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      Anti-Abortion Republicans Don’t Want You to Notice Ohio’s Issue 1

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      There’s an extraordinarily important referendum in Ohio next week that the anti-abortion movement hopes most citizens don’t notice. It’s a vote that demonstrates why reproductive rights and the preservation of democracy, two issues that have catalyzed recent Democratic victories, are intertwined. That’s almost certainly why it’s being held in the torpid month of August, a time when a great many people would rather think about almost anything other than politics.Issue 1, which Ohio Republican legislators put on the ballot, would make future ballot measures to change the state Constitution harder to pass in two key ways. If it’s approved, citizens who hope to put amendments to the voters would first have to collect signatures in each of the state’s 88 counties, up from 44 now. And to pass, constitutional ballot initiatives would need to win 60 percent of the vote, rather than a simple majority.The measure’s import may not be immediately clear to voters, but it’s meant to thwart a November ballot initiative that will decide whether reproductive rights should be constitutionally protected in Ohio, where a sweeping abortion ban is tied up in court. Publicly, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, has denied that abortion is the motivation behind Issue 1. But at a private event in May, he told a group of supporters, “It’s 100 percent about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our Constitution.”The outcome of next Tuesday’s vote will resonate nationally, because the strategies of both Ohio abortion-rights supporters and opponents are being replicated elsewhere. Throughout the country, reproductive-rights advocates, faced with legislatures that have insulated themselves from the popular will, are turning to referendums to restore some of what was lost when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And throughout the country, abortion opponents understand that to keep abortion illegal, they need to change the rules.Most voters, as we’ve seen repeatedly, want abortion to be legal. Last August, a Kansas measure declaring that abortion isn’t protected by the state’s Constitution was defeated by an overwhelming 18 percentage points. In the midterms, there were abortion-related initiatives on the ballots in five states, including Kentucky and Montana, and the pro-choice side won all of them. Encouraged by these victories, activists are planning ballot measures to restore reproductive rights in states including Arizona, Florida, Missouri and, of course, Ohio.Ohio has been trending right for years, but gerrymandering ensures that the State Legislature is far more extreme than the population. As The Statehouse News Bureau, a news organization devoted to Ohio politics, has reported, “Ohio’s voter preference over the past 10 years splits about 54 percent Republican and 46 percent Democratic.” Yet under Ohio’s highly gerrymandered maps, Republicans control 67 of 99 State House seats and 26 of 33 State Senate seats. The Ohio Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled these maps unconstitutional, but before the last election, federal judges appointed by Donald Trump ordered the state to use them.“This August election is sort of a final vote that gives the people any chance to say, at some point we still exert power here,” said David Pepper, former head of the Ohio Democratic Party and author of “Laboratories of Autocracy,” a book about undemocratic right-wing statehouses.Ohio, you might remember, is the state that forced a 10-year-old rape victim to flee to Indiana for an abortion. Its prohibition on abortion once fetal cardiac activity is detectable — usually at around six weeks of pregnancy — has no exceptions for rape or incest. The Republican governor, Mike DeWine, told The Statehouse News Bureau that even though he signed the law, he thinks it goes farther than voters want, and he urged lawmakers to amend it, though he didn’t specify how. But with Republicans in gerrymandered districts more worried about primary challenges from the right than about general election challenges from the center, they have little incentive to respond to public sentiment. Instead, some anti-abortion lawmakers want even stricter anti-abortion laws, and one, Representative Jean Schmidt, has said she’d consider a ban on birth control.The November ballot initiative to make abortion a constitutional right is a chance for Ohio voters to circumvent their unrepresentative representatives. With this August initiative, the Republicans are working to head off the voters by essentially asking them to disenfranchise themselves. Because most people are unlikely to give up their rights quite so easily, Republicans scheduled the vote at a time when few are paying attention. Just last December, Ohio Republicans voted to effectively eliminate August special elections because of their expense and low turnout. But for this election, they reversed themselves.It is not just Democrats who oppose Issue 1; the former Ohio governors John Kasich and Bob Taft, both of whom are Republicans, do as well. “This is a fundamental change in Ohio’s voting rights,” Taft said during a League of Women Voters forum in June, adding, “I just think it’s a major mistake to approve or disapprove such a change at the lowest-turnout election that we have.”The task for opponents of Issue 1 isn’t to convince voters, but to alert them. “It’s just a math question: Can you reach enough people on a short timeline?” said Yasmin Radjy, executive director of the progressive group Swing Left, which is running a get out the vote drive in Ohio. Polling has been mixed: A July USA Today/Suffolk University poll found that 57 percent of voters oppose the measure, but one from Ohio Northern University shows a tossup, with a little more than 42 percent supporting Issue 1, 41 percent opposing it, and the rest neutral or undecided. (Interestingly, the Ohio Northern poll also shows that almost 54 percent of voters support a constitutional amendment to protect reproductive rights, suggesting that some voters aren’t connecting Issue 1 to abortion.) As The Columbus Dispatch points out, there hasn’t been an August vote on a ballot initiative in Ohio in almost a century, making the outcome unpredictable.Issue 1’s backers are doing their best to confuse Ohioans with ads suggesting, bizarrely, that the initiative is about defending parents’ rights against those who, as one spot said, “put trans ideology in classrooms and encourage sex changes for kids.” This is such dishonest agitprop that it’s challenging to even parse the logic behind it, but essentially, Issue 1 proponents are pretending that language in the November referendum saying that “individuals” have the right to make their own “reproductive decisions” implies that children have the right to transition without parental consent.If the right prevails on Issue 1 — and probably even if it doesn’t — you can expect to see the blueprint repeated in other places. Already, Republicans in states including Florida, Missouri and North Dakota, recognizing the danger that direct democracy poses to their own abortion bans, are trying to make the ballot initiative process much more onerous.In May, Dean Plocher, the Republican speaker of the Missouri House, angry that a bill creating new obstacles to citizen-led ballot initiatives had stalled in the State Senate, warned that, in the law’s absence, there would be a referendum to “allow choice,” which would “absolutely” pass. If that were to happen, he said, the Senate “should be held accountable for allowing abortion to return to Missouri.” It’s not clear whom exactly he thought the Senate should be accountable to. He certainly didn’t mean the 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. More

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      Alabama Scrambles to Redraw Its Voting Map After a Supreme Court Surprise

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      State lawmakers have until Friday to come up with new congressional districts that do not illegally dilute the power of Black voters.Under orders from the Supreme Court to produce a voting map that no longer illegally dilutes the power of Black voters in Alabama, the state’s lawmakers are now facing a high-stakes scramble to come up with an acceptable replacement by the end of this week.A little over a month after the court’s surprise ruling, the Alabama legislature will convene for a special five-day session on Monday, with the Republican supermajority having given little public indication of how it plans to fulfill a mandate to craft a second district that allows Black voters to elect a representative of their choice — one who could well be a Democrat.The effects of the revised map, which must be passed by Friday and approved by a federal court, could reverberate across the country, with other states in the South confronting similar voting rights challenges and Republicans looking to hold onto a razor-thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives next year.The session also comes at a pivotal moment in the debate over the constitutionality of factoring race into government decisions, as conservatives have increasingly chipped away at the 1965 Voting Rights Act and other longstanding judicial protections centered on equality and race.“The eyes of the nation are looking at you,” Evan Milligan, one of several Alabama residents who had challenged the legality of the map, told lawmakers during a committee hearing in Montgomery on Thursday. “If you can cut out the noise, look within — you can look to history, you can make a mark in history that will set a standard for this country.”Alabama has a long list of bitter disputes over the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark law born out of the civil rights movement whose key provisions were gutted by a 2013 Supreme Court decision. Litigation forced the creation of Alabama’s first majority-Black congressional district in 1992, and the seat has been represented by a Black Democrat ever since then.But the current fight stems from lawsuits filed to oppose the map drawn after the 2020 census. In a state where 27 percent of the population is Black, the Republican-controlled legislature packed nearly a third of the Black population into that one district. The state’s remaining six districts each elected a white Republican.There is little disagreement that voting in Alabama is highly polarized, but lawyers for the state legislature attributed the situation to politics rather than race. (The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that a gerrymander that discriminates against one party’s voters is a political problem, not a legal one.)Evan Milligan, an Alabama resident who sued over the state’s voting map, speaking with reporters outside the Supreme Court in Washington last year.Patrick Semansky/Associated Press“Black Alabamians’ ‘candidates of choice’ tend to lose elections in Alabama not because they are Black or because they receive Black support, but because they are Democrats,” the state’s lawyers wrote.And with about 80 percent of Black voters in Alabama identifying as Democrats or leaning toward Democratic candidates, according to the Pew Research Center, “that just makes them easy prey in terms of redistricting,” said Seth C. McKee, a University of Oklahoma professor who has written about political realignment in the South. “And once Republicans get control, it’s just difficult for them not to dominate.”But a federal panel of three judges unanimously said the map had most likely violated the Voting Rights Act and ordered it redrawn, four months before the 2022 primary elections. The Supreme Court, while agreeing to consider the challenge, allowed the map to go into effect ahead of the November elections.Many experts expected the Supreme Court to say in the Alabama case what it essentially said in its decision outlawing affirmative action in education: Making allowances to remedy discrimination against one group inevitably ends up discriminating against other groups.However, in June, the court narrowly upheld Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the principal remaining clause of the law, which outlaws any election law or rule that discriminates based on race, color or language. That decision has already had ramifications elsewhere: a similar lawsuit is now moving forward in Louisiana, while voting rights advocates in Georgia have begun sparring with the state over whether the ruling affects similar lawsuits there.“We’re already showing how this opinion is going to have ripple effects,” said Abha Khanna, who represented some of the Alabama plaintiffs as the head of the Elias Law Group’s redistricting practice. She added, “You are sending a message to states and jurisdictions.”The Alabama legislature now has until Friday to create another map that gains approval from a federal court, and has solicited public proposals. Should the legislature fall short, the map could again be challenged, leaving open the possibility that the court would draw its own map and cut out the legislature altogether.“It is critical that Alabama be fairly and accurately represented in Washington,” said Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, as she formally summoned the legislature back for the special session. “Our legislature knows our state better than the federal courts do.”But it leaves Republicans with a task that could jeopardize the electoral security of one of their own in Congress. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report now marks the once solidly Republican First and Second Congressional Districts as toss-ups, citing “the presumption that one of their seats will ultimately become a Montgomery and Mobile-based Black majority seat that comfortably elects a Democrat.”On Thursday, multiple Black Republicans spoke during the committee hearing, including Belinda Thomas, a Dale County councilwoman and Republican Party official who later described herself as “living proof” that the current map made it possible for Black candidates to succeed. Some residents and officials also raised concerns about diminishing the representation of rural communities and economic opportunity under some of the proposed maps.State Senator Rodger Smitherman comparing congressional maps during a special session on redistricting at the Alabama Statehouse in Montgomery in 2021.Mickey Welsh/The Montgomery Advertiser, via Associated PressDemocrats appeared divided over which plan to back, with some lawmakers supporting one that relies on a combination of traditionally Democratic voting blocs to create a new district in order to avoid drawing on racial lines. At least one of the plaintiffs wore a T-shirt emblazoned with their preferred map, which would enshrine the 18 counties of Alabama’s Black Belt, the stretch of historically rich soil that fueled cotton plantations worked by slave labor, into two districts with at least 50 percent of the Black voting population.“I want myself and my community to have a seat at the table, rather than be on the menu,” said Shalela Dowdy, a Mobile resident and one of the plaintiffs.But notably absent from the public discussion on Thursday was any plan backed by the Republican supermajority. State Representative Chris Pringle, a Republican from Mobile, said that a final map would be shared before a committee meeting on Monday, although Democrats balked at being left out of the process and at the public getting little time to review a final plan.“This is a really tortured process,” said State Representative Chris England, a Democrat from Tuscaloosa. He added that “everybody else has been presenting the maps that they believe best represent the state of Alabama, give everybody an opportunity to be represented, but the supermajority has not.”Mr. Pringle said that the committee tasked with overseeing the creation of the new map had been overwhelmed with a number of submissions, including from as far away as France and New Zealand. A little over a dozen had been made public online or in a hearing, with Mr. England sharing a few more maps circulated among the committee on Twitter on Friday evening.“We have been pretty much overwhelmed,” Mr. Pringle said.Adam Liptak More

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      A Century Ago, Golf Fans Watched a ‘Do-or-Die’ Moment

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      Bobby Jones won the first of his four U.S. Opens at a course near what is now Kennedy Airport. The New York Times was there.Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at a moment in the history of golf that will be recreated where it happened 100 years ago tomorrow. We’ll also get details on why there will probably be more squabbling over the maps for New York’s congressional districts.Bobby Jones in 1927, four years after he won the U.S. Open at Inwood Country Club.Fox Photos/Getty ImagesOn July 15, 1923, 100 years ago tomorrow, a 21-year-old golfer named Bobby Jones stood just off the 18th fairway at Inwood Country Club, now just across from Kennedy International Airport. My colleague Corey Kilgannon explains how Jones made history:Jones had squandered a commanding lead in a playoff for the U.S. Open the day before, but he still had a chance to salvage a victory over the Scottish star Bobby Cruickshank — if Jones made a daunting shot. The New York Times described what happened as “truly miraculous.”“Without a moment’s hesitation,” The Times said, “Jones drew his No. 1 iron out of the bag, took a momentary look at the lie, glanced at the flag and swung. The ball flew off the face of his club, rose in the air and carried squarely on the green, 190 yards away.” The ball landed within six feet of the cup.That moment will be memorialized on Saturday at Inwood, where several of Jones’s descendants are expected at a club tournament and dinner. Among them is a grandson, Dr. Bob Jones IV, who said his grandfather had been on a losing streak and was considering quitting championship golf until his “do-or-die moment” in 1923.“When he got to Inwood, he was really considering that this might be his last tournament,” Dr. Jones said. “If he had not executed that shot and won, I think he would have given up tournament golf and become an obscure sports trivia item.”Instead, Jones drilled the ball next to the hole and two-putted to win the first of his four U.S. Opens.It jump-started golf’s most successful amateur career, one that would include Jones’s 13 majors, four of them in a single calendar year (1930) — golf’s Grand Slam. He became a lawyer but later designed the Augusta National Golf Club and co-founded the Masters tournament.Bobby Jones receiving the trophy after winning the U.S. Open in 1923.Edwin LevickHis triumph at Inwood came at a time when golf had assumed a place in the debonair lives of the well-to-do in the Jazz Age, when the New York area was the cradle of golf in America. There’s a reason F. Scott Fitzgerald made the blasé Jordan Baker a golfer in “The Great Gatsby,” published two years after Jones’s Inwood victory. Babe Ruth and the Three Stooges used to frequent Van Cortlandt, a public course in the Bronx.Inwood will try to recapture the old-fashioned vibe on Saturday. On several holes, players will have to use hickory-shafted replicas of Jones’s clubs. For the putting contest, they will have to use a replica of Jones’s favorite putter, which was known as Calamity Jane, and old-fashioned golf balls. For the dinner in the clubhouse, guests are encouraged to wear Jazz Age dress.But first, during the cocktail hour, they will get a chance to replicate Jones’s storied shot from the same spot. If they can. It is still a daunting shot, even with modern high-compression golf balls and titanium-shafted clubs.“With a wooden shaft, it’s a lot harder to get the ball up in the air,” said Kyle Higgins, the club’s head pro, who added that Jones often played in a long-sleeve dress shirt and tie — something Higgins has tried himself, to get the feel of hitting the way Jones did. (“It’s definitely restrictive and makes it pretty tough to swing,” he said.)Jones had wasted a three-shot lead in the final round to let Cruickshank into a playoff. But Jones’ shot on 18 “sealed the fate of the little Scottish gamecock,” The Times reported, and “opened up the portals of fame” to Jones.The celebration, with spectators carrying Jones triumphantly toward the clubhouse as a kilted bagpiper wailed away, is known to many club members even today.“The day is less about competition and more about celebrating the anniversary,” said the club’s golf chairman, Brian Ziegler. “We try to make sure everyone who joins is aware of the club’s history, and we knew we needed to celebrate the 100th anniversary.”WeatherIt’s going to be mostly cloudy, with temperatures in the 80s. There’s a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon persisting into the evening. At night, temps will fall to the mid-70s.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Aug. 15 (Feast of the Assumption).The latest New York newsSeth Harrison/USA Today NetworkPolice fatally shoot man after report of stolen fruit: A 37-year-old man was shot by the police in New Rochelle, N.Y., on July 3 after he was accused of eating grapes and a banana without paying, his family’s lawyer said. The man died a week later.Mayor turns to his religious base: As signs of trouble have arisen in recent weeks, Mayor Eric Adams has leaned heavily on the religious segment of his multiethnic, outer Manhattan base for support.One man’s war on pickleball: “Paddleball Paul” is making his last stand to eradicate pickleball from the handball courts of Central Park. It’s not going very well.More squabbling over mapsCarlos Bernate for The New York TimesA New York appeals court ordered the state’s congressional map redrawn yet again. Or re-re-redrawn.Language aside, the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court in Albany sided with Democrats in a long-running legal fight, saying that the districts drawn last year on orders from the state’s highest court had been only a temporary fix. The justices ordered the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission to restart a process that would effectively give the Democrat-dominated State Legislature final say over the contours of New York’s 26 House seats for the rest of the decade.My colleague Nicholas Fandos writes that if that decision is upheld, as many as six Republican-held seats could go the Democrats’ way.The state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, will have the final say, because Republican leaders immediately said they would appeal. And it was the Court of Appeals that blocked Democrats’ attempt to gerrymander the maps of the state’s congressional districts last year. The high court said then that the Democrats had violated the state Constitution and ignored the will of voters who approved a 2014 constitutional amendment intended to limit political influence in redistricting.The current district lines were drawn by a court-appointed expert last year to maximize competition. The new map helping Republicans flip four seats on the way to taking control of the House.If Thursday’s ruling stands, both parties believe that Democrats could draw maps that would pass muster legally while making re-election almost impossible for incumbent Republicans, such as Representatives Mike Lawler and Marc Molinaro in the Hudson Valley, or Anthony D’Esposito and George Santos on Long Island and in Queens.New Democratic seats in New York could help offset expected Republican gains in North Carolina, where a newly conservative top court is allowing the G.O.P. to replace a more neutral map. Separately, Democrats won an unexpected victory at the U.S. Supreme Court. The court said Alabama had used a map that watered down the power of Black voters in a decision that could affect redistricting in several southern states.Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top House Democrat, praised Thursday’s ruling and called the current New York congressional map undemocratic. METROPOLITAN diaryBarefoot on the FDear Diary:It was a hot summer day in the late 1990s. Dressed in a sundress and slide-style sandals, I was about to step onto an arriving F at 14th Street when one of my sandals slipped off and fell between the train and the platform and then down onto the tracks.I sheepishly entered the car and looked for a seat, praying that no one had noticed. Of course, several people had“Well, that’s a first!” said one of them, an older man.With my bare foot tucked behind my sandaled one, I spent the rest of the ride home to Brooklyn pondering what I would do once I got off.Should I walk through the station and the three blocks to my apartment with one sandal and one bare foot? Should I remove the other shoe and go fully barefoot?As we pulled into the station, a woman sitting a few seats away approached me and pulled something from her bag.“Excuse me,” she said, “but I saw what happened when you got on the train, and I wanted to offer you this pair of flip-flops.”— Megan WormanIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you on Monday. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Johnna Margalotti and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      This Is One Republican Strategy That Isn’t Paying Off

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      In 2011, determined to push back the ascendant Democratic coalition that elected America’s first Black president, Republicans capitalized on their control of legislatures and governor’s mansions in 20 states to enact measures designed to suppress minority Democratic voters.Barack Obama’s successful campaign for the presidency in 2008 had provoked fear in Republican ranks that the conservative coalition could no longer maintain its dominance. Getting 52.9 percent of the popular vote, Obama was the first Democratic presidential nominee to break 50 percent in the 32 years since Jimmy Carter won with 50.1 percent, in 1976.Republicans counterattacked, mounting a concerted drive to disenfranchise Democrats, a drive that gained momentum with the June 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder. The court ruled that Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which required states and jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to obtain preclearance for any change in election law, procedure or regulation, was unconstitutional.Within hours of the Shelby decision, Republicans announced plans both to enforce laws that had been blocked by the federal government and to pass laws designed to prevent Democrats from casting ballots.Greg Abbott, then the attorney general of Texas, was first out of the gate, immediately declaring that the state would revive a voter identification law that had been barred under Section 5: “With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately. Photo identification will now be required when voting in elections in Texas.”In a 2019 report, the liberal Brennan Center for Justice found:Overall, 25 states have put in place new restrictions since 2010 — 15 states have more restrictive voter ID laws in place (including six states with strict photo ID requirements), 12 have laws making it harder for citizens to register (and stay registered), 10 made it more difficult to vote early or absentee, and three took action to make it harder to restore voting rights for people with past criminal convictions.All of which raises the question: How effective has the onslaught of state-level legislation been at raising the odds for Republican candidates?The apparent answer: not very.“Contemporary election reforms that are purported to increase or decrease turnout tend to have negligible effects on election outcomes,” Justin Grimmer and Eitan Hersh, political scientists at Stanford and Tufts, write in their June paper, “How Election Rules Affect Who Wins.”“Contrary to heated political rhetoric,” Grimmer and Hersh write, “election policies have small effects on outcomes because they tend to target small shares of the electorate, have a small effect on turnout, and/or affect voters who are relatively balanced in their partisanship.”How about partisan gerrymandering? Did the Shelby decision open the door to disenfranchising political opponents by allowing Republican legislatures to reduce the number of “minority opportunity” congressional and state legislative districts likely to elect Black or Hispanic Democrats — a process known as retrogression?Again: apparently not.Nicholas Stephanopolous of Harvard Law School, Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California and Christopher Warshaw of George Washington University compared every congressional, State Senate and State House district before and after the lines were redrawn to accommodate population shifts in the 2020 census in their paper “Non-Retrogression Without Law.”“Our primary finding,” they write,is that there was little retrogression in formerly covered states. In sum, the number of minority opportunity districts in these states actually rose slightly. We also show that formerly covered states were largely indistinguishable from formerly uncovered states in terms of retrogression. If anything, states unaffected by Shelby County retrogressed marginally more than did states impacted by the ruling.These two papers raise some intriguing questions.If changes in election laws, especially those affecting voter turnout, have little influence on partisan outcomes, why should the average citizen care about these developments?Conversely, even if the laws have only marginal influence on election outcomes, couldn’t that marginal difference become crucial in very close elections? The contest for attorney general in Arizona in 2022, for example, was won by just over 500 votes out of more than 2.5 million cast.The authors of the two papers cited above, along with other experts in election law, reject out of hand the notion that the often minimal partisan effect of regressive legislation should dampen the continuing effort to make voting easier and more accessible.Richard Hasen, a specialist in election law at U.C.L.A., emailed in response to my inquiry asking for his view of the two papers:Even if it turns out that laws intended to suppress the vote do not have that effect overall and in the aggregate, that would not justify such laws. A state should not have the right to put stumbling blocks in front of eligible voters. Such laws violate the rights and dignity of each voter, and such laws should have to be justified by real, empirically verifiable interests in preserving the integrity of the vote or serving some other key state purpose.Grimmer and Hersh argued in an email that their work should prompt increased public interest in election law:First, there are a lot of reasons legislators, activists, or political parties might want to reform laws that have nothing to do with the change in laws affecting outcomes. For instance, changing laws might improve the functioning of elections and increase trust in the electoral process. We might think some changes to election laws are simply the right thing to do based on our ethical values.In addition, Grimmer and Hersh argue, the minimal effects of changes in the law on election outcomes means that partisans on both sides “will have to win on the merits of their arguments rather than through changing the rules of the game. We think that’s a pretty optimistic story for democratic governance.”Marc Elias, a founding partner of Elias Law Group and a longtime Democratic election lawyer, raised the point that even very small shifts can determine the outcome in extremely close races.Grimmer and Hersh’s reply:In our paper, we concede that on the very rare occasions that an election is decided with a razor thin margin, nearly everything that happened could explain a candidate’s victory — a seasonal flu, a rainstorm, a “hanging chad,” etc. That said, even some of the most hotly contested policies have effects smaller than the margin Mr. Elias quotes from Arizona. For example, in our paper we estimate that the ban on out-of-precinct voting in Arizona only yielded Republicans 177 votes, even though this policy was a major source of dispute in the Brnovich Supreme Court decision. So even if a policy such as that had been implemented in 2022 and everything else remained the same, the Arizona attorney general result would have remained unchanged.In support of their argument, Grimmer and Hersh create a hypothetical case study: “Suppose a state recently held a close election in which 51 percent of voters supported the Democratic candidate and 49 percent of voters supported the Republican candidate.” In response, the Republican legislature enacts a law that “imposes additional requirements to vote” on 4 percent of the electorate containing voters who are 60-40 Democratic. The law will produce a “a 3-percentage point decline in turnout in this group.”If the 51-49 election is run again with this new voter suppression regulation, they continue, “the policy would cause a 0.12 percentage point decline in the overall turnout. And it would cause a 0.011 percentage point decline in the two-party vote share for the Democratic candidate.”The result?50.989 percent of voters would support the Democratic candidate while 49.011 percent of voters would support the Republican candidate. If the state had one million eligible voters, the policy would deter 720 Democratic voters and 480 Republican voters, netting the Republicans a 240-vote shift.Interestingly, if this hypothetical is applied to the Arizona attorney general race I mentioned, the voter suppression law would have changed the Democratic victory into a Republican one by adding a net of 600+ Republican votes.In addition to Hasen, I asked a number of scholars and voting rights proponents to comment on the two papers.There was general agreement, with some caveats, in the case of the Stephanopolous, McGhee and Warshaw paper. The Grimmer-Hersh paper provoked a wider range of reactions.Kevin Morris, a researcher in the democracy program at the Brennan Center, did not fault the Grimmer-Hersh paper, but stressed that “As the authors do not dispute, the impact of partisan outcomes in statewide races is not the only or even primary reason to be concerned about those restrictions.”Grimmer and Hersh are careful to note, Morris continued, that “restrictive voting laws usually disproportionately harm voters of color. Whether or not this has a partisan impact on statewide results, this is a significant harm in and of itself.”Kareem Crayton, senior director for voting and representation at the Brennan Center, argued in an email that the elimination of the preclearance requirements under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act has placed cumbersome and time-consuming burdens on private lawyers bringing voting rights cases.Preclearance, Crayton wrote, required “a submission outlining the state’s intentions, its underlying data, and supporting documentation,” all of which provided “major sources of foundational evidence for any such lawsuit.”The lack of this crucial information, Crayton continued,has meant that Section 2 plaintiffs must gather much of this material through discovery, a litigation tool that involves far more time and resources than when Section 5 was operational. Alabama’s current illegal congressional map has stood for almost a full election cycle, denying Black voters an equal opportunity to elect candidates of choice. At least part of this unjust delay is due to the extra time needed to build the factual case showing the Section 2 violation.Guy-Uriel Charles, a law professor at Harvard who directs its Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, argued in an email that “from a democracy perspective,” partisan outcomes are “the wrong way to think about voting rights.”What matters most, in Charles’s view, “is whether voter suppression laws prevent eligible voters — whether those voters are Republicans or Democrats; Black, White, Asian, Native, or Latino; live in the South or the North; poor or rich, college educated or not — from exercising what ought to be a fundamental right.”In addition to Elias, there are others who challenge Grimmer and Hersh’s portrayal of minimal effects on election outcomes resulting from new legislation.Thad Kousser, a political scientist at U.C. San Diego, wrote by email that he sees “two possible caveats to Grimmer and Hersh’s overall message that voter participation reforms have ‘essentially no effect on partisan advantage.’”First, Kousser wrote, “even marginal partisan effects can be consequential in a nail-bitingly close election.” He pointed to an “illustrative example” that Grimmer and Hersh use:a reform that increased turnout by 1.25 percentage points overall — a size similar to the impact of many real-world reforms — would yield a decrease in the Republican candidate’s vote margin of 7,500 votes, out of 487,500 votes cast. Because the authors assume in their example that the state overall is strongly Republican, this would only reduce “the two-party share for the Republican candidate from 78.46 percent to 77.00 percent.” In that example, it would not be large enough to swing the election. But of course, if the state were much more closely contested, those 7,500 votes could change the winner. And if the votes were concentrated in a few legislative districts, they could also play an important role in those outcomes.Second, Kousser wrote:There are some recent reforms that may have significantly larger impacts than those reviewed by Grimmer and Hersh. California’s recent law that shifts most off-cycle local elections onto the same schedule as even-year presidential and gubernatorial elections is proving to have major impacts on the size and composition of the electorates voting for mayors, county supervisors, and school boards.Kousser pointed to a 2022 paper, “Who votes: City election timing and voter composition” — by Zoltan L. Hajnal, Vladimir Kogan and G. Agustin Markarian, political scientists at U.C. San Diego, Ohio State and Loyola University-Chicago — which examined the changed composition of the electorate in California as cities shifted from holding local elections on days separate from federal contests to holding them on the same day, known as “on cycle elections.”When cities shift to on-cycle elections, Hajnal and his two colleagues write, the non-Hispanic white share, previously two-thirds of the vote, “decreases by nearly 10 percentage points” in presidential election years and “by 5.7 points when they are concurrent with midterm elections.”The Latino share increases “from about 18 percent in off-cycle elections to just under 25 percent when these elections are consolidated with presidential contests.” The Asian American “share of the electorate increases by 2.3 percentage points when cities move to the same date as presidential elections,” which may not seem like much “but it’s important to keep in mind that Asian Americans account for only 7.7 percent of the electorate in off-cycle elections, so this represents an increase of 30 percent.”The changed composition of the electorate in on- and off-cycle elections is equally remarkable for young and old voters. The authors found that older voters “account for nearly half of off-cycle voters. But the share of older voters drops almost 22 points in local elections that coincide with presidential elections and 13 points for midterm elections.” The share cast by younger voters, in turn, “almost doubles during presidential elections.”In the case of all these factors — race, ethnicity and age — Hajnal, Kogan and Markarian conclude that “on-cycle elections produce a more representative electorate.”Along similar lines, four political scientists, Michael P. McDonald, Juliana K. Mucci and Daniel A. Smith, all of the University of Florida, and Enrijeta Shino of the University of Alabama, found significant turnout increase in states adopting mail voting.In their June 2023 paper, “Mail Voting and Voter Turnout,” the four write thateven before the 2020 election, we show voter turnout across the states is consistently higher in every general election over the past decade in states with greater shares of overall ballots cast by mail. Drawing on turnout data from the 2012-2020 Current Population Survey and the Cooperative Election Study, we find states with greater usage of mail voting experience higher overall voter turnout.During the 2018 governor’s race in Georgia, between Brian Kemp, the Republican secretary of state, and Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate, Kemp gave voice to the precise anxiety of Republicans generally: that they might be swamped by a growing Democratic electorate.An audio recording leaked from an October 2018 fund-raising event caught Kemp as he was warning his supporters:As we were going into the start of early voting with the literally tens of millions of dollars that they are putting behind the get out and vote efforts for their base, a lot of that was absentee ballot requests that had just an unprecedented number of that, which is something that continues to concern us especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote, which they absolutely can, and mails those ballots in.Kemp went on to win, but two years later, despite the flood of voting restrictions since 2010, turnout in the 2020 presidential election was the highest in 30 years, according to the U.S. census.What this suggests is that the American electorate is determined to exercise the franchise and is resistant to legislated hindrances — more so than many would expect. This does not bode well for a Republican Party that for the moment has applied its money, energy and strategic skill to reducing Democratic turnout and suppressing Democratic votes.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

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      Utah Supreme Court to Hear Arguments Over G.O.P. Map Splitting Salt Lake County

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      The Utah Supreme Court will hear arguments over whether a congressional map drawn to dilute Democratic votes is subject to judicial review, or a political issue beyond its reach.The 550,000 voters in Salt Lake County, Utah’s most populous, handed Joseph R. Biden Jr. an 11-percentage point victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 contest for president. A year later, in November 2021, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature drew a new political map that carved up the county, putting pieces of it in each of the state’s four congressional districts — and ensuring that Republican voters would outnumber Democrats in all of them.On Tuesday, the Utah Supreme Court will consider whether to wade into the increasingly pitched nationwide battle over partisan gerrymanders. The justices will decide whether the state’s courts can hear a lawsuit challenging the House map, or whether partisan maps are a political issue beyond their jurisdiction.The U.S. Supreme Court considered the same question in 2019 and decided that the maps were beyond its purview. But voting rights advocates say Utah’s Constitution offers a stronger case than the federal one for reining in political maps.“There’s a very clear provision in the State Constitution that says all power is inherent in the people, and that they have the right to alter and reform their government,” said Mark Gaber, a lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington-based advocacy group representing the plaintiffs. He said other relevant provisions in the State Constitution, but absent from the federal Constitution, include guarantees of free elections and the right to vote.State Senator Scott D. Sandall, Republican co-chair of the State Legislature redistricting committee that drew the House map, did not respond to requests for comment for this article.In court filings, legislators said that the State Constitution gave them exclusive authority to draw political maps, and that the plaintiffs were trying to impose “illusory standards of political equality” on the mapmaking process.Though Utah is a conservative state, no one argues that four Republican-dominated districts are inevitable. “If you just draw a very compact circle around the middle of Salt Lake County, you’re going to get a Democratic district,” Mr. Gaber said.Rather, the central issue in the case is whether Republican legislators had a constitutional right to maintain their party’s monopoly on the four seats through a map that was beyond the purview of judges to review.The Utah case could have national implications — not merely for the political balance in the closely divided U.S. House of Representatives but also for the emerging body of legal precedents that influence how courts rule in other states.With the Supreme Court removing the federal courts from deciding partisan gerrymander cases, state courts are becoming a crucial battleground for opponents of skewed maps. Joshua A. Douglas, an expert on state constitution protections for voting at the University of Kentucky, said the growing body of legal precedents in state gerrymandering cases was important because many state constitutions share similar protections for elections and voters, often derived from one another.Courts in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Alaska, New York and, last week, New Mexico have ruled that partisan gerrymanders can be unconstitutional. So have courts in Ohio and North Carolina. However, the Ohio court proved unable to force the Legislature to comply with its rulings, and the North Carolina decision was overturned in April after elections shifted the court’s partisan balance from Democratic to Republican.The Kentucky Supreme Court will hear a challenge to that state’s congressional and legislative maps in September. And a lawsuit contesting an extreme Republican gerrymander of the Wisconsin Legislature is widely expected after an April election gave progressives a majority on the state’s high court.Perhaps the closest analogy to the Utah gerrymander is in Nashville, where the Republican-run state legislature’s latest congressional map divided the city’s onetime Democratic-majority House district among three heavily Republican districts. Democrats have not challenged the map in state courts, presumably because they see little prospect of winning in a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees.In Utah’s case, however, the State Supreme Court’s five justices do not have reputations for bending easily to political winds. They are chosen through a merit-based selection process.The Utah plaintiffs — the state chapter of the League of Women Voters; the advocacy group Mormon Women for Ethical Government and a handful of Utah voters — accuse the State Legislature not just of illegally gerrymandering the state’s congressional map but of ignoring voters’ explicit instructions not to do so.The State Constitution allows voters to enact new laws, and to repeal ones that the Legislature enacted, through ballot initiatives. In 2018, voters narrowly approved a law outlawing maps that were unduly skewed to favor a candidate or party, and allowing voters to enforce that mandate through lawsuits. The Legislature later repealed that law and then drew the congressional map that quartered Salt Lake County. Plaintiffs in the suit argue that the repeal violated a provision in the State Constitution stating that citizens “have the right to alter or reform their government as the public welfare may require.” And they say that the gerrymandered map ignores a host of state constitutional provisions, including guarantees of free speech, free association and equal protection — provisions that they say should be read to prohibit partisan maps.For their part, Republican legislators contend that they had the right to repeal the redistricting law, just as they can any other state law. And they say the plaintiffs’ aim is no different than their own: to tilt the playing field in their favor.Katie Wright, the executive director of Better Boundaries — the grass-roots group that led the successful effort to pass the 2018 redistricting law and is backing the lawsuit — said there is a difference between the two. She noted that the Legislature’s disclosure of its new maps in 2021 sparked an unusually large public outcry that continues even today.“The reason we have these maps is to keep the people who are in power in power,” she said. “Utahns have not given up.” More

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      How Utilities Use Money From Your Bills to Block Clean Energy

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      To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we have to make two big transitions at once: First, we have to generate all of our electricity from clean sources, like wind turbines and solar panels, rather than power plants that run on coal and methane gas. Second, we have to retool nearly everything else that burns oil and gas — like cars, buses and furnaces that heat buildings — to run on that clean electricity.These changes are underway, but their speed and ultimate success depend greatly on one kind of company: the utilities that have monopolies to sell us electricity and gas.But around the country, utility companies are using their outsize political power to slow down the clean energy transition, and they are probably using your money to do it.State regulators are supposed to make sure that customers’ monthly utility bills cover only the cost of delivering electricity or gas and to set limits on how much utilities can profit. But large investor-owned utilities, with legions of lawyers to help them evade scrutiny, bake many of their political costs into rates right alongside their investments in electrical poles and wires. In doing so, they are conscripting their customers into an unknowing army of millions of small-dollar donors to prolong the era of dirty energy.Fortunately, Colorado, Connecticut and Maine passed laws this spring that prohibit utilities from charging customers for their lobbying, public relations spending and dues to political trade associations like the American Gas Association and the Edison Electric Institute. Regulators in Louisiana are considering similar policy changes. Every state in the country should follow those leads.These reforms are crucial because while all corporations in the United States can spend money on politics, in most cases, consumers who don’t approve can take their business elsewhere. Utilities — as regulated monopolies — have the unique ability to force customers to participate.It’s not that utilities aren’t interested in building and profiting from clean energy. Many are doing so, and the Inflation Reduction Act offers utilities extensive tax incentives to increase their investments in wind, solar and batteries. But that does not mean that utilities want others to do the same. They will support a clean energy transition only if it happens exclusively on their terms and at their pace — a stance at odds with the scope and urgency of the herculean task of decarbonizing our electric grid.Most electric utilities view distributed energy — technologies owned by customers that generate electricity in smaller amounts — as a threat to their business. They have tried for years to stop their customers in many states from investing in rooftop solar by rigging rates to make it less economically attractive. They’ve also funded opposition to policies that would speed clean energy.Florida Power & Light spent millions of dollars on political consultants who are accused of engineering a scheme to siphon votes to third-party ghost candidates, according to reporting by The Orlando Sentinel. The ghost candidates never campaigned, but their names appeared on ballots for competitive State Senate seats in an effort to spoil the chances of Democrats who had been critical of the utilities. One of the Democrats had repeatedly introduced legislation supportive of rooftop solar power, which Florida Power & Light has crusaded against for years, including writing legislation in 2021 that would have slowed its growth. “I want you to make his life a living hell,” the utility’s chief executive wrote in an internal email. The legislator lost by fewer than 40 votes. Florida Power & Light has denied wrongdoing in the ghost candidate scandal.Utilities also have also fought to cling to plants powered by fossil fuels as long as possible. In Ohio the utility FirstEnergy concealed $60 million in bribes through a web of dark-money groups to the political organization of the state’s speaker of the House. Before his conviction and sentencing for this instance of racketeering, he helped pass a law that secured a $1.3 billion ratepayer-funded bailout for FirstEnergy’s bankrupt nuclear and coal plants, gutted the state’s renewable energy and energy efficiency standards for utilities and bailed out coal plants owned by other utilities. Audits showed that FirstEnergy used money collected from ratepayers in its scheme.Electric utilities have even opposed policies to hasten the development of desperately needed long-range transmission wires for clean energy, as NextEra Energy, Florida Power & Light’s parent company, spent millions to do in New England, where NextEra generates and sells power from oil and gas.And many utility conglomerates don’t just sell electricity; they also sell methane gas, a serious threat to decarbonization efforts. Many of those gas utilities are fighting tooth and nail against local communities’ efforts to electrify our buildings and using ratepayers’ money to do so. In California, SoCalGas, the nation’s largest gas distribution utility, has been caught illicitly and repeatedly misusing ratepayer money to fight cities’ building electrification plans. In New York the gas utility National Fuel reportedly made its customers pay for advocacy materials directing New Yorkers to oppose pro-electrification policies.The Colorado, Connecticut and Maine laws address these tactics by prohibiting utilities from charging customers for a suite of political activities. Other states and the federal government should go further in two ways:First, they should add mandatory enforcement provisions so that if utilities illegally charge customers for political activities, stiff and automatic fines would kick in.Second, policymakers should, at minimum, require that utilities disclose all political spending. The recently passed state laws won’t stop utilities from spending their profits on politics. The post-Citizens United campaign finance landscape makes it difficult to restrict such expenditures, but it does not protect companies’ ability to spend secretly, which is how utilities like FirstEnergy, Florida Power & Light and SoCalGas have attempted their most noxious influence campaigns.Utilities are too central to the clean energy transition to be allowed to dictate our energy and climate policies based on their profit motives. Limiting their influence gives us the best chance to move quickly and affordably to a safer and cleaner future.David Pomerantz is the executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog organization.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

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      It’s Not America’s Unhappiest Birthday

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      Bret Stephens: Gail, happy almost Independence Day. In the spirit of the holiday: Is America toast?Gail Collins: Well, gee, Bret, happy almost Independence Day back. Hope you’re not planning to celebrate by, um, shooting things off.Bret: Only my mouth. As usual.Gail: Seriously, please elaborate. If you’re thinking of the Supreme Court, I’m happy to join in any hand-wringing. But somehow I suspect you’ve got a different vision of doom.Bret: It won’t surprise you that I’ve been pretty happy with the court’s rulings this term, which I’m sure we’ll get to in a moment. But what I mean is the brokenness of almost every institution I can think of, a thought I’m borrowing from Alana Newhouse, the editor of Tablet magazine. Congress: broken. Public education: broken. The I.R.S.: broken. The Roman Catholic Church: broken. The immigration system: broken. Cities: broken. Civil discourse: broken. Families: broken. Race relations: broken.And the most broken thing of all: public trust. Trust in government, in news media, in police, in the scientific establishment. There’s a ton of scholarly research showing that when societies become low-trust, like in Lebanon or Brazil, they tend to fare poorly.Gail: I know that many very smart people are in the throes of despair, but I just can’t get there. People have been complaining about the schools since the beginning of time — and that’s a good thing; you certainly don’t want to be complacent about education.Bret: Did you know that The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1944 for reporting on how shockingly ignorant American college freshmen were about U.S. history? And them wuz the good ol’ days.Gail: The I.R.S. is broken only to the extent that Republicans in Congress are refusing to supply funding to make the tax system work.Bret: And because the agency runs with the sort of peerless efficiency we generally expect from federal bureaucracies.Gail: And let’s see — as a longtime fallen-away Catholic, I don’t think the church is going to fix itself until we have both women priests and married priests. But it’s not as if it’s more broken now than it was throughout my life.Bret: I defer to you on this one. Just trying to think of the last time I read a story about a Catholic priest that didn’t involve child molestation or an effort by the church hierarchy to cover it up.Gail: The cities: They aren’t broken — most of them just need a whole lot more federal aid for housing and public safety. And gee, federal gun laws that crack down on villains from buying weapons down South and illegally shipping them to gun-control states like New York.I could go on, but I don’t want to monopolize our civil discourse. Are you really so superpessimistic?Bret: It’s easy to get carried away with gloom, and America has a history of bouncing back from bouts of depression and disorder. But I find it really hard to feel any optimism when Donald Trump seems to be cruising to the Republican renomination and Joe Biden is generating excitement among Democrats the way a colonoscopy generates excitement among people turning 50: something your doctor says you must do but only because the potential alternative is lethal.Gail: Oh, gosh, Bret, now whenever I look at Joe Biden, I’m going to think “colonoscopy president.”You know I’m very sorry he decided to run again and put a damper on all the promising younger Democrats who might have been great options to replace him. But still, he’s been a good president. Our problem isn’t really on the Democratic side. The Trump-remodeled Republican Party is one thing I’d put on a list of national disasters.Bret: Don’t forget it’s also an international disaster.Gail: Know you’re as down on Donald as I am. Should we talk Supreme Court? The big decisions — affirmative action, gay rights, student loans. Am I right guessing you agreed with all three?Bret: Well, don’t forget the court striking down the independent state legislature theory in Moore v. Harper, in which three conservative judges joined with three liberals to uphold the right of state judiciaries to have a say in how state legislatures draw congressional districts and conduct elections. Or the Counterman v. Colorado case, in which four conservative justices joined Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson in a 7-to-2 decision protecting free-speech rights. This may be a conservative court, but it’s not a MAGA court.Gail: Can see the Trump campaign calls …Bret: Regarding the cases you mentioned, I think even the Biden administration knew deep down that its effort to forgive billions in student loans without action from Congress was legally doubtful. And I don’t have to agree with a web designer’s religious beliefs about same-sex marriage to accept that she has a free-speech right not to participate in something she finds morally objectionable.Gail: How would you feel about a wedding dress designer who refused to take business from a mixed-race couple because her own moral beliefs are against Black people being able to marry white people?Bret: Well, obviously I’d find it abhorrent. But this current case is different, because it turned on whether a business owner could be obliged to design a website for a same-sex couple. That’s clearly a matter of speech, not the identity of the customer.Gail: This case comes out of Colorado, which has a very specific state law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Once again our Supremes have made it clear that they’re only going to rule for stuff they like — to hell with details like legality.Bret: I don’t think either of us questions the right of the Supreme Court to overturn any state laws that violate fundamental constitutional rights, even if we don’t like the views of the people claiming those rights. As for the affirmative action case, I think it was one of the best decisions in the court’s history. I know you, um, dissent ….Gail: We had a big argument about that one last week. Having a diverse student body or workplace isn’t just a good goal; it’s critical to building and maintaining a truly free and equal society.Bret: Sure, provided diversity isn’t achieved by giving advantages to some racial groups at the expense of others. In the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases, Asian Americans were put at a significant disadvantage in the admissions process simply on account of their race.Gail: I’m still hopeful business leaders and school administrators will be able to work to the same end by concentrating on other factors — like, say, looking for applicants who have been able to overcome an impoverished upbringing.Bret: We agree on this. And as our colleague David French pointed out in a terrific column last week, Harvard could have long ago redesigned its admissions process to favor students on account of socioeconomic status rather than race and achieved roughly the same kind of diversity without putting race at the center of its admissions calculus.Gail: We’ll see. Still hate the idea that striving to have a student body or work force that’s racially diverse is some kind of mortal sin.Can we talk presidential politics for a minute? Feel kinda guilty for bringing it up, given that the nominating conventions are still more than a year away, but it does continue to fascinate me.Bret: By all means …Gail: I noticed that the proudly middle-middle-class governor Ron DeSantis got $1.25 million for his political memoir. Also that he just signed a bill allowing Florida roads to be built with a radioactive material.Bret: Phosphogypsum, a byproduct of making fertilizer, which is now kept in mountainous stacks across Florida. Used for construction in Europe, Australia and Japan, to no apparent ill effect. As for the memoir, Andrew Cuomo, a former New York governor, got $5.1 million for his book, shortly before he completely disgraced himself. I’d say the Florida governor’s advance is pretty modest, in the scheme of things.Gail: I retreat. For the moment. Anyhow, the DeSantis stories are just silly details in a race when the Republican front-runner keeps getting charged with major crimes. Now, this is supposed to be your flock, Bret. How do you keep focused?Bret: Gail, I read about the Republican Party the way I would about a former friend with whom I was once close but who tragically turned to a life of debauchery and crime in his demented old age.Gail: Is that why you’re feeling so down on everything, from the cities to religion?Bret: Might be. Hard to feel optimistic, politically, when you don’t really have a team to root for. But maybe you’re right and I’m too depressed about America. Still would much prefer to live here than in Britain, with its sky-high inflation. Or France, with its riots. Or Mexico, with its corruption and creeping authoritarianism. Or Canada, with its Justin Trudeau.So I’m back where we started. Happy Fourth of July!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

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      In North Carolina, a Voting Rights Clash Ahead of 2024

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