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      North Carolina Republicans’ Gerrymandered Map Could Flip at Least Three House Seats

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      The gerrymandered congressional map, made possible by a new G.O.P. majority on the state Supreme Court, ensures Republican dominance in a closely divided state.Republicans in North Carolina approved a heavily gerrymandered congressional map on Wednesday that is likely to knock out about half of the Democrats representing the state in the House of Representatives. It could result in as much as an 11-3 advantage for Republicans.The State House, controlled by a Republican supermajority, voted for the new lines a day after the State Senate approved them. Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, a Democrat, cannot veto redistricting legislation.The map creates 10 solidly Republican districts, three solidly Democratic districts and one competitive district. Currently, under the lines drawn by a court for the 2022 election, each party holds seven seats.The new lines ensure Republican dominance in a state that, while leaning red, is closely divided. President Donald J. Trump won it by just over a percentage point in 2020, and Republicans won the last two Senate elections by two and three points.The Democratic incumbents who have been essentially drawn off the map are Representatives Jeff Jackson in the Charlotte area, Kathy Manning in the Greensboro area and Wiley Nickel in the Raleigh area. A seat held by a fourth Democrat, Representative Don Davis, is expected to be competitive.“If either of these maps become final, it means I’m toast in Congress,” Mr. Jackson said in a video on X last week after the release of two draft maps, one of which became the final product. “This is the majority party in the state legislature in North Carolina basically saying, ‘We want another member of our party in Congress, so we’re going to redraw the map to take out Jeff.’”On Thursday, he announced that he would run for attorney general of North Carolina “to fight political corruption,” a label he applied to the gerrymandered maps.Mr. Nickel, who won a close race last year, was also defiant.“I don’t want to give these maps credibility by announcing a run in any of these gerrymandered districts,” he said on X. “The maps are an extreme partisan gerrymander by Republican legislators that totally screw North Carolina voters. It’s time to sue the bastards.”Ms. Manning did not announce specific plans but said she was “not willing to let these partisan maps take away my constituents’ right to representation.” She criticized Republicans for diluting voters in Guilford County, which includes Greensboro, by dividing them among three districts that also include distant parts of the state.Republicans openly acknowledged the advantage they were drawing for themselves. “There’s no doubt that the congressional map that’s before you today has a lean towards Republicans,” State Representative Destin Hall, the chairman of the redistricting committee, said on the floor, while adding that legislators had “complied with the law in every way.” (Mr. Hall did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)The new map and the events that led to it illustrate both the power of gerrymandering to render voters’ preferences electorally irrelevant, and the extent to which control of the House is being determined by courts’ interpretation of what lines are permissible.North Carolina has long been one of the most gerrymandered states in the country, as well as the subject of years of legal battles. Last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that a previous gerrymandered map was illegal, and court-drawn lines were used in the midterm elections, producing more competitive districts and, ultimately, an evenly divided congressional delegation.But something else also happened in the midterms: A Republican won a seat on the state Supreme Court, flipping it from a Democratic to a Republican majority. Though none of the facts had changed except the composition of the court, the justices promptly threw out the 2022 ruling, opening the door for Republican legislators to restore their party’s advantage.In several other states, the courts are also prevailing.In Wisconsin, where voters recently elected a liberal justice, the state Supreme Court is widely expected to rule against an existing Republican gerrymander. In Alabama, a court ordered a map this month that includes two districts, instead of one, where Black voters have or are close to a majority. That change, stemming from a United States Supreme Court decision earlier this year, will most likely result in one more Democratic representative.The same Supreme Court ruling could lead to a new majority-Black district in Louisiana, though that is tied up in another lawsuit. Separately, a contentious redistricting process is on the table in New York. More

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      Turnover of Election Officials in Swing States Adds Strain for 2024, Report Says

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      A tide of resignations and retirements by election officials in battleground states, who have increasingly faced threats, harassment and interference, could further strain the election system in 2024, a national voting rights group warned in a report released on Thursday.The group, the Voting Rights Lab, said that the departures of election officials in Arizona, Pennsylvania and other swing states had the potential to undermine the independence of those positions.The 28-page report reveals the scope of challenges to the election system and underscores the hostile climate facing election officials across the nation. Resignations have swept through election offices in Texas and Virginia, while Republicans in Wisconsin have voted to remove the state’s nonpartisan head of elections, sowing further distrust about voting integrity.In Pennsylvania, more than 50 top election officials at the county level have departed since the 2020 election, according to the report, which said that the loss of their expertise was particularly concerning.In Arizona, the top election officials in 13 of 15 counties left their posts during the same period, the report said. Some of the defections have taken place in counties where former President Donald J. Trump’s allies have sought to require the hand-counting of ballots and have spread misinformation about electronic voting equipment.“They are leaving primarily due to citing harassment and security concerns that are stemming from disproven conspiracy theories in the state,” said Liz Avore, a senior adviser for the Voting Rights Lab.The Justice Department has charged at least 14 people with trying to intimidate election officials since it created a task force in 2021 to focus on such threats, according to the agency. It has secured nine convictions, including two on Aug. 31 in Georgia and Arizona, both battleground states.“A functioning democracy requires that the public servants who administer our elections are able to do their jobs without fearing for their lives,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement at the time.Along with the departures, the Voting Rights Lab report examined a series of issues that it said could create obstacles for the 2024 election, including the approval of new rules in Georgia and North Carolina since 2020 that are likely to increase the number of voter eligibility challenges and stiffen identification requirements.In another area of concern for the group, it drew attention to the expiration of emergency rules for absentee voting in New Hampshire that were enacted during the pandemic.At the same time, some other battleground states have expanded voting access. Michigan will offer at least nine days of early voting in 2024, accept more forms of identification and allow voters to opt in to a permanent mail voting list, while Nevada made permanent the distribution of mail ballots to all voters, the report said. More

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      Six injured after man drives vehicle into migrant workers in North Carolina

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      A man drove a sport-utility vehicle into six people in North Carolina who were described as migrant workers in what “appears to be an intentional assault”, police have said.Investigators in Lincolnton – about 35 miles north-west of Charlotte – are hunting the driver of the car, who fled the scene. All six victims were taken to hospital after the apparent attack, which unfolded on Sunday afternoon.Police made it a point on Sunday to say the motive for the reported assault remained under investigation.Nonetheless, it came at a time of intense political rhetoric related to immigrants and immigrant workers. A hardline stance on immigration has become essential among Republican candidates for president, and 2024 White House hopefuls – including Donald Trump – repeatedly rail against migrants in campaign speeches.In a statement, Lincolnton police department said six people were struck by a car at about 1.17pm local time Sunday.“All six were transported to Atrium Health – Lincoln with various injuries,” police said. “None of the injuries appear to be life-threatening.”The statement appealed for the public to help track down the driver and the car.“The vehicle is an older model mid-size black [SUV] with a luggage rack,” police said. “The driver was described as an older white male.”In May, a man was charged with manslaughter after plowing into a crowd outside a migrant center in Brownsville, Texas, a community on the border with Mexico.Witnesses reported that the driver in the Texas case shouted anti-immigration sentiments, including that immigrants were invading the US.“He said, ‘Damn your mother, immigrants’,” Freddy Granadillo, who migrated to Texas from Venezuela, told the Guardian.“Leave my country,” he recalled the driver saying. More

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      The housing community that will require ‘patriots’ to fly the US flag

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      The 17 June groundbreaking of a future suburban neighborhood in Gastonia, North Carolina, had all the trappings of a campaign rally. Brock Fankhauser, the real estate developer of 1776 Gastonia, waved to onlookers from the open top of a sport-utility vehicle; his wife, Nicole, was by his side, wearing a cowboy hat and matching T-shirt with the development’s namesake year, referring to the American Revolution.Video footage of the event shows a crane dangling a giant US flag over the site where 43 lots are for sale. Parcels range from $17,500 to $75,000 for land, and homes cost $410,000 and up in this city 20 miles from Charlotte. A young girl rode a horse down a newly paved street flanked by American flags. She gripped the saddle with one hand; in the other, a giant flag. Her sandy blonde hair flowed in rhythm with the Stars and Stripes.There will be even more flags. This development, which the company has described as “where freedom lives”, is for homeowners 55 and older. And not just any homeowners: “patriots” who will be required to fly the US flag on their properties, on a pole provided and maintained by the subdivision. Each 1776 community (Fankhauser plans on more) will also donate a home with no mortgage, free of cost, to a wounded veteran through the nonprofit Building Homes for Heroes.With ambiguous ideals and an insistence on a disinterest in politics, the 1776 brand builds off the contentious history of the US flag. Historically, the flag has been a symbol of protest, pride and polarization. When Donald Trump kissed and caressed the American flag after a 2020 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he mouthed the words: “I love you, baby.” The gesture landed favorably with his conservative base.When asked how this community will define patriotism, Fankhauser responded obliquely that patriotism is a mountain landscape. “We’re in a valley right now, and to the extent that I can have any impact whatsoever on bringing us from a valley towards a peak, it would give me tremendous satisfaction,” he said via phone.As for how he plans to identify potential homeowner-patriots for the 1776 community, Fankhauser said: “There is no screening process that’s different than how one would buy a home in any other neighborhood. We’re only as strong as the pledges that individual homeowners make to one another.”Fankhauser began his career at his father’s real estate company. He now specializes in low-maintenance housing for seniors, a fast-growing segment of real estate. According to Plante Moran Living Forward, an accounting firm specializing in advising senior living, projections show that age-related units will increase at a 4.7% annual growth rate, doubling senior housing demand from 2020 to 2040.Some of that boom has expanded to include “active adult communities” or others with on-site health care. 1776 Gastonia is part of an even newer type of neighborhood: one where community members presumably share ideals or interests. There are even themed subdivisions like Latitude Margaritaville in Florida and South Carolina for Jimmy Buffet fans.Fankhauser says the 1776 brand is a “movement” and the Gastonia project is “only the beginning”.“We think that commonality and unification is a critical element in patriotism because it brings us to the broadest denominator of being in America,” Fankhauser told the Guardian. “We will shun any attempts to make this a political movement.” (Fankhauser donated to the Republican party and Donald Trump in 2020 and had previously donated to Republicans in 2003, according to Federal Election Commission records).Still, he’s got the practiced manner of a politician whose conversations swell with lofty, vague talk about American values. It’s the kind of nationalist rhetoric common to movers and shakers across the political spectrum. It’s also the kind of discourse that can be weaponized – metaphorically and literally: The real estate company’s staff show off star-spangled handguns on Instagram, a gift from fans.In the launch event’s recap video on the company’s YouTube channel, men in kilts play bagpipes, and bikers slowly cruise a parade route. Fankhauser delivered a speech that becomes a voiceover to the tune of the national anthem. His remarks end with this signoff: “God bless this community, and God bless this great nation.”Fankhauser’s nonspecific brand leans into what American studies professor Ben Railton refers to as mythic patriotism, which “creates and celebrates a mythologized, white supremacist vision of American history and identity”. Railton, author of Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism, argues that such thinking led to the January 6 insurrection and the Trump-initiated 1776 Commission that targeted professors and other educators.Railton said this ideology “very often has meant agreeing with that white-centered vision”. And “a lot of the time, that also defines someone who doesn’t agree with that vision, who is entirely outside of it and not a part of it. When I was looking at the [1776 Gastonia] website, it’s this undercurrent of, if one doesn’t share this perspective, then there’s not a place for you here.”Real estate lawyer Harmony Taylor, who is based in nearby Charlotte, agreed that “this appears to be a pretty overt political agenda”. Taylor first learned about the community through an op-ed in the Charlotte Observer.“In the United States in 2023, unfortunately, the flying of a flag or the mandating of an exhibition of patriotism in some way seems to have become aligned with a particular [far-right] political movement. And I don’t think that can be ignored,” she said.But is requiring the flag even legal?1776 Gastonia will use a restrictive covenant that includes the flag stipulation. Restrictive covenants, a norm in residential real estate, allow homeowners associations to enforce rules and consistency in planned communities. Fankhauser defines them as a “pledge of allegiance” to the United States and “promises” among neighbors. He doesn’t anticipate that enforcing the flag provision will be an issue and has not included repercussions in the covenant if anyone refuses to fly the flag. The Guardian obtained the 1776 Gastonia covenant via email, but it had not yet been recorded in a Gaston County, North Carolina public database at the time of publication and is therefore not enforceable.Harmony Taylor, the Charlotte real estate lawyer, wrote about the rules governing flags and political signs in HOAs for a legal blog in 2020.“Typically, restrictive covenants are designed to protect the rights, not impose a speech,” she said. The Freedom to Display the American Flag Act of 2005 did just that, legislating that condos, co-ops, residential associations or housing management groups could not ban any of their members from flying the US flag within their properties. Under North Carolina state law, the right to fly a United States or state flag in a planned community or condominium is similarly protected, with some exceptions.Taylor believes the 1776 Gastonia rule is the first of its kind in the state, and she’s curious about its implications for freedom of speech. She added that constitutional free speech protections generally don’t apply to private actions that curtail speech, such as covenants. But she’s still uncomfortable with the idea of the development’s flag mandate.“I believe there is a strong public policy against requiring someone to espouse a particular political view, and I can’t help but think that is different from telling someone to simply keep silent,” said Taylor. “In my opinion, there is a real risk that the covenant requiring someone to fly a particular flag would be contrary to the public policy of the state of North Carolina and invalid.”1776 Gastonia properties go on sale on 10 July, according to spokesperson Casey Kupper. One home site has already been allocated to veterans Peter and Kelly Clark, through the Building Homes for Heroes nonprofit. Peter is a lung and brain cancer survivor with memory issues, and his wife, Kelly, is his caregiver. Speaking from their RV in South Carolina, Kelly said they fit in well in RV parks where seniors often live, but were looking for a forever home. They don’t consider themselves heroes, applying that term to Fankhauser and the nonprofit instead.“Without their generosity, we would be worried about the financial part of it because we can’t afford a house right now. This is really life-changing. There’s really no words to describe it,” Kelly said. The neighborhood’s patriotism focus was “an amazing bonus”.For his part, Fankhauser is gearing up for outreach, with the goal of spreading “a patriotic flame that lives inside” of him.“I do think that I can have some influence on turning up that flame in every individual,” he said. More

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      North Carolina voting rights ‘still in five-alarm fire’ despite supreme court ruling

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      The US supreme court ruled in favor of North Carolina voting rights groups last week, which celebrated with one breath and with the next condemned the new election laws and political maps being pushed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature.“We are still in a five-alarm fire here in North Carolina,” said Gino Nuzzolillo, campaign manager for the state’s Common Cause branch, which was one of the plaintiffs that won in the case the supreme court ruled on.North Carolina Republicans, including Tim Moore, the speaker of the state’s house of representatives whose name is on the case, Moore v Harper, had asked the supreme court to take up a highly controversial legal theory that would have given him and legislators around the country immense power over setting state-level federal election laws.Even though the high court rejected that theory in a 6-3 vote, preventing a nationwide shift in checks and balances over writing election laws, North Carolina’s Republican legislators can already act largely unchecked by the other branches of state government. They have a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature and the now Republican-controlled state supreme court signaled it would not act as a check on legislative power, including by taking the rare step to reverse two recent decisions by the previously Democrat-controlled court to re-allow partisan gerrymandering and require voter ID.Moore v Harper originated in state court as a partisan gerrymandering case, and as part of that litigation state courts put temporary maps in place for the 2022 elections. In a statement about the supreme court decision, Moore confirmed that the legislature will draw new maps.“We will continue to move forward with the redistricting process later this year,” Moore said.North Carolina is the only state where the governor cannot veto election maps drawn by the legislature, meaning that not even split-party leadership of the executive and legislative branches is a check on gerrymandering.For voting rights groups in North Carolina, this political reality makes the supreme court’s other voting rights decision this term that much more important. In Allen v Milligan, a case out of Alabama, the court rejected arguments from Republicans to do away with another part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This leaves an open lane to sue in federal court to overturn maps that dilute the voting power of racial minorities.Even with the victories in these two cases, federal judicial protections for voting rights are still the weakest they’ve been since at least 2013, when the supreme court crippled the Voting Rights Act. Still, voting rights groups are celebrating these two rulings because they preserve what legal tools are left at the federal level to protect the significant gains in voting access and fair representation since the civil rights era.What’s nextMoore and his Republican colleagues are working on three election bills, which they have enough votes to pass and overturn a likely veto from the Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, as long as no Republicans defect.S747 is an omnibus election bill that would make wide-ranging changes to voter access, including requiring all same-day registration voters to cast provisional ballots and changing the deadline for mail ballots.S749 would change the structure and powers of state and county boards of elections, making them deadlocked between parties, rather than having a majority vote favoring the party in control of the governor’s mansion, as it is now.H772 would change rules around poll observers, including the possible criminalization of elections officials who are found to interfere with observers.In the fall, the legislature will turn its attention to redistricting maps for seats in the US House of Representatives. North Carolina is a purple state, currently controlled by a Democratic governor but with a Republican supermajority in the legislature. Under the current map, North Carolina sent seven Democrats and seven Republicans to Congress.The redrawn map this fall will probably look similar to the map Republicans first proposed in 2021, which would likely have given Republicans a 10-4 advantage, according to Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper. He testified as an expert witness for Common Cause in state court that the congressional map, as well as the state map’s counterparts, were partisan gerrymanders.He anticipates that Democratic representatives Jeff Jackson, Kathy Manning and Wiley Nickel will have their districts redrawn to favor Republican candidates.Leaders from Common Cause and the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters, both groups that sued the state and won in the Moore v Harper case, said they oppose all three bills and will oppose redistricting that dilutes the votes of political or minority groups.Public polling by the Associated Press showed that a majority of people in both parties see gerrymandering as a major problem, and research shows it is a key driver of political polarization and protecting politically extreme candidates.Neither Moore nor Ralph Hise, chair of the state senate’s redistricting and elections committee, responded to emailed questions about how the public can participate in legislative action around the election bills or redistricting, about whether the legislature will consider racial data for redistricting or about limiting partisan bias in drawing maps.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2021, North Carolina Republicans wrote rules that they could not consider racial data when drawing political maps. At the time, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ), whose attorneys represented Common Cause in the Moore litigation, argued they should have used racial data for fair representation.In light of the Allen v Milligan ruling, the coalition’s senior voting rights lawyer, Hilary Harris Klein, said the legislature will have to consider racial data this time or be in violation of federal law.Using racial data, or not, will be a key point in the development of possible federal litigation to challenge discriminatory maps. Klein stressed that the SCSJ will advocate for equitable maps during the drawing process because the organization does not want to resort to litigation.Weakness of democratic institutionsNorth Carolina Republicans have a long history of passing racially and politically discriminatory voting maps and election laws, according to several federal and state court judgments since 2013.Since 2016, voting rights groups have been able to turn back some of those laws with a Democratic-majority state supreme court. But as of 2022, Republicans control the court, and will at least until 2028.“The state courts are probably a closed avenue to any further vindication of voter’s rights under the state constitution,” Nuzzolillo said.Relying on federal courts has been made increasingly difficult by the US supreme court under its chief justice, John Roberts.“The court in the last 10 years has done extraordinary damage to democratic institutions,” said Carolyn Shapiro, professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. She wrote a brief to the supreme court in the Moore v Harper case supporting the voting rights groups.She points to the 2013 Shelby county decision, in which Roberts wrote the opinion to strike down the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act and allowed states to immediately pass laws aimed at voter suppression. In the Abbott v Perez and Rucho v Common Cause cases from 2018, the court made it harder to win racial gerrymandering cases and impossible to bring political gerrymandering cases in federal courts. Then, in 2021, in Brnovich v DNC, the court made it harder to bring vote denial claims, which are the claims voting rights groups could try to bring against the election laws that North Carolina’s legislature is currently considering.The reason voting rights groups saw this year’s rulings as huge victories was because expectations were so low, Shapiro said.That Moore v Harper and Allen v Milligan were even taken up is an aberration from the historically typical strategy of the supreme court, showing how far the court and political thinking has shifted, according to Rick Su, a law professor at the University of North Carolina.The rulings mainly kept precedent in place rather than adding any rights or protections, Su said. That responsibility would fall to Congress.“We held the line,” Klein said. “In this climate, that is a huge win.” More

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      In North Carolina, a Voting Rights Clash Ahead of 2024

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      Republicans, whose edge in the state has narrowed in recent years, have gone on offense politically, leading to clashes over voting access and control over elections.A closely watched political fight is developing in North Carolina over voting rights and control of elections, as Democrats aim to recapture a presidential battleground and Republicans look to win back the governor’s office.Much as Georgia, Florida and Texas drew an outpouring of national attention and political cash as Republicans moved to restrict voting in the heated months after the 2020 election, North Carolina is poised for headline-grabbing confrontations over nearly every lever of the electoral apparatus.In the Republican-led legislature, the State House is considering two bills passed by the Senate that would sharply alter how elections are run, adding voting restrictions and effectively neutering the state elections board, which is now controlled by Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat. And in a looming redistricting clash, the newly conservative State Supreme Court has ordered lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional and state legislative maps, which will most likely be far friendlier to Republicans.In North Carolina, every little edge could matter: The state, despite a long string of Republican presidential victories interrupted by Barack Obama’s 2008 triumph, has grown increasingly close. Donald J. Trump squeezed by in 2020 by just over a percentage point, and President Biden’s allies have signaled that they plan to invest in the state in 2024, seeing it as potentially winnable. Mr. Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and other Republican candidates have already held events in North Carolina as they contend for their party’s nomination.“North Carolina is one of the states that have both of the factors that exacerbate this,” said Wendy Weiser, the vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, referring to Republican attempts to wield more power over voting and elections. “It is a battleground state and a state that has a history of discrimination in voting.”She added, “It is definitely one of the most critical states to be worried about.”Seismic shifts in North Carolina politics cleared the runway for Republicans to go on offense. They now have veto-proof legislative majorities after a Democratic representative defected to the G.O.P. in April, limiting what Mr. Cooper can halt. And conservatives captured the State Supreme Court in last year’s elections, upending it from a 4-to-3 liberal lean to a 5-to-2 conservative advantage.Republicans gained veto-proof majorities in the North Carolina General Assembly this spring, and last year they won control of the State Supreme Court. Travis Dove for The New York TimesBehind the scenes, a network of right-wing activists and election deniers led by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who played a key role in efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election, has been meeting with North Carolina lawmakers, pushing its priorities and helping shape certain provisions.Across the country, Republicans continue to try to tighten voting laws, arguing that they are needed to protect “election integrity” and pointing to voters’ Trump-fueled worries about election fraud.So far this year, at least 11 states have passed 13 laws adding such restrictions, according to the Brennan Center. That is a slightly slower clip than in 2021, when Republican-led legislatures passed a flurry of voting laws, often in response to election lies spread by Mr. Trump and his supporters.North Carolina has a particularly tortured past on voting rights. Under the Voting Rights Act, parts of the state were forced to obtain federal clearance to change voting laws because of their history of racially discriminatory election rules. More recently, in 2016, a federal court struck down a Republican-led voter identification law, saying it had targeted “African Americans with almost surgical precision.”Republicans have defended the latest measures. State Senator Warren Daniel, one of the primary sponsors of the bill to change voting laws, said on the chamber floor that the measure “increases confidence and transparency in our elections.” He added that certain changes, including a provision requiring that all absentee ballots be received by the time polls close on Election Day, would bring North Carolina in line with many other states.Democrats, however, have denounced the voting proposals, with one state senator, Natasha Marcus, going so far as to call them a “jumbo jet of voter suppression.” During final debate on the bill, she said it “includes a lot of problematic things that are going to dissuade people from voting, throw out ballots, and suppress the votes of certain people in a way that I think is discriminatory and anti-democratic.”A key provision would effectively eliminate same-day voter registration and replace it with a system in which voters would cast provisional ballots, then be required to follow up and verify their identities. Only some forms of identification would be acceptable: Data from the State Board of Elections found that in the four general elections since 2016, over 36 percent of voters who used same-day registration had provided IDs that the new law would not allow.Gov. Roy Cooper at an abortion-rights rally in downtown Raleigh, N.C., in May. Republicans will seek to reclaim the governor’s office next year.Kate Medley for The New York TimesIn 2016, when Republican state lawmakers tried to eliminate same-day registration, a Federal District Court found that it was “indisputable that African American voters disproportionately used” that method of voting. Black voters, the court found, made up 35 percent of same-day registrants in the 2012 election, while representing only 22 percent of the electorate.The new legislation also makes mail voting more complicated, adding a requirement that voters’ signatures be verified and a “two-factor” authentication process that would be unique to North Carolina and has left voting experts confused as to how it would work. As in other states, far more Democrats in North Carolina now vote by mail, with Mr. Trump and his allies instilling a widespread Republican distrust of the practice. In the 2022 midterm elections, more than 157,000 people in the state voted by mail. Forty-five percent were Democrats, and 35 percent were independents.As Republican lawmakers wrote the legislation, they received outside help.Three G.O.P. lawmakers, including Mr. Daniel, met in May with Ms. Mitchell, the Trump-allied lawyer, and Jim Womack, a leader of the North Carolina Election Integrity Teams. That organization is part of a national network of right-wing election activists coordinated in part by Ms. Mitchell, who declined to comment.The two activists pressed the lawmakers on their laundry list of changes to election laws, including measures on same-day registration, absentee ballots and maintenance of voter lists, according to a video in which Mr. Womack summarized the meeting. The video was obtained by Documented, a liberal investigative group, and shared with The New York Times.“Same-day registration, we’re all in agreement, violent agreement, that same-day registration will now be a provisional ballot,” Mr. Womack said in the video of the meeting. “So if you’re going to same-day register, it’s going to give you at least a little bit of time, maybe 7 to 10 days, to have a chance at researching and challenging that voter under the law as opposed to where it is now, where it’s less than 24 hours’ opportunity to do that.”Mr. Daniel declined to answer questions about the role Ms. Mitchell and Mr. Womack played in drafting the bills.Republicans have defended their proposed voting measures, saying that they will increase confidence in elections.Kate Medley for The New York TimesA 2017 law aiming to restructure the state election board was struck down by the State Supreme Court. Now that the court is more conservative, Republicans have resurrected the effort.Currently, Mr. Cooper appoints all five members of the board, but only three can be Democrats. Under the Republican proposal, the board would have eight members, all appointed by state lawmakers — four by Democratic leaders and four by Republican ones.State Senator Paul Newton, the bill’s Republican sponsor, introduced it as a measure “intended to take partisan advantage out of elections administration entirely.”The bill would all but certainly cause deadlock on many major election issues — a prospect that has alarmed election officials and democracy experts.The current election board, after reports of harassment of election officials in 2022, stepped in with rules limiting access for poll watchers, a move that angered conservatives.And there is one big unknown: What would happen if the new election board deadlocked over the certification of an election?That possibility is unaddressed in the bill. Phil Berger, the Republican leader of the State Senate, told The News and Observer that any such deadlock would probably send the matter to the courts, where decisions could depend on the partisan lean of the judge or court in question.“That’s a tell right there,” said Robyn Sanders, a counsel at the Brennan Center. “It seems pretty clear to me that it was deliberately designed so that there would be those kinds of situations.” More

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      The supreme court denied a wild election theory. But don’t relax yet | David Daley

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      Such is the dismal state of the US supreme court that it is genuinely surprising any time the court’s conservative supermajority turns down an opportunity to further distort American democracy to the benefit of their partisan benefactors and enhance the prospects of enduring one-party minority rule.Moore v Harper – the case from North Carolina involving the so-called “independent state legislature” (ISL) theory, the ludicrous notion that state legislatures have a free hand when it comes to election law and redistricting, unfettered by pesky state constitutions, state supreme courts or even gubernatorial vetos – was satisfyingly swatted away on Tuesday by a 6-3 majority.This theory, spawned from a footnote in the then Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s concurrence in Bush v Gore, and nurtured for two decades in the hothouse of conservative legal academia, lacks any grounding in American history, represents a terrifying threat to elections as we know them, and should never have made it this far in the courts.The decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, makes it clear that the constitution’s elections clause does not carve out an exception to the fundamental principle of judicial review. “When state legislatures prescribe the rules concerning federal elections, they remain subject to the ordinary exercise of state judicial review,” Roberts wrote, in a decision joined by the court’s three liberals and justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.It’s good news and a welcome sigh of relief. Taken to its extreme – as seems to be the practice in so many conservative state legislatures these days – the ISL theory could have handed state legislatures, many already deeply gerrymandered and beyond the control of state voters, dangerous unchecked powers with regard to election certification and presidential electors. And it could have removed state courts, constitutions, governors and potentially even independent redistricting commissions and ballot initiatives as any meaningful check on runaway legislatures.But while the headlines proclaim victory for American democracy, and supreme court reporters hoist the chief justice back on their shoulders as a great centrist hope, it’s far too soon to celebrate. Buried within the details of this decision, as well as a short concurrence by Kavanaugh, are the seeds of future cases to come. This decision is hardly the silver bullet antidote to take down this dangerous zombie notion once and for all.The court’s decision makes clear that the elections clause does not liberate state legislatures from state constitutions and state law, but also that federal courts must not abandon their duty to exercise judicial review. “This Court has an obligation to ensure that state court interpretations of state law do not evade federal law,” Roberts writes.Furthermore, state courts, according to the decision, must “not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review such that they arrogate to themselves the power vested in state legislatures to regulate federal elections”.What does that mean? The court does not tell us. As the NYU law professor Rick Pildes points out, the decision does not adopt any standard at all, set any boundaries whatsoever, or even rule on whether the North Carolina state court exceeded its role. We head into the 2024 presidential election without any sense of what the federal courts believe to be an appropriate and non-transgressive role for state courts to play.That means that one of the most important lines from the decision might be this one from Kavanaugh’s short concurrence: “In other words, the Court has recognized and articulated a general principle for federal court review of state court decisions in federal election cases. In the future, the Court should and presumably will distill that general principle into a more specific standard such as the one advanced by Chief Justice Rehnquist.”The court’s decision invites future cases. (Kavanaugh issued a similar invitation for future cases in a short concurrence in the Alabama redistricting case this month that affirmed what remains of section two of the Voting Rights Act.) They may arrive in the days after the 2024 presidential election. And they could prove crucial in deeply gerrymandered Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona, three extraordinarily close states that provided President Biden’s electoral college victory in 2020 with the slenderest of margins, and where election deniers, some in the state legislature, made mischief with the results.A court that has already proven, time and again, its willingness to put the thumb on the scale for its own side in cases at the heart of American democracy may decide those future cases on a case-by-case basis, with no clear standard at all, based on how the individual justices feel about that state supreme court’s interpretation, and perhaps the consequence of that ruling. It’s an uncomfortable position to begin a presidential election, given the fact that, in many states, election deniers are in a stronger place today than they were on 6 January 2021.There are so few moments to breathe easier these days. Today’s surprising reasonableness from the court offers a respite. It may only be a brief one.
      David Daley is the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy. He is a senior fellow at FairVote More

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      in Elections

      The Supreme Court Just Helped Save American Democracy From Trumpism

      by

      To understand both the Trump-led Republican effort to overturn the 2020 election and the lingering Republican bitterness surrounding that contest, it’s important to remember that the G.O.P.’s attack on American democracy had two aspects: a conspiracy theory and a coup theory. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to both. In a case called Moore v. Harper, the court rejected the “independent state legislature” doctrine, reaffirmed the soundness of the 2020 election and secured the integrity of elections to come.First, a bit of background. The effort to steal the 2020 election depended on two key arguments. The first, the conspiracy theory, was that the election was fundamentally flawed; the second, the coup theory, was that the Constitution provided a remedy that would enable Donald Trump to remain in office.The disparate elements of the conspiracy theory varied from truly wild claims about voting machines being manipulated and Italian satellites somehow altering the outcome to more respectable arguments that pandemic-induced changes in voting procedures were both unconstitutional and disproportionately benefited Democrats. For example, in one of the most important cases filed during the 2020 election season, the Pennsylvania Republican Party argued that changes in voting procedures mandated by the State Supreme Court violated the Constitution by overriding the will of the Pennsylvania legislature.The Pennsylvania G.O.P. argued for a version of the independent state legislature doctrine, a theory that the Constitution grants state legislatures — and state legislatures alone — broad, independent powers to regulate elections for president and for Congress. The basis for this argument is found in both Article I and Article II of the Constitution. The relevant provision of Article I states, “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” And Article II’s electors clause says, “Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the state may be entitled in the Congress.”The question was whether those two clauses essentially insulated the state legislatures from accountability to other state branches of government, including from judicial review by state courts.The Supreme Court refused to hear the Pennsylvania G.O.P.’s petition, with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissenting. But the issue was bound to come back to the court, and in Moore v. Harper it did.The case turned on a complicated North Carolina redistricting dispute. After the 2020 census, the Republican-dominated state legislature drew up a new district map. The Democratic-controlled North Carolina Supreme Court rejected the map as an unlawful partisan gerrymander under state law, and the legislature appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the State Supreme Court had no authority to override the legislature. The Supreme Court accepted the review.After SCOTUS took the case, last November’s midterm elections handed control of the North Carolina Supreme Court to Republicans, and the new, Republican-dominated court reversed itself. It held that partisan gerrymanders weren’t “justiciable” under state law, but it did not reinstate the legislature’s original map. This new North Carolina decision raised the question of whether the court would decide Harper on the merits or if it would dismiss the appeal as moot, given that it was based on a state ruling that had already been overturned.In a 6-to-3 vote, the Supreme Court not only declined to dismiss the case; it also flatly rejected the independent state legislature doctrine. Chief Justice John Roberts — writing for a majority that included Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson — was unequivocal. “The elections clause,” Chief Justice Roberts declared, “does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review.”Or, to put it another way, the relevant provisions of the federal Constitution did not grant state legislatures independent powers that exempt them from the normal operations of state constitutional law. Chief Justice Roberts cited previous Supreme Court authority rejecting the idea that the federal Constitution endows “the legislature of the state with power to enact laws in any manner other than that in which the Constitution of the state has provided that laws shall be enacted.”The implications are profound. In regard to 2020, the Supreme Court’s decision strips away the foundation of G.O.P. arguments that the election was legally problematic because of state court interventions. Such interventions did not inherently violate the federal Constitution, and the state legislatures did not have extraordinary constitutional autonomy to independently set election rules.In regard to 2024 and beyond, the Supreme Court’s decision eliminates the ability of a rogue legislature to set new electoral rules immune from judicial review. State legislatures will still be accountable for following both federal and state constitutional law. In other words, the conventional checks and balances of American law will still apply.Trump’s coup attempt was a national trauma, but if there’s a silver lining to be found in that dark cloud, it’s that the political and judicial branches of American government have responded to the crisis. Late last year, Congress passed significant reforms to the Electoral Count Act that were designed to clarify the ambiguities in the original act and to reaffirm Congress’s and the vice president’s limited roles in counting state electoral votes.And on Tuesday, a supermajority of the Supreme Court, including both Democratic and Republican appointees, reaffirmed the American constitutional order. State legislatures are not an electoral law unto themselves, and while Moore v. Harper does not guarantee that elections will be flawless, it does protect the vital role of courts in the American system. The 2020 election was sound. The 2024 election is now safer. The Supreme Court has done its part to defend American democracy from the MAGA movement’s constitutional corruption.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More