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      Stolen-Election Myth Fuels G.O.P. Push to Change Voting Laws

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIn Statehouses, Stolen-Election Myth Fuels a G.O.P. Drive to Rewrite RulesRepublican legislators want big changes to the laws for elections and other aspects of governance. A fight over the ground rules for voting may follow.Poll workers preparing absentee ballots for tabulation in Lansing, Mich.Credit…Bryan Denton for The New York TimesFeb. 27, 2021Updated 1:44 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Led by loyalists who embrace former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims of a stolen election, Republicans in state legislatures nationwide are mounting extraordinary efforts to change the rules of voting and representation — and enhance their own political clout.At the top of those efforts is a slew of bills raising new barriers to casting votes, particularly the mail ballots that Democrats flocked to in the 2020 election. But other measures go well beyond that, including tweaking Electoral College and judicial election rules for the benefit of Republicans; clamping down on citizen-led ballot initiatives; and outlawing private donations that provide resources for administering elections, which were crucial to the smooth November vote.And although the decennial redrawing of political maps has been pushed to the fall because of delays in delivering 2020 census totals, there are already signs of an aggressive drive to further gerrymander political districts, particularly in states under complete Republican control.The national Republican Party joined the movement this past week by setting up a Committee on Election Integrity to scrutinize state election laws, echoing similar moves by Republicans in a number of state legislatures.Republicans have long thought — sometimes quietly, occasionally out loud — that large turnouts, particularly in urban areas, favor Democrats, and that Republicans benefit when fewer people vote. But politicians and scholars alike say that this moment feels like a dangerous plunge into uncharted waters. The avalanche of legislation also raises fundamental questions about the ability of a minority of voters to exert majority control in American politics, with Republicans winning the popular vote in just one of the last eight presidential elections but filling six of the nine seats on the Supreme Court.The party’s battle in the past decade to raise barriers to voting, principally among minorities, young people and other Democrat-leaning groups, has been waged under the banner of stopping voter fraud that multiple studies have shown barely exists. “The typical response by a losing party in a functioning democracy is that they alter their platform to make it more appealing,” Kenneth Mayer, an expert on voting and elections at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said. “Here the response is to try to keep people from voting. It’s dangerously antidemocratic.”The most conspicuous of the Republicans’ efforts are a slew of bills raising barriers to casting votes, particularly mail-in ballots.Credit…Robert Nickelsberg for The New York TimesConsider Iowa, a state that has not been a major participant in the past decade’s wars over voting and election rules. The November election saw record turnout and little if any reported fraud. Republicans were the state’s big winners, including in the key races for the White House and Senate.Yet, in a vote strictly along party lines, the State Legislature voted this past week to cut early voting by nine days, close polls an hour earlier and tighten rules on absentee voting, as well as strip the authority of county auditors to decide how election rules can best serve voters.State Senator Jim Carlin, a Republican who recently announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate, made the party’s position clear during the floor debate: “Most of us in my caucus and the Republican caucus believe the election was stolen,” he said.State Senator Joe Bolkcom, a Democrat, said that served as justification for a law that created “a voting system tailored to the voting tendency of older white Republican voters.”“They’ve convinced all their supporters of the big lie. They don’t see any downside in this,” he said in an interview. “It’s a bad sign for the country. We’re not going to have a working democracy on this path.”The issues are particularly stark because fresh restrictions would disproportionately hit minorities just as the nation is belatedly reckoning with a racist past, said Lauren Groh-Wargo, the chief executive of the voting advocacy group Fair Fight Action. The Republican push comes as the rules and procedures of American elections increasingly have become a central issue in the nation’s politics. The Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal-leaning law and justice institute at New York University, counts 253 bills in 43 states that seek to tighten voting rules. At the same time, 704 bills have been introduced with provisions to improve access to voting.The push also comes as Democrats in Congress are attempting to pass federal legislation that would tear down barriers to voting, automatically register new voters and outlaw gerrymanders, among many other measures. Some provisions, such as a prohibition on restricting a voter’s ability to cast a mail ballot, could undo some of the changes being proposed in state legislatures.Such legislation, combined with the renewed enforcement of federal voting laws, could counter some Republican initiatives in the 23 states where the party controls the legislature and governor’s office. But neither that Democratic proposal nor a companion effort to enact a stronger version of the 1965 Voting Rights Act stands any chance of passing unless Democrats modify or abolish Senate rules allowing filibusters. It remains unclear whether the party has either the will or the votes to do that.“Most of us in my caucus and the Republican caucus believe the election was stolen,” State Senator Jim Carlin of Iowa said of Donald J. Trump’s loss to President Biden.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesOn the legal front, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on Tuesday in an Arizona election lawsuit that turns on the enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. That section is the government’s main remaining weapon against discriminatory voting practices after the court struck down another provision in 2013 that gave the Justice Department broad authority over voting in states with histories of discrimination.Those who back the Republican legislative efforts say they are needed to restore flagging public confidence in elections and democracy, even as some of them continue to attack the system as corrupt. In Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, for example, the chairs of House election committees refused for weeks or months to affirm that President Biden won the election. The chairs in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin urged U.S. House members or former Vice President Mike Pence to oppose the presidential electors certified after Mr. Biden won those states’ votes.Some respected Republican lawmakers reject charges that election proposals are bad-faith attempts to advance Republican power. “These are really big tweaks. I get that,” said State Senator Kathy Bernier, who heads an election committee in Wisconsin. “But we do this routinely every session.” Ms. Bernier said the party’s election-law bills, two of which would strengthen ID requirements for absentee ballots and limit ballot drop boxes to one per municipality, were honest efforts to make voting more secure.That said, proposals in many states have little or nothing to do with that goal. Georgia Republicans would sharply limit early voting on Sundays, when many Black voters follow church services with “souls to the polls” bus rides to cast ballots. On Friday, a State Senate committee approved bills to end no-excuse absentee voting and automatic voter registration at motor vehicle offices.Iowa’s legislation, passed this past week, also shortens the windows to apply for absentee ballots and petition for satellite polling places deployed at popular locations like college campuses and shopping centers.Bills in some states to outlaw private donations to fund elections are rooted in the unproven belief, popular on the right, that contributions in 2020 were designed to increase turnout in Democratic strongholds. The nonprofit Center for Technology and Civic Life distributed the $400 million that the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated to underwrite coronavirus protective equipment, polling place rentals, drop boxes and other election needs.Unsurprisingly, some of the most vigorous efforts by Republicans are in swing states where last year’s races for national offices were close.An early voting site for Georgia’s Senate runoff at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta in December. Credit…Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockRepublicans in Georgia, which Mr. Biden won by roughly 12,000 votes, lined up this week behind a State Senate bill that would require vote-by-mail applications to be made under oath, with some requiring an additional ID and a witness signature.Arizona Republicans are backing bills to curtail the automatic mailing of absentee ballots to voters who skip elections, and to raise to 60 percent the share of votes required to pass most citizen ballot initiatives. Legislatures in at least five other Republican-run states are also considering bills making it harder to propose or pass citizen-led initiatives, which often involve issues like redistricting or tax hikes where the party supports the status quo.And that is not all: One Arizona Republican has proposed legislation that would allow state lawmakers to ignore the results of presidential elections and decide themselves which candidate would receive the state’s electoral votes.In Wisconsin, where gerrymanders of the State Legislature have locked in Republican control for a decade, the Legislature already has committed at least $1 million for law firms to defend its redistricting of legislative and congressional seats this year. The gerrymander proved impregnable in November; Democrats received 46 percent of the statewide vote for State Assembly seats and 47 percent of the State Senate vote, but won only 38 percent of seats in the Assembly and 36 percent in the Senate.In New Hampshire, where Republicans took full control of the Legislature in November, the party chairman, Stephen Stepanek, has indicated he backs a gerrymander of the state’s congressional map to “guarantee” that at least one of the state’s two Democrats in the U.S. House would not win re-election.“Elections have consequences,” he told the news outlet Seacoastonline. He did not respond to a request for comment.And in Nebraska, one of only two states that award electoral votes in presidential contests by congressional district, conservatives have proposed to switch to a winner-take-all model after Mr. Biden captured an electoral vote in the House district containing Omaha, the state’s sole Democratic bastion.Conversely, some New Hampshire Republicans would switch to Nebraska’s current Electoral College model instead of the existing winner-take-all method. That would appear to help Republicans in a state where Democrats have won the past five presidential elections.Pennsylvania’s Legislature is pushing a gerrymander-style apportionment of State Supreme Court seats via a constitutional amendment that would elect justices by regions rather than statewide. That would dismantle a lopsided Democratic majority on the court by creating judicial districts in more conservative rural reaches.Many Republicans argue — and some election experts at times agree — that fears about restrictive election laws among Democrats and civil liberties advocates can be overblown. Republicans point to record turnout in November as proof that restrictive laws do not suppress votes.Ms. Bernier of Wisconsin, for example, said she saw little problem with a bill that would allot one ballot drop box for voters in towns like New Berlin, with 40,000 residents, and one for voters in Milwaukee, with 590,000 residents. There were no drop boxes at all, she noted, until state officials made an emergency exception during the pandemic.“The Legislature could say that no drop boxes are necessary at all,” she said. Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford University political scientist and election expert, said he disagreed. Presidential elections always draw more voters, he said, but the grunt work of democracy often occurs in off-year votes for lesser offices where interest is lower. In those elections, “if there are barriers placed in the way of voters, they’re not going to turn out,” he said.Mike Noble, a Phoenix public-opinion expert, questioned whether the Arizona Legislature’s Trumpian anti-fraud agenda has political legs, even though polls show a level of Republican belief in Mr. Trump’s stolen election myth that he calls “mind-boggling.”Republicans who consider themselves more moderate make up about a third of the party’s support in Arizona, he said, and they are far less likely to believe the myth. And they may be turned off by a Legislature that wants to curtail absentee ballot mailings in a state where voters — especially Republicans — have long voted heavily by mail.“I don’t see how a rational person would see where the benefit is,” he said.Some other Republicans apparently agree. In Kentucky, which has some of the nation’s strictest voting laws, the solidly Republican State House voted almost unanimously on Friday to allow early voting, albeit only three days, and online applications for absentee ballots. Both were first tried during the pandemic and, importantly, were popular with voters and county election officials.If that kind of recognition of November’s successes resonated in other Republican states, Mr. Persily and another election scholar, Charles Stewart III of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in a recent study, it could bode well for easing the deep divisions over future election rules. If the stolen election myth continues to drive Republican policy, Mr. Persily said, it could foretell a future with two kinds of elections in which voting rights, participation and faith in the results would be significantly different, depending on which party had written the rules.“Those trajectories are on the horizon,” he said. “Some states are adopting a blunderbuss approach to regulating voting that is only distantly related to fraud concerns. And it could mean massive collateral damage for voting rights.”Susan C. Beachy More

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      We Still Have to Worry About the Supreme Court and Elections

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Campaign to Subvert the 2020 ElectionKey TakeawaysTrump’s RoleGeorgia InvestigationExtremist Wing of G.O.P.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyWe Still Have to Worry About the Supreme Court and ElectionsThe justices are about to consider whether the Voting Rights Act applies to policies that restrict the vote.Contributing Opinion WriterFeb. 25, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesWhen the Supreme Court on Monday rejected Pennsylvania Republicans’ after-the-fact effort to invalidate late-arriving mailed ballots, it was tempting to suppose that the country’s courthouse doors had finally closed on this most litigated of presidential elections.If only it were that simple.True, in denying the Republicans’ petitions, the court didn’t issue an opinion. Of the four votes necessary to accept a case, these two cases (treated by the court as one) garnered only three. So for the official record, the only outcome in Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. DeGraffenreid and in Corman v. Pennsylvania Democratic Party was “denied.”But the three justices who would have accepted the cases — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — issued dissenting opinions that provide both a road map and a rationale for the Supreme Court’s future intervention in the quintessentially state matter of how to conduct elections.Remember Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 presidential election, in which five justices voted to overturn the Florida Supreme Court’s handling of a statewide recount? That decision was based on a theory of equal protection so wacky that the majority opinion insisted that “our consideration is limited to the present circumstances” — that is to say, don’t dare invoke this poor excuse for an opinion as a precedent.That didn’t stop Justice Thomas from citing Bush v. Gore in his dissenting opinion on Monday, and he did so in a particularly shameless fashion. The language he cited wasn’t even from the Bush v. Gore majority opinion, but rather from a separate concurring opinion filed in that case by only three of the majority justices, who argued that the Florida Supreme Court had violated the U.S. Constitution by substituting its will for that of the state Legislature. Justice Thomas invoked that minority portion of the decision to assert that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was constitutionally out of bounds when, citing both the Covid-19 pandemic and the collapse of the Postal Service as its reasons, it added three postelection days for lawful receipt of mailed ballots.He went on to warn that fraud was “more prevalent with mail-in ballots,” citing as evidence a 1994 Federal District Court case, an article in this newspaper from 2012 and the 2018 Republican ballot-harvesting fraud in North Carolina. Such occurrences, he said, raise “the likelihood that courts will be asked to adjudicate questions that go to the heart of election confidence.” This was the reason, he argued, that the Supreme Court should have taken and decided the Pennsylvania cases before the next election cycle.In his inventory of ballot fraud, Justice Thomas of course could not refer to fraud in the 2020 election, because there wasn’t any. Not a problem:We are fortunate that many of the cases we have seen alleged only improper rule changes, not fraud. But that observation provides only small comfort. An election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election confidence. Also important is the assurance that fraud will not go undetected.In other words, Justice Thomas would have it both ways: If there was fraud, the court needed to intervene, and if there was no fraud, the court needed to intervene because the fraud might simply be undetected. Despite his disclaimer, the entire structure of his opinion, suggesting that something bad had happened even if no one could prove it, is fairly read as validating the essence of the Trump narrative.Justice Alito, in a separate dissenting opinion that Justice Gorsuch also signed, was more circumspect about the fraud issue. His emphasis was the urgency of stopping state courts from substituting their judgment for that of the legislatures. He said that even though the election was over and late ballots were too few to have made a difference in Pennsylvania’s vote totals, state courts could be expected to behave in the same way in the future unless the Supreme Court used this occasion to stop them.There are several things to note about the Pennsylvania cases. The most obvious is the absence of a fourth vote. In an initial round in the Pennsylvania cases, in mid-October, Justice Brett Kavanaugh had provided Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch with a fourth vote to grant a stay of the state court decision. But a stay requires five votes rather than four. With Amy Coney Barrett not yet confirmed, the eight justices divided 4 to 4, and the stay was denied without opinions. Justice Kavanaugh withheld his vote on Monday, without explanation. Maybe he decided this was a propitious time to offer some cover for Chief Justice John Roberts, who has voted in nearly all the election cases this fall with the three remaining liberal justices.Justice Barrett was also silent. During her confirmation hearing, Senate Democrats had pressed her to promise recusal from any election cases, given that President Donald Trump had said he needed a prompt replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg so that he would have a majority of justices voting his way in any election disputes. Justice Barrett did not recuse herself from the Pennsylvania case. Perhaps her decision not to provide the fourth vote her dissenting colleagues needed was a kind of de facto recusal, in recognition that the optics of voting to hear a last-ditch Trump appeal would be awkward, to say the least.The deeper question raised by Monday’s development is why Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch are so intent on what would seem to be a counterintuitive goal for conservatives: curbing the power of state courts. I’m cynical enough to think it has to do with how these three understand the position of state legislatures and state courts in today’s political climate. It’s been widely reported that Republican-controlled legislatures are rolling out bills by the dozens to restrict access to the polls, aimed at discouraging the kind of turnout that produced Democratic victories in Georgia last month. The vote-suppression effort has become so aggressive that some Republicans are starting to worry about voter backlash, according to a recent Washington Post article.State courts, on the other hand, are capable of standing in the way of this strategy. When state high-court judges are elected, as they are in many states, they typically run in statewide races that are not subject to the gerrymandering that has entrenched Republican power in states that are much more balanced politically than the makeup of their legislatures reflects. What better way to disable the state courts in their democracy-protecting role than to push them to the sidelines when it comes to federal elections.So there is no way the Supreme Court is finished with elections. Next Tuesday, as it happens, the justices will hear a crucial voting rights case. The case, from Arizona, asks the court to decide for the first time how Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 applies to policies that restrict the vote, through such measures as voter ID requirements.Section 2, which pertains nationwide, is the major remaining provision of the Voting Rights Actfollowing the Supreme Court’s dismantling of the act’s Section 5, in the 2013 Shelby County case. That section barred certain states and smaller jurisdictions from making changes in their election procedures without first receiving federal permission, known as “preclearance.” Section 5 provided vital protection in parts of the country where racism had not released its grip on the levers of power.The issue now is whether Section 2 can be deployed to fill that gap. It prohibits any voting practice that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” It has typically been used to challenge redistricting plans that dilute the electoral power of racial and ethnic minorities. The question of whether it can be useful in challenging the wave of vote-suppression schemes, which can present complex problems of proof, hands the justices arguably the most important civil rights case of their current term.With the country exhausted and still reeling from the turmoil of the 2020 election and its bizarre aftermath, the urge not to think about elections for a while is powerful. I share it. But it’s a luxury the Supreme Court hasn’t given us, not now, not as long as some justices have more to say.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Presidential Primary Calendar Stinks. Now’s the Time to Shake It Up.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Presidential Primary Calendar Stinks. Now’s the Time to Shake It Up.Democrats should take the opportunity to reform an out-of-touch system.Ms. Cottle is a member of the editorial board.Feb. 19, 2021Credit…Jordan Gale for The New York TimesDon’t freak out, but Nevada’s Democrats are already looking ahead to the next presidential election — and, more specifically, how to pick their nominee.On Monday, a bill was introduced in the State Assembly that would replace the current caucus system with a primary. As conceived, the move threatens to throw the party’s national nominating calendar into conflict and chaos.It’s about time.Nevada’s nominating process has had a rocky run of late. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the caucuses, but complex delegate-selection rules led to chaos at the state party’s convention, when Bernie Sanders’s fans became convinced that the process had been “hijacked” for Mrs. Clinton. (Intraparty death threats are rarely a good sign.) The 2020 cycle was less explosive but still bumpy. Mr. Sanders scored a clear win, but there were initially competing claims for second place, the reporting of results was delayed, and Pete Buttigieg’s campaign claimed “irregularities.”Not all of this is poor Nevada’s fault. Caucuses are a convoluted, vaguely anti-democratic way to pick a nominee. The rules are mind-numbing and the process time-consuming, giving an unfair advantage to party activists and people with numerous hours to kill. If anything, Nevada’s 2020 headaches could have been far worse if the party hadn’t scrambled at the 11th hour to shore up its systems in response to the epic failure of the Iowa caucuses.For those who have already repressed the debacle, Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses suffered a meltdown last year. The system “crumbled under the weight of technology flops, lapses in planning, failed oversight by party officials, poor training and a breakdown in communication between paid party leaders and volunteers out in the field,” The Times found. The results were not reported for days and, even then, were a hot mess. More than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, incomplete or flat-out impossible under the rules.It’s not as though the caucus states weren’t aware of the potential for trouble. Post-2016, as part of a push to simplify and clarify the nominating process, the Democratic National Committee urged the state parties to shift to primaries. Most did. The few that refused were instructed to adopt measures to make voting more inclusive. Iowa and Nevada toyed with remote telephone voting, but those plans fell apart over security concerns.Despite adopting changes, including setting up caucus sites in casinos to accommodate workers and providing for early voting, Nevada Democrats have now decided that “the only way we can bring more voices into the process is by moving to a primary,” the state party chairman said in a statement.This is the sensible — and democratic — thing to do. But there’s a hitch.Nevada Democrats aren’t looking simply to shift to a primary system. They are looking to host the first primary election of the presidential cycle. “Nevada’s diverse population and firsthand experience in issues relating to climate change, public lands, immigration, and health care provide a unique voice that deserves to be heard first,” said Jason Frierson, the Assembly speaker, in announcing the bill.Nevada is a lovely, diverse state with much to recommend it. But its attempt to claim pole position in the presidential primaries will not be well received by New Hampshire, which has held that honor for more than a century. New Hampshire so values its first-primary status that state law requires that the state hold its vote at least seven days before any “similar election.” A caucus is considered different enough not to pose a conflict, but if Nevada tries easing toward a primary: Fight on. New Hampshire’s longtime secretary of state has already told the local media, in effect: Relax. I’ll handle it.It’s hard to blame early states for clinging to their privilege. Leading the presidential calendar means they get lavished with time, attention and obscene amounts of money from the candidates, the parties and the legions of journalists who cover the circus. Their voters and their issues receive preferential treatment. Who knows how many Iowa diners would fail if not for all the candidates and journalists jockeying to hobnob with “real Americans”?That said, oceans of words have been devoted to why Iowa and New Hampshire should not have a lock on early voting. Especially for Democrats, these lily-white states are hardly representative of the party’s electorate. This cycle, Joe Biden’s abysmal showing in both Iowa and New Hampshire had many declaring his candidacy deader than disco.After South Carolina Democrats, dominated by Black voters, saved Mr. Biden’s bacon, the calls to overhaul the nominating calendar grew even louder and more pointed. “A diverse state or states need to be first,” Tom Perez told The Times as he was wrapping up his tenure as head of the D.N.C. last week. “The difference between going first and going third is really important.”Yes it is.There is, in fact, a strong argument to be made that no state — even a superdiverse one — should have a permanent claim on that privilege. Many worthy states would love to have their parochial concerns receive saturation coverage during an election. And the denizens of small towns in Iowa and New Hampshire are no more entitled to having candidates fawn all over them than those in North Carolina or Ohio or Maine. The current nominating scheme is not the only option. Plenty of alternatives have been floated, including a system of rotating regional primaries. It’s past time to give them a serious look.Nevada Democrats are aiming to shake things up. The national party should seize the opportunity to shake even harder, reforming a system that’s increasingly out of touch with voters.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How the Pennsylvania GOP is Trying to Increase Their Control of State Courts

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPennsylvania G.O.P.’s Push for More Power Over Judiciary Raises AlarmsAfter fighting the election results, state Republicans are trying to increase their control of the courts. Outraged Democrats and good government groups see it as a new kind of gerrymandering.The Pennsylvania Capitol building, which houses chambers for the State Supreme Court. Under a Republican proposal, the legislative branch would have more control over the courts. Credit…Hilary Swift for The New York TimesFeb. 15, 2021Updated 10:29 a.m. ETWhen the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unanimously rejected a Republican attempt to overturn the state’s election results in November, Justice David N. Wecht issued his own pointed rebuke, condemning the G.O.P. effort as “futile” and “a dangerous game.”“It is not our role to lend legitimacy to such transparent and untimely efforts to subvert the will of Pennsylvania voters,” wrote Justice Wecht, a Democrat who was elected to a 10-year term on the bench in 2016. “Courts should not decide elections when the will of the voters is clear.”Now Pennsylvania Republicans have a plan to make it less likely that judges like Justice Wecht get in their way.G.O.P. legislators, dozens of whom supported overturning the state’s election results to aid former President Donald J. Trump, are moving to change the entire way that judges are selected in Pennsylvania, in a gambit that could tip the scales of the judiciary to favor their party, or at least elect judges more inclined to embrace Republican election challenges.The proposal would replace the current system of statewide elections for judges with judicial districts drawn by the Republican-controlled legislature. Those districts could empower rural, predominantly conservative areas and particularly rewire the State Supreme Court, which has a 5-to-2 Democratic lean.Democrats are now mobilizing to fight the effort, calling it a thinly veiled attempt at creating a new level of gerrymandering — an escalation of the decades-old practice of drawing congressional and state legislative districts to ensure that political power remains in one party’s hands. Democrats are marshaling grass-roots opposition, holding regular town hall events conducted over Zoom, and planning social media campaigns and call-in days to legislators, as well as an enormous voter education campaign. One group, Why Courts Matter Pennsylvania, has cut a two-minute infomercial.Republicans in Pennsylvania have historically used gerrymandering to maintain their majority in the legislature, despite Democratic victories in statewide elections. Republicans have controlled the State House of Representatives since 2011 and the State Senate since 1993.Current schedules for the legislature make it unlikely the Republicans could marshal their majorities in the House and Senate to pass the bill by Wednesday and put the proposal before voters on the ballot in May. Passing the bill after that date would set up a new and lengthy political war for November in this fiercely contested state.Republicans have some history on their side: Pennsylvania voters tend to approve ballot measures.“You should be very suspicious when you see a legislature who has been thwarted by a Supreme Court in its unconstitutional attempts to rig the democratic process then trying to rig the composition of that Supreme Court,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.She added, “It is way too much control for one branch to have over another branch, particularly where one of its charges is to reign in the excesses of the legislative branch.”If the Republican bill becomes law, Pennsylvania would become just the fifth state in the country, after Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi and Illinois, to wholly map its judicial system into electoral districts, according to the Brennan Center. And other states may soon join Pennsylvania in trying to remake the courts through redistricting.Republicans in the Texas Legislature, which is also controlled by the G.O.P., recently introduced a bill that would shift districts for the state appellate courts by moving some counties into different districts, causing an uproar among state Democrats who saw the new districts as weakening the voting power of Black and Latino communities in judicial elections and potentially adding to the Republican tilt of the Texas courts.Gilberto Hinojosa, the chair of the Texas Democratic Party, called the bill a “pure power grab meant to keep Blacks and Latinos from having influence on courts as their numbers in the state grow.”These judicial redistricting battles are taking shape as Republican-controlled legislatures across the country explore new restrictions on voting after the 2020 elections. In Georgia, Republicans in the state legislature are seeking a host of new laws that would make voting more difficult, including banning drop boxes and placing sweeping limitations on mail-in voting. Similar bills in Arizona would restrict mail-in voting, including barring the state from sending out mail ballot applications. And in Texas, Republican lawmakers want to limit early voting periods.The nationwide effort by Republicans follows a successful four-year drive by the party’s lawmakers in Washington to reshape the federal judiciary with conservative judges. Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, until recently the majority leader, and Mr. Trump, the Senate confirmed 231 federal judges, as well as three new Supreme Court justices, over the former president’s four-year term, according to data maintained by Russell Wheeler, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution.In a state like Pennsylvania, which has two densely populated Democratic cities and large rural areas, this could give outsize representation to sparsely populated places that lean more conservative, particularly if the legislature resorts to a gerrymandering tactic similar to one used in Pennsylvania in 2011.“Republicans have been good at gerrymandering districts in Pennsylvania, or good in the sense that they’ve been successful,” said State Senator Sharif Street, a Democrat. “I think they would like to remain successful, and they are confident that they can gerrymander judicial districts.”Republicans in the state legislature argue that their proposed move would give different regions of Pennsylvania more representation.Russ Diamond, the Republican state representative who is sponsoring the bill, said in an email that regional representation was necessary for the judiciary “because the same statewide consensus which goes in making law should come to bear when those statutes are heard on appeal, are applied in practical real-life situations, and when precedent is set for the future of the Commonwealth.”State Representative Russ Diamond during a town hall meeting in Llewellyn, Pa. He sponsored the bill to reshape the judiciary, after first introducing a similar one in 2015. Credit…Lindsey Shuey/Republican-Herald, via Associated Press“The overall goal is to include the full diversity of Pennsylvania’s appellate courts,” Mr. Diamond added. “There is no way to completely depoliticize the courts, other than choosing judges via random selection or a lottery system. Every individual holds some political opinion or another.”Geographic diversity, however, rarely equates to racial diversity in the courts. The four states that use judicial districts in state Supreme Court elections — Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi and Kentucky — have never had more than one justice of color on the court at any given time, according to data from the Brennan Center.While eight states use some form of judicial districts to elect judges, Pennsylvania’s proposal remains an outlier on a few key elements. First, a partisan legislature would have the power to redraw the districts every 10 years, whereas those elsewhere remain for longer or are based on statute. Additionally, the judicial districts in Pennsylvania would not be bound by or based on any existing legislative or congressional districts, created from scratch by the Republican-controlled legislature.The move has caught the attention of national Democratic groups that are at the forefront of redistricting battles across the country.“A decade ago, Pennsylvania Republicans gerrymandered themselves into majorities in the legislature and congressional delegation,” said Eric H. Holder Jr., the former United States attorney general and current chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “Now that their grip on power has been forcibly loosened by the courts, they want to create and then manipulate judicial districts in a blatant attempt to undermine the independence of the judiciary and stack the courts with their conservative allies.”Because the bill has already passed the House once, in 2020, it needs only to pass both chambers of the state legislature again to make it on the ballot.Further stoking Democrats’ fears: The bill does not need the signature of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat. Since it would be an amendment to the Constitution, it would head to the ballot as a referendum question to be voted on in the next election (if the bill passes before Wednesday, it would go to voters during the May primary). Historically, Pennsylvania voters have voted more in favor of ballot measures than against them, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.Good government groups have teamed up with Democrats to mount a huge voter education campaign, anticipating that the judicial question may soon be on the ballot. Progressive groups including the Judicial Independence Project of PA, a new coalition that includes the voting rights group Common Cause, have been holding digital town halls about the judicial redistricting proposal, with attendance regularly topping 100 people.On a Thursday evening late last month, more than 160 people logged into Zoom to hear from coalition leaders about the bill and to hatch plans to further mobilize against it. Rebecca Litt, a senior organizer from a local Indivisible group, proposed a call-your-legislator day. Ricardo Almodovar, an organizing director with We the People PA, another progressive group, noted the graphics and other social media campaigns already underway to help educate voters.“We’re also trying to humanize the courts,” Mr. Almodovar explained during a smaller session with southeastern Pennsylvania residents, sharing stories of how specific court decisions “impact our lives.”Throughout the full, hourlong meeting, organizers repeatedly sought to make the stakes very clear.“We are in the last legislative session of this,” said Alexa Grant, a program advocate with Common Cause. “So we are the last line of defense.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Pennsylvania G.O.P.’s Push for More Power Over Judiciary Raises Alarms

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPennsylvania G.O.P.’s Push for More Power Over Judiciary Raises AlarmsAfter fighting the election results, state Republicans are trying to increase their control of the courts. Outraged Democrats and good government groups see it as a new kind of gerrymandering.The Pennsylvania Capitol building, which houses chambers for the State Supreme Court. Under a Republican proposal, the legislative branch would have more control over the courts. Credit…Hilary Swift for The New York TimesFeb. 15, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETWhen the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unanimously rejected a Republican attempt to overturn the state’s election results in November, Justice David N. Wecht issued his own pointed rebuke, condemning the G.O.P. effort as “futile” and “a dangerous game.”“It is not our role to lend legitimacy to such transparent and untimely efforts to subvert the will of Pennsylvania voters,” wrote Justice Wecht, a Democrat who was elected to a 10-year term on the bench in 2016. “Courts should not decide elections when the will of the voters is clear.”Now Pennsylvania Republicans have a plan to make it less likely that judges like Justice Wecht get in their way.G.O.P. legislators, dozens of whom supported overturning the state’s election results to aid former President Donald J. Trump, are moving to change the entire way that judges are selected in Pennsylvania, in a gambit that could tip the scales of the judiciary to favor their party, or at least elect judges more inclined to embrace Republican election challenges.The proposal would replace the current system of statewide elections for judges with judicial districts drawn by the Republican-controlled legislature. Those districts could empower rural, predominantly conservative areas and particularly rewire the State Supreme Court, which has a 5-to-2 Democratic lean.Democrats are now mobilizing to fight the effort, calling it a thinly veiled attempt at creating a new level of gerrymandering — an escalation of the decades-old practice of drawing congressional and state legislative districts to ensure that political power remains in one party’s hands. Democrats are marshaling grass-roots opposition, holding regular town hall events conducted over Zoom, and planning social media campaigns and call-in days to legislators, as well as an enormous voter education campaign. One group, Why Courts Matter Pennsylvania, has cut a two-minute infomercial.Republicans in Pennsylvania have historically used gerrymandering to maintain their majority in the legislature, despite Democratic victories in statewide elections. Republicans have controlled the State House of Representatives since 2011 and the State Senate since 1993.Current schedules for the legislature make it unlikely the Republicans could marshal their majorities in the House and Senate to pass the bill by Wednesday and put the proposal before voters on the ballot in May. Passing the bill after that date would set up a new and lengthy political war for November in this fiercely contested state.Republicans have some history on their side: Pennsylvania voters tend to approve ballot measures.“You should be very suspicious when you see a legislature who has been thwarted by a Supreme Court in its unconstitutional attempts to rig the democratic process then trying to rig the composition of that Supreme Court,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.She added, “It is way too much control for one branch to have over another branch, particularly where one of its charges is to reign in the excesses of the legislative branch.”If the Republican bill becomes law, Pennsylvania would become just the fifth state in the country, after Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi and Illinois, to wholly map its judicial system into electoral districts, according to the Brennan Center. And other states may soon join Pennsylvania in trying to remake the courts through redistricting.Republicans in the Texas Legislature, which is also controlled by the G.O.P., recently introduced a bill that would shift districts for the state appellate courts by moving some counties into different districts, causing an uproar among state Democrats who saw the new districts as weakening the voting power of Black and Latino communities in judicial elections and potentially adding to the Republican tilt of the Texas courts.Gilberto Hinojosa, the chair of the Texas Democratic Party, called the bill a “pure power grab meant to keep Blacks and Latinos from having influence on courts as their numbers in the state grow.”These judicial redistricting battles are taking shape as Republican-controlled legislatures across the country explore new restrictions on voting after the 2020 elections. In Georgia, Republicans in the state legislature are seeking a host of new laws that would make voting more difficult, including banning drop boxes and placing sweeping limitations on mail-in voting. Similar bills in Arizona would restrict mail-in voting, including barring the state from sending out mail ballot applications. And in Texas, Republican lawmakers want to limit early voting periods.The nationwide effort by Republicans follows a successful four-year drive by the party’s lawmakers in Washington to reshape the federal judiciary with conservative judges. Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, until recently the majority leader, and Mr. Trump, the Senate confirmed 231 federal judges, as well as three new Supreme Court justices, over the former president’s four-year term, according to data maintained by Russell Wheeler, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution.In a state like Pennsylvania, which has two densely populated Democratic cities and large rural areas, this could give outsize representation to sparsely populated places that lean more conservative, particularly if the legislature resorts to a gerrymandering tactic similar to one used in Pennsylvania in 2011.“Republicans have been good at gerrymandering districts in Pennsylvania, or good in the sense that they’ve been successful,” said State Senator Sharif Street, a Democrat. “I think they would like to remain successful, and they are confident that they can gerrymander judicial districts.”Republicans in the state legislature argue that their proposed move would give different regions of Pennsylvania more representation.Russ Diamond, the Republican state representative who is sponsoring the bill, said in an email that regional representation was necessary for the judiciary “because the same statewide consensus which goes in making law should come to bear when those statutes are heard on appeal, are applied in practical real-life situations, and when precedent is set for the future of the Commonwealth.”State Representative Russ Diamond during a town hall meeting in Llewellyn, Pa. He sponsored the bill to reshape the judiciary, after first introducing a similar one in 2015. Credit…Lindsey Shuey/Republican-Herald, via Associated Press“The overall goal is to include the full diversity of Pennsylvania’s appellate courts,” Mr. Diamond added. “There is no way to completely depoliticize the courts, other than choosing judges via random selection or a lottery system. Every individual holds some political opinion or another.”Geographic diversity, however, rarely equates to racial diversity in the courts. The four states that use judicial districts in state Supreme Court elections — Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi and Kentucky — have never had more than one justice of color on the court at any given time, according to data from the Brennan Center.While eight states use some form of judicial districts to elect judges, Pennsylvania’s proposal remains an outlier on a few key elements. First, a partisan legislature would have the power to redraw the districts every 10 years, whereas those elsewhere remain for longer or are based on statute. Additionally, the judicial districts in Pennsylvania would not be bound by or based on any existing legislative or congressional districts, created from scratch by the Republican-controlled legislature.The move has caught the attention of national Democratic groups that are at the forefront of redistricting battles across the country.“A decade ago, Pennsylvania Republicans gerrymandered themselves into majorities in the legislature and congressional delegation,” said Eric H. Holder Jr., the former United States attorney general and current chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “Now that their grip on power has been forcibly loosened by the courts, they want to create and then manipulate judicial districts in a blatant attempt to undermine the independence of the judiciary and stack the courts with their conservative allies.”Because the bill has already passed the House once, in 2020, it needs only to pass both chambers of the state legislature again to make it on the ballot.Further stoking Democrats’ fears: The bill does not need the signature of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat. Since it would be an amendment to the Constitution, it would head to the ballot as a referendum question to be voted on in the next election (if the bill passes before Wednesday, it would go to voters during the May primary). Historically, Pennsylvania voters have voted more in favor of ballot measures than against them, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.Good government groups have teamed up with Democrats to mount a huge voter education campaign, anticipating that the judicial question may soon be on the ballot. Progressive groups including the Judicial Independent Project of PA, a new coalition that includes the voting rights group Common Cause, have been holding digital town halls about the judicial redistricting proposal, with attendance regularly topping 100 people.On a Thursday evening late last month, more than 160 people logged into Zoom to hear from coalition leaders about the bill and to hatch plans to further mobilize against it. Rebecca Litt, a senior organizer from a local Indivisible group, proposed a call-your-legislator day. Ricardo Almodovar, an organizing director with We the People PA, another progressive group, noted the graphics and other social media campaigns already underway to help educate voters.“We’re also trying to humanize the courts,” Mr. Almodovar explained during a smaller session with southeastern Pennsylvania residents, sharing stories of how specific court decisions “impact our lives.”Throughout the full, hourlong meeting, organizers repeatedly sought to make the stakes very clear.“We are in the last legislative session of this,” said Alexa Grant, a program advocate with Common Cause. “So we are the last line of defense.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Stacey Abrams and Lauren Groh-Wargo: How to Turn Your Red State Blue

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      Credit…June ParkSkip to contentSkip to site indexOpinionStacey Abrams and Lauren Groh-Wargo: How to Turn Your Red State BlueIt may take 10 years. Do it anyway.Credit…June ParkSupported byContinue reading the main storyStacey Abrams and Ms. Abrams was the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia in 2018. Ms. Groh-Wargo was her campaign manager. They opened Fair Fight Action in late 2018.Feb. 11, 2021We met and became political partners a decade ago, uniting in a bid to stave off Democratic obsolescence and rebuild a party that would increase the clout of regular, struggling Georgians. Our mission was clear: organize people, help realize gains in their lives, win local races to build statewide competitiveness and hold power accountable.But the challenge was how to do that in a state where many allies had retreated into glum predictions of defeat, where our opponents reveled in shellacking Democrats at the polls and in the Statehouse.That’s not all we had to contend with. There was also a 2010 census undercount of people of color, a looming Republican gerrymander of legislative maps and a new Democratic president midway into his first term confronting a holdover crisis from the previous Republican administration. Though little in modern American history compares with the malice and ineptitude of the botched pandemic response or the attempted insurrection at the Capitol, the dynamic of a potentially inaccurate census and imminent partisan redistricting is the same story facing Democrats in 2021 as it was in 2011. State leaders and activists we know across the country who face total or partial Republican control are wondering which path they should take in their own states now — and deep into the next decade.Georgians deserved better, so we devised and began executing a 10-year plan to transform Georgia into a battleground state. As the world knows, President Biden won Georgia’s 16 electoral votes in November, and the January runoff elections for two Senate seats secured full congressional control for the Democratic Party. Yet the result wasn’t a miracle or truly a surprise, at least not to us. Years of planning, testing, innovating, sustained investment and organizing yielded the record-breaking results we knew they could and should. The lessons we learned can help other states looking to chart a more competitive future for Democrats and progressives, particularly those in the Sun Belt, where demographic change will precede electoral opportunity.We realize that many people are thinking about Stacey’s political future, but right now we intend to talk about the unglamorous, tedious, sometimes technical, often contentious work that creates a battleground state. When fully embraced, this work delivers wins — whether or not Donald Trump is on the ballot — as the growth Georgia Democrats have seen in cycle after cycle shows. Even in tough election years, we have witnessed the power of civic engagement on policy issues and increases in Democratic performance. This combination of improvements has also resulted in steady gains in local races and state legislative races, along with the continued narrowing of the statewide loss margin in election after election that finally flipped the state in 2020 and 2021.The task is hard, the progress can feel slow, and winning sometimes means losing better. In 2012, for example, we prevented the Republicans from gaining a supermajority in the Georgia House of Representatives, which would have allowed them to pass virtually any bill they wanted. We won four seats they had drawn for themselves, and in 2014 we maintained those gains — just holding our ground was a victory.The steps toward victory are straightforward: understand your weaknesses, organize with your allies, shore up your political infrastructure and focus on the long game. Georgia’s transformation is worth celebrating, and how it came to be is a long and complicated story, which required more than simply energizing a new coterie of voters. What Georgia Democrats and progressives accomplished here — and what is happening in Arizona and North Carolina — can be exported to the rest of the Sun Belt and the Midwest, but only if we understand how we got here.Understand why you’re losing.To know how to win, we first had to understand why a century of Democratic Party dominance in Georgia had been erased. For most of the 20th century, Georgia Democrats had existed in a strained alliance of rural conservatives, urban liberals and suburbanites, all unconvinced that voting Republican would serve their ends. After serving as the incubator of the Gingrich revolution in the early 1990s, Georgia turned sharply to the right. When Democrats lost U.S. Senate seats in 2002 and 2004, as well as the governorship in 2002, it showed that former conservative Democrats had fully turned Republican. The Democratic Party lost its grip on power. By 2010, Democrats were losing every statewide race, and in 2012 the State Senate fell to a Republican supermajority. Clearly, Democrats had to change tactics. More

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      A New Delay for Census Numbers Could Scramble Congressional Elections

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA New Delay for Census Numbers Could Scramble Congressional ElectionsCensus data needed for legislative districts won’t be ready until September. Could that alter the balance of power in the House?If Illinois cannot approve district maps by Sept. 1, the State Constitution shifts mapmaking power from the Democratic-controlled Legislature to a bipartisan panel.Credit…Andrew Nelles for The New York TimesMichael Wines and Feb. 11, 2021Updated 9:11 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The delivery date for the 2020 census data used in redistricting, delayed first by the coronavirus pandemic and then by the Trump administration’s interference, now is so late that it threatens to scramble the 2022 elections, including races for Congress.The Census Bureau has concluded that it cannot release the population figures needed for drawing new districts for state legislatures and the House of Representatives until late September, bureau officials and others said in recent interviews. That is several months beyond the usual April 1 deadline, and almost two months beyond the July 30 deadline that the agency announced last month. The bureau did not respond to a request for comment but is expected to announce the delay on Friday.The holdup, which is already cause for consternation in some states, could influence the future of key districts. And with Democrats holding a slim 10-seat House majority, it even has the potential to change the balance of power in the House and some state legislatures, according to Michael Li, the senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. States need the figures this year to redraw district lines for the 435 seats in the House of Representatives and for thousands of seats in state legislatures.The delay means there will be less time for the public hearings and outside comment required in many states, and less time once maps are drawn to contest new district lines in court, as often happens after redistricting.“The concern in some of those states is that the legislators will simply use a special session to secretly pass maps with zero public scrutiny, and then count on a tight timetable to eke out at least one election cycle” before a court could require new maps to be drawn, said Kathay Feng, the redistricting and representation director at Common Cause.The challenges extend beyond just drawing up districts. State and local election officials need time after new political maps are approved to redraw voting precincts and overhaul voter rolls to ensure that everyone is directed to the proper place to vote. And prospective candidates generally cannot file for office until they know whether they live within the new boundaries of the districts they are seeking to represent.“States are literally sitting on their hands, asking, ‘When will the data come?’” said Jeffrey M. Wice, an adjunct professor at New York Law School and a longtime expert on census and redistricting law.The Census Bureau’s delay stems mostly from problems the pandemic caused in last year’s counts of certain places, including college dorms and housing for agricultural workers. College students, for example, should be counted in dormitories and apartments near their schools, but the pandemic sent most students home last spring just as the census was starting. Now experts must find and locate them properly — and also ensure they are not double-counted as living with their parents.Such problems can be fixed, Census Bureau officials say, but doing so takes time. The location of millions of people is in play, and allotting or placing seats during reapportionment and redistricting can turn on the location of hundreds.It remains unclear how serious the political repercussions of the delay will be, but early indications are that Democrats have more reason to worry.By Mr. Li’s calculation in a report issued on Thursday, Republicans will most likely draw the maps for 181 House seats and Democrats for 49 seats, possibly rising to 74 if the New York Legislature (which is controlled by Democrats) chooses to override the state’s new independent redistricting commission.The map for the rest of the seats in the House will be drawn either in states where power is split between the parties or in states with nonpartisan redistricting commissions, which have mostly proliferated in blue states like California and Virginia and purple states like Michigan.That means Republicans, who have already shown an appetite for extreme gerrymandering in states like North Carolina and Wisconsin, could benefit disproportionately if too little time exists to contest maps drawn by legislatures for 2022 and the rest of the decade.The biggest targets for increasing one party’s share of Congress are the fast-growing Southern states of Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, where Republicans oversee the drawing of maps through control of both houses of the legislature.In Texas, Mr. Li expects Republicans to draw maps that would ensure Republican control of three new House seats that the state is expected to add because of population growth, and two existing seats now held by Democrats. The delay in receiving census data “could be used in some states to game the redistricting process, by leaving less time for legal challenge,” Mr. Li said.“It used to be, for example, that Texas finished redistricting in June, which gave affected parties six months to litigate,” he said. “Now a map might not be approved until November, which gives you less time to gather evidence and expert testimony.”Students outside a coronavirus testing site at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this month. The pandemic complicated census counts on campuses across the country.Credit…Lauren Justice for The New York TimesSuits that challenge redistricting often involve complicated fact-finding about whether a state has engaged in racial gerrymandering (either packing Black and Latino voters into a small number of districts to limit the scope of their political power, or spreading them thinly so they cannot easily elect a candidate).Democrats could try to squeeze out a few more seats in states they control through gerrymandering. But outside of New York, where the Democratic-controlled Legislature has the power to reject maps drawn by an independent commission, the party has slimmer pickings, Mr. Li said.Some Democrats are more sanguine. Population shifts in fast-growing states like Texas are concentrated in Democratic-leaning cities and suburbs, making it harder to draw districts that dilute the party’s power, said Patrick Rodenbush, a spokesman for the party’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee.In North Carolina and Pennsylvania — which both have elected Democratic governors — State Supreme Courts have ruled that the Republican gerrymanders of the last redistricting cycle violate State Constitutions, raising a barrier to future distorted maps.And in other big states that Republicans controlled and gerrymandered a decade ago — Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio among them — either Democratic governors or nonpartisan redistricting commissions place limits on overly skewed legislative maps.For other reasons, the delay in census totals has the potential to upend map drawing in Illinois and Ohio.Democrats control 13 of the 18 House seats in Illinois, in part because of gerrymandering. (The state’s total number could drop to 17 after the House is reapportioned this year.) But if final maps cannot be approved by Sept. 1, the Illinois Constitution shifts mapmaking power from the Democratic-controlled Legislature to a panel of four Democrats, four Republicans and one person randomly chosen from the two parties. Giving Republicans a say in map drawing would probably increase the share of seats they are likely to win.The same could be true in the State Senate, where Democrats now control 70 percent of the chamber’s seats, and in the State House, where they hold 60 percent of them. The Legislature is aware of the Constitution’s redistricting provision, and Democrats could try to address the issue, although how is unclear.“Illinois is an example of where the Legislature is talking about using old data to produce maps that are largely the same as they currently have — and letting people sue,” Ms. Feng, of Common Cause, said.The reverse applies in Ohio, where a 2018 referendum amended the State Constitution to hand congressional and state legislative map duties to a bipartisan commission. The same amendment returns redistricting duties to the Republican-dominated Legislature if the commission fails to approve political maps by Oct. 31, barely a month after the Census Bureau’s current estimate for finishing population calculations. Some experts said legal challenges to redistricting based on the Census Bureau’s delay seemed likely, from voters or candidates who would want to extend the period for drawing maps.“If the necessary data aren’t available at the time the law says the state redistricting must be done, then a court could relax the deadline,” said Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford law professor and co-director of the Stanford-M.I.T. Healthy Elections Project. In some states, courts granted similar pandemic-related extensions for deadlines related to balloting procedures in the November election, like voting by mail.The rationale is that “given extraordinary circumstances, we’re doing something different this time,” Mr. Persily said.The delay in receiving the census data could also cause the completion of map drawing to bump up against candidates’ filing deadlines in states like Virginia and New Jersey, which will hold elections for the State Legislature in November, as well as states with early 2022 filing deadlines for later primary elections.In Virginia, officials said, the delay raises the prospect of holding state legislative elections three years in a row — using old maps in 2022 if the new ones are not finished, using new maps in 2023 and conducting scheduled legislative elections in 2024.“Whenever this crazy process ends, election administrators have to deal with all these lines,” said Kimball W. Brace, a Washington-based redistricting consultant who usually works with Democratic politicians. “Precincts, voter registration systems — all of that is now in a shorter timetable.”Come Election Day, he said, “Either you’re ready, or you’re not.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Gerrymander Battles Loom, as G.O.P. Looks to Press Its Advantage

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Gerrymander Battles Loom, as G.O.P. Looks to Press Its Advantage With new census results coming, Republicans control redistricting in key states, while Democrats prepare for legal challenges and look to redraw some maps of their own. Demonstrators at a rally protesting gerrymandering outside the Supreme Court building in Washington in 2019.Credit…Brendan Mcdermid/ReutersReid J. Epstein and Jan. 31, 2021Updated 6:37 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — With the election over and Democrats in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, officials in both parties are bracing for a bruising new battle with a different balance of power: the redrawing of congressional maps, where Republicans hold the advantage in many state legislatures across the country, including in key battleground states.Republicans hold total control of redistricting in 18 states, including Florida, North Carolina and Texas, which are growing in population and expected to gain seats after the 2020 census is tabulated. Some election experts believe the G.O.P. could retake the House in 2022 based solely on gains from newly drawn districts.Already, Republicans are discussing redrawing two suburban Atlanta districts held by Democrats to make one of them more Republican; slicing Democratic sections out of a Houston district that Republicans lost in 2018; and carving up a northeastern Ohio district held by Democrats since 1985.“I would say that the national vote could be the same as this year two years from now, and redistricting by itself would easily be enough to alter who controls the chamber,” said Samuel S. Wang, the director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. He estimated that reapportionment alone could net the Republicans three seats, and gerrymandering in North Carolina, Georgia and Florida another five seats.With Democrats holding a 222-211 edge, Republicans would probably need to flip just six seats to win back the majority. But Dr. Wang and other good-government experts cautioned that other factors could determine the majority.Democrats will try to redraw districts in their favor in states like New York, Illinois and Maryland, they said. Some battleground states have adopted nonpartisan independent redistricting commissions. And President Biden did not create a wave of downballot victories for Democrats in the November elections, so there are fewer surprise winners who could easily lose their seats in 2022.While partisan warfare on Capitol Hill draws most of the national attention, the battles over redistricting are among the fiercest and most consequential in American government. Reapportionment and redistricting occurs every 10 years after the census, with states with the fastest-growing populations gaining seats in Congress at the expense of those with slower-growing or shrinking populations. The balance of power established by gerrymandering can give either party an edge that lasts through several election cycles; court challenges — even if successful — can take years to unwind those advantages.Outside of the State Capitol in Austin. Texas is expected to pick up House seats after the 2020 census results are tabulated.Credit…Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesThis year, Texas (with potentially three new seats) and Florida (two) are expected to be the biggest winners, while Illinois, New York and, for the first time, California will each lose seats once the Census Bureau makes the reapportionment figures official. That could give Republicans an inherent advantage in the midterm elections in November 2022 — regardless of Mr. Biden’s popularity then.The bureau is not expected to deliver its data until late July, several months behind schedule, giving state lawmakers and redistricting commissions far less time than usual to draw the maps and deal with inevitable court challenges before the 2022 primaries begin.Democrats have been fighting on slanted terrain with redistricting ever since Republicans ran the table during the 2010 midterm elections and drew themselves favorable gerrymandered maps in 2011 and 2012. Though courts invalidated them in states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina, many still remain.Even though Democrats won control of the House in 2018, “the lingering effects of partisan gerrymandering, disproportionately by Republican controlled legislatures, make it harder for the Democrats to hold onto control or win control,” said Bernard Grofman, a professor of politics at the University of California, Irvine, “because they have to win probably closer to 52 percent of the national vote, or definitely more than 51 percent.”A host of states have adopted independent commissions to draw maps, arguing that people without a vested interest would be more likely to draw fairer maps. Some good-government groups and political scientists have lobbied for more changes, such as the use of algorithms to determine district boundaries, though there is broad debate about what would be effective in erasing the partisan tilt of the process.Adam Kincaid, director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, is preparing for legal challenges to redistricting.Credit…T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesRepublicans have, for the most part, adopted an elections-have-consequences attitude toward the mapping process. Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the party’s main mapmaking organization, said his energy will be directed toward the inevitable legal battles that will follow this year’s partisan map-drawing.“If it wasn’t for lawsuits that were brought in Pennsylvania and North Carolina and Florida, Republicans would be in the majority today,” Mr. Kincaid said. The things to focus on, he said, were “defending maps drawn by Republican legislatures and also being more aggressive about going after Democrat gerrymanders in the blue states.”As they look to reframe the electoral maps, Republicans are debating how aggressive they should be. They can push the boundaries and try to win the most seats possible in 2022, which puts them at risk of losing more seats in future years in the growing suburbs that are attracting waves of Democrats. Or they can aim for a smaller number of Republican districts that can create a more durable majority, with the potential to last the decade.The central redistricting battlegrounds will be in Texas and Florida. Though both states are controlled by Republicans, the population growth has come largely from people of color and suburbanites — demographics that have trended toward Democrats during the Trump era.“Their ability to manipulate the map to the tune of 30 seats like they did last time is no longer on the table,” said Kelly Ward Burton, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “If the map plays out fairly, we will end up with more competitive seats than we have now.’’Kelly Ward Burton, the executive director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, at her Santa Barbara home.Credit…Damon Casarez for The New York TimesStill, the combination of sophisticated mapmaking software and the abbreviated map-drawing period will give Republican lawmakers a far freer hand to put into effect favorable districts in the next year. And Republicans in states like Texas and Georgia will benefit from the Supreme Court decision in 2013 on the Voting Rights Act, which lifted the requirement that they get federal approval for redistricting.“I’m very concerned,” said Manny Diaz, the former Miami mayor who this month became the new chairman of the Florida Democratic Party. He is spending his first weeks as chairman devising a plan to challenge and offset Republican efforts.A decade ago, Mr. Diaz led the Fair Districts Now effort, which proposed a constitutional amendment offering guidelines for redistricting in Florida. Voters approved the measure in 2010, in time for the 2011 redistricting. But Republicans in the legislature ignored many of the principles, installing a highly gerrymandered map that helped Republicans win 17 of the 27 House seats in 2012 while President Barack Obama won re-election.Although there were near immediate legal challenges, it was not until 2015 that the State Supreme Court struck down the redrawn map, saying eight districts had been aggressively gerrymandered to favor Republicans.In Texas, a similar concern is rippling through the electorate. On Thursday, the State Senate’s redistricting committee held a virtual hearing, welcoming public commentary. For over two hours, pleas came in from across the state: please draw fair maps.“I believe that gerrymandering is an existential threat to the nation,” said Rick Kennedy, who lives in Austin and ran for Congress as a Democrat in 2018 and 2020.Though the data for reapportionment is still outstanding, Phil King, the Republican who leads the redistricting committee in the Texas State House, said almost all of the population growth had come from the triangle between Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. He noted that the committee was probably going to have to extend some rural districts into urban areas to keep the population at roughly 850,000 per district.“If you’re in West Texas where most of the counties are 10 to 20,000 people, you’ve got to reach into those urban areas to pick up some population,” Mr. King said.Yet those slivers into urban areas are what Democrats and good-government groups denounce as a contorted form of gerrymandering, weakening one area’s political voice by spreading it among other districts — and one that disproportionately affects people of color.“We’ll continue to see racial gerrymandering and partisan gerrymandering in terms of packing in the urban areas,” said Allison Riggs, the interim executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, referring to a gerrymandering tactic of creating a heavily partisan district by “packing” it with supporters. Ms. Riggs argued gerrymandering lawsuits against the 2010 Republican-drawn maps in Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.Members listening as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, delivers an address in the House Chambers on the opening day of the 117th Congress in the Capitol Building.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesDemocrats will draw lines for far fewer congressional seats. The biggest Democratic state, California, outsources redistricting to a commission, as do Colorado, Virginia and Washington. And Mr. Kincaid said Republicans were preparing to challenge Democratic maps in states like Illinois, Maryland and New Mexico.In New York, where Democrats control redistricting for the first time since 1991, half of the Republican congressional delegation — either seven or eight members, depending on the outcome of one undecided race — could see their districts disappear if Democrats pursue the most aggressive gerrymandering available.“It’s reasonable to expect that when the voters of New York have given Democrats a supermajority control of both houses of the legislature, that might create an opportunity that didn’t exist in the past,” said Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.Some election experts argued that Republicans were so successful at drawing gerrymandered maps 10 years ago that it would be difficult for them to add to their advantage now.“The Democrats were able to win the House in 2018 despite the fact that there were some very gerrymandered states,” said Jonathan Cervas, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University who studies gerrymandering.Democrats are also in stronger position nationally then they were in 2011. Key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have divided government with Democratic governors who could veto maps, setting up likely court battles. In Virginia, Democrats won control of the state government in 2019 and in 2020 voters approved a nonpartisan redistricting commission, eliminating the ability of either party to dominate the redrawing of districts.Other battleground states like Michigan and Arizona have established independent commissions, rather than partisan legislatures, that will draw the new maps.Ben Diamond, a Florida state representative who leads the Democratic redistricting efforts there, is calling on his colleagues in the legislature to commit “to transparency and public engagement” and “a meaningful scheduled way of doing this.”He added: “The sooner we can lay out how this work is going to be done, from a public engagement and a transparency perspective, the better,”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More