The executive committee of the Republican Party of Texas was in Austin on Saturday to finalize its first-ever legislative review, outlining a list of censurable offenses that some within the Texas GOP want to use to block certain House Republicans from the 2026 primary ballot.
Those Republicans, made up of delegates chosen by county parties, want to use the list to hold their elected officials to the state party’s priorities. But others see it as an illegal effort to deny officials from the primary ballot if they don’t follow the most fervent conservative activists’ aims 100% of the time.
Texas GOP Chair Abraham George told The Blast that he and House Speaker Dustin Burrows, who spoke to members of the SREC at a separate meeting with Gov. Greg Abbott earlier Saturday morning, have not discussed the party’s censure effort, a new “accountability” mechanism the state party approved at its 2024 convention. Still, Burrows likely knew the SREC members would be approving a hit list that could be used to keep “RINOs” from the ballot….
“Midterms are more than a year away, but Trump is already challenging them | Opinion”
Chris Brennan column in USA Today:
They’re building the machine now to meddle in the 2026 midterm elections 15 months from now.
And those machinations are built on two lessons learned from 2020: Attack the election with everything you have before it happens, and stock the Trump administration only with officials who will do exactly what he says on elections, no matter what the law says.
Trump’s team of election deniers, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, represent both of these lessons.
The first they learned in 2020, when they failed while trying to help Trump overturn a free and fair election. It was all so careless and chaotic back then, a dizzying series of unsubstantiated claims and discombobulated news conferences punctuated by judge after judge tossing out Trump’s challenges as meritless.
I was reminded recently of a news conference I attended at Philadelphia’s airport on the day after the 2020 election. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, then working as Trump’s lawyer doing work that eventually got him disbarred, was the ringmaster for the election deniers that day. And Bondi was right by his side….
Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at The Brennan Center for Justice, told me that Trump and his team appear to be building a “pretext” on the false claim of rampant election fraud as justification for their potential meddling in the elections. They’re systematically removing “the brakes” that protect democracy during the voting process, she said.
“They’re taking aim at all of the brakes that applied before. And they’re starting earlier,” Weiser said. “That just shows you he’s laser-focused on interfering in elections here by any means necessary. Bend the rules. Throw out the playbook.”
David Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who founded The Center for Election Innovation and Research, has been hosting monthly webinar meetings with hundreds of state election officials since March. Those officials – Republicans and Democrats – have plenty of questions and concerns about the “unprecedented level of federal interference in state election processes,” he told me.
“They’re not sure where all this is leading,” Becker said. “They hear the rhetoric coming out of the White House. They hear the continued false statements about past elections and election security in the United States.”
It’s worth noting here, as Weiser told me, that presidents have no role in running or overseeing elections in America, except for enforcing voting laws passed by Congress. And Becker noted that Congress, now controlled by Trump’s Republican allies, has not authorized the DOJ intrusions into state election systems.
“How Alabama’s historic congressional map still faces uncertainty amid redistricting battles”
In this sweltering political August, redistricting has become the hot fight of the moment.
It’s driving Texas Democrats to flee their state, hunkering down in Illinois while Republican Gov. Greg Abbott threatens to have lawmakers removed from office. It’s throwing a Black-majority district in Louisiana into limbo, igniting fears that the U.S. Supreme Court could soon unravel what remains of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.
And in Alabama, after years of courtroom showdowns, a long-fought redistricting battle appears to have reached a moment of resolution — at least for now. A three-judge federal panel last week ruled unanimously that Alabama must use the map drawn up by a court-appointed special master until 2030.
While it is unclear whether Alabama officials will appeal the latest ruling, it marked the second time the same Alabama Northern District panel ruled that the GOP-drawn map, with just one majority Black district, was unconstitutional and in violation of the Voting Rights Act.
The legal fight may not be over and experts warn that a Supreme Court decision in a Louisiana case could still send ripples through Alabama….
The Louisiana case has the potential to affect Alabama where Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act remains a key force that led to a redrawn 2nd district.
“It would not surprise me to see the Supreme Court hold any further appeals in the Alabama redistricting litigation pending a decision in the Louisiana case,” said Richard Hasen, a political science professor and election law expert at the UCLA School of Law, said before Thursday’s ruling by the three-judge panel in the Alabama case. “If Section 2 falls or is limited in the Louisiana case, it would affect the rights and remedies in Alabama as well.”…
Jeff Wice, chair of the New York City Bar Association Election Law Committee and a professor at New York Law School, said he believes the Alabama case is different from Louisiana and from Texas. He said that in Alabama, the conservative court ruled that the state’s congressional map clearly diluted the Black population’s vote.
“In Louisiana, they redrew their congressional map to also satisfy a requirement to create a second Black (majority) district,” Wice said. “But by doing so, the legislature created other districts that seemed to separate white votes from Black votes, and to be able to protect the incumbent Republicans including (U.S. House) Speaker Mike Johnson.”
He added, “the question there is becoming – to what extent is the use of race required if the prevailing factor is politics? Louisiana would not be having this problem if politics were not playing a role and if they simply did as Alabama’s court did in simply drawing two Black majority districts without politics getting in the way.”…
“Newsom warns Trump in heated letter he’s ‘playing with fire’ on redistricting”
With Democrats lining up for a bare-knuckle match on redistricting, Gov. Gavin Newsom has offered President Trump a cease-fire proposal: No redrawing congressional maps in red states and California will stand down, he wrote in a letter sent to Trump on Monday morning.
“If you will not stand down, I will be forced to lead an effort to redraw the maps in California to offset the rigging of maps in red states,” he said. “But if the other states call off their redistricting efforts, we will happily do the same. And American democracy will be better for it.”
Newsom’s latest play comes as the drama around redistricting heightened over the weekend. Democratic leaders in other blue states argued on Sunday morning political shows that they were ready to battle head-to-head over the congressional district maps, which are normally tied to the census taken once a decade….
“You are playing with fire, risking the destabilization of our democracy, while knowing that California can neutralize any gains you hope to make,” he told Trump in the letter. “This attempt to rig congressional maps to hold onto power before a single vote is cast in the 2026 election is an affront to American democracy.”
“What are the Federal Voluntary Voting System Guidelines?”
New from the Bipartisan Policy Center:
he Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) are a set of principles and standards for the election equipment that Americans use to vote. These guidelines help ensure that election outcomes reflect the will of voters, a cornerstone of the democratic process.
The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) established the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The VVSG serve as the foundation for the EAC’s testing and certification program, which helps ensure that voting systems meet key requirements for usability, accessibility, and integrity.
Here’s what you need to know about the VVSG.
The VVSG are federal but voluntary, though many states have codified the use of VVSG in state law.
HAVA established minimum standards for all voting equipment used in federal elections, but the VVSG is a more comprehensive, modern set of standards that states can choose to adopt.
The EAC adopted the first set of guidelines, VVSG 1.0, in 2005. The EAC adopted the latest version, VVSG 2.0, in 2021 with an emphasis on usability, accessibility, auditability, and physical and cyber security. One voting system has been certified to 2.0 and two systems are under test at the time of this publication.
Thirty-eight states and DC use aspects of the federal testing and certification program. This means changes to the VVSG may have downstream effects on how states procure their voting equipment. Because so many states depend on the VVSG in some form, election technology vendors have “little choice but to ensure their products meet [federal] standards.”
On March 25, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies to take a broad set of actions related to election administration. Section 4(b) of the order directs the EAC to amend VVSG 2.0 by:
- Prohibiting the use of voting systems that encode a vote in a barcode or quick-response (QR) code “except where necessary to accommodate individuals with disabilities,” and
- Requiring voting systems to provide a voter-verifiable paper record.
In June, the EAC released a draft version of VVSG 2.1 which attempts to incorporate these changes.
The new draft VVSG 2.1 requires that barcode representations of a voter’s ballot selections “only be generated on an electronic voting system accessible by voters with disabilities.” All voting equipment certified to VVSG must meet its full suite of accessibility requirements, so some have argued that all VVSG-certified equipment would meet the exception described here.
Additionally, HAVA requires that election officials provide at least one accessible voting machine per polling place, but states determine whether all voters or just voters with disabilities can use these systems (a decision that warrants nuanced discussion).
In short, while the VVSG establishes technical standards for voting systems, it does not and cannot govern which voters get to use which pieces of equipment. This means the executive order does not ban jurisdictions from using machines that use bar codes….
Looking back at 2021-2022
In light of Rick P’s post about David Shor’s current lament about the failure of Congress to redress gerrymandering back when Democrats were consumed by their efforts to enact the massive S1/HR1 reforms, I recall this column I wrote for The Washington Post on February 4, 2021, less than one month after the insurrection on January 6: Congress should make a deal to end partisan gerrymandering.
The main point of the column was that Democrats in Congress should trade away issues like voter ID, vote-by-mail, and other wish-list reforms relating to election administration in order to secure the much more important structural change of eliminating partisan gerrymandering.
The column noted, as Shor did the following year, that altering election administration rules wouldn’t make a significant difference in the capacity of the electoral system to translate voter preferences accurately into electoral results, whereas ending partisan gerrymandering would. (“Easy vote-by-mail isn’t a must for Democrats; they just need sufficient opportunities to cast a ballot — and reasonably drawn districts — for good candidates to have a chance.,” the column said.) To make this point, the column cited the then-recent Georgia Senate runoffs: “The lesson of the Georgia Senate runoffs is that Democrats don’t need their preferred set of voting rules in order to win. No voting rights advocate thinks Georgia’s electoral system, run by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, is ideal. But it was good enough. It didn’t cause disenfranchisement that prevented voters from getting what they wanted.”
On the other hand, looking specifically at Texas, the column observed: “For reasons of self-interest alone, Democrats should see ending gerrymanders as Job One.”
At the time, I thought Democrats should strive to find 10 Republican Senators–just 3 more than voted to convict Trump in his January 6 impeachment trial–to agree on the necessity to end partisan gerrymandering, and since Senators don’t benefit from gerrymandering themselves, I thought the strategy should be to negotiate with them solely to achieve gerrymandering reform, without weighing it down with all the other provisions in S1/HR1 that were inevitably objectionable to all Republicans, including those willing to risk their political careers to cross Trump. The column ended this way: “Democrats should stay focused on what’s most important in electoral reform. Right now, that’s restoring sanity to redistricting.”
This was a theme I continued to stress in additional Washington Post columns in 2021. For example, on March 29, 2021, I repeated that Democrats should focus on the “anti-gerrymandering” provisions in S1/HR1 and jettison all provisions that were dealbreakers from a GOP perspective. The last sentence of that column: “Democrats are in danger of missing the moment, by going too big and too far.”
On May 27, 2021, I again stressed the need to focus on gerrymandering and wrote: “Senate Democrats are at risk of blowing their chance at meaningful electoral reform. Rather than ending up with nothing, because they spent too long trying to shoot the moon with S. 1, they should compromise with 10 reasonable Republicans on a set of simple measures to ensure that congressional elections genuinely implement voter preferences.”
I won’t belabor the point by quoting the additional columns along the same lines as the Democrats continued their efforts to enact their omnibus bill over unified Republican opposition.
As the effort to protect American democracy from the forces of authoritarianism continues, and indeed grows more urgent, I continue to believe that the potential window of opportunity of 2021-2022 was wasted by a misguided approach on the part of congressional Democrats.
David Shor, Data Analyst for Democrats, with Current and 2022 Posts on Gerrymandering v. Other Voting Issues
Campaign Finance Expert Robert E. Mutch (“Bob”), 1940-2022
I recently learned that Bob Mutch, who has written the most comprehensive and important histories of campaign finance regulation in the United States, died in August 2022.
Bob was a political scientist by training, but he wrote excellent histories of… Continue reading
Quote of the Day (Sam Issacharoff on SCOTUS Removing Election Guardrails)
“The majority of today should always fear that it may find itself in the minority tomorrow and that its rules can be used against it. . . . What happens when this breaks down? What happens if the majority of… Continue reading
Thanks to Nick Stephanopoulos
for blogging this last week, which should have been quiet at the beginning of August and was anything but.
“How did we get all this gerrymandering? A short history of the Republican redistricting scheme”
Dave Daley in The Guardian.
“Inside Democrats’ risky gambit to ‘fight fire with fire’ over election maps”
WaPo deep dive:
Their exodus, coordinated with top Democrats outside Texas, is the latest flash point in a rapidly spreading fight over election maps — embodying Democrats’ newly combative posture on redistricting. After Texas Republicans initiated an unusual mid-decade… Continue reading
Callais Offramps
As we all know, the Callais reargument potentially poses the momentous question of Section 2’s constitutionality. But it’s worth noting how many steps the Court would have to take to reach that question. Each of these steps represents an offramp… Continue reading
“In Election Cases, Supreme Court Keeps Removing Guardrails”
New York Times.
Developments in recent weeks signaled that some members of the court think there is more work to be done in removing legal guardrails governing elections. There are now signs that court is considering striking down or severely… Continue reading