All posts by Richard Pildes
House GOP Conference Uses a Version of Ranked-Choice Voting to Seek Majority Winner
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
A Bit of Context on Alexander v. the South Carolina Conference of the NAACP
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
Democracy, Twenty-Five Years On
(This post is co-authored with Sam Issacharoff)
Our thanks to Rick Hasen for organizing this symposium and for giving us the chance to revisit our work from 25 years ago. Neither of us had read Politics as Markets in more… Continue reading
Must-Read NYT Piece on How Changes to Campaign Finance Contribute to Extremism
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
Existential Politics
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
The VRA and the Affirmative Action Cases
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
More from the Hersh/Grimmer Paper on Election Laws and Turnout
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
“The Geography of Racially Polarized Voting: Calibrating Surveys at the District Level”
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
The Court’s Mixed Message on the Independent State Legislature Theory
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
One Way or Another, We are Likely to Get at Least Some Opinions in Moore v. Harper
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
A Dissent From the View that the Court’s VRA Decision in the Alabama Case Was a Stunning Surprise
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
One Initial Point on the Alabama Decision
There will be a temptation to see this decision as an affirmation of the status quo. But in a subtle way, I think the decision does more than that. New technology, as in this case, now enables plaintiffs to search… Continue reading
More on Religious Gerrymandering
Nick posted about a piece in the Election Law Journal on the topic of potential religious-based gerrymandering claims. I wanted to flag an essay a student of mine wrote on the same subject in the NYU Law Review. That piece… Continue reading