Is wearing ACLU&#39;s &quot;Let People Vote Pin&quot; to the polling place considered electioneering? For context, the region I'm in is Sangamon County, Illinois. I ordered an ACLU pin from their shop. I expect it to arrive before November 3rd and I am excited to wear it at the polling place. I am, however, not certain if this is permitted under the law. I checked on the Electoral Judge's manual for clarification and I found this: Electioneering is defined as working for, against, or in the interest of a candidate, party, or proposition. Electioneering is not allowed in the polling place or within the campaign free zone (a distance of within 100 horizontal feet of the room). No one is permitted to wear a campaign button, display political literature, or engage in any political discussion within the restricted area. So I interpret this as putting me in the clear. The pin is unrelated to a candidate, party, or any proposition on my region's ballots. I wanted a concrete illustration of the law so I did a search and found within the Illinois Compiled Statutes: 10 ILCS 5/7-41 (c) No person shall do any electioneering or soliciting of votes on primary day within any polling place or within one hundred feet of any polling place, or, at the option of a church or private school, on any of the property of that church or private school that is a polling place. Election officers shall place 2 or more cones, small United States national flags, or some other marker a distance of 100 horizontal feet from each entrance to the room used by voters to engage in voting, which shall be known as the polling room. […] […] This subsection shall be construed liberally in favor of persons engaging in electioneering on all polling place property beyond the campaign free zone for the time that the polls are open on an election day. It's striking that electioneering isn't defined within the section, so I reviewed 10 ILCS 5/0.01 et seq. and found section 5/7-4. Definitions does not provide clarification about electioneering. Okay, maybe it’s a common sense term. I checked Black’s Law Dictionary 5th ed. and also found no definition of electioneering. Well maybe there's relevant case law? I reviewed West's Smith-Hurd ILCS Annotated and found there were no reported cases related to 10 ILCS 5/0.01 et seq. Last I checked West's IL Digest and found no relevant case law. There were surprisingly only 5 cases related to elections, none of which had anything to do with electioneering. So I imagine if a judge were to make a determination about whether displaying this pin within a polling place is electioneering, they would have to refer to a dictionary definition. From Webster's: electioneer verb elec·​tion·​eer | \ i-ˌlek-shə-ˈnir \ electioneered; electioneering; electioneers Definition of electioneer intransitive verb : to take an active part in an election specifically : to work for the election of a candidate or party Well this is incredibly unhelpful! While this pin is not working for the election of a candidate or party, my very presence in the polling place is taking an active part in an election. So in summary, would displaying this pin in a polling place be considered unlawful electioneering?
A poll worker was fired for making people turn a Black Lives Matter T-shirt inside out before voting. Since it does not advocate for a candidate, a political party or something explicitly on the ballot it is not electioneering in Tennessee.
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.
Entrapment is when a law-enforcement organization, or other parts of a government working with an LEO, entice a person to violate a law, and then prosecute the person for that violation, usually arresting the person first. Note that this definition of &quot;entrapment&quot; is US-specific, and does not apply in all other countries, perhaps not in any other county. But then, the question is tagged for California. As the school presumably does not intend any criminal prosecution, these actions are not legally entrapment, even if they are morally similar. Entrapment is not itself illegal even when it leads to criminal charges. That is to say, the police and prosecutor cannot be charged criminally for engaging in entrapment, nor sued for money damages by the person entrapped. However, entrapment can be a defense. If a person charged with crime can show that the crime only occurred because of entrapment, that will generally be grounds for acquittal. In addition, many people consider entrapment to be morally and ethically wrong. Generally, for a situation to be entrapment legally, a person must not only have an opportunity to break a law, but must be actively persuaded or enticed to do so, and the idea must come from the entrapper. However, the question says that the school &quot;has a strict policy against using social media during school time&quot;. If the students retain the laptops outside of school hours (as they may well do) it might be fine with the school to use social media during those times, so perhaps school authorities don't think a blocker is needed. In any case there is no legal requirement for the school to install a social media blocking program, even if use of the school-issued laptops to access social media is against school rules at all times. A parent could install a blocker, unless school rules for use of the laptops prohibit doing so. Of course, in later life, people will almost surely encounter situations where they could do something unlawful or forbidden, but should not. An employer might provide access to computers, but forbid using them to access porn, even though no blocking software is in place. It is also not a bad idea to check school-issued laptops for possible privacy violations. There have been cases where school IT departments or contractors routinely activated built-in web-cams, ostensibly as an anti-theft measure, but in fact observing private situations, including inside the student's home.
This is a super complex question and no one really knows the answer yet. Orin Kerr is probably the leading scholar on this question, and he generally argues that forced decryption of one's own device is not a Fifth Amendment violation. As I understand it (and oversimplifying by a lot), one key piece of his position is that requiring you to put in your password is a statement about your knowledge of the password itself, not about the contents of the machine into which you are entering it. And because your knowledge of the password for your own devices is presumed, an exception for "foregone conclusions" would leave this compulsion unprotected by the Fifth Amendment. You can read one of his explanations here. The Eleventh Circuit disagreed with that approach, but a California judge recently reached a conclusion similar to Kerr's. This will probably by a question for SCOTUS before too long.
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.
Assuming that all of these locations are in the same state, this is not an issue of federal law and is not governed by the U.S. Constitution. The geographical jurisdiction of state and local law enforcement officers is exclusively a matter of state law and has no single correct resolution. Different states handle the issue differently. Even if state law or the state constitution prohibited the arrest, this violation of state law or the state constitution, would not give rise to a federal claim for violation of civil rights under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, which may vindicate only federal rights, and could not form a basis for a collateral attack on a state court conviction in a federal court habeas corpus petition which is likewise limited to vindications of federal law rights. Any remedy would have to be secured in the state court system invoking state law rights (assuming for sake of argument that state law provides such a remedy), or in a diversity lawsuit in federal court applying state substantive law, if the defendant was from another state and the amount in controversy was in excess of $75,000.
Authorizing someone else to vote on your behalf (either at your direction or at their own discretion is called Proxy Voting. It is extremely common in elections within corporations and other organisations; it is extremely rare in governmental elections. Each state of the US determines the rules governing voting so there is no blanket answer. For California the answer is no - from Where and How to Vote the voter must cast their own ballot, either in person or by mail.
No, absent a state law to the contrary (and I am aware of no such law in this case) it is not illegal. Universities, as institutions, are permitted to express opinions on political issues, especially political issues that are pertinent to their operations. Indeed, they often do so. (Political candidates are arguably a different matter and certainly involve a more complex analysis to determine if the Johnson Amendment applies to a public university, but that isn't at issue in this case.) Governmental entities may not take religious positions, but may take political ones. Generally, even public colleges like Rutgers have this autonomy. Indeed, lobbying is frequently necessary for the survival of a public university - it has no choice but to lobby and a free hand regarding the issues upon which it does lobby.