Thanks again to Justin, Tabatha, Derek, Guy, and Rick P. for excellent work being primary bloggers during May while I had to attend to other things.

Here’s the June blogging schedule:

Week of June 5: Nick Stephanopoulos

Weeks of June 12 and June 19: Ned Foley

Week of June 26 (likely final week of Supreme Court term): me

Thanks for reading!

From the WP:

An Atlanta-area investigation of alleged election interference by former president Donald Trump and his allies has broadened to include activities in Washington, D.C., and several other states, according to two people with knowledge of the probe — a fresh sign that prosecutors may be building a sprawling case under Georgia’s racketeering laws.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) launched an investigation more than two years ago to examine efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his narrow 2020 defeat in Georgia.Along the way, she has signaled publicly that she may use Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute to allege that these efforts amounted to a far-reaching criminal scheme.

In recent days, Willis has sought information related to the Trump campaign hiring two firms to find voter fraud across the United States and then burying their findings when they did not find it, allegations that reach beyond Georgia’s borders, said the two individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about the investigation. At least one of the firms has been subpoenaed by Fulton County investigators.

A sad story that exemplifies what’s been happening with election administrators in several areas around the country. From the WP:

After facing an onslaught of harassment and violent threats for certifying the results of the 2020 election, a Republican on the governing board of Arizona’s largest county will not seek reelection during the 2024 cycle.

Bill Gates, a longtime conservative and Harvard-educated attorney, told The Washington Post that he intends to serve his term through the end of 2024 and carry out the election-related duties that come with it. In an interview and prepared statement, he said he was proud of his time in office and thanked county workers….

Gates’s decision also adds a high-profile name to the exodus of local election officers across the nation who have left their posts or have passed on reelection campaigns amid attacks….

As he helps the county prepare for another election, Gates wants stronger protections for election officials and more federal funding to help them recruit and train poll workers, bolster cybersecurity measures, install security cameras and more. He is joining a bipartisan group of election workers in D.C. next week to urge the White House, members of Congress, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to advocate for the funding and protections as part of an effort by Issue One, an organization that advocates for issues of democracy and more regulation of money in politics.

Marion County, IN (home of Indianapolis) has been the site of two major Supreme Court election-law cases, Whitcomb v. Chavis and Davis v. Bandemer. A  lawsuit has now been filed asking a federal court to declare Marion County’s system of selecting judges — which is different from how the state selects judges — unconstitutional. Story from Indy Politics here.

The suit claims Marion County’s judicial selection system violates the federal and state constitutions, as well as the Voting Rights Act.

In Marion County, as well as Lake and St. Joseph, voters do not directly elect judges as in Indiana’s other counties.  Instead, the candidates are selected by a Judicial Nominating Committee, and the Committee submits three names to the Governor, and the Governor appoints Marion County Superior Court judges.

Residents do vote to retain judges, however.

The suit argues if elections for Superior Court judges in Marion County were free and open, as they are in most other counties in the State, minority residents would be able to elect judges of their choice.   Instead, the Governor, who is elected in a state-wide election, not solely in Marion County, chooses Superior Court judges in Marion County.

Update: I was reminded I should add Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the voter ID case, to this list

This NYT story runs counter to a lot of the narratives after 2022, but the story explains what its data analysis differs from those narratives:

In the 2020 presidential election, voters who were 18 to 29 in 2008 backed Joe Biden by 55 percent to 43 percent, according to our estimates, a margin roughly half that of Mr. Obama’s 12 years earlier.

The exit polls show it even closer, with Mr. Biden winning by just 51-45 among voters who were 18 to 27 in 2008 (exit polls report results among those 30 to 39, not 30 to 41 — the group that was 18 to 29 in 2008).

And last fall, the young voters of ’08 — by then 32 to 43 — preferred Democratic congressional candidates by just 10 points in Times/Siena polling….

But it is nonetheless at odds with a wave of recent reports or studies suggesting otherwise. The Financial Times, for instance, wrote that “millennials are shattering the oldest rule in politics” by not moving to the right as they age. Similarly, the Democratic data firm Catalist found that Democrats essentially haven’t lost ground among millennials and Gen Z over the last decade. These findings have helped spark a new wave of speculation about whether the long-awaited era of Democratic dominance might this time really be at hand.

But a different story emerges by tracking the same cohort of voters over time, rather than a whole generation with changing composition. The millennials of 2008 are not the same as those of 2016, for instance: Six additional years of even more heavily Democratic millennials became eligible to vote after the 2008 election, canceling out the slight Republican shift among older millennials.

Charles Stewart summarizes some of the main findings at ElectionLine. The full report is here. The percentage of voters who cast their ballot by mail dropped more than 10 points from 2020, to 32%. 40% of mail voters… Continue reading

NBC News: “The large-scale voter contact effort that conservatives have put at the center of their political operations in recent years is plagued with issues, according to more than a dozen people who’ve worked in GOP-aligned field operations and internal… Continue reading

I have posted on SSRN a very close to final version of this paper, to be published in the University of New Hampshire Law Review. Here is the abstract: Total Vote Runoff (TVR) is an electoral system designed to be… Continue reading

From the Daily Montanan: Ten Montanans, including former elected officials and Constitutional Convention delegates, have sued the state arguing a bill that adds a host of new requirements for people trying to get initiatives and constitutional amendments onto the ballot… Continue reading

From this piece in The Hill by Steven Lubet: Adding members to the House will only increase partisanship and feed extremism, as the behavior of state legislatures has amply demonstrated…. Smaller districts would theoretically bring representatives closer to the people,… Continue reading

Josh Douglas has this detailed report on the subject for The Institute for Responsive Government. He also has a related piece for the Washington Monthly which criticizes Florida’s new restrictions on third-party registration efforts.

NBC News: Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration has quietly changed state guidelines, essentially giving its blessing for a state-level political committee he previously ran to move millions of dollars to a super PAC helping his presidential campaign. For years, elections officials… Continue reading