so it's a week later. spent xmas w/ fam. i'm back in chinatown, having a citrine at a little cafe that's too hip to get food at and no where on maanhattan seems to have wifi. i mean there are 22 wifi networks showing but none of them connect, even to ask for a password.
not sure what's up with that. i found some art, a portrait of friedaa kahlo, so i will try to carry that home with me.
next stop cincinatti. there is a gay bar probably 10 blocks from here, but without wifi i can't bring up a map, so not going to try to find it at semirandom. i have 2 hours to kill before i get on the bus. it's snowinbg outside. the ride here from wilmington was $20, 95% negros. of course i got to sit next to the rapper.
finished the john grisham book i expected bill to get me and he did. the whistler. one guy, expendable, gets killed by the bad guys
but his widow gets $10 mill, the reward is another 10M, and the bad guys go to jail.
my next task is to write up the new michigan case in the style of a grisham novel. so i can do that next. if there are working outlets on the bus.
so i should go to the bus station early enough to charge up.

====

Once upon a time, a guy in michigan was sentenced to 30 days in jail for election fraud. today is friday december 30th 2016, so i guess that was tuesday.
Brandon Hall is his name. I'd written to him December 4th,and he wrote back on the 26th saying I'm interested! but then they took him off to jail. So he might not have gotten my 1- page reply yet.
I've figured out away I can email him in jail, that's innovative,and not too expensive. But I havent finished signing up yet.
His crime was forging some petition signatures for a guy running for judge. I in no way approve of that, but I won't say I didnt once do something similar, long before I became an election lawyer. I've also run for judge, getting only 25,000 votes, but that's another story.
I don't write like Grisham, and he's spent years building his audience, so it's not like I expect this to be publishable. But I need to write it down. And this time I'm starting writing somewhat early. I'm 20 years into this project, but it's less than a month since my path crossed with Brandon's.  Maybe this will go nowhere. But quite possibly we'll have an adventure,and I'll be able to write about as it happens. A Grisham novel is fiction,and it can start or end wherever he chooses. Mine's a true story, parts of which havent happened yet, so it might not turn into a simple three act of conflict, exposition, resolution.
Here at the hipster bar, there's a funky backbeat playing, and the crowd is thinning out enough I don't have to worry about taking up one of their bales. tables.
This is the unedited first draft, so typos happen.
Chapter II
Once upon a time, I was still sitting in a hipster bar a couple blocks off broadway, near the canal street office of the chinatown bus i'll be taking back to cincinnatti in an hour.
I've introduced the reader to the general idea that i've proposed some kind of project to Brandon Hall just as he was heading off to jail in Michigan for a month for election fraud.
But I need to go into more detail on what this project is.
But I write in a somewhat stream of counsciousness manner, like the story of jim blaine's grandfather's  ram, so there could be some more detours before i get to all that. 30 days in county plus probation isn't so bad, for his second offense. it could have been up to 5 years.
still, it all depends which county. i've done a weekend in boulder county, and it was an adventure and a vacation.
[this would be a good place for a footnote about the stonebreaker story.]
but 18 days in indianapolis general population was enough to give me a nervous breakdown, which is why i took a ten year break from the practice of law, and still haven't really gotten back to it. I was tortured, starved, and attacked while there.
so this project with Brandon could end up as another failure, or could be a kind of redemption.
i'm hoping Ottowa county MI isn't too bad.
Where was I? Brandon. Brandon Hall is a sincere energetic young man with an interesting history.
Like me, he's a blogger. Like me, he started young, and was about 20 when he won a seat on his local school board. I didnt run for the school board until I was 32, and I lost, although I got 400 votes per $1 spent. But by 20 I was campaign manager for a statewide race, after starting out doing lit drops at 10 and working the polls at 14, making radio ads with Senator Biden at 15.
Unlike me, he got caught embezzling some funds from the school. I dont know the full story on that one. I've never been convicted of anything more serious that contempt of court.
He hasn't won an election for himself since then. On the other hand, he might have been responsible for Trump winning Michigan. I can't prove that one way or the other, but he was active in the Trump machine which only won by 10,000 votes, the narrrowest margin in the country. Trump's wins in MI, WI, and PA gave him his victory over Clinton.
Brandon's main issue these past few years has involved a cross on a hill on some public property in Brandon's town in Michigan. He's gung ho for it, while separation of church and state folks like myself are opposed. I'm only philosophically opposed, not actively, but some atheist had sent the town council a letter, so it became an issue.
The cross came down, and then a flagpole with a cross-bar went up.   Sneaky. Its been a month ssince I read the articles on this andin some future draft I will hope to correct whatever details I've gotten wrong here. I'm just trying to set out a general background. I realize I still havent explained this project that I keep talking about. I'm almost there now. In 45 minutes, my bus comes.
Chapter III.
As  a single-issue zealot, Brandon's been involved with town council races. At one point he organized a recall campaign against a guy who didnt vote the way he wanted on this cross thing. Feisty, but not what caused the second of his three conflicts with the law.
What did is that he ran an ad in the local paper supporting a candidate, who maybe did vote the way he liked. It was that candidate who ratted out Brandon to the Michigan Election Board, filing a formal complaint in 2015. The board opened an investigation, and then dismissed the case. So it's that complaint that brings me into the picture. But I might neveer have hearrd about it if Brrandon wasn't gettting famous semifamous for other reasons.
Meanwhile, Brandon's petition signature forgery case was working it was though the courts.
The lower court had agreed with Brandon that these were misdemeanor counts, not felonies. But the Supreme Court of Michigan disagreed. So like me, Brandon has had a case go to his state Supreme Court.
My case - one where I was the lawyer, not the defendant - did not lose at the state supreme court, but later lost at the 7th circuit, when I got caught in th crossfire between two famous judges, Posner and Easterbook. But that will be a later chapter.
I am in no way involved in Brandon's forgery case,and it's over, and he's doing his time. But the one weakness I see in the case is that he's been convicted of ten counts, but I see an argument that they arose from a single set of operattive circumstances, and it may raise a double jeopardy/due process issue to treat them as 10 separate offenses. I haven't seen the case file, maybe he's already lost on that point, or just failed to raise it at the right time. I have about 10 minutes before I head back across the street to wait for the bus.
 So, first he gets this bad rap as an embezzler, second he gets convicted of 10 counts of forgery, but becaause that case went up to the high court and back, by the time he gos to trial, conviction, and jail, he'd had a role in the Trump campaign. So the headlines screamed,
"Trump Aide Convicted of Election Fraud!" right at a time when the media really wanted some dirt on the Trump campaign  but wasn't finding any.
Now, I wrote an obscure little election law blog at ballots.blogspot.com, in addition to some of my other blogs such as the one where I'm the Arbitrary Aardvark.
vark.blogspot.com. Between them I've gotten a measly almost 200,000 hits over the years, so basically they arre a failure, but it lets me feel i still havee ahand inthe game.
So I was reading and reposting these articles and caught some reference to the disclaimer issue and started doing a bit more digging, and ended up writing to brandon which eventuaally prompted his reply.
So now I'm ready to sign him up  as a client, draft a complaint, and take on Michigan's unconstitutional attempts at regulating political speech. But first I have to go catch this bus.
In the next chapter, I hope to go into a bit more detail about what it is that Michiagn is trying to do,and why I don't like it.

Chapter IV. 11:00 pm 12/30/16 on a bus.
Michigan tells people who run an ad or make a sign like "Vote for Smith!"
that the signs has to say "Vote for Smith! Paid for by [Brandon Hall], address, not authorized by candidate or committee." These are called disclaimers.
Hall's ad said that it was paid for by Hall (doublecheck, might have had committee info.) But it did not state that it was not authorized by committee. Some second bit of officialeze was also omitted - i'll have to doublecheck which.
The United States Supreme Court has addressed this issue at least 4 times.
In 1960, in Manuel Talley v California, the court held for the first time that disclaimer rules are unconstitional under the First Amendment, because anonymous speech is protected speech.
Talley had distributed a flier calling for the boycott of racist businesses. It had its group,s name on it, but not his own name and address. The court, 6-3, found that such a rule would chill speech.
However, lower courts did not always follow the decision, although they are supposed to do so. They split about 2-1 with most following Talley but with courts in Kentucky, N Carolina, and Tennessee, for example, going their own way and upholding disclaimer statutes.
These were later joined by courts in Chicago, Florida,and Connecticut, even after the Supreme Court ruled 3 more times.
Next up was Ohio Elections Comnmission v. McIntyre, 1995. The Ohio Supreme Court, as many courts have, confused the rules for disclaimers with the rules for disclosures, a separate but related topic. Under Buckley v Valeo, 1976, disclosures get an intermediate level of scrutiny, less strict than the usual first Amendment test.
Judge Wright dissented, outlining the ideas the U S Supreme Court would soon adopt. Mrs. McIntyre was an old lady who had run for the Westerville Ohio School board several times, and was part of gang that had fought off a tax increase twice before. Her story is told in Hanson v Westerville, which the Supreme Court declined to take.
(So she was not a lone pampleteer as later claimed.)
She had died by the time the case reached the Supreme Court, but her husband as executor kept the case going.
It's fuller title is Estate of McIntyre v Ohio Elections Commission.
The court, vote count?, found strict scrutiny applies, and rejected state interests in a people's right to know, or election integrity, or some third pretext.
Justice Scalia dissented, helpfully listing the 50 statutes the case called into question.
Justice Thomas concurred, rejecting strict scrutiny in favor of original intent of the founders.
Justice Ginsberg wrote in a concurrence "In for a calf is not in for a cow" suggesting that some future case might find an exception.
This happened in Citizens United, 2010?, in which the court, in dicta, seemed to create a new exception  for disclaimers for election speech by corporations, which had previously been altogether banned in Austin v MI Chmber of Commerce. The court apparently found disclaimers rather than a ban to be a less burdensome alternative.
The court next discussed these issues in Victoria Buckley v. ACLF. Buckley was the Colorado Secretary of State. Plaintiffs included Paul Grant of Grant v Meyer.
ACLF had a variety of concurring and dissenting opinions, but all 9 agreed disclaimer rules are unconstitutional.
The case involved whether circulators of a legalize weed petition in Colorado had to wear name badges, and had to file forms with the secretary of state. The case makes clear distinctions between disclaimers, unconstitutional under Talley and McIntyre, and disclosure, constitutional under Valeo.
The next case to discuss these issues was Watchtower Bible v Village of Stratton. Because of the right to anonymous speech, Jehovah's Witnesses could not be required to register in advance before going door to door.
I have already mentioned Citizen's United, which may have creted a narrow exception for election speech by corporations.
While these are the main cases on the right to anonymous speech, there are other cases that more generally support the idea that the government may not compel the content of speech.
Riley, Tornillo, Wooley are examples.  I know I'm forgetting one.
So by now it should seem simple. The Supreme Court has spoken, set out the rules, and now these rules should be followed by lower courts, legislatures, and election officials, right?
Actually it doesn't work that way.
Lower courts do as they please, ignoring supreme court decisions they dont care for. They are immune, and face no consequences for getting it wrong.
Legislators similarly hav utter immunity and routinely violate their oaths of office to uphold the constitution.
For the bureaucrats in the trenches, it is almost this good.
A doctrine called qualified immunity protects them from being sued.. some of the time.
So, it turns out, state and local governments simply ignore supreme court decisions much of the time, as do judges. because they can get away with it.
chapter 5.
once upon a time, it wasn't new years eve after all, turns out december has 31 days. it's 12 30. we are somewhere in PA. i have maybe 3 hours battery life left.
i'm next to the bath room. strong piss smell. i think the heat came on.
so, brandon. he gets this warning letter. then he gets another letter saying he messed up but they are closing the case anyway. wifi not working so i cant quote exact text but i've seen it. it is enough, in my opinion, to confer standing. and i've won a few landmark standing decisions.
not anybody anytime can sue over some government action that annoys them. the courts require "standing"; some personal involvment in the controversy.
actually not every state has this requirement, but we are probably looking at federal courts. i haven't done my homework yet for michigan.
but i think brandon has standing, so he's my guy, if he wants to go forward. his situation helps illustrate the ridiculous lengths the statutes will go to micromanage speech.
maybe i should do a chapter on stewart v taylor.
once upon a time it was 1996 and i was running  for center township advisory board in indianapolis. i had moved to the city in 1994 and what i always do is go to city hall and introduce myself and offer to serve on any boards or commissions they have vacancies for. i've been on bicentennial and energy and environment and trails committees at various times over the past 40 years. but in indianapolis a guard with a gun told me to go away. so i ran for the center township board. i won the gop primary and was cross-nominated by the libertarian party, a trick i like called "fusion". it's mostly a new york thing, but crops up here and there as well. the district was solidly dem, so my only chance of winning to to build a multiparty coalition. didnt turn out, but it was worth a shot. in 1994 kevin fleming, a libertarian, had won the school board race i'd lost 2 years before. i look for winnable niches.
i digress. so there i was was, winning the primary, when they took down one of the signs i had made for 38 cents a piece the night before at kinko's print shop. it's called fedex now. i think i made 20 of them.
so i told them, you really don't want to do that. better call your lawyer.
so they called the lawyer and i told him you really dont want to do that,and he said well we're doing it anyway. that was my introduction to doub webber. not a bad guy. we get along, now. so i get on the internet and find this case i remember freematt talking about. freematt, a former client, is dead now. gun nut, fatso, libertarian, from ohio. hated kasich, thought he was soft on gun issues. Estate of Mcintyre v Ohio Elections Commission. see above. that was a 1995 case and this was 1996.
so i send doug webber a copy and tell him to write me a  nice lette rof apology and i'll let it drop. he doesn't, i don't, so i find  lawyer and sue the county judge tell us we need to sue the state too, which was wrong, but what they heck, so we amend the complaint to sue the statte election board. asking for damages of course. i'm not in this for my health.
tuskarorra tunnel! or one of those on the PA turnpike. maybe we are past breezewood? ticonderoga? kittainy? i would know it if i heard it.
allegheny, i think that's it.
so we win in court, great opinion saying mcintyre controlls, then tthey dont want  to pay us. i wanted $17K but let my lawyer talk us down to $7K. of which my share was 2.5k.
and then the doublecross - next year they pass the same statute all over agaain, IC 3-9-3-2.5 this time. minor irrelevant changes. i sue again, forming tavel and stewart public interest law firm to handle such cases, but it goes nowhere, and dr tavel and i bicker and after 3 years he pulls the plug. At this point in time i have 6 sources of stress in my life and i end up having my first of 2 nervous breakdowns  and lose all my money.
Meanwhie we go up to the 7th circuit and win round 1,and go to the indiana supreme court aand win round 2,and go back to the 7th curcuit and lose round 3, in  case called majors v abell. i'm working on the supreme court appeal when i get falsely accused of a crime, spend 3 weeks in county, get tortured there, hae another nervous breakdown, have to take my brief printing money to make bail, and end up being a day late in filing the cert petition.
i stopped practicing law for 10 years after that. i know i can't function while non compos mentes. i have focused on staying calm, earning a living without having to have an actual job, and trying to rebuild. it's going slowly. i lost 4 rounds of voter ID pro se litigtion. i have my name on an amicus brief to the supreme court about voter ID, but they ignored our arguments.  i wasn't expecting this chaapter to have all this in it, but i get caaught up sometimes telling the story. i'm telling it as something from the past, but grisham would tell it as it happned, to build suspense. i'm less of a writer. so i fell into what my old friend harry browne called, in "how i found freedom in an unfree world", the lawsuit trap. i could ave let them take my sign down and gone on with my life.
but i saw this as something i could fight for, win and make money at,and that doing so would build my skills reputation and connections. didnt work out as planned. at the time, i was oblivious to the substantial mental health challenges i would be facing. what i've learned is that i dont handle stress well. so i've had to re-arrange my life to the point where i stay out of high stress situations.
anyway, in these recent years of not practicing, i've kept an ear out for cases like brandon's. a couple years ago i started going to meetings of the marion county bar association, to see if i'd want to be a lawyer again. i spent about $1000 to catch up on CLE courses I'd let slide,and got my dues caught up,and I've been readmitted for over a year, but still havent filed a new case yet.
so brandon's case is a possibility. not yet  a certainty. something i'm lookingg into. 1:35 am 12/31.