Texas Republicans said Tuesday that they would kick off a second special legislative session Friday to redraw the state’s congressional maps in favor of the GOP, putting pressure on absent Democrats to quickly return to the state or commit to remaining away for another month.
Dozens of Democrats in the Texas House fled the state last week to block a Republican plan to shift five congressional districts sharply to the right ahead of next year’s midterm elections. They have said they are committed to staying away long enough to kill the measure during a special session slated to last until as late as Aug. 19.
Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows (R) said Tuesday that if Democrats do not return by Friday, Republican lawmakers will end the special session that day. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said he would immediately call a new 30-day special session, which Burrows would gavel in later Friday.
The move essentially restarts the clock, forcing Democrats to decide whether they’re willing to stay away for another four weeks — or longer. Democrats have not said whether they would stay away beyond the current special session. Abbott said Tuesday that he will keep calling special sessions until the Democrats come back….
All posts by Rick Hasen
Supreme Court Fast-Tracks Potential Demolition of Section 2 of Voting Rights Act by Setting Argument October 15 in Louisiana Case, Possibly in Time to Affect 2026 Midterm Elections
We know the Supreme Court dallied a long time in setting the Louisiana case for reargument, only recently adding a doozy of a question in this racial gerrymandering case that could tee up a potential knocking down of the remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act, Section 2. I explained the whole thing at Slate.
I had (wrongly) assumed given how long it took to set the case for reargument and to tee up the VRA issue that the Court would move slowly in the upcoming term so as not to mess with potential districts being used in the 2026 elections. (A decision to strike down Section 2, in this era of re-redistricting, could lead to a tsunami of new redistricting harming minority voters in Republican-dominated states.)
Now the Court has set oral argument in the case for October 15, in its first sitting of the new October 2025 Supreme Court term.
There are no guarantees on timing. The Court could well take until June 2026 to decide the case (or longer!). But setting it so early in the term after an expedited supplemental briefing schedule increases the chances of messing with the midterms.
Now it could also be that it was set for then because this case is held over from last term and the Court wants to dispose of a case it is already up to speed on.
But wow, this potentially raises the stakes a lot.
“Voter Intimidation: Forging a Judicial Standard”
Ben Goldstein has written this article for the Journal of Law and Politics. Here is the abstract:
In the last few years, federal courts have seen a notable increase in voter intimidation cases. Empirically, instances of voter intimidation, whether litigated or not, may be increasing as well. After briefly offering explanations for this trend, this Article reviews federal laws aimed at voter intimidation, especially Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act. It then considers how courts can reconcile First Amendment speech protections with the need to regulate conduct that interferes with voting, drawing lessons from two recent lawsuits in the 2022 midterm elections
in Arizona.
Rather than solely balancing competing individual rights, courts should embrace a more expansive conception of the governmental interests at stake in voter intimidation cases. In particular, courts should recognize that voting is a separate sphere of civic life—a unique method of public decisionmaking distinct from day-to-day public discourse. As such, the act of voting merits stricter levels of protection than the laissez-faire system governing public discourse.
This Article also suggests that in our post-pandemic era of extended voting, a regime requiring narrowly tailored speech restrictions may be inadequate to safeguard voters from intimidation and interference. Given voting’s essential role in democratic self-governance, courts should not hesitate to enjoin intimidating conduct under Section 11(b), even absent a showing of subjective intent or threatened physical violence. Furthermore, courts should evaluate alleged intimidation not in isolation, but in light of its broader historical and social context and its actual impact on voters.
This looks to be an important piece.
“The D.N.C.’s New Leader Seeks to Curb Dark Money Influence in 2028 Primaries”
Ken Martin, the Democratic National Committee chairman, is taking a symbolic step toward curbing the influence of undisclosed and corporate funds in his party’s 2028 presidential primary, a move that is likely to instigate a broader conversation about the role of big money in Democratic politics.
Mr. Martin’s proposal, which was included in a packet of documents to be sent to D.N.C. members that was obtained by The New York Times, seeks to have a new reforms committee propose “real, enforceable steps the D.N.C. can take to eliminate unlimited corporate and dark money in its 2028 presidential primary process” by the summer of 2026.
The move is the first significant maneuver from Mr. Martin to shape the party’s next presidential nominating process. How much bite the effort has will be determined in large part by the enforcement mechanism the party seeks to implement.
Efforts to curb the influence of super PACs, which can take in unlimited contributions but must disclose their donors, in the 2020 Democratic primaries failed when the party’s leading candidates — from Joseph R. Biden Jr. to Elizabeth Warren — accepted and encouraged support from such outside groups….
It is unclear how the D.N.C. could enforce possible penalties against candidates who have support from outside groups with whom they may not be coordinating. Or whether, as President Trump and Republicans are moving to curb Democrats’ ability to regain power in 2026 and beyond, the party is willing to repel progressive donors who are willing to give unlimited amounts of money….
“Why a gerrymandering critic wants to toss out California’s maps”
Sara Sadhwani is proud of her work on California’s independent redistricting commission, but now she wants voters to tear up the maps she and her colleagues spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours crafting.
The Pomona political science professor grabbed political insiders’ attention when she backed state Democrats’ move to counter Texas Republicans’ planned gerrymander with one of their own.
Sadhwani, one of the commission’s Democratic members in 2020, believes partisan gerrymandering should be outlawed nationwide. But she argued democratic institutions have been so weakened by President Donald Trump’s administration that slanting California’s maps toward Democrats is necessary to push back on a Republican power grab — which is why she’s inviting voters to override her own work.
“These are extraordinary times,” she told Playbook. “At this moment, I’m not so worried about California’s democracy.”
You got a lot of attention for calling for the maps to be redrawn. Can you talk me through your thinking?
First of all, I’ll say that I stand by the maps that the commission drew. They are fair, they are competitive, and those are the kinds of maps that we should have for congressional districts across the nation. We expanded opportunities for Latinos, in particular, to elect their candidates of choice in ways that the Legislature never bothered to do in California. I’m incredibly proud of the work that we did in the largest state in the nation.
That being said, not all of the states are playing by the same set of rules. Certainly, we see the showdown happening in Texas. President Trump has talked about getting the FBI involved to get Democratic members back to the Texas Legislature. These are extraordinary times. At this moment, I’m not so worried about California’s democracy. We have strong democratic institutions here in the state of California, but I’m also a political scientist, and at the national level, what we’ve seen over the last 10 or even 20 years is a backsliding and a decay of our institutions that should worry all of us….
“Voting Rights and Private Rights of Action: An Empirical Study of Litigation Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, 1982-2024”
Chris Seaman has posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming, FSU Law Review). Here is the abstract:
The Voting Rights Act is perhaps the most effective civil rights law ever enacted, bringing millions of Americans who have historically been discriminated against into the democratic polity and facilitating the election of candidates of their choice. But for more than a decade, the rights guaranteed by this landmark statute have been undermined by the courts. Recently, the Eighth Circuit has eroded what remains of the Act by holding that private plaintiffs cannot sue to enforce the protections of Section 2 in federal court. This holding—which is in conflict with several other circuits, as well as prior Supreme Court decisions regarding implied rights of action to enforce other parts of the Voting Rights Act—seems likely to be reviewed by the Court.
To assess the potential impact of a possible nationwide ban on private plaintiffs bringing Section 2 claims, this Article reports findings from a comprehensive empirical study of over 1500 challenges brought in federal court between 1982 and 2024. It finds that over 90% of Section 2 challenges were brought by private plaintiffs rather than the Attorney General. Moreover, private plaintiffs were highly successful in these challenges, winning nearly two-thirds of the time. The Article then explains why, if Section 2 lacks a private cause of action, the federal government is ill-equipped as both a practical and a political matter to fill this gap in enforcement.
Looking forward to reading this!
“Republican Party of Texas sets stage to censure members who stepped out of line in likely bid to block them from primary ballot”
The executive committee of the Republican Party of Texas was in Austin on Saturday to finalize its first-ever legislative review, outlining a list of censurable offenses that some within the Texas GOP want to use to block certain House Republicans from the 2026 primary ballot.
Those Republicans, made up of delegates chosen by county parties, want to use the list to hold their elected officials to the state party’s priorities. But others see it as an illegal effort to deny officials from the primary ballot if they don’t follow the most fervent conservative activists’ aims 100% of the time.
Texas GOP Chair Abraham George told The Blast that he and House Speaker Dustin Burrows, who spoke to members of the SREC at a separate meeting with Gov. Greg Abbott earlier Saturday morning, have not discussed the party’s censure effort, a new “accountability” mechanism the state party approved at its 2024 convention. Still, Burrows likely knew the SREC members would be approving a hit list that could be used to keep “RINOs” from the ballot….
“Midterms are more than a year away, but Trump is already challenging them | Opinion”
Chris Brennan column in USA Today:
They’re building the machine now to meddle in the 2026 midterm elections 15 months from now.
And those machinations are built on two lessons learned from 2020: Attack the election with everything you have before it happens, and stock the Trump administration only with officials who will do exactly what he says on elections, no matter what the law says.
Trump’s team of election deniers, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, represent both of these lessons.
The first they learned in 2020, when they failed while trying to help Trump overturn a free and fair election. It was all so careless and chaotic back then, a dizzying series of unsubstantiated claims and discombobulated news conferences punctuated by judge after judge tossing out Trump’s challenges as meritless.
I was reminded recently of a news conference I attended at Philadelphia’s airport on the day after the 2020 election. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, then working as Trump’s lawyer doing work that eventually got him disbarred, was the ringmaster for the election deniers that day. And Bondi was right by his side….
Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at The Brennan Center for Justice, told me that Trump and his team appear to be building a “pretext” on the false claim of rampant election fraud as justification for their potential meddling in the elections. They’re systematically removing “the brakes” that protect democracy during the voting process, she said.
“They’re taking aim at all of the brakes that applied before. And they’re starting earlier,” Weiser said. “That just shows you he’s laser-focused on interfering in elections here by any means necessary. Bend the rules. Throw out the playbook.”
David Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who founded The Center for Election Innovation and Research, has been hosting monthly webinar meetings with hundreds of state election officials since March. Those officials – Republicans and Democrats – have plenty of questions and concerns about the “unprecedented level of federal interference in state election processes,” he told me.
“They’re not sure where all this is leading,” Becker said. “They hear the rhetoric coming out of the White House. They hear the continued false statements about past elections and election security in the United States.”
It’s worth noting here, as Weiser told me, that presidents have no role in running or overseeing elections in America, except for enforcing voting laws passed by Congress. And Becker noted that Congress, now controlled by Trump’s Republican allies, has not authorized the DOJ intrusions into state election systems.
“How Alabama’s historic congressional map still faces uncertainty amid redistricting battles”
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.”…
“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).