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    ‘This is not right’: grassroots campaign aims to repeal Missouri Republicans’ gerrymandering

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    When canvassers fan out across neighborhoods, they usually rely on sophisticated lists that will tell them things like a voter’s political party and how likely they are to support a given cause. Jill Imbler isn’t bothering with any of that.The 69-year-old has lived in Moberly – a Missouri town of about 14,000 people – her entire life. She doesn’t use a GPS when she drives around, knows where people live, and what time they’re likely to be home. And there’s a pretty good chance that she, or one of her six siblings, knows them personally.She also knows there’s a pretty good chance they don’t agree with her politically. Imbler is the President of the Randolph county Democrat club, and Randolph county is just about as Republican as you can get. Donald Trump won the county by more than 50 points in the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections. He also handily carried the state in all three elections.But Imbler nevertheless started collecting signatures to repeal a new congressional map abruptly passed by Missouri Republicans in mid-September. At the request of Donald Trump, Republicans called a special legislative session and carved out the Kansas City congressional district of longtime Democratic representative Emanuel Cleaver, and replaced it with a Republican one.It was part of a nationwide push by Trump to get about half a dozen Republican-controlled states to rejigger maps to find more GOP seats ahead of the 2026 midterms. But Missouri offers something distinct: a chance for voters to rebuke politicians and stop the map from going into effect.A provision added to the Missouri constitution in 1908 allows voters to pause most enacted laws from going into effect and put them up for a referendum if they gather enough signatures. Since 1908, Missouri voters have used the citizens veto process about two dozen times. In nearly every case, voters have chosen to repeal the statute they have been asked to vote on.The Missouri legislature approved the map in mid-September and Governor Mike Kehoe, a Republican, signed it into law at the end of the month. Imbler, her husband Lynn, and canvassers across Missouri have until 11 December to turn in more than 106,000 signatures that must come from six of the state’s eight congressional districts. If they can, the new map will be on hold until voters decide whether to adopt it in a 2026 referendum. Canvassers say they have already collected more than 200,000 signatures and say they plan to turn in more. “We turn in signatures, the map goes on hold,” said Richard Von Glahn, the executive director of People not Politicians, the group leading the signature gathering effort.The Missouri effort is being closely watched amid an all out mid-decade redistricting war between Democrats and Republicans that will shape which party controls the US House of Representatives. Republicans currently have a razor-thin three seat majority, but have redrawn congressional districts in Missouri, Texas and North Carolina to add as many as seven seats. (The Texas map was recently struck down by a three-judge panel, but the US supreme court temporarily halted the ruling on Friday while an appeal is pending.) Democrats are poised to counter those gains with their own redrawn maps in California and Virginia.Recognizing the huge consequences of the Missouri effort, outside groups have poured money into the campaign. Committees on both sides have raised about $7m, which includes funds from national Republicans opposing the effort.Imbler, a retired teacher’s aide, ran for a few local offices in the 90s, and said she was outraged when she saw Missouri lawmakers move to weaken ballot referendums approved by Missouri voters last year that protected abortion and raised the minimum wage.“I realized, ‘wait a minute, we don’t have the final say,’” she said over a cup of coffee at the Bean, a coffee shop just a few blocks from the old train depot at the center of town. “It pissed me off – I realized this is not right.“When we first took this on, there were several comments made about ‘oh my gosh,’ you’re actually going to go door to door here in Moberly,” she said. “I said, ‘Yeah I’m going to. If the door shuts in my face, it shuts in my face.”But on a warm fall afternoon earlier this month, doors weren’t closing in front of Imbler at all.As Imbler popped door to door at an apartment complex for retirees, she barely had to mention gerrymandering before people would say they were willing to sign. “Have you heard about the gerrymandering, where they’re redistricting all the congressional districts,” she would begin. “They changed all of our congressional districts to try to push the power so Republicans can have most of the seats. They’re trying to get Emanuel Cleaver out,” she said.“Normally we do that at the end of the decade after a census, and Governor Kehoe decided – he hasn’t given us any reason – for why he decided to do it in the middle of the decade,” she added. Nearly everyone she spoke with over the course of an hour decided to sign.“I feel that way because I think they’re manipulating to stack their votes up in one spot,” said one of the voters who signed the petition.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I think things need to be left alone,” said another voter who signed. “There’s some things that shouldn’t be changed.”Imbler has been making a similar pitch across Moberly since early October when she began collecting signatures. A few weeks ago, she said she had been in Cairo, a tiny town just outside of Moberly, to track down a man who had wanted to sign. She left her phone number with him and told him to pass it along to anyone else who might be interested. By the time she got home, she had gotten nine more signatures on the gerrymandering petition.“People know me. I mean, if I don’t know you personally, I either taught your kid, or I went to school with your brother, or I rode the bus with your sister, or worked with you,” she said. “When people see that this is an issue that I’m willing to get out and ask for signatures for, they understand I’m not a radical either way.Her tour also included a stop at a local motorcycle shop in town in late October during a toy drive. Imbler went to school with the two men who now run the shop and they agreed to let her set up a table in their showroom. She and Lynn set up a table in between a Trump 2024 sign and a rebel flag. “[They] were willing to sign and willing to agree that this isn’t about Democrat or Republican, this is about the vote of the people,” she said. By the end of the day they collected 56 signatures.Recognizing the likelihood of the new map being blocked, Republicans have launched an all-out effort to halt the referendum. Missouri secretary of state Denny Hoskins, a Republican, is trying to get more than 90,000 signatures thrown out. A group funded by the Republican National Committee recently sent out a text message encouraging people to withdraw their signatures on the petitions.The Missouri attorney general has also filed a separate lawsuit based on a fringe legal theory arguing that the state legislature has the exclusive power to draw congressional districts, so it cannot be overturned through a citizens veto. A shadowy group has offered canvassers $5,000 to stop collecting signatures, the Kansas City Star reported.“This isn’t an easy undertaking. It’s not just something you do because maybe you’re a little upset,” Von Glahn said. “It’s really reserved for major infractions of the legislature.” More

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      California is voting on redistricting. An election skeptic runs the process in one county

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      When Clint Curtis was appointed to oversee voting in California’s Shasta county earlier this year, the Florida-based lawyer and election skeptic pledged to “fix” the voting process.Curtis had never before administered an election and didn’t live in this rural northern California region. But he was well-known to followers of the US election denialism movement, who believe the voting system is not secure and that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. Curtis, a former congressional candidate, described himself as an expert in elections law and had long argued that voting machines could be hacked and that the government could manipulate the results of elections.The ultra-conservative majority on Shasta county’s board of supervisors was hopeful he could overhaul their elections and set an example for the rest of the US.Now, that vision is being put to the test.On 4 November, California voters will decide on a high-stakes redistricting proposal in the first election Curtis is tasked with administering.The special election is one with particular national importance: the ballot measure proposes to suspend the work of California’s independent redistricting commission and allow the legislature to redraw congressional districts to carve out five additional Democratic seats in the US House of Representatives. The effort is a direct attempt to neutralize Texas’s partisan gerrymander, which, engineered at Trump’s behest, created several new safe Republican districts.Curtis says he’s overseeing the most transparent election in county history, with a livestream of ballot processing and a new area set aside for observers.“We’re showing people everything, which means they actually have no reason to mistrust it, because they can watch it with their own eyes,” he said.View image in fullscreenCritics say Curtis’s changes have made them distrust an election system they once felt confident in. They’re alarmed by a statement from the California secretary of state’s office that Curtis hadn’t worked with the department on his plans for the election as he had said. The county’s board of supervisors, which appointed Curtis, threatened to censure him after he stopped sharing press releases with a well-known local media outlet.They’ve raised concerns about a reduction in drop boxes all well as about several temporary staff members Curtis has hired, many of whom have been outspoken critics of the elections office and its workers, and one who even unsuccessfully sued the county after she lost a local race last year.“How is this going to increase trust in the community?” asked resident Dawn Duckett, who previously served on a county elections commission. “You [had] this vocal minority of people that [had] concerns. Now you’ve got everybody else now concerned about elections. The whole county is in a state of chaos and turmoil.”Shasta, a county of 180,000 people where Republicans outnumber Democrats more than two to one, has been attracting national attention for its far-right politics and thriving election-denier movement for years.In the wake of the 2020 election, a group of local activists convinced of widespread voter fraud waged a years-long campaign against former election officials and staff – one that resulted in many of them leaving the office.The former registrar of voters, Cathy Darling Allen, in 2022 told a US Senate committee that activists had weaponized election observation activities; that she and staff faced interference and bullying from residents who accused them of election fraud; and that record numbers of poll workers didn’t show up for work. Tensions continued to heighten and that same year, local “election integrity” activists, unaffiliated with the elections office, visited the homes of some voters while wearing gear labeled “official voter taskforce”, which Allen said at the time could amount to voter intimidation.Allen was one of a few county election officials with a national profile, said Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director of the non-profit Verified Voting, with a reputation for competence, knowledge of election procedure and an openness to policy conversations. But the attacks on her and the office were relentless.The activists found support from at least part of the county leadership, with some members of the board of supervisors not shy about their desire to affect change nationally by dramatically remaking voting in Shasta county. Their efforts have drawn interest from people such as MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, who has for years pushed misinformation about the integrity of voting machines. Some have claimed, without evidence and despite their own successful elections, that voting in the county has been manipulated for years.In 2023, Shasta’s governing body cut ties with Dominion Voting Systems, the voting machine company at the center of baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud, without consulting the elections office. The board of supervisors sought to implement a hand-count system that experts warned would be costly and far less accurate before the state thwarted their plans. They established an ill-fated elections commission that made recommendations, such as hand-counting ballots, that would have violated state law.View image in fullscreenWhen health issues forced Allen to retire with more than two years left in her term, the board opted to appoint a former prosecutor, Tom Toller, to the role rather than Allen’s deputy, Joanna Francescut, who had more than 16 years’ experience.He became a vocal defender of the office, stating that he never saw evidence of fraud and that the workers were talented and dedicated. But the campaign against the office continued. Laura Hobbs, a failed supervisor candidate, sued the office, claiming that an error in the placement of her name on the ballot cost her the election. A judge ultimately dismissed the lawsuit, citing a “profound” lack of evidence.Toller also resigned owing to health issues and endorsed Francescut, but earlier this year the board moved to appoint Curtis rather than the assistant elections clerk and registrar of voters. During a public interview, Curtis highlighted his appearances on the shows of Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon and his work with Mike Lindell, and said he had decades of experience in elections law. He had spent years advocating for hand-counting votes, and arguing that elections were not secure.He told the board that restoring trust in elections was personal to him, repeating an account he has shared countless times over the years – that as a computer programmer he once developed a software that could change votes. “I broke it. I better fix it,” he said.In voting to hire Curtis, the supervisor Chris Kelstrom said his appointment could “change voting not only in Shasta county but possibly the whole state and possibly the whole nation”.Curtis quickly fired Francescut, and moved to start reshaping Shasta elections.In his new role, Curtis installed additional cameras in the Shasta county elections office to capture ballot processing, removed a gate at the front and significantly reduced the number of ballot drop boxes. He hired Brent Turner, a San Francisco Bay Area-based attorney and elections reform activist who served on the board of the California Association of Voting Officials, as his deputy.“This was a very contentious place. They were fighting with the public. They were locking them behind these basically spiked walls. They locked them up. Couldn’t let [observers] see anything,” he said of the facility. (As election workers faced growing hostility from observers, the former registrar of voters, Allen, in 2023 had tall metal fencing installed in the office.)Curtis and Turner provided a tour of the office to the Guardian. The mood inside was jubilant as longtime prominent critics of the department processed ballots in the weeks before the election. State law prevents the county from hand-counting, and Curtis said his focus was on taking additional security measures.But cameras, Lindeman noted, have done little to move people who are obsessed with transparency and believe something sinister is happening.“We always see room to do things even better, but the idea that someone can just wave a wand in the great beyond and make the results something different is not factual,” he said. “And it does a real disservice to Americans to attempt to mislead them in that way.”In Curtis’s view, the office was meeting its goals in establishing an election that everyone can trust. “I’ve looked at a million elections. This is the first [that] I don’t have to sue people so that’s good,” he said. “From a lawyer’s perspective, we’re very solid.”But Curtis himself has already faced the threat of a lawsuit, accusing him of targeting a local media outlet, Shasta Scout, because of coverage he didn’t like.The outlet had published a story revealing that the secretary of state’s office said it had not approved Curtis’s plans for the election, contradicting his claims, said Annelise Pierce, the editor and founder of Shasta Scout. Turner, Curtis’s deputy, told Pierce that she was coming close to “meddling” in elections and might be engaging in election interference, Pierce said.Curtis soon excluded Shasta Scout from receiving press releases, telling the non-profit that his office only “notifies potential media outlets that appear legitimate”. The First Amendment Coalition, a non-profit advocacy group, warned Curtis that excluding Shasta Scout was a violation of the first amendment and made the county vulnerable to a lawsuit.Less than a week later, the board of supervisors voted unanimously to condemn Curtis’s actions and said it would censure him if it happened again.“The board’s vote was a real surprise to our community, because we’ve seen this board sort of play a little fast and loose with first amendment rights over the past year,” Pierce said. “And we’ve reported on that. But in this case, they really strongly supported access, and I think that’s a win for the community.”The elections office moved to publish all its press releases online in the aftermath of the incident. Turner said Shasta Scout had received “bad information” and was speaking to the wrong people in the secretary of state’s office.“Those people were giving information which was not correct, because we have been in constant conversation with the secretary of state since I’ve been here,” Turner said. (The office said that it had not approved Curtis’s plans, telling Shasta Scout: “We have not seen, nor have been provided, with any such plans.”)For his part, Curtis said the board received only one side of the story and he had reported Shasta Scout to the IRS and US Department of Justice for what he described as a questionable non-profit status. Pierce said the outlet, one of more than 500 associated with the Institute for Nonprofit News, was operating legally and its filings were up to date. She said Curtis told her that he viewed Shasta Scout as a partisan outlet, but that he declined to provide her with examples of reporting he took issue with.“We’re a non-profit news organization that believes in non-partisan reporting. We don’t take a stance on things like Prop 50 or who should be elected to office,” she said. “We respect our readers. We just try to provide them with the information that will help them to make those decisions.”At a meeting of the board of supervisors in late October, several residents said Curtis’s attack on the outlet had them on edge. So did recent changes and Curtis’s decision to hire some of the same local activists who had campaigned against the elections office and its staff for years. Among the new hires was Hobbs, the failed supervisor candidate, who filed another lawsuit against the office earlier this year.“It’s an extreme concern to me to have many election deniers basically have total access to the ballots and to the elections office,” said Steven Kohn, a local business owner who has frequently spoken to the board in support of the office. He said that he believed Shasta county has long had fair elections and that he was no longer confident in the office.View image in fullscreenCurtis said he has encouraged people of all political backgrounds to apply for jobs within the office, and that some concerned residents “just want to whine”. Turner was quick to clarify Curtis’s comments.“I think they’re rightfully nervous, because there have been issues with the systems, and people get nervous about change, but these are upgrades, security upgrades that, by the use of transparency, it shores up the system and you have to recognize that systems always can be upgraded,” he said.Bringing together critics with the office staff they used to criticize has served as a “psychological integration”, Turner said, adding that morale is high. The office has been in “consistent and ongoing” conversations with the state about the changes, Turner said, and he hopes it can serve as an example to other counties. The California secretary of state’s office said in a statement to the Guardian this week that staff visited Shasta to observe the county’s new processes, but that it had not approved any proposed plans.The saga in Shasta county stands apart from other places, said Lindeman of Verified Voting, describing Curtis as a contender for the “most clearly unqualified” elections official in the country.Lindeman expressed concern about recent comments from Curtis that logic and accuracy testing, which ensures voting equipment is fully functional, is a “waste of time”. “That’s like saying that umbrellas are a waste of time because a brick might fall on your head,” Lindeman said. “Good logic and accuracy testing is the first line of defense to help protect voters’ votes.”But Lindeman was rooting for the county, saying: “I will be hoping that Clint Curtis manages to lead a successful election for the people of Shasta county, who certainly deserve it.”Curtis has already announced his plans to run for office when his term is up, writing on his campaign website that “if politicians can gain this seat back, America will never return to real elections again”. Francescut too is running with the endorsement of other elections officials, retired sheriffs and her predecessor Toller, who wrote that her “professionalism and impartiality transformed this former election skeptic”. More

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      ‘My vote is my voice’: protesters fight for democracy as Trump casts shadow

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      Wearing a T-shirt proclaiming “We won’t Black down”, Wanda Mosley had made the trip from Atlanta. “I had to be here because the Voting Rights Act is on life support,” the 55-year-old explained. “Today the court will synthesise the arguments and decide if they’re going to kill it – or allow it to live.”Mosley was among a few hundred protesters who gathered in warm October sunshine outside the supreme court on Wednesday. Inside the building, whose facade was obscured by scaffolding, justices were weighing arguments in a case involving Louisiana electoral districts and section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.From afar, it might seem like a dry debate over an arcane law enacted by Congress half a century ago. But to those gathered at the court steps, most of whom were Black, there was a palpable consciousness that the legacy of civil rights giants such as Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King and John Lewis was on the line.Speakers noted that the Voting Rights Act had been a landmark law intended to prevent racial discrimination in voting. Undercutting it would reverse decades of progress.People held aloft signs that said “Black voters matter”, “Build Black political power”, “Fight for fair maps”, “Fight like hell!”, “It’s about us”, “My vote is my voice”, “Protect people, not power”. One said, “Protect our vote” around a photo of Lewis, the Georgia congressman who died five years ago.Donald Trump cast a shadow. An African American man waved a black-and-white flag that declared: “Fuck Trump and fuck you for voting for him.” A white woman carried a sign with a mocking cartoon image of the president and the slogan: “Trump’s afraid of free and fair elections.”Another held a sign that referenced Marshall, the first African American supreme court justice, and current justice Clarence Thomas, a conservative who is also African American. “Thurgood is watching you, Clarence,” it said. The back of the sign added: “Stop legalizing Trump’s race war.”There were chants of “Power to the people” and “We shall not be moved”. Songs including Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come, Common and John Legend’s Glory and Jill Scott’s Golden boomed from loudspeakers.Cliff Albright, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, admitted mixed feelings to the crowd: “There’s a part of me that gets sad at the impending death of this thing that has meant so much. I feel that sadness. There’s a part of me that feels weak, that feels small as I stand outside this huge building with so much history.”But Albright also insisted on hope, referencing Lewis’s role in the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965, where he led peaceful protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. “When we believe, we got the power to move mountains, we got the power to cross the bridge in a city called Selma and changed the course of history.“We got the power to make good trouble and we’ve got the power to move this court. This court ain’t nothing but another mountain for us to move. We’ve got that kind of power but we’ve got to believe, y’all.”A great cheer went up when Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who had been arguing on behalf of a group of Black voters, emerged from the court building and descended the steps that have witnessed many past triumphs. Two white women in police uniform and sunglasses looked on.Nelson struck an optimistic tone, telling the gathering: “We believe in the future of this multiracial democracy. We believe that, no matter what assaults and attacks we are currently facing, the right to vote is still the lifeblood of our democracy and that it must be protected at all costs.“And we know that the law is on our side. We know that if these justices follow their own words, we will prevail in this case and so that is the argument that we made today.”Speakers framed the legal fight as the latest chapter in a long, generational struggle for civil rights, frequently invoking the movement’s heroes.Terri Sewell, a Democratic congresswoman who represents Alabama’s seventh congressional district, which includes her home town of Selma, said: “I want to remind all of you of what John Lewis said on his very last time on that bridge in Selma.“John’s body was riddled with cancer but he stood up tall and strong at the apex of that bridge and he said with a very strong voice: ‘Never give up. Never give in. Keep the faith and let’s keep our eyes on the prize.’”Alanah Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, cited King’s “promissory note” analogy from the March on Washington, stating that “America had defaulted on that promise” and that generations later the question remains: “When will this country make good on what it put down on paper?”As the crowd dispersed, Mosley, the activist from Atlanta, lingered a while and reflected on why she had come. “It’s frustrating because I’m as American as anybody else,” she said. “I’m a descendant of enslaved Africans that literally built this country.“I deserve to have unfettered rights to vote, and I deserve to have representation that lives in my neighborhood, that comes from my community and knows what our community needs. And we’ll fight for those things.” More

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      I chaired the US Federal Election Commission. Now there’s no cop on the beat | Ellen L Weintraub

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      Threats to the US electoral process keep accelerating. Donald Trump is issuing increasingly unhinged demands that his political adversaries and those who fund speech that he views as contrary to his political agenda or supports his political opponents be prosecuted. When a prosecutor balked at this political intervention, Trump simply found one who is more compliant.In what appears to be yet another attempt to concoct support for unproven claims of voter fraud, the Department of Justice has issued exhaustive voting records requests to multiple states. Voting rights lawsuits have been dismissed. A division targeting foreign interference in our elections has been dismembered. Attempts are under way to make voter registration more onerous. Alarmingly, at least one commentator has warned that the extraordinary call-out of the military against US civilians on US soil may be a “dress rehearsal” for taking over the 2026 election from the lawful administrators in the states. Even short of a takeover, one could well imagine this administration developing pretexts for troop deployments in Democratic strongholds during voting. Indeed, Trump has already called for the military to use American cities, at least those run by Democrats, as “training grounds” and ominously talks of a “war from within”.American democracy may be under attack, but billionaire mega-donors are fully engaged in protecting their own interests. And as we head into what will undoubtedly be another multibillion-dollar election year, the agency charged with regulating money in politics is missing in action. With the recent announcement of another commissioner leaving the already moribund agency, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) will be down to two commissioners. By law, there should be six, but it takes four to make a quorum. Without a quorum, the FEC cannot enforce the law.Fifty years ago, in the wake of Watergate, a scandal featuring a president who used burglars and bags of cash to go after his political enemies, the Federal Election Commission opened its doors to enforce campaign finance restrictions and enable the American people to “follow the money”. In this anniversary year, the commission finds itself, for the fourth time, without even a bare quorum of commissioners to conduct its most important business. Three out of four of these periods have occurred during a Trump administration. The last time, in 2020, as previous fundraising records were being shattered, Trump waited until after the election to restore the quorum.The Trump administration’s gutting of the FEC is another indication of a pervasive contempt for the electoral process and the post-Watergate anti-corruption reforms that would have made Richard Nixon blush. The FEC is just one of the checks on the president’s conduct that Trump has disabled, along with removing Inspectors general, Democratic appointees to boards and commissions throughout the federal government, and others who dare to voice a dissenting view.Watergate was a scandal involving about a million dollars, an amount that shocked the nation back then, but would be considered chump change today, after a 2024 campaign cycle when six separate donors contributed 100 times that amount, moguls lined up to make million-dollar donations to a largely unregulated inaugural committee, 2,500 Super Pacs together raised more than $5bin, and overall, almost $15bn was spent, almost $2bn in undisclosed “dark money”.No one is more aware than I am of the FEC’s shortcomings in enforcing the law and the increasing challenges it will face in a world where the president feels empowered to fire any official who defies him.Having no cop on the beat to address any potential campaign finance wrongdoing, however, will only embolden political actors who would disregard the law, and it leaves those seeking to comply with no way to get definitive guidance. And the resulting backlog of enforcement cases will provide an opening for those commissioners seeking an excuse to avoid investigating alleged illegality. The commission needs a quorum, and specifically, a quorum of commissioners willing to enforce the law and stop engineering loopholes.We are sadly learning how many ways there are for a determined president to undermine government agencies whose missions he finds inconvenient. The president needn’t zero out the budget or fire all the staff to literally decommission the commission. In the case of the FEC, it’s been death by decapitation. Billionaires seeking new ways to wield influence from the shadows will face no deterrence while the American people’s desire for a fair and transparent political system goes unfulfilled.

      Ellen L Weintraub is currently a senior fellow at End Citizens United. She served as a commissioner on the FEC from 2002-2025, until her removal by Donald Trump, and served as chair four times More

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      ‘The stakes are quite large’: US supreme court case could gut Voting Rights Act

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      The US supreme court is set to hear a case this month that could gut what remains of the Voting Rights Act, effectively killing one of the crown jewels of the civil rights movement and the nation’s most powerful statute to prevent discrimination in voting.The court’s decision in the case, Louisiana v Callais, could be one of the most consequential rulings for the Voting Rights Act since it was enacted in 1965 and is almost certainly the biggest test for the law since its decision in Shelby county v Holder in 2013, when the justices hollowed out a provision of the law, section five, that required certain places to get voting changes approved by the federal government before they go into effect.The supreme court is considering the constitutionality of the most powerful remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act: section two. The measure outlaws election practices that are racially discriminatory and has been the tool that minority voters and voting rights advocates have frequently turned to challenge redistricting plans – from congressional districts to county commissions and school boards – that group voters in such a way to dilute the political influence of a minority group.Getting rid of section two, or severely limiting the ways in which it can be applied, would effectively kill the Voting Rights Act. It would take away the most powerful tool voters have to challenge racially discriminatory districts.“The stakes are potentially quite large,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, the director of the voting rights project at the American Civil Liberties Union. “The outcome of the case will not only determine the next steps for Louisiana’s congressional map, but may also shape the future of redistricting cases nationwide.”The dispute at the court is focused on a challenge by white voters to a majority-Black district in Louisiana that stretches from Shreveport to Baton Rouge. The justices already heard oral argument in the case in March that focused on whether Louisiana Republicans had overly relied on race when they redrew the district in response to a Section 2 lawsuit by Black voters. In an unusual move, the court did not reach a decision at the end of the court’s term this summer, and instead set the case for re-argument this fall.The justices announced in August they wanted the parties to submit briefing on whether Louisiana’s “intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the fourteenth or fifteenth amendments to the US constitution”. The 14th amendment guarantees equal protection of law for all US citizens and the 15th amendment prohibits the government from denying someone the right to vote based on their race.The question raised the stakes of the case at the court, giving opponents of the law a chance to argue that the landmark civil rights statute should either be significantly narrowed or struck down entirely.“The challengers and the state do not limit themselves to whether conditions in Louisiana continue to justify application of the Voting Rights Act there,” said Stuart Naifeh, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is representing voters defending the existing map. “They have attempted to expand the question beyond what the court has asked. And they argue that section two is not constitutional at all, anywhere.”There are many possibilities for how the court could rule. The justices could beat back those arguments and affirm the constitutionality of section two. The court could also say once and for all that the provision is unconstitutional, dealing a fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act. It could also rule somewhere in between, leaving section two intact, but make the test to deploy it much harder, in effect neutering it.“The two key pillars, at least since 1982, were section two and section five,” said Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California Los Angeles. “Shelby county already knocked down one of those pillars, and this case could potentially either knock it down or render it so weak that you might as well say it’s been knocked down.” He added that weakening but not killing section two might “potentially avoid some of the political cost”.The case arrives at the court after many of the court’s conservative justices have openly expressed skepticism about the continued need for section two. “The authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a 2023 concurring opinion, a remark that was widely seen as an ominous sign for section two. Justice Clarence Thomas has long publicly said he thinks the statute is unconstitutional when it comes to redistricting.Congress amended section two in 1982 to clarify that it outlawed practices that resulted in discriminations – one did not need to prove intent. Working as an attorney in the justice department, John Roberts advocated strongly against those amendments.The consequences of gutting section two would be drastic, Lakin and other attorneys representing Black voters defending Louisiana’s current map wrote in a brief to the justices.“Without section two, jurisdictions could simply eliminate minority opportunity districts even where they remain necessary for voters of color to have any opportunity to elect candidates of choice, wiping out minority representation and re-segregating legislatures, city councils, and school boards – as some have recently attempted to do,” they wrote. “Districts based in obvious majority-minority communities, like Harlem or Tuskegee, could be divided along obvious racial lines without consequence.” Louisiana legislators reportedly have already been asked to hold dates for a possible special session on redistricting after the oral argument this fall.The case before the court on 15 October involves a long and twisted saga over Louisiana’s congressional map, which Linda Greenhouse, who covered the supreme court for decades for the New York Times, called “without doubt the most complicated voting rights case I have ever encountered”.After the 2020 census, the state drew a congressional map that had only one majority-Black district out of six, even though Black voters make up about a third of eligible voters in the state. Black voters sued the state under the Voting Rights Act. Two courts agreed with their claims and the state eventually drew a new map that created a second majority-minority district. Wanting to protect powerful incumbents in the state, including the House speaker, Mike Johnson, and Representative Julia Letlow, while also being majority-Black, the new district has an extremely odd-shape.But after the new maps went into effect, a group of white voters sued in a different court, arguing the new district improperly sorted voters based on their race. A court agreed with that argument in 2024, but the US supreme court allowed the redrawn map to go into effect for last fall’s election. Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, won the district by more than 13 points.His win was a big deal for people like Martha Davis, who worked as both a teacher and administrator for 40 years. She still remembers waiting in segregated waiting rooms as a young girl and going to a segregated Catholic school, where she got used books from the white Catholic school. Now, she lives in North Baton Rouge. “It’s like the wrong side of the track. It’s like the forgotten area,” said Davis, who was one of the Black voters who sued Louisiana over its original map. “There are no hospitals nearby, no grocery stores nearby. The streets are deplorable. Nobody could care less what happens in that part of town.“The fact that we were able to choose somebody that looks like me, somebody who knows what our needs are, and fight for us – that made me overjoyed,” she said.Fields’s win also made a difference to Davante Lewis, a member of the Louisiana public service commission who represents the Baton Rouge area. He said that since Fields’s election last year, it had been easier to get help on federal issues like disaster relief.“When we need help for certain areas, you want your member of Congress to know it,” said Lewis, who was also one of the plaintiffs in the original suit challenging Louisiana’s map. “You don’t want them to be 170 miles away, who have no connection to where you are.”When the case was before the supreme court in March, Louisiana defended its redrawn map – saying it had made a good faith effort to comply with the constitution and the Voting Rights Act after judges had blocked their original plan. But after the justices invited further briefing, the state switched its position and now says that its map is unconstitutional.There isn’t the kind of ongoing discrimination that would justify bringing racial considerations into redistricting, the state’s lawyers say. They argue that the supreme court has only recognized two contexts in which it is acceptable for the government to take race-based action: remedying specific past instances of discrimination and avoiding imminent safety risks in prisons, like preventing a race riot.“Those two interests share a critical feature that section two lacks: They turn on a specific harm and permit only a correspondingly narrow, temporary remedy,” they wrote in their own brief to the court. “Race-based redistricting pursuant to section two, by contrast, is nothing of the sort. It presents no imminent danger to human safety. In its heartland application today, it also has nothing to do with remedying past intentional discrimination, let alone specific, identified instances of intentional discrimination.”The US supreme court has allowed mapmakers to use race in drawing districts if it is in service of a “compelling interest” and its use is “narrowly tailored” to that interest. Writing for the court in a 2017 case, Justice Elena Kagan noted the justices had “long assumed” that complying with the Voting Rights Act was a compelling interest.Those defending the maps argue that supreme court precedent already requires them to clear a series of high hurdles to show that race-conscious redistricting is needed in a section two case. It is difficult to win a section two case. From 2012 to 2021 there were 48 section two cases dealing with vote dilution filed and just 21 of them were successful, according to data collected by the Voting Rights Institute at the University of Michigan. Clearing those hurdles, those defending Louisiana’s map say, requires them to show that there is ongoing discrimination.“Section two’s permanent nature does not mean that its application is without limitation. Congress ensured that section two’s results test is appropriately constrained and requires a remedy only where race is already shaping political decision-making,” they wrote in their brief to the court. “Where voting is starkly racially polarized, leading to a pattern of persistent and ongoing electoral losses for candidates preferred by a cohesive minority voting bloc, as is true in Louisiana, those current conditions may give rise to the need for a race conscious remedy for unlawful racial vote dilution.”The Trump administration has filed a brief in the case siding with the white voters challenging the map and urging the supreme court to make it harder to win a section two case. Since Trump’s inauguration, the justice department has withdrawn from all of its pending section two cases and has not filed any new ones. “Too often, section two is deployed as a form of electoral race-based affirmative action to undo a state’s constitutional pursuit of political ends.”Davis, the former teacher who recalled growing up during segregation, expressed disbelief at the argument that the Voting Rights Act was no longer needed. “The fact that they want to take that away, it’s like we just keep fighting and fighting and fighting, when does it end?” More

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      in Elections

      Election deniers now hold posts on local US election boards, raising concerns for midterms

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      A number of people who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and often of other elections in which Republicans have not been victorious, have been elevated to positions of power since Donald Trump’s re-election, raising concerns about the potential for partisan meddling in critical parts of the country such as Arizona and Georgia.State by state, activists aligned with the “election integrity” movement have found their way on to local elections boards and elections offices, raising red flags for Democrats who have already started efforts to have them removed.“I think Republicans want to put us in jail,” Fulton county commissioner Dana Barrett said, moments after a contempt hearing in an Atlanta, Georgia, courtroom in August, where she and five other county commissioners were fighting a battle to reject the appointment of two Republican election denialists to the Fulton county board of registrations and elections.The commission’s charter says the board must appoint two nominees made by each political party. A finding of criminal contempt could have resulted in commissioners being jailed until they agreed to make the appointment, but Fulton county superior court judge David Emerson found the board in civil contempt last month for refusing to vote for the appointment as ordered by the court. A $10,000 daily fine for failing to make the appointment is on hold, pending appeal.“At the end of the day, we have no choice but to resist,” Barrett said. “This is not a particularly strategic move on my part, but rather a move to defend the integrity of our elections and to do what I can in my corner of the world to try to help hold this democracy together. If that means I’m resisting, then by all means, I’m resisting.”One of the two appointees in question, Julie Adams, works for the Election Integrity Network, an election denial activist organization founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his efforts to overturn the election in Georgia and elsewhere. The other, Jason Frazier, is a consultant for EagleAI, software that collects open-source data of dubious validity to aid activists making thousands of voter challenges at a time. Frazier was a plaintiff in a 2023 lawsuit demanding voter registration purges by the county and the state.“I believe that Jason Frazier and Julie Adams are election deniers,” Barrett said.“We all find ourselves in positions where we have to make tough decisions considering the climate in our country,” said Fulton county commissioner Mo Ivory. “I’m glad to be standing up for the people that put me in office, and continue to fight for our democracy, not for partisan politics, but for what it means to live in a democracy.”In Georgia, board appointments to county election offices are idiosyncratic. Fulton county’s charter gives power to the board of commissioners and to the political parties’ county committees. In neighboring DeKalb county, the appointments are made by the chief judge of its superior court, who is free to reject a nominee by one of the party’s committees if that person doesn’t meet the judge’s legal standards.Such was the case earlier this year, when Shondeana Morris, chief judge of the DeKalb county superior court, rejected William Henderson after a letter campaign by the county’s Democratic committee and voting rights activists. But the judge did allow the appointment of Gail Lee, another Republican activist linked to the Election Integrity Network.During a DeKalb county election board meeting last week, local political activists challenged the qualification of Jason Lary, a former mayor of Stonecrest, Georgia, to run for the city council. Lary recently returned from federal prison, where he was serving a sentence for fraud after being convicted of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal Covid-19 relief funds allocated to the city.Lary is a Democrat and the board has a Democratic majority, but after a brief discussion, the board voted unanimously to kick him off the ballot and strip him of his voter registration, given that he was still under supervision for his sentence and thus ineligible to vote.“The one thing that became clear is the importance of the public to remain vigilant on little things like people who qualified for office,” Lee said at the end of the meeting. “Because if a person hadn’t come for and challenged the candidates then they would have gone forward and possibly had a felon in office.”There’s only so much a Republican activist can accomplish on a five-person board with a Democratic majority, as is the case in metro Atlanta’s core counties. When Adams refused to certify a primary election in Fulton county in 2024, state superior court judges ruled that she was required to do so by state law, a decision affirmed by the Georgia supreme court this week. The duty to certify is “ministerial”, a pronouncement that is obligatory, not discretionary.And many if not most decisions by an elections board involve mundane procedural questions about where to site a voting drop box or how to schedule poll worker training. Even contentious issues often result in unanimous votes.But elections offices are staffed by human beings maintaining sensitive equipment and critical records, all of which are vulnerable to someone with authority and an agenda.Protect Democracy, an advocacy organization, describes a strategy of election subversion in three parts: deceive, disrupt and deny.Disinformation from influencers suggests that voter fraud or noncitizen voting occurs often enough to swing an election. Then these influencers call on their supporters to disrupt election administration and voting process and introduce chaos into the system. Finally, they attempt to interfere or halt the certification process and “declare the true result untrue, unknown, or unknowable”, Protect Democracy’s advocates wrote.The object is to allow the loser to claim victory regardless of the results, forcing a court to either choose a winner or order a new election, delegitimizing a fair vote.Changes wrought by a new law specific to Spalding county, Georgia, populated its board with Republican election activists. The board members and the county’s new elections director called for a hand-count of ballots following elections in 2022 and 2023. The process, observers noted, was painfully slow and riven by inaccuracies that took days to rectify, with an end result that showed Dominion machines had counted votes correctly.They did not hand count ballots in 2024.Spalding county’s Republican elections board members – Ben Johnson, Roy McClain and James Newland – are among the many defendants in a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn a law permitting mass voter challenges passed in the wake of the 2020 election that voting rights advocates argue violates the Voting Rights Act.Meanwhile, Maricopa county’s board of supervisors has been in a political war with the county’s elected recorder Justin Heap to prevent this outcome. Maricopa county contains Phoenix and almost two-thirds of Arizona’s population.Heap, a former state representative, defeated the incumbent Republican in 2024 while refusing to say if he believed the 2020 and 2022 elections were fair and calling Maricopa county elections a “laughingstock”.After Heap’s victory, the board stripped the recorder’s office of its duties to manage in-person early voting and some IT management of voter rolls. Negotiations broke down in May, leading to lawsuits and acrimony. Heap retained America First Legal, a Trump-aligned firm, to represent him in the lawsuit.“Justin Heap is lying about me, and going forward, he better keep my name out of his lying mouth,” Maricopa county supervisor Steve Gallardo said in a July release, refuting claims by Heap that Gallardo had agreed to restore power to the recorder’s office. “Since his election, Justin Heap has taken actions that have confused voters and damaged relationships. This must end. Justin Heap should stop the performative theater and just do his job.”Some states appear to be more fertile ground than others for election denialist’s influence on boards.North Carolina’s Republicans controlled the state legislature with a veto-proof majority last year, even though its former governor Roy Cooper was a Democrat. After Josh Stein, another Democrat, won the governor’s race, legislators stripped the governor of the power to appoint members to state and county elections boards, handing it to newly elected state auditor Dave Boliek, a Republican.The state’s Republican-majority supreme court ratified the law in May after court challenges. Boliek almost immediately replaced 3-2 Democratic majorities with 3-2 Republican majorities across all 100 county election boards.Those appointments have drawn pushback from election denialists as well as from Democratic activists.Places such as Durham county, where less than 10% of voters are registered Republicans, now has a Republican majority on its elections board. But most new board members appear to have been rewarded for their loyalty to the party and not their fidelity to election denialism.“There are concerns that there are people that are getting rewarded as a political favor, as opposed to their working knowledge and their experience in elections,” said Jim Womack, Lee county GOP chair and the president of the non-profit North Carolina Election Integrity Team, speaking to North Carolina news site The Assembly. More

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      in US Politics

      Utah emerges as a pivotal battleground amid race to redraw congressional maps

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      In the fast-escalating national arms race over redistricting, Utah has emerged as an unexpected and potentially pivotal battleground.The campaign began in Texas, where Donald Trump openly declared he was “entitled to” five additional Republican House seats. It quickly expanded to California, where Democratic lawmakers are asking voters to retaliate with new congressional maps drawn to “neutralize” Texas.At least half a dozen other states have been recruited into what has is now an unprecedented push to redraw their congressional boundaries in ways that could lock in political advantage ahead of next year’s midterms.The president has been candid about his aims: to safeguard Republicans’ fragile hold on the House. A loss of the speaker’s gavel would derail Trump’s legislative ambitions in the second half of his term – and open the door to a wave of investigations, from his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files to its mass detention and deportation policies.Deeply conservative Utah, by contrast, has been pulled into the redistricting fray not by the president but by a judge.This week, Judge Dianna Gibson tossed out Utah’s current congressional map and gave the Republican-led state legislature until 24 September to submit a new one.The existing boundaries fracture Salt Lake City – a splash of blue in a sea of red – across all four congressional districts, effectively diluting Democrats’ political influence. A redrawn map could consolidate more of Utah’s capital city into one district, giving Democrats a rare opening in one of the nation’s most reliably Republican states.“There’s no doubt that any map that complies with this ruling would be more competitive than the current map,” said David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst at the non-partisan Cook Political Report. But he cautioned that lawmakers could still carve up Salt Lake City in ways that would maintain a Republican edge.On Friday, lawyers for the Utah legislature asked Gibson to pause her gerrymandering order to allow time for lawmakers to appeal the decision to the state supreme court, according to local news reports. The request comes a day after the state’s Republican legislative leaders said they would comply with the ruling, which they denounced as “misguided” and “unreasonable” given the 30-day deadline.“While we will continue to pursue every legal option available – including requesting a stay from the Utah Supreme Court if necessary – we will attempt to redistrict under these unprecedented constraints, consistent with our oath to represent the best interests of Utah,” the state house speaker, Mike Schultz, and senate president J Stuart Adams, said in a statement.The ruling in the Utah case stems from a yearslong legal battle over Proposition 4, a ballot initiative narrowly passed by voters in 2018 that aimed to ban partisan gerrymandering through the creation of an independent redistricting commission. Although the Republican-controlled legislature weakened the commission and enacted its own map, the state supreme court – made up of five justices all appointed by Republican governors – ruled last year that lawmakers had probably overstepped, paving the way for this week’s decision.Mark Gaber, an attorney representing the groups challenging Utah’s congressional maps, called the ruling a “vindication of a fair and neutral process”.“The voters passed this in 2018 to effectively ban partisan gerrymandering and now we’re seeing a push across the country to gerrymander,” he said. “It’s nice to see this standing out as a shining example of a process that can work.”Mid-decade redistricting on this scale is extraordinary. Typically states draw new congressional maps at the start of each decade following the census to account for population shifts.At stake is the balance of power in Congress, where the president’s party typically loses ground in midterm elections. House Democrats need to flip only a handful of seats to retake the majority, and early signs point in their favor: Trump’s approval ratings are low and falling, and since his return to the White House, Democrats have outperformed expectations in a series of low-turnout contests from Florida to Iowa.In a tit-for-tat redistricting fight, political analysts and experts say Republicans still hold the advantage: they control more state legislatures and have fewer constraints on gerrymandering.Yet the Texas plan, which was signed into law on Friday by the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, faces multiple lawsuits, including one alleging that the new districts are racially discriminatory. In California, Republicans have asked the state supreme court to block the proposed countermeasure from reaching the ballot. And even seats drawn to favor one party can become competitive depending on candidate quality, voter turnout and the national mood.In a closely fought election, even a single seat could tip the balance of power, making the prospect of a Democratic pickup in Utah all the more worrying for the president.On Wednesday night, Trump called the Utah decision “absolutely unconstitutional”.“How did such a wonderful Republican State like Utah, which I won in every Election, end up with so many Radical Left Judges?” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “All Citizens of Utah should be outraged at their activist Judiciary, which wants to take away our Congressional advantage, and will do everything possible to do so.”Gibson, the judge, was appointed to the district court in 2018 by the then governor Gary Herbert, a Republican.Trump continued, urging Republicans in Utah to “stay united” and ensure the state’s “four terrific Republican Congressmen stay right where they are!” (One of Utah’s four House members, Celeste Maloy, is a woman.)Trump’s outrage over the Utah ruling is a reminder, experts say, that courts – and voters – also have a say in shaping the political map.Kareem Crayton, the vice-president of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Washington DC office and a leading expert on redistricting, said the Utah ruling “achieves something closer to redistricting with guardrails” – in stark contrast to what is unfolding elsewhere.The lurch toward maximalist gerrymandering underlines the need for national standards, long sought by advocates of less partisan maps, Crayton said, but for now the message from the White House is: “Do more of it.”“This system is broken,” he said. “It’s a broken one when the outcome of the people’s house – the one that’s actually supposed to be the most representative of the public – turns out to be the least representative because people are going back to the maps multiple times and, with no abandon, with respect to partisanship, drawing districts that choose their voters and not the other way around.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump says he plans unconstitutional executive order to mandate ID for voters

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      Donald Trump has said he will issue an executive order to mandate identification for all US elections, a move likely to be challenged in court as unconstitutional.“Voter I.D. Must Be Part of Every Single Vote. NO EXCEPTIONS! I Will Be Doing An Executive Order To That End!!!,” the US president said on Truth Social late on Saturday.Trump also claimed he wants to ban all voting by mail except for those who are very ill or in military service.The US constitution grants primary authority to regulate elections to the US states, while empowering Congress to enact election laws or regulations. It gives no explicit authority to the president to regulate voting.The voting reform push by Trump stems from baseless claims that the 2020 election he lost was stolen from him. Earlier this month, Trump falsely claimed only the US uses mail-in voting. Dozens of countries permit at least some form of mail-in voting.Trump himself has cast election ballots by mail. In the 2024 elections, 14 states and Washington DC had voter turnout by mail exceeding 30%, with Trump winning half of those states, including Utah, which had 91.5% vote by mail turnout and whose elections are overseen by Republicans.Some 36 US states have laws requesting or requiring voters to show identification at the polls, with the remaining states and DC using other forms of identity verification. Voter fraud is incredibly rare and voter ID laws have been shown to disproportionately impact minorities, low-income individuals and disabled voters.“As many as 11 percent of eligible voters do not have the kind of ID that is required by states with strict ID requirements, and that percentage is even higher among seniors, minorities, people with disabilities, low-income voters, and students,” the Brennan Center for Justice states.A previous attempt by Trump to require proof of citizenship to vote was blocked by a federal judge in June 2025, as the law risked disenfranchising millions of Americans who don’t have passports, may not have easy access to birth certificates, and millions of married women with name changes may not have citizenship documents with their current legal name.Enforcement would likely affect tens of millions of Americans every election cycle who vote for the first time or update their voter registration information. Some 146 million American citizens do not have a US passport. More