“How Alabama’s historic congressional map still faces uncertainty amid redistricting battles”

redistricting, Supreme Court

Al.com:

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.”…

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“Newsom warns Trump in heated letter he’s ‘playing with fire’ on redistricting”

Uncategorized

LA Times:

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.”

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“What are the Federal Voluntary Voting System Guidelines?”

election administration, election subversion risk

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….

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Looking back at 2021-2022

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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.

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Campaign Finance Expert Robert E. Mutch (“Bob”), 1940-2022

election law biz

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 campaign finance law and politics in the United States, including two books that I constantly rely upon in my own research, Campaigns, Congress, and Courts: The Making of Federal Campaign Finance Law (Praeger 1988) and Buying the Vote: A History of Campaign Finance Reform (Oxford University Press 2014). The work is extremely careful, lively, and helpful, including some details that have not appeared in any other work on this history.

Here is the blurb I wrote for the Oxford book:

The book is no doubt the leading historical account of the debate over campaign finance regulation from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Mutch has mined a wealth of primary sources to paint the most detailed picture possible (consistent with the paucity of the early historical record) of the financing of U.S. federal campaigns and the national debate over that financing. Mutch usefully ties current judicial debate to the earlier historical record, providing valuable context and serving as a corrective to much of what passes for historical analysis in the U.S. Supreme Court’s campaign finance opinions.

Here is Michael Malbin’s review of that book, the Schaffner & LaRaja book, and my own Plutocrats United.

Bob was always generous with his time and his comments on other work. He gave great comments on my scholarship and we had a great, but intermittent correspondence; the last email I received from him came a few months before he passed, when he congratulated me on my move to UCLA.

Researcher Sam Garrett, writing in his personal capacity, passes along these thoughts: “Robert Mutch’s meticulous research was and is indispensable to how I learned about campaign finance in the United States.  His writing was thorough, clear, and enthusiastic.  Bob reminded us that campaign finance policy might be rooted in law, but also that debate–and good stories–about money and politics date to the founding of the republic and continue today.  He also didn’t stop at campaign finance.  Several years ago, when Bob spoke to my American University students, he gave us more than an hour—without notes—on his latest project, about George Washington’s family.  It was a privilege to know Bob and to continue learning from him.”

Bob apparently died without any immediate family, and I have been unable to find any obituary for him. So I thought it appropriate to say here at ELB how much he meant to many of us in the election law community. We will miss him, his spirit of inquiry, and his enthusiasm for studying our democracy to make it better.

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