From Alex Seitz-Wald and Ben Kamisar at NBC News:
Republicans are beginning to catch up with Democrats in online fundraising, creating for the first time in modern history a political landscape where both parties are largely funded by… Continue reading
The 2021 Supplement is now available at this link at Foundation Press. A few things happened regarding the law of democracy over the past year, all of which are covered in the 2021 Supplement — including major new sections on… Continue reading
Not exactly like an Olympic relay, but a couple of weeks ago I received the hand-off from Dan Tokaji and now I’m passing it on to Derek Muller. Please send any tips to him. I’m looking forward to his posts.
Now that I’ve described in Part I how DRA enables assessing a map’s competitiveness, along with other dimensions, I’ll lay out how DRA makes it possible to compare different maps. To do that, I’ll compare the preliminary map for the… Continue reading
Colorado’s congressional districts are being drawn by an independent redistricting commission created in 2018 by “Amendment Y,” a legislatively referred constitutional amendment that voters approved. That amendment also specifies the criteria the commission is to use. After specifying that districts… Continue reading
On Wednesday, the House will hold hearings to address the risk of electoral subversion. In light of that, I’m re-upping this NYT piece of mine, titled “There’s Still a Loaded Weapon Lying Around in Our Election System.” The piece identifies… Continue reading
Continuing the discussion of the two-year term for the House, Tyler Yeargain, Associate Director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, sent me this graph he created. This shows, first, the strength of the original view that democracy… Continue reading
Nick Stephanopoulos makes some fair points in response to my post on whether, in the absence of a new Act of Congress, the House can or should refuse to seat winning candidates solely on the ground that their districts were… Continue reading
In response to the NYT piece I published today on the two-year term for the House, Rob Richie pointed out to me that governors had originally been enacted to short terms for many decades. Indeed, after WWII more than 20… Continue reading
In a recent post, Ned expresses skepticism about the House exercising its power to judge its members’ elections. I agree that it’s a difficult political question whether the House should invoke its Article I, Section 5 authority. But as I… Continue reading
My new piece in the NYT highlights how institutional design choices, which we come to take for granted as the background features of American democracy, dramatically shape the kind of politics and governance we end up with:
The ability of… Continue reading
Rick Pildes in The NY Times makes a strong case on this point. As he acknowledges, however, a constitutional amendment to redress this problem seems out of reach for the foreseeable future.
An ELB reader kindly pointed me to this piece. (Thanks for the tip.) Written by distinguished authors whom I greatly admire, the argument is in my view gravely mistaken.
First, let me try to summarize it fairly: the claim… Continue reading
By Geoffrey Skelley:
Incumbent politicians have moved further toward the political extremes in recent elections partly because they are worried about a primary challenge. But studies suggest that the primary electorate itself isn’t any more ideologically extreme than the… Continue reading