‌‌‌‌‌Will SCOTUS Give State Republicans Free Reign On Elections?

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The Supreme Court last week said it will decide a case next term that could dramatically restructure how our federal elections work. 
 

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Does Your State Legislature Reign Supreme? 

The Supreme Court announced Thursday that it would hear the case of Moore v. Harper, a NORTH CAROLINA redistricting dispute that goes much farther than one issue in one state. At its heart, the case is about “Independent State Legislature” theory, or the idea that, because the Constitution names “the legislature” of the various states as the governing body for federal elections, those legislatures should essentially have unchecked power. 
 

That’s right: No state courts, no executive branch officials, not even popular ballot measures can compete with an all-powerful state legislature when it comes to determining how elections are conducted. Under this theory, if affirmed, disputes over federal elections would circumvent those checks entirely and go straight into the federal court system. In essence, this is the Supreme Court deciding whether it wants to grab power for itself.

And they sure seem ready to do it. “[T]here must be some limit on the authority of state courts to countermand actions taken by state legislatures when they are prescribing rules for the conduct of federal elections,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in March, joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, when they dissented from the court’s decision not to hear the case at the time.

The implications are staggering: Imagine in 2020 if state legislators were on the butt end of a Trump pressure campaign to overturn the election without any checks from state courts or executive officials. Wild gambits like the bid to appoint alternate electors would have had a greater chance of success, legal scholars warn.

SCOTUS Sticks Louisiana With Racial Gerrymander

A district judge in LOUISIANA, then a right-leaning panel on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, all agreed that state Republicans’ congressional map was a racial gerrymander: Though Black people make up nearly a third of the state’s population, they make up the majority in only one out of six congressional districts drawn by lawmakers.

The district judge issued, and the appeals court ultimately let stand, an order to the legislature to submit a new map. But state Republicans — stop me if you’ve heard this before — played a waiting game: they asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and twiddling their thumbs in the meantime. 

It worked. On Tuesday last week, a day before the district judge was scheduled to hold a hearing in which she was expected to lay out her own map, the Supreme Court took up the case and delayed any resolution until it deals with a similar case in Alabama, which is also stuck with gerrymandered districts this election cycle. 
 

In the Alabama case, Justice Kavanaugh wrote in a February shadow docket decision that the state’s late-May primaries were just too close for a court-ordered fair map, condemning “late judicial tinkering with election laws.” But Louisiana’s primaries are in… November. So why not have Republicans redraw the map, as lower courts agreed they should? The court offered no explanation, merely a one-paragraph scheduling order.

As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern observed, “The far-right majority has effectively struck down the ban on racial gerrymandering without full briefing or oral arguments, on the basis of a future ruling that it has not yet issued.”

Around The States

Democrats on the NORTH CAROLINA State Board of Elections voted against certifying the Green Party as an official party, citing “obvious signs of fraud” on petition sheets. Board Republicans voted to certify the party, but were outnumbered.
 

MISSOURI Gov. Michael Parson (R) signed a new voting restrictions package into law Wednesday, including a ban on ballot drop boxes and a photo ID requirement for voters casting regular or absentee ballots (similar to one that was struck down by the state Supreme Court in 2020). The law also replaces Missouri’s presidential primaries with caucuses. 
 

NEBRASKA Republicans, including Gov. Pete Ricketts (R), are collecting signatures for a voter ID ballot initiative after a similar measure failed in the legislature. 

The Latest In Election Sabotage

The DOJ has subpoenaed records from ARIZONA’s Republican state Senate leader, as well as the Republican state Sen. Kelly Townsend, as part of its investigation into Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. 
 

Tina Peters, the clerk of Mesa County, COLORADO now facing multiple felony counts for allegedly violating her office’s election security protocols and stealing a local man’s identity to do so, was soundly defeated in the Republican Party primary to be Colorado’s next secretary of state. In fact, the seemingly sanest of the three major candidates in the race won
 

It wasn’t just Peters: Several candidates at the county level who professed their belief in Trump’s election lies were defeated in Colorado’s primary elections last Tuesday. 

A Trump-appointed member of the Federal Elections Commission spoke at an “Election Integrity” event for the Denton County, TEXAS Republican Party, where he was described as a member of the “Trump Elections Team.” 

Happy birthday to WISCONSIN Republicans’ review of the 2020 election, which has reached the one-year mark, has spent $1 million, and has basically nothing to show for it beyond the many controversies surrounding the behavior of the man leading the review, retired state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a full examination of where the shambolic effort has led to date. 
 

Plaintiffs in an election security lawsuit have issued subpoenas seeking evidence of whether unauthorized people gained access to Coffee County, GEORGIA ’s voting machines. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has this this fascinating tidbit about the incident’s relation to a national team, backed by ex-Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne and others, that went from state-to-state “investigating” “election fraud”: 

“A year and a half after the presidential election, it remains unclear whether Coffee County election computers were compromised by individuals pursuing evidence of fraud. Flight records provided by FlightAware.com show a plane from Atlanta visited the county on Jan. 7, 2021 — the day after the Capitol riot in Washington. The subpoenas target several people who might have been on the flight, including individuals who were involved in a ballot examination in Maricopa County, Arizona, and an investigation of counting errors in Antrim County, Michigan.” 

NPR: Election deniers have taken their fraud theories on tour — to nearly every state
 

WaPo: With violent rhetoric and election denial, podcaster becomes GOP force
 

Politico: The Supreme Court has chipped away at the Voting Rights Act for 9 years. This case could be the next blow.
 

The Guardian: Republicans seek to install ‘permanent election integrity infrastructure’ across US

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