“Republicans Swiftly File Lawsuit in Bid to Block California’s New House Maps”

redistricting

NYT:

The lawsuit filed on Wednesday accuses California of violating the Constitution “when it drew new congressional district lines based on race, specifically to favor Hispanic voters, without cause or evidence to justify it.” The lawsuit points to statements made by Democratic state lawmakers and a mapmaking consultant this year in which they referred to having intentionally drawn some districts with Latino majorities.

“These arguments are not frivolous, but they are not going to be easy, and the timing is going to present a major challenge,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The case is likely to hinge on whether race or partisanship was the predominant factor in drawing the new maps. A Supreme Court ruling in 2019 established that federal courts are powerless to hear claims about partisan gerrymandering, essentially allowing lawmakers to carve up districts for political gain. So California could argue that the maps were a raw political play, crafted explicitly to help Democrats even the score against similarly partisan maps in Republican-led states.

Michael Columbo, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said that the case would show that race was a predominant factor in drawing the new maps, even though Democrats said their main goal was to flip five seats for Democrats.

“There was a lot of rhetoric and maybe even an effect, but within that, we have clear statements that establish that there was racial gerrymandering going on,” Mr. Columbo said at a news conference on Wednesday….

Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard, said he thought it was unlikely the courts would act on the case early enough to change the course of California’s primary election in June 2026.

“A big procedural problem for this lawsuit is that legislatures and elected officials are allowed to make late changes to district lines, but the Supreme Court has been really stringent in saying that courts can’t do anything close to an election,” he said….

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“Redistricting Battles, Set Off by Trump, Have Few Parallels in U.S. History”

redistricting, Supreme Court

NYT:

But election lawyers and experts say that what is happening now is a crisis with few parallels in American history, especially given the potential weakening of the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court is expected to rule on in the coming months.

They fear this one-two punch could weaken democracy.

“The wheels are coming off the car right now,” said Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who has studied gerrymandering. “There’s a sense in which the system is rapidly spiraling downward, and there’s no end in sight.”

Congressional redistricting is typically carried out after the national census, which is taken every decade. States can win and lose House seats according to population changes, and state legislatures from both parties have used the once-per-decade opportunity to redraw districts that benefit them politically.

But this year, that norm has been shattered. Election experts worry that if the trend continues, redistricting could become a chaotic and near-constant process, with state lawmakers redrawing districts with the onset of every midterm election…..

Richard H. Pildes, a law professor at New York University, said that gerrymandering generated more controversy when the country was closely divided politically, with power regularly flip-flopping between parties.

At the same time, both parties in recent years have painted the other as a fundamental threat to the future of the republic.

“When the stakes are viewed as so high and the partisan margins of control are so thin,” Mr. Pildes said, “it creates all of this pressure for those who control the structure of elections to use that power to try to advance the interests of their side.”…

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The Complaint Filed By Republicans Against the Maps Created by California’s Prop 50 Raising Racial Gerrymandering and Intentional Discrimination Claims Faces an Uphill Battle, Especially Given 2026 Timing

redistricting, Voting Rights Act

You can find the complaint here. The main argument in the case is that plaintiffs engaged in a racial gerrymander by making race the predominant factor in drawing district lines without s compelling reason to to so. The primary allegations concern what the mapmaker for the Legislature said about protecting Latino voting power in the new district lines, something that the state would be required to do to to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

If partisanship, preserving communities of interest or other factors predominated when the Legislature drew the lines enacted via Proposition 50, then the case would fail on the first prong. Seems like this was a very partisan process, so there’s a good chance the case would fail on this prong. If we get to the second prong, the state could try to defend by saying the districts were drawn race consciously to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

There is also a brief set of claims in here that the Legislature drew lines to intentionally discriminate against Latinos. That claim is supported by no real evidence and I don’t expect it to go anywhere.

Plaintiffs will likely seek a preliminary injunction and have asked for a three-judge court. They will likely want a preliminary injunction hearing quickly. It may not happen quickly, and as we get closer to the election, the Purcell Principle, which has been applied to similar challenges in Louisiana and Alabama, tells courts not to make changes to districts in the period close to the election. Although applying Purcell typically has benefitted Republicans could benefit Democrats in this instance.

If the district court denies the injunction, plaintiffs could try to get emergency relief from the Supreme Court.

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The New Fraudulent Fraud Squad: “Trump Administration Chooses a Critic of California Elections to Monitor Them”

fraudulent fraud squad

NYT:

When the Justice Department announced a week and half ago that it would send monitors to watch California’s elections, it didn’t say who exactly would be doing the monitoring.

For Orange County, a populous and ethnically diverse area south of Los Angeles, the administration tapped Michael Gates, a lawyer with a history of questioning the county’s voting procedures.

For years, Mr. Gates worked as the city attorney for the Orange County community of Huntington Beach, where in 2024 he helped pass the first local voter identification law in the state. When the California attorney general and secretary of state sued, saying that the city’s law conflicted with state election laws, Mr. Gates defended the city in court.

In February, Mr. Gates was appointed deputy assistant attorney general in the federal Justice Department’s civil rights division. Shortly afterward, the department sued election officials in Orange County, alleging that noncitizen immigrants were receiving mail-in ballots and voting. The Department of Justice filed the lawsuit after the county registrar refused to release unredacted voting records and registration information for alleged noncitizen voters.

Local election officials said this week that the Justice Department had informed them that Mr. Gates and an assistant U.S. attorney, Cory Webster, would be serving as election observers in Orange County. Mr. Webster was hired as a U.S. attorney late last year….

It was unclear precisely how Mr. Gates and Mr. Webster were observing the election in a county with nearly two million voters. But Democrats questioned Mr. Gates’s ability to be a fair and impartial monitor.

Rob Bonta, the California attorney general, said he planned to send his own monitors to guard against any voter intimidation. And the state Democratic Party sent out more than 2,000 of its own observers — a record number of volunteers in the role — and had about 150 lawyers stationed around the state. While some Democratic officials were worried about voter intimidation, several said that they were more concerned about what the federal officials would say after the election.

“If they so much as blink at anything like voter interference, they will find themselves in parking lot or in jail,” said Justin Levitt, who served in the Justice Department’s civil rights division during the Biden administration. “But I think they will continue to sow doubt without any evidence.” Mr. Levitt said that as a political appointee, he would not have taken such a role in monitoring elections….

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Joey Fishkin: “California’s Prop 50 passed. Now, here’s how to end partisan redistricting once and for all “

political parties, political polarization, redistricting

Joey Fishkin with an important piece in the SF Chronicle:

The nationalization of politics also provides an opening to solve this problem. Congress has the power to do what it did in 1842: Enact a statute to bring both parties back from the brink. Congress’ authority to set the “Times, Places, and Manner” of choosing representatives is undisputed. Prop 50 itself, perhaps as a sweetener to help the partisan medicine go down, included an anti-gerrymandering cri de coeur: It “establishes state policy supporting use of fair, independent, and nonpartisan redistricting commissions nationwide.” 

We need a new federal statute of mutual disarmament — ideally before we reach the point where there are zero California Republicans and zero Texas Democrats. Prop 50’s call for nonpartisan redistricting commissions nationwide is a good start. So is the bill by Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Rocklin (Placer County), who may lose his seat because of Prop 50, which would ban mid-decade redistricting nationwide. 

However, there are major problems to overcome. First, it will be difficult to prevent states from stacking nonpartisan commissions with partisans. Second, the two parties are unfortunately not similarly situated: Both parties benefit from gerrymandering, but Republicans have more opportunities and benefit more. That is part of why Democrats were able to unite their caucus in 2021 behind their democratic reform package, HR1, which included a requirement that every state use a nonpartisan redistricting commission, whereas Republicans do not seem interested in even Kiley’s modest bill. 

Thus, unfortunately, the most plausible route to solving the gerrymandering problem is to elect a Democratic majority in the House and Senate, and a Democrat in the White House, and then make sure they — at their moment of maximum opportunity to lock in partisan advantage through partisan hardball — instead engage in anti-hardball, building fairer rules for everyone. ….

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