CBS news reports here that Emil Bove, the current Deputy Attorney General and President Trump’s nominee to the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, has “declined to rule out the possibility of the president running for a third term and did not denounce the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol in a questionnaire submitted to a Senate panel considering his nomination for a lifetime appointment as a federal judge.”

Bove is also the subject of a whistleblower allegation that he might have advised government lawyers to defy court orders.

ELB readers might be interested in this roundup of various law and democracy issues from the Expand Democracy team.

You can download a PDF of the report at this link.

Yunior Rivas with the Democracy Docket has the story here.

From Yunior’s write-up:

In a case where the 8th Circuit has severely weakened the Voting Rights Act (VRA), Native American voters in North Dakota are preparing to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene after the federal appeals court ruled that private individuals cannot bring lawsuits under Section 2 — the part of the Voting Rights Act that bars racially discriminatory voting laws.

On Wednesday, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, the Spirit Lake Tribe and Native voters asked the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to pause the implementation of its decision, warning that the ruling puts “every American citizen” in danger of losing their ability to fight racial discrimination in voting.

“Plaintiffs intend to file a petition for a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court to resolve this circuit split on a question of exceptional importance,” the motion states. “There is a reasonable probability that at least four Justices will agree to grant Plaintiffs’ petition for certiorari.”

If the Supreme Court agrees with the 8th Circuit’s ruling, it could end voters and private groups’ ability to file Section 2 lawsuits, leaving only the U.S. Department of Justice with power to enforce one of the most important protections in federal civil rights law.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has put redrawing the State’s congressional map on the agenda for a special legislative session. Stories here, here, and here.

From one of the news stories:

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that tackling redrawing the state’s congressional maps would be part of an special legislative session later this summer as Republicans seek to hold on to their narrow U.S. House majority in next year’s midterm elections.

Abbott said in a news release that the session, scheduled to begin July 21, would address 18 different policy items the Legislature didn’t get to during its regular session, which wrapped up last month. That list included: “Legislation that provides a revised congressional redistricting plan in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.”

The New York Times reported last month that members of President Donald Trump’s political operation had privately urged Texas Republicans to redraw their maps ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Republicans hold a slim 220-212 advantage in the House. And in Texas, they already control 25 of the 38 congressional districts. Padding the GOP’s majority by even just a few seats in Texas could complicate Democrats’ ability to take control of the House in 2026.

The story is here.

From the report:

MADISON, Wis. — A new lawsuit seeking to redraw Wisconsin’s congressional district boundary lines was filed on Tuesday, less than two weeks after the state Supreme Court declined to hear a pair of other lawsuits that asked for redistricting before the 2026 election.

The latest lawsuit brought by a bipartisan coalition of business leaders was filed in Dane County circuit court, rather than directly with the state Supreme Court as the rejected cases were. The justices did not give any reason for declining to hear those cases, but typically lawsuits start in a lower court and work their way up. 

This new lawsuit’s more lengthy journey through the courts might not be resolved in time to order new maps before the 2026 midterms.

The Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy argue in the new lawsuit that Wisconsin’s congressional maps are unconstitutional because they are an anti-competitive gerrymander. The lawsuit notes that the median margin of victory for candidates in the eight districts since the maps were enacted is close to 30 percentage points.

Two articles on ranked-choice voting and the New York City primary here and here.

Glenn Thrush and Julian Barnes reporting here.

From the article:

The Trump administration appears to be targeting officials who oversaw the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, examining the actions of the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and the former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan, according to people familiar with the situation.

John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director and a harsh critic of his Democratic-appointed predecessors, has made a criminal referral of Mr. Brennan to the F.B.I., accusing him of lying to Congress, officials said. The bureau is also scrutinizing Mr. Comey for his role in the Russia investigation, other officials said, although the exact basis for an inquiry remains unclear.

Even if it is unclear whether the moves will lead to charges, they are among the most significant indications that President Trump’s appointees intend to follow through on his campaign to exact retribution against his perceived enemies. That includes people leading the investigation into what he has repeatedly denounced as the “Russia hoax” nine years ago and officials involved in two failed federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump during the Biden years.

David Yaffe-Bellany and Kenneth Vogel of The New York Times provide an interesting account of how crypto lobbyists won over President Trump. Here are some key excerpts:

Just over a year ago, while sitting around a table in an ornate meeting room at Mar-a-Lago, David Bailey and a group of top Bitcoin executives made a pitch to Donald J. Trump.

They were looking for a savior.

For years, cryptocurrency companies had endured a sweeping crackdown in Washington — a cascade of lawsuits, regulatory attacks and prosecutions that threatened the industry’s survival.

Since Mr. Trump’s election, the price of Bitcoin, the most valuable cryptocurrency, has skyrocketed to over $100,000, enriching executives who supported his campaign. Crypto advocates who were shunned in Washington during the Biden administration now enjoy astonishing access to the Trump White House, which has quickly unwound the regulatory crackdown. And the federal government has embraced sweeping pro-crypto policies that could upend the U.S. financial system for decades.

All of that resulted from one of the great lobbying free-for-alls in recent history. For months, industry executives, paid lobbyists, campaign operatives, and Trump business partners and family members orchestrated a diffuse but stunningly effective influence operation that turned Mr. Trump from an outspoken Bitcoin skeptic into crypto’s most important supporter.

Virtually every step of Mr. Trump’s transformation has been steered by the industry. Lacking much knowledge of its intricacies, Mr. Trump embraced crypto when he saw it could generate huge profits for himself or his political groups, while outsourcing the details to industry advisers with their own business ambitions, according to documents and audio recordings, as well as interviews with more than 50 people involved in Mr. Trump’s crypto plans.

Now he is deeply enmeshed in an industry his administration regulates — one that was founded as a renegade alternative to the big banks. He and his sons unveiled their own crypto business last fall, the start of a blitz of new ventures that has grown to include four Trump-branded digital currencies and even a Bitcoin mining company.

At some points, the only meaningful check on the industry’s power has come from rival crypto interests jockeying against one another to influence Mr. Trump. The competition has at times resembled a bidding war.

Protect Democracy’s Ben Raderstorf and FairVote’s Mike Parsons have written this piece on the lessons that today’s reformers can learn from the wave of electoral systems reform that swept through American cities between 1915 and 1950, when many cities adopted and repealed PR.

Read the whole thing! But here are some excerpts on the lessons one can learn from :

So four lessons from this historical debate to take forward:

One: Focus on the end goals — pluralism and representation

Every reform is an instrument to an outcome, not an end in itself. Even as we argue and debate and experiment, let’s not miss the forest for the trees. American democracy is under threat because a calcified two-party system supported by winner-take-all elections are advantaging extremists and has put an unpopular autocrat back in the White House.

Two: Stay experimental

Because we don’t know exactly how different reforms will interact with the particular idiosyncrasies of American politics, we should be building a diverse portfolio of reform efforts with a reasonable degree of experimentation among proven systems as an explicit goal. Over-investment in any specific reform strategy, be it party-list or STV or otherwise, risks catastrophe if the bet goes bad. Alternatively, every reform that tries something slightly different gives us more data about how proportional representation works in the real, 21st-century United States.

Three: Find ways to channel — not resist — parties and factions

Political scientists almost unanimously agree that political parties are a necessary feature of a healthy democracy, as much as many Americans dislike them (the parties, we mean, not the political scientists). They’re the basic organizing function that keeps politics from descending into chaos. So one key question for reformers is this: How can we tap into widespread frustration with the parties as they are today to enact reform while proposing ways to help them function better in the future to sustain reform? Party-list advocates can learn from the adoptions of the Progressive Era just as STV advocates can learn from the repeals.

Four: Beware the election reformer’s dilemma

Finally, regardless of what happened back in the early 20th century, it’s worth approaching reform with a degree of humility regarding what will work, what won’t, and why. This is in part due to “the election reformer’s dilemma”:

The people who are most excited about electoral reform at the outset often approach politics from a different perspective from the voters the reform is intended to serve.

Almost by definition, those of us who are excited about electoral reform on its own merits are not anywhere close to the average voter. Election reformers tend to be far more politically engaged than the majority of the electorate. Many have more free time to engage in politics, or even count reform or politics as a full-time job. Some of us may follow the latest research produced by political scientists (or be political scientists ourselves). And some of us may be personally willing — even excited — to vote in multiple elections a year and have fairly detailed preferences and political views, including on individual candidates, ballot issues and so on.

From the Democracy Docket, we get this warning on the SAVE Act. The Save Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act) would require voters to provide proof of citizenship when they are registering to vote in federal elections.

According to the Democracy Docket:

The SAVE Act has stalled in the Senate since April, but a group of influential right-wing activists have hatched a plan to get it to President Donald Trump’s desk. 

Tea Party Patriots, the political arm of the long-running Tea Party movement, is launching a campaign aimed at pressuring lawmakers to prioritize the bill, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. 

Voting rights advocates warn the legislation could disenfranchise millions of eligible Americans, particularly women, young voters, low-income people and naturalized citizens.

The Brennan Center has conducted this analysis, concluding that at least $1.9 billion was spent on online ads in the 2024 election.

From the report:

Political advertisers spent $1.9 billion on online ads for the 2024 election on the four largest digital platforms (Meta, Google, Snap, and X) that publish analyzable spending data, according to a new analysis by the Brennan Center, OpenSecrets, and Wesleyan Media Project. Although this is the most complete accounting of online spending to influence the 2024 elections to date, it is an underestimate since no law requires platforms to publish information about political spending. Some platforms publish no data on this, and the voluntary disclosures of others are unstandardized and likely incomplete.

Our new examination of political ad content in the general election period expands on our summer 2024 and postelection analyses of online ad spending, identifying significant differences in the strategies used by spenders. Parties and outside groups were much more likely than candidates to use negative ads, and their ads focused largely on persuading voters. Candidates’ advertising goals, by contrast, tended to be evenly split between persuading voters and fundraising.

Some ELB readers might find this part of the report of particular interest:

There were partisan differences, too: While both sides of the aisle spent on efforts to persuade voters, spending in favor of Democrats was more likely to have fundraising as a goal, and spending in favor of Republicans was more likely to include get-out-the-vote efforts. Additionally, pro-Democratic spenders put a somewhat greater portion of ad money toward contrasting their party’s candidates with their opponents compared with pro-Republican spenders, who spent more on simply promoting their own candidates.

The prospect of a new political party by Elon Musk is garnering considerable attention. The question for me is whether the focus on third parties will also begin to undermine the American aversion to proportional representation. Ross Douthat has some advice for Musk here. Nate Cohn weighs in here and here. Alexander Burns explains how Musk could succeed. N.Y Times journalists Reid Epstein and Theodore Shleifer outline some of the difficulties that a potential new party would face.

From the article:

Congressional candidates for a theoretical new party face a labyrinthine system of signature requirements that vary from state to state. The most restrictive laws are in Georgia, where candidates outside the two major parties must gather 27,000 signatures from their district. This hurdle has kept third-party congressional candidates from being on a general election ballot since the law was enacted in 1943, according to Richard Winger, the publisher of Ballot Access News, which has tracked election laws since 1985.

They quote this ELB post by Derek Muller.

Even the name America Party could trip up Mr. Musk. New York State, for instance, has a law that forbids the word American — or any variant of it — to be on the ballot as part of a party name, according to the Election Law Blog.

Qualifying a slate of 435 House candidates, were Mr. Musk to take his idea national, would require about three times as many petition signatures as putting a presidential candidate on the ballot in every state and could cost more than $50 million just in signature gathering, Mr. Winger said.