Voters in Alaska adopted a top-four primary election structure and ranked-choice voting in the general election as a way to reward candidates with the broadest electoral appeal. Those reforms have been challenged under the state constitution, with the state supreme… Continue reading

I’m looking forward to participating in this event (free registration required): The Wake Forest Law Review is excited to present “Preserving American Democracy,” a symposium evaluating the influence of First Amendment jurisprudence and election law on modern American Democracy.… Continue reading

NYT: Senate Democrats plan to press ahead this week with an effort to push new voting rights protections through Congress, in an all but doomed attempt to enact a key piece of President Biden’s agenda that has been undercut… Continue reading

NYT: With the door slammed shut this week on federal legislation to create new protections for access to voting, Democrats face an electoral landscape in which they will need to spend heavily to register and mobilize voters if they are… Continue reading

Before this redistricting cycle began, I wrote a lengthy essay on the importance of competitive congressional districts as one means of limiting political extremism, as part of my more general focus on institutional reforms that might help mitigate extremism.… Continue reading

Watch CSPAN’s Washington Journal.

Politico: Sen. Mitt Romney said Sunday that he “never got a call from the White House” to negotiate bringing Republicans and Democrats together to create bipartisan voting reform.The Utah Republican lamented the lack of bipartisanship on the pivotal issue… Continue reading

Ron Brownstein in the Atlantic on Chief Justice Roberts’s responsibility for — even authorship of — the poor state of American democracy. Roberts as much as anyone set in motion the events that have led to this week’s climactic Senate… Continue reading

Now that the Ohio Supreme Court has struck down Ohio’s congressional plan on state constitutional grounds, it’s worth considering whether an “independent state legislature” challenge could be brought on this basis. The thrust of the challenge would be that the… Continue reading

Doyle McManus in L.A. Times. Also, I missed El Kilgore’s Intelligencer column from a few days ago, A Plan to Fix the Electoral Count Act Is Taking Shape, which quoted this ELB post. The Washington Post today… Continue reading

New evidence on the Trump administration’s meddling with the Census, confirming its focus on excluding noncitizens from the population count for reapportionment purposes. The memo laid out a string of instances of political interference that senior census officials planned to… Continue reading

WaPo on next steps in the Jan. 6 inquiry: But so far the department does not appear to be directly investigating the person whose desperate bid to stay in office motivated the mayhem — former president Donald Trump — either… Continue reading

Persuasive evidence that circumvention of federal contribution limits has occurred since McCutcheon struck down the aggregate limits. A fundraising committee operated jointly by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee in 2016 served as a vehicle for state parties… Continue reading

Matthew Seligman on Electoral Count Act reform: This Article exposes the vulnerabilities of the legal framework governing Congress’s role in resolving disputed presidential elections: the Electoral Count Act of 1887. The constitutional and statutory framework for resolving such disputes remains… Continue reading

Stephen Griffin on how voting rights commentary often ignores history, especially in the South. Unfortunately, this viewpoint leaves out one region and one group of surpassing importance to the Democratic party and, one hopes, to the nation as a whole… Continue reading