The system, first approved by voters in 2020, quickly drew Republican opposition after a Democrat flipped the state’s single U.S. House seat in 2022, the first time it was used. But the state’s predominantly Native areas formed a bulwark to defend it this fall, despite notorious barriers to political participation in these more rural and remote regions.

The measure to repeal the system trails by 664 votes, or 0.21 percent, with all ballots counted. The small margin means that proponents of repeal may ask for a recount in December, though no statewide recount has changed a lead of this size in this century. 

Areas with large Alaska Native populations provided the winning margin against repeal. Across the state’s three majority-Native House districts, the ‘no’ vote is leading by 2,960 votes, 64 to 36 percent. 

“This is definitely demonstrating the power of us as a block,” said Michelle Sparck, director of Get Out the Native Vote. “We tend to scream into the void that we count, that we matter. If we vote to our full power, which is a quarter of the statewide vote, then we would see a lot more of a representative government.”

Alaska Native organizers rallied to defeat Measure 2, Bolts reported in September, and they worked to educate people on how the new system works. 

The Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN) formally endorsed the open primary and ranked-choice voting system last year at its annual convention, saying that the new rules afford Native voters “more freedom, more choice, more influence, and greater participation.” They reaffirmed their support at their convention in October, right before the Nov. 5 referendum.

In the lead-up to Election Day, Native leaders worked to grow turnout by hosting events in dozens of rural villages, spreading the word through radio, and recruiting young people to volunteer at the polls. They also closely monitored each precinct to get ahead of logistical challenges that come up in remote areas, from a lack of equipment to winter storms.

In Alaska’s new system, all candidates regardless of party run in one primary that is open to all voters. Then, the top four candidates advance to the general election, at which stage voters can rank them. The state then tabulates the ballots and rankings until one winner emerges. 

Native organizers told Bolts that they saw the first half of this reform—the open primary—as the most valuable to their aims. Under the old system, major parties acted as “gatekeepers,” and candidates had little hope of prevailing without winning their support and approval, Sparck said. But now, voters can pick whoever aligns best with their needs, regardless of party affiliation. The priorities of Native voters rarely fall squarely into the platform of any one party, she added, and the open primary system allows them to support candidates across party lines.

Data suggests that Natives have embraced this option more than other Alaskans. According to a report by Get Out the Native Vote, over 80 percent of voters in predominantly Native districts split their primary ballots in the 2022 primary, choosing some Republican candidates and some Democratic candidates. That is a far higher rate than the state at-large, where half of voters split their ballots.

Many also credited the new system for contributing to the historic election of Mary Peltola, who won a competitive race in 2022 to become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress.

But Peltola lost this month to Republican challenger Nick Begich. Begich already led Pelota as voters’ first preference by two percentage points. Once the state tabulated the ranked preferences of voters who supported minor candidates on Wednesday, Begich gained more ground. He prevailed 51.3 to 48.7 percent.

FairVote, a national organization that promotes ranked-choice voting, pointed to the results on Wednesday to make the case that the system does not favor any one party. Begich’s win, two years after Peltola’s victory, is “a reminder that the reform is completely party-neutral,” Meredith Sumpter, the president of FairVote, said in a statement.

If the result holds, the failure of Measure 2 may have significant repercussions on state politics: By preserving open primaries, it would signal that Republican officials do not need to worry about surviving a partisan GOP primary in 2026 or 2028. Lisa Murkowsi, the moderate U.S. senator, benefited from the new system in her last reelection race in 2022. In the legislature, Democrats and moderate Republicans have formed a coalition to run both chambers; they hope to attract more Republicans now that open primaries appear to be here to stay.

The outcome of Measure 2 in Alaska stands in stark contrast with the Nov. 5 results in much of the country. Measures to adopt open primaries and ranked-choice voting failed this fall in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon. (Nevadans had approved the measure in 2022, but it needed to pass twice to become law.) Plus, Missouri voters banned localities from using it. 

Alaska will remain one of only two states with ranked-choice voting, alongside Maine. It will be the only state with an open primary system, since Maine still uses partisan primaries.

Voters in Washington, D.C., also approved a switch to ranked-choice voting on Nov. 5. Cities including Portland, San Francisco, and Minneapolis already use it in their local races.

In Alaska, the ‘no’ campaign to preserve the current system was led by Alaskans for Better Elections, and it massively outraised and outspent supporters of repeal. 

Philip Izon, who led the effort to get Measure 2 on the ballot, did not reply to a request for comment on its defeat. In an interview this summer, he criticized the ‘no’ campaign for being funded by out-of-state groups, such as the Colorado-based group Unite America PAC and the Texas-based Act Now Initiative. He also told Bolts that he had formed Alaskans for Honest Elections, the group that organized the citizens initiative, because the ranked-choice system was so confusing that his grandfather wasn’t able to figure out how to cast his ballot. He faulted the system as a way to tip the scales towards Democrats.

The ‘no’ to Measure 2 did well in Anchorage and in the southern tip of the state. These are areas that tend to be friendlier to Democrats. But it drew support beyond Democratic voters and outpaced Kamala Harris’ share of the vote in the presidential race by nearly 9 percentage points statewide.

The gap between the ‘no’ and Harris was greatest in areas with large Native populations. Four of the six legislative districts where the ‘no’ vote outperformed Harris by the largest margin are the state’s four majority- and plurality-Native districts. That suggests the results in those regions can’t just be reduced to partisanship. 

In Alaska’s majority-Native 40th House district, the ‘no’ did 19 percentage points better than Harris. Voters there voted against repeal 61 to 39 percent, even as Harris lost to Republican Donald Trump 51 to 42 percent.

The ‘no’ also prevailed with more than 60 percent of the vote in the 38th and 39th districts, the state’s two other majority-Native districts. 

These districts are part of the Bush, a region with harsh weather and large distances between isolated villages and polling places that can discourage potential voters and make organizing difficult. 

The region has a history of disenfranchisement. The state often does a poor job of ensuring people have access to the ballot and some communities lack proper accommodations for voting information and ballots in their languages, despite those protections being guaranteed by the Voting Rights Act.

Native organizers this fall made a mammoth effort in order to ensure that registered voters in remote villages disconnected from roadways could still participate in the election.

Sparck told Bolts that, in the small village of Newtok in western Alaska, voters were caught off guard when they learned just before Election Day that the state had no plan to set up a polling place, even though it was a designated precinct and there had been one there in past elections. There are no roads connecting Newtok to any other polling places; the nearest location would have been across the Ningliq River, which was frozen and impassable by boat. The village also has no post office, ruling out mail voting as a solution.

Newtok is a coastal village that has begun collapsing into the ocean due to rising tides brought on by climate change. Most residents have abandoned Newtok and moved to a nearby village across the river, but dozens have yet to relocate. 

“They assumed that Newtok didn’t exist anymore, without realizing there were still voters in town,” Sparck said. “Those folks would have been completely left out of the entire process. As difficult as it was, we were able to salvage some level of voting. The system was not prepared to work with a region like that.” 

The window of opportunity was slim: A powerful storm was rolling in that would shut down air travel for a week. Jackie Boyer, a volunteer with the Mobilization Center’s Rural and Indigenous Outreach Program, a private organization, flew on a small plane to the village the day before the election to help find a way for Newtok residents to vote. She worked with the Alaska Division of Elections to request a vote-by-fax process and then spent hours setting up a printer for the ballots and troubleshooting connectivity issues. 

She sent out messages through the VHF radio system that most households in the Bush rely on to inform the community that they would be able to cast their votes.

Fifty-five people ended up voting on Measure 2 in the Newtok precinct, which also includes another village across the river. The ‘no’ won handily: 18 people voted in favor of repealing open primaries and ranked-choice voting, while 37 people voted against it. 

“We’ve dealt with issues like this in multiple years. And as climate change furthers and storms become more prevalent, there are more delays with mail and with planes coming in,” said Boyer. “It highlights the unique nature of Alaska and voting in rural areas. It takes a community to get this done.”

The post Powered by Native Voters, Ranked-Choice Voting and Open Primaries Survive in Alaska appeared first on Bolts.

It was just four years ago that voters approved the switch to this new way of running elections. But Republicans have lashed out against the change ever since Democrat Mary Peltola won the first election held under the new rules in 2022, flipping Alaska’s sole U.S. House seat. This also made Peltola the first Alaska Native to join Congress.

Alaskans for Honest Elections, an organization founded in early 2023 in opposition to ranked-choice voting, put an initiative on the ballot this fall to turn back the clock. If Measure 2 passes in November, it would end Alaska’s novel system, under which the state holds an open primary, with all candidates running on one ballot regardless of party, and then the top four candidates face off in a ranked-choice general election. Instead, the state would return to a more conventional approach: partisan primaries, followed by a first-past-the-post election. 

Alaska Native leaders are now working to consolidate support for the open primary and ranked-choice voting system. The state’s largest tribal organization, the Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN), formally endorsed the new rules last year at its annual convention.

The AFN adopted a resolution that said the system better represents Native voters by allowing “more freedom, more choice, more influence, and greater participation.”

AFN members have since launched a coordinated campaign to persuade voters to oppose Measure 2. Native leaders say they’ll be reaching people through public radio, local newspapers and pop-up events in rural areas. 

“No system is going to be perfect. Ranked-choice voting gets us closer to something that is equitable,” said Barbara ‘Wáahlaal Gidaag Blake, an elected board member of the Sealaska Corporation, one of Alaska’s regional organizations that manages Indigenous land claims.

Proponents of the 2020 reform are making the case that most Native voters in Alaska are not registered with a party, and that the open primary system is more inclusive for independent voters, helping energize disaffected voters. “Alaskans should be able to choose a person, not a political party, and trust that the process will encourage good public policy,” says the AFN’s resolution.

For Michelle Sparck, director of Get Out the Native Vote, an organization affiliated with the Cook Inlet Tribal Council that promotes turnout in Native communities, the change to the elections system opens up the field to lesser known candidates. “Anybody can run,” she told Bolts. “You don’t have to have the party’s blessing and backing, and that does change things a lot. You have more unique and representative people on that ballot than we have ever seen before.” 

“And a lot of them look like us, and that was exciting too,” added Sparck, who is a member of Chevak’s Qissunamiut Tribe.

The mistrust many Alaska Natives feel towards the political system extends far beyond the exact mechanics of voting. But to Native groups that support the change, the new voting system has been a step towards repairing past harms by bolstering Native representation, and they’re frustrated to see that the state may roll back a reform they believe has worked in their favor.

A long history of voter suppression and gerrymandering, familiar to Indigenous populations throughout the United States, have dampened Alaska Natives’ political power. The geography of the land presents logistical challenges as well. Many Natives live in villages spread across the vast Alaskan Bush, disconnected from major roadways and separated from regional hubs by the rugged landscape that can only be traversed by small plane or by boat. Election administration in the region regularly falls short. There are also at least 20 distinct language groups among Alaska Natives, an additional challenge for political campaigns and organizers.

The federal Voting Rights Act requires that election communications in some parts of the state be conducted in at least one Native language so voters know how to vote, and understand what is on the ballot, but this is often not implemented well. Speakers of Yup’ik, the most widely spoken Indigenous language family in Alaska, sued the state in 2013 with the backing of Native rights groups for failing to provide language assistance. A federal judge ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in 2014, and a settlement agreement required Alaska to improve language accessibility. 

But Native rights groups say the state never fully complied with the court order, and the settlement was extended through 2026. “There’s off-and-on legal battles over access to polling stations, and about having voter pamphlets in languages that we can understand since English is not the first language everywhere, and it is a journey just to get to the capitol for most folks,” said Joe Nelson, the co-chair of the AFN.

For Blake, those electoral difficulties magnify the disillusionment that many Alaska Natives have towards a political system that has continuously exploited their resources, lands and communities.

“There are inequities and biases built into every aspect of our government,” said Blake. “Our constitution recognizes the pioneers of Alaska and everybody that came after. Even in our constitution, we are forgotten. At the founding of our state, we weren’t even allowed to vote.” 

“It makes it really hard to get our people, who have felt generations of disenfranchisement, erasure, and racism, excited about stepping foot into those spaces,” she added. “It is a matter of getting our people comfortable in these spaces that have never ever written laws that feel like they are on our side.” 

Blake regrets that many Alaska politicians don’t talk about how to preserve the subsistence lifestyles prevalent in Alaska Native towns in remote parts of the state, and don’t help residents in those regions keep living off the land so communities can continue their traditional practices and way of life. “All of our people still hunt, fish and gather the same way our ancestors did,” Blake said. “But it’s a slow death by a thousand cuts, where each generation doesn’t realize the rights of hunting, fishing and gathering that are being stripped away from them.”

Peltola, Alaska’s newest member of Congress, hails from the Bethel region, in the Bush, and she has focused on fishing issues since joining the House. She once worked as executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, and she has even missed some sessions of Congress to help her family store fish for the winter. 

“The fact that every summer she gets out there to fish for salmon, smoke it and dry it and share it with family—she is very much a subsistence driven person who lives off the land,” said Nelson. “Many of us consider ourselves salmon people, we really rely on the rivers and oceans here to provide for us.”

Turnout is typically much lower in primaries than in November. But under Alaska’s old system in place through 2020, the summer primary was what decided the final winner in many races—for instance in legislative districts that overwhelmingly lean in one direction or another. 

In the new system, major decisions always take place in the higher-turnout general elections, since the primary’s leading candidates make it all the way there regardless of party. Voters in the fall rank as many of the candidates as they choose; once votes are tabulated, the candidate with the least first-choice support is eliminated and the totals are retabulated based on voters’ ranked preferences, until a winner emerges who has more than 50 percent of the vote. 

Partisan primaries were “a playground of the party faithful,” Sparck said, and it was hard to draw voters in. “It’s hard to compete with the summer. It’s hard to compete with subsistence. How many people in the villages are just out in the wilderness trying to survive, trying to stock our freezers for the winter?”

Until 2020, voters who wanted to take part in the primary had to choose either a Democrat or Republican ballot to participate; critics of this older system say this was a turn-off to independents, preventing them from picking candidates they like in different parties’ contests. 

Now voters can pick candidates from different parties. In the 2022 open primary, the first of its kind, almost half of Alaskans chose candidates from different parties, according to a report prepared by the organization Get Out the Native Vote. 

The shift proved particularly helpful for Native voters to express their preferences: In districts with a predominantly Native population, 80 percent of voters split their ballot.

“More than anywhere else in the state, voters in predominantly Alaska Native communities supported a list of candidates and expressed preferences that would have been impossible to support in a partisan primary,” Burke Croft, deputy data director with Ship Creek Group, a political consulting firm that led the data analysis for the report. “Partisan primaries disadvantage people who want to express preferences across party lines.”

One concern voiced by critics of the ranked-choice system is that it leads some people to waste their vote: If they haven’t ranked enough candidates, their preference may not influence the final rounds of the tabulation. This is called an exhausted ballot.

A recent study by Nolan McCarty, a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton, found that in Alaska’s 2022 election, voters in predominantly Native districts were more likely to end up with exhausted ballots than the rest of the population. The finding was part of broader results that indicated that ranked-choice voting may dilute the voting power of minority voters. The study was released in January by the Center for Election Confidence, an organization that opposes ranked-choice voting.

In an interview with Bolts, McCarty said this may be due to the fact that fewer candidates make direct appeals to voters of color and to Indigeneous communities. 

“I think certain groups are just not mobilized to cast second ballots,” he said. “Voters often only rank multiple candidates if those candidates make appeals to them,” he said. That may change if future candidates “find it beneficial to reach out to those groups to get those second and third place rankings.”

Organizers say they’re working with voters to minimize ballot exhaustion. But some also push back on the notion that an exhausted ballot is a wasted vote. It still allows voters to express their preferences, Croft said, including by withholding a vote in protest against a candidate that doesn’t align with their values.

“We need to understand that [an exhausted ballot] can be a viable, intentional choice rather than disenfranchisement,” Croft said. “Any time a voter steps into a ballot box, they are expressing their preferences one way or another, even if they walk in, don’t fill out any boxes, and turn it in.”

Phil Izon, who runs Alaskans for Honest Elections, the group behind Measure 2, says the ranked-choice system does more harm than good for Alaska Natives and he pointed Bolts to McCarthy’s study, saying, “The research is there but people don’t want to look at the research because it doesn’t fit their narrative.” 

Izon began organizing against ranked-choice voting after the 2022 election and drew quick support from Sarah Palin, the former Republican governor who lost the U.S. House race to Peltola in 2022. Izon, who says he has consulted for Palin in the past, also says on his website that he wants Alaska to hand count ballots, a cause some conservatives have nationwide.

Izon argues that the new voting system doesn’t help independents run for office, as they’re likely to need party support to make the top 4. He also cites a statement against ranked choice by Native Americans for Sovereignty and Preservation, a conservative Arizona-based organization connected to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. 

Historically, debates over ranked-choice voting did not clearly fall along partisan lines, and Democrats have also fought its implementation in some places like Washington, D.C. and Nevada. But the issue has grown increasingly partisan in recent years.

In Alaska, many Republicans turned hard against the new system after Palin’s loss to Peltola in 2022. 

Palin reacted to the result by calling ranked-choice voting “crazy, convoluted, confusing,” and her allies followed suit. Conservatives were also frustrated that the new system meant they could no longer target Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who in early 2021 voted to convict Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial, in a GOP primary. Murkowski was endorsed by the Alaska Federation of Natives and easily won reelection in November 2022 in the final round of ranked-choice voting; most voters who selected a Democrat as their first choice also then ranked Murkowski over her Trump-endorsed challenger.

Peltola, meanwhile, has praised ranked-choice voting and endorsed its spread to other states. “Ranked choice voting is gaining popularity because it’s giving people a better voice in their democracy,” Pelota said in 2022. “People can vote for the candidates they align with instead of being forced to vote defensively every election.” Peltola did not return a request for comment for this article. 

Besides Alaska, only Maine uses a ranked-choice voting system in statewide elections. Maine Republicans unsuccessfully tried to organize a ballot measure to repeal ranked-choice voting, and they also failed to challenge the system in court. 

Republicans in other states have also grown more aggressive in opposing ranked-choice voting in recent years. Ten GOP-leaning states have now passed laws prohibiting local governments from adopting ranked-choice voting systems, and this fall voters in Missouri will decide on a similar ban. “Missourians don’t want more voter confusion and exhaustion when they go to the ballot box than they already have,” one of that measure’s chief Republican sponsors has said. 

This fall in Alaska, Peltola is up for reelection again alongside Measure 2. In November she will face three candidates in a general election that will once again be decided by ranked-choice voting—possibly for the last time if voters approve Measure 2 on the same day.

Nelson, the co-chair of the AFN, now hopes to mobilize Native voters to reelect Peltola and halt the repeal effort. He told Bolts that the tribes in his federation will spread the word through local networks like the regional corporations that manage Native land claims.

“It’s just the whole gamut of tactics you can imagine, including social media and video ads,” he said. “It requires a lot of traveling… In our rural areas, we have to rely on locals there, even posting flyers at the local grocery and that type of thing.”

“The get out the vote effort is something we are always doing,” he continued. “But this year, there is an added urgency because of the attacks on ranked-choice voting and also because our congresswoman is up for election.”

The post Native Leaders Organize to Defend Alaska’s Ranked Choice Voting System appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

Voting rights today: How we got here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Threats to the Voting Rights Act and redistricting reform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can be done to bolster democracy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post How the Supreme Court Is Undermining Voting Rights: Your Questions Answered appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

Kentucky | Secretary of state

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

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

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

Louisiana | Secretary of state 

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

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

Maine | Question 8

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

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

Michigan | Municipal referendums on ranked choice voting

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

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

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

Mississippi | Secretary of state

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

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

Pennsylvania | Supreme court justice

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

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

Pennsylvania | Bucks County commission

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

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

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

Pennsylvania | Berks County commission

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

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

Virginia | Legislative control

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

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

Washington | King County director of elections

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

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

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

Memphis residents who head to the polls next week will face a dizzying ballot for mayor. With Mayor Jim Strickland term limited in this city of 600,000, there are 17 candidates running to replace him in this nonpartisan race—a crush of local businessmen and politicians, including a former reality TV judge, two different life coaches, and a former mayor. Despite the crowded field, Oct. 5 will be the only round of voting: Whoever finishes first becomes the next mayor of Memphis, however small their share of the vote. 

Memphis is by far the most populous city in the nation to elect its mayor this way, in a one-round, first-past-the-post election. There is no primary, no runoff, no ranked-choice voting to cull the herd, encourage consolidation, or help clarify the stakes. All other U.S. cities with at least half a million residents have some such mechanism to ensure that the field narrows, or that the winner gets broader support.

This rare voting procedure was set up when a court eliminated runoffs more than 30 years ago to prevent white residents from coalescing to block Black candidates. But the white share of the population has declined considerably since then, rendering that original purpose more obsolete. Voters in this now majority-Black city tried in recent years to change their election rules and adopt ranked-choice voting, a system that could produce winners with wider appeal. But Tennessee Republicans who run the state government adopted a law in 2022 that banned the use of ranked-choice in the state. 

This has left Memphis with a system that risks diluting voters’ power, making it harder for them to elect leaders who represent the preferences and priorities of a large share of the population. 

“There’s still a whole lot of battle fatigue, angst, frustration, anxiety,” says Reverend Earle Fisher, director of the Black Clergy Collective of Memphis, about voters’ mood. “If there’s one thing I’ve heard a million times over the last few months that I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard it is: ‘There’s too many people in this race.’”

He says the danger to democracy is that public officials are getting elected without a mandate, without “50 percent of the people participating saying, ‘I want this person because I believe this person is gonna do the things that the majority of us want to be done.’”

Whoever wins the mayor’s race in Memphis will have to contend with concerns over public safety and economic disinvestment, a shrinking population, and a GOP-run state government that has increasingly interfered in the decisions made by its cities. The election also comes in the wake of Tyre Nichols’ death and other high-profile police shootings that have rocked the city recently, which puts a spotlight on the next mayor’s relationship with the police department and appointments of a police chief.

But in a field that’s this crowded, and where nearly all mayoral contenders say they share the same broad priorities—reduce crime, promote economic investment, and improve housing—it’s been exceedingly difficult for the conversations to go beyond sound bites or to really air out any policy disagreements between any two candidates. 

“Voters don’t really create their own messages. They choose between the alternatives that are put in front of them,” says Jack Santucci, who studies electoral systems as a political science lecturer at Queens College, CUNY. “Especially in a nonpartisan local election, voters are going to have trouble differentiating among the candidates.”

Local media has made decisions about which of these 17 candidates to invite to debates based on how much money they’ve raised and the available polling. 

By those metrics, the leading candidates include Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner, who is touting support from police unions and his long experience in law enforcement, while also  drawing criticism for the high number of deaths in the local jail he oversees. They also include Paul Young, president of the Downtown Memphis Commission, a newcomer to electoral politics who leads the race in funds raised; state Representative Karen Camper, who voted against the law to ban ranked-choice voting while in the legislature; and Shelby County Commissioner Van Turner, a former Memphis NAACP president whose left-leaning platform has earned him the endorsement of Justin Pearson, a lawmaker representing part of the city who was expelled from the state House (and later reinstated) by Republicans earlier this year over a protest for gun control.

Also running is Willie Herenton, who has made fewer appearances at public events, skipped debates, and raised a lot less money. But as the former mayor from 1992 to 2009, the name recognition he garnered over his five terms makes him a frontrunner: In an August poll conducted by Emerson College, Herenton received 16 percent—enough to put him in the lead. A plurality of respondents, 26 percent, remained undecided. 

Even in smaller debates organized by the media, candidates have had limited time to state their cases and have struggled to distinguish themselves. The dynamic has heightened competition, incentivizing attack ads and even jockeying among the candidates over who has the best Christian faith credentials. 

Every possible advantage counts: The next mayor is likely to win with less than 30 percent of the vote, if not less, hardly a mandate from voters to carry out a particular policy vision.

“What we’re facing right now, with so many candidates in the way, is that we could possibly have the next mayor of Memphis elected by 20,000 or fewer votes,” Martavius Jones, chair of the city council, told Bolts.

Tennessee’s other largest city just held its own mayoral race this summer under different rules: Nashville holds runoffs for its local elections, giving the race a much different shape.

There were 12 candidates for mayor during Nashville’s first round of voting on Aug. 3, and the top two vote-getters, Freddie O’Connell and Alice Rolli, received 27 and 20 percent of the vote, respectively. In Memphis, this would have been the end of the road, but in Nashville it paved the way for a 6-week runoff campaign. O’Connell touted his progressive bona fides while Rolli ran with conservative support, a contrast that gave voters a clear choice. During the runoff, O’Connell rallied support from progressive advocacy groups, labor unions, as well as several of the candidates he beat in the first round, and on Sept. 14, won the mayorship with a decisive 64 percent of the vote. 

Republicans in the legislature floated a bill earlier this year to ban runoffs in municipal elections throughout the state. Democrats denounced it as an attempted power-grab in the run-up to Nashville’s election, warning that it would allow a single Republican to beat out a crowd of Democrats in the decidedly blue city. Had the bill passed, the summer’s result would not have changed since O’Connell won both rounds. Still, Rolli, the sole Republican among the major candidates, would have been 7 percentage points from victory rather than the 28 percentage points by which she lost the runoff.

Memphis too used to have runoff elections for its mayoral and city council contest, a system it adopted in the mid 1960s. Because of the city’s racial makeup at the time—63 percent white and 37 percent Black—runoffs worked to preserve white political power and ensured that Black candidates almost never took office. Runoffs were used not only to consolidate votes around just a couple of candidates, but also to shore up racial voting blocs. 

“Blacks could not hope to win citywide races given the traditional level of white polarization and bloc voting,” explains Marcus Pohlmann in his book Racial Politics At a Crossroads, a history of Memphis electoral politics. “Without a runoff, Blacks could have run single candidates in races in which there were several white candidates, and, by giving a candidate a plurality of the vote, have some reasonable possibility of winning.”

Elections continued on this way until in 1991, when a federal judge struck down the runoffs rule, saying that it violated the Voting Rights Act. U.S. District Judge Jerome Turner said the city had to adopt a new plan to “eradicate the minority vote dilution.” 

Mere months later, Herenton was elected as the city’s first Black mayor—by a hair, with only 142 more votes than his opponent, white incumbent Richard Hackett. The contest was decided in one round, and a runoff very well could have reversed the results, Pohlmann writes.

The racial makeup of Memphis has changed considerably since then; the U.S. census’ 2022 estimates show that 63 percent of the city’s population is Black and 24 percent is white. This has largely eliminated the concern of “minority vote dilution” that the 1991 ruling was intended to address. Still, the no-runoffs rule has remained. 

Memphians have devised other informal ways of consolidating the field in intervening years, including holding an unofficial mock election called the Memphis People’s Convention, also known as the People’s Primary. The event was originally put on ahead of the historic 1991 race, and had the effect of galvanizing Black voters around Herenton. 

After a long hiatus, the event was brought back in 2019 by the Black Clergy Collective of Memphis as a way to engage and inform voters, give candidates an opportunity to make their case, and signal who the leading candidates might be. 

“It’s been important for us not to concentrate on individuals or politicians as much as we concentrate on issues and policies that the majority of the people want to see enacted,” says Fisher of theBlack Clergy Collective.

This year, only six candidates registered for the event, which took place in August, and only two candidates—Young, the president of the downtown commission, and Turner, the former Memphis NAACP president—showed up in person. Young won the mock election, though Fisher stresses that many Memphians remain undecided. 

Lexi Carter, chair of the Shelby County Democratic Party, agrees that the People’s Convention this year is less of a political bellwether compared to the first convention in 1991. 

“That was effective then, but I think as the years passed the dynamics changed,” Carter told Bolts. She says that people engaged in 1991 “because it was the first time a Black mayor was ever going to be elected. Whereas now, there are African Americans that fill most of the elected positions [in city government.]” The leading candidates in the race this year are all Black and have some attachment to the Democratic party.

The Shelby Democratic Party has largely stayed out of this race, as they have a policy of not endorsing candidates in non-partisan races such as this one, where most candidates are registered Democrats or have Democratic affiliations. “It’s really a very close race and difficult to predict,” says Carter.

As an alternative to the current system, Memphis has tried to adopt ranked choice voting. This voting method, in which voters rank all candidates in order of preference instead of choosing just one, helps ensure that whoever wins has at least some level of support from most voters. 

Memphis residents first approved ranked choice with 71 percent of the vote in a 2008 referendum. The city didn’t move to implement it until 2017, though, when Shelby County Elections Administrator Linda Philips announced plans to use it in the 2019 elections. But members of the city council raised concerns about whether voting equipment could handle the change, and Tennessee’s election director Mark Goins halted Philips’ plan, issuing an opinion saying that ranked-choice voting violated state law. The Memphis city council put another referendum on the ballot for 2018, this time asking voters whether they wanted to repeal ranked-choice voting, but that referendum failed when 54 percent of voters rejected repeal. 

In 2022, the legislature stepped in to ban ranked-choice voting throughout Tennessee with a law sponsored by Republican state Senator Brian Kelsey, who represents parts of Shelby County. Many Democratic lawmakers who represent portions of Memphis voted against the ban, including Camper, the state Representative who is now running for mayor.

“I voted against the bill because the people of my community were for ranked choice voting. We chose it for ourselves,” Camper told Bolts in an email. 

“The legislature likes to lean on and meddle in the affairs of Memphis and Nashville,” she added. “I believe that this is one more way to override the will of Memphis and Shelby County.”

Fisher, who has supported the adoption of ranked-choice voting in Memphis, says he was disappointed to see the option removed. 

“I wanna do whatever we can do to ensure that whoever is elected to office, the probability of them representing the will of the majority of the citizens is high and not low,” he told Bolts.

With the path to ranked-choice voting now blocked, one prominent local Democrat is proposing another path to reform: introducing partisan primaries. Jones, the city council president, recently introduced an ordinance that, if passed, would put a popular referendum on the ballot in 2024 to set up a system that would have parties nominating candidates before they face a general election. Mayoral elections in Memphis are currently nonpartisan.

Jones says his ordinance is motivated by the size of the mayoral race, though in a city that is as staunchly blue as Memphis, a one-round Democratic primary could still reproduce some of the current system’s crowding issues. Jones says a partisan primary setting would still help condense the field and encourage candidates to adhere to party values.

He also says it’s less complicated and uncertain than petitioning a court to allow them to bring back runoffs. “Some of the feedback that I’ve received from people has been that there are just way too many people in the race,” said Jones. “So just by doing a partisan basis for selecting the mayor, we avoid having to go to court.”

The Shelby County Democratic Party has endorsed the measure. “We would much prefer to have the opportunity to choose our candidate,” Carter told Bolts. “When we have a nominee in advance, we can really get behind one individual and put all of our resources there, instead of dividing our resources between 16 or 17 people.”

Jones’ proposal has not yet been brought up for discussion by the full city council. It’s not likely to come up until after this election is over. 

“It’s a beautiful thing that we have the freedom that anybody who meets the qualifications can get in the race,” said Jones. “I don’t have a problem with that. But when it comes down to making that mayoral decision, let’s make it simple.”

The post With 17 Candidates and Unusual Voting Rules, Memphis Mayoral Race Gets Jumbled appeared first on Bolts.

In Michigan and Connecticut, they made it easier for people to vote early in future elections. In at least six localities, voters adopted ranked-choice voting. Oakland, California, adopted a new experiment in leveling the playing field in campaign spending. And other measures will try out new approaches to increasing participation locally. 

“It’s great to see voters embracing pro-democracy reforms to make the voting process easier and more inclusive,” Josh Douglas, a University of Kentucky professor who specializes in election law and was watching a wide array of ballot measures on Tuesday, told Bolts. “When we make it easy to vote, and when turnout improves as a result, then democracy wins.”

The biggest expansion of ballot access on Tuesday comes with the passage of Michigan’s Proposal 2, a catchall measure that amends the state constitution to make voting easier while also protecting against efforts to curtail voting rights launched in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. 

The proposal, backed by a coalition of Michigan organizations that support expanding voting rights, will establish nine days of early in-person voting, create new mandates for townships to set up ballot drop boxes, and supply state-funded postage to vote by mail. It passed handily with 60 percent of the vote.

“It’s the role of our government to make sure people have the ability to vote and aren’t bogged down by constructed barriers,” Branden Snyder, co-executive director of a Detroit group backing the measure, told Bolts in October. 

Yvonne White, president of NAACP Michigan, another member of the coalition, celebrated the result this week, stating in a press release that, “Proposal 2 helps to ensure that every eligible voter in Michigan will have their vote counted without intimidation, harassment or interference.”

Early voting also notched a win in Connecticut, which has some of the nation’s strictest rules for people who hope to vote before an Election Day; voters there adopted a constitutional amendment that authorizes the legislature to set up early voting. (It does not mandate this, unlike Michigan’s.)

At the local level, voters adopted a variety of innovations in campaign and voting procedures, with an eye to revitalizing democracy. Oakland, California passed a measure to revamp campaign finance and implement a democracy vouchers program in future local elections. It leads with 69 percent of the vote as of publication.

The program would provide each eligible voter with four $25 vouchers to donate to the candidate of their choice for upcoming city and school board elections, Bolts reported in July. Proponents of Measure W, modeled after a similar one that passed in Seattle in 2017, hope to draw more residents into the electoral process as small donors and candidates, while also increasing transparency in campaign finance. Since Seattle implemented its program, it has seen a 350 percent increase in the number of donors per race, and the pool of candidates in local races has diversified.

Other provisions in Measure W would lower the cap on campaign contributions for city races to $600, and require campaign ads to list their top three contributors. Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, which supported the measure, says democratizing campaign funding is a means of democratizing the governing process.

“We have hyper concentrated political giving in the hands of a tiny and totally non-representative slice of Oakland,” Stein told Bolts. “The majority of Oakland, which is working class and communities of color, has virtually no political giving power—and that changes who can run for and win, and it changes what ideas are taken seriously.”

Oakland also appeared poised to adopt a separate initiative to enable noncitizen residents who have children in city schools to vote in school board races. Noncitizen voting, which has long existed in some localities around the country, has spread over the past year, including to some municipalities in Vermont. But voters in Oregon’s Multnomah County turned down a measure on the issue on Tuesday, and Ohio voters adopted a constitutional amendment to ban noncitizen voting in local and state elections. 

In San Francisco, California, and Boulder, Colorado, voters approved proposals to move city elections from odd-numbered to even-numbered years so that they coincide with federal and statewide elections, which will boost turnout.

And at least six jurisdictions nationwide voted to institute new ranked-choice voting systems. Proponents of the procedure, which asks people to rank candidates by order of preference rather than just opt for one, say it helps better reflect voters’ preferences.

Ranked-choice measures appear to have passed in Ojaj, California; Fort Collins, Colorado; Evanston, Illinois; Portland, Maine; Portland, Oregon; and Multnomah County, Oregon (which includes Portland). In Washington State, Clark and San Juan counties rejected ranked-choice voting, and the fate of a similar measure in Seattle was inconclusive as of publication.

But all eyes were in Nevada, a critical swing state voting on whether to adopt ranked-choice voting for state and congressional races; Alaska and Maine are the only states that already do this. Ballot Question 3 leads by 3 percentage points as of publication, with remaining ballots likely to lean in its favor. (Update: The Nevada Independent called the referendum in favor of Question 3 on Nov. 11.)

Before ranked-choice voting comes to Nevada, though, voters would need to approve it a second time in 2024 due to the state’s multi-year process for adopting constitutional amendments.

As Bolts reported in September, establishment politicians from both parties criticized the measure as too complicated and confusing for voters. But proponents of Question 3, which would also get rid of the state’s closed primaries, saw it as shifting power away from big-party politics and back to voters in a state where the largest plurality of voters are either nonpartisan or members of a minority party. 

According to FairVote, a national organization that supports ranked-choice voting, Tuesday’s results mean that there are now 61 jurisdictions that will use ranked-choice voting in their elections. Critical elections, including a U.S. Senate race in Alaska, a U.S. House race in Maine, and the DA race in San Francisco, are set to be resoled by ranked-choice voting in coming weeks.

The energy around these democracy measures come at the same time that voting rights have come under attack. 

Michigan’s ballot proposal was written to include defensive measures against the attacks on election systems that emerged from the Trumpian lie that the 2020 election results in Michigan were invalid. Conspiracies about widespread fraud resulted in at least one county canvasser board resisting certifying election results, outside groups calling for an independent audit of statewide results, and Republican legislators introducing a slate of bills that hemmed in people’s ability to access the ballot. 

The drafters of Proposal 2 countered each of these attempts with a specific reform. A 2021 petition to conduct an independently-funded “forensic audit” of 2020 election results, for example, was met with a provision in the ballot measure establishing that only election officials can conduct audits.  

Also on Tuesday, Michigan Democrats gained control of the state government for the first time in nearly 40 years by flipping the state legislature, and they also maintained control of the governorship and state Supreme Court, which may aid the measure’s implementation given Democrats’ broader support for these reforms.

And a candidate who was running to take over election administration in Michigan on a platform of similar conspiracies handily lost on Tuesday in the secretary of state race. (Many other election deniers fared very poorly around the country.)

The fate of some ballot measures remained uncertain as of Thursday. In Arizona, measures to tighten voter ID requirements or make it harder to pass future initiatives were unresolved as of publication, with hundreds of thousands of ballots left to process.

The article has been updated on Nov. 11 with more information about elections in Nevada and San Francisco.

The post The Ballot Measures That Revamped Voting on Tuesday appeared first on Bolts.

Palin’s reaction mirrors the worry, shared by both parties’ establishments, that ranked choice voting is making election outcomes more unpredictable at a time when high-profile races are more foreseeable than ever based on partisanship.

Now ranked choice voting is up for voter approval in Nevada, one of the nation’s most competitive states.

Question 3, which would amend the Nevada Constitution to implement a system similar to Alaska’s ranked choice voting, faces a bipartisan chorus of high-profile critics in the state, from the GOP chair to the state’s Democratic governor and both Democratic U.S. senators. 

Like in Alaska, the amendment would set up a two-round system. First, it would make all candidates for congressional, gubernatorial, state executive and legislative contests run in a single primary open to all voters. The top five vote getters would then advance to the general election, where a second change would take effect: ranked choice voting, where voters can rank all five candidates on the ballot. 

Despite attempts by critics to disqualify the initiative, the Nevada Supreme Court in June ruled 4-3 to let the proposed changes, known collectively as Final-Five Voting, onto the November ballot. The issue will now go before the one group that appears most excited about the reform: the public. A poll from August showed that Nevada voters support Question 3 by a 15-point margin (though nearly a third of voters say they neither support nor oppose the idea). Because the measure requires an amendment to the state constitution, it must pass this November and then again in 2024. If it passes both elections, Final-Five Voting would take effect in the 2026 election cycle.

Even small changes could tilt the balance of power in Nevada, a Democratic-controlled battleground state that was led by a Republican governor, legislature, and U.S. Senator as recently as 2016. However, neither the political dynamics nor the arguments against ranked choice voting are unique to Nevada. 

Whether it’s Democrats or Republicans, the political establishment often fights RCV, and they tend to offer the same justifications: it’s confusing, potentially discriminatory, and, especially after Alaska’s recent experience with ranked choice voting, unfair. 

These criticisms are especially pressing as RCV grows. In 2010, only eight major cities used ranked choice. As of July 2022, it’s used in two states, one county, and 53 cities, which are home to over 11 million voters, according to FairVote, a nonprofit advocating for RCV nationwide.  

This November, nine other jurisdictions have an RCV initiative on the ballot. Nevada is the only one that includes open primaries as well, but two others—Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine—would implement RCV on top of proportional representation, which is a “silver bullet toward gerrymandering,” says Deb Otis, director of research at FairVote, which advocates for ranked choice voting. 

Proponents of Final-Five Voting in Nevada argue that open primaries and RCV are particularly well suited for the state’s political landscape. About 37 percent of voters are registered with a minor party or as nonpartisan, which is greater than both registered Democrats (33 percent) and Republicans (30 percent). Meanwhile, the state has been so gerrymandered that about half  of state legislative primaries were uncontested this year.

And where there have been competitive races, the winner often earns less than the majority. Steve Sisolak won the governorship in 2018 with 49.4 percent of the vote, and Catherine Cortez Masto won her U.S. Senate seat in 2016 with 47.1 percent.

Ranked choice voting would ensure that the winner has majority support. If no candidate earns more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, the bottom vote getter is eliminated, and their second-choice votes are redistributed to the other candidates. That process continues until someone takes the majority. 

“RCV rewards both deep support as evidenced by a high number of first rankings, and broad support, as evidenced by many backup rankings,” writes Steven Hill, co-founder of FairVote.

Critics like Sisolak argue that the ranking process is confusing for voters, especially voters of color, although at least one study suggests little difference in how racial and ethnic groups understand the process. Otis argues that RCV can prevent the kind of vote dilution that can obstruct candidates of color. She points to the recent Democratic congressional primary in Detroit, which is 80 percent Black. There were nine candidates running, and after voters split their votes between multiple Black contenders, a non-Black candidate won with around 28 percent of the vote. Now, Detroit will likely not have Black representation in Congress for the first time since the early 1950s.

“Once they get to know the candidate field, people tend to know, ‘Oh, I like these three,’ ‘I’d be ok with these three,’ and ‘I really don’t want these three,’” she says. “But we’re locked into a ballot style where we cannot express that.” 

In terms of difficulty, voters also reported few problems in the most recent high-profile ranked choice voting election, the Alaska special election triggered by the death of U.S. Representative Don Young. Ninety-five percent of voters surveyed by Alaskans for Better Elections said that they’d received instructions on how to rank their choices before filling out their ballots. Only 6 percent said that the system was “very difficult” to use. Eighty-five percent said it was “somewhat” or “very” simple. 

After nearly 50 candidates ran in the election’s first stage in June, four moved to the August runoff to be decided by ranked choice voting. One dropped out, leaving in Peltola the Democrat and two Republicans: Palin and Nick Begich. 

In the first round of the ranked choice voting, Peltola received about 40 percent of the vote; the two Republicans combined for about 60 percent, with Palin coming in second. When Begich’s voters were transferred to other candidates, though, Peltola clinched a win over Palin, 51 to 49 percent.

To Palin, this was evidence that something went awry: The victory of a Democrat, Palin says, has “disenfranchised” the 60 percent of first-round voters who opted for a Republican. 

But voters select candidates, not parties. Just half of Begich voters chose Palin as their second choice, and nearly 30 percent flipped and went to Peltola.

When unpopular candidates with a ceiling to their support like Palin prevail in a primary, they often lose a lot of voters their party would otherwise expect to win in a general election, which leads to upsets. The Begich voters who voted for Peltola may fall in that familiar category. 

But the remaining 21 percent didn’t rank anyone else, meaning their ballot was “exhausted” in the final round of the election between Palin and Peltola, and played no role. Critics of ranked-choice voting generally fault the system for producing too many of these “exhausted” ballots, leaving some unable to influence the decisive round. 

David O’Brien, policy counsel for RepresentUs, says choosing how many people to rank is part of what people get to decide. “We shouldn’t assume people don’t rank every candidate because they’re confused or don’t understand the process,” he says. “If voters don’t choose to rank every candidate, that’s their choice.”

Still, about eight percent of all voters who participated in Alaska’s August primaries did not have a preference registered in the final round that settled the House winner. That’s an unusually high rate for a high-profile election. In the past two cycles in November 2018, and 2020, no more than 2.5 percent of Alaskans who went to the polls skipped voting in the U.S. House general election. Now, Peltola, Begich, and Palin are all running again in a regularly-scheduled election in November, and Republicans think they can do better with fewer “exhausted” ballots. They are urging voters to “rank the red” to ensure that either Palin or Begich wins.

If Nevada switches to a similar system, it may shuffle the partisan calculations of the state’s usually-tight general elections. 

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, says Katherine Gehl, who founded The Institute for Political Innovation, which has led the campaign for Final-Five Voting in Nevada this year. 

She argues that, because the status quo guarantees the dominance of both major political parties, especially in gerrymandered districts without competitive primaries, politicians have little incentive to deliver results for voters. In that sense, Final Five is as much about changing the behavior or lawmakers as it about voters. “The threat of new competition in any industry, that really drives progress,” she says.  

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