Control over elections administration in North Carolina could flip from Democratic to Republican control within hours, following a decision late Wednesday from the state Court of Appeals.
Elections decisions in North Carolina are made by political appointees, who make calls on issues such as where and when to open early voting sites, which allegations of campaign finance violations or voter fraud to refer to prosecutors, and whether to confirm election results.
Last week, a trial court ruled that Republican state lawmakers violated the constitution when they tried taking control of the elections board away from Democratic Gov. Josh Stein.
Today, the Republican-controlled state Court of Appeals overturned that decision. The two-sentence ruling offered no explanation for why the judges were overruling the trial court; it also didn’t name the judges who made the decision. And it came despite the judges hearing no oral arguments on the case.
The 15-judge court of appeals typically hears cases in panels of three judges. Because the court has 11 Republicans and four Democrats, its panels are almost always majority-Republican.
Wednesday’s ruling means that as soon as Thursday, the elections board could switch to GOP control. After Stein defeated Republican challenger Mark Robinson for governor in 2024, Republican legislators passed a law — which former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper unsuccessfully vetoed — putting elections in the hands of the new state auditor, Republican Dave Boliek, who is close with GOP legislative leadership….
Also Wednesday, Stein immediately sent word to the North Carolina Supreme Court that he intends to appeal the ruling. Typically, big changes such as the proposed elections overhaul are put on hold while being appealed. However, it’s unclear what might happen if Boliek takes steps to overhaul the elections board quickly on Thursday before the Supreme Court can potentially step in. The state law, which the Court of Appeals put back into place Wednesday, transfers control of elections to Boliek starting Thursday.
Monthly Archives: April 2025
“A 100-day assault on America’s Madisonian system”
A new Common Ground Democracy post. As discussed therein, it’s worth contemplating what the first 100 days of a Nikki Haley presidency would have been like in comparison, which arguably is what a majority of Americans wanted but were unable to vote for in November because of the existing electoral system. Thus, being forced to choose between Trump and Harris, more voters chose Trump over Harris as the only way to express their desire for a change from the Biden administration. If Trump had realized that his mandate was only to govern as Haley would have, and not to pursue his extreme agenda, his popularity wouldn’t have plummeted in the way that it has during his first 100 days.
Meanwhile, because the existing electoral system produced a Trump rather than Haley presidency, the nation has had to suffer the assault on the constitutional system that Trump has perpetrated and the MAGA-dominated Congress has permitted. In this regard, the Common Ground Democracy post notes that the Wisconsin Law Review has published the final version of “The Real Preference of the Voters: Madison’s Idea of a Top Three Election and the Present Necessity of Reform.
“Grants tie Trump’s anti-DEI order to election security money”
Federal election officials are suggesting states must pledge to follow President Donald Trump’s directive curbing diversity, equity and inclusion programs as a condition for receiving $15 million in election security funding.
The new requirement for the grants has sent Democratic secretaries of state around the nation scrambling to assess the financial, legal and operational implications of accepting the money from the independent, bipartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
The dispute is complicated by the vagueness of the revised federal grant agreement, which some state officials fear could be turned against them. The grant’s terms tell states they must promise to follow federal antidiscrimination laws but cite an executive order from Trump on DEI that Democrats oppose.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D)— whose state is locked in a dispute with Trump over laws on transgender athletes — said she will forgo about $273,000 rather than sign an agreement that she fears would require her to follow the DEI order. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) is reviewing the conditions with attorneys and is leaning toward rejecting the money rather thanagreeing to the conditions, according to a person familiar with her thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Other secretaries of state worry that taking the funds could put them in legal jeopardy if federal officials later determined that staff hires, programs or contracts ran afoul of the terms and conditions. Three secretaries said they are considering challenging the commission’s terms in court….
New Jersey: “Paterson council president indicted, allegedly destroyed ballots for other candidates”
City Council President Alex Mendez faces a new indictment on voter fraud charges in a case that has dragged on for almost five years involving an all vote-by-mail election that took place at the beginning of the COVID pandemic in 2020.
Mendez’ wife, Yohanny, and two of his campaign workers, Omar Ledesma and Iris Rigo, also are accused of election crimes under the indictment announced Wednesday morning by New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin.
The accused allegedly collected mail-in ballots completed by voters, brought them to Mendez campaign headquarters, destroyed the ballots that did not contain votes for Mendez in Paterson’s 3rd Ward council race, and replaced them with bogus ballots for Mendez.
“Trump’s Maximalist Assertion of Presidential Power Tests the Rule of Law”
Charlie Savage for the NYT:
Nearly every president has pushed the bounds of executive power to try to achieve something specific. And a handful of presidents who took office during a true national crisis, like the Civil War or the depths of the Great Depression, swiftly made a series of legally aggressive moves to grapple with the challenges facing the country.
But the sheer volume and intensity of the power grab President Trump has undertaken in the first 100 days of his second term — an assault on legal constraints untethered to any equivalent catastrophe — is unlike anything the United States has experienced.
“They are trying to do a moonshot on executive power,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration.
The rule of law in the United States has been traditionally understood to use checks and balances to prevent too much concentration of arbitrary executive power. But the maximalist cascade in the early days of Mr. Trump’s second term is testing the fundamental structures of American democracy in a way that has never been seen before.
Mr. Trump, pursuing a confrontational style of presidential politics, has unleashed an assault on counterweights to his authority: attacking judges, sidelining Congress’s role in making decisions about taxes and spending, steamrolling internal limits on the executive branch and using the levers of government to try to force outside centers of power like law firms and universities to submit to his will.
Akhil Reed Amar, a Yale Law School professor, said the broader picture was of an administration that was “proudly lawless and anti-law.” The danger, he added, “is that Trump is the most powerful person in the world, and he does not seem to be very good at restraining himself and he’s not getting any younger.”
In a recent interview with Time magazine, Mr. Trump was repeatedly pressed on his attempts to increase presidential power. While his answers largely meandered off topic, he denied that he was expanding executive authority, said he was deploying power as it was meant to be used and claimed an electoral mandate for his actions.
“I think I’m using it properly, and I’m also using it as per my election,” he said.
Yet Mr. Trump has flaunted his disrespect for the other branches of government. When it comes to the courts, he has denounced judges who rule against him and called for their impeachment while his administration has exploited loopholes and sidestepped complying with some of their injunctions.
He and the president of El Salvador all but openly mocked a Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of a man who was deported to a Salvadoran prison despite an immigration judge’s order not to send him there, acting as though bringing him back was impossible. Mr. Trump’s appointees fired a prosecutor because he spoke candidly to a judge about that mistake….
“The Battle for the Ballot in New Jersey”
Gene Mazo has posted this draft at SSRN (Seton Hall Law Review). Here is the abstract:
A scholarly literature has recently emerged to study, document, and measure the effects of New Jersey’s unique ballot bracketing system, colloquially known as the “county line,” which New Jersey’s party insiders and political machines have long used to determine the outcomes of the state’s primary elections. To date, this literature has examined how the “county line” works and what its empirical effects are, but it has thus far not adequately explained exactly why the “county line” system violates the U.S. Constitution. This Article fills this gap. Part I explores how New Jersey election law works to create the “county line” before surveying the different ways in which scholars have recently attempted to measure the “county line’s” empirical effects. Part II then proceeds to examine why the “county line” turns out to be so radically and vehemently repugnant to the Constitution. The Article looks at the recent litigation brought to challenge the “county line”—in the three cases of Conforti v. Hanlon, Mazo v. Durkin, and Kim v. Hanlon—and uses it to explore the rights-based balancing theories under which New Jersey’s “county line” ballot bracketing system violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution, as well as the structural non-balancing theories under which the “county line” violates the “by the People” provisions (found in Article I, Section 2 and the Seventeenth Amendment), the Qualifications Clauses, and the Elections Clause of the Constitution.
New York Post Story Shows Why Voter Impersonation Fraud Almost Never Happens
A Long Island voter pretended to be someone else to cast an extra ballot in the 2024 election but his scheme was exposed when the resident he impersonated showed up on Election Day, cops said.
Lindenhurst resident Christopher Lindenberg, 54, was slapped with felony voter fraud charges for allegedly submitting a mail-in ballot under another person’s name before voting legally a second time, Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said.
Lindenberg had requested the early mail-in ballot through an online portal for another person without their knowledge last October.
The county Board of Elections initially counted the fraudulent vote but authorities first got suspicious when the real individual showed up to vote on Election Day and was turned away, the DA said.
It’s unclear if Lindenberg knew the person before the scheme. It’s also unclear whom the fraudulent ballot was cast for, but Lindenberg was a registered Republican, according to state records…..
“100 days in, Trump’s moves to overhaul election law get pushback from courts, Democrats”
Since returning to office, Trump has taken multiple executive actions related to elections and campaign spending, with Democrats challenging his moves in court. Meanwhile, House Republicans have passed legislation to address one of his priorities: noncitizen voting.
On March 25, the president issued an executive order outlining new federal actions, including making available Social Security database information for states to verify voter eligibility and directing Attorney General Pamela Bondi to “take appropriate action” against states that “fail to comply with the list maintenance requirements of the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act.”
The order also takes aim at the practice of counting mail ballots received after Election Day. Many states require that ballots only be postmarked by Election Day. But a fact sheet accompanying the order called on the attorney general to “take appropriate action against states that count ballots received after Election Day in Federal elections. Federal election funding will be conditioned on compliance.”
But as with many of the president’s moves, federal court challenges and constitutional questions abound. On April 25, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., put on hold key provisions of Trump’s order, including a directive to the Election Assistance Commission to make changes to the national mail voter registration form to require proof of citizenship.
“The President is free to state his views about what policies he believes that Congress, the EAC, or other federal agencies should consider or adopt,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote. “But, in this case, the President has done much more than state his views: He has issued an ‘Order’ directing that an independent commission ‘shall’ act to ‘require’ changes to an important document, the contents of which Congress has tightly regulated.”…
“Federal election panel chair opposes counting ballots that arrive after Election Day”
Amid the Republican Party’s broad effort to hamstring voting by mail, the chair of an independent federal election commission said he believes states should no longer accept and count ballots after Election Day — a change that would lead to numerous ballots being rejected in multiple states.
“There should be a deadline for absentee or mail ballots prior to Election Day and then they should be returned by Election Day,” Donald Palmer, the chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), said in a House hearing Tuesday on California’s ballot counting process.
Palmer’s comments come after President Donald Trump has repeatedly called on states to no longer accept and count ballots that arrive after Election Day, and signed an executive order last month directing the EAC to withhold federal funding from states that continue to do so.
Mississippi is currently set to ask the Supreme Court to weigh in on whether states accepting late-arriving ballots are unconstitutional. If the court takes the case, which was brought by the Republican National Committee, its decision could have far-reaching implications for mail voting.
In his written testimony to the Committee on House Administration, Palmer specified that the statements were his personal opinion….
“Reporting Gerrymanders”
Ross Davies has written this fun article for The Green Bag. Here is the abstract:
Over the past 80 years or so, maps have appeared in many (but not all) of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions involving gerrymanders. This papers discusses some of those maps, and also addresses a couple of problems with the way those maps are published (or not published) in the U.S. Reports, in the Supreme Court Reporter, and in online databases of Supreme Court opinions.
There is an accompanying puzzle which is, alas, sold out.
“Secret Deals, Foreign Investments, Presidential Policy Changes: The Rise of Trump’s Crypto Firm”
The pitch from “ZMoney” arrived on the encrypted messaging app Signal just days before Donald J. Trump’s presidential inauguration.
“ZMoney” was Zachary Folkman, an entrepreneur who once ran a company called Date Hotter Girls and was now representing World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency firm that Mr. Trump and his sons had recently unveiled. Mr. Folkman was writing to a crypto startup in the Cayman Islands, offering a “partnership” in which the firms would buy each other’s digital coins, a deal that would bolster the startup’s public profile.
But there was a catch, The New York Times found. For the privilege of associating with the Trumps, the startup would have to make, in effect, a secret multimillion dollar payment to World Liberty.
“Everything we do gets a lot of exposure and credibility,” Mr. Folkman wrote, asserting that other business partners had committed between $10 million and $30 million to World Liberty.
The Cayman startup rejected the offer, as did several other firms that received a similar pitch from World Liberty, executives said. They considered the deal unethical, concluding that World Liberty was essentially selling an endorsement — and hiding the arrangement from the public.
World Liberty’s executives, who have maintained that they did nothing improper, were undeterred. They successfully pitched similar deals to other firms while also marketing their coin to buyers around the world, reaping more than $550 million in sales, with a large cut earmarked for the president’s family.
Mr. Trump’s return to the White House has opened lucrative new pathways for him to cash in on his power, whether through his social media company or new overseas real estate deals. But none of the Trump family’s other business endeavors pose conflicts of interest that compare to those that have emerged since the birth of World Liberty.
The firm, largely owned by a Trump family corporate entity, has erased centuries-old presidential norms, eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history.
Mr. Trump is now not only a major crypto dealer; he is also the industry’s top policy maker. So far in his second term, Mr. Trump has leveraged his presidential powers in ways that have benefited the industry — and in some cases his own company — even though he had spent years deriding crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.
He has filled his administration with sympathizers to the crypto cause, including by appointing a former adviser to industry players as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, the Justice Department recently disbanded a crypto crimes task force, continuing a broader unwinding of Biden-era scrutiny of the industry.
A Times examination of World Liberty’s rapid ascent from fledgling startup to international force — and Mr. Trump’s conversion from crypto skeptic to industry cheerleader — highlights the range of conflicts of interest trailing the company….
Rich Bernstein: “The North Carolina’s Supreme Court’s Dangerous Violation of Equal Protection Threatens All Elections”
The following is a guest post from Rich Bernstein:
Imagine that a state’s statute (or constitution) required a photo ID to vote, but only in certain counties that had a history of consistently voting for Democrats by wide margins. Everyone would agree that such a law violated the Equal Protection Clause, and the First Amendment to boot for the obvious viewpoint discrimination. But that is how the North Carolina Supreme Court applied a statewide statute in April 2025, in its decision concerning a close November 2024 election for one seat on that Court. All fair-minded Americans should be very afraid of the precedent that be would be set for all elections, including elections for federal offices, if the federal courts do not invalidate this North Carolina Supreme Court decision.
Continue reading Rich Bernstein: “The North Carolina’s Supreme Court’s Dangerous Violation of Equal Protection Threatens All Elections”My New Draft: “Faux Campaign Finance Regulation and the Pathway to American Oligarchy”
I have posted this draft for an upcoming conference on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The collapse of campaign finance regulation in the United States has facilitated a path toward oligarchic power redistribution. Americans did not adopt the current set of rules favoring the influence of the ultrarich over who is elected and what candidates do once in office through democratically-promulgated legislation. Instead, a long-term litigation strategy using the First Amendment of the United States Constitution as a deregulatory cudgel has decimated reasonable limits enacted by Congress and curtailed even disclosure of some political activity. Remaining campaign finance rules are easily circumvented, leading to faux regulation that makes it hard for ordinary people to understand the increased power of the wealthy.
Under the current campaign finance regime, American billionaires have begun giving tens—and increasingly hundreds—of millions of dollars to nominally independent political groups (including “super PACs”) to support candidates for President and other offices. These outside groups may accept unlimited funding to coordinate with candidates, including staffing their entire field operations, without running afoul of the legalistic prohibition on “coordination.” Such spending buys outside group funders unprecedented candidate access. With plutocratic power rising, other actors are constrained: political parties remain severely limited in their ability to coordinate and raise funds. Strict direct individual contributions limits curtail the average voter’s influence and can trap less sophisticated donors who lack lawyers navigating them through the loopholes.
Part I describes the litigation strategy that led to deregulation with a false appearance of continued regulation. Part II describes the state of campaign financing in federal elections in the United States, with special attention paid to the activities of the ultrawealthy in the 2024 elections, especially Elon Musk. Part III explains how the new campaign finance regime, facilitated by litigation-driven deregulation, raises the risk of American oligarchy.
Here is a figure from the paper:
“Trump’s justice department appointees remove managers of voting unit”
Sam Levine for The Guardian:
Donald Trump’s appointees at the Department of Justice have removed all of the senior civil servants working as managers in the department’s voting section and directed attorneys to dismiss all active cases, according to people familiar with the matter, part of a broader attack on the department’s civil rights division.
The moves come less than a month after Trump ally Harmeet Dhillon was confirmed to lead the civil rights division, created in 1958 and referred to as the “crown jewel” of the justice department. In an unusual move, Dhillon sent out new “mission statements” to the department’s sections that made it clear the civil rights division was shifting its focus from protecting the civil rights of marginalized people to supporting Trump’s priorities.
Tamar Hagler, the chief of the voting section, which is responsible for enforcing federal laws designed to prevent voter discrimination, and five top career managers were all reassigned last week to the complaint adjudication office, a little-known part of the department that handles employee complaints, according to people familiar with the matter. A career line attorney in the section has also been reassigned to the complaint adjudication office.
The voting section had seven managers in January overseeing around 30 attorneys. Of the two other managers, one retired and another was detailed to work on an antisemitism task force.
Political appointees have also instructed career employees to dismiss all of their active cases without meeting with them and offering a rationale – a significant break with the department’s practices and norms.
The justice department did not return a request for comment.
Taken together, the changes have raised significant alarm about what the future of voting rights enforcement will look like for the federal government at a moment when states continue to pass restrictive voting measures….