Monthly Archives: July 2025

New Podcast: “This Old Democracy”

alternative voting systems, third parties

From the Center for Ballot Freedom:

We have launched a podcast called This Old Democracy. (Political scientists often call our system “pre-modern,” meaning it’s really old, it’s falling apart in a lot of ways, and it definitely needs a serious renovation).

We have found the perfect host for the show: author and organizer Micah Sifry, who wrote Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Parties in American Politics. He will focus on the ideas, movements, and people working to renovate our faltering political system — and rebuild American democracy on a stronger, more inclusive, and truly representative foundation….

To listen, go here on Spotify or here on Apple Podcasts. Or find This Old Democracy wherever you get your podcasts.

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“Proxy Season Results Show Strong Support for Corporate Political Disclosure and Accountability”

campaign finance

Bruce Freed, Dan Carroll, and Karl Sandstrom of the Center for Political Accountability, in the Harvard Law School Forum for Corporate Governance: “[V]otes for Governance proposals calling on companies to adopt political disclosure and accountability policies surged in the just concluded 2025 proxy season…. This proxy season saw the average vote on CPA’s resolution rebound to 41.6 percent from last year’s 26.2 percent. This is the third highest vote average for the resolution behind 48.1 percent in 2021 and 41.9 percent in 2020.”

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“Silicon Valley’s bet on Trump starts to pay off”

campaign finance, lobbying

Washington Post:

The White House on Wednesday plans to reveal how it will position the United States to lead a global race to develop artificial intelligence and unveil three executive orders intended to boost the American tech sector, according to two people familiar with the rollout who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss plans that have not been made public…..

Trump has flaunted his administration’s connections to the industry as a display of innovation and economic power. But consumer advocates warn that industry should not be able to write its own rules, amid concerns that AI could kill jobs, harm the environment and exacerbate existing social biases….

Trump’s AI plan is just the latest administration policy that stands to amplify the fortunes of his Silicon Valley supporters, many of whom publicized their support for him in the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year and donated millions to support his candidacy.

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The Latest on Texas Redistricting

redistricting

NYT has this story on a possible Democratic walkout of the special legislative session: “Republicans in the Texas Legislature are planning to hold off on voting on measures to address the state’s deadly July 4 flooding until after they approve a partisan redistricting of Texas’ U.S. House boundaries, hoping to thwart Democrats’ efforts to block new House maps, according to two people briefed on the discussions.”

Politico reports on a DCCC polling memo, finding “that 63 percent of likely voters across 22 of Texas’ congressional districts — including 41 percent of Republicans — think the effort to redraw lines in the GOP’s favor is unnecessary.”

The Texas Tribune has this story on the reluctance of Gov. Greg Abbott to engage in mid-decade redistricting — until a conversation with President Trump — as well as the wariness of some Republican members of the state’s congressional delegation.

And Lisa Falkenberg has this column in the Houston Chronicle, suggesting that the Trump-backed re-redistricting is likely to succeed: “This steal will be much easier than Trump’s failed heist of the 2020 presidential election – and potentially even more destabilizing for our wobbly democratic republic. “

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White House and Allies Blocking GAO Inquiries

legislation and legislatures

NYT reports:

A federal watchdog has opened dozens of investigations to determine if President Trump and his top aides have illegally withheld billions of dollars in congressionally approved funds.

Now, Republican lawmakers are working alongside the White House to stymie those inquiries and the officials conducting them, in a move that could help Mr. Trump seize more control over the nation’s budget.

The attacks target the Government Accountability Office, a roughly century-old agency formed to help Congress keep track of federal spending. The legislative office primarily produces detailed reports on ways that Washington can save money, sometimes rankling administrations that are not so keen about its allegations of waste.

But oversight officials have recently found themselves in a direct and highly unusual confrontation with the White House over the power of the purse.

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“As Texas dives into federal SAVE database to verify voter citizenship, some experts are worried”

voter registration

Votebeat:

Texas is one of the earliest states to start using the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ overhauled SAVE database to check voters’ eligibility. That comes after the Trump administration, in its campaign to eliminate the risk of noncitizen voting, made the database free for states to use and easier to search.

But some experts and watchdogs warn that the changes haven’t necessarily made the system more reliable. They say the administration hasn’t publicly released enough information about it, which makes it difficult to assess how complete and accurate the search results are, and whether there are enough safeguards to protect people’s privacy and voting rights.

More on the issues with SAVE here.

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“Miami postponed its 2025 elections. A judge says it’s illegal. Why did the city do it?”

election administration

Washington Post:

A circuit court judge ruled Monday that a controversial decision by Miami commissioners in June to postpone the city’s November elections until 2026 without voter approval is unconstitutional and unlawful.

The ruling by Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Valerie Manno Schurr came in response to a lawsuit from one mayoral candidate challenging the city’s decision to move Miami from odd-year elections to match federal and state contests held in even years. The city’s move — made less than five months before the originally scheduled 2025 election — effectively gave Miami’s elected officials, including term-limited Mayor Francis Suarez, an additional year in office.

Miami commissioners have faced swift backlash in recent weeks for their vote to push the elections despite warnings from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and state Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) that they not delay the election without letting voters decide.

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USC Report on California’s 2024 Turnout Drop

voting

From the Center for Inclusive Democracy:

After historically high turnout in the 2020 presidential election amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2024 presidential election saw a decline in turnout across California. Despite the hopeful expectations of many that the voter behavior seen in 2020 would become the new normal, a notable number of Californians who participated four years earlier did not participate in November. This drop in turnout prompted many policymakers, advocates and researchers to ask who participated in the 2024 presidential election, and possibly more importantly, who did not. To explore these questions, the Center for Inclusive Democracy conducted a statewide analysis of voter participation in the 2024 presidential election by examining official California voter files. Analysis was broken out by race, ethnicity, age group, party affiliation, gender and language designation.

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“Kenneth Chesebro and the Ethics of Election Subversion”

chicanery, election law biz

Sung Hui Kim has posted this draft on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This Article examines the role of attorney Kenneth Chesebro in orchestrating the “fake electors plot” following the 2020 U.S. presidential election. It traces Chesebro’s transformation from a Harvard-educated lawyer with Democratic ties to a key architect of Donald Trump’s post-election strategy to derail the transfer of power to Joseph Biden. Part I provides a detailed chronology of Chesebro’s activities between November 2020 and January 2021, revealing how his legal advice evolved from preserving legal rights in Wisconsin to a coordinated plan to impanel alternate electors across multiple battleground states as a pretext for the Vice President to intervene unilaterally in the Congressional certification of the national election on January 6. Part II analyzes the professional discipline case against Chesebro under Model Rule 8.4(c). It examines the principal elements of Chesebro’s strategy and argues that his conduct appears to have involved dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation, warranting professional discipline. Part III interrogates Chesebro’s moral culpability, contending that his actions represent not merely a violation of professional conduct rules but a profound betrayal of public trust and democratic principles. This Article concludes that Chesebro’s moral culpability transcends his violations of the professional conduct rules. By pursuing increasingly aggressive strategies to overturn Biden’s legitimate victory without evidence of outcome-changing fraud, by offering a would-be autocrat with a blueprint for how to subvert the collective will of the voters in contravention of the U.S. Constitution, federal and state laws, and by using his legal expertise to peddle implausible theories designed to exploit procedural leverage to advance a naked power grab, he demonstrated a mind-blowing willingness to undermine democracy itself. Chesebro betrayed the public trust in ways that existing professional conduct rules, which lack explicit duties to preserve democracy, cannot adequately capture or address.

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Brennan Center: “Homeland Security’s ‘SAVE’ Program Exacerbates Risks to Voters”

fraudulent fraud squad, voter registration

Jasleen Singh and Spencer Reynolds:

The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or “SAVE,” program was designed to help states verify the citizenship and immigration status of people applying for government benefits…. But SAVE’s results — sometimes based on incomplete or outdated information — have never been perfect. For that reason, the information gleaned from the SAVE program should be considered useful, but not definitive, in assessing an individual’s citizenship.”

…. DHS has allowed state and local election officials to search for hundreds of thousands of voters simultaneously. This increases the risks that state officials will carry out erroneous voter purges and disenfranchise eligible voters. SAVE could also mislead, either because it incorrectly identifies someone as a noncitizen or fails to confirm immigration status, fueling false conspiracy theories about the integrity of U.S. elections.

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“Trump Admin Defying Court By Stonewalling on Anti-Voting Order, Plaintiffs Say”

absentee ballots, Department of Justice, Election Assistance Commission, voter registration

Democracy Docket:

The Trump administration is defying a court order by refusing to say how federal agencies may be implementing President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-voting executive order, pro-voting groups and Democrats alleged in a filing Friday.

Among the order’s directives that lawyers for the administration have failed to provide answers about: How is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) allowing its databases to be used to purge voters? How will the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) punish states for continuing to offer a grace period for mail ballots that arrive after Election Day? And how will the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — an independent agency — withhold funds from states that don’t comply with aspects of the order?

“To this day, Defendants have failed to serve a single interrogatory response or make any specific objection to a particular interrogatory,” the groups challenging the order wrote, referring to written questions one party sends to another as part of the discovery process. They added that the Trump administration broke a court-mandated July 11 deadline in failing to respond.

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