a dead guy would be absurd, but in fact it seems like it would be the safest scenario for their party.
No, the minor cannot be in violation either being on the property of residence or the sidewalk in front of that property. Montgomery County Curfew Law: Section 1-2 (Offenses): (a) A minor commits an offense if he remains in any public place or on the premises of any establishment within the unincorporated areas of the county during curfew hours. Section 1-3 (Defenses): (a) It is a defense to prosecution under Section 1-2 that the minor was: (1) Accompanied by the minor’s parent or guardian; (2) On an errand at the direction of the minor’s parent or guardian, without any detour or stop; (3) In a motor vehicle involved in interstate travel; (4) Engaged in an employment activity, or going to or returning home from an employment &gt;activity, without any detour or stop; (5) Involved in an emergency; (6) On the sidewalk abutting the minor’s residence or abutting the residence of a next-door neighbor if the neighbor did not complain to the police department about the minor’s presence; (7) Attending an official school, religious, or other recreational activity supervised by adults and sponsored by Montgomery County, a civic organization, or another similar entity that takes responsibility for the minor, or going to or returning home from, without any detour or stop, an official school, religious, or other recreational activity supervised by adults and sponsored by Montgomery County, a civic organization, or another similar entity that takes responsibility for the minor; (8) Exercising First Amendment rights protected by the United States Constitution, such &gt;as the free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, and the right of assembly; and (9) Married, had been married, or had disabilities of minority removed in accordance with Chapter 31 of the Texas Family Code. (b) It is a defense to prosecution under Section 1-2 (c) that the owner, operator, or employee of an establishment promptly notified the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department, or the appropriate Constable’s office, that a minor was present on the premises of the establishment during curfew hours and refused to leave. Your property is not public, so you cannot be in offense of this ordinance being on your private property. You also cannot be in violation being on your sidewalk (or a neighbors sidewalk if that neighbor has not called police on the offender).
BAD idea It is one thing to upload the phonebook and associated pictures for use of the owner of the phonebook. It isn't a fair use of the phonebook pictures - and you might not have a license anyway, as some people associate photos with numbers that they don't have a license to associate with anyway. But what if instead of a photo of the person, the first photo someone associated with the person is a photo of something like... crack cocaine, a photo of someone in a very compromising situation, just genitals, or some other thing that is just as tasteless or possibly criminal to share? In that case, your company is possibly committing defamation, and in case sharing or possessing of the image itself is illegal, your company is now the actor and liable. Depending on the content of the picture, distribution of pornographic material (possibly even underage material of that sort) could be up that alley just as much as hate speech through symbols, usage of banned symbols (such as swastikas in Gernamy) and many many others.
In the United States, it does not matter how you save any evidence; the other side will essentially always be permitted to question its authenticity. Even if they don't question it, a judge or jury would still be free to do so. That said, the standard means of saving this kind of evidence would be to make a screengrab or print it to PDF, and to attach that to an affidavit in which you swear that the image is an authentic representation of the content of the web page as of whatever date and time. If you want something that is harder to question, you could also ask some independent third party to do so. There are, for instance, archiving services like archive.org and perma.cc that will copy a page and store it indefinitely, largely removing the question of whether you might have manipulated the page in any way.
Yes, so long as you are still a US citizen, it does not matter if you no longer maintain residence in the United States. If you no longer have any sort of residence that can be claimed as a current residence, you simply register at whatever the last residence you used was when you lived in the United States (even if someone else lives there now). You would then have an absentee ballot mailed to you overseas. However, if you don't maintain any sort of residence in the United States, you will only be eligible to vote for federal offices (president, senate, house). You won't be allowed to vote in state or local elections. The keywords you'll need for voting are: UOCAVA, which is a program that allows for easier voting overseas (in some cases the ballot can actually be emailed to you and you are only responsible for printing it out, filling it out, and mailing it back). FPCA, which is the form you fill out. It actually doubles as a registration and an absentee ballot request, so you only have to fill out one form. The absentee request is good for all elections in the calendar year it is submitted, so you only have to fill it out once for both the primary and the general.