State Legislatures

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Georgia’s Top Election Official Calls for End to Runoff System

      by

      Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, said that a newly tightened timeline for runoff elections had put added strain on election workers.ATLANTA — Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, called for the state legislature to end the use of runoff contests during general elections on Wednesday, a potential move that would overhaul Georgia’s heavily debated system of choosing its leaders.Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican who oversees the state’s elections, cited the recently condensed timeline for runoff elections as one problem, saying that it had put added strain on poll workers. The runoff window was shortened to four weeks from nine under a major 2021 election law backed by Republican state lawmakers.“No one wants to be dealing with politics in the middle of their family holiday,” Mr. Raffensperger said in a news release. “It’s even tougher on the counties who had a difficult time completing all of their deadlines, an election audit and executing a runoff in a four-week time period.”Mr. Raffensperger does not have any legislative power and did not endorse any other specific changes on Wednesday. But his early support for eliminating the runoff system could influence how Republican state lawmakers approach the question.The Republican-controlled legislature would need a simple majority to alter or end the system, and then Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, would have to sign the measure. Republican leaders in the General Assembly and Mr. Kemp have not indicated yet whether they would support changes to the runoff system.Mr. Raffensperger also noted that Georgia is one of very few states that still use a runoff system for general elections. Louisiana is the only other state that requires a runoff in a general election if no candidate receives at least 50 percent of the vote. The system is a relic of Jim Crow-era laws that aimed to limit Black voters’ political power.In recent years, however, Georgia Democrats have won several high-profile runoff victories, including that of Senator Raphael Warnock against Herschel Walker last week. That race had soaring turnout that led to long lines at precincts in heavily populated, Democratic-leaning counties. Democrats also successfully sued to hold early voting for an extra day on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.In an interview with The New York Times on Friday, Mr. Raffensperger said that his office would present several proposed runoff changes to the state legislature when it reconvenes in January. They include mandating that larger counties open more voting locations to cut down wait times, lowering the threshold needed to win an election outright to 45 percent from 50 percent and instituting a ranked-choice instant-runoff system that would not require voters to return to the polls after the general election. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Which Party Controls the Pennsylvania House? It’s TBD.

      by

      Three seats won by Democrats in November are now vacant, giving Republicans more House members for now and sowing uncertainty ahead of the legislative session.More than a month after the elections in Pennsylvania, which were among the most closely watched in the country, a question remains unanswered in the state’s House of Representatives: Who, exactly, is in charge?For now, both the Democratic and Republican parties are claiming a majority in the chamber, and representatives from both parties have declared themselves the House majority leader. Both are accusing the other party of ignoring the will of the voters, the rule of law or some combination thereof. With the House set to reconvene, and presumably to choose a speaker in less than three weeks, the question now sits with the courts.Election Day was largely disappointing for Pennsylvania Republicans, who fell short in the race for governor, and, with the victory of John Fetterman, the generously tattooed Democrat, lost their seat in the U.S. Senate.Democrats also won a majority of seats in the State House for the first time in a dozen years, even as Republicans maintained control of the State Senate. But the margin in the House appeared to be wafer-thin, 102-101, decided by fewer than 65 votes in a race in the Philadelphia suburbs. It turned out to be even more tenuous — one of the victorious lawmakers was dead.In early October, Anthony DeLuca, 85, a Democrat who represented a district in the Pittsburgh suburbs and was the longest-serving member of the House, died of complications from lymphoma. His death occurred too close to the election to replace his name on the ballot, and, a month later, he was re-elected in a landslide.Republicans saw a stalemate. Until a special election could be held in Mr. DeLuca’s district, they reasoned, each party had 101 representatives, and neither could claim a majority in the House.An opinion issued last Wednesday by the Pennsylvania Legislative Reference Bureau, a nonpartisan advisory body, seemed to concur. “Under current law, an individual must at least be elected and living to qualify as a member of a legislative caucus,” the opinion concluded, adding that “the House Democratic Caucus falls short of the 102 members necessary for a majority.”That same day, two Democratic representatives who had won their House races but who, in the same election, had been voted into higher office — Summer Lee, now an incoming U.S. congresswoman, and Austin Davis, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor-elect — formally resigned their House seats. Republicans concluded that they now had a majority outright, at least until special elections took place for all three seats.Democrats saw things differently. Voters had chosen Democratic representatives in 102 of the state’s 203 districts, they said, and by particularly overwhelming margins in the three seats that are now vacant.“We won 102 districts compared to the Republicans’ 101,” Joanna McClinton, the House Democratic leader — and, according to her, the majority leader — said in an interview. “It’s a fact, it’s indisputable.”Within hours of her two fellow Democrats’ resignations last week, Ms. McClinton was sworn into office in an otherwise empty House chamber. She then scheduled elections for all three of the vacant seats on Feb. 7, the earliest date possible under state rules, and Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state, a Democrat, signed off on the plan.Republicans were livid, accusing the Democrats of having staged a “paperwork insurrection.” Within days, Representative Brian Cutler, the leader of the House Republicans, sued the secretary of state, arguing that Ms. McClinton was not the House majority leader and thus lacked the authority to set special elections.On Monday morning, it was Mr. Cutler’s turn to be sworn in on the House floor. In an interview afterward, he said that since he was the House Republican leader and since there were 101 Republicans ready to take office, compared with 99 Democrats, “the math makes me the majority leader.”Mr. Cutler said that he would soon submit his own dates for the special elections but that the recent moves by the Democrats had made it too complicated to figure out the dates just yet.What happens now is anyone’s guess.Adam Bonin, an elections lawyer in Philadelphia who has long worked with Democrats, said the stakes were significant. “This isn’t just about who’s in charge of this chamber for the first month,” he said. “This really is about all sorts of potential exercises of power.”Among them is a Senate bill that would put a handful of constitutional amendments proposed by Republicans on a statewide ballot — including ones that would establish a voter ID requirement, expand the legislature’s power and assert that there is no state constitutional right to abortion. If each chamber approved the bill during the upcoming legislative session, the questions would be put to a statewide vote.Some Democrats are also concerned that if Republicans control the House, even temporarily, they might change the rules to ensure that their choice for speaker keeps the job even if Democrats win control after the special elections.Mr. Cutler said such speculation was premature, insisting that the first priority of the session should be electing a new speaker.As for which party is in charge when that vote happens, it is too soon to say. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      The Election Is Over. Now Comes the Battle for Voting Rights in 2024

      by

      Voters rebuffed the most aggressive efforts to weaken democracy in the midterms. But battles over election districts and ballot restrictions that could prove crucial in 2024 have already resumed.WASHINGTON — With Raphael Warnock’s victory in the Georgia Senate race on Tuesday, the major midterm elections are over.But the battles over voting rules, restrictions and political boundaries that will help determine who wins the next ones barely paused for ballot-counting before resuming in force.Indeed, the day after Mr. Warnock’s election, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a potentially seismic case brought by Republicans in North Carolina that could give state legislatures significantly expanded power over election laws — and virtually unlimited authority to draw gerrymandered maps.The landscape is familiar. Democrats who took control of state legislatures in Michigan and Minnesota are preparing legislation to to broaden voting access, including measures in Michigan that would mandate absentee ballot drop boxes.Republicans, who control a majority of legislatures across the country, are proposing new restrictive legislation they say would combat election fraud, though it remains exceedingly rare. And though both parties have benefited from gerrymanders, Republicans are far more likely to make it a centerpiece of their electoral strategy.In the Ohio Legislature, Republicans are poised to pass bills that would stiffen the ID requirement for casting a ballot, limit the use of drop boxes and end automatic mailings of absentee-ballot applications to voters.In North Carolina, a Republican sweep of state Supreme Court races last month makes it likely that the State Legislature will be able to gerrymander existing nonpartisan maps of congressional and legislative districts before the 2024 elections.In Wisconsin, both parties are girding for an April election that will determine partisan control of the state’s already politicized Supreme Court — and either open or shut the door on a legal challenge to an impregnable Republican gerrymander of the State Legislature.Some of that jockeying for power always goes on beneath the radar of most voters. But in the wake of more direct attacks on democracy by insurrectionists at the U.S. Capitol and by election deniers in last month’s vote, the divergent legislative priorities of the two parties — and particularly Republican reliance on restrictive voting measures and supercharged gerrymanders — reflect what has become a ceaseless tug of war over the rules of American politics and governance.“It’s not the same thing as throwing out the vote count and putting in the wrong count,” said Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “But it’s a form of unfair gaming of the system to gain electoral advantage, in a way that shuts out legitimate voters.”The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      This Case Should Never Have Made It to the Supreme Court

      by

      “The most important case for American democracy” in the nation’s history — that’s how the former appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig described Moore v. Harper, an extraordinary lawsuit that the Supreme Court considered in oral arguments Wednesday morning. Judge Luttig, a conservative and a widely respected legal thinker, is not one for overstatement. Yet most Americans aren’t paying attention to the case because it involves some confusing terminology and an arcane legal theory. It is essential that people understand just how dangerous this case is to the fundamental structure of American government, and that enough justices see the legal fallacies and protect our democracy.First, the back story on the case: In 2021, North Carolina lawmakers redrew their congressional maps. The state had 13 districts at the time, and its voters were more or less evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. But the Republicans who are in control of North Carolina’s legislature didn’t want fair maps; they wanted power. In one of the most egregious gerrymanders in the nation, they drew 10 seats intended to favor themselves.The North Carolina courts were not amused. A panel of three trial judges found that the 2021 maps were “intentionally and carefully designed to maximize Republican advantage” — so much so that Republicans could win legislative majorities even when Democrats won more votes statewide. The State Supreme Court struck down the maps, finding they violated the North Carolina Constitution’s guarantees of free elections, free speech, free assembly and equal protection.That should have been the end of it: A state court applying the state Constitution to strike down a state law. But North Carolina’s Republican lawmakers appealed, arguing that the U.S. Constitution does not give state courts authority to rule on their congressional maps — even though the legislature had passed a law authorizing the courts to review redistricting plans like these. Instead, the lawmakers are relying on an untested theory that asserts that state legislatures enjoy nearly unlimited power to set and change rules for federal elections.In 2000 the chief justice at the time, William H. Rehnquist, proposed the idea in his concurring opinion on Bush v. Gore, and the independent state legislature theory has been floating around the fringes of right-wing legal circles ever since.To be clear, this is a political power grab in the guise of a legal theory. Republicans are trying to see if they can turn state legislatures — 30 of which are controlled by Republicans — into omnipotent, unaccountable election bosses with the help of the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. The theory has no basis in law, history or precedent. The idea that state lawmakers exist free of any constraints imposed by their constitution and state courts makes a mockery of the separation of powers, which is foundational to the American system of government. By the North Carolina lawmakers’ logic, they possess infinite power to gerrymander districts and otherwise control federal elections. It is a Constitution-free zone where no one else in the state — not the governor, not the courts, not the voters through ballot initiatives — has any say.On Wednesday morning, Justice Elena Kagan rejected the theory out of hand, saying it “gets rid of the normal checks and balances on the way big governmental decisions are made in this country. And you might think that it gets rid of all those checks and balances at exactly the time when they are needed most.”In practice, the theory that the petitioners in the case are seeking to use would turn hundreds of state constitutional provisions into dead letters in federal elections. For instance, 48 states affirmatively guarantee a right to vote in their constitutions. (The federal Constitution still does not.) Most state constitutions guarantee free, fair, equal or open elections. Even the secret ballot — so fundamental to American democracy — is a creature of state constitutions. If the justices accept the most aggressive version of the independent state legislature theory that the petitioners want them to and even if they accept a weaker version, provisions like these could become invalid overnight, because the theory holds that state constitutions have no authority to impose any regulations on federal elections. (The Constitution and federal law remain supreme, so challenges to state legislative actions could still be brought in federal courts.)Some of the justices insist that they don’t — they can’t — pay attention to the real-world outcomes of their rulings. They’re just interpreting law. By that logic, this case should be rejected on its merits.First, the theory is based on bad legal interpretation. The Constitution uses the word “legislature” in describing who has the power to regulate federal elections. Because of this word, the theory’s supporters claim, state legislatures have nearly unlimited power in that realm. But as Judge Luttig has noted, the theory has “literally no support” in the Constitution. To the contrary, the framers who wrote the Constitution were concerned that state legislatures had too much power, not too little. The text they wrote makes many references to the powers of those legislatures and of Congress, but it never says or implies that they are immune to review by the judicial branch.Second, the theory is based on bad history. The best evidence its supporters offer is a two-century-old document that has long been known to be fraudulent. Written in 1818 by Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, a founding father, it is purported to be a replica of the plan for government that he introduced three decades earlier at the Constitutional Convention. But what he submitted in 1818 was not the real deal. James Madison suspected this immediately, as have virtually all historians to examine it in the years since.When the theory’s supporters sought to claim that the practices of early state legislatures proved that their side should win, Justice Sonia Sotomayor responded, “Yes. If you rewrite history, it’s very easy to do.”Third, if the Supreme Court accepts this theory, it will create a logistical nightmare in states across the country. That’s because the theory applies only to federal elections, not state elections, in which state courts unquestionably have a role to play. As a result, there would be two sets of rules operating at the same time, one for federal elections and one for state elections. Chaos and confusion would reign.Most important, the Supreme Court has already implicitly rejected the theory many times over. In precedents stretching back decades, the court has made clear that state courts have the power to set limits on what lawmakers can do when it comes to federal elections. As recently as 2019, the court rejected a plea for it to stop the extreme partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina and other states. In doing so, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that this is exactly the role that state courts should play. “Provisions in state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply,” he wrote.At Wednesday’s argument, Justice Samuel Alito appeared to reject that premise. He accused elected state court judges, like those in North Carolina, of being political actors themselves. “There’s been a lot of talk about the impact of this decision on democracy,” said Justice Alito, who has given openly partisan speeches to outside groups and voted consistently in alignment with Republican policy priorities. “Do you think that it furthers democracy to transfer the political controversy about districting from the legislature to elected supreme courts where the candidates are permitted by state law to campaign on the issue of districting?”Another way to appreciate the absurdity of the theory is to consider who has come out for and against it. On one side, a large and bipartisan group of judges, government officials, former lawmakers, leading historians and constitutional scholars from across the political spectrum have rejected it. These include a co-founder of the right-wing legal group the Federalist Society, the chief justices of all 50 states, multiple Republican former governors and secretaries of state and civil rights organizations.On the other side, you will find a far smaller and less bipartisan cast of characters — among them, the Republican National Committee, a group of Republican state attorneys general and John Eastman, a former law professor last seen helping Donald Trump plan an illegal and unconstitutional coup to stay in office (an act that has exposed Mr. Eastman to a real risk of criminal prosecution).That so many justices would take the theory seriously is bad enough. Three of them — Justices Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas — appear to favor the independent state legislature theory, as they suggested in an opinion in an earlier stage of the case. Justice Brett Kavanaugh has also indicated his openness to it. It’s worse when the public trust in and approval of the court have fallen to historic lows, thanks largely to aggressively partisan recent opinions, as this board has argued.There’s an old saying that only close cases make it to the Supreme Court. If they weren’t close, they would have been resolved in the lower courts. But Moore v. Harper isn’t a remotely close case. A ruling for the North Carolina lawmakers would flood the federal courts with election litigation that normally plays out in the states, upending the balance of federalism that defines American government. That’s not a conservative result; it’s a dangerously radical one.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

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Is the Supreme Court About to Upend American Election Laws?

      by

      Here’s what to know about a court case that could change the way Americans vote — and who decides how they do.For months, my inbox has been bombarded by anxious Democrats and election experts wanting to talk about a once-obscure legal theory that could fundamentally alter the way Americans vote.Known as the independent state legislature doctrine, it holds, in its purest form, that state constitutions have little to no ability to constrain state legislatures. The doctrine emerged from a novel interpretation of the U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause, which grants states the authority to set the “time, places and manner” of federal elections.At the core of the dispute is whether the framers intended the word “legislature” in the document to be understood strictly, or whether they meant that other institutions — like state courts, governors and secretaries of state — also had important roles to play in setting and interpreting the rules around elections and voting.A fringe version of the doctrine entered the public discussion last year when it emerged that one of Donald Trump’s lawyers, John Eastman, had written a memo arguing that it even allowed state lawmakers to send their own slate of presidential electors to Washington.The Supreme Court has traditionally been gun-shy about encroaching on state courts, especially when they are interpreting their own constitutions.But a more mainstream conservative position, embraced by the Republican Party and rejected by Democrats, started gaining support on the right amid legal battles over the accommodations some states made for voters during the pandemic, like the expansion of mail voting.If adopted, the doctrine would, among other things, bar state courts from ensuring that state laws comply with a requirement, common in many state constitutions, that elections be “free and fair” — with potentially vast implications for rules on redistricting, citizen-led commissions and voting. Understand the U.S. Supreme Court’s New TermCard 1 of 6A race to the right. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Losing Another Runoff, Georgia Republicans Weigh an Election Shake-Up

      by

      Some in the party said that additional changes to election rules were likely, after Senator Raphael Warnock’s victory put a new spotlight on a major 2021 voting law passed by the G.O.P.As Georgia Democrats won their third Senate runoff election in two years, the party proved it had crafted an effective strategy for triumphing in a decades-old system created to sustain segregationist power and for overcoming an array of efforts to making voting more difficult. Republicans, meanwhile, were quietly cursing the runoff system, or at least their strategy for winning under a state law they wrote after losing the last election.The various post-mortems over how Georgia’s runoff rules shaped the state’s Senate outcome on Tuesday put a spotlight on a major voting law passed by the Republican-led General Assembly last year. Some Republicans acknowledged that their efforts to limit in-person early voting days might have backfired, while others encouraged lawmakers to consider additional restrictions next year.With Georgia poised to remain a critical political battleground and with Republicans holding gerrymandered majorities in both chambers of its state legislature, some in the party said that additional election law changes were likely.Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who oversees the state’s voting procedures, said in an interview on Wednesday that there would be a debate next year over potential adjustments to Georgia’s runoff laws and procedures after Senator Raphael Warnock’s victory.Mr. Raffensperger said he would present three proposals to lawmakers. They include forcing large counties to open more early-voting locations to reduce hourslong lines like the ones that formed at many Metro Atlanta sites last week; lowering the threshold candidates must achieve to avoid a runoff to 45 percent from 50 percent; and instituting a ranked-choice instant-runoff system that would not require voters to come back to the polls again after the general election.Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said there would be a debate next year over potential changes to Georgia’s runoff laws and procedures. Audra Melton for The New York Times“The elected legislators need to have information so they can look at all the different options that they have and really see what they’re comfortable with,” Mr. Raffensperger said.Understand the Georgia Senate RunoffNew Battlegrounds: Senator Raphael Warnock’s win shows how Georgia and Arizona are poised to be the next kingmakers of presidential politics, Lisa Lerer writes.A Rising Democratic Star: Mr. Warnock, a son of Savannah public housing who rose to become Georgia’s first Black senator, is a pastor and politician who sees voting as a form of prayer.Trump’s Bad Day: The loss by Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate, capped one of the worst days for former President Donald J. Trump since he announced his 2024 bid.Republicans are not the only ones hoping to end Georgia’s requirement that a runoff take place if no candidate in a general election wins at least half of the vote. Democrats have long viewed the practice — a vestige of racist 1960s efforts to keep Black candidates or candidates backed by Black voters from taking office — as an additional hurdle for working-class people of color.Park Cannon, a Democratic state representative from Atlanta who was arrested last year after knocking on the closed door behind which Gov. Brian Kemp signed the state’s voting law, said that last Friday, she had driven for 30 minutes and then waited an hour to vote early in person.Runoffs, Ms. Cannon said, “are not to the benefit of working families.” She added, “It’s very difficult to, within four weeks of taking time off to vote, have to do that again.”Since the law was passed in 2021, Georgia Democrats have criticized the new barriers to voting that it set in place. During the runoff, Mr. Warnock, a Democrat, spared no opportunity to highlight the law and characterize it as the latest in a decades-long push to minimize the influence of Black voters and anyone who opposed Republican control.His stump speech featured a regular refrain reminding supporters that Georgia Republicans had sought to prohibit counties from opening for in-person early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, after the state’s Republican attorney general and Mr. Raffensperger concluded that doing so was in violation of state law. Mr. Warnock and Democrats sued, and a state judge agreed to allow for the Saturday voting.“People showed up in record numbers within the narrow confines of the time given to them by a state legislature that saw our electoral strength the last time and went after it with surgical precision,” Mr. Warnock said in his victory speech on Tuesday night in Atlanta. “The fact that voters worked so hard to overcome the hardship put in front of them does not eliminate the fact that hardship was put there in the first place.”Because of the new voting law, Tuesday’s runoff was held four weeks after the general election, rather than the nine-week runoff period under which Georgia’s high-profile Senate races in early 2021 unfolded. The nine-week runoff period that year had been ordered by a federal judge; runoff contests for state elections have always operated on a four-week timeline.Tuesday’s contest also included fewer days to vote and new restrictions on absentee ballots — and it ended with virtually the same result.The 3.5 million votes cast in Tuesday’s runoff amounted to 90 percent of the general-election turnout in the Senate race on Nov. 8. In 2021, when Mr. Warnock first won his seat, runoff turnout was 91 percent of the general-election turnout, which was higher because 2020 was a presidential year. The outpouring of voters in both years was orders of magnitude higher than in any prior Georgia runoff.A get-out-the-vote event on Tuesday near a polling site in Atlanta.Nicole Buchanan for The New York TimesThe booming turnout this year has led Georgia Republicans to insist that their voting law was not suppressive.“We had what I think was a nearly flawless execution of two huge elections in terms of turnout and in terms of accuracy and integrity,” said Butch Miller, a Republican leader in the Georgia State Senate who helped write the voting law and is leaving the chamber after losing the primary for lieutenant governor.Mr. Miller said he “didn’t care for” the way that some counties, including large Democratic-leaning ones in the Atlanta area, had opened for extra early voting days, a sentiment echoed by other Georgia Republicans after Mr. Warnock’s victory.The new law evidently had an effect on how Georgians voted. In the January 2021 runoffs, 24 percent of the vote came via absentee ballots that had been mailed to voters. On Tuesday, just 5 percent of the vote came through the mail, a result of restrictions on who could receive an absentee ballot and the shortening of the runoff period, which made it more difficult to request and receive a ballot within the allotted time period.The 2021 law also cut the amount of in-person early voting days to a minimum of five, but allowed Georgia’s counties to add more days before the state’s mandated early-voting week. The Warnock campaign pressed the state’s Democratic counties to open for early voting on the weekend after Thanksgiving, giving voters who were more likely to vote for the senator extra days to do so.But then Mr. Raffensperger sought to enforce a state law that forbids in-person early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, leading to Mr. Warnock’s successful lawsuit.Jason Shepherd, a former chairman of the Cobb County Republican Party, said the push to stop Saturday voting “wasn’t worth the fight” and served to energize Democratic voters.“You can be completely right and it can send the wrong message, because it plays into the Democrats’ narrative about voter suppression,” Mr. Shepherd said on Wednesday.In the end, 28 of Georgia’s 159 counties opened for extra in-person early voting days. Of those, 17 ended up backing Mr. Warnock and 11 went for his Republican challenger, the former football star Herschel Walker.Compared with weekdays, when the entire state was open for in-person early voting, relatively few votes were cast on the extra voting days. Just over 167,000 votes in all were cast combined on the Saturday and Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, along with the Tuesday and Wednesday before the holiday, when just two counties opened for voting. By contrast, 285,000 to 352,000 votes were cast statewide on each day of weekday early voting.But voters who cast ballots during those extra in-person early voting days were likely to tilt heavily toward Mr. Warnock.The largest 14 counties to back Mr. Warnock — including seven in metropolitan Atlanta — all opened for extra early voting days. Just two of the 11 largest counties to back Mr. Walker opened for extra in-person early voting days.Maya King More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Supreme Court Hears Case That Could Transform Federal Elections

      by

      The justices are considering whether to adopt the “independent state legislature theory,” which would give state lawmakers nearly unchecked power over federal elections.WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is hearing arguments on Wednesday about whether to adopt a legal theory that would radically reshape how federal elections are conducted. The theory would give state legislatures enormous and largely unchecked power to set all sorts of election rules, notably by drawing congressional maps warped by partisan gerrymandering.The Supreme Court has never endorsed the “independent state legislature” theory, but four of its conservative members have issued opinions that seemed to take it very seriously.The theory is based on a reading of the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which says: “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”Proponents of the strongest form of the theory say this means that no other organ of state government can alter a legislature’s actions on federal elections. They say that state supreme courts cannot require state laws to conform to state constitutions, that governors may not use their veto power to reject bills about federal elections, that election administrators may not issue regulations adjusting legislative enactments to take account of, say, a pandemic and that voters may not create independent redistricting commissions to address gerrymandering.Understand the U.S. Supreme Court’s New TermCard 1 of 6A race to the right. More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      North Carolina’s Governor Says a Fringe Claim Before the Supreme Court Would Upend Democracy

      by

      Over the past six months, the United States Supreme Court has handed down one misguided ruling after another, stripping Americans of the constitutional right to an abortion, curtailing the regulation of guns and industrial emissions, and muddying the divide between church and state. The people have protested. They’ve organized. And in 2022, they voted.In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the June decision on abortion, the majority wrote that “women are not without electoral or political power.” That’s one thing they got right, and Republicans found that out the hard way in the November midterm elections that they expected to win big. Now, however, the very ability to exercise electoral and political power at the ballot box is hanging in the balance in a case the court is scheduled to hear on Wednesday.Moore v. Harper is a case from North Carolina that state and national Republicans are using to push an extreme legal premise known as the “independent state legislature theory.” While the United States Constitution delegates the authority to administer federal elections to the states, with Congress able to supersede those state decisions, proponents of this theory argue that state legislatures are vested with the exclusive power to run those elections. This view would leave no room for oversight by state courts and put the ability of governors to veto election-related legislation in doubt.The court’s decision on this alarming argument could fundamentally reshape American democracy. Four justices have suggested that they are sympathetic to the theory. If the court endorses this doctrine, it would give state legislatures sole power over voting laws, congressional redistricting, and potentially even the selection of presidential electors and the proper certification of election winners.Indeed, the North Carolina Supreme Court, in a decision earlier this year, said the theory that state courts are barred from reviewing a congressional redistricting plan was “repugnant to the sovereignty of states, the authority of state constitutions and the independence of state courts, and would produce absurd and dangerous consequences.”You can look to North Carolina to see the potential for dire consequences. In 2010, Republicans took over the state legislature in a midterm election. Since then, North Carolina has been ground zero for Republican attempts to manipulate elections. As the state’s attorney general and now governor since 2017, I’ve dealt with Republican legislative leaders as they advanced one scheme after another to manipulate elections while making it harder for populations they have targeted to vote.These schemes robbed voters from the start to the end of an election: a voter ID requirement so strict that a college ID from the University of North Carolina isn’t good enough. No same-day registration during early voting. No provisional ballots for voters who show up at the wrong precinct. Shorter early voting periods eliminated voting the Sunday before Election Day, a day when African American churches hold popular “souls to the polls” events.Fortunately, these measures were stopped in 2016 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which described them as targeting African Americans “with almost surgical precision.”Republicans in the legislature have also gerrymandered districts in diabolical ways. In 2016, state Republicans drew a congressional redistricting map that favored Republicans 10-3. They did so, the Republican chairman of a legislative redistricting committee explained, “because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”North Carolinians have relied on courts and my veto power as governor to foil many of these schemes. In 2022 a successful lawsuit in state court challenging a 2021 gerrymandered congressional map resulted in fair districts, splitting the state’s 14 districts (the state gained a district after the 2020 census) so that Democrats and Republicans each won seven seats in November’s elections. It seemed only right, given the nearly even divide between Democratic and Republican votes statewide. Republican efforts to avoid this result led to the Moore v. Harper appeal now before the Supreme Court.As recently as 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a majority opinion on partisan gerrymandering claims in Maryland and North Carolina that state courts were an appropriate venue to hear such cases but that those claims were political issues beyond the jurisdiction of the federal courts. Retreating from that position on the role of state courts would be a shocking leap backward that would undermine the checks and balances established in state constitutions across the country.Republican leaders in the North Carolina state legislature have shown us how the elections process can be manipulated for partisan gain. And that’s what you can expect to see from state legislatures across the country if the court reverses course in this case.Our democracy is a fragile ecosystem that requires checks and balances to survive. Giving state legislatures unfettered control over federal elections is not only a bad idea but also a blatant misreading of the Constitution. Don’t let the past decade of North Carolina voting law battles become a glimpse into the nation’s future.Roy Cooper, a Democrat, has been the governor of North Carolina since 2017. He was previously elected to four terms as attorney general.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