“Ruing Senate Loss, Georgia G.O.P. Asks if Runoff Rule Changes Backfired”

election administration

Reid Epstein in the New York Times, with this potential statutory tidbit:

Mr. Raffensperger said he would present three proposals to lawmakers. They include forcing large counties to open more early-voting locations to reduce hours-long lines like the ones that formed at many Metro Atlanta sites last week; lowering the threshold candidates must achieve to avoid a runoff to 45 percent from 50 percent; and instituting a ranked-choice instant-runoff system that would not require voters to come back to the polls again after the general election.

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“Trump ally Sidney Powell asks court to overturn sanctions over election lawsuit”

fraudulent fraud squad

Reuters:

Sidney Powell and other conservative lawyers who sued to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in Michigan asked a U.S. appeals court on Thursday to overturn an order sanctioning them for pressing “frivolous” election claims.

During oral arguments that lasted more than two hours, the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals pressed Powell to defend her November 2020 Michigan lawsuit, which sought to declare then-President Donald Trump winner of the state’s presidential election.

. . .

During Thursday’s hearing, 6th Circuit Judge Raymond Kethledge questioned Powell about affidavits in the lawsuit that purportedly connected voting machines to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and suggested people from North Korea and Iran somehow had hacked voting machine software.

“Isn’t that facially something that’s not credible?” Kethledge asked.

But Kethledge and the others also pressed attorneys for Michigan state officials and the city of Detroit about whether the sanctions Parker imposed were appropriate, and why a lawsuit would not be the right avenue to challenge allegations of a stolen election.

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Kate Shaw on oral argument in Moore v. Harper

Elections Clause, Supreme Court

Over at Just Security, Kate Shaw has a piece entitled, “Oral Argument in Moore v. Harper and the Perils of Finding ‘Compromise’ on the Independent State Legislature Theory.” From it:

[A] majority may be willing to sign onto some version of the theory, even if a more circumscribed one. Depending on what that looks like, the theory could have important implications for future elections—both congressional and presidential. The “blast radius,” as Neal Katyal repeatedly called the potential effects of the Moore decision during Wednesday’s argument, appears unlikely to be as wide as many initially feared—and as the North Carolina legislators are still seeking—and the decision might not immediately “wreak havoc in the administration of elections across the nation,” in the words of Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar. But, in the effort to find a “middle ground” or the like, the Court may nevertheless embrace some version of the ISLT. That is both alarming in its own right, and could invite future challenges that allow the Court to go still further.

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The Fifteenth Amendment and the Independent State Legislature Theory

Elections Clause

The following is a guest post from Travis Crum:

The Supreme Court recently heard oral argument in Moore v. Harper, which concerns the definition of “legislature” in Article I’s Elections Clause and the so-called independent state legislature theory (ISLT). A core dispute in the case is whether—and to what extent—state constitutions can restrain state legislatures’ regulation of federal elections. Accordingly, the parties and the Justices deliberated over historical examples of state legislatures regulating federal elections. However, this discussion overlooked an important historical episode concerning the analogous power of “legislatures” exercising ratification authority under Article V.

Continue reading The Fifteenth Amendment and the Independent State Legislature Theory →
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How Would the Supreme Court’s Major Precedents Concerning Democracy Fare under the Potential Test Discussed in Moore v. Harper?

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Both before and during the argument in Moore v. Harper, I wrote about the possibility that the Court might think about extending the approach in the CJ Rehnquist’s Bush v. Gore concurrence – which was about state court statutory interpretation – to the domain of state court constitutional interpretation.  I’ve also suggested that this approach is more difficult in the constitutional domain, given the much higher level of generality at which most constitutional provisions are drafted.

To explain those difficulties further, it might be useful to ask how the Supreme Court’s own major precedents concerning the law of democracy would fare under this approach – that is, if state courts had rendered similar decisions under similar state constitutional provisions, before the Supreme Court had issued these rulings, would any or all of those decisions violate what I’ll call the Moore v. Harper test?  As one version of that “test” discussed at argument, I’ll use the precise version Don Verrilli articulated:  “And we think the standard is that you’d ask whether the state decision is such a sharp departure from the state’s ordinary modes of constitutional interpretation that it lacks any fair and substantial basis in state law.”

The reason I raise this issue is most major Supreme Court precedents in this area represented fairly avulsive changes in constitutional law.  I’ll highlight some of the more important ones, in chronological order.  I won’t try to resolve the issue of how these decisions would fare under the “fair and substantial basis in law” standard, and the debate about that might vary from decision to decision.  But these cases present the types of questions federal courts would have to answer about state constitutional interpretations under the Verrilli test (or any version of such a test):

  • Reynolds v. Sims (1964):  establishing under the EP clause the one-person, one-vote rule, despite Court precedent and long historical practice. 
  • Harper v. Va. State Bd. of Elections (1966) and Kramer v. Union Free School District No. 15 (1969):  recognizing for the first time that the right to vote is an unenumerated fundamental right under the EP clause and applying strict scrutiny to voting laws.
  • White v. Regester (1973):  holding that the form of an election structure (at-large elections or multi-member districts) could constitute unconstitutional racial vote dilution.
  • Davis v. Bandemer (1986):  recognizing a cause of action under the EP clause for partisan gerrymandering challenges. 
  • Bush v. Gore (2000):  holding for the first time that the EP clause applies to the way individual ballots are treated in a statewide election.

This is not to say that any decision which breaks new ground might raise issues under the “fair and substantial basis in law” standard.  For example, although Buckley v. Valeo (1976) constituted the first time the Court struck down limits on campaign spending as a violation of the First Amendment, a substantial body of FA law existed by then on which the issues in Buckley could be debated.  Whether one thinks Buckley was rightly or wrongly decided, I don’t think there’s any likelihood the decision would fail this “fair and substantial basis” test. 

But the law of democracy decisions I’ve noted raise more challenging questions under that test because they constituted much more sharp breaks, under the broad generalities of the EP clause, from prior doctrine (and from long-standing historical practice and the original public understandings of the clause).  None of this is to say anything about the correctness of any of these decisions; the question is how they would fare in the search for decisions that go so far beyond a “fair and substantial basis test” that they would violate the federal constitution if decided by a state court initially under a state constitutional provision with similar history and precedent (these issues are related to a talk I gave on “Originalism and the Law of Democracy,” on a panel at which then-Seventh Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett also spoke, at which I argued that originalists had not yet addressed how much of the law of democracy was inconsistent with originalist principles).

To bring this to bear on the NC decision at issue in Moore, compare that to the dissenting opinion for four Justices in Common Cause v. Rucho, based on the EP clause, which would have struck down certain partisan gerrymanders for the first time in the Court’s history.  It’s hard to imagine that an opinion four Justices on the Supreme Court issued would – if a majority opinion of a state court under analogues to the EP clause – fail this “fair and substantial basis” test.  If the answer is that’s because Davis v. Bandemer had already been decided, that just pushes the question back one step:  would Davis v. Bandemer violate this test?

These are the kinds of questions the Court inevitably is going to have to grapple with if it concludes that the Elections Clause is violated when state constitutional-law decisions lack a “fair and substantial basis” in law. 

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What Difference Would It Make If the Supreme Court in the Moore v. Harper Case Embraced the Bush v. Gore Concurrence Rather Than a Full-Throated Independent State Legislature Theory?

Bush v. Gore reflections, legislation and legislatures, statutory interpretation, Supreme Court
In my earlier recap of today’s oral argument in Moore v. Harper (transcript here), I suggested that the middle ground position that the three Justices in the middle might embrace would be bad but not awful compared to the… Continue reading