Faced with eroding federal protections, some states have tried to shore up voting rights. They have passed their own voting rights acts, banned partisan gerrymandering, and expanded the franchise. But their efforts are facing legal challenges as well, this time from the right, raising fresh questions as to what strategies can most effectively strengthen democracy.

Heading into this new political era, Bolts has identified eight legal battles that are likely to shape voting rights in 2025.

These cases will affect election rules locally, from redistricting in Florida and Louisiana to the future of mail ballots in Mississippi and the fate of new protections in New York. But their effects will also ripple nationwide, as other states eye how they may further buttress or cut down on voting.

1. Will a redistricting case out of Louisiana weaken the VRA?

Conservatives are pursuing a multi-pronged attack to eliminate what is left of the Voting Rights Act. Since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions in 2023, conservatives have objected with renewed vigor to the longstanding approach of considering race in redistricting to create minority-majority districts, arguing that race-based districting is unconstitutional.

Their effort is coming to a head this year in a blockbuster Supreme Court case that is centered around Louisiana’s congressional map.

After the 2020 census, Louisiana legislators approved a new congressional map that included only one Black-majority district, stretching from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. A lawsuit countered that this map diluted the power of Black voters, and that the Voting Rights Act required two Black-majority districts. After lengthy proceedings, the Fifth Circuit of Appeals sided with plaintiffs in late 2023 and ordered that a new map be drawn by January 2024. 

The legislature abided by the ruling, creating a second majority-Black district that goes from Baton Rouge in central Louisiana to Shreveport in the far northwest corner. The district elected Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, in November.

But a group of mostly white voters, who describe themselves as “non-African American,” now wants to throw the new map out. They claim the legislature impermissibly relied on race to draw the districts, violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Two Trump-appointed judges ruled last year that the map was likely unconstitutional and struck it down, though the Supreme Court stepped in and allowed it to be used in the 2024 election. 

The Supreme Court will hold hearings on this case in the spring of 2025. The justices will decide whether Louisiana’s new map survives by the end of their session in late June.

Complicating matters: The state of Louisiana is ostensibly defending the new map, but voting rights advocates have accused the state of deliberately undermining its own case. Louisiana officials already raised eyebrows last year when they chose to draw a new majority-Black district that bore a striking resemblance to a district that was struck down in the 1990s. Civil rights groups had pushed for a more compact design they deemed legally safer, and they suspected Republicans had different intentions. 

If the Supreme Court sides with the plaintiffs, it could gut Section 2 of the VRA, which shields minority-majority districts. Or, the court may introduce new restrictions on factoring in race in redistricting. Even if it doesn’t strike down Section 2, this would raise a host of new questions about its implementation and the viability of minority-majority districts nationwide. In either case, it would spell major trouble for Cleo Fields’s future in Congress.

2. How will courts treat new state-level Voting Rights Acts?

As the U.S. Supreme Court has trimmed the federal VRA, some states have stepped in to pass VRAs of their own. Though details vary depending on the state, they frequently go much further than federal law in safeguarding fairness in redistricting and access to the ballot. 

But these laws have sparked conservative challenges of their own. Last fall, a superior court judge in New York struck down the state’s VRA, concluding that it violated the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

The case is now working its way through New York’s appeals process, an important test of the viability of state VRAs as an alternative to the federal law. Other VRAs have fared better in their own state’s courts so far, but still more states have adopted these laws in recent years (including New Mexico in 2023 and Minnesota last year), creating new battlegrounds to watch. 

3. Will mail ballots still be afforded a grace period to arrive?

In 18 states, mail ballots can trickle into election offices after Election Day, as long as they’ve been postmarked by Election Day. The approach helps people vote by mail without needing to worry about possible delays in delivery, but it also lengthens election counts, and Republicans have accused it without evidence of facilitating voter fraud. 

In a bombshell ruling in October, a panel of conservative federal judges threw this longstanding practice into question. The case will continue in 2025 and possibly create new obstacles to mail voting.

The Republican National Committee and the Mississippi Republican Party last year challenged Mississippi’s rule, which allows ballots to arrive up to five days after Election Day, arguing that it conflicts with a federal law that sets the date of the election. Three Trump-appointed judges on the Fifth Circuit agreed. They ruled that “ballots must be both cast by voters and received by state officials” by the “day of the election,” though they did not apply their holding to the 2024 elections. Several voter groups have asked the full Fifth Circuit to hear the case; their appeal may end up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, which could swat away the ruling. 

But the Supreme Court could also apply the rule nationwide, affecting all of the states that allow ballots to arrive after Election Day. This would risk disenfranchising thousands of voters. Administrative delays and errors in sending ballots out are common enough, and a requirement that ballots be received by Election Day would put voters at the mercy of how quickly the U.S. Postal Service operates. Trump has evoked the prospect of privatizing USPS, which could add further complications.

4. Will GOP states succeed at criminalizing voter assistance?

GOP-run states have passed new bans in recent years on civic organizations helping people vote. They’ve made it harder to provide assistance with registration, to fill out requests for mail ballots, and to collect filled-out ballots.

Just last year, Alabama adopted a law that imposes lengthy prison sentences on paid organizers who help people vote by mail. A new Missouri law similarly restricts assisting people with absentee ballots and with voter registration. And Florida barred non-citizens from assisting with voter registration efforts.

These bans on voter assistance now all face legal tests. All three suffered early defeats in 2024; the Florida and Alabama laws were suspended or struck down by a federal district court, and a state court judge blocked Missouri’s. But proponents of the bans have appealed to salvage the laws. These cases in 2025 will shape how similar restrictions evolve around the country.

5. Will lifetime disenfranchisement survive two lawsuits in Virginia?

Youngkin has made Virginia one of the harshest states in the nation when it comes to restoring the voting rights of people with criminal convictions. Two years ago, he rescinded policies put in place by his predecessors and brought back a lifetime ban on voting for anyone convicted of a felony. 

The ACLU of Virginia and other groups have filed an unusual lawsuit in response: They claim that Youngkin’s decision violates the Virginia Readmission Act, the Reconstruction-era federal law that allowed Virginia to rejoin the United States. In an effort to limit schemes to exclude Black residents, Congress in 1870 restricted the range of felonies that Virginia can use to strip people of the right to vote. Yet, Virginia today disenfranchises people who’ve been convicted of any felony whatsoever; the practice disproportionately affects Black Virginians.

The case is now poised to go to trial in federal court, after the Fourth Circuit greenlit the lawsuit in December. Jared Davidson, a co-counsel for the plaintiff, has said the case is a “milestone in terms of ensuring that the promises and guarantees of the Reconstruction Congress are finally fulfilled and honored by the state of Virginia.”

Virginia’s felony disenfranchisement rules are also the target of a separate lawsuit, this one brought by George Hawkins, a Virginian profiled by Bolts in 2023 who expected to regain his voting rights until Youngkin cut down his hopes. The lawsuit alleges that Virginia’s new rules violate the First Amendment. A district court ruled in favor of the state last year, and this case currently sits with the Fourth Circuit.

If courts strike down Virginia’s approach in either case this year, it may expand the franchise just in time for the state’s elections that will decide, among other offices, Youngkin’s successor. 

6. How will eligible voters be affected by measures targeting noncitizens?

Donald Trump and his allies have relentlessly spread the false claim that non-citizens are illegally voting in significant numbers in U.S. elections, and Republican state officials have taken a range of actions in response. Arizona and New Hampshire have passed laws requiring that voters provide proof of citizenship at the time of registration; the rule is tripping up many people who are citizens but lack the proper documentation. And in the final stretch of the 2024 election, several GOP-led states purged their voter rolls, claiming they were getting rid of alleged non-citizens. But the purges affected U.S. citizens who were eligible to vote. 

This issue is sure to keep grabbing legal headlines in 2025. 

Voting rights advocates have battled Arizona’s law for years, pointing out that the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, shields voters from needing to prove their citizenship. The Supreme Court last summer allowed parts of the law to be enforced in the 2024 elections, but the case remains alive in the Ninth Circuit. In September, voting rights advocates also filed a similar suit against the New Hampshire law. Should federal courts end up ruling that the NVRA authorizes proof-of-citizenship requirements, it may open the floodgate to similar laws in other states. Republicans in Congress have also signaled this will be a priority for them at the federal level.

And Virginia’s upcoming elections will be fought in the shadow of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s decision to order a big voter purge last summer. Youngkin issued his order 90 days before the presidential race, even though the NVRA bars “systematically” purging voters within 90 days of a federal election. A lawsuit to block his order saw some early success but, in a shock order, the U.S. Supreme Court intervened and allowed the purges to continue with no explanation. 

The case will still be heard in lower court to determine the legality of Youngkin’s purge. The result may set important precedent, not just for purges in other parts of the country, but also for how Youngkin himself acts in the lead-up to Virginia’s gubernatorial race in November.

7. Will courts allow noncitizens to vote in New York’s local elections?

Across the country, even as nativist rhetoric has amped up, some municipalities have gone in the opposite direction: They’ve allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections, with the idea of giving them a voice in the decisions closest to them. 

But conservatives have sued to stop these laws, arguing that they dilute the political power of citizens. Federal law does not prohibit allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections, so these lawsuits are usually playing out in state court. San Francisco, Washington, D.C, and multiple towns in Vermont have managed to implement this reform in recent years despite litigation to stop them. 

But with just months to go before New York City’s municipal elections this summer, this reform remains stuck in the country’s most populous city. The city council passed an ordinance to allow noncitizens to vote in its local elections in late 2021, but a local judge struck it down in the spring of 2022 and an appeals court affirmed that ruling last year. The city council has since appealed the decision to the state’s highest court, but there’s been no development since.

8. Will Florida judges destroy protections against gerrymandering?

Floridians in 2010 embraced redistricting reform. They approved two constitutional amendments that barred partisan and racial gerrymandering and set up other measures to force lawmakers to draw fair maps. After GOP lawmakers largely ignored those requirements, the state supreme court in 2015 struck down their maps for violating the 2010 measures. Significantly, this produced a new Black-majority congressional district that connected Tallahassee to Jacksonville in north Florida, which elected Democrat Al Lawson in 2016.

Urged on by Governor Ron DeSantis, Republicans in 2022 adopted new aggressive gerrymanders and eliminated Lawson’s seat. And this decade, the voting rights groups that are challenging the maps are faced with a judiciary that has veered sharply to the right during DeSantis’ tenure. This has left the Fair District Amendments on the brink of irrelevance.

The Florida Supreme Court heard a lawsuit against the state’s new congressional map in September. The plaintiffs argued that the state diluted Black political representation by eliminating the Black-majority district in North Florida, in violation of the 2010 amendments. “Under Florida precedent from last decade, this is an open and shut case,” Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, told NPR at the time.

Instead, Chief Justice Carlos Muniz, a DeSantis appointee, raised the prospect that the 2010 Fair Districts Amendments might be unconstitutional altogether—and that the court might strike it down. 

While this court always appeared unlikely to strike down the legislature’s map, striking down the fair districting requirements entirely would be another matter. There would be no more protection against partisan gerrymandering in the Florida Constitution, allowing Republicans going forward to freely gerrymander without even the feeble threat of state court intervention.

Honorable mentions

There can be no exhaustive list of the challenges that await democracy in 2025, and there are plenty of other state-specific legal battles that are already brewing.

In the final days of 2024, North Carolina Republicans passed legislation that upended election administration, stripping the Democratic governor of his authority over election boards and transferring that power to an office held by a Republican; Democrats have signaled they will sue over these changes. Wisconsin awaits a supreme court decision on the fate of Meagan Wolfe, the state’s top election administrator whom Republicans hope to fire. And today, Pennsylvania’s supreme court said it will decide whether mail ballots that have not been dated should count; the state has a complex legal landscape when it comes to mail voting.

And the upcoming legislative sessions may create new sources of litigation if states pass laws that affect voting rights. For instance, an Idaho lawmaker just introduced legislation to make it harder to pass ballot instance; the state supreme court struck down a prior round of restrictions on direct democracy at the beginning of this decade.

The post On Voting Rights, Eight Legal Battles to Watch in 2025  appeared first on Bolts.

State Public Defender Rémy Starns holds a monthly virtual gathering with the lawyers in charge of Louisiana’s 42 public defender offices. “Coffee with Rémy,” as he calls these meetings, has become more tense in recent months as Starns rolls out pay cuts.

Louisiana passed legislation in March giving Governor Jeff Landry, a Republican who took office in January, more command over the state’s public defense system. Starns quickly told district defenders in charge of indigent defense across the state to start bracing for cuts to their pay—a reversal of raises the state had issued for defenders with basement-level salaries just a year ago. 

During Starns’ first meeting with public defenders under the new law, which gives him more control over the state public defense budget, he warned of the cuts on the horizon—to the point of even encouraging district defenders to open private practices to supplement their income, as the Louisiana Illuminator first reported last month. The axe finally fell during Starns’ meeting with district defenders last week, when he announced salary cuts of up to 51 percent and a new scheme for paying district defenders. 

In his meeting with district defenders, Starns insisted that he’s simply redistributing the state’s public defense budget “with goals of getting the most money, the most resources in the courtroom.” But public defenders and experts in indigent defense say Starns has provided few details on how he will accomplish that. Instead, his new plan stretches an already-underfunded system, and could jeopardize the quality of representation for the 146,000 people in Louisiana who need legal aid each year, they say. 

Starns’ plan removes prohibitions on private practice for district defenders and boosts their pay if they take on their own cases in addition to managing their regional public defense offices. The plan also ties district defender pay to fees that clients must pay their office whenever they’re convicted, which critics say provides an incentive for offices to encourage quick convictions. 

“When you have a system that incentivizes lawyers to lose, that’s a problem,” said Will Snowden, a Loyola University New Orleans law professor and former public defender. “How can any poor person reasonably believe that their public defender has their best interests at heart?”

Louisiana has long struggled with providing adequate representation for the roughly 85 percent of people accused of a crime who are too poor to afford a lawyer. Making the problem more dire, the state has the highest rate of incarceration in the U.S., and Black people are locked up at a much higher rate than white people. But public defenders, experts, and a member of the former board that oversaw legal aid told Bolts that problems across the system were consequences of a lack of reliable funding, not the people who oversaw it. 

Landry, who in his first months as governor has pushed for and enacted dozens of bills that will increase traffic into Louisiana’s criminal legal system, also championed the law giving himself more say over indigent defense in the state. The legislation disbanded the previous 11-member board that decided the state public defense budget. In its place, it gave more control over that funding to Landry and created a new nine-member oversight board with less power over how the state spends its public defense dollars.

The legislation also cut money to programs that defend people against capital punishment; Landry, a death penalty supporter, has already signed legislation to resume executions in the state. 

“This is the wild west now, and it’s never really been tame,” Jean Faria, Louisiana’s state public defender from 2008 to 2013, told Bolts of Landry’s newfound authority.

Landry and Starns did not respond to requests for comment or questions for this story.

During the debates over the bill, Landry insisted the changes were needed to improve indigent defense. “The Louisiana Public Defender system lacks accountability and has strayed from providing defense and moving criminal cases,” he said of the bill at the opening of the legislative session. “We propose to increase transparency and refocus the mission of providing defenders and support personnel for much needed efficiency.”

But experts in indigent defense told Bolts that the new law comes with few safeguards to protect against Landry or future governors abusing the public defense budget. They say the legislation removed a firewall of oversight that shielded the public defense system from the governor’s influence. One lawyer worried public defenders in charge of legal aid offices throughout the state will either quit or be forced to provide subpar representation because of salary reductions. Others say the legislation doesn’t fix existing problems with how Louisiana administers legal aid. 

“I don’t see how there’s a way to look at this bill with honesty and in good faith and see that it will actually do anything to improve indigent defender services in the state,” Susan Meyers, a senior staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center who worked on a 2017 lawsuit over Louisiana’s representation of poor people, told Bolts.

Just over a decade ago, Hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana’s indigent defense system. 

Louisiana is the only state in the country to primarily depend on money from court fees and traffic tickets to finance legal aid, including a $45 fee their clients have to pay if they’re convicted. When the money disappeared in the wake of Katrina, so did New Orleans’ public defenders. Prior to the storm, the office had 42 attorneys and six investigators. Afterwards, those numbers shrunk to six attorneys and a single investigator. Thousands of people jailed in the Orleans Parish Prison when the storm hit remained locked up for more than a year without talking to a defense lawyer. 

As it became clear that the state didn’t have the infrastructure to ensure that people were guaranteed their constitutional right to a lawyer, the legislature in 2007 passed a law aimed at bolstering public defense. The bill, known as the Louisiana Public Defender Act, created a state fund to supplement money coming in from tickets and court fees. The bill also established an 11-member board to oversee public defenders and administer that new pot of money. This board, called the Louisiana Public Defender Board (LPDB), consisted of law professors, advocates, retired judges, and lawyers from across the state who were appointed by a variety of entities. It additionally created a scheme to make sure that people facing the death penalty received qualified lawyers with specialized training in handling those complicated cases.  

Experts lauded the changes. “They recognized they had a problem, they addressed it, they fixed it and that’s something I just think is great,” David Carroll, who at the time worked at the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, told NPR in 2007. (Caroll now leads the Sixth Amendment Center, a nonprofit working on improving indigent defense.) 

When the original plan to assign lawyers to capital murder cases didn’t work out, the LPBD instead decided to contract with specialized nonprofits to perform death penalty work from trial to post-conviction appeals. “It made all the difference in the world,” said Faria, the former chief public defender, who later served on the LPBD coordinating capital defense.  

Fewer people were unfairly sent to death row in a state where four out of five death sentences have been overturned, contributing to the highest reversal rate and number exonerations per capita in the country.

While the 2007 legislation created a blueprint for the successful administration of public defense, it failed to solve the funding problem. Law enforcement agencies continued to receive outsized funding compared to lawyers representing people who couldn’t afford a lawyer. In 2015, for example, New Orleans taxpayers paid $355 per capita to the New Orleans Police Department, $17 per capita to the district attorney, and $2.40 per capita for public defense, wrote former Chief Defender Derwyn Bunton in an op-ed. 

By 2016, 33 of 42 public defender offices across the state were forced to restrict services at some level, with many offices placing people on months-long waitlists because funding deficits had made them unable to take on new clients. 

“I think it’s fair to say everyone thinks there was problems. No one thinks the system was perfect by any stretch of the imagination,” Carroll told Bolts last month. “I’m a firm believer that it’s mostly rooted in the lack of funding and the over reliance on traffic tickets.”

A class action lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) the following year alleged the “poor in Louisiana are denied access to effective and meaningful attorney representation when facing criminal charges.” The complaint, which has since been dismissed, included accounts showing how people facing charges received poor representation. One man had such minimal contact with his lawyer that the lawyer allowed a judge to issue a bench warrant to arrest him, even though he was still incarcerated. Another, who was facing up to 30 years in prison, was represented by a lawyer who worked as a prosecutor in another parish. He’d spoken to his lawyer for just five minutes over the course of more than six months.

Landry’s seizure of public defense happened during a nine-day special legislative session on crime, when the Republican-controlled legislature passed all 39 bills put before them—including laws to automatically place 17-year-olds in the adult system, limit post-conviction relief, and resume executions through new methods and increased secrecy.  

Starns, the state public defender, and State Senator Mike Reese, the bill’s sponsor, were the only two people to testify in favor of the bill restructuring the state public defense system during a House committee hearing on it in February, while dozens of people testified in opposition. Critics raised concerns about giving Landry more control over public defense as he ratchets up punishment in the state, a move that will create the need for increased legal aid. “The statute as written risks creating further instability and backlogs in a criminal legal system that is about to face enormous and perhaps unprecedented changes,” testified Pamela Metzger, a Southern Methodist University law professor who represented prisoners who couldn’t afford an attorney in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. 

The previous board also worked within the governor’s office but its power was spread among 11 people instead of a single governor’s appointee. Though the state public defender will now have the ultimate authority over legal aid, their appointment will be subject to approval by the senate and the new nine-member oversight board, which will be responsible for approving contracts over $250,000. 

This new board met for the first time last month. The governor selects four of the board’s nine members, and he also gets to choose a fifth out of a list submitted by the Louisiana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and Public Defenders Association of Louisiana. The remaining members are named by the Louisiana Supreme Court and the leaders of the two legislative chambers.

There’s no longer a requirement that the board reflect the racial and gender makeup of the state, spurring concerns about whether it’s built to provide the necessary oversight. No one on the board even appears to have a background in public defense. 

“It’s just frustrating that we don’t have the kind of experiential knowledge represented on this board,” Snowden told Bolts. “I think that’s certainly going to have negative effects on what public defense looks like in the state.” 

Malia Brink, a senior policy attorney at Southern Methodist University’s Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center, warned the House committee in February of the possibility that the governor could act through the chief public defender to devalue public defense. “If you have someone appointed by the governor, then the governor doesn’t have to say anything,” Brink said during her testimony to the committee. “If you know where the governor stands, you may be influenced or pressured to act accordingly.”

She continued, “No person, not even a governor, can be both prosecutor and defender.”

The dual powers will be especially relevant in death penalty cases, the majority of which are represented by public defenders. The governor is in charge of signing death warrants and deciding whether to spare someone’s life by granting a clemency petition. As attorney general, Landry sued to block clemency hearings for 55 death row prisoners who filed petitions in hopes they’d be spared by outgoing Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, before he left office. 

Under the new law, Landry’s appointee now has more control over a shrinking pot of funding for defending poor people who face execution; as part of the legislation, lawmakers also cut funding to programs representing capital defendants from 35 percent to 25 percent of the public defense office’s budget. 

Tony Clayton, the DA of West Baton Rouge, Iberville, and Pointe Coupee parishes who led the Landry transition team that pushed for restructuring public defense, told nola.com in February that the goal of the legislation was to spend less on death penalty defense organizations. “The constitution says they’re entitled to a defense, but they sure as hell aren’t entitled to a Cadillac defense,” he said. 

Louisiana hasn’t executed anyone since 2010 but lawmakers passed a bill last session that will make it easier to restart executions even in the face of lethal drug shortages. The legislation authorized nitrogen and electrocution as alternative execution methods to lethal injection and made it easier to secure drugs by shielding suppliers from public disclosure.  

“We all believe that Landry is going to have a heavy hand in making sure people get executed,” said Nick Trenticosta, a Louisiana death penalty lawyer. He estimated that five people of the 62 people on death row have exhausted their appeals and are eligible for execution. 

Starns could elect to cut all funding to the seven death penalty programs that get state funding for capital defense, or he could still fund those programs but mandate they move into district public defender offices and perform other work. Starns hasn’t yet announced his budget, but several sources told Bolts that he’s been meeting with the death penalty organizations to hammer out a new plan. 

“If there is not a concerted effort to insulate and isolate each of those units from the budgetary and caseload issues associated with already overburdened public defenders, then you will see a significant uptick in death penalty prosecutions and convictions and sentences,” said Faria, the former state public defender. “You will see a continued retention problem in the offices themselves and an erosion in the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.”

Louisiana’s Public Defender Board first appointed Starns to be the state’s head public defender in 2020. Prior to taking over, he was a prosecutor in Avoyelles Parish and a founding member of the LPDB. He had no experience himself working in the trenches as a line public defender, although he had done some criminal defense work in private practice. 

In private practice, Starns also defended the state against the 2017 SPLC lawsuit alleging that its representation of poor people was deficient. The lawsuit, he wrote in a filing, was filled with “loud howls regarding a lack of funding.” 

Starns, whom Landry reappointed to the newly empowered role last month, has maintained that he wants to create a more stable system with better paid public defenders, but his critics say he’s not experienced enough in public defense to handle the job. Several people told Bolts that Starns does not believe in caseload standards, a tool the American Bar Association recommends to determine how many cases defense lawyers should handle at a time to ensure their clients receive effective representation. 

The standards are also used by policymakers to decide funding by looking at how many lawyers are needed to handle an office’s caseload. Instead, Starns measures how much money each district receives by examining how many people it represents, a figure that public defense experts say doesn’t accurately reflect the workload of each office because some people may have several cases and those cases can vary in severity. “Now I have real concerns that he is going to just develop these fantastical imaginary guidelines to fund those officers at a bare bones level,” said Flozell Daniels, who served on the LPDB for nearly 11 years until 2023.

Though parishes still rely on traffic tickets and court fees to partially fund indigent defense, the legislature under Edwards had increased state funding for public defense in recent years. Last year, it allocated more than $50 million, nearly $20 million more than in 2015. Despite those increases, district defenders still have trouble attracting and retaining line defenders—who are not state employees and do not receive state benefits such as health insurance and retirement, although some district offices pay for line defenders to buy private insurance plans.

“Excessive workloads, depleted staff and attrition continue to be the biggest obstacles regarding our representation,” wrote Danny Engelberg, the Orleans Parish district defender, in the 2023 LPDB annual report. 

The pay raises last year were a bid to improve these staff and retention issues, said Daniels, who sat on the board when it approved the raises. “I see no reason why we shouldn’t have competitive salaries to ensure that we can attract the best talent because that’s what’s going to really create some high functioning public defenders,” he said.

Daniels said Starns was clearly angered by their decision. During his virtual coffee hour with district defenders last month, Starns called the raises an “abomination” and an “irresponsible obscenity.” 

And his decision to reverse the pay raises was one of his first moves in his newly empowered role. Prior to the raises, defenders made between $50,000 to $155,000 per year, according to the Louisiana Illuminator. After the raises, they made between $95,000 to $160,000. Their compensation was based on several factors, including a $20,000 bonus for defenders who solely worked in public defense and did not work in private practice. 

Under the new scheme, according to a slideshow detailing the plan obtained by Bolts, district defenders will make between $60,000 and $180,000. 

The state hasn’t yet passed this year’s budget so it’s not clear how much Starns will have at his disposal, but he says his plan to change how district defenders are paid will result in better paid line defenders. Still, two district defenders told Bolts that even marginally better pay won’t make those jobs easier to fill. They said they regularly give their line defenders raises but still struggle to retain them because it’s difficult to compete with private law firms that can pay much more and offer a more comfortable schedule and benefits.

John Lindner, head defender of the 22nd Judicial District, which covers St. Tammany and Washington parishes, told Bolts he hadn’t asked for a raise in his 12 years on the job, largely because his office was facing financial issues. Last year’s raise, he calculated, amounted to a 2.5 percent increase for each year he’s worked. “In the grand scheme of things, you know, it wasn’t a big, big thing. It was something we should have gotten anyway.” 

The new plan promises bigger bonuses for districts that collect more in conviction and user fees. A district defender overseeing a district that collects $1 million in those fees will get a $20,000 bonus, while a defender whose district collects less than $250,000 will receive nothing. 

Defenders receive a 25 percent bonus for taking on their own caseload, a factor that some took issue with. “In a district my size that’s almost impossible,” said one district defender. “So I have no opportunity to get that additional [money] because I’m not able to take a caseload because I’m presently managing my district?”

Starns also announced that there will be no restrictions on district defenders working in private practice, dissolving the previous limitations on the extra work. The move contradicts ABA standards, which say that lawyers working at defense organizations should work full-time and not engage in private practice work.

Prior to Starns’ announcement about salary reductions, some worried that the cuts will force talented district defenders to quit. 

“Is everybody going to quit at once? I don’t know,” a district defender who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation told Bolts. “I mean, you know, my biggest fear is that people won’t quit. And they’ll keep it part time because of the insurance. And then like, things will just run into the ground.”

After the meeting, Lindner said he was focused on changes that will improve indigent defense for clients. 

“What I want to see as an end game, is I want to see a public defender system that provides the best possible representation for poor people. And I want them properly trained, and I want them, you know, compensated fairly,” he said. “And I think it’s, you know, we still have a long way to go with that.”

The post Landry’s Power Play Over Public Defense in Louisiana appeared first on Bolts.

In February, as the Louisiana legislature debated Senate Bill 3, which would move all 17 year olds charged with a crime out of the juvenile justice system and back into the adult system, Will Harrell, an advisor to New Orleans Sheriff Susan Hutson, went to update the department’s Prison Rape Elimination Act coordinator on the proposed changes. He watched as tears came to her eyes. Teenagers are uniquely vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse in adult jails, and federal law requires they be separated from the adult population, which often translates to solitary confinement conditions. “She knows what that means for these kids,” Harrell told Bolts. 

The bill quickly passed and was signed into law by Louisiana’s new governor Jeff Landry on Wednesday. Now, Harrell is scrambling to figure out how to absorb dozens of 17 year olds into the already-overburdened Orleans Parish Justice Center once SB 3 takes effect in April. “We’re already at capacity. We’re under a consent decree,” he said. “I talked to deputies who were there seven years ago when they had kids. And they were like, ‘oh, this is just going to be a mess.’” 

“In conjunction with other legislation pending during this special session, we anticipate a massive, unmanageable population explosion at OJC,” Hutson wrote in a statement.

Landry sailed into the governor’s office last November after a campaign filled with crime-and-punishment rhetoric. Despite the fact that Louisiana already has the nation’s highest rate of incarceration, he made one of his first acts as governor convening a special legislative session on crime. In an extraordinarily fast nine-day session which ended last Friday, Republican lawmakers passed all 37 bills under consideration, a grab bag of tough-on-crime proposals that included restricting post-conviction relief, increasing law enforcement immunity, and legalizing execution methods such as nitrogen gas and the electric chair. 

Sarah Omojola, the director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s New Orleans office, called it a “one hundred percent” rollback of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, the raft of bipartisan criminal legal reforms passed under former Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards in 2017. “In some instances, this isn’t just a rollback,” she added. “This is taking us back to the early 2000s, late ‘90s.”

Observers are just starting to take stock of what this flurry of new legislation will mean for crime deterrence, and for the state budget. But Omojola, Harrell, and others are already certain that several different measures will work together to significantly grow the state’s pretrial populations, as well as the number of people sentenced and serving time. Other bills effectively eliminate parole, vastly restrict “good time” credits, and mandate prison time for technical violations of parole and probation. 

“Of course it’s going to balloon the prison population. Every single time these kinds of laws go into play, the incarceration rate jumps,” said Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, a University of Kentucky geography professor whose 2023 book, Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana, examines incarceration in the state. “That’s just basic math.” 

And in Louisiana, that means, once again, a profound and reverberating impact on parish jails and sheriffs. Owing to a unique arrangement designed to address overcrowding and bad conditions at Angola prison back in the 1970s, Louisiana’s local lock-ups house more than half of its state prisoner population. 

Jails operate as sort of a carceral shadow system: deadlier than the state prison system, lacking many of its resources and offerings, and run by sheriffs, who are comparatively unaccountable to state officials. East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, a dangerous jail that has for 15 years running been presided over by the same notorious sheriff, for instance, does not allow in-person visits, even though some of the people held there have been incarcerated for years on end. If someone dies in custody in a Louisiana jail, officials have no responsibility to notify their loved ones.

The Louisiana Sheriff’s Association, which lobbies on behalf of the state’s 64 sheriffs, testified in favor of SB 3, despite Hutson’s opposition. “It’s not just a bill that we are supporting, this is a bill that is part of our plan,” spokesperson Mike Ranatza told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “This is what we asked the governor to entertain for us in the special crime session…this is what the overwhelming majority of our sheriffs have asked for.” 

The jail system runs on “per diem” payments that the state grants local law enforcement in exchange for jailing people who have been sentenced to state prison, payments which this year will total $177 million. More prisoners means more money for sheriffs across the state—and likely future efforts to expand jails, according to Pelot-Hobbs. 

“Louisiana law enforcement agencies are uniquely invested in incarceration” because of the per-diem system, Omojola told Bolts. “They financially benefit from people who are being held in their jails without providing any of those programs or resources.” 

The origins of today’s jail arrangement has its roots not in tough-on-crime policies, but in a lawsuit filed by four Black Angola prisoners challenging the conditions of their confinement. In 1975, in response to the lawsuit, a federal judge limited Angola’s population. Rather than build new prisons, it was cheaper and easier for the state to transfer some prisoners to local jails to serve the remainder of their sentences. At first, Pelot-Hobbs writes in Prison Capital, sheriffs protested. But after the per diem system was instituted, they began to consider their new prisoners a boon, even asking Angola to send them more people.

By the 1990s, Pelot-Hobbs argues, jails had gone from being a “temporary spatial fix” to “the long-term geographic solution for the Louisiana carceral state.” Sheriffs, now reliant on the per-diem money, organized for jail expansion to hold more state prisoners. Between 1999 and 2019, the state added some 14,000 jail beds. “Other parishes built out huge jails that they’ll never need for their local population,” said Harrell. “It’s like a hotel. You open up the hotel, DOC sends you some kid from New Orleans, they pay you for the hotel rooms. And that literally is why you have the jail.”

This system may financially benefit local sheriffs and the state department of corrections, but it comes at the expense of the people locked up in their jails. “There’s nothing on the inside,” said Amelia Herrera, an organizer with Voice of the Experienced’s Baton Rouge chapter who spent time in the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison in 2015 and has a loved one currently incarcerated there. Officials, she said, “will say the reason there’s no type of programs inside of this facility is because it’s a pre-trial facility…But when we have people in there for six and seven years?” 

“You can’t visit,” she added. “They make it almost impossible to keep a connection with the outside.”

As it stands, providing no programming or visits even for people locked up for years on end is legal. Louisiana’s regulations governing how people should be treated while incarcerated in its jails are notably minimal and vague. While the state has a set of “basic jail guidelines” that apply to facilities that house state prisoners, a 2023 report by the University of Texas at Austin’s Prison and Jail Innovation Lab found that they fell short compared to regional counterparts like Texas and Florida. The report determined that the state’s jails have little to no requirements regarding transparency around in-custody deaths, adequate heating and cooling systems, or in-person visiting rights, and that their regulations around discipline are the least comprehensive of anything they reviewed. It also noted that the family members of incarcerated Louisianans contend that the regulations that do exist are routinely flouted. 

The state legislature had commissioned the report, which concluded with a set of recommendations for jails to adopt guidelines prohibiting corporal punishment and the denial of basic needs like water or sleep. But when the lab’s director, Michele Deitch, and her team submitted their work last fall, the Louisiana Sheriff’s Association immediately sent a letter expressing appreciation for the work but signaling they would not follow the bulk of their recommendations, citing concerns over security plus limited capacity. 

The report was completed several months before Landry took office. Now the new raft of bills passed during the special crime session threatens to turbocharge Louisiana’s cycle of jail expansion, exacerbating the problems already on display in the report’s pages before the state does much to try to remedy them. 

Omojola highlighted three bills proposed by Republican Senator Debbie Villio, HB 9, 10, and 11, which, taken together, “essentially work to make sentences much much longer—and therefore fill our prisons and our jails,” she said. HB 9 aims to abolish discretionary parole in most cases, HB 10 limits the accumulation of “good time” credits meaning that an individual would be required to serve at least 85 percent of his sentence without exception, and HB 11 increases the penalties for even technical violations of parole or probation. 

Harrell noted that HB 9 and 10 may have an indirect impact on the pretrial population as well, because they take away people’s incentive to accept a plea offer. With vastly reduced prospects of getting out on parole or getting a sentence reduced with “good time” credits, people may be less keen to accept a conviction and start getting their time over with, and more likely to wait out a trial date in jail. “When that’s taken away from them, they are like, ‘Well, then why should I leave? I’m just gonna stay here in jail and roll my dice and hopefully somebody on a jury will decide that I’m not guilty,’” he said. 

Villio, the bills’ sponsor and an ally of Landry’s, contends that these laws won’t increase prison populations as long as judges adjust their sentencing decisions accordingly. In a text message to Nola.com, she said, “It requires a mind-reset on sentencing that in the end should result in a wash. We, of course, will be monitoring that.” When Bolts asked how this sort of paradigm shift for judges would work in practice, Villio said, “I have the utmost confidence in our judiciary,” noting she believes that trainings have already been scheduled. 

The Crime and Justice Institute, a policy analysis group, has studied other states’ implementation of similar determinate sentencing laws; Leonard Engel, the group’s director of policy and campaigns, told Bolts their research shows that judges do not ultimately adjust their sentences anywhere enough to make up the difference in years served.

HB 11, the bill dealing with technical violations of probation and parole, is also alarming to reform advocates like Bruce Reilly of Voice of the Experienced. Under the terms of the bill, people on parole or probation who are merely re-arrested, not even convicted, could get sent to prison. “That’s really where the sheriff and jails are gonna get their bread and butter,” Reilly said.

The special session also passed a law requiring 20 year mandatory minimums for carjacking cases that involve bodily injury and established financing to establish a state trooper force for New Orleans. “That’s gonna rack up a whole bunch of new arrests,” Harell said of the state trooper force. “Where do you think those people are gonna be housed?”

Overcrowding is likely to lead to an expansion of the footprint of local jails in what Pelot-Hobbs predicted could be a repeat of the same patterns of the 1980s and 1990s. The Crime and Justice Institute estimates that the additional prison time people in a given year serve under HB 9 and 10, instead of getting out on “good time” credits or parole, will cost the state upwards of a billion dollars over time. And that’s before any budget increases sheriffs could ask for—and they are likely to ask, Pelot-Hobbs said. “We’re going to see sheriffs organizing and pushing to expand their jails for this moment,” she said. “We are going to see sheriffs mobilizing and organizing to get either property taxes or millages or sales taxes to get more jail space to incarcerate the state prisoners. I also think we’re likely going to see them lobbying the state legislature for higher per diem rates.” 

Advocates worry that the growth of local budgets and contracts, combined with Landry’s efforts to reduce accountability for law enforcement, will add to the state’s problems with cronyism. “It’s going to fuel the corruption, the closed circle of sheriffs and the folks who contract with them, who will know that there’s more money to be had if they can land the contracts for this jail expansion and for the increased services needed for a larger population,” says Julien Burns, the communications lead for Sheriffs for Trusting Communities. Along with Common Cause, the group has documented how sheriffs receive millions in campaign contributions from guard uniform makers, telecoms and bail bonds companies, and contractors that may hope to secure lucrative contracts with the department. 

In the waning days of the special crime session, a discussion finally arose about the collective impact of these bills on Louisiana’s jails, with even conservative lawmakers such as Villio, the sponsor of HB 9, 10, and 11, expressing an awareness of the need for greater programming and services in the jails. “Everybody’s on record, saying the right thing—like if we’re gonna do this, we can’t just warehouse [people]. We’re gonna have to address the issues,” said Harrell. The legislature now moves to its regular session, where some of these issues could be hammered out. 

Dramatically expanding jail programming, of course, would mean an even greater expansion of the carceral budget in Louisiana. Pelot-Hobbs said that she doubts that substantive programming will actually materialize in the jails. “I just think it’s a false promise,” she told Bolts. “And even if the promise came true, it’s still just acquiescing to the general kind of commitment to incarceration as the solution.” 

Still, in Harrell’s view, allocating such resources is crucial given the vastly restricted terrain for criminal legal transformation in the state as long as Landry is in office. “These tough on crime Republicans are running the show,” he said. “There’s no going back right now, at least for the next four years. And so to the extent people are concerned about the health and safety of people who are currently incarcerated, who will soon be incarcerated under these legislations, they need to understand that programming resources matter.”

Nola.com reported this week that the exact costs of the laws that have already passed in February are uncertain because lawmakers rushed them through, suspending usual rules that would have entailed more attention to the budget. 

The state’s decision to double down on incarceration, Pelot-Hobbs added, will affect public spending in other areas, too. “As money gets more and more directed towards these kinds of expenditure projects, less funds are going to be available for road construction, levy construction, schools,” she said. “The criminal legal system never operates in a silo.” 

The post “We’re Going to Be Overwhelmed”: How Louisiana Just Ballooned Its Jail Population appeared first on Bolts.

“The court didn’t make it any easier to win voting rights cases,” redistricting expert Justin Levitt told Bolts at the time. “It just declined to make it much, much, much, much, much, much harder.”

But the reprieve may have been temporary, and winning voting rights cases may still get much harder this year. A series of cases are working their way through federal courts that represent grave threats to Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits denying the right to vote “on account or race or color,” language that extends into protection against racial gerrymandering. 

In these cases, conservatives are trying out a suite of new legal arguments, each of which would dramatically narrow the scope of the VRA. The cases are still making their way through district and appellate courts, with some early rulings favoring conservatives, at times authored by judges nominated by Donald Trump. Many are expected to end up at the Supreme Court, where members of the conservative majority have already expressed skepticism at various aspects of the VRA. 

Judges will decide if critical protections afforded by Section 2 of the VRA remain applicable to the present, whether the law applies to statewide races and coalition districts, and even whether voting rights groups can ever bring a lawsuit under Section 2—a sleeper case that already detonated in an appeals court last fall. The most acute stakes concern the rules of redistricting, with officials in GOP-run states including Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Texas proposing new interpretations that would fuel gerrymandering and undercut the voting power of communities of color. 

Here is your roadmap to four major legal threats that may further unravel the VRA in 2024, and what cases you should be watching.

1. What if private plaintiffs can no longer sue?

What is the threat to the VRA?

For decades, ordinary citizens and voting-rights organizations have brought lawsuits alleging VRA violations. These lawsuits, and the mountain of legal work and research that goes into them, have been critical to getting courts to strike down discriminatory legislation and create districts that allow communities of color to be represented by candidates of their choice.

In what’s undoubtedly the biggest threat facing the VRA, federal courts might invalidate that entire approach. Conservatives have made the case that only the U.S. Attorney General has the power to sue over violations of Section 2 of the VRA, and they landed a startling ruling by a district court judge last year. If the ruling stands, it would ban private parties from bringing these lawsuits, massively shrinking enforcement; when the Department of Justice is controlled by politicians hostile to civil rights, it may eliminate these VRA lawsuits altogether. 

What are the cases to watch?

Keep an eye on Arkansas State Conference NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment, the challenge to Arkansas’s state legislative districts. 

After Arkansas Republicans drew new legislative maps in 2021, the state NAACP sued in federal court, arguing that Black Arkansans were underrepresented, and that this violated Section 2 of the VRA. But the district court judge who heard the case, Trump-appointee Lee Rudofsky, questioned whether the NAACP was even allowed to bring suit at all. 

It’s been a long-established practice for private parties to sue over Section 2 allegations. But Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas encouraged that question to be revisited in a 2021 concurrence, stating that courts have “assumed” that this is appropriate without ever deciding it. Walking into that breach, with an explicit appeal to Gorsuch, Rudofsky ended up dismissing the suit with a bombshell finding: “Only the Attorney General of the United States can bring a case like this one.” 

In November, a three-judge panel on the Eighth Circuit, one of the most conservative appellate courts in the country, affirmed that ruling in a decision authored by Eighth Circuit Judge David Stras.

If the ruling holds—the NAACP has asked the full Eighth Circuit to reconsider the decision, and an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is likely regardless—it would be sure to sideline a great many VRA cases. Besides the Arkansas litigation, high-profile cases last year that led to new maps in Alabama and Louisiana were brought by private plaintiffs, and would have been dismissed outright under Stras’ ruling.

The GOP has rushed to defend the holding and use it in other contexts. In December, the Republican attorneys general of twelve states (including Idaho’s Raul Labrador, Kansas’ Kris Kobach, and Texas’ Ken Paxton, all prominent far-right figures) signed on to an amicus brief asking the Fifth Circuit to take on the Eighth Circuit’s interpretation and rule against voting rights groups in the ongoing litigation around Alabama’s congressional map.

And in North Dakota, a state that falls within the Eighth Circuit, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and the Spirit Lake Tribe successfully challenged legislative districts in 2023 for diminishing the voting power of Native voters. State officials have agreed to use a replacement map for the 2024 election but have appealed the use of the map beyond that point. And in pushing back against the ruling last month, North Dakota’s Republican Secretary of State, Michael Howe, has already invoked the same argument that private parties cannot bring suits under Section 2 of the VRA, an argument that would outright silence the legal power of the two tribes that challenged the state.

2. The conservative case that times have changed

What is the threat to the VRA?

When the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down Section 5 of the VRA, which required certain jurisdictions to seek D.O.J. approval before changing their voting procedures, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “things have changed dramatically” in the South since 1965.

Some conservatives want federal courts to go even further, and dramatically re-interpret Section 2 on that same basis. And Justice Brett Kavanaugh last year gave them a reason to keep trying, doing so in the very same Alabama case in which he sided with the liberal justices to otherwise save the VRA. He noted that Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissenting opinion in the case argued that “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.” But Kavanaugh wrote that “Alabama did not raise that temporal argument in this Court, and I therefore would not consider it at this time.” The time may now be coming that’ll test Kavanaugh: Despite the massive barriers that people of color continue to face in exercising the franchise, multiple cases are working their way through the legal system in which defendants are renewing the argument that “things have changed” too much to keep enforcing Section 2.

What are the cases to watch?

Keep an eye on Milligan v. Allen, the continued litigation over Alabama’s congressional map, and Robinson v. Landry, the challenge to Louisiana’s congressional map 

Alabama this year will vote under a new congressional map that a federal court drew in late 2023 to create an additional district likely to elect a Black candidate. State officials have objected to the new map, and in so doing they’ve picked up on Kavanaugh’s argument: Alabama is asking courts to decide whether “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting extends to the present day,” regardless of its original justification. 

Louisiana officials have made a similar claim in their effort to fight court rulings that have struck down the state’s congressional maps as violating the VRA. (Louisiana adopted a new map creating a new majority-Black district this month due to a court-ordered deadline, but the litigation over that order continues.) 

Alabama has called the litigation against its original map “affirmative action in redistricting.” In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 struck down affirmative action in university admissions, and even though that case did not touch on voting rights, GOP officials in several states have weaponized the case to argue that the VRA is no longer applicable to the present.

In July, Louisiana officials filed a brief arguing that the affirmative action decision shows that “statutes requiring race-based classification” will “necessarily become obsolete.” They ask courts to settle “whether the facts on the ground here similarly warrant a rejection of Section 2 of the VRA, as applied, because it is no longer necessary.”

If the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court take the bait and say the established interpretation of Section 2 as no longer permissible, it would greatly narrow the legal space for racial discrimination claims.

It would amount to a judicial carte blanche for states to double down on discriminatory practices, except now shielded by the argument that the country is too enlightened to allow such practices.

3. Courts may shut the door to sue over statewide elections

What is the threat to the VRA?

Legal challenges often focus on how politicians have drawn districts: Have they respected the VRA in how they’ve separated or combined a state’s communities? But civil rights litigants have also contested the use of “at-large” elections, which are elections that elect the members of a body (say, a city council) throughout the jurisdiction, without the use of districts. Using this “at-large” structure for local races can prevent minority groups from electing a candidate of their choice; in some contexts, lawsuits have successfully forced counties and cities to convert their electoral system to use districts, allowing different communities to be better represented.

A case that’s percolating through the federal court system may decide whether similar lawsuits can ever be brought in the context of statewide elections. If that door is shut, it would put many government bodies whose members are elected at-large—most commonly, public utility commissions, boards of university regents, or boards of education—beyond the reach of VRA litigation.

What is the case to watch?

Keep an eye on Rose v. Raffensperger, the challenge to Georgia’s public service commission elections. 

In 2020, several Georgia voters sued over the use of statewide (“at-large”) elections for the five members of the state’s Public Service Commission, the body that regulates public utilities. They argued that a compact, Black-majority district could be created to elect a member of the Commission; a district court agreed after a trial, and ordered the state legislature to draw districts to that effect. But the state’s decision to appeal dragged out the process, leading to canceled elections. And in November, in a ruling authored by Judge Elizabeth Branch, another Trump appointee, a three-judge panel on the Eleventh Circuit reversed that decision. The panel held that the plaintiffs had not made out a sufficient claim under the VRA because their proposed remedy would “upset Georgia’s policy interests,” specifically, its “interest in maintaining its form of government.” In other words, because the Georgia legislature decided to make the Public Service Commission elected statewide, the court was obligated to respect that decision.

The ultimate resolution of this case will shape the viability of a lot of prospective litigation. This is believed to be the first case challenging the use of a statewide electoral system, so the district court’s decision had opened the door to similar challenges popping up elsewhere. If lawsuits like this can be brought against the use of statewide elections to pick members of state boards, voters may be able to target other elected state institutions whose “at large” membership is largely or all-white—Alabama’s Public Service Commission and Texas’s Railroad Commission come to mind—with the demand that they replace statewide elections with a system that providing communities of color a better opportunity to elect a member. 

If these challenges can’t be brought, however, communities of color may keep being systematically shut out with impunity.

4. The use of “coalition districts” is under threat

What is the threat to the VRA?

The VRA may compel states or localities to create districts that give voters in a racial group the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice. In deciding whether such a district is required, federal courts assess whether a specific group’s size and voting behavior warrant such an opportunity district. But what happens when no single racial group is large enough to reach that threshold, but several do so when combined? 

In that context, some federal courts have required the creation of “coalition” districts, a practice that has boosted representation for people of color. For instance, they may consider Black and Latinx residents together to force the creation of a district in which voters would have a better shot at electing a nonwhite candidate. A case out of Texas is now threatening this practice, however. 

What are the cases to watch?

Keep an eye on Petteway v. Galveston County, the challenge to county commission districts in Galveston County, Texas. 

Following the 2020 census, Galveston County commissioners drew a new set of districts for their county commission; their map eliminated the county’s only “majority-minority” district—a coalition district in which Black and Latino voters make up a majority. Backed by conservative legal groups, the county argued during a trial last year that the VRA should not be used to protect multiracial coalitions; but a federal court sided with plaintiffs in restoring the district. Judge Jeffrey Brown, who was nominated by Trump, even wrote that the “circumstances and effect of the enacted plan were mean-spirited and egregious.”

But the conservative Fifth Circuit chose to suspend the decision until it could decide the county’s appeal, and the U.S. Supreme Court blessed that move in December over the objections of liberal justices. The appeals court made clear that it wanted to revisit its past decisions that have endorsed the use of coalition districts.

The case may hand conservative justices another shot at upending the redistricting norms, if they choose to weigh in for the first time on the permissibility of coalition districts. If coalition districts are no longer used as a remedy to racial discrimination, it may further cut the number of districts drawn to elect people of color; in racially diverse regions like Texas, it would make it harder to challenge maps that are resulting in a disproportionate number of white officials.

Some of these questions are playing out in Georgia. A federal court last year struck down the state’s congressional map, ordering an additional Black opportunity district. The legislature responded by carving up an existing coalition district and turning it into a Black majority district. The challengers have argued, unsuccessfully so far, that this is impermissible: that fixing a VRA violation cannot involve eliminating an existing coalition district.

The post Your Guide to Four Emerging Threats to the Voting Rights Act appeared first on Bolts.

And then, just as quickly, it slammed shut: Louisiana’s attorney general and the leading candidate in the race for governor, Jeff Landry, filed a lawsuit against the Board of Pardons and Parole, seeking to disqualify the petitions; he then fired the lawyer the Board hired to represent it in the suit, and instead installed an attorney who has represented him in the past. What followed over the next few months, as Edwards’s days in office dwindled to zero, has amounted to an agonizing bureaucratic back-and-forth: the Board, following Landry’s suit, has repeatedly declined to grant the prisoners full clemency hearings, instead scheduling brief administrative reviews for fewer than half of them. 

One of the prisoners, Henri Broadway, has maintained his innocence in the 1993 murder of police officer Betty Smothers. During his review, his defense team was cut off early, while the opposition received 10 extra minutes to speak. “It’s very, very discouraging,” Broadway’s lawyer, Sarah Ottinger, told Bolts. “Henri Broadway is innocent.” 

“It was headed towards fair and full consideration of these cases,” said Cecelia Kappel, whose organization, the Capital Appeals Project, coordinated the petitions. “It took, I think, a huge effort by Jeff Landry and the DAs association to stop this.” Ultimately, not a single person was granted clemency—or even a full hearing. 

In November, after a dismal voter turnout, Landry won the election. His inauguration as governor earlier this week marked a stark transition for the state.

For the people who fight to change Louisiana’s penal system—historically brutal, harsh, and deadly even compared to the rest of the US—the past eight years under Edwards were a time of cautious optimism. A rare Democratic leader in the Deep South, he worked to pass landmark, bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation in 2017, expanded Medicaid to prisoners, vetoed harsh criminal justice laws passed by the Republican-dominated legislature, and ramped up commutations, especially over the last year. With Edwards as a “backstop,” Promise of Justice Initiative organizer Katie Hunter-Lowrey told Bolts, “it felt for a while that Louisiana had been protected from some of the more extreme actions being taken across the country.”

Landry, meanwhile, has signaled that he will be a very different sort of leader—a return to Louisiana’s harsh status quo on criminal justice, but with a heightened level of bombast. A Trump ally and product of the Tea Party, he embodies the new Republican party’s commitment to the culture war and antipathy toward compromise. He has repeatedly targeted the state’s majority Black cities, supported harsher criminal laws, and indicated his intention to roll back Edwards’ landmark reforms. Empowered with a GOP supermajority in both houses of the legislature, Landry is likely to be able to carry out his agenda without much resistance. “Louisiana will continue to stay at the top of the prison incarceration list, and we will not be any safer or any more prosperous for it,” said Sarah Omojola, the director of Vera Institute of Justice’s New Orleans office.

But advocates are refusing despair, opting instead to view this as a signal to redouble their organizing efforts, especially to communities that aren’t already mobilized but might recoil from the hard-line policies that Landry is poised to enact. “These [low voter] turnouts were a wake up call,” said Reverend Alexis Anderson, the co-founder of the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Reform Coalition, which works to shed light on the local jail death crisis. 

Anderson told Bolts she views this moment as an opportunity—nowhere to go but up. “If we don’t, and we basically go hide in a corner somewhere, then we’re ceding something that doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “We are always one election away from changing things.”

A moderate operating amidst a sea of red, outgoing governor Edwards at times moved too carefully for some onlookers, a frustration recently on display after his refusal to use his power to unilaterally direct the Board of Pardons to hold full hearings for the death row petitioners. But his reforms have made a difference: Louisiana may still be the “prison capital of the world,” with the highest per capita rate of incarceration on the entire planet, but its incarcerated population has gone down some 24 percent during Edwards’s time in office. 

These improvements are largely owing to the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, a landmark package of 10 criminal justice bills that Edwards and the legislature worked to pass in 2017. In the six years since its passage, the reforms have reduced the number of people convicted of nonviolent crimes in prison, funded victims’ support and reentry services that reduce recidivism, and shrunk the parole and probation population. But advocates now worry this progress could be undone under the new governor. Last year, Landry supported the creation of a task force on violent crime designed to review the effects of the reform package, as well as another 2016 law that moved 17 year olds back into the juvenile justice system. He has already announced a special legislative session on crime, where it is widely assumed he will support repealing the laws that made up the justice initiative. The special session could convene as soon as February.

Anderson said she’s especially troubled by the thought that Landry might roll back Louisiana’s scant juvenile justice reforms. (Last year, he vigorously supported a bill that would have made teenagers’ criminal records public, but only for teenagers who lived in three of the state’s majority-Black parishes, including East Baton Rouge.) “Primarily African American boys are going to be put into harm’s way in the worst kind of way,” Anderson said. “You just can’t unring that bell, the harm that’s going to be done.” 

Meanwhile, Landry has already assembled a special committee on New Orleans, an unusual move. It’s an indication that he might seek to use his new office to preempt local control and try to ramp up law enforcement presence in the city, both things he also did as Attorney General. 

In response to Landry’s proposals, Omojola told Bolts that Vera will be going back to the coalition that succeeded in winning those landmark 2017 reforms in the first place— “reconvening that dream team of people to figure out, how do we both protect the progress we’ve made and also continue to move forward?” she said. “Those reforms were just a first step. Much, much more needs to be done.” 

While Louisiana’s GOP trifecta and a Republican supermajority in the legislature will make it difficult for organizers to stop new bills from becoming law, they hope that they can get people into the streets and continue to organize on the local level as well. “The race to the bottom isn’t just at the governor’s mansion. It’s in the legislature but it’s also in some of these localized policymakers,” said Anderson, highlighting the need for advocates in Louisiana’s cities to organize with rural populations as well. 

Omojola stressed the importance of national organizations like Vera partnering with local membership groups like Louisiana Survivors for Reform, which Hunter-Lowrey coordinates. The coalition’s work organizing with people who might not already be inclined towards criminal justice transformation could be a useful strategic template. This year, for example, they’ve worked with family members of victims in two of the death row cases. “So often, this tough-on-crime legislation is passed in the name of victims and survivors. But for the past few years, [the Louisiana Survivors for Reform coalition] has showed that there are survivors who are saying, ‘Actually, that’s not for me,’” Hunter-Lowrey told Bolts. “The work that we’re doing to provide a non-judgmental space for survivors and victims’ families where advocacy is explicitly part of our healing—it has made a difference.” 

“It’s going to continue to take some time, but I think that path that we’re laying brick by brick is still the right one,” she added.

Hunter-Lowrey’s colleague at Promise of Justice Initiative, Michael Cahoon, has been organizing with faith leaders across the state for several years, most recently around the campaign to ask for mercy for those on death row. “We activated a lot of folks who hadn’t been active,” he said. “We’re definitely hoping to continue that sense of urgency and that sense of moral imperative in the next year.” 

“As we move forward into a new political reality,” Cahoon went on, “It’s also about presenting an affirmative vision for what safety looks like, beyond our over-reliance on mass incarceration. “And I think that’s going to be the work of the next year, four years, eight years, 10 years.” 

For Anderson, it all comes down to voter mobilization. “There are things that any governor can do that can be problematic,” she told Bolts. “When the voters simply do not show up, do not flood the legislature, do not call, there’s no accountability.” She pointed to the raft of elections coming up this year. In 2024, Louisiana will select a new state supreme court justice and nine intermediate appellate court judges, send six representatives to the U.S. House, and choose a public services commissioner. The state’s three biggest parishes will hold school board elections. Even party elections can make a difference: Norris Henderson, a formerly incarcerated organizer, is running for Democratic State Central Committee. 

The Louisiana Parole Project has a practice of posting to social media each time a client’s sentence is commuted. Most of the photos depict older Black men, smiling broadly, with Angola’s gates blurred in the background. This year, the images have proliferated: despite his reluctance to move on the death row clemency petitions, Edwards did commute the sentences of at least 123 prisoners, the vast majority of them lifers. Though that’s just a small percentage of those serving life sentences in the state, it’s still the highest number of commutations of any governor since the 1980s. “For a lot of those families, the only way they would have seen their loved one was in a box when they sent him home,” Anderson said. 

But if Landry is anything like his Republican predecessor, relief will be scarce in the coming years: Bobby Jindal commuted just three people’s sentences during his entire eight years in office.

Landry’s election has not only dashed hopes of commutation for prisoners on death row or anywhere else—it has also raised the very real possibility that executions will resume in the state. Louisiana last put a man to death in 2010, only after he waived his right to keep fighting his case and asked the state to end his life; there have been no contested executions in the state since 2002. But Landry has long defended capital punishment. In 2018, he criticized Edwards for not doing more to resume executions and argued that the state should consider older methods of execution, like hanging and firing squads.

Cecelia Kappel, the capital defense lawyer, is worried that the new governor might try to do what he can to jumpstart executions. But she’s also motivated by how the clemency battle exposed deep flaws in the way Louisiana doles out death sentences and by how much the public’s support for capital punishment has eroded in recent years. In August, she succeeded in getting one of her clients an entirely new trial. “We’re just going to keep moving forward,” she told Bolts. “And we shall see what the future brings, but I think that we will see more exonerations and we will certainly see more reversals in the next few years.”

The post Louisiana Organizers Brace for Landry appeared first on Bolts.

The final result: Democrats won five additional legislative seats this year, Bolts calculated in its second annual review of all legislative elections. 

That’s a small change, since there were more than 600 seats in play this year. But it goes against the expectation that the party that holds the White House faces trouble in such races. In 2021, the first off-year with President Biden in the White House, the GOP gained 18 new seats out of the roughly 450 seats that were in play, according to Bolts’ calculations. (Three special elections will still be held in December, but none is expected to be competitive.)

It also mirrors Republicans’ disappointment in 2022, a midterm cycle that saw Democrats defy recent history by flipping four legislative chambers without losing any. They pulled off a similar feat this year: Democrats held off GOP hopes of securing new chambers in New Jersey and Virginia and instead gained one themselves in Virginia, the fifth legislative chamber they’ve flipped in two years.

Still, these aggregate results mask regional differences, with Democratic candidates continuing their descent in much of the South. That too is an echo of 2022, when the GOP’s poor night was somewhat masked by their surge in a few red states like West Virginia, where Democrats still haven’t hit rock bottom; this year, Republicans surged in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Districts are not all created equal, with vast differences in the populations they cover in different states; the seats Democrats gained correspond on average to twice as many residents than those Republicans gained. 

The results of the 2023 cycle have been dissected at length for any hints as to who will fare well in the far-higher profile races in 2024.

The encouraging case for the GOP, as laid out last week by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, is that Republicans overperformed in Virginia compared to the last presidential race, even as they failed in their bid to win the legislature. But they also came close to suffering much greater losses in the state, the Center for Politics notes: Virginia’s seven tightest legislative elections this fall were all won by the GOP, all by less than two percentage points.

The encouraging case for Democrats is the national view: They’ve overperformed in special elections throughout the year—as documented by Daily Kos Elections, their nominee improved on President Biden by an average of 6 percentage points across 34 special elections—a measure that has had predictive value in the past. They also did very well this fall in Pennsylvania, the only presidential battleground that hosted a significant number of elections. 

But the results of the 2023 legislative races matter first and foremost for themselves—not for what they signal for other, future elections. Just as the Democratic gains last year in Michigan and Minnesota opened the floodgates to major progressive reforms in both states, the newly-decided composition of legislative chambers will shape power and policy within Virginia, New Jersey, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Below are four takeaways from the elections.

1. The GOP’s state goals flail, with one major exception

These legislative races, alongside three governor’s elections, decided who will control state governments over the next two years.

Democrats denied the GOP’s bids to grab control of Virginia and Kentucky by winning the House and Senate in the former, and the governorship in the latter. In addition, Republicans hoped to break Democrats’ trifecta in New Jersey, pointing to supposed voter backlash against liberal school policies and trans students to fuel talk that they may flip the Assembly or Senate; instead, they lost ground and now find themselves down a 24-seat hole in the lower chamber.

The GOP’s best results came in Louisiana, where the party flipped the governorship to grab the reins of the state government, a result that will likely open the floodgates of staunchly conservative policy. Republicans also retained their trifecta in Mississippi by holding onto the governor’s office.

2. Abortion mattered, again 

Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s Republican governor, tried to win the legislature for his party by selling his constituents on new abortion restrictions. His failure has been widely held up since Nov. 7 as the latest evidence of voter alarm about the bans that have multiplied since the Dobbs decision. But abortion also mattered in New Jersey’s campaigns this fall, with Democratic candidates arguing that their continued majority would protect abortion rights and funding.

The question, Rebecca Traister writes in NY Mag, is what Democrats do next after winning on the issue and what affirmative policies they adopt. Earlier this year, Democrats who run the Virginia Senate adopted a constitutional amendment to codify abortion rights; the measure died in the state House, which was run by the GOP but just flipped to Democrats. Scott Surovell, Senate Democrats’ incoming leader, confirmed this month that he plans to advance the amendment again now that his party controls the full legislature. 

Virginia Democrats can advance the amendment while circumventing Youngkin but it would be at least a three-year process. The legislature would need to adopt it in two separate sessions separated by an election to send it straight to voters—so they’d have to do it now, then defend their legislative majorities in the 2025 elections, then pass it again in 2026, and then win a referendum that fall. 

3. GOP attacks on crime fell flat, again

The GOP in both New Jersey and Virginia banked that it would make inroads by attacking Democratic lawmakers on crime, repeating a strategy that already did poorly in the 2022 midterms. Democrats won swing districts in both states in which Republicans assailed their opponents for endangering public safety.

Amol Sinha, executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey, stresses that these elections took place in the wake of New Jersey adopting major criminal justice reforms, which the GOP tried and failed to turn against the party electorally. “New Jersey is the nation’s leading decarcerator, reducing state prison populations by more than 50 percent since 2011, and we’ve shown that decarceration is possible and crime rates across all major categories continue to decline,” he told Bolts. 

Still, he wishes the lawmakers who passed the reforms would have been bolder in defending them on the trail given recent evidence they’re not politically harmful. “The lesson for candidates running in 2024 and 2025 is that reforming unjust systems and promoting public safety are not at odds with one another.”

Since their wins on Nov. 7, Virginia Democrats have chosen two new legislative leaders with a history of supporting criminal justice reforms. Incoming Speaker Don Scott is an attorney who spent years in federal prison, a fact that GOP strategists have tried using against Democrats, and he has championed issues like ending solitary confinement. Surovell, Democrats’ new Majority Leader, was a force behind the criminal legal reforms Democrats passed while they controlled the state government in 2019 and 2020. He played the lead role within his party this year in calling out Youngkin’s administration for making it harder for people with felony convictions to vote, Bolts reported this spring.

4. Competition evaporates in Louisiana and Mississippi

Just six years ago, the GOP held 86 legislative seats in Louisiana (out of 144) and 106 in Mississippi (out of 174). After the 2023 elections, they’ll hold 101 in Louisiana and 115 in Mississippi, a surge born not just from election results in recent cycles but also party switches. 

Both legislatures are also disproportionately white, and both drew attention this year for targeting underrepresented Black communities. (Black voters in both states vote overwhelmingly Democratic.) 

Gerrymandering is contributing to these dynamics, even if white Republicans also dominate statewide races in both states. A coalition of civil rights groups filed a lawsuit against Mississippi’s current legislative maps for diluting the voting power of Black residents, saying that both House and Senate maps lacked enough Black opportunity seats; the lawsuit argues that the state should have drawn seven more Black-majority districts across Mississippi’s two chambers. In Louisiana, the legal battles have revolved around the congressional map, which a federal appeals court recently struck down for violating the Voting Rights Act; Democrats raised similar concerns about Louisiana’s legislative maps.

“When you gerrymander people’s power away, you can’t elect candidates of choice,” says Ashley Shelton, executive director of Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, a Louisiana organization that focuses on voter outreach. “We understand the power of gerrymandering: It’s not that Black people don’t care or don’t want to vote, it’s that the power of their vote has been lessened.”

Gerrymandering this fall contributed to a startling dearth of competition: Not a single legislative race in either state was decided by less than 10 percentage points between candidates of different parties. (That’s out of 318 districts!)

In fact, many districts didn’t feature any contest at all. No Democrats were even on the ballot in the majority of districts in each of Louisiana and Mississippi’s four chambers, mathematically ensuring that the party couldn’t win majorities before any vote was cast. 

In Louisiana, some critics of the state Democratic establishment also faulted the party for neglecting to mount a proper campaign this fall. “I didn’t see any get out of the vote effort,” one progressive lawmaker told Bolts after the October primary, which saw the Democratic Party spend very little money. 

Shelton told Bolts last week that the state’s traditional establishment similarly didn’t work to turn voters out in the lead-up to Saturday’s runoffs, which featured statewide elections for attorney general and secretary of state as well as a scattering of legislative runoffs; she saw little noise and outreach outside of nonprofit groups like hers and their partners. 

“When I think about the political machines, there’s no money being spent to engage voters,” Shelton told Bolts. “We can certainly create the energy that we can, but there’s something to the bigger momentum and energy that comes from the machine actually working.” She added, “It’s very quiet in the state of Louisiana, and that’s crazy to me.” 

The post Democrats Held Off the GOP in Legislative Races This Year, Again Bucking Expectations appeared first on Bolts.

In this guide, Bolts introduces you to ten elections that are coming up this month that will impact how local officials administer future elections, and how easily people can exercise their voting rights. 

Voters this month will select the secretaries of state of Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi, who’ll each be the chief elections officials within their state. They will choose a new supreme court justice in Pennsylvania, a swing state with looming election law battles, and dozens of county officials who’ll decide how easy it is to vote in Pennsylvania and Washington state next year. And some ballot measures may change election law in Maine and Michigan.

All these elections are scheduled for Nov. 7, except for Louisiana’s runoff on Nov. 18. 

As we cover the places where democracy is on the ballot, our staff is also keeping an eye on the other side of the coin—the people who are excluded from having a say in their democracy: Three of the eight states featured on this page have among the nation’s harshest laws barring people with criminal convictions from the polls, and our three-part series highlights their stories. And beyond the stakes for voting rights, our cheat sheet to the 2023 elections also lays out dozens of other local elections this November that will shape criminal justice, abortion access, education, and other issues. 

Kentucky | Secretary of state

Michael Adams, the Republican secretary of state of Kentucky, has vocally pushed back against the false conspiracies surrounding the 2020 election, and he has touted his efforts to facilitate mail and early voting during the pandemic. He survived the GOP primary this spring by beating back election deniers who wanted to replace him as the state’s chief election administrator.

Buddy Wheatley, Adams’ Democratic challenger and a former lawmaker, says the state should go much further in expanding ballot access. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that the candidates disagree on whether the state should institute same-day registration and set-up an independent redistricting commission, two proposals of Wheatley’s that Adams opposes. 

The election is unfolding in the shadow of the governor’s race, in which Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear is running for reelection four years after restoring the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of people who had been barred from voting for life. (Adams and Wheatley have both said they support the executive order.) Voting rights advocates regret that the order still leaves hundreds of thousands Kentuckians shut out from voting and that the state hasn’t done enough to notify newly-enfranchised residents; Bolts reports that a coalition led by formerly incarcerated activists has stepped into that void to register people.

Louisiana | Secretary of state 

In trying to appease election deniers since the 2020 presidential election, Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin weakened Louisiana’s voting system and gave a platform to election conspiracists. His successor will be decided in a Nov. 18 runoff between Republican Nancy Landry, who currently serves as his deputy, and Gwen Collins-Greenup, a Democratic attorney. Each received 19 percent of the vote in the all-party primary on Oct. 14, but Landry is favored in the Nov. 18 runoff since much of the remainder of the vote went to other Republican contenders.

Not unlike Ardoin, Landry has resisted election deniers’ most radical proposals but she has also echoed unfounded suspicions of voter fraud and election irregularities, Cameron Joseph reported in Bolts. The next secretary of state will have to deal with continued pressure from the far-right, Joseph writes, while making critical decisions regarding the state’s outdated voting equipment: The state’s efforts to replace the equipment have stalled in recent years amid unfounded election conspiracies about the role of machines in skewing election results.

Maine | Question 8

Since its drafting two centuries ago, Maine’s constitution has barred people who are under guardianship from voting in state and local elections. Then, in 2001, a federal court declared the provision to be invalid in response to a lawsuit filed by an organization that protects the rights of disabled residents.

Mainers may scrub this exclusionary language from its state constitution on Nov. 7, S.E. Smith explains in Bolts: Question 8 would “remove a provision prohibiting a person under guardianship for reasons of mental illness from voting.” While Mainers under guardianship can already vote irrespective of this constitutional amendment due to the 2001 court ruling, Smith reports that the referendum could spark momentum for other states with exclusionary rules to revise who can cast ballots and shake up what is now a complicated patchwork of eligibility rules nationwide. 

Michigan | Municipal referendums on ranked choice voting

Three Michigan cities will each decide whether to switch to ranked-choice voting—a system in which voters rank the different candidates on the ballot rather than only opting for one—for their local elections. If the initiatives pass, residents in East Lansing, Kalamazoo, and Royal Oak would join Ann Arbor, which approved a similar measure in 2021.

But there’s a catch: Even if voters approve ranked choice voting, it will not be implemented until the state of Michigan first adopts a bill authorizing the method statewide. The legislation to do so has stalled in the legislature so far.

Many cities have newly adopted ranked-choice voting in recent years, and some will use the method for the first time this November; they include Boulder, Colorado, and several Utah cities such as Salt Lake. Other municipalities this fall will also consider changing local rules: Rockville, Maryland, in the suburbs of D.C., holds two advisory referendums on whether their city should lower the voting age to 16 and enable noncitizens to vote in local elections.

Mississippi | Secretary of state

Republican Michael Watson spent his first term as secretary of state defending restrictions on ballot access. He stated he worries about more college students voting, rejected expanding mail voting during the COVID-19 pandemic, and championed a law that banned assisting people in casting an absentee ballot (the law was blocked by a court this summer). He is currently fighting  a lawsuit against the state’s practice of permanently disenfranchising people with some felony convictions.

Watson is now seeking a second term against Democrat Ty Pinkins, an attorney who only jumped into the race in September after the prior Democratic nominee withdrew for health reasons. Pinkins has taken Watson to task for backing these restrictions, and he says he is running to expand opportunities to vote, such as setting up online and same-day voter registration. Pinkins this fall also teamed up with Greta Kemp Martin—the Democrat challenging Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who is currently representing Watson in the lawsuit against felony disenfranchisement—to say that the state should expand rights restoration for people with felony convictions.

Pennsylvania | Supreme court justice

Pennsylvanians will fill a vacant seat on their state’s high court, where Democrats currently enjoy a majority. The outcome cannot change partisan control but it will still shape election law in this swing state, Bolts’ Alex Burness reports. For one, a GOP win would make it easier for the party to flip the court in 2025, affecting redistricting. It may also make it easier for the GOP to win election lawsuits next year: Voting cases haven’t always been party-line for this court, especially ones that revolve around how permissive the state should be toward mail ballots. Recent rulings made it more likely that mail ballots with clerical mistakes get tossed, an issue that now looms over the 2024 election.

Burness reports that Republican nominee Carolyn Carluccio has echoed Trump’s attacks against mail voting, implying an unfounded connection to election fraud, and she appeared to invite a new legal challenge to a state law that expanded ballot access in 2019. Dan McCaffery, her Democratic opponent, has defended state efforts to make voting more convenient, telling Bolts, “If we’re going to err, we should always err on the side of including votes.”

Pennsylvania | Bucks County commission

Pennsylvanians are electing the local officials who’ll run the 2024 elections, and the results will shape how easy it is for millions of people to vote next year in the nation’s biggest swing state. Daniel Nichanian reports in Bolts that counties have a great deal of discretion when it comes to the modalities of voting by mail, and local voting rights attorneys warn that if more counties adopt tighter rules, tens of thousands of additional ballots may be rejected.

Bucks County stands as the clearest jurisdiction to watch, Nichanian writes. Democrats gained control of the commission in 2019, part of a firewall against Trump’s efforts to game the following year’s election. The county commissioners made it easier to vote by mail, attracting legal challenges from Trump.  Now, they’re now running for reelection, but the Republican Party is hoping to gain control of this swing county’s commission. 

Also keep an eye on the Democratic efforts to retain majorities in the other Pennsylvania counties they gained in 2019, often for the first time in decades: Delaware, Chester, Lehigh, and Monroe. The GOP would also gain control of the board of elections in Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, if it scores an upset in the county executive race. Sam DeMarco, who signed up as a fake Trump elector in 2020, is already certain to sit on Allegheny County’s board of elections.

Pennsylvania | Berks County commission

Will any Pennsylvania county try to stall the certification of elections next year, in a repeat of Trump’s strategy in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential race? The results of next week’s elections will determine which are susceptible to try out such a strategy, Daniel Nichanian reports in Bolts. Election attorneys told him that this would be a dereliction of duties on the part of county commissioners but that it may still cause some legal and political upheaval. Already in 2022, the Republican commissioners in three counties resisted certifying results because they insisted on rejecting valid mail ballots; they’re now all seeking reelection.

The Democratic challengers running in Berks County—the most politically competitive of these three counties—say this is a key issue in their race. “The most important thing is that we have a board of commissioners that endorses the winner of a campaign,” one of them told Bolts. But they’re also running on a platform of easing mail voting by installing more accessible ballot drop boxes, and instituting new policies to notify residents if their ballots have a clerical error. Also keep an eye on Fayette and Lancaster, the other counties that tried to not certify the 2022 results, and in the many red jurisdictions where candidates with ties to election deniers made it past the Republican primaries.

Virginia | Legislative control

Since Virginia Republicans gained the governorship and state House in 2021, they have passed bills through the lower chamber to repeal same-day voter registration and get rid of ballot drop boxes, among other restrictive measures. Until now, these bills have died in the Democratic-run Senate. But will that change after Nov. 7, when Virginians elect all lawmakers?

The GOP is hoping to gain control of the Senate while defending its majority in the House, Bolts reports, a combination that would hand them full control of the state government and open the floodgates for the party’s conservative agenda on how the commonwealth should run elections. Inversely, if Democrats have a great night—flipping the House and keeping the Senate—they may have more oversight over Governor Glenn Youngkin’s dramatic curtailment of rights restoration and over his administration’s wrongful voter purges; still, those matters are decided within the executive branch, and the governor’s office is not on the ballot until 2025.

Washington | King County director of elections

Only one county in the entire state of Washington is electing its chief administrator. It just so happens to be King County, home to Seattle and more than 2 million residents—in a race that features a staunch election denier, no less. Doug Basler has sowed doubts about Washington state’s election system since the 2020 election, alongside others on the far-right, and he has helped a lawsuit against its mail voting system.

Basler is a heavy underdog on Nov. 7 in his challenge against Julie Wise, the Director of King County Elections. This is a heavily Democratic county, though there will be no partisan label on the ballot, potentially blunting the effect of Basler’s Republican affiliation. Still, Cameron Joseph reports in Bolts that the spread of false election conspiracies—even when they are defeated at the ballot box—is fueling a threatening climate. “It’s a very scary time to be an election administrator,” Wise told Bolts.

The post 10 Local Elections This Month That Matter to Voting Rights appeared first on Bolts.

A boon for the GOP, the results will have stark consequences for state policy, easing the way for new legislation that would target LGBTQ+ residents, and empowering politicians who have championed draconian anti-crime measures and attacks on public education. They will likely set up more clashes between the conservative state government and the city of New Orleans. 

The results also signaled that election conspiracies continue to resonate with the GOP base, as several campaigns emerged triumphant after fueling false allegations of fraud during a critical juncture for the state’s voting systems. Jeff Landry, the incoming governor, tried to help Donald Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as attorney general, and he doubled down on his alliance with the former president during his campaign this year.

Bolts covered the elections in the lead-up to Oct. 14, with an eye to its ramifications for criminal justice and voting rights. Below are seven takeaways on the results. 

1. Landry’s win hands the GOP a new trifecta

Jeff Landry, the state’s arch-conservative attorney general, easily prevailed in the governor’s race on Saturday, receiving 52 percent in a 16-person field. He will replace John Bel Edwards, a Democrat who was barred from seeking reelection due to term limits. 

Landry’s victory hands Republicans full control of the state government for the first time since 2015, since his party also defended its large majorities in the state House and Senate.

The result will free conservative policy ambitions, which were held back over the last eight years by Edwards’ veto power. Even when the GOP gained a supermajority capable of overriding Edwards’ vetoes earlier this year, it remained frequently unable to do so. This summer, for instance, the GOP failed to muster the votes to override Edwards on a bill that would have prevented discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. 

Landry is sure to bring an entirely different outlook on such issues. Throughout his career, he has pushed Louisiana to restrict LGBTQ+ rights and block teaching of such issues in education, including at the collegiate level. Last year, Landry created a new tool for people to file complaints against teachers and libraries. He has also worked for the state to obtain information about Louisiana residents who travel out of state to obtain gender-affirming care or abortions.

Landry has fiercely fought local and state reforms meant to reduce the state’s near-record incarceration rate, Bolts reported in a profile of the attorney general in August. This year alone, he ran ads lambasting “woke DAs,” fought efforts by Louisianans on death row to seek clemency, and championed a measure, which ultimately did not pass, that would have opened the criminal records of children as young as 13 to the public—but only in three predominantly Black parishes. 

2. Things are about to get more complicated for New Orleans

Republican-run states commonly preempt liberal policies adopted in their cities, so just the fact that the GOP gained a trifecta in Louisiana would put New Orleans in a tough spot. But beyond that, Landry has been particularly aggressive in undercutting his state’s most populous city. As attorney general, he retaliated against New Orleans officials when they crafted policies to protect immigrants and to shield residents from anti-abortion laws, proposing to withhold flood protection funds. He has also undermined efforts to reform New Orleans police while also setting up a short-lived state task force with the authority to make arrests in the city. 

And Landry has made it clear he would double down as governor, telling Tucker Carlson last year that the governor’s office in Louisiana “has the ability to bend that city to his will,” and that “we will.”

New Orleans voters on Saturday signaled their appetite for a very different politics. Landry received less than 10 percent of the vote in the city, far behind Democrat Shawn Wilson who drew 71 percent. A former public defender with some progressive support, Leon Roché, also defeated a former prosecutor for a position as criminal court judge in the parish. And one of Louisiana’s most left-leaning lawmakers, Mandie Landry (no relationship to Jeff Landry), defeated more centrist challengers in a heated state House race for an uptown district.

On Sunday, even as she celebrated her own win, Mandie Landry said she was preparing for a “sobering” stretch for her city. “I think there is going to be more of a push from Baton Rouge to interfere in New Orleans than usual,” she told Bolts. “I am not under any delusions.”

3. This was a low-turnout election

For an election that will deeply affect Louisiana, engagement was very low: just 36 percent of registered voters turned out on Saturday.

Turnout fell sharply in the state’s two most populous urban regions, which vote very Democratic. Compared to the 2020 presidential election, the number of voters who cast a ballot fell by 60 percent in New Orleans and by 52 percent in East Baton Rouge Parish. In the rest of the state, it only fell by 49 percent. 

Mandie Landry, the New Orleans lawmaker, faults the state Democratic Party for doing little outreach to her city’s voters. Compared to the “huge efforts to get out the vote” she witnessed in 2015 and 2019, “there was none of that this time,” she told Bolts. “I didn’t see any get out the vote effort.” The state Democratic Party, which scarcely spent money in the run-up to the primary, did not respond to a request for comment. 

4. Secretary of state race heads to a runoff, but a new frontrunner emerges

Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin has tried to appease election conspiracists since 2020, for instance quitting a multi-state consortium that monitors voter registration after false claims that it was tied to George Soros. With Ardoin retiring this year, the big question on Saturday was which of the many Republican candidates would advance to a runoff. 

Ardoin’s deputy Nancy Landry (no relation to Jeff Landry or Mandie Landry) barely edged out her rivals, coming in first with 19 percent. Bolts reported earlier this month that, much like her boss, Landry has resisted election deniers’ most radical proposals while also echoing unfounded suspicions of voter fraud and election irregularities. 

Mike Francis, the Republican who most firmly rejected election conspiracies, very narrowly lost out on a runoff spot, coming in third with 18 percent. Brandon Trosclair, a little-known businessman who ran as a hardline election denier and called for fully hand-counting ballots, got 6 percent.

Landry will now face Democrat Gwen Collins-Greenup, an attorney who snatched the second runoff spot. Collins-Greenup got 19 percent as well, but Landry will be the clear front-runner since all Republican candidates combined for 68 percent of the vote cast on Saturday. The state is at a crossroads on election administration since it has to soon replace its outdated voting equipment, an issue around which the far-right has mobilized.

5. In first referendum inspired by “Zuckerbucks,” voters ban private election grants 

Voters overwhelmingly approved Amendment 1, a measure that will block Louisiana’s election offices from receiving private grants from outside organizations. 

A non-profit with ties to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated hundreds of millions of dollars in 2020 to local election offices nationwide, in order to help them run elections during the early pandemic. The right quickly dubbed these grants “Zuckerbucks,” fueling conspiracies about election interference, and many GOP-run states proceeded to pass laws to ban such grants. To circumvent the Democratic governor’s veto, Republican lawmakers in Louisiana placed such a ban directly on the ballot for the first time.

Some elections experts critical of such bans share the reservations about private money flowing into elections, but they also stress that public funding is woefully inadequate, and that the bans risk further starving cash-strapped offices, threatening election security rather than protecting it. 

“Nobody’s got money to pay election officials what they’re worth (particularly in this new environment), to invest in new systems, to make improvements to back-end security,” Justin Levitt, a voting expert who now teaches at Loyola Law School, told Bolts on Sunday. “If the state actually responded by funding the elections we deserve, banning private money wouldn’t be the worst outcome. Private donations were only ever there to stop the bridge from collapsing entirely. They never should have been necessary. Yet they were.”

He added, “I think we can all hope that we’re not dealing with that kind of 10-alarm fire in 2024.”

6. In sheriff’s races, a sea of white men—again

Sixty-three parishes held sheriff elections, and only three even featured women running for the office. All lost on Saturday. 

This means that all 63 parishes have elected a man, or are sure to do so after the Nov. 18 runoffs. This dynamic is nothing new: All of these parishes already have a male sheriff. 

Nearly all incoming sheriffs will also be white. Across these 63 parishes, only three elected a Black sheriff on Saturday, with Black candidates advancing to a runoff in three additional parishes. By contrast, 57 of these 63 parishes elected a white sheriff on Saturday or will do so after the runoff. Louisiana’s population is 30 percent Black. 

This pattern is symptomatic of the societal biases regarding what law enforcement should look like, though breaking it up would not in itself change brutal conditions and treatment inside the state’s jails. And here again, New Orleans stands out from the rest of the state.

Its sheriff, Susan Hutson, is a Black woman who took office in 2022 (New Orleans holds its elections on a different cycle than all other parishes, and so Hudson was not on the ballot this fall). “As a woman and as a Black woman, I go through additional types of microaggressions in the job,” Hutson told Verite News last year. “So just having somebody else there who might be experiencing something similar with me, it’s good—it’s good to see someone like you.”

7. East Baton Rouge sheriff secures another four years 

The jail in Louisiana’s most populous parish is notorious for an alarming death rate and for the brutal treatment of people detained there. But, as Bolts reported in August, organizers and civil rights lawyers have run into Sheriff Sid Gautreaux, who has overseen the facility for 15-plus years, boosted by campaign contributions from people and groups that benefit from more jail spending. 

Gautreaux won reelection with 86 percent of the vote on Saturday. He is a Republican in a heavily blue jurisdiction but he faced no Democrat; two opponents were kicked off the ballot over the summer, though neither was expected to mount a serious challenge to the entrenched sheriff.

Reverend Alexis Anderson, co-founder of the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Reform Coalition, a local organization that has pushed back against the sheriff’s practices, told Bolts on Sunday that she would continue to demand accountability regardless of these results. “I stand committed to working towards independent investigations of each and every death that has occurred in that facility under the Gautreaux administration,” she said. “We will continue engaging our community on the development of real public safety tools.”

Anderson added, “There are too many lives at stake to become discouraged.”

Piper French contributed reporting for this article.

The post Louisiana Takes a Hard Swing to the Right appeared first on Bolts.

Louisiana’s leading Republican candidates for secretary of state have largely rejected calls from election conspiracists to upend the state’s voting system, but they’re still courting GOP base voters who continue to believe Donald Trump’s lies that he won the 2020 election.

Some of the main contenders in next week’s election are playing rhetorical footsie with the hard right in the campaign to replace retiring Republican incumbent Kyle Ardoin, whose own efforts to appease election deniers weakened Louisiana’s voting system without saving his political career.

Whoever replaces him as the state’s next chief election administrator will have to deal with continued pressure from conspiracists while making decisions about everything from administering the 2024 presidential election to replacing Louisiana’s aging voting equipment. 

Louisiana uses touchscreen electronic voting machines that are almost two decades old and prone to error, and do not include a paper ballot printout, making results impossible to audit. State officials have been mulling how to replace the equipment for years now to address these concerns but their efforts have repeatedly stalled, and far-right conspiracists have jumped into the fray to push for a radical reboot of the election system.

Brandon Trosclair, the most hardline candidate in the race, wants to switch to hand-counting elections, mirroring an approach some far right politicians have pushed around the nation that experts warn would produce inaccurate counts.

Local political observers doubt Trosclair has a real shot at winning the race, and most of the front-running candidates strongly oppose his calls for such a dramatic overhaul while supporting plans to acquire new voting machines with a paper trail. 

But two of the top candidates, Ardoin’s lieutenant Nancy Landry and state Speaker Clay Schexnayder, have also hedged their responses to false concerns of widespread fraud in a seeming attempt to appeal to the Republican voters in the state who still believe the game is rigged, a sign that they could fall into the same appeasement trap that Ardoin did in office. On top of that, Jeff Landry, the Louisiana Attorney General who joined Texas’ attempts to overturn the 2020 election in four swing states won by President Biden, is favored to win Louisiana’s governorship this fall, which would hand him more power to pressure the eventual secretary of state on how to run elections.

Schexnayder, Trosclair, and Nancy Landry (no relationship to Jeff Landry) are running in the Oct. 14 primary alongside five other candidates, including Public Service Commissioner Mike Francis, the Republican who is most direct about rejecting election conspiracies. Democrats Gwen Collins-Greenup, an attorney who received 41 percent of the vote in the 2019 runoff for secretary of state, and Arthur Morrell, a former court clerk in New Orleans, will be on the ballot as well.

The top two in the all-party primary will advance to a mid-November runoff regardless of party. 

Francis, Landry, and Schexnayder have raised the most money and are the only candidates currently running statewide TV ads, according to local Republicans tracking ad buys. With early voting already underway, at least one of those three Republicans is expected to advance to the runoff, where they would be favored since this is a deep red state. There’s a possibility that the Democratic candidates split their party’s vote and two Republicans advance.

Pearson Cross, a political science professor and associate dean at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said the leading Republicans’ message on widespread voter fraud has been “that they’re concerned about it, but it’s not an issue here.”

This attempt to walk a tightrope—defending their own state’s election system while nodding to more general worries about the 2020 elections—was also attempted by other state officials.

Ardoin, the outgoing secretary of state, spent years trying to appease the state’s far right who claimed that Louisiana’s elections were rife with fraud. Ardoin allowed MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a leading proponent of disproven election fraud theories, to air his views at an official hearing of the Louisiana Voting Systems Commission. 

Ardoin also pulled his state out of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a bipartisan, multi-state collaborative effort that monitors whether people illegally vote in multiple states. 

More than 30 states run by both Democrats and Republicans were part of ERIC with little controversy until it became a target on the far right when the Gateway Pundit website falsely claimed that it was secretly a “left-wing voter registration drive” bankrolled by liberal billionaire George Soros. Ardoin announced he would quit the program shortly thereafter, at an event hosted by a group of election-denying conservative activists in early 2022. Seven other GOP-controlled states have since followed suit, with Texas officially planning to withdraw later this month.

Every state that leaves ERIC not only limits its own ability to detect voter fraud but hurts the entire endeavor, because it relies on states communicating with each other to identify if a voter casts their ballot in multiple states.

But Ardoin’s actions were not enough for conspiracy theorists, and they continued to hound him throughout his tenure. He decided this spring not to run for reelection, triggering Louisiana’s first secretary of state race without an incumbent since 1987—and slammed them in a statement.

“I hope that Louisianans of all political persuasions will stand against the pervasive lies that have eroded trust in our elections by using conspiracies so far-fetched that they belong in a work of fiction,” Ardoin said. “The vast majority of Louisiana’s voters know that our elections are secure and accurate, and it is shameful and outright dangerous that a small minority of vocal individuals have chosen to denigrate the hard work of our election staff and spread unproven falsehoods.”

Ardoin’s decision to quit ERIC hasn’t come up much at all on the campaign trail, but Francis, one of the leading Republican candidates, told Bolts he planned to rejoin the organization so long as new information didn’t come to light during his technical review. “I plan to go back to that unless something surfaces,”he said. 

It’s unclear where Landry and Schexnayder stand—neither has mentioned it on the campaign trail and their campaigns didn’t respond to questions from Bolts about the program. 

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican who defeated primary challenges from election deniers in May, told Bolts at the time that he wished public officials did not bow to such pressure. Referring to Louisiana, Adams said Ardoin “dropped out of ERIC and did the things that he thought he had to do to survive, and it didn’t work, he got run out of his race.”   

“I’ve seen my colleagues in the same job in other states try to feed the tiger,” Adams said. “I’ve seen them make decisions that I think were probably not good for their voters to try to survive a primary and all it does is just validate the conspiracy theories.”

In Louisiana, the secretary of state candidate most invested in these conspiracy theories hasn’t gotten much traction.

As of Oct. 4, Trosclair’s campaign website included a countdown clock to the Nov. 18 runoff, not the October 14 all-candidate election. He’d raised less than $100,000 for the race as of early September campaign finance reports, and has made no ad buys.

“It’s very difficult if you have no money and are trying to sell a narrative that people in this state don’t believe and a system that they don’t want,” Schexnayder adviser Lionel Rainey III said about Trosclair.

One prominent local Republican is helping Trosclair. When Bolts reached out to Trosclair with an interview request, Lenar Whitney, a former state lawmaker and current national committeewoman for the Republican Party of Louisiana with a long history of circulating conspiracies, called back and said that she was working on his campaign. Trosclair never called back. 

Trosclair has made clear his lack of faith in the state’s elections in no uncertain terms. 

“Safe and secure? I don’t think so,” he said of Louisiana’s system at a candidate forum on Sept. 21. “I don’t trust it at all.”

But some of the other GOP candidates are also courting election deniers, even as they defend their own state’s system. 

Nancy Landry’s campaign announcement video criticized election procedures in other states like Arizona and Pennsylvania. And she has hedged when asked if Joe Biden had legitimately won the 2020 election. 

“I do think that President Biden is the legitimate president, but I do think there were some very troubling allegations of irregularities in many states,” she said at the same Sept. 21 forum, before adding that Louisiana has “safe, fair and accurate elections.”

“I understand people’s concerns and their lack of confidence in elections. I think most of it is based on what they’ve heard that happened in other states,” she said later. 

She has also echoed a conspiracy spread by the far right since the 2020 election, attacking Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for donating funds to help struggling local election offices at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We must also continue efforts to prohibit private funding of elections from California leftists like Mark Zuckerberg,” she said in her announcement video. 

Louisiana did not receive any of the Zuckerberg funding in 2020 after Jeff Landry, the attorney general, stepped in to prohibit it. But Louisiana could be on its way to ban any future private elections funding if an amendment question put on the Oct. 14 ballot passes. 

Schexnayder won his speakership because of Democratic support and while his relationship with some legislative Democrats soured in recent years, he’s seen as more of a moderate than Landry. But he, too, has taken the tack that Louisiana’s elections are safe while stoking concerns about how other states and the feds handle elections, saying in an August TV interview that he wanted to ensure “we don’t have any overreach from the federal government to come in and manipulate elections.”

He has promised to create a board to “investigate all and any allegations made towards election irregularities”—a move that would mirror the creation of new investigative bodies in other red states, spurred by unfounded concerns of widespread fraud. 

Francis, a wealthy oilman and former state party chairman, has expressed significantly more skepticism of voting fraud theories than the other candidates.

“I voted for Trump. I’m very conservative,” he told Bolts. “I don’t agree that the election was stolen from him, because there’s no proof of that. I’ve been watching the news and all of the conspiracy theorists. Give me the proof that it was stolen.”

He still plans to give these theories air time, saying that as secretary of state he would organize a “technical conference” to test “all these accusations about the wrongdoing.” But he said he hopes that the conference might help convince them that “we have good solid elections.”

One reason that Louisians who are spreading lies about the 2020 election are so fired up is because Louisiana’s machines are leased from Dominion Voting Systems, which Trump and his allies have falsely claimed were involved in rigging the elections. 

For Trosclair and his allies, the solution is switching to an all-paper system with hand-marked and hand-counted ballots. That idea has been promoted by Trump allies like Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, but elections experts say it would be much more prone to error.

The leading candidates have distanced themselves from proposals for hand-counting: They say they want to replace the old machines with new ones that will provide a paper backup in case anything goes wrong with the count and to audit the system.

But they’ve also acknowledged that voting machines may be unpopular with the GOP base.

“Don’t boo me, but we do have Dominion machines,” Schexnayder joked at a recent event, before explaining that they were secure. He promised that the updated machines would follow a similar model, while also creating an auditable paper trail.

Landry and Francis have similarly said they’d acquire new machines with an auditable paper trail, as has Collins-Greenup.

At a recent candidate forum, Trosclair declared “If you live in Louisiana and you think our elections are just fine there are seven other candidates that are going to change very little or nothing about the process.”

He may be right—but his opponents’ rhetoric during the campaign shows how powerful his movement remains in Louisiana politics.

The post Election Conspiracies Loom Over Louisiana’s Secretary of State Race appeared first on Bolts.

Most of these elections are playing out in the South, where Republicans could secure three more trifectas than they currently have—that is, control of the governorship and both chambers of their state legislature. 

The biggest and most suspenseful battle is taking place in Virginia. Despite Democrats’ gains in the state since the 2000s, the GOP just needs to flip a couple of seats in the state Senate to grab full control of state government. Republicans are also aiming to gain control of Kentucky and Louisiana, in each case by flipping the governor’s mansion. All three states currently have divided governments. 

In Mississippi, the GOP is defending its existing trifecta. 

Democrats don’t have the opportunity to gain a new trifecta this fall, but they’re aiming to keep control of the state government in New Jersey, the most populous of these five states. And in a bonus addition to the fall’s calendar due to a single special election in New Hampshire, they have a shot to keep eroding the GOP majority in the nearly-tied state House, though they won’t be able to quite erase it for now.

These elections are a final messaging test for the parties before 2024, but they’ll also profoundly affect public policy around critical rights within these states, with measures ranging from LGBT rights in Louisiana and new abortion restrictions in Virginia hanging in the balance.

Below, Bolts guides you through each of the states electing governors or legislatures this year as part of our coverage of the 2023 local and state elections around the country. Much more is on the ballot in these states and many others, from a supreme court election in Pennsylvania—the only such race this year—to referendums in Maine or Ohio. 

Kentucky 

Current status: Split government, with a Democratic governor and Republican control of both legislative chambers

What’s on the ballot: The governorship

No matter what, the GOP will retain control of the Kentucky legislature heading into 2024 after very comfortably retaining majorities in the state House and Senate in 2022; those seats are not up for grabs until November 2024.

Republicans also have the votes to override vetoes by the governor, in a rare state where that only takes a simple majority, and they’ve rarely blinked. This year, the GOP-run legislature overrode Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s veto of 15 bills, ramming through a ban on gender-affirming care for minors and major abortion restrictions.

Still, Beshear has flexed his executive power during his first term, issuing public health orders during the COVID-19 pandemic and winning a legal fight against GOP lawmakers who sought to block them. He also issued an executive order in 2019 that restored the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians who were permanently disenfranchised. And last year, he issued other executive orders to allow some people to access medical marijuana, drawing condemnation from Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who is now challenging Beshear for the governor’s office; Beshear’s order eventually pressured state lawmakers into legalizing medical marijuana through legislation this spring. 

The ensuing clashes have put November’s race between Beshear and Cameron on track to break fundraising records.  

Louisiana

Current status: Split government, with a Democratic governor and Republican control of both  legislative chambers

What’s on the ballot: The governorship, and both chambers of the legislature

All legislative seats in Louisiana are on the ballot this year, but we already know who will run the legislature come 2024 before a single vote has been counted. 

Only Republican candidates filed to run in the majority of districts in both the House and the Senate, guaranteeing GOP majorities in each chamber. Still, the fall’s elections will determine whether they can easily pass their priorities in coming years. 

John Bel Edwards, a Democrat has occupied the governor’s mansion over the last eight years, and he has vetoed many Republican bills in that time. Just this summer, he vetoed a barrage of legislation, including laws that criminalized getting too close to an on-duty police officer and banned discussion of sexual orientation in a classroom. Republicans have made major gains in the legislature during Edwards’ tenure, and earlier this year they finally clinched supermajorities in both chambers after a longtime Democratic lawmaker switched parties, giving them the power to  override vetoes. But veto overrides have remained unusual in Louisiana; Republicans this summer held a special session to take up just a few of the bills Edwards vetoed, and while they passed a bill to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth, they could not muster the votes for other legislation.

Edwards is now barred from running for re-election due to term limits. If the GOP flips the governor’s office, it would gain unified control of the state government and no longer have to worry about vetoes. The front-runner is Jeff Landry, the state’s ultra-conservative attorney general, who is worlds apart from the outgoing governor on criminal justice policy. 

And even if Democrat Shawn Wilson pulls off an upset victory to become governor, the state’s legislative elections will determine the size of the Republican majority. Democrats have said they hope to break the GOP’s new supermajority, though the party has suffered from dysfunction, undercutting its preparation. Republican leaders, meanwhile, would like to grow their edge even more to make it easier to override vetoes.

Mississippi

Current status: Republican trifecta

What’s on the ballot: The governorship, and both chambers of the state legislature

The GOP is vying to keep unified control of Mississippi’s state government, which should be easy on the legislative side: Republican candidates are running unopposed in most Senate districts as well as in just shy of a majority of House districts, shielding them from any big surprise at the polls in November.

But Democrats have zeroed in on a scandal involving misspent welfare funds that has engulfed Republican Governor Tate Reeves, who is running for re-election and banking on the state’s red lean to prevail. He faces Brandon Presley, a member of the Mississippi Public Service Commission and a well-known politician in the state, who is aiming to hand Democrats’ their first victory in a governor’s race since 1999. Like past Democratic candidates in the state, Presley has vowed to expand Medicaid if he is elected, a reform Reeves has opposed; Mississippi remains one of only ten states that hasn’t expanded the program as provided by the Affordable Care Act, even though the expansion would cover more than 200,000 Mississippians.

The elections are unfolding in a tough landscape for voting rights and restrictions that depress participation, including a lifelong ban on voting for people convicted of many felonies—a policy that disenfranchises more than one in ten adults in the state, including sixteen percent of Black residents. And even though a new law meant to criminalize assistance with mail-in voting was blocked by a judge this summer, it has still left local organizations in a difficult position as they mount turnout efforts. 

New Jersey

Current status: Democratic trifecta

What’s on the ballot: Both chambers of the state legislature

Democrats walked into the 2021 elections confident they would easily keep unified control over state government, but they only barely survived with Governor Phil Murphy’s securing re-election in a surprise squeaker. 

Two years later, the stakes are considerably lower since the governorship is not on the line, but all legislative seats are up for grabs. And although the GOP, which gained seven seats in 2021, once made noise about 2023 being the year they flip a chamber for the first time in two decades, the party has already hit most of its obvious targets and it would have to reach into districts that are firmly blue. According to calculations by the New Jersey Globe, President Biden carried 25 of the state’s 40 legislative districts by double-digits in the 2020 presidential race. Even when Murphy survived statewide by three percentage point in 2021, he carried the majority of legislative districts by at least five percentage points. That gives Democrats a clear roadmap to retaining their legislative majorities this fall. 

Unified Democratic control hasn’t meant that those in the party always see eye to eye, though. Relationships between the legislature’s Democratic leaders and the more progressive governor have been difficult at times since Murphy’s first election. Senate President Steve Sweeney’s shock election loss in South Jersey in 2021 removed one of the state’s more centrist politicians, but progressive priorities like same-day voter registration have still died in the chamber.

Virginia

Current status: Split government: a Republican governor and House, and a Democratic Senate

What’s on the ballot: Both chambers of the state legislature

Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin badly wants his party to seize control of the Virginia legislature, which would give him far more control over the affairs of the state. Alongside Youngkin’s victory in 2021, the GOP also flipped the state House. But the Senate was not on the ballot that year and remained Democratic, and since then it has frustrated conservative ambitions on many issues, including abortion rights, criminal justice, and voting rights. 

Senate Democrats over the last two sessions have killed a barrage of Republican legislation, including bills that would have banned access to abortion at 15 weeks, ended same-day voter registration, enacted new voter ID requirements, and restrained the discretion of reform prosecutors to drop low-level cases.

If the GOP gains the Senate and keeps the House in November, it would open the floodgates for such bills. To get there, they need to flip two Senate seats (out of 40), and not lose more than one House seat compared to the state’s last elections. These margins are tight enough that Democrats are hopeful they’ll be the ones celebrating on Nov. 7 if they manage to not just retain the Senate but also flip the GOP-run House. 

And there are many competitive seats; 14 House districts and 7 Senate districts were within 10 percentage points in the last governor’s race, according to a review of data supplied by the Virginia Public Access Project. (The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics reviews the specific districts that are the likeliest to decide the majority.) Both parties are pouring in large amounts of money to win them, with many ads focusing on abortion access.   

These legislative races are the first general election since Youngkin dramatically tightened voter eligibility in March by ending his predecessor’s practice of automatically restoring the voting rights of people who leave prison. Many Virginians are unable to vote as a result. 

Bonus: New Hampshire 

Current status: Republican trifecta

What’s on the ballot: Just one state House seat

In the entire state of New Hampshire, only one state House district around Nashua is up for election in November. But with the state House nearly evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, that election carries great symbolic weight. 

Big gains in the 2022 midterms left Democrats within three seats of a majority in the state House and they made further gains in special elections this year, most recently on Sept. 19 by flipping a district in Rockingham County. That cut Republicans’ edge to just one seat, 198 to 197, putting Democrats on track to tying the chamber with an even number of representatives per party ahead of Nashua’s Nov. 7 special election, which is taking place in a district that leans strongly blue, according to Daily Kos Elections. 

Then, on Monday, a House member announced that she would quit the Democratic Party, leaving her former party two seats behind heading into Nov. 7. 

Practically speaking, the exact number of seats held by each party wouldn’t at this stage change the bottom line: The GOP’s hold on the chamber is already tenuous. This is the largest legislative body in the U.S. by far, and lawmakers have other jobs since they’re only paid $100 a year. This means that chronic absences make the chamber difficult to predict and manage on any given day. Expect more vacancies, and party switches, over the next 15 months.

The post The Five States Where Trifectas Are At Play in November appeared first on Bolts.