The timing of both elections are major surprises. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called them in late May, while French President Emmanuel Macron shocked his country on June 9 by announcing that he was dissolving the National Assembly and organizing elections within a month.

Each election will decide who governs the country, using rules that often differ from U.S. norms. The modes of government vary, of course, but so do policies, gerrymandering, voter registration, voting in or after prison, voter ID, tabulations, and much more. 

At Bolts, we’re always interested in varying models of democracy, and what lessons they teach us. And we suspected that our readers have many questions as well. 

As part of our ongoing “Ask Bolts” series, we asked you to let us know what you’re thinking—and you delivered. We narrowed down your questions (with great difficulty) and had fun answering them below.  

We’ve organized your questions under five themes—explore at your leisure:

Why is this happening right now?

How do these parliamentary elections even work?

So, how do you vote?

How are districts drawn?

Who can vote?

Read on to learn how people vote in France and the U.K., why snap elections are a thing, what constraints exist on gerrymandering, and much more. 

Why is this happening right now?

Why are they allowed to decide when to hold elections? That seems kind of undemocratic to me, to call an election whenever the political tide favors them. What sort of balance is there in the system to prevent one party from running up the numbers for decades? — @aurorasintexas, on X

Snap elections are indeed unusual by U.S. standards: Current U.S. law dictates that federal elections be held in early November every two years—rain or shine. State governments tend to have similarly rigid calendars. 

In France, by contrast, the president has unchecked power to dissolve the National Assembly and order parliamentary elections; the only constraint is that it can’t be done again for a year. But this move is always a personal gamble: When presidents lose parliamentary elections, they appoint a prime minister from within the coalition that controls the Assembly; in such a configuration, presidents are largely reduced to a figurehead when it comes to domestic affairs. That’s what happened in 1997, the last time a president called snap elections: Conservative President Jacques Chirac thought his camp would emerge victorious, but there was instead an upset by the left. 

And now it’s happening to Macron, who called elections three years before they were scheduled. His party held a plurality in the outgoing Assembly but now appears on track to lose at least half of its seats later this week. 

In the U.K., snap elections are even more routine. It’s always the prime minister’s prerogative to decide when exactly to schedule the next national elections, though they must be within five years of the last ones. Unlike in France, there isn’t even a default date for the next election.

This system has faced plenty of criticism that it gives the ruling party an unfair advantage, and the U.K. actually experimented with reform in recent years: A 2011 law significantly constrained the PM’s prerogative, setting a default term of five years and requiring that the House of Commons approve earlier elections. “For the first time in our history the timing of general elections will not be a plaything of governments,” said one of the reform’s champions at the time. But subsequent PMs still managed to convince Parliament to schedule unexpected snap elections to take advantage of favorable polling, and the reform was repealed in 2022. 

But let’s return to the U.S.: Manipulating the timing of elections isn’t exactly rare here either.

State and local officials sometimes schedule ballot measures on dates they think will be most favorable to their goals. In 2018, for instance, Missouri Republicans controversially rescheduled a labor initiative from the November general election to the lower-turnout summer primary, expecting that this would yield better outcomes for them; last year, the Oklahoma governor scheduled a popular initiative to legalize marijuana on a standalone winter date, a choice denounced by state groups as a maneuver to depress turnout. 

How do these parliamentary elections even work?

Can you explain the runoff process in France? How is it determined which candidates make the runoff, e.g. how can three candidates qualify? — B., from New York | I see that France and the U.K. both elect representatives by district. Does that look the same as in the U.S.? — Anonymous

Just like in the U.S., France and the U.K. are carved up into districts, and each district elects one member of Parliament. (That’s what’s happening this week.) Unlike in the U.S., neither country has intraparty primaries; party leaders designate their nominees, rather than leave that decision to a popular vote. 

Otherwise, the rules of U.K. elections should be familiar to Americans: Each district holds a first-past-the-post election to select its MP, much like what’ll happen in the U.S. in November. In each district, the candidate with the most votes wins the seat, whatever their share of the vote. 

France holds its parliamentary elections over two rounds, though. In the first round, voters get to choose between all candidates who filed to run. If a candidate tops 50 percent, they win outright. Otherwise, a runoff is held a week later, and whomever gets the most votes in the runoff wins.

But who exactly makes these runoffs? Here’s where things get tricky: Runoffs in France’s parliamentary elections can have more than two candidates. 

The top two candidates always advance, plus any candidate who gets the support of more than 12.5 percent of the district’s registered voters. When turnout is low, it’s a lot harder to cross that threshold; candidates need a prohibitively high share of the actual votes cast. But when turnout is high, as it is this year, third-placed candidates routinely make it through. 

In France’s 2022 elections, turnout was just 48 percent; as a result, just eight out of 577 districts saw three-way runoffs. But turnout last Sunday surged to 67 percent. As a result, 311 districts saw three candidates advance; a handful of districts even had four candidates make the runoffs.

This set up a mad scramble. There are many French districts in which the far-right party, the Rassemblement National, likely cannot top 50 percent of the vote in two-candidate runoffs; but it has a much stronger shot in three-way battles where it only needs a plurality. In an effort to block the far-right and not split the vote, over 200 candidates dropped out in the days after the first round; as of publication, only 91 districts are still set for a runoff of more than two candidates.

Do these countries end up electing leaders who are more representative? — Bolts Lovers, in Virginia | Does the two round system work to improve representation? Why does France use it instead of instant runoffs/the single transferable vote? — Sefine 

In fact, France came close to having a system that looks a lot more like the U.K.’s: One of the main drafters of the 1958 constitution admired the British first-past-the-post system, but was overruled by President Charles de Gaulle, who saw the runoff system as likelier to produce stable majorities, according to Georges Bergougnous, a professor at the Sorbonne University. 

Neither the French nor British system is ultimately conducive to a parliamentary landscape where smaller political forces are well represented. The U.K.’s first-past-the-post system creates the same sort of pressure for voters to opt for the dominant parties as in U.S. general elections. In France, with each district electing one member and a two-round system that usually requires candidates to get a majority, it boxes out many parties unless they ally with larger forces.

Both countries have seen insistent calls by smaller parties and some election reformers to select at least part of Parliament through a method of proportional representation, but these proposals have not come through. (France briefly switched to a proportional system from 1986 to 1988.) 

Both countries’ parliaments also skew male and white, and people with immigrant backgrounds are underrepresented. 

France does have a law requiring that parties nominate an equal number of men and women, or else face fines. Since the law was adopted by the left in 2000, the share of women in the National Assembly has soared from 11 percent to 37 percent in 2022, but some parties don’t respect the requirement. (France imposes stricter gender parity in other elections.) In the U.K, which has no such requirement, women make up a third of the outgoing House of Commons. Women in the U.S. won 29 percent of House seats in 2022, which was a record-high for the country. 

So, how do you vote?

A family friend from France was visiting and told us that, instead of absentee ballots, you deputize another person who fills out a ballot for you on Election Day. How many people do that? — @rvarco, on X

Neither France nor the U.K. has any in-person early voting. Polls are open on Election Day. In France, that’s always on a Sunday; in the U.K., it’s always been on a Thursday since the 1930s. 

So what do you do if you can’t make it to the polls on that one day? As the question indicates, France has no mail-in voting. The U.K. does, though: Voters there can cast postal ballots.

Plus, both France and the U.K. have a system of proxy voting: People can deputize their right to vote to someone else by filing an application, which in both countries can be done online. On Election Day, this person then has the ability to go to your polling place and cast a ballot in your name—in addition to the ballot they’ll cast in their own name. There’s no way to control what the person you deputized does: You’ll have to find someone you trust will respect your wishes.

To your final question, the number of people who deputized their right to vote surged in France, in part due to the fact that Macron timed these snap elections for the early summer. More than 2 million voters signed up for proxy voting, which is more than double the 2022 elections.

I believe that, as reported, voter fraud was not a problem that needed solving in the U.K.. But why was voter fraud not more common before voter ID was required? — Paula 

The U.K.’s Conservative government recently adopted new requirements for people to show photo ID to vote. It was implemented for the first time in local elections last year, and will be used again in the national elections this week. We posed your question to Jessica Garland, director of research and policy at the U.K.-based Electoral Reform Society and a critic of this new requirement.

This is a “solution looking for a problem,” she answered. “Prior to the introduction of voter ID there were very low levels of recorded personation fraud in Britain,” she said, pointing to the country’s 2019 national and local elections: “Out of all alleged cases of electoral fraud that year, only 33 related to personation fraud at the polling station—this comprises 0.000057% of the over 58 million votes cast in all the elections that took place that year.” 

Compare those tiny numbers to the disruptions caused by the new law: Thousands of British people were turned away from the polls in 2023 due to the requirement, and thousands more did not attempt to vote as a result, according to the nation’s Electoral Commission. 

Said Garland, “Since its introduction, voter ID has prevented thousands more people from voting than have ever been accused of personation fraud.” This is a familiar phenomenon in the United States. Under the guise of cracking down on fraud, which is tremendously rare, conservative laws have deterred large numbers of eligible Americans from voting.

Do [France and the U.K.] have voter registration? Can you register between the 1st and 2nd rounds in France? — @m_schettig, on X

In both countries, it’s up to residents to proactively register to vote and update their registration as they move (either online, or at a government agency). And they must register weeks before election day. In France this year, because Macron organized snap elections within three weeks—an exceptionally rapid campaign—the deadline came within a day of his announcement, leaving people virtually no time to check their status and get on voter rolls amid widespread confusion.  

Reformers warn that millions of people are falling through the cracks of this system in both the U.K. and France. Many aren’t registered to vote or are registered at the wrong address. 

“This process for registration is proving to be an obstacle to universal suffrage,” Garland told Bolts about the U.K., where she works. “The groups most likely to be missing from the electoral registers are those who rent their homes (only 65 percent of private renters are registered compared to 95 percent of those who own their homes) and young people.” 

Garland wants the U.K. to adopt automatic voter registration, a model that exists in other European countries and many U.S. states. (French people are automatically registered at age 18, provided they abided by the mandatory census at age 16; but there is no update after they inevitably move.)

The idea is for public agencies to use information they already have to proactively register people to vote; this increases the registration rates among groups that are less likely to be engaged in the electoral process. (In the U.S., many states automatically register people through the DMV; some states are trying to register people when they interact with Medicaid services or when they are released from prison.)

The Labour Party has said it’ll introduce automatic voter registration in the U.K. if it wins Thursday’s elections. 

How are districts drawn?

In the U.K. and France, what is the (re)districting process like? Is there a scheduled amount of time until new boundaries are drawn? How does it compare to the U.S., where redistricting is plagued with gerrymandering, protection of incumbents, and litigation? — Tommy, in Pennsylvania

Let’s tackle them one by one. In the U.K., these districts are drawn by so-called boundary commissions. There’s a separate commission for each of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Since a reform adopted in 2020, boundaries are meant to be reviewed every eight years.

These bodies are mostly independent. “The scope for electoral gerrymandering, U.S.-style, is vanishingly small,” The Guardian quipped in 2023, the last time the map was redrawn. Garland agrees: “Changes must include public consultation and be agreed by parliament, and boundary decisions must be made according to principles that are set out in law,” she told Bolts. “This process and the commissions are generally viewed as non-partisan, and the commissioners are not under direct ministerial control.”

France mostly ignores redistricting. The country last redrew its boundaries in 2010; despite extensive demographic change, the rounds of redistricting before that were in 1986 and 1958.

It’s effectively up to the ruling Cabinet to decide if the time has come. At that point, the process is led by the Minister of the Interior in consultation with local leaders and political parties.

On paper, this could be a recipe for gerrymandering gone wild since the entire nation’s map is overseen by one partisan actor. But that doesn’t tend to be the case, according to Thomas Ehrhard, a professor of political science at the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas who has written a book on redistricting in France. He told Bolts that redistricting in the past has produced maps that were meant to protect incumbents, but that they were not distorted by partisanship. 

One reason for this is that districts must respect other administrative boundaries; this “prevents monstrous forms of gerrymandering,” Ehrhard said. For instance, districts can’t overlap between different départments (the rough equivalent of a U.S. county), many of which are quite small; this greatly constrains what can be done with them. Districts “have fairly homogeneous territorial cohesion that respects the socio-economic realities of small geographical areas,” Ehrhard says. 

Each of the last two rounds of redistricting was overseen by the ruling conservative party, Ehrhard points out. Each time, the center-left won the first elections held under the new maps. 

How does the malapportionment of representatives compare between the U.S., the U.K. and France? — @USHouseEquality, on X

The fact that France redistricts so rarely means that it addresses demographic shifts very slowly, and population disparities between districts can snowball. 

And even when the country adopts a new map, districts may already be drawn with uneven sizes. Each district can deviate by up to 20 percent from its county’s average district population. That’s a large allowance compared to the U.S., where all districts within a state must be as equal as possible. 

Right before the 2010 redistricting, there was a 7 to 1 disparity between the populations of the smallest and largest district in mainland France. (Districts in some of France’s overseas regions tend to be smaller.) As of 2022, the disparity was 3 to 1, according to an analysis by Le Monde that shows large variance across the country. 

On paper, the U.K. is much stricter: The country only allows for a variation of 5 percent.

But there’s another major source of disparity there: The size of districts is assessed based only on the number of people who are registered to vote, not based on an area’s total population. This dilutes representation for areas that have a greater number of residents who are ineligible to vote, or who simply are less likely to be on voter rolls. 

“Practically, it means the [Members of Parliament] representing young and diverse inner-city seats have to serve much larger populations of constituents than MPs representing older, rural seats with high registration rates,” Robert Ford, a professor of political science at Manchester University, told The Guardian. An analysis released last year by pollster Peter Kellener confirmed that this significantly distorts the political map; districts held by Labour are on average more populous than districts held by the Tories. 

Who can vote?

Can voting rights be removed from citizens in France and the U.K., such as if they receive a felony conviction? — Madison, from New York

France mostly does not strip people of the right to vote when they’re convicted of a crime—including while they’re incarcerated.

It largely enables people to vote even from prison, as Cole Stangler reported in Bolts during the country’s 2022 presidential election. “Today, only a small minority of the country’s prisoners are stripped of their voting rights—political officials who have misused their power and convicted terrorists,” Stangler wrote at the time. This is a far cry from the U.S., where only Maine, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., have no restrictions on people voting from prison.

France has also taken proactive steps in recent years to help incarcerated people actually exercise this right. Turnout among people from prison surged nearly 13-fold between 2017 and 2022.

The U.K. disenfranchises people convicted of a crime while they’re in prison. The European Court of Human Rights repeatedly said that this ban violates human rights, rulings that triggered some debate in the country but ultimately led to only minor changes. 

But the U.K. allows its citizens to vote when they’re released from prison.

That, too, is a far cry from vast swaths of the United States; in roughly half of the states, people with felony convictions are barred from voting long after they’ve been released; sometimes they have to pay hefty fees to regain their voting rights. Neither France nor the U.K. does anything resembling the practice of some U.S. states like Mississippi and Virginia, which strip people of their right to vote for life over most or all felony convictions. 

I’m a British citizen living abroad. I still can vote and I have applied for a postal vote in the last constituency in which I lived in the U.K.. Do French citizens living outside of France have voting rights, and if so, where do their votes get counted? — Ray 

The two countries approach representation for citizens who live overseas very differently. 

U.K. citizens vote in the district where they used to live. (This means that they cannot vote in parliamentary elections if they’ve never lived in the country in the past.) In practice, this means they have to cast a mail ballot or deputize a proxy to vote for them. 

France, by contrast, has seats just for its citizens who live outside of France: The entire globe is carved up into 11 districts, and each of these districts elects an Assemblymember through the same exact procedure as any other seat. (There are calls in the U.K. to set up similar districts.) French citizens who live abroad can vote at polling centers set up by their consulate on election day, or they can vote online—an option that does not exist in mainland France. 

For instance, all of the United States makes up one French district alongside Canada. In the district’s first round this past Sunday, a candidate from Macron’s party and a candidate from the Left coalition advanced to a runoff.

The post How Voting Works in the U.K. and France: Your Questions Answered 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.

But even with all these hurdles, a cadre of advocates, nonprofits, churches, and community-minded elected officials have shown up year after year for decades, working hard to protect the right to participate in democracy—especially for Black and other minority voters, who are often the most affected by voting restrictions. 

“We have organizations across the state that are part of the Civic Engagement Roundtable that’s organized by One Voice,” said Representative Zakiya Summers, a Democrat in the state house, referencing a Jackson nonprofit focused on policy advocacy. “These organizations are on conference calls every month. They have created voting rights guides and information that partner organizations can distribute in their community to get people educated and engaged.”

In the lead-up to this year’s primary elections in August, these advocates were gearing up to contend with the latest obstacle that Mississippi’s Republican-controlled legislature had thrown their way: Senate Bill 2358. The bill, which passed in the spring and went into effect on July 1, prohibits anyone from assisting another voter in handling and returning a mail-in ballot unless they are an immediate family or household member, a caregiver, or authorized election worker or mail carrier. Anyone caught violating the law could face up to a year in county jail and a fine of up to $3000.

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves praised the bill when he signed it into law, saying that it would protect against “ballot harvesting,” or the practice of collecting ballots en masse, a fear that is central to the unfounded conspiracies about voter fraud that conservatives around the country latched onto since the 2020 election.

Despite a lack of evidence of widespread ballot harvesting or other fraud in Mississippi elections, the bill has threatened to limit the number of volunteers and advocates involved in get-out-the-vote efforts from sending or retrieving ballots on behalf of voters they don’t live with. More importantly, it could impede ballot access for people who count on this kind of assistance. 

“It just seemed like another barrier that would prevent people with disabilities from being able to vote autonomously,” says Jane Walton, the communications officer for Disability Rights Mississippi, which includes voting access among their advocacy work. “The bill in question dealt with whether or not someone can have a person assist them. Really, it’s an issue of whether a person with a disability has the autonomy to choose to vote in a way that is most accessible to them.”

Soon after it was passed, groups including Disability Rights Mississippi and Mississippi’s League of Women Voters sued the state in federal court to block the law, stating it “impermissibly restricts voters with disabilities from having a person of their choice assist them in submitting their completed mail-in absentee ballots.” On July 26, a federal judge sided with them and temporarily blocked the law, saying it disenfranchised voters with disabilities and violated the Voting Rights Act.

The decision blocked enactment of SB 2358 just in time for the Aug. 8 primary, and will also prevent it from taking effect ahead of the general election in November, when Mississippians will vote on nearly every major office, including governor and lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and representatives in both legislative chambers. Polling indicates that Republican incumbents who supported the bill—including the embattled Reeves, and Attorney General Lynn Fitch—are favored to win in this deep red state.

But no matter who people cast their vote for, advocates are more concerned about some residents being able to cast a vote at all. The suspension of SB 2358 offers some temporary relief, but these advocates fear that the threat of similar legislation still looms.

“For the past two years, we’ve been monitoring legislation that [has]pretty much been pushed by the Secretary of State every year to deal with ballot harvesting, Jarvis Dortch, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Mississippi, told Bolts. ”That makes it harder to return a ballot by absentee, especially individuals with disabilities.”

Before the passage of this bill, advocates already had their hands full navigating existing restrictions that make it harder for citizens to vote, and for Black candidates to win. 

The state requires eligible voters to register 30 days before elections, one of the earliest deadlines in the country. This means that often, advocates must find eligible voters early, and educate them on the importance of registering long before there’s any major discussion of elections in the media, because there’s no early voting or same-day registration options as a backup. And advocates must repeat this process every year thanks to Mississippi’s odd-year elections. 

But in order to even register, eligible voters must comply with a stringent voter ID law, passed in 2011 by way of a ballot initiative that established a strict list of acceptable forms of ID, including a birth certificate, firearms permit, driver’s license, college ID card, US passport, tribal ID, or Voter ID card. 

“Voter ID targeted vulnerable populations who may not have access to ID or may not have access to a birth certificate so they can get an ID. The law was written so strongly that the state was willing to provide a free Voter ID,” says Summers.

Voting absentee by mail is also an involved process in Mississippi. As opposed to the majority of states, which offer no-excuse absentee voting, mail ballots are only available to populations with qualifying characteristics, including those living out-of-state, students, people with disabilities, people over 65, and certain others. Absentee ballots must be postmarked by election day to be counted. 

“We make it harder than anyone else to get folks registered and make it hard for people to vote absentee,” said Dortch. We don’t provide early voting. Now, instead of making it easier for folks to vote, we’re trying to get people off the voting rolls… and make it harder for people to actually vote absentee. When we have one of the hardest processes to vote absentee in the country. It doesn’t make sense.” 

Mississippi has also had a longtime a lifelong ban on voting for people convicted of certain types of felonies, a policy which has disenfranchised nearly 130,000 Black voters, or 16 percent of the state’s adult Black population. It’s one of only three states, alongside Tennessee and Virginia, where anyone stripped of voting rights loses it for their whole life. They can only regain it if they receive an exceedingly rare pardon from the legislature or the governor.

A federal appeals court this summer struck down that system as unconstitutional, calling it a “cruel and unusual punishment,” and denouncing Mississippi as “an outlier among its sister states, bucking a clear and consistent trend in our Nation against permanent disenfranchisement.” The state appealed the decision in late August, and the rights of hundreds of thousands of Mississippians are still hanging in the balance.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given all these restrictions, Mississippi has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. In the 2022 midterms, Mississippi ranked eighth from last, with roughly 46 percent of voters showing up. And turnout for non-white voters was even lower.

Democrats and progressives have historically championed an increase in access to voting options in the state, and have in turn looked to Black and other disenfranchised voters for support in elections. This upcoming race is no exception. Democrat gubernatorial candidate Brandon Presley, for example, is betting on bases of support in majority-Black enclaves around the capital city of Jackson, as well as pockets of white and immigrant progressive and moderate voters scattered around the Mississippi Delta in his long-shot bid to oust Tate Reeves.

Ty Pinkins, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state, is a recent addition after previous candidate Shuwaski Young dropped out of the race for health reasons. While Pinkins has limited time to build name recognition before the contest, he’s hoping that a campaign message of easing the state’s restrictive voting laws will connect with voters.

“Making sure people can register to vote online makes sense, making sure that we have a way for people to do early voting—that makes sense, and not restricting access to the ballot for people with disabilities,” Pinkins told Mississippi Today. 

SB 2358 remains on hold until further hearings are held and a final decision is handed down. And while advocates, voters, and progressive candidates can continue to move as if the law had never been signed, the landscape for voting rights remains difficult in Mississippi. But advocates are quick to mention that they will continue to work to make progress. 

“We along with our partners and our co-counsel are absolutely prepared to do everything that we can to protect the rights of citizens with disabilities,” said Walton. “Whatever that road looks like going forward, we’re prepared to fight for accessibility in Mississippi’s voting system.”

Correction (Sept. 14): An earlier version of this post misspelled the name of the communications officer from Disability Rights Mississippi.

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.

The post Mississippi Organizers Navigate Difficult Voting Rights Terrain in Run Up to November appeared first on Bolts.

Each of the previous three states to consider voter-ID ballot measures—Missouri in 2016, and Arkansas and North Carolina in 2018—had approved them by at least 10 points each. In Arizona, a 2004 voter-ID measure that was less stringent than Proposition 309, had passed comfortably, too. At least on this issue, the concerns of organizations like the ACLU and the League of Women Voters kept being ignored.

But Arizonans on Nov. 8 bucked this history, despite Proposition 309’s huge fundraising advantage and the lack of organized opposition. They narrowly rejected the measure by about 18,000 votes, or 0.76 percent.

It was the first defeat in ten years for a ballot measure increasing voter ID mandates in the U.S., according to the National Conference of State Legislatures’ database. (Minnesotans rejected a voter ID measure by eight percentage points in 2012.)

Local advocates on both sides of the measure told Bolts that they were surprised by the outcome but explained it by naming several factors, starting with antipathy to Trumpism.

“Fundamentally, I just don’t think we can look at this one in a vacuum,” said Sarah Gonski, a Phoenix-based elections lawyer who has represented Democratic candidates in the state in recent cycles. 

The measure was placed on the ballot on a party-line vote by Arizona’s GOP-controlled legislature, which spent much of the past two years rehearsing the former president’s lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election. This inextricably linked it to controversial, top-of-the-ticket Arizona candidates who ran for office this year on election denialism, local politicos said. Proposition 309 appeared just down the ballot from far-right election deniers Kari Lake, who lost the governor’s race, Blake Masters, who lost the U.S. Senate race, and Mark Finchem, who lost the secretary of state’s race. 

“I think that rejecting this initiative, which is a policy proposal that gets a lot of support usually, is intimately tied up with rejection of the Big Lie narrative that has pervaded Arizona’s political environment for the last two years,” said Gonski.

Bie Lie figures have been wildly successful in radicalizing people who previously trusted standard elections procedures. But their efforts have also made the broader electorate pay far more attention to once-obscure matters of election administration. Secretary of state races this year drew record spending, especially on the Democratic side.

Advocates in Arizona say this new context prepared many to more carefully consider proposed changes to voting rules than they may have in the past.

“I think that the population is a lot more interested in what used to be pretty dry, bureautic understandings of the way ballots are processed and the way election security is run,” said Gonski, who is now a senior policy advisor at the Institute for Responsive Government. “They’re paying attention and they’re interested to know so much more about elections and the way they work, and that does a huge amount for people understanding how secure our elections actually are.”

J.D. Mesnard, the Republican state senator who authored Proposition 309, has defended his proposals in recent years by saying that lawmakers should address people’s concerns about fraud even if there is no underlying evidence for them. In an interview with Bolts, he echoed the analysis that Arizonans voted down his initiative as part of rejecting efforts to revisit the 2020 election. 

“To the extent that anybody sees bills focused on improving the integrity and security of our elections, and thinks the only reason you’re running them is because of the 2020 election, this all gets tangled up with people’s sentiments about President Trump and 2020,” he said. 

Mesnard added that his frustration is with Democrats, not Trump: “I’m not trying to place blame on him; don’t get me wrong,” he said. “The opposition did a relatively consistent job of saying this is all feeding into the quote-unquote Big Lie.”

Then there’s the fact that Proposition 309 was a notably harsh voter ID law. It was more restrictive than the measures passed in the last decade in Nebraska, Missouri and Oklahoma. And it zipped far beyond the voter ID law Arizona adopted in 2004.

The measure would have required anyone voting in person to use a photo ID: This would have eliminated voters’ current ability to present two documents as alternatives to a photo ID—say, a bank statement, lease agreement, or utility bill. 

It would also have made it harder for Arizonans to vote by mail, a widespread approach to voting there. Ballotpedia found at least 75 percent of the state’s voters cast ballots by mail in every general election between 2014 and 2020. Proposition 309 would have added more requirements for mail voters: They would have also had to fill out and enclose an affidavit including their driver’s license or ID card number, the last four digits of their Social Security number, or a unique registration number assigned to them by the state’s elections office.

The state has enabled voting by mail since the early 1990s. By 2007, when the legislature created a permanent early voting roll, “Arizona had so many people voting by mail that we literally couldn’t keep up with the applications,” Patrick said.

She added, “Arizonans have been doing this for a long time, and they love to do it, until and unless you have a presidential candidate, and then an incumbent president, suggesting voting by mail is fraudulent.”

Patrick, who now works as co-CEO of The Election Center, the national organization representing state and local elections officials, said Arizonans have had a long time to observe that stricter voter ID requirements don’t just ensnare fraudsters. Not everyone has an identification card, and some who do have ID that lacks a photo or an address.

“These are people saying, ‘I voted for that proposition in 2004, but I didn’t think it would affect me because it was just about fraud and it was just going to affect those other people,’” Patrick said. “Arizonans remember that, and they know that you can be a valid, eligible voter and not have an ID that is required under these specific types of laws.”

Native voters would have felt the brunt of the burdens proposed under Proposition 309, The Arizona Republic documented in October. Many tribes use identity cards that lack photos or home addresses, or otherwise don’t line up with state government standards.

“The reality for Native Americans who don’t have the same type of access to services whether it is the government, or any other things, this just needlessly complicates our ability to vote,” Kris Beecher, a lawyer in Arizona who is a member of the Navajo Nation, told The Republic. Nationwide analyses show that voter ID laws burden more people of color and reduce their participation.

That was of primary concern for groups that advocate for tribal communities, said Angela Willeford, intergovernmental relations project manager for the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community.

“We’re nonpartisan, but we said ‘vote no on 309’, and we never do that typically,” she told Bolts. 

Arizona Republicans likely won’t be able to pass new statutes restricting voting rights for at least the next four years; the governor’s office flipped blue last month for the first time since 2009, handing Democrat Katie Hobbs a veto pen. But the GOP still controls the legislature, and lawmakers could vote again to place a measure like Proposition 309 directly on the ballot, circumventing Hobbs. Mesnard told Bolts he isn’t sure it will. 

Since their defeat, Republicans like Lake and Finchem have fanned false conspiracies about the results and some lawmakers have signaled they will take up the issue.

But Patrick said state and local elections administrators in Arizona are doing more public education than ever around how elections are run, and said she’s heartened that journalistic outlets are dedicating more resources to the elections beat. 

“We used to lament about toiling away in obscurity,” the former Maricopa County official said.

Opponents of 309 prevailed narrowly, but in defeating the measure, Gonski believes, “The people of Arizona started to say that we’re not prepared to give up easier access to democracy in exchange for more heightened security checks on top of what we have. They started to say, enough.”

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