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.

The ruling is certain to deter voting rights litigation within the Eighth Circuit, and advocates worry that the U.S. Supreme Court could take the rule nationwide. Since the 1980s, outside organizations have pursued the vast majority of VRA cases since the DOJ doesn’t have the resources, and in many cases the political will, to pursue many lawsuits on its own.

But lawmakers in Minnesota looked for a remedy this year, and Minnesota has now become the first state within the Eighth Circuit to enshrine a private right of action into state law. Governor Tim Walz in May signed the Minnesota Voting Rights Act, which spells out protections for voters and allows private citizens and outside organizations to bring lawsuits in state courts.

For David McKinney, an attorney at the ACLU of Minnesota who supported the law, the reform “honors a tradition and sets a value under Minnesota law that individuals, when their rights are violated, they’re the ones that are best positioned to assert it.”

“They are the folks who, under the theory of their case, can’t vote, right? They’ve been unlawfully discriminated against, and so they’re in the best position to assert their rights,” McKinney continued.

The Minnesota Voting Rights Act was adopted as part of a package that contains other voter protections, like an end to prison gerrymandering. Voting rights advocates told Bolts that the Eighth Circuit’s ruling supercharged their push, and ensured that enshrining a private right of action would be part of the bill. Several other states have passed similar laws in recent years to shield voters from voting rights’ federal erosion.

“It was the Eighth Circuit decision that added the urgency by taking away the ability of Minnesotans who have been discriminated against to go to court and enforce their rights under federal law,” explains Emma Greenman, a state Representative who co-authored the bill, along with Minnesota Senate President Bobby Joe Champion. Greenman pointed to the fact that two thirds of Voting Rights Act cases are brought by private plaintiffs or organizations. “The U.S. Attorney General is a piece, but not a big piece, of the way that the federal rights are enforced.”

Often, individuals or groups that are being discriminated against are represented in court by organizations such as chapters of the ACLU or NAACP. “Litigation is expensive, and so you do require a fair amount of resources to successfully bring a case. And I think a lot of these organizations do have resources that individual citizens might not have,” said Justin Erickson, general counsel in  the Minnesota secretary of state’s office. “A lot of these organizations are doing this work throughout the country, so they have a really good grasp of the trends that are out there, the different work that’s being done, the best practices that different agencies have undertaken in order to protect voting rights.”

The Eighth Circuit, in a ruling authored by Judge David Stras, a former Minnesota justice who was nominated to the federal bench by President Donald Trump in 2017, has threatened to halt a lot of that work. 

Before the decision came down, the Minnesota bill’s crafters had been weighing whether to include language codifying a private right of action. While the federal VRA doesn’t include a provision saying explicitly that private citizens can sue for violating the law, Americans have for decades sued under Section 2 of the VRA; in 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this right for private individuals and organizations alike. Greenman says there are also many aspects of federal voting rights law that aren’t explicitly mentioned in the VRA but have been affirmed by courts, which can make legal proceedings complicated.

But given the current conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, Greenman and her allies wanted to be more proactive in protecting rights. “What was a simple and very eloquent bill has been made more and more complicated, especially since we’ve had a Supreme Court that has really been hostile to its protections,” said Greenman. 

They looked to these federal court precedents, as well as to VRAs that were popping up in other states, championed by well-known national organizations like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Campaign Legal Center, and the Brennan Center for Justice. Greenman described the thought process as, “How do we provide strong protections in light of what’s happening to the federal Voting Rights Act?” 

Lilly Sasse worked on Greenman’s state House campaign, and now works for We Choose Us, a coalition of groups that support stronger voting rights protections in Minnesota. Sasse said that the coalition began in 2021, but the campaign became much stronger after the Eighth Circuit decision. “In order for people to have those protections from voter suppression, vote dilution, their day in court, we needed to have something in Minnesota that explicitly stated that.”

Eight other states have adopted their own Voting Rights Acts—California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington. Greenman said she and her colleagues looked to these existing laws and to other states still considering their own state-level VRAs, including Michigan and Maryland, as they drafted their own bill. “It’s always impossible to use a specific model, because all states are so different,” she said.

In part, these laws are a way for a state to go beyond the floor of federal voting protections, and enshrine more specific rights relevant to its particular communities. New York’s VRA, for example, guarantees ballot access in languages other than English.

But they’re also a reaction to worries that courts could further erode federal voter protections. “In recent years, federal courts have been spending some time stripping the VRA of critical components and creating a body of case law that can make it extremely difficult for plaintiffs to win their cases,” said Lata Nott, of the Campaign Legal Center. 

Last year’s Eighth Circuit decision came out of a dispute over a redistricting plan in Arkansas. Liberal groups in that state, including local branches of the ACLU and NAACP, announced in July that they won’t appeal the circuit court’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, and will instead seek redress under other laws, even though they believe it was wrongly decided. An adverse ruling by the Supreme Court could end a private right of action nationwide. But in the meantime, the right to sue in federal courts has virtually ended across the Eighth Circuit, which besides Minnesota covers Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. 

“With the Eighth Circuit now having significantly curtailed private causes of action under the Voting Rights Act, and who knows what the Supreme Court’s gonna do on this one, what at least happens in Minnesota now is that voting rights are protected under state law, and individuals now have this ability to enforce their own voting rights,” said David Schultz, a professor of political science and law at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Another key protection of the federal VRA gutted by federal courts is Section 5, known as the preclearance requirement. Under it, jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination had to get federal approval before making changes to voting rules. But the U.S. Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder ruling struck down Section 5 in 2013, giving the issue greater significance at the state level. 

New York and Connecticut have both added preclearance provisions into their state VRAs, requiring that jurisdictions with a history of discrimination get approval, either from state officials or courts, for proposed voting changes before they can be implemented. Nott said her organization has pushed for preclearance requirements in state VRAs, but this didn’t make it into the Minnesota law. 

“We’re hoping, actually, that next session, that’s something that we can try to push forward,” she said. “With the Eighth Circuit decision, there was some emphasis on being able to pass a bill that could protect the rights of Minnesotans to assert their own rights in court.”

Experts also point to Minnesota’s particular racial disparities in voter turnout as a reason why the state law is necessary. Today, slightly more than a fifth of Minnesotans are people of color, roughly double the population of 30 years ago, according to Schultz. “Minnesota remains a state with enormous racial disparities in criminal justice, education housing, et cetera, but one of the other major racial disparities in the state of Minnesota,” Schultz said, “is voter registration and turnout.”

“A lot of people say the state of Minnesota is usually the north star when it comes to voter turnout. But I also think that we need to stop and ask, for who? For who is the state of Minnesota the number one in voter turnout?” said Annastacia Belladonna-Carrera, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of Common Cause. Belladonna-Carrera and her organization helped campaign for the Minnesota VRA. “Most of the categories where the state of Minnesota does outshine the rest is in the disparities,” said Belladonna-Carrera. 

In part because of how recently the law was enacted, no lawsuits have yet been filed under the Minnesota Voting Rights Act. Belladonna-Carrera said that Common Cause Minnesota is “entertaining a couple of potential cases” but nothing is definite yet. Nott, of the Campaign Legal Center, said that even in the other states with their own VRAs, there’s “not a huge number” of cases yet. “People fear that passing one of these will lead to a torrent of litigation. That’s not the case,” she said.

“These cases are not easy,” acknowledges Greenman. “They have a very high burden of what you have to prove.” But that’s why she believes it’s important for voters to know it’s a right they may exercise. 

“Without a private right of action,” she continued, “what it would mean is you would have to wait for the discretion of a government official to decide whether to bring that case or not, and it would just depend on the resources that the attorney general had.”

Correction: This article has been updated to include a mention of New Mexico’s Voting Rights Act.

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As New Jersey Democrats vote in Tuesday’s primaries, they’ll encounter a revamped ballot, stripped of a unique design that critics say has given party leaders the ability to hand-select primary winners.

To people living anywhere else in the nation, the new ballot would look very familiar. Offices will appear on the ballot as distinct blocks, inviting voters to consider them separately from each other. But in New Jersey, this design is overhauling a longstanding practice.  

A federal judge in March barred county clerks from printing Democratic primary ballots that use the “county line,” a bespoke New Jersey ballot system that grouped candidates who are seeking separate offices—from president down to sheriff—into single rows or columns. Within each county, candidates gained a spot in the most advantageous grouping—where they were paired with well-known incumbents running for higher offices—through an endorsement by that county’s party. That prominent placement came with a powerful boost; candidates with support from party leaders seldom failed to win a nomination. 

The ruling was a preliminary stay that only applies this spring; courts are still weighing whether to permanently end the county line. 

But the upcoming primaries already offer a window into a possible new era of New Jersey politics—one where party bosses are a touch less powerful, even if they’ll retain other tools in their arsenal, and where primaries are more competitive. 

“In the places where we have contested races, I think we’ll get a more accurate depiction of where voters stand and not one that’s skewed particularly in favor of the party-endorsed candidates,” said Brett Pugach, one of the attorneys who argued the case against the county line.

Research has found that the line confers a measurable advantage to candidates who receive it. Julia Sass Rubin, director of Rutgers University’s public policy program and an expert witness in the lawsuit, found that gaining an endorsement by a county party organization, and a spot on the county line, boosts a candidate by about 12 percentage points on average. 

Josh Pasek, another expert witness and a political science professor at the University of Michigan, reported similar findings. His study assessed that the line conferred an advantage of 10 to 11 points; the effect was far larger in primaries with no incumbents and candidates with little name recognition.

“The line undergirds an ability of political machines to control politics and policy of the state,” said Rubin. “That’s fundamentally the impact of the line.”

Good government groups and grassroots Democrats have long protested the use of the line, alleging that the boost it provides to party-backed candidates is unfair. In late 2020, a coalition of groups headed by the New Jersey branch of the League of Women Voters launched a campaign to educate voters on the line and call for the state to adopt a more traditional ballot design. That same year, a group of former candidates filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the line system violated their constitutional rights, though the case has moved very slowly and remains unresolved. 

The issue came to a head this fall when first lady Tammy Murphy decided to run for the state’s U.S. Senate seat after a federal grand jury indicted Senator Bob Menendez on bribery charges, among other allegations. Democratic county chairs in some of the state’s most populous counties lined up to endorse her over U.S. Representative and fellow candidate Andy Kim. 

What followed was a surprisingly effective revolt from Kim’s supporters and longtime line opponents, who forced new scrutiny on these practices. After Kim and two other congressional candidates filed a new lawsuit against the line, New Jersey’s attorney general agreed that the line was unconstitutional. A judge in March ruled that the case had a substantial chance of succeeding, enjoining the line from use in upcoming Democratic primaries while the case awaits a final resolution. 

Ironically, the ruling is unlikely to have a major effect on the Senate race since Murphy unexpectedly dropped out of the race shortly before the judge’s decision. 

But it thrust two Democratic congressional primaries that might otherwise be perfunctory into fierce competition. Five Democrats are vying for Kim’s 3rd District seat as he campaigns for Menendez’s spot in the upper chamber. Had lines still existed, Assemblymember Herb Conaway, a physician who won endorsements from Democrat organizations in all three of the district’s counties, would be overwhelmingly favored to win the nomination for Kim’s House seat.

But absent the line, Assemblymember Carol Murphy poses a credible threat to her former running mate’s House bid, as does civil rights attorney Joe Cohn, a relative outsider.

“I think the race, as far as when the race begins—and to some degree ends—has shifted,” said state Senator Troy Singleton, who represents their legislative district in the state Senate and is not picking sides in their primary.

Singleton, an influential figure in the suburban and increasingly Democratic Burlington County who backed abolishing lines in February, said the lack of a line had broadened other candidates’ paths to victory.

He stressed that the ruling doesn’t just affect how voters behave when they’re filling in their ballots. The effects were felt immediately, he said. It allowed some candidates, like Cohn, to appear on debate stages that might have been barred to them if organizational support was among the qualifications to appear.

The dynamics are a little different in the 8th District, centered in Hudson County, where Democratic Representative Rob Menendez, the son of the now-indicted senator, faces a primary challenge from Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla, one of the candidates who joined the lawsuit against the county line alongside Kim. The race is unfolding in the shadow of the father’s ongoing corruption trial.

Though Hudson County Democrats swiftly dropped support for the elder Menendez after the senator was indicted in September, they have not hesitated to throw their resources behind his son.

That support could be key even absent a line. Hudson County Democratic leaders like North Bergen Mayor Nicholas Sacco—a former state senator who is one of the county’s numerous power brokers — wield vast ranks of canvassers that grassroots campaigns have, historically, failed to match.

“When you have organizations such as Nick Sacco’s on your side, you’re a big favorite,” said Hudson County Democratic Chairman Anthony Vainieri.

In the 3rd District, by contrast, the Burlington County Democratic Party, which accounts for roughly two-thirds of the district’s Democratic primary vote, has not thrown its organizational weight behind Conaway, even though the party had given him a spot on the county line. Singleton said the presence of two popular incumbents limited the party’s active involvement.  

Earlier research conducted by Sass-Rubin assessed the effects of party support without teasing out the line from the other resources that come with it; she found candidates that received both performed 38 points better on average. But the strength of institutional get-out-the-vote operations absent organizational lines remains untested.

“This is the underlying problem: We don’t know what a likely voter looks like in a competitive Democratic primary in New Jersey because we haven’t had one in more than 10 years,” said Dan Cassino, director of the Fairleigh Dickinson University Poll.

The advantages granted by the party support under the line system are stark enough that, in the past, even incumbents who haven’t gotten it have opted to not seek reelection rather than run off-the-line.

That was the case for former Assemblyman Nicholas Chiaravalloti, a Hudson County Democrat who did not seek reelection after Bayonne Mayor Jimmy Davis in 2021 awarded the county line to William Sampson through a longstanding tradition that lets Hudson County mayors pick members of their legislative delegation. Sampson was elected handily and he remains in the Assembly.

The ruling applies only to Democrats, so voters taking part in GOP primaries will still see the old design. This has made for a remarkable split screen in recent weeks, as New Jersey residents have received sample ballots with sections that look starkly different for each party’s primary.

Burlington County is the only county that will use office-block ballots, which group candidates by office sought, for both parties’ primaries due to a decision by the local clerk.

The system of grouping candidates together—it’s called bracketing—came into being in 1941, when Governor Charles Edison signed a bill allowing candidates to group themselves on the ballot under a common slogan. That law barred slogans from indicating a candidate’s party affiliation, but that prohibition was removed when the bracketing statute was rewritten in 1985.

Still, state statutes meant to denude party leaders of their influence on primary elections kept the system in check until the late 1980s. New Jersey’s current system of county lines spawned after the U.S. Supreme Court in 1989 ruled a California ban on party primary endorsements impermissibly violated parties’ free speech and associational rights.

Over the succeeding 15 years, New Jersey courts struck down laws limiting candidates’ ability to bracket or seek party backing, first eliminating statute that required candidates for governor and U.S. Senate appear separate from others on the ballot before voiding an already unenforced law that barred parties from endorsing primary candidates in 2004.

Party leaders have broadly defended county lines, arguing candidate screening processes in some counties lead to better nominees more likely to win in November. The process for awarding lines varies from county to county. In some, chairs award them unilaterally, and in others, they are awarded by a vote of county committee members elected during primaries.

“It’s easier for the voter to support a team of candidates rather than looking all over the ballot for their choice,” said Vainieri.

But opponents of the system argue that it stifles competition and deprives voters of a choice. It’s not just that it influences the result, they say; it also dissuades people from even running in the first place. 

“You need to kiss the ring in order to have any chance of winning,” said Henal Patel, a policy director at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, who penned amicus briefs in both lawsuits for the League of Women Voters and other groups. “That’s the first hurdle, and that, in and of itself, does kill participation—of course it does.”

The court’s ruling this year came too late to change that dynamic and get more candidates to run since the judge issued it days after the state’s filing deadline for the 2024 elections. 

“One of the impacts is that more people will get into primaries to run,” said Rubin. “But you’re not seeing that in this cycle because the decision came after the cutoff to file to run this cycle.”

If courts confirm the line’s demise, its opponents hope that it’ll encourage more residents to challenge incumbents and run for open seats. 

The filing deadline for New Jersey’s 2025 primaries for governor and legislature—elections that have long been dominated by local party bosses—are less than one year away.

The post A Revamped Ballot Design Jumpstarts Democracy in New Jersey appeared first on Bolts.

Written by election law expert Joshua Douglas, The Court v. the Voters: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights dives into nine landmark cases in which the court undercut U.S. democracy. These include Citizens United, which struck down campaign finance regulations, and Rucho, which shrugged away partisan gerrymandering.

The country is now approaching an election in which the Supreme Court is poised to play an unusually large role, with uncertainty around what will be left of the VRA, what congressional maps will be used, and how justices will respond to lawsuits around the presidential results. 

At Bolts, we suspected that our readers may be trying to make sense of the legal landscape today with regards to voting rights. So last week, we asked you to share your questions about the Supreme Court’s ongoing effect on voting rights—and how the damage may be repaired. And Douglas agreed to respond to them.

Floored by all the submissions we received on social media and on our website, we struggled to narrow the list down but finally settled on eleven questions to pose to Douglas, from big-picture inquiries to some that dive into the weeds of election law.

Below, Douglas answers Bolts readers. He identifies the Supreme Court cases you may never have heard of despite their role in undermining voting rights, assesses where VRA protections may go from here, explains why he thinks ranked choice voting is safe for now, and much more.

Voting rights today: How we got here

What’s the most underrated case where this court weakened voting rights, but that we just don’t talk about enough? — Anonymous

There are two cases that hardly anyone has heard of but that have had a major impact on the way the Supreme Court treats the constitutional right to vote: Anderson v. Celebrezze, in 1983, and Burdick v. Takushi, in 1992. Anderson dealt with the desire of an independent candidate to gain ballot access after a state’s deadline for turning in enough signatures. Burdick was about an individual’s attempt to write-in a candidate instead of choosing one of the candidates listed on the ballot. (These two cases are the subjects of Chapters 1 and 2 of my new book.) But the specific disputes in these cases are less important than the judicial test that came out of them.

These two cases began the Supreme Court’s descent into its underprotection of the right to vote by failing to apply the highest judicial standard, known as strict scrutiny. 

Previously, the court in the 1960s had strongly protected voters by requiring a state to prove that it had a really good reason for a law that infringed upon the right to vote, and that the law actually achieved that goal. But in Anderson, the court began to weaken that test, instead balancing the burden that a law imposes on voters with a state’s interests in regulating the election as it wishes. Burdick went further, accepting a state’s desire to run its election as it sees fit. These two cases comprise what election scholars call the “Anderson–Burdick” balancing test. 

Now, states no longer have to explain, with specificity, their reasons for a law to have the Supreme Court uphold its voting regulation. As far as this court is concerned, a state can simply offer a more general assertion that it’s looking to “prevent voter fraud” or “ease election administration,”  even when doing so is at the expense of voters’ easy access to the ballot.

If voting is a constitutional right (isn’t it?), how is it that requiring an ID, to which one isn’t entitled to by constitutional right, can be used to trump (pun intended) the right to vote?  — Rocky, from California

This question goes to a broader point: The Supreme Court has failed to protect the constitutional right to vote and instead has unduly deferred to state rules on election administration, even when these rules infringe upon voters’ rights. 

In recent decades, the court has routinely credited state assertions of their desire to root out voter fraud, even when the state has zero evidence that there are real election integrity concerns. On voter ID specifically, in its 2008 decision in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the court rejected a challenge to Indiana’s ID law, saying that the plaintiffs had not presented enough evidence that the rules imposed a burden on voters. At the same time, it accepted the state’s generalized assertions of its desire to prevent in-person impersonation, even though Indiana could not point to a single example of this kind of voter fraud in its history. That is why, as I argue in the book, the court’s approach to the constitutional right to vote is backward.

Would you see any legal challenges the Supreme Court may accept in opposition of states implementing ranked choice voting for all their elections? — J.C.

It is hard to see what the successful legal challenge might be to ranked choice voting, and lower courts have already rejected some theories. In one case out of San Francisco, plaintiffs argued that ranked choice voting violated the concept of “one-person, one-vote” by giving voters the chance to choose multiple candidates. The court rejected the challenge because in the end each ballot is counted only once for one candidate. 

There was, however, a successful challenge to ranked choice voting in Maine, though it was brought under Maine’s state constitution, which explicitly says that the winner of state elections is the candidate with the most votes. That’s why Maine does not use ranked choice voting for the general election for governor, state senator, or state representative, even though it uses it for federal elections. But courts rejected other legal challenges to ranked choice voting in Maine.

Why is 18 the voting-age floor in the U.S.? Did SCOTUS have anything to do with that? — Lewis M.

At the founding the voting age was 21, which simply came from English common law. But 21 was essentially a historical accident: in medieval times, 21 was the age that men were thought strong enough to wear a suit of heavy armor and therefore entered adulthood. In the U.S., there was a long movement to lower the voting age to 18, starting around the time of World War II and increasing during the Vietnam War. Congress tried to lower the voting age to 18 for all elections, but the Supreme Court struck down the provision as it applied to state and local elections in Oregon v. Mitchell in 1970. That decision spurred Congress and the states to enact and ratify the 26^th Amendment in 1971, which lowered the voting age to 18 for all elections. 

Interestingly, although the amendment says that states cannot deny the right to vote to those 18 and older, it does not prohibit states or localities from lowering the voting age further. Several jurisdictions in California and Maryland have set a voting age of 16 for local or school board elections. And several states allow 17-olds to vote in the primary if they will be 18 by Election Day. There is nothing unconstitutional about these rules, at least under the U.S. Constitution.

Threats to the Voting Rights Act and redistricting reform

SCOTUS unexpectedly struck down Alabama’s congressional map last year in Allen v. Milligan. Could that decision have an impact on other states’ gerrymandering cases? Could it be enough to slow down gerrymandering in Texas? — Moon, from Texas

The Allen v. Milligan case was helpful to ensure stronger minority representation within a map, but the case itself did not make any new law. The court simply refused Alabama’s extreme argument to overturn decades of precedent in how the court construes Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act, which prohibits a voting practice (including redistricting) that has the effect of harming minority voters. As for Texas, the question is whether the map has sufficient minority representation, and there has been a lot of litigation on that front; the Allen v. Milligan ruling kept lawsuits like this alive but it did not create new precedent to help plaintiffs.

Setting aside whatever official immunity a state actor might have, does an individual voter have a private right of action against someone else for interfering with the voter’s electoral rights? — curiousKat, from Texas

The courts have long agreed that there is a private right of action under the Voting Rights Act for an individual or group to sue a governmental entity for violating the law. But several lower courts, most prominently the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, have recently questioned that rule, spurred by a comment that Justice Neil Gorsuch made in a concurring opinion in Brnovich v. DNC in 2021. Contrary to all history and precedent, the Eighth Circuit ruled that only the federal Department of Justice can bring suit under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. (Editor’s note: Bolts reported on this and other emerging threats to the VRA in January.)

That issue might reach the U.S. Supreme Court soon, and if the court agrees with the Eighth Circuit, then it will be much harder to effectuate equal voting rights, as the Department of Justice does not have the resources to bring many cases. The bottom line: if the court agrees that there is no private right of action under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, then you will likely see many fewer lawsuits that challenge unfair voting rules, and states will have even further leeway to regulate their elections without meaningful judicial oversight. 

I’m wondering if the Supreme Court will revisit its 2015 decision upholding Arizona’s independent redistricting commission. It seems they now have the votes to end redistricting reforms by proposition. The cynic in me says they haven’t overturned it because Dems would benefit compared to the current system. — @controversycow, on Threads

(Editor’s note: Arizonans set up an independent redistricting commission through a ballot initiative; but this case argued that redistricting power belongs to lawmakers, and that the citizens-led initiative improperly wrestled it from the legislature. The court rejected that theory on a 5-4 vote.)

If new challenges emerge to these commissions, the votes are probably there to strike them down, though there are reasons to think the Supreme Court might not go that far. 

That Arizona case was 5-4 with Chief Justice John Roberts writing a vigorous dissent. Justice Anthony Kennedy was in the majority in that case and now Justice Brett Kavanaugh is in the seat. And, of course, Justice Amy Coney Barrett replaced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote the majority opinion in 2015. So it’s quite possible that the court could strike down independent redistricting commissions, at least for drawing congressional lines, saying that under the U.S. Constitution only the state “legislature” can engage in redistricting. 

That said, the court rejected a similar argument last year that only a state legislature can promulgate voting rules in Moore v. Harper, the case about the independent state legislature theory. That could be a saving grace for these initiative-created commissions: I could see enough justices refusing to go down the path of explicitly overturning both the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission and Moore v. Harper decisions.

What can be done to bolster democracy?

In light of all the recent rulings striking down campaign finance rules, what can still be done legally to combat dark money in elections? — @sophieclw5, on Threads

The Supreme Court has still upheld disclosure requirements for campaign finance. In fact, in Citizens United, the 2010 case that I cover in chapter 5 of my book, the court voted 8-1 to uphold the disclosure requirements of federal law, with only Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting. So, I think both Congress and state legislatures could enact more robust disclosure rules. That would not stop the flow of money in campaigns, but it could close some of the loopholes that allow groups to hide behind fictitious names or organizations.

Of course, the political problem remains, in that Congress and many state legislatures do not have the political will to enact stronger disclosure rules.

Is there a path to restoring the VRA by invoking the 15th Amendment? — Donald, from Louisiana | Could Congress argue that Section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment means that Congress’ judgment on voting rights supersedes court rulings (as long as Congress is acting to protect voting rights)? — @carlnyberg312, on BlueSky 

(Editor’s note: Section 1 of the 15th Amendment says, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Section 2 adds: “The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”)

The problem with using the 15^th Amendment is that the Supreme Court has long said that plaintiffs must prove intentional discrimination to invoke that amendment. That is why Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is more powerful: it prohibits both discriminatory intent and discriminatory impact or effect. Unless the court changes its case law on the Fifteenth Amendment, it is hard to use that provision to protect voting rights unless there is clear evidence of a discriminatory intent, which is difficult to prove. 

Section 2 of that Amendment authorizes Congress to act, but the court has also narrowly construed a similar provision of the Fourteenth Amendment to say that any federal legislation must be “congruent and proportional” to the harm Congress is trying to address, which is a restrictive standard.

If the U.S. Supreme Court is undermining voting rights, what are state supreme courts doing? What can they do? Wisconsin’s supreme court struck down gerrymandering last year, is that the solution? — Anonymous

State courts are a great source of stronger voting rights protection, especially given that state constitutions go much further than the U.S. Constitution in conferring and protecting the right to vote. Virtually all state constitutions explicitly grant the right to vote, and, as I’ve written in recent scholarship, state constitutions have several provisions that collectively elevate the status of voters. 

The key is for state courts to use those provisions and not simply follow U.S. Supreme Court case law. Some state courts have construed their state constitutions to be in “lockstep” with the U.S. Constitution and federal case law, meaning that they simply follow U.S. Supreme Court precedent even though their state constitutions go beyond the U.S. Constitution in protecting voters. In my view, that approach is wrong given the stronger protection for voters within state constitutions. That is, state courts should be more protective of voting rights.

Take the issue of gerrymandering: Several courts, such as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the Wisconsin Supreme Court, have gone beyond the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to address partisan gerrymandering by pointing to more specific language in their state constitutions. But other state courts have adopted the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause that issues of partisan gerrymandering are not for the courts to resolve. If neither federal courts nor state courts will address partisan gerrymandering, however, then there are few outlets for voters to vindicate their right to a fair election.

The Roberts Court has been willing to negate laws and constitutional amendments. In light of that, what might be the most practical and effective steps that can be taken to protect voting rights nationally, so that it will protect voters in states that have become increasingly hostile to voting? — Firthermor, from Maryland

I think that the best path to securing stronger voting rights in the current climate—especially given restrictive rulings from the Supreme Court—is to focus on local, grassroots movements to expand voting opportunities. As I discuss in my 2019 book, Vote for US, there are many examples of individuals working in communities all over the country to make our elections more convenient, inclusive, and democratic. Many movements, including women’s suffrage, vote-by-mail, ranked choice voting, and others started at the local level and then spread to other places. 

For example, I love the efforts of the organization VoteRiders, which helps people obtain IDs so they can vote. Having a valid ID also assists them in so many other aspects of their lives. I am also impressed with a local group in my own community in Kentucky, CivicLex, which helps members of the community understand and engage with local government. [Full disclosure: I am a Board member of CivicLex.] The National Vote at Home Institute does great work in promoting expanded vote-by-mail policies.

The post How the Supreme Court Is Undermining Voting Rights: Your Questions Answered 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.

This fall, Maine voters will again decide whether to scrub that exclusion from their state’s constitution, echoing the court ruling. Question 8, one of several constitutional amendments on the state’s Nov. 7 ballot, asks voters if they want to “remove a provision prohibiting a person under guardianship for reasons of mental illness from voting.”  

Maine is already closer to universal suffrage than most states. It’s one of two states, plus Washington D.C., that is approaching universal suffrage. Maine allows people to vote from prison and state law affirms the voting rights of people with intellectual disabilities, autism, and brain injuries. That makes this clause stand out—it treats mentally ill people under guardianship as second-class citizens, which is precisely why the court ruled it unconstitutional. 

“We are creating a subset of mentally ill people under guardians who can’t vote,” Democratic State Senator Craig Hickman, who spearheaded the effort to put the matter to the vote, told Bolts. Hickman, a voting rights advocate, has also been involved in other measures to remove outdated language from Maine’s constitution. “I think it’s important to ratify this amendment. [We need to] make it clear that in this state we have no reason to disenfranchise.” 

“Voting is…a fundamental right,” says Lewis Bossing, an attorney at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, an organization that advocates for adults and children with mental disabilities. “We would like to see a world in which there is no competency standard for voting, because we don’t subject people generally to proving somehow that they can make a choice.”

While it may seem symbolic, the amendment in Maine highlights the patchwork and shifting landscape of voting rights for people under guardianship across the country. And it may have a material impact. The constitutional amendment, if passed, could encourage other states to examine and strike or reform their language—and Bossing notes that the American Bar Association has a recommended standard, starting with due process, for determining when someone under guardianship may lose their voting rights. Some states, such as California, have already adopted versions of this language in their code. 

While the number of people living under guardianships in the United States is unknown because there’s no formal tracking, one study this year guessed at 1.5 million, with guardians supervising some $50 billion in assets. The specifics of these legal arrangements can vary by state and by person, but typically require going to court to petition a judge for a guardianship on the grounds that someone cannot make independent decisions. Considerations for guardianships can include severe mental illness, some developmental or intellectual disabilities, and illnesses related to aging such as Alzheimer’s. 

Many states, including Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming, have clauses in legislation or their constitutions that explicitly prohibit some people judged “incompetent” from voting, though the specifics can vary by state. Many, like Maine, have conflicting constitutional and legislative positions around voting rights for people under guardianship. Kentucky’s constitution, for example, uses outdated language to describe who shall not have the right to vote (“idiots and insane persons”), though the state’s civil code is actually protective of voting rights for those under guardianship. According to a congressional report published in 2018, nearly 10,000 people across the country lost the right to vote due to “mental incompetence”, which Bossing warns can be an overly broad category.  Though advocates say that the true number is likely much higher because reporting is not reliable. 

Maine barred people under guardianships for mental health conditions from voting until the Disability Rights Center of Maine sued on behalf of three women under guardianships who wanted to vote in the 2000 presidential election. One of them was allowed to vote in that election after successfully petitioning the local judge overseeing her guardianship. Another woman tried but was unable to vote that year after her judge denied the petition to amend her guardianship, citing the prohibition in the state constitution. The third plaintiff was unable to seek a modification to her guardianship ahead of the 2000 election because she had been hospitalized at the time.    

The federal court in Maine ruled in 2001 that it was in fact unconstitutional to deny ballot access for people under guardianships for mental illness, a violation of both the due process and equal protection clauses in the federal 14th Amendment. The state chose not to appeal the decision and legislators struck the relevant sections of the elections code. Today, the voting information page maintained by Maine’s Secretary of State affirms voting rights for people under guardianship, in alignment with the court decision and legislative changes. 

But the outdated voting restrictions have remained in Maine’s constitution since then. Scrubbing the language requires a two-thirds majority in both the state House and Senate to place an amendment on the ballot, followed by a simple majority vote in a referendum. 

“I want to excise anything that is unconstitutional,” Hickman, who led the amendment process in the legislature this year, told Bolts. “We have already removed any disenfranchisement of mentally ill people under the courts and law.” Only a handful of people testified in this year’s legislative hearing over the amendment, including Maine’s secretary of state, who noted that it would finally bring the state’s foundational legal document in line with established case law.

Bossing and other advocates for people under guardianships also argue that people who express a desire to vote should be allowed to vote, and should be provided with any accessibility accommodations they need, such as an electronic voting machine equipped for use by blind voters, plain language material for people with cognitive or intellectual disabilities, or a communication board for a developmentally disabled voter. 

But that help isn’t always available. Despite numerous federal laws protecting the right to vote privately and securely for disabled people, disabled voters report systemic access problems in every election. A 2017 U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that 83 percent of voting places surveyed had one or more accessibility barriers. Disabled voters are also harmed by restrictions on mail and early voting, poor mail ballot design, limits on who can collect and drop off ballots, and calls for hand-marked paper ballots. In a bitter twist, leveraging the Americans with Disabilities Act to close or move polling places has become a voter suppression tactic.

The conversation about voting rights for people under guardianship also connects with a larger discussion about guardianships: Some disability activists and organizations, including Bazelon, question whether they should exist at all, when alternatives that offer more autonomy are available. The supported decision-making movement, for example, presents an option where a disabled person can talk to friends, family, service providers, or others about a decision, weighing those conversations but ultimately making an independent choice. Individual disabled people decide which kinds of decisions they want help with on the basis of their own needs, and they can revisit the topic as their lives change. 

While reformers work on a state-by-state basis, there have been attempts to address the issue federally. The Accessible Voting Act of 2020 filed by U.S. Senator Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat, would have barred voting restrictions on the basis of guardianships. Under the bill, which failed that session, in order to terminate voting rights, guardians or the state must produce “a court order finding by clear and convincing evidence that the individual cannot communicate, with or without accommodations, a desire to participate in the voting process.”

In Maine, there is currently no coordinated campaign against Question 8 this year, but its proponents are concerned that voters may not understand the context of the ballot measure. “People are confused,” notes Hickman, who hopes clarifying the fact that the amendment is simply cleaning up the constitution to remove language that violates the law will help voters. In the state’s voters’ guide, Disability Rights Maine Executive Director, Kim Moody, explains the story behind the amendment, saying “that outdated provision remains part of the Maine Constitution today and should be removed.”

“People assume folks can’t make their own decisions, people must be making them for them. They think people are going to be taken advantage of,” Hickman says, describing concerns about Question 8. But, like Bossing, he believes in the capacity of disabled voters to make their own decisions, telling Bolts “you can’t disenfranchise based on a feeling.”

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Patty Durand followed a pretty typical path into local politics. She thought her representative on the Georgia Public Service Commission—the body tasked with regulating gas, electricity, and telecommunications in the state—wasn’t doing enough for ratepayers who faced mounting monthly utility bills. Durand, who worked in the energy sector, says that after meeting with her representative on the commission, Tim Echols, she became convinced that he wasn’t doing the research necessary to understand the rate increases he regularly approved for power companies. So, in July 2021, she launched a campaign to replace him in the 2022 midterms. 

“I started looking around for other candidates,” Durand said, “Then I thought, ‘Nobody’s gonna say and do what I want, I’d better just run myself.’ So that’s what I did.”

But nearly two years after Durand entered the race, no election has taken place. Her race against Echols, a Republican incumbent, was canceled last year after a federal judge ruled that the state’s system for electing utility commissioners violates the federal Voting Rights Act. Echols remains in office to this day, many months after his term was set to expire, as state appeals have continued to delay any new utility commission elections. 

A year before Durand filed as a candidate, environmental justice and voting rights advocates filed a federal lawsuit against the state challenging how representatives on the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) are elected in the first place. While commissioners ostensibly represent and are required to live within five distinct districts, elections for these seats are held at-large—meaning voters statewide get to weigh in on elections for each district, not just those who live there.

Brionté McCorkle, executive director of the Atlanta-based Georgia Conservation Voters, and one of the main plaintiffs in the suit, argued that this system dilutes the power of Black voters to elect the candidate of their choice, in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Her lawsuit, which sought district-wide voting for PSC seats and a majority-Black PSC district around the Atlanta region, cited a long history of this voting structure being used to disenfranchise Black Georgians, dating back to 1906, when commission elections were first changed to at-large by a governor who ran on an explicit platform of disenfranchising African Americans. 

McCorkle tried educating and organizing voters to make their voices heard on the utility commission, but eventually realized that this wasn’t a winning strategy for Black voters in District 3, which covers Atlanta and the surrounding metro area. The district, like the commission at large, has for the past 30 years been represented by mostly white Republican men, despite the tendency of voters in that district to support Democrats in other races.

“They don’t feel accountable to their voters,” McCorkle said. “And that’s what I started to look at. Why do they feel like they can just ignore what the people who elect them are saying they want? Then I started looking at the election structure.”

After a five-day trial last summer, a federal judge sided with the plaintiffs and ruled in August 2022 that the commission must end at-large voting for PSC representatives. Elections for two commission seats that were slated to occur in November were put on hold, including the one Durand, a Democrat who is white, was running in. By that point, however, her campaign had already been thrown into chaos—GOP lawmakers gerrymandered her out of the Athens-area district where she had sought to challenge the incumbent. 

As it has unfolded, the conflict over utility commission elections in Georgia has shone a harsh light on a government body that often goes unnoticed by voters, despite its everyday impact on their lives and budgets. The now years-long fight for equal representation on the PSC also highlights the anti-democratic lurch of these state oversight commissions, from at-large elections and gerrymandered districts diluting the voting power of minority communities to a larger trend of states removing voters from the equation in lieu of governor-appointed commissioners.     

Among other duties, PSC commissioners are tasked with regulating Georgia Power, the utility company that generates and supplies electricity to more than 2.6 million customers across the state. In addition to approving increases to the rates customers pay for their energy, the commission also has oversight over the company’s capital projects, including a $30 billion expansion to Plant Vogtle, a nuclear power plant. Since it was first approved in 2009, the expansion project has drawn widespread criticism for its exorbitant construction costs, which are then passed on to consumers, as well as potential environmental and health hazards stemming from radioactive waste. 

The power of the PSC to affect people’s everyday lives became glaringly apparent in March 2020 when commissioners responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by issuing a temporary moratorium on utility shutoffs for people who suddenly couldn’t pay their bills. But the relief was short-lived; months later, in July of that year, commissioners voted against extending the moratorium.

“They have a lot of oversight over real, kitchen-table [issues], everyday, lived experience in Georgia,” McCorkle said. “You get a ton of coverage over the Senate, and the governor, and the president, and then things like who’s actually making the decision about the power bill you have to pay every month, [people] don’t know anything about.”

Only two Black members have ever served on the commission in its entire 144-year history, both of whom were initially appointed to their seats by governors. David Burgess was both the first Black member and the last Democrat to sit on the commission, and was appointed in 1999. He won his election to retain the seat in 2000, but was defeated by a white Republican in 2006. Fitz Johnson, a Black Republican representing District 3, was appointed to the commission in 2021, after McCorkle and other activists had filed their lawsuit challenging the structure of PSC elections. 

McCorkle was joined in her lawsuit by several other Black residents of District 3, including James Woodall, then-president of the Georgia NAACP. They argued that while Black voters in the district have tried repeatedly to vote out Republican incumbents, their votes were outnumbered by white voters in the rest of the state. Black residents are indeed a voting minority in Georgia; they make up roughly 33 percent of voters across the state, and are regularly outnumbered by white voters in other statewide races. But in areas where they do have concentrated power, the plaintiffs argued, Black voters should have been able to elect the candidate of their choice, but were unable to do so because of at-large elections. During the trial, the court heard from Lindy Miller, a Democrat who ran for the District 3 seat the last time it went on the general election ballot in 2018 and lost despite winning a majority of votes in her district. 

“It’s not about partisanship, we’re upset because the preferred candidate of Black voters can’t win, regardless of who that preferred candidate is,” McCorkle said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a Democrat, if it’s a Libertarian, [these voters] just don’t want the incumbent who has been approving bill increases to stay in that seat. What we’ve seen is that the preferred candidate cannot win in this election structure because of the vote dilution effect of the voters in the other parts of the state.”

In early 2022, while the lawsuit from activists was still winding through the courts, Georgia lawmakers redrew the PSC district lines to ensure the commission would retain a GOP supermajority even if federal judges forced the state to end at-large voting.

McCorkle says the gerrymandering was a direct response to their lawsuit. 

“[The redistricting committee] admitted that they were concerned about our ability to win this case,” she told Bolts. “So they drew these new districts intentionally to make one district less competitive and better for Republicans. It was just case-in-point gerrymandering.”

Lawmakers also gerrymandered the maps to target one candidate in particular: Durand, who was drawn out of the district she had been campaigning for. She then filed her own lawsuit against the secretary of state appealing her disqualification from the ballot, and evidence in the case revealed PSC commissioners—including Echols, whom she was campaigning against—had colluded to draw her out of the district. (While PSC elections were at-large, they still required members to file and live in certain districts). A state court judge sided with Durand and allowed her to remain on the ballot for the seat, writing in her ruling, “The record here contains substantial evidence that District 2 was drawn to exclude Ms. Durand, specifically, as a candidate.” 

The win was short-lived: Hours later, on the same day as that state court ruling allowing Durand to stay on the ballot, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a separate federal court ruling in favor of McCorkle’s lawsuit challenging at-large districts, which blocked those races from appearing on the midterm election ballot.

The state immediately filed an emergency injunction, pending an appeal, to try to get the PSC races back on the November ballot, but then backtracked. Since then, no election has been held for the District 2 and 3 seats, whose representatives continue to make decisions on the commission despite being elected to terms that were supposed to end in January 2023. The episode adds to the list of canceled elections that Georgia has experienced in recent years. 

“We’ve just been in a gray area,” McCorkle said. “And the way that the statute was written that created the public service commission races, it says the commissioners are allowed to serve until their successor is elected. So that means these folks are just sitting in these seats—basically squatting.” 

Durand, who wasn’t able to run in November, has a similarly ambivalent feeling about how things turned out. 

“At first I was really furious because I’d been running my campaign for so long, we’d been working so hard, we were 80 days away from the vote,” Durand said. She says she was hoping to capture many of the voters who turned out for Stacey Abrams in the gubernatorial race, but realized once Abrams lost, she likely would have too. 

“The tiny silver lining is that I get to run again.” 

The federal court ruling blocking at-large elections for Georgia’s utility commission was groundbreaking for applying an argument about vote dilution to a statewide elected body as opposed to smaller jurisdictions like cities or townships, where such voting rights battles more commonly occur. 

But barriers to equal representation and democratic access around regulatory oversight bodies are hardly isolated to Georgia. In 2020, New Mexico voters amended its constitution to switch its public utility commission from an elected body to a governor-appointed one, eliminating a majority-Native district that routinely elected Native representatives to the public utility commission. (Several Native nonprofits later sued over the change, but the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled against them.) 

New Mexico follows a larger trend of states moving away from elected public utility commissions, which have slowly disappeared over the past century, according to research by legal scholar and frequent Bolts contributor Quinn Yeargain. Today, just 11 states have elected public utility commissions, down from roughly half of states at the start of the 20th century. Among these states with elected commissions, representing roughly 66 million Americans, most elections occur statewide. But where districts do exist, they are regularly subjected to gerrymandering without much legal pushback, according to Yeargain––often flying under the radar of legislators, activists, and everyday voters. For example, Democratic lawmakers in Montana objected to newly-drawn utility commission districts that heavily favor Republicans, but the map ultimately passed the legislature this past April. 

All of this has meant that, even when elected, commissioners often serve the interests of the companies they’re meant to regulate, says Caroline Spears, executive director of Climate Cabinet Action, and advocacy group that supports political candidates based on their climate action policies. 

“Usually the biggest and sometimes only funder of these races are the utilities that they regulate directly,” Spears said. “The ability of utility [companies] to put a bunch of money into politics, and then recoup all of their costs by just charging their ratepayers for it—it’s just really an unlimited pot of money. And that ability is alive and well whether the public service commission is elected or not.” 

Because these commissions have such direct control over the way energy companies conduct their business, many aggressively lobby commissioners—as well as the politicians who appoint them—to achieve their desired policy outcome, from approving major capital expenditures for new projects to continuing to invest in fossil fuels like coal and natural gas over clean energy technologies like wind and solar.  

“From a climate and clean energy perspective, public utility commissions couldn’t be more important,” Spears said. “They can set 100 percent clean energy goals and decide how much, and how fast, clean energy like solar and wind are added to the grid. When monopoly utilities try to block wind and solar, we need our public utility commissioners to fight back and build the clean energy economy of the future, not squash the market.” 

In Georgia, this has all come to a head in the debate over the expansion of Plant Vogtle, which is currently $17 billion over budget and seven years behind schedule. The ballooning costs have meant that Georgia Power ratepayers have already paid an additional $913 in advance charges, and are expected to see $3.78 added to their monthly power bills once the plant is up and running, although recent estimates conducted by PSC staff put that additional monthly cost much higher at $17.20 per month for the first five years of the plant’s operation. Still existing commissioners, including Echols, who has been shown to have ties to energy industry execs, have maintained their support for the expansion plans. 

Such critical decisions are a major reason why Durand, McCorkle, and others feel an urgency to hold new PSC elections. Echols and Johnson, the District 2 and 3 incumbents who were supposed to face challengers at the ballot box last year, can remain active and voting members on the commission until a final ruling in the lawsuit McCorkle filed three years ago, which is currently pending at the 11th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals.

“There are serious public policy implications of two commissioners voting on billions of dollars of rate increases whose terms expired,” Durand said. “Echols and Johnson should not be voting.”

Observers believe that the ultimate decision in the lawsuit over at-large PSC elections could be influenced by the Supreme Court’s June 8 ruling in Allen v. Milligan, when the court surprised many by upholding a key section of the Voting Rights Act and striking down racially gerrymandered district maps in Alabama. McCorkle hopes this precedent will soon lead to an appeals court ruling supporting their case. But even then, further appeals, possibly even to the Supreme Court, could take years to fully resolve, says Bryan L. Sells, the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs.

“There’s a really good chance that whichever way the 11th Circuit panel rules, the losing side will try to seek further review,” Sells said. “These cases take forever.”

In the meantime, the path forward for PSC elections isn’t clear either.  

“If there is a new election, are there new rules? Old rules? Do we get new districts? What is the new structure gonna be if we do get the ruling upheld?” McCorkle said. “It’s just an endless flow chart of possibilities at this point.”

Theoretically, there is nothing stopping the Georgia legislature from redesigning the races according to the original federal district court ruling, but they have not taken any action while the appeal is pending. So for now, the elections remain in limbo. 

Even though this effort to make the PSC elections more fair in the long run has had the effect—for now—of halting them entirely, McCorkle has no regrets. She sees this fight over one arcane corner of government as part of a larger continuum, extending from Black voters in Georgia’s past fighting for equal rights and representation to a younger generation of voters fighting for sustainable energy in a rapidly changing climate. 

“It’s all very deeply connected. Because who’s hurt? It’s this more diverse wave of voters and younger voters who are inheriting the country and the planet,” McCorckle said. “Because we’re inheriting it, we have a greater stake in it. We should be able to exercise our right to elect leaders who we think will do the right thing.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the year the commission first approved the Plant Vogtle expansion. This story has also been updated with a PSC estimate of added monthly costs due to the expansion.

The post Canceled Elections Leave Georgia’s Utility Commission in Anti-Democratic Limbo appeared first on Bolts.

Known as the independent state legislature doctrine, the theory claims that the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution grants state legislatures near-total authority to regulate federal elections and draw congressional districts, and that no other institution can check them. Had justices embraced the doctrine, it could have drastically curtailed if not eliminated the ability of state courts to thwart lawmakers looking to suppress votes, gerrymander election maps, and subvert election results. It could even have sidelined governors, independent redistricting commissions, and other state officials from overseeing federal elections.

Instead, writing for a majority of six justices, Chief Justice John Roberts rejected the theory. “The Elections Clause does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review,” he wrote in a decision that’s largely focused on the power of state courts.

Roberts was joined by the court’s three liberal members, Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor, as well by Justices Amy Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. Three conservative justices dissented. 

Tuesday’s decision keeps alive high-stakes litigation challenging gerrymanders and onerous voting requirements in state courts, such as a lawsuit challenging Wisconsin’s congressional map that is expected to be filed once the state supreme court flips to a liberal majority this summer. Given the conservative bent of the federal bench, civil rights litigants have increasingly turned to state courts on all sorts of matters from abortion rights to criminal justice; an adverse ruling in this case could have gutted that strategy on voting rights.

Stuart Naifeh, manager of the Legal Defense Fund’s Redistricting Project, stressed his relief that his organization will be able to continue litigation on issues they cannot bring in federal courts. “The Supreme Court has affirmed that state courts are not barred from addressing critical issues, like partisan gerrymandering, which the Supreme Court held in 2019 that it did not have jurisdiction to consider,” he said in a statement, alluding to a ruling, also authored by Roberts, that partisan gerrymandering claims in particular cannot be brought in federal court. 

He added, “By rejecting ISL theory, the Supreme Court has set an important precedent that state courts retain the authority to prevent suppression and protect their citizens from disenfranchisement.”

Still, Tuesday’s ruling came with a caveat whose full ramifications may not be known until 2024, if not later. 

The fifth section of Roberts’ opinion stresses that the authority of state courts authority is not unlimited when it comes to regulating federal elections, and that the U.S. Supreme Court has an “obligation” to intervene to ensure that state courts do not “transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review.” This language is vague as to how the justices will test this criteria, and when they might intervene. But in a break with usual practice, it hints that they may be more aggressive going forward in policing how state courts interpret their own state’s laws and constitutions.

In light of the right’s dominance on the federal bench, this caveat could end up undermining state courts as a fruitful alternative for voting rights litigation after all. And with the 2024 presidential election just around the corner, it is also creating new uncertainty for future election cases. One election law expert labeled it a potential “time bomb.”

The independent state legislature doctrine arose for the first time in recent memory in the litigation over the 2000 presidential election, but the doctrine’s visibility in conservative legal circles grew as state courts asserted a greater role in combating partisan gerrymandering, as well as in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

In late 2020, several GOP-led states asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block the certification of some states’ election results to help Donald Trump overturn his loss to Joe Biden. They argued that changes ordered by state courts in places like Pennsylvania, for example, had violated the U.S. Constitution because the authority to order those changes should have been reserved for lawmakers. This legal effort failed but some conservatives remained intent on further testing the doctrine.

When the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2022 struck down a congressional map approved by the state legislature as an illegal gerrymander, state Republicans invoked the independent state legislature theory and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Voting rights advocates grew alarmed when it agreed to hear the case.

The federal court heard Moore vs. Harper in December, just weeks after control of the North Carolina’s supreme court flipped from a liberal to a conservative majority in the midterms, and the new court in early 2023 overturned the earlier rulings striking down the state’s congressional map. Some court observers thought that the U.S. Supreme Court may use this as an opportunity to declare the case moot, deferring the showdown over the independent state legislature theory to a future date.

But the 6–3 majority determined that the case wasn’t moot and proceeded to rule on the merits. Writing for the majority, Roberts pointed to a long string of precedents in which the U.S. Supreme Court has held that state legislatures’ power under the Elections Clause isn’t absolute.  In the past century, Roberts detailed, the court has greenlit many instances in which the rules of federal elections have been set by actors other than state lawmakers. Those include voters using ballot initiatives to reject a redistricting proposal, a governor vetoing a map, and independent redistricting commissions drawing new congressional lines.

Roberts’s defense of independent redistricting commissions is especially striking since he wrote a vocal dissent in the 2015 case that tested their constitutionality. Roberts castigated Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion in that case as “perform[ing] a magic trick,” and many thought the decision was under threat of being reversed. But on Tuesday Roberts seemed to have changed his tune and approvingly cited Ginsburg’s opinion.

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch and only in part by Justice Samuel Alito, dissented on Tuesday. He argued the case should have been dismissed as moot but he also made a case for the doctrine on the merits. State constitutions, he wrote, “cannot control what substantive laws can be made for federal elections.”

Despite North Carolina Republicans’ failure to get their arguments upheld, Tuesday’s ruling brings no relief to the original plaintiffs who had challenged the GOP’s gerrymander. The new Republican majority on that state’s supreme court has given lawmakers there a virtual carte blanche in how they redraw maps, and the GOP is now widely expected to adopt a brutal gerrymander that could give them as many as four new congressional seats in 2024.

Moreover, many voting rights lawyers and election law experts are now expressing nervousness about Part V of Roberts’ opinion: This is the section that defies the typical deference that federal courts have shown to state court decisions that are grounded on that state’s own statutes and constitution. It carves out an exception to that general practice when it comes to federal election cases. 

The U.S. Supreme Court can always receive appeals of state supreme courts decisions, but its typical practice is to not review the validity of rulings that are focused on state texts. Moore vs. Harper tweaks that approach. Citing the unusual opinion overruling the Florida Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore (this is the first time ever that a majority opinion has cited that case), Roberts’ majority opinion hints that his court will keep a more watchful eye on state judges.

The chief justice nods toward a soft version of the independent state legislature theory. “State courts may not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review such that they arrogate to themselves the power vested in state legislatures to regulate federal elections,” he writes. “The Elections Clause expressly vests power to carry out its provisions in ‘the Legislature’ of each State, a deliberate choice that this Court must respect.”

In practice, there is no way of fully anticipating what this means for future decisions, and whether the U.S. Supreme Court will step in only for extraordinarily rare cases or more frequently, until those cases arise. “The Court makes clear that it is not providing any standard at all—even an attempt at a standard—as to what this means concretely,” Rick Pildes, a professor at New York University School of Law, wrote on Tuesday.  

The concern is that this ruling may give the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court more room to second guess state supreme courts—and that this will be tested in the cases that are bound to arise in the midst of the crucible of the upcoming presidential election. Moore vs. Harper, writes Rick Hasen, a professor at the UCLA School of Law, “is going to potentially allow for a second bite at the apple in cases involving the outcome of presidential elections.”

Still, the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejected voting rights organizations’ worst fears, and these groups largely celebrated Tuesday’s ruling. This was their second court victory this month, after a decision earlier this month that salvaged what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. 

Both cases could have thrown a major wrench into how U.S. elections are run but a majority of justices chose to mostly uphold the status quo. 

“This is the second time this month that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of protecting our democracy through voting rights,” Maya Wiley, president of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which filed an amicus brief in this case, said in a statement. “We will continue the fight to ensure all of us can participate in our democracy and hold accountable the elected officials who abuse their power.”

The post Supreme Court Refuses to Empower State Legislatures to Run Elections as They Please appeared first on Bolts.

The case asked whether the congressional map Alabama adopted in 2021 is an impermissible racial gerrymander. After the legislature drew just one majority-Black district out of seven in a state that is roughly 25 percent Black, a lawsuit filed by voting rights groups argued that this violated section 2 of the VRA. A trial court sided with plaintiffs, but in early 2022, the Supreme Court stayed that ruling, let the state use the map for the midterms, and granted a review of the case. For voting rights advocates, the risk went beyond the court preserving Alabama’s map: they feared its ultra-conservative majority may render Section 2 altogether moot. 

Instead, the court on Thursday issued a reprieve for the VRA. In a 5-4 ruling authored by Roberts—joined by Justice Katanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, as well as Brett Kavanaugh—the court reaffirmed Section 2 and used it to strike down Alabama’s map. The state now has to create a new district that will be likely to elect a Black Democrat, an outcome that may trigger similar results elsewhere in the South, starting in Louisiana. 

Voting rights advocates breathed a sigh of relief at the surprise outcome, thrilled to see the VRA survive.

“I was completely floored,” Ruth Greenwood, who coordinated an amicus brief on behalf of the plaintiffs as director of Harvard Law School’s election law clinic, told me of her initial reaction. “It’s not just a win for the plaintiffs, it’s a full-throated defense of the way the Voting Rights Act has been applied to redistricting. It’s pretty fantastic.” 

But they also remained wary as they cheered, warning that by chipping away at the VRA and other voting rights tools for years, the court has left them shadows of their old selves. The decision on Thursday does nothing to revive Section 5 of the VRA, which forced certain jurisdictions with a history of racist voter suppression to seek preclearance from the Department of Justice before drawing new lines or making other changes to their voting rules; absent that requirement, litigation often drags on for years after harmful changes are already into place.

“I view this outcome as a victory, but it’s a victory in the context of profound losses that still need to be addressed,” says Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola who is deeply experienced in redistricting litigation. Levitt worked at the DOJ at the tail end of the Obama administration and at the White House as a voting rights adviser in the early stages of Joe Biden’s presidency. 

I talked to Levitt hours after the court’s ruling Thursday to break down Allen v. Milligan, racial gerrymanders, how Section 2 has been applied—and how it will be applied going forward.

In an extensive conversation, Levitt laid out conflicting emotions—calling the ruling a “status quo decision” that largely sticks to long-established precedent but also explaining why, in an era of dominant conservative jurisprudence, that alone feels momentous.

Most court observers expected the court to further gut the VRA. How surprised are you by this ruling?

I’m very happily surprised. And the reason for the surprise isn’t a knee-jerk reaction to the justices’ conservative disposition—this is a very conservative court, and it remains a very conservative court even after today. 

I’m surprised because this court has not been particularly friendly to voting rights, particularly voting rights in the racial justice sphere, particularly the Voting Rights Act. I’m surprised because the chief in particular has expressed hostility to some basic tenets of the Voting Rights Act, including in opinions, including going back to his time at the justice department. And I’m surprised because, in the lead up to this case, a trial court gave an A-plus reading of existing precedent, and the Supreme Court in January of 2022 stayed that; that led to an expectation that the court was prepared to upend an awful lot of settled precedent. So all of the evidence leading up to this case pointed to the potential for a very bad ruling.

Let’s start with the basics: The court said Alabama’s congressional map violated Section 2 of the VRA. What’s the history of Section 2, and how does it assess such a map? 

In 1982, Section 2 of the VRA was amended to say that maps with a discriminatory effect would be illegal. In a 1986 case, Thornburg vs Gingles, the court clarified what that would mean in practice: there would be a number of things the plaintiffs have to prove in order to make a successful case. 

Condition one: The minority group or groups have to be big enough to be a majority in a single member district; if they’re not, that shows that the way the lines are drawn isn’t the thing keeping minority voters from political power. 

The second thing you have to show is that there’s a difference in the way minority voters vote.  The VRA doesn’t assume that, for example, Black voters and white voters are going to vote differently; but if you can prove that they vote differently, and that districts are aligned such that they lose most of the time, then that’s a potential problem. 

The third thing you have to prove is that there’s a tie-in to discrimination; it’s not just dumb luck. This does not have to find a specific intent with respect to the lines: It can be discrimination elsewhere in the social or electoral structure that leaves minority voters at a disadvantage. The easiest way to see it is in literacy tests in the original VRA: It’s obvious if you keep a segment of population from being able to read and write, and then you design a voting rule that says you got to be able to read and write in order to participate, that the earlier discrimination feeds the later problem. The VRA is meant to break down these distinctions; if you have discrimination, and you have an electoral process that turns that discrimination into electoral loss of power, then you’ve got to fix the electoral loss power.

Many voting rights advocates worried that this case would obliterate the test you just laid out, but it did not. How would you describe the ruling’s significance?

The significance of today’s case is that it reaffirmed that, yes, this is how we do VRA cases.  The stakes were that the supreme court could have changed the rules entirely; Alabama was asking the Supreme Court to change the rules in really radical ways—and the court said no. 

The court didn’t make it any easier to win voting rights cases. It just declined to make it much, much, much, much, much, much harder. This is a status quo decision. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very excited by today’s result, and I think voting rights activists are very excited by today’s results. But it’s a measure of the fetal position we find ourselves in as voting rights advocates that the court just doing its job gets us excited. The fact that the court didn’t blow up the entire structure, and the fact that that’s cause for celebration, shows you a little bit about how far the window has moved.

When it comes to those radical claims Alabama made in the case, what worried you the most going into the ruling? What changes are you most relieved to avoid?

There were so many. Alabama threw a bunch of grenades out on the ground, and the supreme court just declined to pull any of the pins. The theories that Alabama was putting forward would have radically changed the construction of the VRA across the board, and it shows how much the Overton window has shifted that people took Alabama seriously. 

One of the things they claimed is that you need to show an intent [to discriminate], and not just effect; and that discrimination is the sole reason for the map looking like it did, not just one of the reasons. That’s a radical revision, not just of voting rights law, but of racial discrimination law generally—and of law on any discrimination. Alabama also argued that Section 2 of the VRA doesn’t apply to redistricting at all, which is patent nonsense. 

This was first and foremost a case about Alabama’s map. So how did the court test it against Section 2, and what’s next for redistricting there?

The case in Alabama was whether there should have been a second congressional district drawn in Alabama responsive to Black voters there. Alabama said there should only be one; litigants said at this point there should be two.

So the way in which [the Gingles test] cashes out in Alabama: Condition one, there are enough minority voters to form a reasonable second congressional district responsive to the minority vote. Condition two, voting is exceedingly polarized by race. And is there a tie-in to discrimination? Yes, unfortunately, Alabama shows not only the lingering impacts of past discrimination, but present age discrimination that helps you understand why the loss of minority political power is not just happenstance. 

So it requires a second district that responds to minority voters. 

The trial court didn’t say you have to draw a district exactly here. It said to the legislature to go back and fix it. The legislature gets first shot, and the trial court will be watching very carefully.

Alabama’s map was adopted two years ago and was used in the midterms last year. How do you address the challenge that litigation takes so long that illegal maps are in place for years no matter the final outcome?

Voting cases are different because you can’t fix the damage afterwards. Discriminatory elections have consequences: They’re taking place, and they’re discriminatory, and that means that laws are being put in place and executive actions are being instituted in ways that are not legitimate. The other thing is that VRA cases are hard and complicated; they would take years even if the defendants weren’t fighting like crazy, and they’re often fighting like crazy

That’s why it was so important to have the preclearance regime of Section 5: That stopped the problem before it took effect. And since the Shelby County decision, absent action from Congress, that’s just gone. Folks are right to be frustrated, even with today’s decision.

The supreme court stayed the trial court’s decision against the map in early 2022, saying that it was too close to the election to change it. Could that happen again? Could litigation over a new map drawn by lawmakers drag on for so long that 2024 is held under other illegal lines?

Theoretically yes, because people in robes do what people in robes want to do. So could it happen? Sure.

But I think that’s extremely unlikely. The trial court was very careful in its original opinion, and there’s no shortage of attention now that the Alabama voters were due a map last cycle and they had to sit through an election that was discriminatory. The supreme court has now said the trial court was right, and the trial court is likely to give the legislature a real shot but it is also extremely likely to monitor the legislature’s work very carefully and demand proof that its new math satisfies the VRA and remedies the problem. I think that if the legislature engages in bad faith, particularly in drawing a map that does not fix the problem, the court will step in.

I’d like to look beyond Alabama to what the ruling signal for future cases. For one, there’s similar litigation in Louisiana and speculation of a broader domino effect in the South. What does this decision mean for other states?

I think of Louisiana as the next map standing, the one most directly related, and this will help the litigants in Louisiana proceed in a much more straightforward analysis of the Voting Rights Act than people were expecting. I don’t think it’s far to assume Louisiana is going to fall. There are also pending challenges in Georgia and in Texas, a somewhat related case in Florida (though it’s under the state constitution). So there are certainly other cases in the pipeline. 

You’ve referred to the decision as preserving the status quo. But is there any small way in which it makes it harder or easier for future lawsuits to meet the Gingles test?

It’s mostly the same. There are little caveats in the opinion, caveats that were there in the law before, little pieces that I’m sure states will use to fight back against VRA claims; I don’t think any of them are new, they may be slightly differently phrased.

What’s an example of such a caveat?

The court emphasized VRA cases are hard. The chief said, look, this isn’t that many districts we’re talking about and you don’t have to worry about proportionality because no state has proportional representation for its communities of color. That’s a pretty big societal red flag, to not worry communities of color are represented consistent with their numbers in the population. And that also jumped out at me as recognizing the limitations of litigation under the VRA as currently construed; the court’s not saying you should bring and win a whole bunch of cases.

Justice Kavanaugh, a decisive fifth vote in the case, wrote a concurrence that qualifies some of the majority opinion; he states that race-based redistricting cannot “extend indefinitely.” Does that concern you, as to what it means for this future pipeline?

No. I mean, his concurrence reflects some wishy-washiness, but that wishy-washiness is all over the rest of his jurisprudence. This is a majority that surprised people because it’s a majority that most people were not counting on in VRA cases, and I think the skepticism leading up to today is still warranted for cases tomorrow.

Throughout our conversation, you’ve warned that the situation remains precarious for VRA litigation no matter today’s decision. Taking a step back, how would you assess the health of that law at this juncture—to what extent has it become a shadow of itself?

It’s part of why we’re in the fetal position. There’s absolutely no question that the VRA remains one of the crown jewels of the civil rights movement and that it is still one of the most powerful tools there is. And also, in its current state, it is nowhere near enough. Shelby County was a huge blow; the Brnovich decision made all Section 2 cases harder; and there have been a number of smaller decisions that have also made cases harder to prove and harder to win. 

It’s part of why, like others, I view this outcome as a victory. But it’s a victory in the context of profound losses that still need to be addressed.

It’s part of why there was such a strong emphasis on restoring the Voting Rights Act in the John Lewis Voting Rights Restoration Act. To secure real justice, it still has to be a priority. You really need Congress to step in to set national rules. 

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Surprise After Supreme Court Saves What’s Left of the Voting Rights Act appeared first on Bolts.

But that didn’t stop Arkansas Republicans, who this month pushed through those same stricter ballot measure rules that voters rebuffed in 2020. This time, lawmakers simply packaged their proposal into a regular bill, which sidesteps another referendum to amend the state constitution, and Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed it into law on March 7.

“I think the ultimate goal is to make it harder for citizens to challenge what their government does,” Senator Bryan King, who opposed House Bill 1419, told Bolts. 

King is a Republican, one of three GOP lawmakers (out of 111) who joined Democrats in voting against the bill. Days later, King filed a lawsuit to block it alongside the League of Women Voters of Arkansas, an organization that defends voting rights in the state. Their complaint argues that HB 1419 violates the rules for the ballot initiative process that are laid out in detail in the state constitution. 

“We see this bill as an attack on direct democracy in Arkansas,” says Bonnie Miller, the league’s president. “To have them go into session, pass this bill because they lost, and just say, ‘We know that you didn’t want this, that you don’t want us to restrict the process, but we’re just gonna do it anyway’—it’s ridiculous,” she added.

Currently, organizers must collect signatures from no less than 15 of the state’s 75 counties, a requirement embedded in the state constitution. The 2020 proposal that voters rejected would have increased that threshold to 45 counties. HB 1419 increases it to 50 counties. This will require organizers to set up robust signature gathering operations across most of the state, significantly raising the amount of money and resources that citizen groups need to get an initiative on the ballot. 

“Even collecting signatures in 15 counties is wildly expensive, and so for them to increase the number of counties to 50, it’s going to shut out groups like ours,” says Miller. “We’re not going to be able to afford to do this.” 

David Crouch, an Arkansas attorney who helped jumpstart several initiatives like the successful 2014 medical marijuana measure, and who is now the lead counsel in the lawsuit against HB 1419, agrees. “The grassroots people are going to be screwed,” he said.

HB 1419 is part of a broader nationwide effort by Republican politicians to undercut ballot initiatives. The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center has identified many such bills in recent years; when submitted to voters, like in South Dakota last spring, these changes are often defeated by dramatic margins. But the GOP has also pushed through bills to make the process of qualifying initiatives far more impractical, including imposing more onerous requirements for the geographic distribution of signatures gathered, which is the template that HB 1419 emulates. 

Most recently, Oklahoma’s governor chose to schedule a citizen-initiated referendum to legalize recreational weed in an unusual standalone special election, dampening turnout. The day after the measure lost, on March 8, Oklahoma’s GOP-run state Senate passed a bill that would make it easier to invalidate signatures in the future by mandating that voters use their full legal name when signing a petition (any misspellings, nicknames, or other deviations from a government ID could nullify their signatures). The bill now sits in the Oklahoma House. 

Even in this national context, the law Arkansas Republicans passed this month stands out for recycling a proposal that voters just recently rejected. But crafting HB 1419 as a regular bill to sidestep voter opposition only works as a legal maneuver if its changes to the ballot initiative process don’t require revising the constitution. 

To the bill’s critics, the fact that the state GOP first tried to change the signature requirements for ballot measures with a constitutional amendment in 2020 was acknowledgment that their proposal required one, and that an ordinary statute wouldn’t do. In fact, Republicans initially rebounded from their 2020 failure by drafting yet another constitutional amendment, one that would have forced future initiatives to receive 60 percent of the vote at the polls, rather than 50. Arkansans again rejected that measure overwhelmingly in November 2022, by 18 percentage points. 

David McAvoy, a progressive advocate who chaired the group Protect AR Voices when it helped fight off the 2020 amendment, is livid that the state is ignoring those repeat election results and calls the new law an unconstitutional “power grab.”

“They tried amending the constitution,” McAvoy says, “and now that the voters have rejected those attempts, they’re just saying, ‘Well, we’re just going to forget what the constitution says and just do whatever we want.’” 

The lawsuit against HB 1419 argues specifically that its requirements contradict those in the state constitution’s Article 5, which is the section that regulates the initiative process, and that lawmakers therefore needed to craft their proposal as a constitutional amendment like they did in 2020.

Article 5 states that an initiative must gather signatures “in at least 15 counties.” The lawsuit argues that this constitutional stipulation bars the legislature from passing a law requiring a higher threshold. The bill’s proponents have said this language merely sets “a floor” that lawmakers can raise. Crouch said in an interview that the words “at least” do not authorize lawmakers to  raise the threshold because those words needed to be there to clarify that organizers don’t need to pursue signatures from exactly 15 counties. (Case in point: Republicans deployed the same phrasing in HB 1419, which requires signatures from “at least 50 counties.”)

Crouch also points to Article 5’s final clause, which lays out what the legislature is allowed to do when it comes to toying with the rules: “All its provisions shall be treated as mandatory, but laws may be enacted to facilitate its operation. No legislation shall be enacted to restrict, hamper or impair the exercise of the rights herein reserved to the people.” For Crouch, HB 1419 plainly violates these bounds because raising the county threshold from 15 to 50 restricts the ballot initiative process.

“You can’t change the constitution with a bill,” Crouch said. “Facilitate means facilitate, and 15 means 15 and not 50.”

The chief sponsor of HB 1419, Representative Kendon Underwood, did not reply to a request for comment. 

Other Republicans who supported the change say the law will ensure that rural voters are heard. A spokesperson for the governor said Sanders signed the bill because she “wants to ensure all Arkansans, especially rural residents, have a voice in this process.” But King, who represents a Northwest Arkansas district, rejects that argument. “I’m a rural guy through and through, I represent rural counties,” he told Bolts. “This is making it harder for the citizens.”

HB 1419 poses a particular challenge to progressive proposals because Democratic-leaning counties tend to be more populous. Until now, progressive organizers needed to spread their work across 15 counties, and Joe Biden received 35 percent in Arkansas’s 15th bluest county in 2020; that’s nearly identical to his statewide result. But once they need 50 counties, they’ll have to find allies in far more conservative territory than even the state as a whole; Biden received just 20 percent of the vote in the state’s 50th bluest county.

The legislature added an “emergency” clause in HB 1419, so the changes take effect immediately. If upheld, it will affect several efforts that state advocates say are already in the works for 2024, such as the rerun of a 2020 proposal to implement an all-party primary coupled with ranked-choice voting—an initiative akin to what Alaska implemented last year. The proposal was set to make the ballot in 2020 but the Arkansas supreme court blocked it over its strict interpretation of a background-check requirement for canvassers gathering signatures. 

The fate of HB 1419 will also eventually come down to the state supreme court. In last year’s election, conservatives in Arkansas tried to push the state supreme court further to the right by targeting two justices who have a moderate reputation. Both incumbents secured re-election, though, and are likely to be on the court if it hears the case against the new law or any other restrictions, as the legislature could still escalate its war on direct democracy in the remainder of the session. 

On March 10, three days after HB 1419 was signed into law, Republican Representative David Ray filed HB 1601, a new proposal that would require that the canvassers who are hired by organizations to collect signatures first obtain a special license. The bill would ratchet up the costs and bureaucracy associated with the process, just as HB 1419 has required organizations to hire significantly more canvassers given they’ll need to spread in many more counties.

Crouch expects even more attacks on ballot initiatives. “They just feel like they are in power to do whatever they want to do,” he said. “They don’t care anything about the constitution, unless it’s a gun.”

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