In South Dakota, reformers have gathered far more signatures than needed to get a measure on the ballot in November that would create a Top Two open primary, much like CA and WA use. Those signatures now have to be validated. I prefer the Alaska model of a Top Four primary, but it’s impressive to see how much primary reform is becoming a matter of focus in many state ballot measures for this fall.

NYT on an FEC advisory opinion that candidates can raise unlimited sums for issue advocacy groups working on ballot measures.

The Federal Election Commission quietly issued an advisory opinion last week allowing candidates to raise unlimited money for issue-advocacy groups working on ballot measures in elections in which those candidates are on the ballot.

The opinion, issued in response to a request from a Nevada-based abortion rights group, could significantly alter the landscape in the fall in terms of the capacity that candidates aligned with these groups have to help them raise money.

The decision applies to all federal candidates, but with a presidential election taking place in six months, the biggest attention will fall to that race. If Mr. Biden can solicit money for abortion-rights ballot measures, he can add to an already-existing fund-raising advantage that his team currently has over Mr. Trump. . . .

The advisory opinion means that both Mr. Biden and former President Donald J. Trump can raise money for outside groups pushing ballot measures. In the wake of the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision, abortion ballot measures are expected to be a key focus for Democrats this fall.

“I think it’s quite significant,” said Adav Noti, of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, calling it an enormous change from prohibitions put in place by the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill in 2002.

Detroit News on Democrats’ arguments that recent Republican lawsuits in Michigan have the political aim of sowing doubts about election integrity.

On Monday, lawyers for the Democratic National Committee, which is working to reelect President Joe Biden, said two suits filed by the Republican National Committee in Michigan in March were part of “extensive” and “wide-ranging” efforts to make people believe the upcoming election will be unfair. . . .

The Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit on March 13 in Michigan’s Western District federal court, saying Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson had failed to maintain “clean and accurate” voter registration records and allowed dozens of counties to have more active registered voters than adult residents.

Then, on March 28, the Republican committee submitted a separate suit in the Michigan Court of Claims, asserting Benson, who is a Democrat, had improperly issued guidance telling clerks to presume signatures submitted for absentee voting were valid. . . .

As for the voting registration records suit, Democrats said in their brief, the court had “recently disposed of a similar case involving the same basic allegations” and there “is nothing unlawful about Michigan’s voter-roll maintenance program.”

“Contrary to the RNC’s rhetoric, the true threat to our electoral system comes not from voter-roll maintenance like Michigan’s, but from baseless lawsuits like this one,” the Democratic lawyers wrote in their Monday brief.

Interesting story about a Missouri county party claiming the authority to “vet” Republican candidates and bar them from running as Republicans if they fail its test.

In March, the Vernon County Republican Committee filed what is known as a writ of mandamus through their attorney, Mark McCloskey, to, in effect, compel the Vernon County clerk, Adrienne Lee, to do what they believe to be her public duty.

In the filing, the plaintiff maintains that, just like a club is allowed to determine who its members are, the Vernon County Republican Committee is “solely responsible” in the county for determining who may run for office under the Republican banner.

The county clerk, they insist, went beyond her authority when, in February, she took the filing fees from several candidates who were rejected by the committee and told them that their names would be placed on the Republican primary ballot in August.

The committee’s interpretation of state law is that, while the county clerk can take a filing fee, those checks are then passed on to the party committees. They argue that it is ultimately up to a the political parties — Republican or Democrat — whether to accept or reject those fees and accept or reject any particular candidate. In this case, they did not accept those candidates and did not cash their checks. Thus the candidates’ names should be taken off the ballot, the committee argued.

“The whole purpose of the vetting program is to verify that people who run as Republicans adhere to Republican values and principles and aren’t merely putting an ‘R’ behind their name so they can get elected,” McCloskey told The Star. “We believe the courts have backed us up — that a party should have the exclusive right to determine who gets to run under that party’s banner.”

Politico. Of course, these moves to impede Kennedy’s ballot access and attack his candidacy are a product of winner-take-all electoral rules. Under, say, ranked-choice voting, there wouldn’t be the same incentive to stop minor party challengers.

There is a deep concern that Kennedy and other third-party candidates “pose real threats to the Republic by helping Trump win,” said Matt Bennett, president of Third Way, a center-left group that’s involved in efforts to cut Kennedy down. . . .

The push to undercut Kennedy — as well as Green Party candidate Jill Stein and academic Cornel West, both of whom are also running third-party bids — comes from Democrats who say they are motivated by the 2000 and 2016 elections, when third-party candidates played a role in Al Gore and Hillary Clinton’s respective losses. . . .

To date, the campaign against Kennedy has largely focused on research and legal challenges. The Democratic National Committee hired veteran staffers to coordinate their push back against Kennedy, particularly through media stories about Kennedy. They’ve also filed Federal Elections Commission complaints against Kennedy’s allies. The outside groups, like Clear Choice PAC and American Bridge, are diving into opposition research and messaging. MoveOn, a 10 million-member organization, reassigned staffers from No Labels-focused efforts toward Kennedy, as well as bringing on additional staff.

WaPo reports that the share of Black adults who say they’re certain to vote in this year’s election is down sharply from 2020 — and down by more than the analogous share for all adults. Lower turnout is always a cause for concern, but the electoral effects of this development (if it occurs) might be muted given evidence that lower-propensity minority voters are more divided in their partisan leanings.

Black Americans’ desire to vote in this year’s election is down sharply compared with four years ago, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted last month — a potentially troublesome sign for President Biden, whose ascent was powered by Black voters in 2020 and who has intensified efforts to court them before November’s election.

The poll of more than 1,300 Black adults finds that 62 percent of Black Americans say they’re “absolutely certain to vote,” down from74 percent in June 2020. The 12-percentage-point drop outpaces the four-point drop among Americans overall, from 72 percent to 68 percent.

Charis Franklin has written this Note for the Fordham Law Review. Here’s the excerpt:

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (“the Voting Rights Act”) is one of the primary vehicles by which plaintiffs receive injunctive relief ahead of elections. More specifically, § 2 of the Voting Rights Act allows plaintiffs to challenge gerrymandered maps before they are used in contentious elections. However, Justice Kavanaugh’s reframing of the Purcell doctrine in Merrill v. Milligan weakened § 2’s ability to interrupt the use of these maps. This Note discusses how Justice Kavanaugh’s interpretation of the Purcell doctrine recenters the doctrine on bureaucratic inconvenience rather than voter enfranchisement, restricting voters’ access to relief prior to elections. Furthermore, this Note addresses how this restructuring is inconsistent with the intent of the Voting Rights Act and the Purcell doctrine. As a solution, this Note proposes a narrow interpretation of the Purcell doctrine focusing on voter enfranchisement through a strict application of the Gingles factors and a narrow timeline for redistricting.

Politico:

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum on Sunday supported the election fraud allegations made by former President Donald Trump, claiming on CNN: “I think it’s clear that there’s vote-buying going on at a scale like we have never seen before.”…

Trump, never shy about alleging uncorroborated malfeasance by Democrats, said his rivals use “welfare” as an enticement to get people to vote for them. “Don’t underestimate welfare. They get welfare to vote, and then they cheat on top of that — they cheat,” Trump said in his remarks on Saturday.

Burgum didn’t endorse the idea that everyone receiving public assistance is being bribed to vote (“I don’t think that’s the intention that he meant when he said that”) but then circled back to the idea of vote-buying, citing President Joe Biden’s efforts to partially forgive some student loan debt.

“You start trying to give away hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money, and it’s not even — it’s like we’re borrowing to give it away. It’s not tax and spend. It’s borrow, borrow from the Chinese, and give it away,” he said.

Burgum added: “Citizens understand those are like preelection payoffs. Those are like, hey, folks, please vote for us because we’re relieving your debt. So at what point does it cross over, programs like student debt, to just vote-buying?” He then answered his own question, saying he saw this as an unprecedented effort at obtaining votes.

A two-term governor, Burgum was part of the 2024 Republican presidential field until dropping out in December. In July 2023, in order to meet the threshold of individual donors each candidate needed to participate in the GOP’s first debate, Burgum announced a campaign to reward individual donors with $20 gift cards.

“Doug knows people are hurting because of Bidenflation and giving Biden Economic Relief Gift Cards is a way to help 50,000 people until Doug is elected President to fix this crazy economy for everyone,” spokesperson Lance Trover said at the time….

Direct your tips and comments to them during their weeks. Thanks!

So notes this DOJ press release.

Valuable Brennan Center info.

Texas Tribune:

A recent “deepfaked” ad targeting House Speaker Dade Phelan could inspire further legislation to crack down on doctored imagery in political ads.

At the end of Monday’s hearing of the House Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies, political attorney Andrew Cates suggested the committee should recommend an update to Senate Bill 751 from 2019, which created a Class A misdemeanor offense for distributing a “deep fake video” created with the intent to deceive voters.

“Not to bring up sensitive stuff, but the speaker got hit a couple days ago with a fake image, or a deceptively altered image,” Cates said. “It’s not against the law here.”

That mailer, paid for by the Jeff Yass-bankrolled Club for Growth Action PAC, depicted Phelan in an intimate hug with former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, apparently a remake of Pelosi hugging new House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Less publicized was the flip side of the mailer, which falsely depicted Phelan at a lectern speaking at a Texas House Democratic Caucus news conference.

NYLJ.

Rick Pildes here. A month after Jan. 6, 2021, I wrote an essay in the New York Times asserting that “every political reform proposal must [now] be judged by its ability to fuel or weaken extremist candidates.” I’ve now posted at SRRN a much fuller essay, entitled “Political Reforms to Combat Extremism,” which is forthcoming as a book chapter in a book out this fall entitled Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue (J. Zelizer and K. Greenberg eds).

Here is the link to that forthcoming article and the abstract:

This article first identifies different ways of defining political extremism. It then explores empirical perspectives on the extent to which current political extremism and affective polarization are driven from the top down (political elites) or the bottom up.

After addressing these issues, the article then turns to five areas of institutional reform that could help mitigate political extremism: (1) replacing the traditional party primary; (2) changes to the presidential nominations process; (3) the right reforms of campaign finance; (4) greater emphasis on competitive election districts; and (5) changes to voting systems.

There is no silver bullet or set of institutional reforms that can magically transform our political culture. But institutional reforms can at least mitigate to some extent the political extremism that currently characterizes American political culture and politics.