The maneuver paid off last week. The GOP flipped three U.S. House seats, a windfall in light of that chamber’s tiny overall margin.

This sequence of events, besides illustrating the potential ramifications of state judicial elections, also captures the predicament that progressive lawyers find themselves in after Donald Trump’s victory, which cements conservatives’ stronghold on federal courts for the foreseeable future. More than before, progressives working to protect people’s rights will need state supreme courts to be hospitable to lawsuits that are increasingly dead on arrival at the federal level. They’ll have a shrinking range of options in states where conservatives have locked in a right-wing court.

The outcome of dozens of supreme court races last week set the stage for how critical legal battles from abortion rights to gerrymandering could play out in state courts across the country. And the results were mixed, with plenty for both liberals and conservatives to celebrate.

On one side, Democrats expanded their majority on Michigan’s supreme court. In Kentucky, a candidate who ran with the backing of Democrats flipped a seat held by a retiring conservative justice. In Mississippi, a conservative justice endorsed by the state GOP suffered a shock defeat. Montanans maintained a liberal lean on their court, likely keeping it a thorn on the side of GOP leaders. And Governor Tim Walz’s appointees prevailed in Minnesota.

Republicans, meanwhile, expanded their majority on the supreme court in Ohio, leaving Democrats with just one seat, and they may do the same in North Carolina, pending final results. Conservative justices in Arizona survived a campaign to oust them over their decision to revive a long-buried abortion ban. Texas’ high courts jumped further to the right even if their partisan composition—all GOP judges—didn’t change. The elections are also likely to embolden conservatives in Arkansas and Oklahoma. 

Bolts walks you through each supreme court race that took place last week, state by state:

Alabama

Justice Sarah Stewart, a Republican, easily prevailed over her Democratic opponent to become Alabama’s chief justice. Her win keeps the state supreme court all-GOP, and largely unchanged from the court that ruled in February that frozen embryos are children, endangering IVF treatments; Stewart joined the majority in that decision. 

Chris McCool, a Republican appeals court judge, won the race to replace Stewart as an associate justice. (He faced no opponent.) McCool, like the rest of Alabama’s judicial candidates, dodged questions about the court’s IVF ruling during the campaign. 

Alaska

Voters retained Justices Dario Borghesan and Jennifer Henderson, a result well in line with the state’s political history: No Alaska justice has lost a retention race since 1962. There have been some conservative efforts to reshape the court over dissatisfaction with its rulings on abortion, but neither Borghesan or Henderson has ruled on the issue since joining the court.

Arizona

Progressives mounted an unusually vigorous effort to oust Clint Bolick and Kathryn King, two conservative justices who voted to revive a near-total abortion ban this spring. But no Arizona justice has ever lost one of these up-or-down retention elections, and voters kept up that record this fall: Bolick and King secured new terms with 58 and 59 percent of the vote, respectively. 

Meanwhile, Republicans failed in their effort to end judicial elections in the state. Prop 137 would have handed supreme court justices a permanent appointment until they hit the mandatory retirement age, effectively freezing the conservative court in place, but voters rejected it by an overwhelming majority of 77 to 23 percent.

Arkansas

When the Arkansas Supreme Court knocked an abortion rights measure off the ballot in August on a 4-3 vote, Justice Rhonda Wood wrote the majority opinion, while Justice Karen Baker dissented. “Why are the respondents and the majority determined to keep this particular vote from the people?” said Baker, a justice with a moderate reputation.

Three months later, on Election Day, Baker beat Wood in the race for chief justice. This promotion will give her more influence over the Arkansas judiciary since the chief justice supervises state courts and names court administrators. 

And yet it’s conservatives who stand to gain ground on the court after this election, despite moderate judges winning both seats in contention. This is due to the fact that several justices played an odd game of musical chairs this year, running for seats other than their own. Besides Baker and Wood, Justice Courtney Hudson successfully ran to change seats earlier this year to circumvent the state’s mandatory retirement rules by a few extra years. 

Baker and Hudson’s victories have now created two vacancies that GOP Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a staunch conservative, will get to fill. This is expected to increase the conservative bloc on this seven-member court from four to five justices. (Importantly, the state constitution bars an appointed justice from seeking a full term, so both of these seats will be on the ballot without an incumbent in 2026.)

Colorado

The Colorado Supreme Court’s short-lived decision to bar Trump from the ballot grabbed international headlines last year. But it didn’t make waves at the ballot box this fall. Faced with a minor conservative effort to target her, Justice Monica Márquez, who sided with the majority in that decision, prevailed with 64 percent of the vote in an up-or-down retention vote. 

Two justices who dissented in that ruling prevailed with similar numbers: 67 percent for Maria Berkenkotter and 63 percent for Brian Boatright. And while there is some geographic variation in the results, it’s not very pronounced; Márquez did better in blue Denver than in El Paso and Weld counties, large conservative bastions, but she received a majority in the latter as well. 

Florida

No justice has ever lost a retention election in Florida, and no history was made in 2024. More than 62 percent of Floridians voted to keep Justices Renetha Francis and Meredith Sasso in an up-or-down vote. Francis and Sasso were appointed to the court by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis over the last two years, and they’ve quickly made their mark as conservatives even by the standards of this right-wing court. 

Idaho

Chief Justice Richard Bevan, a former Republican prosecutor who was appointed to the court by Governor Butch Otter, was unopposed as he ran for a new term. Anticipating his reelection, his colleagues this fall chose to keep him as their chief for an additional six years.  

Illinois

Democrats will retain a 5-to-2 majority on the Illinois Supreme Court after an uneventful general election.

Democratic Justice Joy Cunningham ran unopposed in the first district, which encompasses Cook County; Republican Justice Lisa Holder White ran unopposed in the fourth district, located in western Illinois.

Indiana

The three justices who faced up-or-down retention votes easily passed the test, each with roughly 70 percent of the vote.

Iowa

Justice David May was facing voters for the first time since his 2022 appointment by Republican Governor Kim Reynolds. This summer, he joined a narrow majority of the court to lift an injunction against the state’s abortion ban, but there was no organized effort to defeat him this fall. He prevailed 63 to 37 percent in an up-or-down retention election.

Kentucky

Liberals gained ground on the Kentucky supreme court. Pamela Goodwine, a state judge who ran with Democratic support, easily won a supreme court race over an opponent aligned with Republicans. She will replace a conservative justice who is retiring. 

With conservatives already frustrated that this court was too moderate, last week’s result comes on the heels of another defeat in the 2022 midterms, when an anti-abortion lawmaker failed in his effort to oust a Democratic-appointed justice. 

Goodwine will be the first Black woman on the Kentucky supreme court.  

“As we look to our state courts to protect certain civil liberties because our federal courts are becoming far less hospitable, we’re always happy to see this court at least remain an option for litigation, and are certainly pleased to see the Kentucky Supreme Court become more representative of the population it serves,” said Corey Shapiro, legal director at the ACLU of Kentucky. Shapiro also cautioned that this court tends to be less starkly polarized than those in some other states, making it tricky to predict how justices will come down on any one case.

Louisiana

The state this year drew a new map for its judicial districts, for the first time since 1997. The long-overdue redistricting created a second majority-Black district as many justices had demanded. Republican Justice Scott Crichton retired from the court, and he will be replaced by John Guidry, a Black Democrat who ran unopposed for this new district.

Maryland

Voters easily retained three justices in up-or-down retention votes. This fits Maryland voters’ usual approach to judicial elections: All of the court’s current members have won retention races with at least 75 percent of the vote.

Michigan

Democrats expanded their majority on this supreme court last week. They swept both seats on the ballot, and are now ahead 5 to 2. 

Justice Kyra Harris Bolden, who was appointed to the bench by Governor Gretchen Whitmer last year, won a full term. She will be joined by Kimberly Ann Thomas, a law professor who currently runs the Juvenile Justice Clinic at the University of Michigan and who was running for the seat held by a retiring Republican justice. They each won by more than 20 percentage points over GOP opponents.

In recent years, the court has issued party-line decisions on major cases that have upheld direct democracy and curtailed the harsh sentencing of minors, and last week’s results are likely to strengthen the court as a pathway for civil rights litigants. 

Minnesota

Two justices appointed by Democratic Governor Tim Walz easily prevailed against more conservative challengers. Justice Karl Procaccini, who joined the court last year after working as Walz’s general counsel, beat Matthew Hanson, a local attorney, and Chief Justice Natalie Hudson beat Stephen Emery, a candidate who in the past has amplified false claims about voter fraud. 

As a result, all members of this court remain selected by Democratic governors.

Mississippi

Justice Dawn Beam ran for reelection with the full backing of the state Republican Party, which usually goes a long way in this red state, but she suffered a shock defeat at the hands of David Sullivan, a lawyer who has worked as a defense attorney and public defender and was labeled “a stealth candidate” by The Sun Herald. 

Beam has one of the most consistently conservative records on the Mississippi supreme court, while Sullivan, the son of a former justice, gave few indications of his judicial philosophy during the campaign and did not respond to a request for comment from Bolts. Sullivan faulted Beam during the campaign for receiving the GOP’s endorsement in this nonpartisan race. 

Whether the court’s overall balance of power shifts isn’t yet settled, however. Jim Kitchens, one of the more moderate justices on the court, will face a runoff on Nov. 26 against Jenifer Branning, a self-described “constitutional conservative” running with the support of the GOP. 

Missouri

Voters adopted a constitutional amendment codifying a right to abortion access, overturning the state’s abortion ban. But the measure was almost knocked off the ballot just two months ago when the state supreme court rejected a challenge to the amendment by only a narrow 4-3 vote. 

Two of the justices who dissented in that decision and would have voided the abortion rights measure easily secured new terms on this supreme court last week: Justices Kelly Broniec and Ginger Gooch received 62 and 63 percent of the vote, respectively, in up-or-down retention elections. Broniec and Gooch also voted this fall to not intervene in the case of Marcellus Williams, who was executed by the state despite the paucity of evidence against him. 

Montana

The Montana supreme court has been a thorn on the side of the Republican politicians who are running the rest of the state government. The justices have struck down a series of GOP laws in recent years, including restrictions on abortion, trans rights, and voter registration. “It’s our last backstop,” Keaton Sunchild, director of civic engagement at the nonprofit Western Native Voice, told Bolts this summer about the sort of civil rights litigation his organization supports. 

Conservatives were hoping to make up a lot of ground this fall by winning both open seats on the ballot—these races are technically nonpartisan, but candidates often draw support from partisan officials and advocacy organizations—but they only secured one. Cory Swanson, who was backed by conservative interests, won the election for chief justice. But Katherine Bidegaray, who was endorsed by liberal interests, will join the court as an associate justice. She won by 8 percentage points in tough conditions, as the GOP swept all statewide partisan offices.

As a result, the court is likely to retain its liberal lean. The sitting justices have sometimes formed idiosyncratic alliances, making it difficult to neatly classify them into ideological camps. But Bidegaray’s victory means that the court would likely rule the same way if it had to reassess its recent election law or trans rights decisions, which came down in 5 to 2 rulings. 

“We are glad that for now the Supreme Court looks like it will protect freedoms enshrined in the Montana constitution,” Sunchild told Bolts after the results were announced.

Nebraska

Justice Stephanie Stacy faced an uneventful campaign as she ran in an up-or-down retention election. 76 percent of voters chose to keep her on the bench. 

New Mexico

Democratic Justice Briana Zamora easily prevailed in her first up-or-down retention election, with 71 percent of the vote. All five members of the state supreme court are Democrats. 

Nevada

Nevada holds regular judicial elections where candidates can challenge incumbents. But no one was running against Justices Elissa Cadish, Patricia Lee, and Lidia Stiglich this year.

North Carolina

A Democratic justice lost her reelection bid in North Carolina by just 401 votes four years ago, which paved the way for the GOP to take over the court two years later. Since then, Republican justices have promptly reversed decisions on gerrymandering, felony disenfranchisement, and voter ID, and changed gears in racial discrimination cases.

Democrats may be losing even more ground on the court this year. As of publication, Democratic Justice Allison Riggs trails Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin by a tight margin of roughly 7,700 votes (that’s 0.14 percentage points). The race remains unresolved pending the final count of mail and provisional ballots. 

Should Griffin retain his lead, the GOP would expand its majority on the court to a commanding 6 to 1. Griffin explicitly ran on preserving the recent rulings that have given a political edge to the GOP, including the decision that greenlit the state’s new congressional map. He also celebrated the court blessing new voter ID requirements, telling voters at a campaign event this spring, “How cool was it to show your ID when you go vote this year? It was pretty awesome, right?” 

Ohio

Republicans swept all three supreme court seats on Ohio’s ballot, boosted by the state’s conservative lean. As a result, they will significantly increase their control over the court, from 4-3 to 6-1. 

Two Democratic justices, Melody Stewart and Michael Donnelly, were defeated by large margins by Joe Deters, a Republican who is already on the court, and Megan Shanahan, a local judge. Republican Dan Hawkins, another local judge, won the third, open race.

These results add to the conservative takeover of Ohio’s supreme court two years ago, when Maureen O’Connor, a moderate Republican who had joined Democrats to strike down GOP gerrymanders, retired and was replaced by a more conservative Republican. The new bloc of GOP justices has been more united on major cases; most recently, they blessed a controversial maneuver by Republican officials to undermine redistricting reform.

Oregon

The court will retain its left-leaning majority: Five of its seven members, all justices appointed to the bench by Democratic governors, won new terms this fall after running unopposed.

Oklahoma

Conservatives cheered a startling victory in Oklahoma: Yvonne Kauger became the first justice in the state’s history to be ousted after losing an up-or-down retention vote. Kauger, who has been on this court since 1984, was dragged down by heavy spending from groups looking to push the bench to the right and she ultimately lost by less than one percent.

Two other justices, James Edmonson and Norma Gurich, survived the onslaught by very narrow margins. They, like Kauger, were appointed to the court by Democratic governors, and conservatives made the case that they were too liberal for the state, pointing for instance to a 5–to-4 ruling last year that affirmed a narrow right for a woman to access abortion when necessary to save her life. (Edmonson, Gurich, and Kauger were all in the majority of that decision.)

The power to appoint Kauger’s replacement now falls to Republican Governor Kevin Stitt, though his choice is restricted to a short list supplied by a nominating commission. The supreme court in recent years has repeatedly struck down priorities of Stitt’s, for instance his plan to privatize Medicaid, and the governor helped fund the campaign to oust the justices this fall.

South Dakota

Justice Scott Myren easily survived his first up-or-down retention election, with 80 percent of voters choosing to keep him. An appointee of Republican Governor Kristi Noem, Myren was the only justice to dissent from a ruling that invalidated a 2020 ballot measure legalizing marijuana, and described initiatives as “this bold experiment in citizen-led direct democracy.”

Tennessee

Dwight Tarwater was nominated to the supreme court last year by Republican Governor Bill Lee, cementing the court’s rightward shift, and he easily prevailed in his first up-or-down retention election, with roughly 72 percent of voters choosing to keep him on the bench.

Texas

Republican nominees continued their decades-old streak of winning statewide elections in Texas, sweeping all six elections for seats on the state’s two high courts. Justices Jane Bland, John Devine, and Jimmy Blacklock all secured new terms on the Texas supreme court, which recently upheld the state’s near-total abortion ban. 

For the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the court that has the ultimate jurisdiction on criminal cases, three archconservative Republicans will join the court. They each ousted a GOP incumbent in the March primary, part of an effort by Attorney General Ken Paxton to seek revenge against the judges who limited his power to prosecute election crimes. “MAKE JUSTICE GREAT AGAIN!” Gina Parker, one of the winning judges who ran by touting Paxton and Trump’s support, posted on Facebook after her victory.

Utah

An overwhelming majority of Utahns voted to retain Chief Justice Matthew Durrant. This summer, Durrant and his colleagues angered Republican lawmakers when they issued a unanimous ruling curtailing the legislature’s ability to override citizen ballot initiatives. Lawmakers tried to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to override that decision, but the court then voided that amendment, ruling that it used deceptive language.

Washington

Democrats dominated state elections in this blue state, sweeping all partisan statewide offices by double-digits. But the open race for state supreme court turned out to be exceedingly close, with just 0.8 percent separating candidates Sal Mungia and Dave Larson as of publication. This is a nonpartisan race, but Democratic leaders largely endorsed Mungia, while Larson, a local judge, said the state’s court system is too progressive.

Regardless, the court will retain a left-leaning majority. Two progressive justices, Steven González and Sheryl Gordon McCloud, secured new terms without facing any opponent.

West Virginia

Charles Trump, a Republican state senator who voted in favor of the state’s near-total ban on abortion in 2022, won a seat on the court this year without facing any opponent. He will join Justice Haley Bunn, who ran for reelection unopposed.

Wyoming

Justices John Flenn and Kate Fox, each originally selected for the court by a Republican governor, easily secured new terms.

The post How Supreme Court Elections Set the Stage for Coming Battles, from Voting to Abortion appeared first on Bolts.

The result is a blow to the democracy organizations that have been combating gerrymandering in the state. They mobilized on behalf of Issue 1 after the lengthy legal standoff with Ohio Republicans in 2022, when the GOP, in a repeat of the prior decade, drew maps that locked in comfortable majorities for their candidates.

It’s also a repeat of two prior defeats for similar ballot measures that would have created independent commissions in both 2005 and 2012. 

“It’s incredibly sad, and it’s not clear to me what the next steps are to improve our democracy,” said Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause, an organization that was part of the coalition that collected hundreds of thousands of signatures that qualify Issue 1 for the ballot. “Addressing gerrymandering is so much about holding elected officials accountable and creating fair districts and fair elections so that we can actually have a functional government.” 

As of publication, the measure is trailing by roughly eight percentage points, with some ballots remaining to be counted.

While several polls in October showed Issue 1 with very large leads, those surveys were simply asking voters if they wanted to create an independent redistricting commission. The official language Ohioans saw on their ballot was very different: GOP officials wrote an official summary that characterized the measure as requiring gerrymandering rather than restricting it. A rare poll that tested the official language found the race effectively tied.

Voters came forward during the early voting period in October to warn that they felt tricked by the GOP-crafted summary. Songgu Kwon, a comic book writer living near Athens, told Bolts that he meant to support the independent redistricting commission but mistakenly voted against Issue 1 after feeling confused in the voting booth. “I didn’t think that they would go so far as to just straight up lie and use a word that means one thing to describe something else,” he said. 

Other media outlets reported similar complaints from other voters who said they only realized after voting ‘no’ that they had meant to vote ‘yes.’ Turcer attributes Issue 1’s failure to the “incredibly deceptive ballot language,” telling Bolts, “elected officials were willing to do anything to stop Issue 1.” 

Opponents of Issue 1 defended the ballot language, with Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who drafted much of it, calling it an “honest explanation.” A spokesperson for Ohio Works, the committee that promoted the ‘no’ vote, said that, “If people go in and intend to vote for Issue 1, read the ballot language and vote no, they are not confused.” 

Issue 1 prevailed in Ohio’s urban centers, which are also the regions whose power the GOP’s gerrymanders have undercut, but it trailed in the more exurban and rural areas. 

Ohioans on the same day voted for Donald Trump for president, and the county-level results for Issue 1 broadly correlate with the presidential results, with more Republican areas opposing the proposed reform.

Aware that they had to persuade Ohioans who vote Republican in this red-leaning state, the ‘yes’ campaign made the case that stopping gerrymandering should not be a partisan issue.

“When you have a gerrymandered state, whether it’s Republicans or Democrats doing the gerrymandering, what you end up with is legislators who are not responsive to the citizens, and you end up with bad public policy, and it just holds your state back,” Chris Davey, a spokesperson for Citizens Not Politicians, the campaign for Issue 1, told Bolts.

One of the measure’s chief proponents was Maureen O’Connor, Ohio’s former Republican chief justice. O’Connor joined her Democratic colleagues on the state supreme court two years ago to strike down Republican-drawn maps seven separate times, but the GOP leaders ran out the clock until O’Connor retired in December of 2022 and her Republican replacement blessed gerrymanders. O’Connor also featured in advertising for Issue 1 this fall, telling voters that the measure “will restore power to where it belongs—with citizens, not politicians.”

But the state’s Republican leaders, including Governor Mike DeWine, rallied against Issue 1. The ‘no’ campaign appealed to Ohio’s overall red lean, making the case that the measure boiled down to an attempt by the Democratic Party to expand its influence on the state. “Don’t let Democrats rewrite the rules,” one ad for the ‘no’ campaign stated. “Protect Ohio’s voice!”

The ‘no’ campaign also emulated the ballot language in trying to turn the table on Issue 1, with yard signs and other messaging that proclaimed that a ‘no’ vote would “stop gerrymandering.” Opponents of Issue 1 made the case that it would erase constitutional protections against unfair maps that Ohioans approved in a 2015 referendum, but reform advocates complained that the Republican mapmakers basically ignored those criteria when they last redrew districts in 2022.

Issue 1 would have set up a new, 15-member panel made up of citizens selected from a pool of applicants; the body, tasked with redrawing the state’s maps, would have included five registered Republicans, five registered Democrats, and five people who are neither. 

This system would have broadly resembled similar commissions set up in states like Arizona, California, and Michigan, which adopted new redistricting processes through successful ballot initiatives. Most recently, in 2018, Michigan voters approved a constitutional amendment that set up an independent redistricting commission by an overwhelming majority, with 61 percent of the vote.

Instead, the failure of Ohio’s measure protects the status quo, which grants the authority to draw districts to a panel of elected officials, including the governor and secretary of state, plus appointees of legislative leaders. 

Going into Tuesday, Ohio’s congressional delegation has 10 Republicans and 5 Democrats. The state House is made up of 67 Republicans and 32 Democrats. And the state Senate is made up of 26 Republicans and 7 Democrats. 

These splits mask a deeper asymmetry in the current congressional map: All 10 of the GOP-held congressional districts are considered to be safely Republican, meaning that they pack so many voters who reliably vote for the GOP that Democrats are not expected to be able to compete there. By contrast, three of the five Democratic-held districts are competitive and winnable by the GOP. In fact, Democrats may lose one of the seats they hold on Tuesday, as the 9th District remains too close as of publication.

Issue 1 included a requirement that the state’s congressional and legislative maps closely mirror Ohio’s statewide partisan split. It likely would have resulted in maps that included at least one additional Democratic-leaning congressional seat, and at least a dozen additional Democratic-leaning legislative seats. This would not have guaranteed how each district votes on any election day, but it would have likely changed the composition of the legislature and House delegation. 

Turcer, of Common Cause, said she is not sure yet what comes next for her and other anti-gerrymandering advocates. “We need to regroup and figure out how we’re actually going to get the job done,” she said. “What I do know is that it is going to take time and effort, and we’re gonna have to be really thoughtful and strategic, and that means it’ll take time to figure out what our next steps are.”

But she also stressed she is determined to find a way to constrain gerrymandering to ensure that voters’ partisan preferences are better reflected in Congress and the legislature. “Their goal is to maximize their power, not to actually create fair elections,” she said of the state’s elected officials.

She added, “We all want to participate in meaningful elections. We don’t want to participate in theater.”

The post Ohioans Reject Redistricting Reform, Protecting GOP Gerrymanders appeared first on Bolts.

“I’m in support of any measures that make the process more fair to reflect the will of the people, instead of letting the politicians decide how to gerrymander,” says Kwon.

In the voting booth, he reviewed the text in front of him. His ballot read that voting ‘yes’ would set up a panel “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts,” and that it would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering.” 

So Kwon voted ‘no’ on the measure—given what he’d just read, he thought, that had to be the way to signal support for independent redistricting. He’d gone in planning to vote ‘yes,’ but he was thrown off by this language he saw; he guessed that he must have been wrong or missed some recent development. “The language seemed really specific that if you vote ‘yes’, you’re for gerrymandering,” he now recalls in frustration. 

But when he left the polling station and compared notes with his wife, he quickly figured out that he’d made a mistake: He had just voted to preserve the status quo. To bring about the new independent process and remove redistricting from elected officials, as was his intention, he would have had to vote ‘yes.’

Kwon says he got confused by the language that was crafted and placed on the ballot by Republican Ohio officials. The official most directly responsible for this language, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, had a direct hand in drawing the gerrymandered maps that Kwon opposes and that the reform would unwind.

“I didn’t think that they would go so far as to just straight up lie and use a word that means one thing to describe something else,” Kwon told me. “They are using the term gerrymandering to describe an attempt to actually fix the gerrymandering.”

He added, “I thought this was a serious document, and that there would be some standard.” Other Ohioans have come forward with similar stories in recent days, complaining they meant to vote ‘yes’ but got tricked by the ballot language into not doing so.

Now the fate of Ohio’s redistricting reform hinges on whether its proponents can dispel this confusion and get the word out to all the residents who intend to support it. 

The result will determine who gets to draw future state congressional and legislative districts, and it may shift seats as early as 2026. But more than that, the dispute adds to a larger saga over the viability of direct democracy in Ohio. Just last summer, the GOP pushed an amendment that would have made it much less likely for future citizen-initiated measures to succeed. That proposal failed, but Mia Lewis, associate director of Common Cause Ohio, told me at the time that she expected Republican leaders to “come back and try again” this year. Now she says that’s exactly what they did when they skewed this latest measure’s ballot language. 

Lewis helped organize Issue 1 this year. And just like in the summer of 2023, she said, state officials “are threatened by the idea that the people of Ohio would have power.”

“They have understood that Ohioans don’t want gerrymandering, they have nothing good to say about voting ‘no’,” she said, “so the only thing they can say is, if you vote ‘yes,’ on this, you’re requiring gerrymandering, which is the exact opposite of the truth.”

Issue 1 would amend the state constitution to create a new panel to draw Ohio districts. It would be made up of 15 citizens selected by retired judges from a pool of applicants; the body would need to include five registered Republicans, five registered Democrats, and five people who are neither. Elected officials would be barred from serving on the commission. 

An independent commission would mark a huge change from current law, which grants the authority to draw districts to a panel of elected officials, including the governor, the secretary of state, and appointees of legislative leaders. The constitution already requires that new maps respect certain principles of fairness. But when Ohio’s high court in 2022 struck down GOP gerrymanders seven separate times, ordering the process to be more equitable, GOP leaders ignored the rulings and ran out the clock until they landed a more conservative court in the 2022 midterms. Issue 1 would also codify more stringent fairness criteria for the new commission to respect. 

The coalition that drafted Issue 1 collected enough signatures to put it on the ballot. But as the secretary of state, LaRose got the opportunity to write the measure’s official summary. LaRose had been an active player in the redistricting process that drew the current maps that favor the GOP, but wrote his proposed summary in a way that suggested Issue 1 would make it likelier that Ohio gets gerrymandered. Proponents of Issue 1 immediately complained that his text was misleading. 

They got more angry after LaRose’s draft went up for review in front of the Ohio Ballot Board, a five-person body that includes LaRose and has a GOP majority. During that process, Republican state Senator and board member Theresa Gavarone proposed the specific wording that Kwon says tripped him up most: She suggested using the term “gerrymander” to describe the way Issue 1 would require a commission to divide up the state.

Gavarone’s proposed tweak was met by gasps and startled laughter from the audience. (This can be heard in the recording’s 1:35:20 mark.) State Representative Terrence Upchurch, one of two Democrats on the board, then laughed in bewilderment when given the opportunity to respond to Gavarone. Still, a majority of the board approved LaRose’s draft and Gavarone’s amendment.

Voting rights groups rushed to court, asking for the language to be struck down. But the state supreme court, which has a narrow GOP majority, rebuffed them in September and upheld most of the ballot summary. 

The four Republican justices said it was accurate to say that the new independent commission would “gerrymander” Ohio since it would be tasked with taking partisanship into account, even if it’s to draw a more evenly divided map.

The three Democratic justices disagreed furiously. Justice Jennifer Brunner wrote in a dissent, “We should be requiring a nearly complete redrafting of what is perhaps the most stunningly stilted ballot language that Ohio voters will have ever seen.”

According to Derek Clinger, an Ohio-based lawyer who has litigated past ballot language cases in front of the Ohio Supreme Court, many states use a system like Ohio’s: They ask elected partisan officials to draft ballot summaries. Still, some do it differently. Oregon, for instance, randomly selects citizens to meet and write statements summarizing each ballot measure. 

But what frustrates Clinger is that Ohio’s state constitution does contain “workable standards” that are meant to enable oversight onto the decisions made by state officials; it states that language on the ballot can’t “mislead, deceive, or defraud the voters.” Clinger said, “You have this standard, but you had a majority [on the state supreme court] that disregarded that.”

Some Ohio justices take the view that they’re not supposed to play a strong oversight role. Pat DeWine, a Republican justice who is also the son of Ohio’s governor, even has a forthcoming law review essay on the matter. DeWine admits that the Ohio Ballot Board “is composed of partisan actors who may have incentives to draft language that at least subtly favors one side or the other.” But the court should be wary of second guessing them, he writes: It “polices only the outer boundaries of the board’s discretion.” 

Clinger, who now works at the State Democracy Research Initiative, a research hub at the University of Wisconsin Law School, disagrees. He points to a separate dispute that unfolded in Utah this fall: There, Republicans advanced a referendum meant to allow lawmakers to more easily overturn citizen-initiated measures, while also crafting ballot language claiming that their proposal would “strengthen the initiative process.” 

The Utah supreme court voided this measure in September, writing that a referendum must be placed “on the ballot in such words and in such form that the voters are not confused thereby.”

“Despite the partisan implications of the case, the Utah Supreme Court seemed able to assess in good faith whether the ballot language fairly described the proposal,” Clinger said. “The big takeaway for me is that the personnel of the court is so important.”

The composition of Ohio’s supreme court is on the line this fall since the state is holding elections for three of its seven seats. The GOP could expand its majority from 4-3 to 6-1, but Democrats also have an opportunity to flip the court in their favor. 

Neither Gavarone nor LaRose responded to Bolts’ requests for comment for this story. LaRose said in a statement last month that the court’s decision was “a huge win for Ohio voters, who deserve an honest explanation of what they’re being asked to decide.” 

If Issue 1 passes, the state would have to quickly set up a new commission to create new maps by the 2026 midterms. But for now, proponents of the reform are focused on getting the measure across the finish line. 

 A poll conducted this month by YouGov found that support for Issue 1 had a large lead of over 20 percentage points. But the survey did not use the actual language that people are seeing on their ballot; instead, it asked how respondents would vote after telling them that “a ‘yes’ vote would establish a new bipartisan redistricting commission” and “ban partisan gerrymandering.” That’s precisely the explanation that proponents are fretting won’t be on the measure.

“I’m not going to rest easy at all until election results have come in,” Lewis said. She says she is worried about “a lot of confusion and purposeful misinformation” during the campaign, like the incorrect claims by GOP opponents of the measure that law enforcement officers and veterans would not be eligible to be on the redistricting commission, for instance. 

Citizens Not Politicians, the committee running the “yes” campaign, is working to reach voters and explain what the measure actually does. The group launched an ad this fall in which former Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor tells voters that politicians opposed to Issue 1 have “lied” to them. O’Connor, a Republican, voted to strike down GOP gerrymanders in 2022; since leaving office two years ago, she has helped champion Issue 1. 

The committee behind the “no” campaign, Ohio Works, is running ads as well. They have used the same strategy as the Ohio Ballot Board, of trying to associate Issue 1 with gerrymandering. In response to the criticism that some voters feel tricked by this characterization, a spokesperson for Ohio Works has said that, “If people go in and intend to vote for Issue 1, read the ballot language and vote no, they are not confused.” 

But Kwon, the comic book writer, gives this warning to other Ohio voters: “Be careful. When you read the description, they’re going to refer to any attempt to change the current districting as gerrymandering. That’s what really threw me.”

“I would just say that, if you’re voting ‘yes,’ you’re voting to reform the current districting system,” he added.

Kwon feels frustrated that he unintentionally undercut a reform he supports and canceled out his wife’s vote. But together they’ve been burning up their friend network ever since to share word of his misfortune. 

He said, “If me sharing the story prevents somebody from getting tricked like I was, or one or two people from getting tricked, hopefully that will balance it out.”

The post Anti-Gerrymandering Groups Warn That Ohio’s Ballot Language Is Misleading Voters  appeared first on Bolts.

The Texas supreme court closed out 2023 by blocking an abortion during a medical emergency, forcing a woman to flee the state. Just days before Christmas, Wisconsin justices struck down the state’s GOP-drawn gerrymanders. So far this year, Montana’s supreme court has stepped in to protect voting rights, while a decision in Alabama threatened in vitro fertilization treatments. 

In each of these states, unlike at the federal level, voters chose who sits on the bench and which judges get to dictate such profound consequences. And the 2024 elections may now reshape who holds power on supreme courts across the country.

Thirty-three states have elections for their high courts this year; some have as many as five or six seats on the ballot. In total, 82 seats are up for voters to decide. 

These races may potentially shift the outcome in high-stakes cases that are already in the legal pipeline on everything from the rules of direct democracy to the fate of reproductive rights.

Michigan and Ohio are the two states where a supreme court’s partisan majority could flip outright. Democrats are defending a narrow edge in Michigan; the GOP is doing the same in Ohio. 

But the 2024 elections may also affect the ideological balance of other supreme courts, starting with Kentucky, Montana, North Carolina, and Texas. Some of these states hold nonpartisan races where judicial candidates are not affiliated to political parties; but those courts still tend to have liberal, moderate, and conservative wings, and parties and other groups often get involved in their elections, sometimes pouring in huge amounts of money.

Eighteen states are holding regular elections for their supreme courts, namely races where candidates can challenge incumbent judges or run for an open seat. There are 51 such elections in 2024, but importantly, about a third of them are effectively already over; in most cases, that’s because only one candidate filed to run.

The procedure is markedly different in 15 other states, where incumbent judges who want a new term run in so-called retention elections—simple up-or-down votes, with no challengers, that decide if a judge should stay in office. It is exceedingly rare for justices to be ousted in retention elections—in some states this has never happened—but some do get heated.

You can explore the rules in the state that interests you in our state-by-state guide to each court. 

Note that the exact landscape of this year’s elections may still change; if a judge up for retention were to resign early, for instance, it would cancel the election altogether.

The 2024 cycle is already well underway. Three incumbents in Texas were voted out in March in the GOP primary after facing attacks by far-right politicians. An Illinois justice survived a primary. And an Arkansas justice hopped to another seat on the bench to evade retirement rules.

The stakes only escalate from here. Conservatives hope to gain ground on Montana’s liberal-leaning court thanks to the retirement of two justices long targeted by the right. In Kentucky, the retirement of a conservative-leaning justice may have the opposite effect. Democrats risk falling even further behind on North Carolina’s court, while the prospect of Michigan and Ohio’s courts flipping carries important ramifications for sentencing and democracy. 

Across Arizona and Florida, four justices who voted to uphold abortion bans this month are up for retention—two in each state. Three justices who took part in the Colorado supreme court’s decision to bar Donald Trump from the ballot also face retention tests. A justice who voted against the erosion of direct democracy faces reelection in Mississippi. 

Bolts today guides you through each of the 33 states with elections for their high courts.

States with regular supreme court elections 

Alabama

When this supreme court ruled 8-1 in February that frozen embryos are children, endangering IVF treatments, it also brought into full view conservative plans to press for more restrictions on reproductive rights. Five of the court’s nine seats are on the ballot in 2024, but three of the justices who joined that ruling—William Sellers, Jay Mitchell, and Tommy Bryan, all Republicans—are running for reelection unopposed. 

The election for chief justice is contested, though. Chief Justice Tom Parker, a far-right jurist whose opinion in the IVF decision drew heavily from the Bible, is retiring. Sarah Stewart, an associate justice on the supreme court who also joined the majority in that ruling, won the GOP primary to succeed Parker and now faces Democrat Greg Griffin in November. Griffin is a lower-court judge who blocked new restrictions on birth centers last year in a victory for reproductive rights groups. No Democrat has won a seat on this court since 2006; last week, the first legislative race since the February ruling swung toward the party.

Stewart’s bid for chief justice means she is not running for reelection for her current seat. Chris McCool, a Republican lower-court judge, is running unopposed and is certain to join the court. 

Arkansas

Justice Shawn Womack secured another term without facing any opposition in this state’s March election. But in the two other seats on the ballot, neither incumbent sought reelection. That set up an odd game of musical chairs: Four of the six candidates running for these two open seats were already sitting justices hoping to move to different seats on the court. 

As Bolts reported, the perplexing situation is poised to shift Arkansas’ high court further right.

One of these races has already ended: Justice Courtney Hudson, who wanted to change seats to circumvent retirement rules by a few extra years, prevailed over an outsider in March by receiving more than 50 percent of the vote. Hudson now has to resign from her current seat, triggering a vacancy to be filled by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the state’s conservative governor.

The second race, for the chief justice seat, remains unresolved, but we already know there will be a similar outcome: The only candidate who was not already on the court lost in March. Two sitting justices—Karen Baker and the more conservative Rhonda Wood—grabbed the only spots for the November runoff. Whoever wins that runoff will need to resign from their current seat, handing Huckabee Sanders a second supreme court appointment. 

Georgia

Three justices on this supreme court are running for reelection unopposed this year—Michael Boggs, John Ellington, and Nels Peterson. The fourth incumbent seeking reelection this year, Andrew Pinson, faces a challenger: That is itself noteworthy in a state that held 12 consecutive uncontested races for its state supreme court between 2012 and 2018.

Then, in 2020, Democrat John Barrow ended that long streak of uncontested elections by announcing a run to join the court—only to have GOP officials exploit a loophole that wound up outright canceling the election. Barrow sued to make the state hold supreme court elections that year, but his lawsuit was rejected by the very court he hoped to join. In an interview with Bolts two years later, Barrow said the threat that an election may be canceled had a chilling effect on outsiders’ willingness to run for the court. “Anybody who is thinking about running has to run the risk that they pull out the rug from under you,” he said.

Barrow decided to jump back in after all this year. He is challenging Pinson, a former state solicitor general appointed to the court by Republican Governor Brian Kemp in 2022.

Update (Sept. 2024): Pinson prevailed over Barrow in the May election.

Idaho

Chief Justice G. Richard Bevan is certain to secure a new six-year term this year after no one filed to run against him by the March deadline.

Illinois

While Republicans had a real shot at flipping this supreme court just two years ago, Democrats have instead expanded their majority to 5-2. This year, there’s no such suspense: Both justices on the ballot are running unopposed in the general election. 

Democratic Justice Joy Cunningham is sure to prevail in the first district, which encompasses Cook County (Chicago). Republican Justice Lisa Holder White, a Republican, is sure to prevail in the fourth district in western Illinois.

Kentucky

In 2022, a lawmaker with a zealously anti-abortion record failed to win a seat on this court; the result added to Kentucky conservatives’ long standing frustrations, with their effort to secure a reliable conservative majority repeatedly faltering. While Kentucky is now staunchly red, its judicial elections are nonpartisan, and the court’s politics can be difficult to decipher.

This year, conservatives are the ones on the defensive, with Chief Justice Laurance VanMeter—a Republican even if he ran for judge without a party label—retiring and leaving an open seat on the ballot. The race to replace him could shift the court one step to the left. The election won’t be waged statewide; it will only take place within the fifth judicial district, a swing region in central Kentucky. (The district, which includes Lexington and Fayette County, narrowly voted for Trump in 2020 and then for Democrats by a large margin in the 2023 governor’s race.)

The candidates running to replace VanMeter have contrasting political histories. Pamela Goodwine, currently chief judge on the Court of Appeals, has appeared at Democratic events and enjoyed union support; Erin Izzo, an attorney, has spoken at GOP events and is boosted by local conservatives. Abortion is among the issues that may shape the race after a divided supreme court rejected a challenge to Kentucky’s abortion ban last year. VanMeter sided with the majority in that case, which was decided on procedural grounds, and abortion is likely to return to the court in the future.

Louisiana

Scott Crichton, a Republican justice, is retiring, and the contours of the race to replace him are uncertain. The state’s filing deadline is not until this summer, the last in the country. In addition, the state legislature is currently considering options to redraw the state’s judicial map, in part to add a second majority-Black district as many justices have demanded. 

Update (Sept. 2024): The state drew a new map, making Crichton’s second district a lot more Democratic. John Guidry, a Democrat, is running for the seat unopposed.

Michigan

This is one of the few supreme courts whose partisan majority could flip this year. Democrats currently have a 4-3 majority, an edge that’s come into play in recent cases that touch on sentencing and democracy, and each party is defending one seat this fall. 

Democratic Justice Kyra Harris Bolden is seeking to stay on the court, one year after Governor Gretchen Whitmer appointed her. If she wins, it will be enough for Democrats to retain a majority.

Republican Justice David Viviano, meanwhile, is retiring. That gives Democrats a golden opportunity to flip a seat and expand their majority, since they won’t need to oust an incumbent. (Sitting judges typically enjoy a large advantage; in Michigan, while the general election ballot does not list candidates’ party labels, it does mention that they’re incumbents.)

Michigan has a unique system in which the parties nominate supreme court candidates during a summer convention, rather than in primaries. In August, the GOP nominated Patrick O’Grady, a local judge, to face Harris Bolden. For the open seat, Democrats nominated Kimberly Thomas, a law professor who runs the Juvenile Justice Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School, and Republicans nominated Andrew Fink, a state lawmaker.

Editor’s note: This item has been updated after the August conventions decided the general election candidates.

Minnesota

Three justices, all of whom were first appointed to the bench by Democratic governors, are running for reelection this year. Anne McKeig, an appointee of Governor Mark Dayton, is unopposed.

Natalie Hudson, who was promoted to chief justice last year by Governor Tim Walz, faces a challenge by Stephen Emery, a self-described conservative who in the past has amplified false claims about widespread voter fraud. Emery won a race for county attorney in western Minnesota in 2022, but resigned within days of the election; his current website features essays against private corporations, the press and the courts and criticizes the judicial branch for imposing “criminal-friendly rules.”

Karl Procaccini was appointed to the court last year by Walz after serving as the governor’s general counsel. He now faces Matthew Hanson, a local attorney who says he is running because judicial races are too often uncontested, and who has criticized Walz and Procaccini for the lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hanson has expressed conservative positions on social media. “I support Donald Trump because he ended abortion and racism”, Hanson posted on X last year in reply to a post by Kamala Harris about the Supreme Court striking down affirmative action in college admissions. He has also posted in defense of ending Roe’s federal protections for abortion, and mused that the state “allow(s) more gun crimes to justify banning law abiding Minnesotans from owning guns.”

The state could have held other races this year. Justice Barry Anderson, who was set to hit the mandatory retirement age in October, said he is resigning in May. Democratic Governor Tim Waltz appointed a new justice, who won’t face voters until 2026. Meanwhile, Justice Margaret Chutich’s seat was scheduled to be on the ballot this fall; her current term ends in January. But she too announced she is retiring this spring. If she had finished her term and retired as scheduled, the state would have held an open race for her seat this year. Instead, her decision to retire months early means there will be no election for her seat in 2024; Walz appointed another new justice who also won’t face voters until 2026.

Editor’s note (Sept. 2024): This item has been updated after the summer filing deadline and primaries settled who will be on the November ballot.

Mississippi

The Mississippi Supreme Court struck down the state’s ballot initiative process in 2021 on a 6-3 vote. All the justices who dissented that day—Robert Chamberlin, Jimmy Maxwell, and James Kitchens—are up for reelection, though Chamberlin and Maxwell are unopposed and already sure to keep their seats on the bench.

But Kitchens, who won his last election with support from state Democrats, faces a crowded field of four challengers, including Republican lawmaker Jenifer Branning, who is running as a conservative with the support of her state party.

This race is taking place within the first district, which leans slightly Democratic.

The fourth and final incumbent on the ballot this year is Justice Dawn Beam, who voted with the majority to void the direct democracy process; she’ll face lawyer David Sullivan in the second district. 

 
Montana

Republicans have consolidated power in Montana, but this supreme court has been a hurdle for their priorities. The court has recently struck down GOP laws that restricted access to voting, expanded gun rights, and imposed parental notification requirements for an abortion. 

Looking to gain power on the court, conservatives have unsuccessfully tried to change the rules of how justices are elected; two years ago, they failed to oust a Democratic-appointed justice.

They have a new shot to grow their influence this year with the retirements of Chief Justice Mike McGrath and Justice Dirk Sandefur, Bolts reports. McGrath and Sandefur have both benefited from Democratic support in the past, though their records have diverged.

Republican donors and their allies have coalesced around local prosecutor Cory Swanson and federal district court judge Dan Wilson in the two races to replace McGrath and Sandefur. Liberal interests are backing federal magistrate court judge Jerry Lynch and district court judge Katherine Bidegaray, two candidates who have signaled some support for reproductive rights.

Editor’s note: This item has been updated after the June 4 primary decided the runoff spots.

Nevada

Nothing to see in Nevada this year: Justices Elissa Cadish, Patricia Lee, and Lidia Stiglich are all certain to win reelection since no one filed to challenge them by the January deadline.

North Carolina

North Carolina is the poster child for what can happen when a supreme court flips. The GOP won control in 2022, and its new majority promptly reversed decisions on gerrymandering and felony disenfranchisement, and changed gears in racial discrimination cases. 

Democrats now hold just two of seven seats, and they’re in danger of slipping further in November since the only seat on the ballot is that of Democratic Justice Allison Riggs. A former civil rights attorney appointed last year by Governor Ray Cooper, Riggs faces Republican Jefferson Griffin, a lower-court judge. Democrats need to defend Riggs’ seat to have a realistic chance of flipping the court back later this decade.

Ohio

The GOP’s majority on this court is just a narrow 4-3, but it became more conservative last year with the retirement of a moderate Republican and the appointment of a conservative prosecutor to the seat. Three seats are on the ballot this year, with two held by Democrats and one by the GOP, so the court could shift in either direction. 

Democrats will flip the court if they sweep all three seats, but the GOP would significantly expand its majority if it does the same. Implementation of last year’s referendum protecting abortion rights hangs in the balance, as well as democracy issues such as possible redistricting cases.

All elections are statewide, and the GOP is confident it can take advantage of Ohio’s red lean in the wake of a recent law adding party labels to judicial races. In fact, Republicans are looking to push their advantage with an aggressive play to oust Democratic Justice Melody Stewart: Joe Deters, the GOP justice appointed last year, is challenging Stewart instead of seeking reelection to his own seat. 

Meanwhile, Democratic Justice Michael Donnelly will face Republican Megan Shanahan, a lower court judge in Cincinnati.

Two lower-court judges, Democrat Lisa Forbes and Republican Dan Hawkins, will face off for the third seat—the one Deters is vacating.

Oregon

Five of Oregon’s seven justices are up for reelection this year. And each and every one of them is running unopposed. With these Democratic-appointed justices all but certain to secure new terms, the court will keep its left-leaning majority. 

Texas: Supreme Court and Court of Criminal Appeals

There are six judicial seats on the ballot across the state’s two high courts. All are held by GOP judges, which has won every statewide race since 1994, judicial and otherwise. 

Democrats are fielding a candidate in all six—that’s better for them than in 2022—and a confluence of factors may at least give them a shot. For one, the aftershocks of the state’s abortion ban are making judicial politics a bit more salient. Then, there’s the fact that three incumbent Court of Appeals judges were ousted in the GOP primary, an unusual result driven by Attorney General Ken Paxton and his far-right allies’ bid to punish justices who restricted his ability to initiate voter fraud prosecutions. Finally, Supreme Court Justice John Devine, a staunch conservative challenged by Democrat Christine Weems, faces allegations about his ethics.

Still, Texas’ red lean will be difficult for the Democratic candidates to overcome, with Trump expected to again carry the state at the top of the ticket.

Washington

Steven González and Sheryl Gordon McCloud, two justices who are members of the court’s emerging progressive bloc, are running for reelection unopposed.

But it’s certain that there will be some changeover on the court since Justice Susan Owens is hitting the mandatory retirement age and cannot run for reelection.

To replace Owens, the state’s judicial establishment quickly coalesced around Sal Mungia, an attorney who has endorsements from eight of the nine sitting justices; Mungia is also backed by Democratic Governor Jay Inslee. Dave Larson, a municipal judge, won the second spot in the November general election; he has criticized the current court for issuing decisions that are too progressive and said he wants to help “take back the judiciary.”

Editor’s note: This item has been updated after the August primary.

West Virginia

Charles Trump, a Republican state senator, voted in favor of the state’s near-total ban on abortion in 2022. Now he is certain to join the state supreme court since no one else filed for an open seat by the filing deadline. 

The state’s second race also features an unopposed candidate: Justice Haley Bunn, who was appointed to the court by Republican Governor Jim Justice in 2022, drew no challenger. This court was one of the nation’s most polarized last decade, when state Republicans maneuvered to impeach justices or pressure them into resigning to secure a conservative majority.

States that only have retention elections this year 

Alaska

Justices Dario Borghesan and Jennifer Henderson, appointed by Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy in 2020 and 2021, face retention tests in November. No Alaska justice has lost a retention race since 1962, despite some organized efforts to oust incumbents in the past.

Still, this court’s membership matters a great deal for the future of reproductive rights. Alaska’s supreme court has ruled in the past that the state constitution protects abortion rights, though it has not revisited that issue since Borghesan and Henderson joined the court, making their views uncertain. State conservatives hope that an anti-abortion majority will emerge on the court and reverse that precedent. The court could soon hear a case filed by Planned Parenthood to expand access to abortion. 

Arizona

The two justices who face retention this year, Clint Bolick and Kathryn Hackett King, are both appointees of former Republican Governor Doug Ducey, who expanded the court and loosened constraints on appointment to shift it rightward. 

Arizona judges have historically easily prevailed in retention elections, though voters ousted a county judge in 2014, the first time that any Arizona judge had lost in decades, and they ousted three other county judges in 2022. Bolick, who was appointed by Ducey in 2016, received 70 percent in 2018 during his last retention race; King, who was appointed in 2021, has not yet faced voters.

Update (Sept. 2024): Bolick and King both joined a ruling this spring that revived a 19th-century law banning nearly all abortions. While the legislature overturned the ban, the court’s ruling prompted fresh progressive organizing against them. But in June, Republicans put a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would end judicial elections in Arizona, and nullify the Bolick and King’s races, Bolts reports.

Colorado

Colorado’s supreme court briefly became the center of the political world in December when it ruled that Donald Trump was ineligible to run for president. (The U.S. Supreme reversed the decision in early March.) This year, three of the justices who took part in that decision are up for retention: Monica Márquez, who sided with the majority in that ruling, and Brian Boatright and Maria Berkenkotter, who dissented. 

Judicial races are rarely eventful in Colorado—over the last decade, no justice has dipped under than two-thirds of the retention vote—and there’s no high-profile effort to change that in 2024 as of now. Still, Márquez already suffered from one viral false attack in the wake of her vote.

Florida

Florida organizers collected hundreds of thousands of signatures on behalf of two initiatives to protect abortion rights and legalize marijuana, but Attorney General Ashley Moody argued the measures were too unwieldy and confusing and tried to get Florida justices to toss them. That proved too much even for this conservative court, which ruled against Moody this week and placed the measures on November’s ballot.

Only two justices, Renatha Francis and Meredith Sasso, agreed with Moody on both counts, dissenting from both decisions. On the same day, Francis and Sasso also voted to uphold the state’s restrictions on abortion, this time joining a majority to overturn a longstanding precedent. 

Francis and Sasso now each face retention elections in November. They were both appointed to the court by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, and this is their first time facing voters. On paper, the races have the potential to flare up, since abortion and marijuana are popular and high-profile issues. But in practice, no judge has ever lost a retention election in Florida history.

Indiana 

Since Indiana adopted a system of retention elections in 1970, voters have never refused to retain a state judge. As of now, there’s no indication that 2024 will break that pattern. The court’s two oldest justices, Mark Massa and Loretta Rush, and its youngest justice, Derek Molter, face retention this fall; all were first appointed to the bench by Republican governors. 

Iowa

Justice David May faces voters for the first time since his 2022 appointment by Republican Governor Kim Reynolds, part of a series of appointments with which she’s reshaped the court in her image since signing a law giving herself more authority to decide judicial appointments.

May joined the court just weeks after its landmark opinion ending protections for abortion. The following year, May sided with the anti-abortion camp, voting to reverse a lower-court ruling that had blocked a new ban on abortions after six weeks. Since the supreme court tied that day, the lower court’s decision blocking the ban remained in effect and kept abortion legal in Iowa. But the supreme court is scheduled to weigh in again this year.

Update (July 8): On June 28, the Iowa supreme court on a 4 to 3 vote lifted the injunction against the six-week abortion ban, allowing the ban to be enforced. David May sided with that majority.

Maryland

Six of the seven members on Maryland’s high court were nominated by former Republican Governor Larry Hogan, though all were then confirmed by the Democratic-run Senate. Hogan’s final two nominees, Chief Justice Matthew Fader and Justice Angela Eaves, are up for retention this year, as is the court’s most senior member, Democratic-nominated Justice Shirley Watts. Don’t expect these races to catch fire, since all of the court’s current members who have faced retention races won with at least 75 percent of the vote. 

Missouri

Justices Kelly Broniec and Ginger Gooch joined the court last fall via appointments by Governor Mike Parson, a Republican. They each face voters this fall. Retention races have not caught fire in Missouri’s recent past, with justices routinely receiving more than two-thirds of the vote.

Nebraska

Nebraska is one of the few states where justices represent geographic districts. In 2024, only residents of Lancaster County, home to the city of Lincoln and to the state’s first judicial district, get to weigh in on the supreme court, with Justice Stephanie Stacy up for retention for the second time. She cleared her first test back in 2018 with 81 percent of the vote, a share that’s in line with Nebraskans’ history of overwhelmingly retaining their justices; David Lanphier, the last justice in the state who lost a retention election, was ousted in 1996 over some of his rulings, including one that gave dozens of people incarcerated over murder convictions the opportunity for new trials.

New Mexico

New Mexico has an unusual system in which justices run in regular partisan races the first time they face voters, and then in up-or-down retention elections thereafter. Democratic Justice Briana Zamora defeated a Republican just two years ago, 54 to 46 percent. This year, she’s asking voters to retain her for a full eight-year term, typically an easier hurdle for judges to clear. 

A high-profile decision in Zamora’s still-brief tenure came in November, when she joined all of her colleagues in upholding the state’s congressional map against a GOP challenge. 

Oklahoma: Supreme Court and Court of Criminal Appeals

Across Oklahoma’s two high courts, six judges face retention this year—three on the state supreme court, and three on its court of criminal appeals. 

No Oklahoma appellate judge has ever lost a retention election, but conservatives in the state are mounting an unusual campaign to oust the three supreme court justices who are up for retention. Each was nominated by a Democratic governor, and conservatives are making the case that they’ve stymied right-wing change, pointing for instance to a ruling last year that held that the state constitution protects a woman’s right to access abortion when necessary to save her life.

South Dakota

Justice Scott Myren faces his first retention vote, three years after he was appointed to the bench by Republican Governor Kristi Noem. In late 2021, Myren was the only justice to dissent from a ruling that invalidated a 2020 ballot measure legalizing marijuana. A majority of justices said the measure was too broad to fit within a single ballot question, but Myren wrote that the court should be more deferential to voters’ preferences, and described the initiative process as “this bold experiment in citizen-led direct democracy.”

Tennessee

Justice Dwight Tarwater, who joined the supreme court last summer, faces retention in August. After serving as general counsel to Republican Governor Bill Haslam, Tarwater was nominated to the court by Haslam’s successor, Republican Bill Lee. He replaced the court’s last remaining Democratic-nominated justice, cementing the court’s rightward shift; he is one of three justices that Lee has nominated in the past two years, alongside Sarah Campbell, a former clerk of Samuel Alito, and Mary Wagner, a Federalist Society member. 

Utah

The Utah supreme court has drawn scrutiny this year for stalling decisions on major cases related to abortion and redistricting. Chief Justice Matthew Durrant, meanwhile, is up for retention. He faced no issue surmounting this test the past two times he faced it, receiving 83 percent of the vote in 2004 and 78 percent in 2014.

Wyoming

Two of the court’s five members, Kate Fox and John Fenn, face voters this year. Both were appointed by Republican governors. Judicial elections in Wyoming have been extremely sleepy affairs over the last two decades; the state’s mandatory retirement age of 70 is far likelier to spark changeover in its membership.

The post Your State-by-State Guide to the 2024 Supreme Court Elections appeared first on Bolts.

But the cast of characters who will steer the process got reshuffled last week, with two newcomers set to play influential roles. 

Meanwhile, the Republican chief justice who had sided with Democrats in last year’s gerrymandering cases exited the stage on Dec. 31. 

Some Democrats hope that they secured a new Republican ally—this time in the legislature, where Jason Stephens was unexpectedly elected Speaker thanks to a bipartisan coalition that included all House Democrats—and that this may mitigate the maps’ partisan bias upfront, before they reach judicial review. But once they do, the GOP’s odds of securing favorable rulings for its gerrymanders has shot up dramatically due to a new conservative justice. 

“I suspect the political tricks to undermine democracy will go the distance,” said Desiree Tims, the head of Innovation Ohio, a progressive organization that lobbies for fair maps and is part of Ohio’s Equal Districts coalition. “The redistricting process should unfold in a democratic way, which has not been our experience in Ohio.” 

Joe Deters, the new justice who shifts the high court to the right

Two days before Christmas, Republican Governor Mike DeWine filled a vacancy on Ohio’s supreme court by appointing Joe Deters, the tough-on-crime prosecutor of Hamilton County (Cincinnati) who is close to the state’s GOP power brokers. “Joe Deters has the right combination of experience, legal knowledge, and passion for public service that will serve the citizens of Ohio well,” DeWine said. Deters was sworn-in this past Saturday, just a week after Justice Maureen O’Connor, one of the court’s anti-gerrymandering crusaders, was forced to retire due to her age. 

The switch greatly alters the court’s ideological balance and likely flips it into a majority willing to uphold Republican gerrymanders.

“It suggests that the minority will become the majority, and there will not be the check on the mapmakers that there was during the 2021-2022 mapmaking,” said Catherine Turcer, who leads Common Cause Ohio, a voting rights organization, about Deters’s arrival on the court.

Katy Shanahan, who last year worked as the Ohio state director of All On the Line, an anti-gerrymandering group, agrees. “Now the state supreme court has an ultraconservative four to three majority, which to me signals that [Republicans] will get a greenlight on whatever they want to pass,” she said. 

O’Connor, a Republican, sided with the court’s three Democratic justices last year in a series of rulings that invalidated the congressional and legislative maps adopted by the GOP-controlled Ohio Redistricting Commission because they “unduly favored” the Republican Party in violation of the state constitution. The three other Republican justices voted to sustain the maps but they were on the losing side of the repeated 4-3 decisions. 

“When the dealer stacks the deck in advance, the house usually wins,” the majority wrote in January 2022, in the decision that struck down the GOP’s first congressional map. Over and over again after that—the court invalidated congressional and legislative maps in seven separate rulings between January and July—the justices faulted Republican map-drawing for packing Democratic voters into just a few districts while also cracking diverse urban areas to dilute their representation.

Still, Republican lawmakers ignored the court’s rulings and ran out the clock by passing an endless stream of gerrymanders; eventually, a federal court allowed a set of maps drawn by the GOP to be used in the 2022 midterms only, helping solidify Republican supermajorities. And with a new round of redistricting now looming, last year’s court majority has unraveled: O’Connor reached the mandatory retirement age, Republican incumbents swept November’s supreme court races, and DeWine added a political ally—Deters—to the court. 

Deters has no track record on matters that involve redistricting: He has worked as a prosecutor for much of the past forty years, with the exception of a brief, scandal-tarred stint as state Treasurer in the early 2000s. But many state observers told Bolts that they harbor little uncertainty over how Deters will approach those cases. 

That’s in part due to Deters’s personal proximity to Mike DeWine, the governor, and to Pat DeWine, the governor’s son and a justice on the state supreme court. Besides donating to the DeWines, Deters has exchanged favors with the family. In 2017, Pat DeWine asked Deters to give his college-aged son an internship in the prosecutor’s office and Deters obliged, as Cincinnati’s City Beat reported at the time. 

Deters and Pat DeWine faced ethics complaints and calls for investigation over this internship, but Deters defended the arrangement, insisting it was proper for him to do a favor for a friend.

Now, the two friends will sit on the supreme court together, called upon to decide the fate of initiatives that Mike DeWine is involved in. Last year, Pat DeWine voted to uphold the gerrymanders of Ohio’s redistricting commission, even though his father is a member of the panel, voted to approve the maps, and has said that he believes the maps passed constitutional muster; Pat DeWine rejected calls that he recuse himself from last year’s cases.

Critics of the state’s redistricting process say all of these intricate relationships will now affect the fate of upcoming legal disputes over district boundaries.

“Mike DeWine knows exactly who he’s appointing to that court. You’re not going to waste a political appointment, given the stakes of, among other things, the redistricting process to someone who you don’t know for sure how you think they should vote on those issues,” said Shanahan. “I think anyone suggesting otherwise doesn’t understand politics.” 

“Joe Deters will not be like Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor,” she added.

Deters’s record on criminal justice also reveals a very different outlook than O’Connor brought to the court. Last year, O’Connor sided with Democratic justices in a case that lightly reformed the state’s bail system but provoked fierce backlash from state Republicans. Deters responded by fueling a conservative counter-offensive against bail reform, which resulted in a constitutional amendment that expanded pretrial detention in November.

Deters has long cultivated this tough-on-crime persona, including on issues that the court will likely confront in the future, from calling a group of defendants in a 2015 case “soulless and unsalvageable” to staunchly championing the death penalty.  

“What we always hope for the courts is that party labels don’t matter, and that was certainly the case with Maureen O’Connor,” Turcer said. “But I think it’s very important that we be realistic about that as well.”

Jason Stephens, the new speaker who may introduce some uncertainty into redistricting 

Some Ohio politicians did defy partisan expectations last week just a few blocks from the supreme court, in the state capitol. 

Largely sidelined in recent years, Democrats injected themselves into legislative proceedings when their House members coalesced with a third of the GOP caucus to elect Stephens as state Speaker. Stephens defeated the candidate who was expected to prevail, a very conservative lawmaker selected by most of his fellow Republicans.

The shock result led some Democrats and some anti-gerrymandering advocates to speculate that it may herald an “honest effort to get bipartisan maps,” as The Columbus Dispatch reported last week. 

“We are certainly encouraged to see a speaker that was chosen by members of both parties, and we hope that that bipartisanship will continue in creating district plans that truly serve the people,” Jen Miller, head of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, told Bolts. 

But no concrete promise has been reported between Stephens and Democrats on redistricting or any other issue. Allison Russo, the chamber’s Minority Leader, did not reply to a request for comment on whether Stephens made any commitments in exchange for Democratic votes. 

Stephens’s office also did not reply to requests for an interview. 

The new Speaker himself has a broadly conservative record as a legislator, including supporting new restrictions on abortion and voting for a legislative package that restricted ballot access in December. That package, which was signed into law by Mike DeWine last week and has been strongly denounced by voting rights groups, restricts the availability of ballot drop boxes, eliminates a day of in-person early voting, and makes the state’s voter ID requirements more burdensome by disallowing some forms of identification, among other changes. 

A number of advocates interviewed by Bolts cautioned that they had no high hopes for Stephens’s leadership. Even if he were to be interested in toning down gerrymandering, they said, he has his work cut out for him given the recent records of Ohio’s other Republican officials.

“I’m cautiously pessimistic about a deal between the Ohio Democrats and Republicans,” said Tims. “The Republicans have shown us their hand every single time throughout the process. It has never been a fair shake.”

“It’s a little hard to not feel like we’re just in another Lucy and the football moment,” Shanahan said about Stephens securing a promotion thanks to Democrats. “I hope that we’re not, I hope Lucy does hold down that football…, I hope that what comes out of this is positive movement away from the fringe extremes that our state legislature has been residing in for years. I’m skeptical, but I hope to be proven wrong.”

The upcoming map-drawing will be handled by the redistricting commission, a panel made up of the governor, auditor, and secretary of state—all of whom are currently Republicans—plus four members that represent the four legislative leaders in each chamber. (The leaders typically serve on the commission themselves.) That means that, even if Stephens were to resist aggressive proposals, there would be four other Republicans on a seven-person body.

Those include Matt Huffman, the state Senate President who played a lead role in ramping up the scope of gerrymandering last year, and Frank LaRose, the secretary of state who last year floated impeaching O’Connor from the state supreme court over her redistricting rulings.

But Stephens is still in a position to at least change last year’s dynamic, if not soften the maps, if he so chooses.

Ohio’s outgoing Speaker Bob Cupp played a very aggressive role in 2022 in controlling the mapmaking and in boxing other officials out of much of the process; legislative leaders wield special influence, especially over how their own chamber’s lines are redrawn. Turcer, who described herself as “guardedly optimistic” about the new Speaker, also floated the possibility that Stephens may at least make the redistricting process more transparent. 

“This is a systemic problem”

Several Ohio advocates told Bolts that their strongest hope about Stephens was that his bipartisan win may at least kill a controversial change to the state’s referendum process—one that would make it harder to change the redistricting process in the first place.

Late last year, Republicans floated increasing the threshold of passage for citizen-initiated ballot measures from 50 to 60 percent. That would make it far harder for independent groups to secure wins over policies that the legislature fiercely opposes, such as abortion protections. The idea did not pass the legislature in late 2022, leaving a path—for now—for redistricting reform.

Miller of the League of Women Voters and Turcer of Common Cause Ohio each said that their groups were exploring how to champion a new citizen-initiated ballot measure in Ohio to implement an independent redistricting commission, like the ones used in Arizona and Michigan. But neither committed to a timeline for such a push. 

In 2015, voting rights groups championed an amendment that put in place the system in use now but Republicans weaponized it in ways that advocates say was unintended. One of the components of that reform was that a map would only be in place for four years, rather than the usual ten, if it failed to gather bipartisan support; it turned out that Republicans in passing their 2022 maps did not care about this constraint, which in fact only gave them the opportunity to refine their lines more frequently. As a result, and no matter what happens in the run-up to 2024, Ohio will yet again need to draw new maps in the lead-up to 2026.

“At some point, there’s an insanity in doing the same thing over and over again,” Turcer told Bolts. “It’s not a matter of new tools—community mapping, citizen engagement, all the different ways that voters can show how their district is manipulated. We’ve tried all that. At this point, we need to actually take the elected officials out of the equation and put this in the hands of an independent insulated citizens commission.”

Federal Democrats mulled institutional protections against gerrymandering when they controlled Congress in 2021 and 2022, but those did not pass due to several senators’ opposition to changing the U.S. Senate’s filibuster rules. “HR1 would have solved a lot of these problems,,” said Tims, referencing the federal legislation, “and because of that failure, voting rights and democracy continue to erode in statehouses across the country.”

“These folks are drunk on power, essentially,” Turcer said of politicians in charge of drawing the maps that keep them in power. “And what do you do with drunks? You take away their keys.”

The post In Ohio’s Redistricting Redo, a New Justice and a New Speaker Will Steer the Ship appeared first on Bolts.

Five supreme court seats are up for grabs this year across North Carolina and Ohio, and the results may once again open the gerrymandering floodgates in both states.

The rulings that struck down GOP gerrymanders in each state hang on narrow 4-3 majorities that are now highly vulnerable to flipping. To preserve the status quo, Democrats must sweep both seats on North Carolina’s ballot. In Ohio, they must win at least one of three races, possibly two. Republicans are jumping on the opportunity, in what is shaping to be a favorable cycle for them.

“We must focus on battleground state Supreme Court elections because so many redistricting fights are won and lost there,” former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie tweeted on Feb. 26, specifically naming North Carolina and Ohio. Christie is the co-chair of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, a group that aims to maximize the GOP’s redistricting advantage this decade.

Dee Duncan, the president of the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), a national group that aims to win state-level elections, said the RSLC would be “spending more on state court races in 2022 than ever before.” The RSLC spent more than $5 million on judicial races in 2019 and 2020 alone, according to a recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice.

Democratic groups like the National Democratic Redistricting Foundation have also contributed money in judicial elections in recent years. But so far in Ohio, the GOP is far more mobilized. The three Republican candidates for the state’s high court have raised more than $1.1 million combined as of January, compared to the three Democrats raising under $190,000, six times less. The numbers were more equal in North Carolina, with a slight advantage for the Democratic candidates as of the end of 2021.

David Pepper, the former head of the Ohio Democratic Party, told Bolts that he thinks national Democratic leaders “should go all in to win these supreme court races.” 

During Pepper’s tenure as party head between 2015 and 2020, Ohio Democrats flipped three supreme court seats, and redistricting played a major role in their messaging. When Democrat Jennifer Brunner won a supreme court election in 2020, her campaign sent her supporters an email with the subject line, “It’s official – we broke gerrymandering in Ohio.”

Those wins gave Democrats three of the court’s seven seats. Republican Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, who had signaled her distaste for gerrymandering ten years ago, joined them in a string of rulings this year to make up a fragile majority that struck down the GOP-drawn maps.

“Gerrymandering is the antithetical perversion of representative democracy,” the court wrote. “When the dealer stacks the deck in advance, the house usually wins.” It ruled that the GOP-drawn maps did not conform to a constitutional amendment voters approved in 2015 to require fairer districts. Republicans on the Ohio Redistricting Commission have argued that the new constitutional standards of fairness are only “aspirational,” not mandatory, a claim that the court majority rejected.

But O’Connor, who is barred from running for re-election this year because of her age, won’t be on the court much longer. Her departure deprives Democrats of a rare Republican ally and forces them to win at least one of three seats on the ballot this year to compensate. 

“With the retirement of the Chief Justice, it is imperative that a fourth justice that believes strongly in democracy is elected,” Terri Jamison, a lower-court judge and one of the Democratic candidates for supreme court, says on her campaign website, explicitly referencing the redistricting rulings.

But the chief justice race is likely to produce a new Republican justice no matter who wins because of who jumped in the election on the Democratic side. The only Democratic contender is Brunner, who is a current associate justice; she will face another associate justice, Republican Sharon Kennedy. Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican who signed the state’s latest gerrymanders, is favored to win re-election, will probably replace whoever wins, so even if Brunner becomes chief justice, her current seat will likely flip into GOP hands. 

This means that, unless DeWine ends up appointing a Republican who bucks their party like O’Connor did, Democrats need to win one of the other two elections on the ballot in order to preserve the court’s latest redistricting rulings. Both involve ousting incumbents.

In addition to the open race for O’Connor’s seat, two Republican justices who opposed the court’s anti-gerrymandering rulings are up for re-election, Pat Fischer and Pat DeWine, the son of Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. Fischer now faces Jamison, and DeWine is challenged by Marilyn Zayas. (Neither Zayas or Jamison responded to requests for comment.)

Pepper says it nevertheless helps Democrats to have Brunner on the ballot, because she will boost the rest of her ticket. He argues that Brunner, who is a well-known former secretary of state, can appeal to moderate voters like O’Connor did. As partisan elections are often swept by one party, the idea goes, lifting the party’s fortunes in one race strengthens Democrats in the others. 

Ohio Republicans changed election rules last year to add candidates’ party on the general election ballot. In the past, partisanship was not included for judicial candidates, and Republicans, who were reeling from their losses in 2018 and 2020, thought that this helped Democrats prevail in this red-leaning state. 

In other states where courts have struck down GOP maps, Republicans are similarly looking to change election rules. The GOP cannot gain a majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court until 2025, for instance, but it is toying with a constitutional amendment that would change the way the state’s justices are selected.

In targeting the rules of judicial races, Republicans are borrowing from the North Carolina GOP’s playbook. Lawmakers there made supreme court elections partisan starting in 2018, and repeatedly tried to manipulate the electoral process. Despite the legislature’s efforts, Democrats have maintained a majority on the court for the last few years. 

The North Carolina Supreme Court split along party lines on redistricting this year. Four Democrats voted to strike down; three Republicans voted to uphold. But two of those Democratic seats are now up for grabs, and Republicans need to win just one to have a majority next year. (In 2020, they swept three elections in the state, winning one seat by only about 400 votes.) 

Republicans now have a shot at an open seat since Justice Robin Hudson, a Democrat, is retiring. Democrat Lucy Inman and Republican Richard Dietz, both lower-court judges, are facing off to replace her. In the second election, Democratic Justice Sam Ervin IV will face one of three Republicans—attorneys Trey Allen and Victoria Prince, and April Wood, a lower-court judge—who did not reply to requests for comment. 

In exchanges with Bolts, Dietz and Inman each declined to share their views on redistricting, saying they would not comment on possible future cases. Both campaigns have faulted the other party for politicizing judicial elections. 

Still, prominent North Carolina Republicans have signaled that they expect that a GOP supreme court majority would give them more leeway in upcoming years. 

“Just a reminder that whatever Congressional maps are used this year can be revised next (and every) year by @NCGOP General Assembly which may have a GOP Supreme Court Majority,” Dallas Woodhouse, the former executive director of the state Republican Party, tweeted on Feb. 4, the same day the state supreme court struck down his party’s maps.

Following that ruling, lawmakers drew new legislative districts, and the supreme court imposed a new congressional map drawn by a bipartisan panel of three experts, all former judges. The GOP’s original map, which was struck down by the supreme court, would have given the GOP 10 of the state’s 14 seats. The new map has at least six Democratic-leaning seats.

But this fairer congressional map will only be in place for one election. There will be another round of congressional redistricting after the midterms that will determine the fate of multiple U.S. House seats, and it’s the new state supreme court elected in 2022 that will review the new districts.

The new legislative districts are more likely to last, because the state constitution says they “shall remain unaltered” until the next census. To pull off mid-decade legislative redistricting, state lawmakers would have to convince the high court to circumvent that ban.

Continued fights over redistricting are also guaranteed in Ohio. That’s because, if maps fail to garner bipartisan support, they are only operative for four years. The GOP has pushed maps all on its own, though they are currently locked in a stalemate with the court, which sets up a next round by 2025-2026. The latest congressional map drawn by the GOP there gives the party at least 11 of 15 districts, and the high court is reviewing it.

Republicans have a plan even if they fail to secure more favorable judges in North Carolina and Ohio: get the U.S. Supreme Court to silence state courts.

They are invoking a theory known as the independent state legislature doctrine, which holds that state lawmakers have carte blanche on redistricting and other election-related matters, free from any judicial review. The U.S. Supreme Court has so far sidestepped the doctrine, but four of its conservative members have signaled they are open to it. 

Republicans say courts are the ones guilty of gerrymandering and of usurping the authority of lawmakers. The RSCL recently criticized Democrats for resorting “to state courts to change the rules,” and it vowed to “keep redistricting in the hands of the people.” But the state lawmakers of North Carolina and Ohio, who according to a growing number of conservatives should have sole discretion over redistricting, spent most of the last decade easily maintaining their majorities through heavily gerrymandered maps.

Kennedy, the Republican judge who could become Ohio’s chief justice in November, recently signaled conservatives’ determination to capture the court and undo its recent rulings. At a dinner hosted by a county Republican Party, she called redistricting “the fight of our life.”

The post Supreme Court Elections May Re-Open Gerrymandering Floodgates in Two Key States appeared first on Bolts.