Marion Campisi, Tommy Ratliff, Stephanie Somersille and Ellen Veomett for WaPo’s Monkey Cage:

This November, members of Congress will be running in new districts based on the 2020 Census data. So how might the new district maps influence the midterm elections — and perhaps more important, which party wins control of the House?

Of course, many issues will affect that result, from the fact that the president’s party usually loses seats in the midterms, to the Supreme Court Dobbs decision, inflation, and the Trump investigations, and any surprises between now and November. We can’t offer any predictions on those factors. But our research finds that this round of gerrymandering hurt Democrats less than the maps in place during the 2020 elections for the House. Here’s how we know….

How can we calculate and compare the impact of gerrymandering across the whole country? By using a new metric that can give an idea of how many districts each party is winning due to gerrymandering in each state. We call it the “GEO metric,” for Geography and Election Outcomes.

New analysis from Michael Li of the Brennan Center.

Cleveland.com:

Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor said Thursday she plans to campaign to try to end gerrymandering in Ohio once she leaves office at the end of the year.

O’Connor commented Thursday on her future plans during her State of the Judiciary address, the final of her judicial career as she prepares to leave office due to judicial age limits. O’Connor, a Republican, was the swing vote in numerous Ohio Supreme Court rulings this year striking down GOP-drawn maps as illegally gerrymandered.

Meanwhile, advocates behind this year’s redistricting litigation also said Thursday they’re assessing their future options as state Republicans are on the cusp of ignoring yet another Ohio Supreme Court deadline to produce a constitutional map for future elections.

O’Connor’s decision to join the court’s Democrats in a series of 4-3 rulings angered Republicans, leading them to effectively excommunicate her from the party as they accused the majority of exceeding its legal authority. As the protracted redistricting litigation caused May’s state legislative primary to be delayed until August, state lawmakers in turn threatened to impeach O’Connor or slash the court’s budget. While they didn’t follow through on their threats, state legislative leaders have taken to effectively ignoring the court’s redistricting orders as they wait for O’Connor to leave office at the end of the year.

Sam Wang:

Lots of pixels have been spilled on a legal theory once considered fringe, the Independent State Legislature doctrine. This theory threatens to wreak havoc with centuries of election law. Two upcoming Supreme Court redistricting cases cite this doctrine. Both are brought by Republican-controlled legislatures, so you’d think it would be of net benefit to their party. I did the math. Like the web ads say, the answer might surprise you.

Until recently, the theory was considered radical. It is based on Article I and II of the Constitution, which assign state-level power to regulate federal elections to legislatures. In two cases, Moore v. Harper and Costello v. Carter, lawyers representing Republican legislators question how much of a role the word “legislature” leaves for state courts.

A favorable ruling would go against precedents going back to George Washington’s first term of office. Ironically, the North Carolina General Assembly itself, represented in Moore v. Harper, passed a law two decades ago explicitly handing authority over redistricting to the state Supreme Court they now oppose. But recent Supreme Court rulings – on abortion, on religious expression, and on election law – make clear that the Court is unafraid to break from the past when there’s power or policy at stake.

If the Supreme Court does rule in favor of the theory, voters across the nation will take a major hit in the form of fewer competitive seats. Legislators generally draw safer districts than courts or independent commissions. I have analyzed ten states whose redistricting will potentially be affected by the ISL doctrine. In these states, up to 25 competitive Congressional districts would be replaced by single party-drawn plans. That’s over half of the competitive districts drawn this year! (Contrary to what is being said out there, there’s actually a fair lot of competition in the new maps. That’s a topic for a different day.)

The Independent State Legislature theory would disrupt the partisan balance that has emerged in many states. To determine this, I estimated what a party-blind redistricting process would produce in the ten states* that would be currently affected by the theory. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project has performed computer simulations** and used fairness metrics to identify neutral ranges of outcomes. Only two states, both under single-party control, have outcomes outside the range, Florida (R) and Maryland (D). Left unchecked, single-party control would let the other eight states join them.

However, Congressional power is determined not by single states, but by their combined total representation. So let’s add it all up….

WaPo:

After the release of the 2020 Census, legislatures across the country redrew their states’ congressional district maps, just like they do every decade. And, just like every decade, aggrieved citizens sued them for gerrymandering — the process whereby politicians craft district boundaries to ensure their own parties’ victory.

But this time around, something has changed. A technological revolution, decades in the making, has added a sharp new arrow to those citizens’ quiver of legal arguments. Known as algorithmic redistricting, the technology has persuaded judges to throw out gerrymandered maps in several states, including New York and Ohio.And it will be part of a case before the Supreme Court in October that could play a role in the 2024 election and the future of voting rights.

Here is how it works.

Louis Menand in the New Yorker.

NYT:

Since January, judges in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Ohio have found that Republican legislators illegally drew those states’ congressional maps along racial or partisan lines, or that a trial very likely would conclude that they did. In years past, judges who have reached similar findings have ordered new maps, or had an expert draw them, to ensure that coming elections were fair.

But a shift in election law philosophy at the Supreme Court, combined with a new aggressiveness among Republicans who drew the maps, has upended that model for the elections in November. This time, all four states are using the rejected maps, and questions about their legality for future elections will be hashed out in court later.

The immediate upshot, election experts say, is that Republicans almost certainly will gain more seats in midterm elections at a time when Democrats already are struggling to maintain their bare majority.

David Wasserman, who follows congressional redistricting for the Cook Political Report, said that using rejected maps in the four states, which make up nearly 10 percent of the seats in the House, was likely to hand Republicans five to seven House seats that they otherwise would not have won.

Some election law scholars say they are troubled by the consequences in the long run.

“We’re seeing a revolution in courts’ willingness to allow elections to go forward under illegal or unconstitutional rules,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the U.C.L.A. School of Law and the director of its Safeguarding Democracy Project, said in an interview. “And that’s creating a situation in which states are getting one free illegal election before they have to change their rules.”

Behind much of the change is the Supreme Court’s embrace of an informal legal doctrine stating that judges should not order changes in election procedures too close to an actual election. In a 2006 case, Purcell v. Gonzalez, the court refused to stop an Arizona voter ID law from taking effect days before an election because that could “result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls.”

The Purcell principle, as it is called, offers almost no guidance beyond that. But the Supreme Court has significantly broadened its scope in this decade, mostly through rulings on applications that seek emergency relief such as stays of lower court rulings, in which the justices’ reasoning often is cryptic or even unexplained.

Conservatives say the Supreme Court’s wariness of interfering with election preparations is common sense.

“It creates all kinds of logistical issues. Candidates don’t know where they’re running,” said Michael A. Carvin, a lawyer at the firm Jones Day who has handled redistricting cases for Republican clients in a host of states and helped lead the legal team supporting George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election dispute. Should the original map be upheld later, he said, returning to it would be “triply disruptive to the system.”

Critics argue, though, that the court is effectively saying that a smoothly run election is more important than a just one. And they note that the longstanding guidance in redistricting cases — from the court’s historic one person, one vote ruling in 1964 — is that using an illegal map in an election should be “the unusual case.”

The Purcell doctrine is not always applied to Republicans’ benefit. In March, the court cited an approaching primary election in refusing to block a North Carolina Supreme Court order undoing a Republican gerrymander of that state’s congressional map.

But scholars say such decisions are the exception. “It just so happens that the unexplained rules in election cases have a remarkable tendency to save Republicans and hurt Democrats,” said Steven I. Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor who addresses the issue in a forthcoming book, “The Shadow Docket.”

“It would be one thing if the court was giving us a compelling or even plausible explanation,” he added. “But the granting of a stay these days is often done with no explanation at all.”

Available here, with maps for each congressional district and state. “Now that all 50 states have finalized new lines for the 2022 elections, the Cook Political Report is pleased to introduce the 25th Anniversary edition of the Cook Partisan Voting Index (Cook PVI℠) for all 50 states and 435 congressional districts, reflecting new post-redistricting boundaries. First introduced in 1997, the Cook PVI measures how each state and district performs at the presidential level compared to the nation as a whole.”