“Judge rules Utah’s congressional map must be redrawn for the 2026 elections”

redistricting

AP:

The Utah Legislature will need to rapidly redraw the state’s congressional boundaries after a judge ruled Monday that the Republican-controlled body circumvented safeguards put in place by voters to ensure districts aren’t drawn to favor any party.

The current map, adopted in 2021, divides Salt Lake County — Utah’s population center and a Democratic stronghold — among the state’s four congressional districts, all of which have since elected Republicans by wide margins.

District Court Judge Dianna Gibson made few judgments on the content of the map but declared it unlawful because lawmakers had weakened and ignored an independent commission established by voters to prevent partisan gerrymandering.

“The nature of the violation lies in the Legislature’s refusal to respect the people’s exercise of their constitutional lawmaking power and to honor the people’s right to reform their government,” Gibson said in the ruling.

New maps will need to be drawn quickly, before candidates start filing in early January for the 2026 midterm elections. The ruling gives lawmakers a deadline of Sept. 24 and allows voting rights groups involved in the legal challenge to submit alternate proposals to the court.

But appeals expected from Republican officials could help them run out the clock to possibly delay adopting new maps until 2028.

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“How AOC built a Democratic fundraising juggernaut”

campaign finance, campaigns

CNN:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is building a fundraising juggernaut that is rivaling some of the Democratic Party’s core infrastructure, prompting questions about both her future and the party’s.

Small-dollar donations – contributions of less than $200 – are the lifeblood of campaigns and a key measure of voter enthusiasm. And on ActBlue, Democrats’ largest online fundraising platform, the New York congresswoman received the third-most small-dollar donations in the first half of the year.

That trailed only the Democratic National Committee and the party’s Senate campaign arm, key party infrastructure. Ocasio-Cortez beat the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the House campaign arm, and every other individual candidate.

Ocasio-Cortez raised nearly $15 million total in the first half of 2025 from 736,000 contributions, an average of $20 a donor. Notably, her fundraising spiked after the March announcement that she would join Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ national “Fighting Oligarchy” tour….

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Unanimous Third Circuit Panel Holds Unconstitutional Pennsylvania Requirement to Discard Timely Received Mail-in Ballots That Have Wrong or Missing Dates

election administration

It’s an interesting case that finds only a minimal burden under the Anderson-Burdick balancing test but still finds the state law unconstitutional. Here, the date requirement on timely received ballots was found to serve no government interest.

I expect the RNC will seek U.S. Supreme Court review.

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“In Private Deal, the D.N.C. Covered $20 Million in Harris Bills Post-Election”

campaign finance, campaigns

NYT:

Not long after Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election, her senior advisers and the Democratic National Committee struck a handshake deal.

Ms. Harris still had bills piling up, and campaign officials had counted on raising more money during a prolonged fight over tallying votes. Instead, the race was called early in the morning after Election Day.

The private agreement was this: The party would pick up the tab for any outstanding 2024 bills, allowing Ms. Harris to claim she did not end the race in debt. In turn, Ms. Harris would raise the money to cover all of those leftover costs, leaving the party whole financially as it sought to navigate the second Trump era.

Left in the dark were the small donors who received nearly 100 email solicitations sent from the Harris operation this year alone on behalf of the D.N.C. The emails did not disclose that funds raised from those emails were essentially earmarked for leftover bills. Convincing donors, both big and small, to pay for debts is typically a tough sell.

The arrangement was described by four people with knowledge of it and corroborated through Federal Election Commission disclosures. The people spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Though the deal was struck before the current party chairman, Ken Martin, was elected in February, it has continued during his tenure.

The total tally in post-election bills that the D.N.C. has covered so far is $20.5 million, federal records show. While significant, that sum amounted to less than 2 percent of the $1.5 billion that the presidential campaign spent in 15 weeks….

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California: “Republicans again ask Supreme Court to stop Democratic redistricting”

direct democracy, redistricting

At the Lectern:

California Republicans today filed a second writ petition — Sanchez v. Weber — in the Supreme Court seeking to prevent the electorate from voting in November to temporarily redraw the state’s congressional districts.

The court denied the first petition last week, two days after it was filed, but before enactment of the legislation necessary to put the redistricting proposal on the ballot. The petition had asked for immediate action to stop the Legislature from acting. The court declined to stop the Legislature from voting, but seemed to leave open today’s second petition, apparently saying the first petition was premature.

Today’s petition asks the Supreme Court to keep off the November ballot ACA 8, the Legislature’s proposed constitutional amendment for temporary redistricting. It requests a court decision — with or without a hearing — in two weeks, by September 8. I do not see in the petition why September 8 is a critical date. The only reference to that day on the California Secretary of State’s web page of key dates for the November special election is: “Translations of Ballot Label and Ballot Title and Summary Available for Public Display” “August 31–September 8, 2025.”

Today’s petition reprises the lone argument made in the first, that the Legislature acted too quickly on the redistricting bills, in violation of California Constitution article IV, section 8(a). But it also alleges ACA 8 violates other state constitutional provisions — the separate-vote requirement of article XVIII, section 1; and the Citizens Redistricting Commission provisions and the once-a-decade-redistricting limitations of article XXI. The petition doesn’t mention how these arguments might be affected by the ACA 8 provision that the changes it makes are “notwithstanding any other provision of [California’s] Constitution or existing law.”

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Prominent NJ Academics Urge High Court to take Fusion Challenge

political parties, third parties,

Three established Rutgers professors, one of them a former state attorney general, have written a joint op-ed in the New Jersey Monitor urging the state Supreme Court to take up In Re Malinowski and rule in favor of reviving the state’s tradition of fusion voting. 

As Rayman Solomon, former dean of the Rutgers Law School-Camden; Robert Williams, state constitutional law expert and distinguished professor of law emeritus at the Rutgers University School of Law; and John Farmer, Jr., who previously served as dean of Rutgers Law School-Newark and attorney general of New Jersey, write, “At a time when democracy is being eroded throughout our country, the court has the opportunity to reaffirm the New Jersey Constitution’s strong commitment to freedom of association and voter choice — both bedrocks of democracy.”

The three scholars take apart the Appellate Division’s ruling, which had rejected Malinowski’s petition, along with the Supreme Court’s Timmons decision in 1998. They write:

“Without any evidence whatsoever from the New Jersey secretary of state, and contrary to the vast evidence from actual experience that the Malinowski plaintiffs supplied in their several-hundred-page record, the appellate court accepted the secretary of state’s claims that adopting ballot-line fusion would generate pervasive voter confusion, inspire fraud, and otherwise undermine ‘public confidence’ in the present system.”

With respect to Timmons, they write:

“What is most striking today, in rereading the Timmons 6-3 decision — authored by then-Chief Justice Rehnquist, with a blistering dissent from Justice Stevens — was the majority’s confidence in how well our two-party system serves the country. Today, 80% of voters say they want more than just two choices, but they must be meaningful choices. The hyper-partisan polarization of the two-party duopoly has led us to the effective collapse of any legislative or judicial check on the threats to democracy brought about by an unprecedented and seemingly limitless expansion of executive power.”

“Throughout our history, ballot-line fusion has been a modest but potent tool for injecting new ideas and new leaders into our politics. It pushes back against the hyperpartisan politics that define our era as it incentivizes major parties to form coalitions with minor ones. We can’t know if the New Jersey Moderate Party will end up building a voting base big enough to force the major parties to bargain, but they should surely have the right to try.”

New Jersey’s Constitution places strong emphasis on the importance of freedom of association and free expression by voters, parties, and candidates. So there’s ample grounds for the state Supreme Court to take up the case. Stay tuned.

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