One county in critical swing state of PA continues to have problems with its touch-screen voting machines. It’s a good thing the system prints out paper recordings of their vote that voters can check, which is one of the policies… Continue reading

Boulder elected its mayor for the first time and also used ranked-choice voting to do so. This was an example of a “come from behind” RCV win. In the initial tally, two candidates from the Boulder Progressives split the vote… Continue reading

The GOP Conference Rules employ a version of ranked-choice voting to find the candidate with majority support in the caucus as a Speaker candidate. If there’s no majority winner when more than two candidates run, the bottom one is eliminated… Continue reading

Wednesday, the Court is going to hear its first case from this round of re-districting on whether race unconstitutionally predominated in the drawing of a congressional district, in this case CD 1 in South Carolina (R. Nancy Mace’s district).  There’s… Continue reading

Tom Edsall in the NYT does a masterful job synthesizing the state-of-the-art empirical knowledge on how changes in recent years to the way elections are financed have contributed to polarization and extremism. Relying on this data, the piece makes two… Continue reading

I’ve been saying in recent years, as in this 2017 post here, that our politics has become existential to many on both sides. Existential politics is very different from political polarization. There can be sharp differences between parties when they… Continue reading

I do not think the affirmative action cases, or Shelby County, directly cast doubt on the constitutionality of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Louisiana has now raised this question in its letter filing with the Fifth Circuit in… Continue reading

I’ve started reading the new paper Rick H. links to a few posts below. This paper is going to be pored over by those interested in voting laws and policies. Here’s another paragraph from the paper: [W]e believe that the… Continue reading

This looks to be an important new article in the APSR from a strong group of authors. Here’s the abstract: Debates over racial voting, and over policies to combat vote dilution, turn on the extent to which groups’ voting preferences… Continue reading

As anticipated after oral argument, the Court rejected the most extreme version of the ISLT. It held that state constitutions continue to bind state legislatures when they regulate national elections. The Court generated a majority decision, though, by deciding the… Continue reading

Enough time has passed since the Court asked the parties to file letters on the jurisdictional issues that it seems highly unlikely the Court — if it is going to dismiss the case — will do so with a one-line… Continue reading

It’s understandable that much of the reaction to the Milligan decision on the VRA is to be stunned that the Roberts Court would endorse the VRA claim and require Alabama to create a second ability-to-elect congressional district for black voters… Continue reading