In this sweltering political August, redistricting has become the hot fight of the moment.
It’s driving Texas Democrats to flee their state, hunkering down in Illinois while Republican Gov. Greg Abbott threatens to have lawmakers removed from office. It’s throwing a Black-majority district in Louisiana into limbo, igniting fears that the U.S. Supreme Court could soon unravel what remains of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.
And in Alabama, after years of courtroom showdowns, a long-fought redistricting battle appears to have reached a moment of resolution — at least for now. A three-judge federal panel last week ruled unanimously that Alabama must use the map drawn up by a court-appointed special master until 2030.
While it is unclear whether Alabama officials will appeal the latest ruling, it marked the second time the same Alabama Northern District panel ruled that the GOP-drawn map, with just one majority Black district, was unconstitutional and in violation of the Voting Rights Act.
The legal fight may not be over and experts warn that a Supreme Court decision in a Louisiana case could still send ripples through Alabama….
The Louisiana case has the potential to affect Alabama where Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act remains a key force that led to a redrawn 2nd district.
“It would not surprise me to see the Supreme Court hold any further appeals in the Alabama redistricting litigation pending a decision in the Louisiana case,” said Richard Hasen, a political science professor and election law expert at the UCLA School of Law, said before Thursday’s ruling by the three-judge panel in the Alabama case. “If Section 2 falls or is limited in the Louisiana case, it would affect the rights and remedies in Alabama as well.”…
Jeff Wice, chair of the New York City Bar Association Election Law Committee and a professor at New York Law School, said he believes the Alabama case is different from Louisiana and from Texas. He said that in Alabama, the conservative court ruled that the state’s congressional map clearly diluted the Black population’s vote.
“In Louisiana, they redrew their congressional map to also satisfy a requirement to create a second Black (majority) district,” Wice said. “But by doing so, the legislature created other districts that seemed to separate white votes from Black votes, and to be able to protect the incumbent Republicans including (U.S. House) Speaker Mike Johnson.”
He added, “the question there is becoming – to what extent is the use of race required if the prevailing factor is politics? Louisiana would not be having this problem if politics were not playing a role and if they simply did as Alabama’s court did in simply drawing two Black majority districts without politics getting in the way.”…
All posts by Rick Hasen
“Newsom warns Trump in heated letter he’s ‘playing with fire’ on redistricting”
With Democrats lining up for a bare-knuckle match on redistricting, Gov. Gavin Newsom has offered President Trump a cease-fire proposal: No redrawing congressional maps in red states and California will stand down, he wrote in a letter sent to Trump on Monday morning.
“If you will not stand down, I will be forced to lead an effort to redraw the maps in California to offset the rigging of maps in red states,” he said. “But if the other states call off their redistricting efforts, we will happily do the same. And American democracy will be better for it.”
Newsom’s latest play comes as the drama around redistricting heightened over the weekend. Democratic leaders in other blue states argued on Sunday morning political shows that they were ready to battle head-to-head over the congressional district maps, which are normally tied to the census taken once a decade….
“You are playing with fire, risking the destabilization of our democracy, while knowing that California can neutralize any gains you hope to make,” he told Trump in the letter. “This attempt to rig congressional maps to hold onto power before a single vote is cast in the 2026 election is an affront to American democracy.”
“What are the Federal Voluntary Voting System Guidelines?”
New from the Bipartisan Policy Center:
he Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) are a set of principles and standards for the election equipment that Americans use to vote. These guidelines help ensure that election outcomes reflect the will of voters, a cornerstone of the democratic process.
The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) established the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The VVSG serve as the foundation for the EAC’s testing and certification program, which helps ensure that voting systems meet key requirements for usability, accessibility, and integrity.
Here’s what you need to know about the VVSG.
The VVSG are federal but voluntary, though many states have codified the use of VVSG in state law.
HAVA established minimum standards for all voting equipment used in federal elections, but the VVSG is a more comprehensive, modern set of standards that states can choose to adopt.
The EAC adopted the first set of guidelines, VVSG 1.0, in 2005. The EAC adopted the latest version, VVSG 2.0, in 2021 with an emphasis on usability, accessibility, auditability, and physical and cyber security. One voting system has been certified to 2.0 and two systems are under test at the time of this publication.
Thirty-eight states and DC use aspects of the federal testing and certification program. This means changes to the VVSG may have downstream effects on how states procure their voting equipment. Because so many states depend on the VVSG in some form, election technology vendors have “little choice but to ensure their products meet [federal] standards.”
On March 25, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies to take a broad set of actions related to election administration. Section 4(b) of the order directs the EAC to amend VVSG 2.0 by:
- Prohibiting the use of voting systems that encode a vote in a barcode or quick-response (QR) code “except where necessary to accommodate individuals with disabilities,” and
- Requiring voting systems to provide a voter-verifiable paper record.
In June, the EAC released a draft version of VVSG 2.1 which attempts to incorporate these changes.
The new draft VVSG 2.1 requires that barcode representations of a voter’s ballot selections “only be generated on an electronic voting system accessible by voters with disabilities.” All voting equipment certified to VVSG must meet its full suite of accessibility requirements, so some have argued that all VVSG-certified equipment would meet the exception described here.
Additionally, HAVA requires that election officials provide at least one accessible voting machine per polling place, but states determine whether all voters or just voters with disabilities can use these systems (a decision that warrants nuanced discussion).
In short, while the VVSG establishes technical standards for voting systems, it does not and cannot govern which voters get to use which pieces of equipment. This means the executive order does not ban jurisdictions from using machines that use bar codes….
Campaign Finance Expert Robert E. Mutch (“Bob”), 1940-2022
I recently learned that Bob Mutch, who has written the most comprehensive and important histories of campaign finance regulation in the United States, died in August 2022.
Bob was a political scientist by training, but he wrote excellent histories of campaign finance law and politics in the United States, including two books that I constantly rely upon in my own research, Campaigns, Congress, and Courts: The Making of Federal Campaign Finance Law (Praeger 1988) and Buying the Vote: A History of Campaign Finance Reform (Oxford University Press 2014). The work is extremely careful, lively, and helpful, including some details that have not appeared in any other work on this history.
Here is the blurb I wrote for the Oxford book:
The book is no doubt the leading historical account of the debate over campaign finance regulation from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Mutch has mined a wealth of primary sources to paint the most detailed picture possible (consistent with the paucity of the early historical record) of the financing of U.S. federal campaigns and the national debate over that financing. Mutch usefully ties current judicial debate to the earlier historical record, providing valuable context and serving as a corrective to much of what passes for historical analysis in the U.S. Supreme Court’s campaign finance opinions.
Here is Michael Malbin’s review of that book, the Schaffner & LaRaja book, and my own Plutocrats United.
Bob was always generous with his time and his comments on other work. He gave great comments on my scholarship and we had a great, but intermittent correspondence; the last email I received from him came a few months before he passed, when he congratulated me on my move to UCLA.
Researcher Sam Garrett, writing in his personal capacity, passes along these thoughts: “Robert Mutch’s meticulous research was and is indispensable to how I learned about campaign finance in the United States. His writing was thorough, clear, and enthusiastic. Bob reminded us that campaign finance policy might be rooted in law, but also that debate–and good stories–about money and politics date to the founding of the republic and continue today. He also didn’t stop at campaign finance. Several years ago, when Bob spoke to my American University students, he gave us more than an hour—without notes—on his latest project, about George Washington’s family. It was a privilege to know Bob and to continue learning from him.”
Bob apparently died without any immediate family, and I have been unable to find any obituary for him. So I thought it appropriate to say here at ELB how much he meant to many of us in the election law community. We will miss him, his spirit of inquiry, and his enthusiasm for studying our democracy to make it better.
Quote of the Day (Sam Issacharoff on SCOTUS Removing Election Guardrails)
“The majority of today should always fear that it may find itself in the minority tomorrow and that its rules can be used against it. . . . What happens when this breaks down? What happens if the majority of today sees this as the last chance to take it all?”
–Sam Issacharoff, quoted in Adam Liptak’s must-read piece, “In Election Cases, Supreme Court Keeps Removing Guardrails.”
I address this Supreme Court history, and why I told Adam I think we may be heading back to the early 1960s in terms of judicial protection of voting and elections, in Richard L. Hasen, The Stagnation, Retrogression, and Potential Pro-Voter Transformation of U.S. Election Law, 134 Yale Law Journal 1673 (2025).
Thanks to Nick Stephanopoulos
“How did we get all this gerrymandering? A short history of the Republican redistricting scheme”
Dave Daley in The Guardian.
“Inside Democrats’ risky gambit to ‘fight fire with fire’ over election maps”
Their exodus, coordinated with top Democrats outside Texas, is the latest flash point in a rapidly spreading fight over election maps — embodying Democrats’ newly combative posture on redistricting. After Texas Republicans initiated an unusual mid-decade effort to redraw their maps at President Donald Trump’s urging, state Democrats have staged a high-profile protest; liberal governors have moved to retaliate with new maps of their own; and many onetime gerrymandering critics have joined the cause. “Fight fire with fire,” as many Democrats have recently put it.
But the party is facing an uphill climb and risks of a letdown. Texas Democrats are likely to stall but not ultimately prevent Republicans from enacting a new map that would add five new U.S. House seats that voted for Trump by double-digit percentages. In several blue states, Democrats must clear legal hurdles that their red-state counterparts don’t face as both parties try to overhaul election maps beyond Texas.
“Fundamentally, this has the potential to be the gerrymandering apocalypse that may have been inevitable given that for both parties, the ends have increasingly justified the means,” said David Wasserman, senior elections analyst with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. Republicans are more likely to get their way, Wasserman said, even if Democrats are able to offset GOP gains in Texas.
The outcome could have major implications for 2026 and the final two years of Trump’s term. Republicans are defending a 219-212 House majority, with four vacancies, and even marginal shifts could be pivotal….
“It’s been 60 years since the Voting Rights Act was signed. Will it make it to 61?”
Zach Montellaro for Politico:
The Voting Rights Act was signed into law 60 years ago this week. What the law will look like when it reaches its 61st anniversary next year is a big question.
The landmark piece of legislation — which helped usher in an era of increased minority representation across American politics — has slowly been chipped away by the Roberts Supreme Court over the last 12 years. And a pair of court battles over the next year could leave the future of the law even more uncertain.
These new cases came “within the Overton window because of what the justices themselves have done to encourage people to think more aggressively as it relates to the Voting Rights Act,” said Wendy Weiser, the vice president for democracy at the liberal advocacy organization the Brennan Center for Justice. “These are radical changes that would do significant damage to voting rights.”…
The North Dakota case does not present as direct an attack on Section 2 as the one from Louisiana. But a ruling that kills the right for private parties to sue would render the VRA effectively moot, Hasen said. “While a ruling that private parties couldn’t sue wouldn’t look like a death knell, when you’ve got most cases — the lion’s share — being brought by private parties, and you have a Trump Department of Justice that has not and does not appear to be interested in bringing any additional Section 2 lawsuits,” he said, “it would essentially be rendering Section 2 a dead letter.”…
I Spoke with Jen Rubin of “The Contrarian” on Courts Chipping Away at the Voting Rights Act, and the Supreme Court Perhaps Killing Off Section 2
You can watch here.
I Was on the Bloomberg Law Podcast with June Grasso: “The Voting Rights Act Is in Jeopardy”
The Media’s Unfortunate Greater Interest in the Texas Redistricting Car Wreck than the Supreme Court’s Slow Poisoning of the Voting Rights Act
I’ve written about two big election stories this week, the newly ignited redistricting wars starting in Texas and the Supreme Court’s strong signal that it could kill off the Voting Rights Act Section 2 by next June. Judged by my conversations with those in the media, Texas redistricting is the bigger story, but I think the VRA is—especially coming on the 60th anniversary of the passage of the Act.
It’s not surprising that the media is more attracted to the Texas story. It happens right now with great visuals of fleeing legislators and threats to bring in the FBI, and Democratic governors vowing to engage in tit-for-tat warfare. The harms to democracy are easy for everyone to see.
But when the Supreme Court acts, it’s very hard to make exciting for the public. A cryptic briefing order issued at the start of a summer weekend does not make good visuals. You don’t get sound bites from Justices Alito and Sotomayor. The action will take place in dense, technical briefs, over months.
So when the Supreme Court kills another aspect of democracy and does it with slow poison, it is much harder to get the public to pay attention. But the lasting cost to our democracy is likely to be far greater than the redistricting skirmishes happening in prime time.
Watch Video of My Appearance on the PBS News Hour Talking about the New Redistricting Wars and the Implications for the Voting Rights Act
I Spoke with Crooked Media’s “What a Day” About the Troubling Future of the Voting Rights Act in the Hands of the Supreme Court
Great conversation with Jane Coaston. You can listen here.
We discussed my recent Slate piece, The Supreme Court Just Signaled Something Deeply Disturbing About the Next Term.