We’ve been telling you a lot about the Republican National Lawyers Association and the election law seminars they hold throughout the country. We had an idea of what the seminars were about, pieced together from who the featured speakers were. But now we have a much, much better idea.
Thanks to the Florida Bar, TPMMuckraker took a look at the agenda for an election law seminar put on by the RNLA on Sept. 10 at a Disney resort. The agenda, which is part of the RNLA’s application to have the seminar count for Continuing Legal Education credit for attending lawyers, includes bios of all the speakers, and a list of the lessons given.
You can take a look at the whole thing here.
The sessions, not surprisingly, focus a lot on Election Day activities: poll-watching, electioneering, voting machine problems, provisional ballots and Election Day litigation.
Those are the same issues that many of the RNLA’s past speakers — people like John Fund and Eric Eversole — are known for discussing when they sound the alarm of voter fraud.
At the Florida event, two speakers who were outwardly political were Rick Scott, the former hospital mogul and current candidate for governor, and Pam Bondi, candidate for attorney general. They aren’t included on the agenda because their speeches didn’t count as part of the continuing education. As one speaker who spoke about Election Day law, Sarah Rumpf, pointed out on her blog, the two were at the hotel because the Republican Party of Florida’s quarterly meeting was being held there the same weekend.
As for the educational speakers at the Florida event, they included the political — like Sean Cairncross, the general counsel for the NRSC and Ariana Fajardo, who works for the Miami-Dade GOP Legal Team and is a co-chair of the RNLA’s Florida chapter. A handful worked for former Gov. Jeb Bush; one worked on the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign; and another served as the Republican Party of Florida’s general counsel. Yet others had private practices specializing in different areas of the law.
The sessions themselves (held in the “Nutcracker Suite” in the Disney Contemporary Resort) seem substantive: Introductions to federal and state election laws, rules about poll-watchers, details on recounts like Bush v. Gore and Coleman v. Franken, etc. And much of the material cited and used in the sessions, like FEC regulations, was straight law.
There were some giveaways to the Republican nature of the event. A session on military voters — something the right wing has been hammering the Obama administration over — included a paper by Hans von Spakovsky and Eric Eversole, as well as a letter that Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder suggesting that the DOJ wasn’t doing enough to ensure troops overseas would be able to vote.
There were also memos written by Cleta Mitchell and Charles Bell, two high-ranking officials in the RNLA, and other documents written specifically for the seminar — including a six page report titled, “Cast of Characters at the Polling Place on Election Day: A Survey of Florida Law on Who is Allowed Where and When on Election Day.”
