Civil rights groups representing Black voters in the Louisiana congressional redistricting case have asked the Supreme Court to stay a three-judge panel’s ruling that the state’s latest map, which creates an additional minority opportunity district, is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The application argues that compliance with Section 2 inevitably requires some consideration of race, but that consideration did not—and does not—constitute impermissible racial discrimination. The application also invokes the principle that stays should generally be granted when an injunction is issued in the period leading up to an election, a principle the Supreme Court has routinely deployed in recent years to block injunctions won by voting rights plaintiffs.

Roll Call:

The State Legislature drew that map in January with a second Black-opportunity district following years of litigation over the Voting Rights Act. Wednesday’s application asked the justices to let the state use that January map this fall.

The applicants, who include some of the original plaintiffs in the case, said last month’s ruling left the state without a map at all, and state officials said they must have one in place by May 15 to conduct the state’s elections.

According to court records, the three-judge panel set a June timeline for the court to approve a new map for the state. But the application said that would be too late, as well as an injustice to Black voters in the state after the Supreme Court itself had prevented the drawing of a new map before the 2022 election.

The full emergency stay application is available here.

Louisiana has given notice that it will appeal a three-judge panel’s recent preliminary injunction against use of the state’s latest congressional maps. The panel found that the new district lines, drawn after a district court found the state needed to create a second minority opportunity district to comply with the Voting Rights Act, violated the Equal Protection Clause. The notice of appeal comes just hours after the panel gave the state a June 3 deadline for passing an interim remedial map.

The full amended notice of appeal:

Notice is hereby given that the State of Louisiana, by and through Elizabeth Murrill, the Attorney General of Louisiana, and Nancy Landry, in her official capacity as Louisiana Secretary of State, hereby appeal this Court’s April 30, 2024 order granting a preliminary injunction, ECF No. 198, as well as orders relating to that injunction (including ECF No. 219), to the United States Supreme Court. This appeal is taken pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1253.

A three-judge panel has given the Louisiana legislature a June 3 deadline for passing a new congressional map after the panel held its previous map violated the Equal Protection Clause. That prior map was enacted after a district court required the state to create a second minority opportunity district to comply with the Voting Rights Act. If the state fails to enact a remedial map that complies with both orders by June 3, the panel “intends to order the use of an interim remedial Congressional districting map on June 4, 2024.”

Associated Press:

A panel of federal judges who recently threw out a congressional election map giving Louisiana a second mostly Black district said Tuesday the state Legislature must pass a new map by June 3 or face having the panel impose one on the state. 

However, voting rights advocates and Republican Attorney General Liz Murrill said they would take an appeal in defense of the new map to the Supreme Court. 

“Today, three federal judges who never spent a day running an election have ignored uncontradicted testimony that we need a map by May 15, and once again turned Louisiana’s Congressional elections upside down,” Murrill said an emailed statement.

The latest order from a panel of two federal district judges and an appellate judge said they would begin work on a remedial plan while giving lawmakers a chance to come up with a plan during the current regular legislative session, which must end by June 3.

“To be clear, the fact that the Court is proceeding with the remedial phase of this case does not foreclose the Louisiana Legislature from exercising its ‘sovereign interest’ by drawing a legally compliant map,” the judges wrote.

Whatever comes out of the court could impact the makeup of the next U.S. Congress. Given voting patterns, a new mostly Black district would give Democrats the chance to capture another House seat. The map that was recently tossed converted District 6, represented by Republican Rep. Garret Graves, into a mostly Black district. Democratic state Sen. Cleo Fields, a former congressman who is Black, had said he would run for the seat.

The full scheduling order is available here

In the race to be Maryland’s next Senator, Prince George’s County executive Angela Alsobrooks has received the lion’s share of endorsements from Democratic party leaders. But U.S. House Rep. David Trone, who is challenging Alsobrooks for the Democratic  nomination, is looking to build support through an advantage of his own: spending $57 million of his own money. That self-financing effort, one of the largest in history, has fueled Trone’s 9-to-1 spending advantage over Alsobrooks—and has shone a spotlight on the unprecedented rise in self-funding by wealthy candidates in American elections.

NBC News:

But Trone’s self-funding is only the biggest example of a broader trend in congressional races. Candidates gave $61 million to their House campaigns in 2023 and $70 million in the Senate, with nearly half of that coming from Trone in his Senate bid. 

Ohio Republican Matt Dolan ($7 million) and Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida ($3.5 million) were the next-biggest Senate self-funders in 2023, followed by Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno ($3 million), who defeated Dolan in the Senate GOP primary earlier this year.

Seven other Senate candidates whose campaigns are still active all cut themselves seven-figure checks last year: six Republicans (Maryland’s Robin Ficker, Utah’s Brad Wilson, Florida’s Keith Gross, Montana’s Tim Sheehy, Michigan’s Sandy Pensler and Pennsylvania’s Dave McCormick) and one Democrat, Florida’s Stanley Campbell. 

Seventeen House candidates gave their campaigns at least $1 million last year; former Rep. Gil Cisneros, D-Calif., loaned his campaign $2.4 million to finance his attempted return to Congress, and Rep. Shri Thanedar, D-Mich., gave his campaign more than $2 million.

There’s been a fairly steady increase in congressional campaign self-funding in recent years, and a massive leap since the early 2000s. 

Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

The State Election Board reprimanded Fulton County and ordered an independent election monitor Tuesday, finding that the county likely scanned over 3,000 ballots twice during the recount of the 2020 presidential election.

The decision, on a 2-1 vote, resolves one of the last remaining investigations of the 2020 election, drawing jeers from a crowd of Republican voters who wanted more severe punishment against the Democratic county.

The case exposed errors in Fulton’s 2020 recount but didn’t indicate any fraud in the election, which Democrat Joe Biden won by a 11,779-vote margin in Georgia over Republican Donald Trump. Three vote counts — two by machine and one by hand — each showed similar results.

Election investigators said they were unable to confirm that the double-scanned ballots were actually counted twice in the recount, which was the official result of the election. During the recount, Trump gained 939 net votes against Biden in Fulton County, where Biden received 73% support, according to the results.

The Houston County voter who brought the complaint, Joe Rossi, said the investigation shows that the 2020 election was flawed, both during the recount and the hand audit of all 5 million votes cast. The State Election Board last year found that thousands of votes were double-counted or misallocated during an audit in Fulton.

In a piece just published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Steven Ruggles argues that U.S. Census Bureau’s new procedure of deliberately adding noise to Census data as a confidentiality measure is counterproductive. The article first argues that the rationale for the change—that the 2010 Census jeopardized the confidentiality of millions of responses—is unsupported. It then argues that the new procedure provides no clear confidentiality benefit and may even increase disclosure risk. These new procedures, which essentially introduce error into data for all sub-state geographic units, have significant implications for the utility of census data to researchers and policymakers.

From the JEP article:

The Census Bureau maintains that strong confidentiality guarantees are essential for maximizing response rates to censuses and surveys, but little evidence supports this view. Indeed, experimental studies have consistently found that assurances of confidentiality actually increase concerns about confidentiality and reduce response rates to surveys (Berman, McCombs, and Boruch 1977; Frey 1986; Reamer 1979; Singer, Hippier, and Schwarz 1992). A Census Bureau analysis in the 1990s found that promises of confidentiality had no significant impact on response rates (Dillman et al. 1996).

The US Census Bureau recently implemented a new disclosure control strategy that marks a “sea change for the way that official statistics are produced and published” (Garfinkel, Abowd, and Powazek 2018, p. 136). The new disclosure control system adds deliberate error to every population statistic for every geographic unit smaller than a state, including metropolitan areas, cities, and counties.

Population data describing small geographic areas are essential for core political functions like drawing boundaries for state legislative districts and for the US House of Representatives. Towns, cities, counties, states, and the federal government use small area statistics for planning and policy purposes, ranging from decisions about delivery of public services to infrastructure needs. Moreover, economists and other social scientists rely on these demographic data to understand social changes and to evaluate policy outcomes. There is no historical precedent and no demonstrated need for introducing deliberate error into every population statistic for geographic units below the state level. These steps do nothing to allay public concern about the invasion of privacy by the government or about government misuse of data.

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This week I’ll be blogging on ELB along with Kunal Dixit. Kunal is about to graduate from HLS and has been a terrific member of HLS’s Election Law Clinic. Welcome, Kunal!

A Common Ground Democracy essay on why, contrary to some recent assertions, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. would not be the “Condorcet winner” in a well-designed Condorcet-based electoral system.

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