Ruth Greenwood was the guest on the Touro Law Review podcast.

POLITICO essay worth reading. I’m not sure I’m convinced by its “glass half full” account on the current situation, but it’s definitely food for thought. In any event, it doesn’t change the need for actors within the system to do their part in preserving, rather than undermining, the capacity for collective self-government through free and fair elections.

N.Y. Times reports on Senator Cruz’s condemnation of FCC Chair Carr’s pressure on ABC over Kimmel:

‘“He says, ‘We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.’” Mr. Cruz said on his podcast “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” quoting Mr. Carr verbatim. “And I’ve got to say, that’s right out of Goodfellas. That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”’

Cruz went on to say that Carr’s comment was “‘dangerous as hell.””

The National Law Review has just published a story about the Third Circuit’s decision last month to invalidate on Anderson-Burdick grounds Pennsylvania’s law requiring the rejection of timely submitted mailed ballots that are misdated by the voters. Will a cert petition be filed in the case? If so, will it be granted? Although in January SCOTUS declined to consider a case that challenged the same rule under the statutory materiality provision, that case sustained the validity of the rule against the statutory challenge. Given instead that in this case the rule was invalidated and specifically on Anderson-Burdick grounds–and given especially that there has been some interest among judges in revisiting the Anderson-Burdick balancing test–what’s the possibility that SCOTUS would take this case for the specific purpose of that revisiting?

The University of Wisconsin Law School, in conjunction with other organizations, is hosting what looks like will be a great event. Parties, Power, and Possibility: Revisiting Fusion Voting in Wisconsin will be held on Friday, November 14, 2025. It has a superb lineup of participants:

• Nathan Atkinson, University of Wisconsin Law School
• Julia Azari, Marquette University
• Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin, Elections Research Center
• Dan Cantor, Center for Ballot Freedom
• Andy Craig, Rainey Center 
• David G. Deininger, Former Wisconsin Court of Appeals
• Daniel DiSalvo, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 
• Lisa Disch, University of Michigan
• Jennifer Dresden, Protect Democracy
• Lee Drutman, New America
• Peter LaVenia Jr., SUNY Oneonta
• Dan Lee, University of Nevada – Las Vegas
• Seth Masket, University of Denver
• Allie Morris, University of Wisconsin
• Derek Muller, University of Notre Dame Law School
• Alexander Tahk, Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership
• Dan Tokaji, University of Wisconsin Law School
• Beau Tremitiere, Protect Democracy

If the goal of fusion voting is to counteract polarization and the election of more extreme candidates, I’m personally skeptical of its potential to achieve those benefits–at least in a state like Ohio, with which I’m most familiar. For example, I don’t think fusion voting would have made a difference in Ohio’s US Senate elections in either 2022 or 2024. In other words, even if Tim Ryan in 2022 and Sherrod Brown in 2024 had appeared on the ballot as the nominee of a “moderate” party as well as being a Democrat, I doubt that the outcome of either election would have been any different. In each case, the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee (Vance in 2022, Moreno in 2024) still most likely would have won in my judgment.

But Wisconsin is a different state than Ohio, purple instead of red. It seems more likely that fusion voting might have made a difference in Wisconsin’s 2022 US Senate election. Ron Johnson won that race by only one percentage point, 50.41% to 49.41%, and Mandela Barnes, the Democrat. If Barnes had been co-nominated by a “moderate” party, that might have been enough to cause him to pull ahead of Johnson.

In any event, I think it’s great that there is a Wisconsin-specific conference focusing on the possibility of fusion voting in that state. I’ll be especially interested to hear if any empirical data is presented at the conference to shed light on what potentially effect it actually would have.

CNN reports: “In a ruling dripping with derision, a federal judge has rejected President Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, asserting that the rambling 85-page suit did not follow federal rules for filing civil complaints”

Here’s the ruling.

The written version of my Miegunyah Lecture has been published and posted on SSRN. Here’s the abstract:

This is the text of US constitutional and election law scholar Professor Edward B. Foley’s Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellow Lecture delivered at the University of Melbourne on 30 July 2025. In the lecture, Professor Foley advocates for ‘centripetal’ forms of voting to be used to help depolarise the intense partisan competition that is experienced in the United States. Professor Foley’s lecture draws on University of Melbourne’s Professor E.J. Nanson’s pioneering methods of preferential voting, outlined in pamphlets such as Methods of Election (1882) and The Real Value of the Vote (1900), that were proposed at the turn of the twentieth century, and which proposed greater centripetal power than the current preferential voting methods used in Australia. You can also find a recording of the lecture at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ucbAxL7W0w.

Earlier today, the top story in the N.Y. Times app on my phone had this headline:

“Trump Says Broadcasters Should Lose Licenses for Criticizing Him”

It’s the kind of headline that should be a parody, like in The Onion, but alas not. I took a screenshot of it because it was so flabbergasting and/or appalling. I had hoped to be able to upload the screenshot as part of this blog post, but my lack of technical skills is preventing me from doing that. (If that changes, I will update this post. In the meantime, the words of the headline are astonishing enough.)

Under this GOP Measure, All of Missouri’s Recent Popular Initiatives Would Have Failed

As Georgia Returns to Electing Its Utility Commission, Worries over Democracy Linger

I just posted this paper, written for the Ohio State Law Journal’s symposium on my book, “Aligning Election Law.” The paper explores how the principle of alignment — congruence between governmental outputs and popular preferences — could be incorporated into mainstream constitutional law. Here’s the abstract. I’ll also be giving the Constitution Day Lecture at Drake University today based on the paper.

At present, American constitutional law gives short shrift to the democratic value of alignment (congruence between governmental outputs and popular preferences). But it doesn’t have to be this way. In this symposium contribution, I outline three ways in which constitutional law could incorporate alignment. First, alignment resembles federalism in that it’s a principle implied by the Constitution’s text, structure, and history. So doctrines analogous to those that implement federalism could be crafted to operationalize alignment. Second, comparative constitutional law recognizes democratic malfunctions that involve misalignment as well as innovative judicial remedies for these problems. Likewise, American constitutional law could appreciate the full arrays of misaligning threats and potential judicial responses to them. Lastly, one of the key concepts of modern originalism is the construction zone, in which disputes must be resolved on grounds other than the constitutional text’s original meaning. Alignment could be a factor that courts consider in the construction zone, pushing them to further, not to frustrate, this value.

VoteBeat’s article explains the new compromise proposal aimed at getting holdouts to agree to early processing of absentee ballots. The compromise includes “regulations for ballot drop boxes and an explicit ban on clerks fixing, or curing, errors on ballots.” Will Governor Evers sign the bill, assuming it passes? The article states: “Evers’ team has said he would sign a Monday processing proposal that’s packaged with other measures, as long as they didn’t contain a “poison pill” or make voting harder.” That leaves me still unclear on the measure’s ultimate fate.

Courthouse News reports on the federal district court’s denial of the Trump Administration’s motion to dismiss in the lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order on elections. The court ruled that the states have standing to sue and that they plausibly allege violations of federal law, including the NVRA.

Comprehensive coverage from The Washington Post.

I was struck by reading two sharply contrasting stories about different civics education initiatives this week. First, within an article focusing on on the “In Pursuit” project (which has prominent current figures discussing significant individuals in American history), the N.Y. Times links to a story about a coalition of organizations devoting $56 million to improved civics education. This effort will support, among other things, “expansion of National Constitution Center programs.” Second, the N.Y. Times also has a story about another civics education effort led by President Trump and his administration. This one reportedly will bypass “traditional civic education groups, such as the National Constitution Center.”

It is perhaps not surprising that a time of hyper-polarization civics education itself will become polarized. I suppose we can hope that debating the meaning and fundamental values of America in the context of civics education will at least cause Americans to focus on these matters and decide for themselves what their country stands for and what they want it to be–and that self-government rooted in free and fair elections will be part of that core commitment. That kind of aspiration was expressed by Donna Phillips, the CEO of the Center for Civics Education, who told the Times: “‘My hope is that the announcement of [the Trump-led] coalition is a starting point for the entire nation to prioritize civics.'”