Programming Note: The Voting Rights Roundup will be taking a break the week of Nov. 27 for the Thanksgiving holiday but will return the following week.

Leading Off

● Wisconsin: In a chilling new report, the New York Times describes how Wisconsin Republicans, led by conspiracy theory-spouting Sen. Ron Johnson, are pushing GOP lawmakers to take control over election administration, which would pave the way for Republicans to potentially overturn future election losses if they were to succeed.

Republicans have set their sights on Wisconsin’s bipartisan Elections Commission after the board—including most of its Republican members—refused to lend credence to the GOP’s lies surrounding the 2020 election outcome. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos even called for felony charges against five of the six commissioners for allowing local clerks to mail absentee ballots to nursing homes.

This isn’t the first time Wisconsin Republicans have tried to exert greater partisan control over the way elections are run in the state. When Scott Walker was governor, Republican lawmakers abolished the nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, which was widely praised as one of the few genuinely nonpartisan state election administration agencies in the country. They replaced it with the current bipartisan panel that has led to repeated gridlock in order to eliminate the GAB’s investigatory powers and shield Walker and his fellow Republicans from scrutiny over activities such as campaign fundraising.​

Campaign Action

​This latest effort in Wisconsin mirrors laws Republicans have passed across the country this year to seize power over election administration. While Democratic Gov. Tony Evers could veto this attempt, he faces a hotly contested re-election battle next year. If he loses, Republicans would face no obstacle to enacting Johnson’s plan heading into the 2024 election cycle.

Redistricting

● Alabama: Two additional lawsuits have been filed in federal court by voting rights advocates challenging the GOP’s recently adopted congressional and legislative gerrymanders, respectively, for discriminating against Black voters. These latest suits follow two previous cases that were recently filed and are seeking to require the drawing of a second congressional district where Black voters can elect their preferred candidates. A hearing in one of those cases has been set for Jan. 4. Under the GOP’s maps, Black Alabamians are heavily packed into just one of the state’s seven districts despite accounting for roughly two-sevenths of the state’s population.

● Alaska: Alaska’s redistricting commission issued a proclamation finalizing the state’s new legislative maps last week, giving them the force of law, though litigation over the new lines remains likely. The board’s three Republican appointees had voted in favor of the new maps while its two independent members voted against them.

● California: California’s independent redistricting commission unanimously voted to advance new congressional and legislative maps last week, though commissioners cautioned that further changes are likely before any proposals are finalized. The maps, which are available on the commission’s site, differ from earlier plans the panel released last month. The commission must complete its work by Dec. 27.

● Colorado: Colorado’s Supreme Court, which is required to review any new redistricting plans under a pair of 2018 amendments to the state constitution, has given its approval to new legislative maps drawn up by the state’s redistricting commission. As with the new congressional map it ruled on earlier this month, the court found that the commissioners had not engaged in an “abuse of discretion” in carrying out their duties.

The new plans by and large reflect Colorado’s shift to the left in recent years. Joe Biden would have won a 25-10 majority of seats in the state Senate and a 46-19 majority in the state House. In both cases, the median seat would have gone for Biden by about 12 points, slightly to the right of his 13.5-point win statewide. However, the breakdown is much less favorable for Democrats when looking at 2016: Hillary Clinton would have carried the Senate just 18-17 and the House 38-27. It’s worth noting as well that Colorado Republicans submitted briefs to the court in favor of the maps (Democrats did not file any briefs).

● Connecticut: Connecticut’s bipartisan redistricting commission has unanimously agreed to a new map for the state House and said Thursday that one for the state Senate will be forthcoming soon. The commission faces a Nov. 30 deadline to complete its work but said that it may ask the state Supreme Court for more time to draw a congressional map.

● Florida: A committee in Florida’s Republican-controlled state Senate released four different draft maps for Congress and four for its own chamber last week, which you can find here. The congressional maps are all quite similar to one another and largely preserve the status quo, with the addition of one new district that the state earned in reapportionment. That seat would be numbered the 15th, a swingy district in east Tampa that would have narrowly gone for Joe Biden, which would also make the adjacent 14th District (held by Democratic Rep. Kathy Castor) less blue. Republican Rep. Scott Franklin, who represents the current 15th, would instead find himself in the redder 28th District.

● Georgia: Republicans in Georgia’s legislature have released a new draft congressional map that’s largely similar to a proposal they put out in September, and the GOP-dominated state Senate passed the new map on a party-line vote on Friday with the state House reportedly set to vote on it on Monday. As before, the chief aim of the new gerrymander is to turn the existing 8-6 GOP advantage into a 9-5 Republican majority in a state Biden won, and in doing so demonstrating a racial dynamic that harms Black representation.

Republicans would make the 6th District, an Atlanta suburbs constituency where growing racial diversity and a highly educated white majority have caused it to lurch from solidly GOP to blue-leaning in the Trump era, much whiter and thus unwinnably red according to Dave’s Redistricting App, likely dooming Black Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath. It does this principally by making the adjacent blue-leaning 7th District appreciably bluer to pack as many Democrats into that seat, which is held by Democratic Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux, a white moderate.

While Bourdeaux’s district would become very diverse, varying citizenship and turnout rates among the different racial groups would still leave the electorate there with a large white plurality rather than one that would be certain to empower Black voters in both a primary and general election. Republicans also packed Black voters into the suburban 13th District on the other side of Atlanta held by Black Democrat David Scott, making that district two-thirds Black to ensure neighboring seats remain heavily white and conservative. The map thus fails to draw a new fourth Black district protected by the Voting Rights Act despite a decade of rapid demographic change in the Atlanta area.

Meanwhile, Republicans in both legislative chambers have passed new maps for the state Senate and state House on party-line votes, sending them to Gov. Brian Kemp. The plans would lock in wide GOP advantages in both chambers and could require Democrats to have to win the popular vote by double digits to have any chance at gaining power.

● Idaho: Idaho’s bipartisan redistricting commission has forwarded its newly adopted congressional and legislative maps to the secretary of state, meaning they now take effect. The congressional lines make minimal changes to the previous map and will continue to easily elect two Republicans in this ruby red state. In response, two lawsuits have been filed, one by a Republican candidate for Idaho schools chief and another by commissioners in Ada County, which is the state’s largest, arguing that the new legislative map excessively splits counties. They are asking the court to order redistricting commissioners to adopt a different map.

● Maryland: Lawmakers in Maryland’s Democratic-run legislature have released four different draft maps for the House, two of which would maintain the party’s 7-1 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation and two of which would target the 1st District, the lone Republican seat. However, even under the most aggressive proposed gerrymander, the 1st would remain very swingy rather than become a reliably blue district like many observers have demonstrated was possible even this past decade.

● Massachusetts: Both chambers in Massachusetts’ Democratic-run legislature passed a new congressional map by wide margins on Wednesday, though a number of Democrats voted against the plan and several Republicans voted for it. The new map is largely similar to the one it would replace and would likely keep the state’s nine-member House delegation all-Democratic. Republican Gov. Charlie Baker could conceivably veto the map, though Democrats enjoy wide supermajorities. (The Senate approved the map 26-13, which just meets the two-thirds threshold, though roll calls on overrides can often differ.)

● Montana: Montana’s bipartisan redistricting commission adopted a final congressional map on Friday, identical to the one it passed a week earlier. As before, the panel’s independent tiebreaker sided with the commission’s two Republican members to pick the GOP’s plan, which yields a western 1st District that would have gone for Donald Trump by a 52-45 margin last year, according to Dave’s Redistricting App, and a much redder 2nd District in the east that would have voted 62-35 for Trump. In most respects, the map resembles the one the state used 30 years ago, the last time it had two congressional districts.

● Nevada: Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak signed Nevada’s new congressional and legislative maps on Tuesday evening, the same day that the Democratic-run legislature passed them. The congressional plan would make the 3rd and 4th Districts bluer at the expense of the 1st District; under these boundaries, all would have supported Joe Biden by about 7-8 points. The 2nd, meanwhile, would remain solidly Republican.

The legislative maps also favor Democrats: 14 districts in the Senate would have gone for both Biden and Hillary Clinton to seven for Donald Trump, while the Assembly map would have yielded a 28-14 advantage for Biden and Clinton. The median district would have been about 6 points bluer than the state as a whole in the upper chamber, and 8 points bluer in the lower. With Nevada being the only swing state where Democrats control redistricting this decade, these are so far the only maps that could realistically be expected to cause Democrats to maintain power even if Republicans win more votes.

● New Hampshire: A committee in New Hampshire’s Republican-run state House passed new gerrymanders for Congress and its own chamber on a party-line vote on Wednesday. The congressional plan would make the 1st District considerably redder in order to target Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas; it would also represent the most radical revamp of the state’s two districts in 140 years.

The state House map, meanwhile, would likely preserve the GOP’s majorities in this blue-leaning state, potentially leading to a repeat instance of Republicans winning legislative power despite Democrats winning more votes, which happened in 2012 under the previous state Senate gerrymander.

● North Carolina: The League of Conservation Voters has filed a lawsuit in state court challenging Republicans’ newly enacted congressional and legislative gerrymanders for illegal partisan and racial discrimination in violation of the state constitution. The LCV has also asked the courts to adopt their own proposed maps drawn by a computer algorithm instead as fairer alternatives.

Meanwhile, the plaintiffs in the 2019 congressional redistricting lawsuit that resulted in the GOP’s prior gerrymander getting struck down and redrawn have filed a new lawsuit in state court opposing the GOP’s latest congressional map on partisan gerrymandering grounds. These plaintiffs had previously filed a supplemental complaint in their 2019 lawsuit earlier this month in hopes of expediting the process, but they said they have now filed an entirely new lawsuit after the court failed to act in the older case.

● North Dakota: Republican Gov. Doug Burgum has signed North Dakota’s new legislative map recently passed by state lawmakers, which you can view here. Both chambers use the same districts, with each electing two representatives and one senator, though the new map adds two exceptions to that pattern: Two House districts based around Indian reservations would now be divided in half, with each half electing its own member, in order to improve Native representation.

● Ohio: Both chambers in Ohio’s Republican-run legislature passed the GOP’s new congressional map on Thursday, sending it to Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. Because the map passed without a three-fifths supermajority—all Democrats and a handful of Republicans opposed it—it will only have legal force for the next two elections rather than the entire decade. However, that may be precisely what Republicans prefer, since it will give them the opportunity to fine-tune their gerrymandering in just four years’ time.

The plan differs from maps that lawmakers previously released, but it shares their most important characteristic: It’s an extreme gerrymander that aims to send 13 Republicans and just two Democrats to Congress. While two seats would have narrowly gone for Joe Biden, those same districts would have also backed Donald Trump in 2016, and in a normal midterm environment, Republicans will have a strong chance to win them.

The GOP’s recently adopted legislative gerrymanders are already facing multiple lawsuits pending before the state Supreme Court, and the congressional map is likely to draw litigation of its own. Because the GOP failed to muster a supermajority, a further provision of the Ohio constitution will now take force, one that prohibits lawmakers from adopting a congressional redistricting plan that “unduly favors or disfavors a political party or its incumbents.” But how aggressively the courts, and particularly Ohio’s 4-3 Republican Supreme Court, decide to enforce this mandate is an open question.

● Oklahoma: Oklahoma’s Republican-run legislature passed new congressional and legislative gerrymanders on Friday, sending them to Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt. The congressional map would make the 5th District, which is the state’s only competitive seat, safely red by cracking the Oklahoma City area between three different districts even though Oklahoma County itself has almost the ideal population for its own swingy district.

The legislative plans replace maps lawmakers approved earlier this year, prior to the release of data from the 2020 census, that were based on population estimates. Republicans sought to pass those premature maps so that they wouldn’t miss a late May deadline in the state constitution, after which they would have forfeited control of redistricting to a bipartisan commission with an even number of members from both parties.

● Oregon: Republicans have filed two lawsuits with the state Supreme Court (here and here) last month that each challenge Democrats’ newly adopted legislative maps, arguing that they violate the state constitution. Meanwhile in a separate GOP-backed lawsuit challenging Democrats’ new congressional map, a court-appointed expert has issued a report that found little evidence for the GOP’s claim that the map was “a clear, egregious partisan gerrymander.” While the report isn’t the final say on the GOP’s lawsuit, judges appoint their own experts in order to guide their own understanding and often draw heavily on their conclusions or adopt them outright.

● Pennsylvania: Last month, a state court dismissed a Democratic-backed lawsuit that had asked the state courts to take over congressional redistricting due to the likelihood that the GOP-run legislature and Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf would fail to agree on a new map (legislative redistricting is handled separately by a bipartisan commission). The court held that it was too early for such a lawsuit since lawmakers still have time to reach a compromise but acknowledged that the plaintiffs could bring suit again at a later date.

● South Dakota: In a fascinating development, a group of Republicans in the South Dakota House banded together with Democrats to pass a new legislative redistricting plan over the objections of a sizable bloc of conservative GOP dissenters, and Republican Gov. Kristi Noem quietly signed the new legislative redistricting plan right afterward with little fanfare.

All seven Democrats present (one was excused) voted in favor of the map, along with 30 Republicans, while 31 Republicans were opposed, meaning Democrats provided the winning majority. The plan, which originated in the Senate, easily passed the upper chamber 30-2, with all three Democrats likewise in favor.

The Republican objectors complained that the map would double-bunk some of their members and undermine their ability to elect far-right legislators. But at issue as well was the matter of Native representation. In particular, the new map places the northern parts of Rapid City, which are home to a large Native population, into a single legislative district, a move that Democratic state Sen. Red Dawn Foster said would enhance the community’s voice.

In addition, the map preserves two districts that are split in half in order to give Native voters a better opportunity to elect their preferred candidates. Normally, South Dakota legislative districts elect two representatives and one senator each (both chambers use the same map), but two House districts are divided into separate sections that elect one member each. At least one plan backed by conservatives would have done away with this approach and risked litigation.

● Texas: The NAACP and a coalition of advocates for voters of color have each filed federal lawsuits that challenge Texas Republicans’ recently adopted congressional and legislative maps on the grounds that they discriminate against voters of color in violation of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. These cases are the fifth and sixth federal lawsuits challenging the maps, while a seventh case is in state court. You can find details on the other cases here.

● Utah: Republican Gov. Spencer Cox has now signed Utah’s new GOP-drawn redistricting plans for the state legislature, following his previous approval late last week of the state’s new congressional map. The congressional plan creates four safely Republican seats by cracking the state’s lone blue bastion, Salt Lake County, four ways.

Activists with a group called Better Boundaries said ahead of the vote that they plan to put a measure on the ballot “to repeal and replace the heavily gerrymandered district maps.” However, because the plan passed with a two-thirds vote in both the state Senate and House, it cannot be subject to a veto referendum, which would have blocked the map from taking effect as soon as it qualified for the ballot—had it been able to.

Organizers could instead seek to pass their own map at the ballot box, but Republican lawmakers would be able to repeal it even if it passes since voters can only initiate statutes instead of constitutional amendments, much as they did when they gutted the measure creating a new redistricting commission that Better Boundaries helped pass in 2018.

● Washington: Washington’s bipartisan redistricting commission collapsed in chaos late on Monday night as its four commissioners failed to approve new congressional and legislative maps by a midnight deadline. As a result, the redistricting process will now get turned over to the nine-member state Supreme Court, which is composed entirely of liberals and is also one of the most diverse high courts in the nation (seven justices are women and four are people of color).

In a bizarre twist to an already bizarre story, Washington’s bipartisan redistricting commission released congressional and legislative maps late on Tuesday night local time—after admitting earlier in the day that it had missed the Monday deadline to complete its work and acknowledging that the state Supreme Court would take over the redistricting process. The commissioners once again did not offer any substantive explanation for why they failed to finish on time, saying only that they could “see no reason why the Court can’t” consider their maps.

● Wisconsin: As promised, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed the new congressional and legislative maps passed earlier in the week by Wisconsin’s Republican-run legislature, calling them “gerrymandering 2.0” in a video statement on Thursday. The process of drawing new maps will now most likely be handled by the state’s conservative Supreme Court, which is currently presiding over a lawsuit filed by a conservative group in August.

Democrats and voting rights advocates have also filed a pair of suits of their own in federal court, in the hopes of obtaining a better outcome there. However, the three-judge panel hearing those cases (which were consolidated in September) has stayed those proceedings in order give the state Supreme Court a chance to adjudicate the dispute.

Voting Access Expansions

● District of Columbia: A majority of members on the Washington, D.C. Council are sponsoring a bill that would permanently adopt universal mail voting and citywide “vote centers” where any city voter may cast their ballot in-person. Both measures were temporarily adopted last year due to the pandemic. The bill would also add more mail ballot drop boxes and make Election Day a holiday for public schools.

Voter Suppression

● Kansas: A federal court has sided with voting rights advocates and temporarily blocked a law that Republicans enacted earlier this year to make it illegal for out-of-state groups to mail applications for mail ballots to Kansas voters. The law also prevented any groups from sending partially pre-filled applications to voters. The plaintiffs have argued that these restrictions violate their First and 14th Amendment rights, and the court agreed to put the law on hold while the case proceeds on the merits. An ongoing state-level lawsuit is also separately challenging the ban on out-of-state applications along with other new voting limits.

● Montana: A state judge has rejected Montana Republicans’ attempt to dismiss a lawsuit backed by Democrats that is challenging three voting restriction laws enacted by the GOP earlier this year, letting the case proceed. Those laws eliminated Election Day voter registration, banned the use of student IDs for voter ID unless voters have additional documentation, and prohibited certain ballot assistance efforts, which Democrats argue discriminates against young and Native American voters in violation of the state constitution.

● North Carolina: Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and North Carolina’s Republican-run legislature have agreed to a compromise state budget that would nevertheless strip state agencies of their power to settle certain lawsuits and transfer that authority to the GOP-gerrymandered legislature instead. It would also limit Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein’s ability to settle certain cases. The provision has direct implications for the state Board of Elections, whose Democratic majority agreed to extend the mail ballot return deadline last year during the pandemic as the result of a lawsuit—a move Republicans unsuccessfully opposed.

Republicans fought for years following Cooper’s 2016 victory to stop Democrats from taking over the board and using it to expand voting access, resulting in lengthy litigation that belatedly enabled Democrats to take charge. A new lawsuit challenging these latest measures for violating the state constitution’s separation of powers is possible.

● Post Office: President Joe Biden announced on Friday that he would nominate former Obama administration official Daniel Tangherlini to replace Ron Bloom, a Democrat serving as chair of the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors, along with former Trump administration official Derek Kan to replace fellow Republican John Barger on the board.

Bloom in particular has been a key defender of Trump-backed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who has used his tenure to throw a wrench in the post office’s operations and helped create significant mail delivery delays just as the use of mail voting began skyrocketing last year due to the pandemic. Replacing Bloom could thus result in a new majority on the board that is willing to finally fire and replace DeJoy, which could result in new policies that better guarantee access to timely mail voting.

Ballot Measures

● Michigan: A panel of three judges on Michigan’s Court of Appeals has largely upheld a lower court ruling striking down key parts of a 2018 law that Michigan Republicans passed in a lame-duck session to effectively make progressive ballot initiatives—but not conservative ones—nearly impossible to put on the ballot. Republicans had approved the law right after voters that year had passed a pair of constitutional amendments expanding voting rights protections and banning gerrymandering by creating an independent redistricting commission.

The GOP’s law mandated that, among other restrictions, no more than 15% of the signatures for a ballot measure could come from any one of Michigan’s 14 congressional districts. Because Republicans gerrymandered the map to pack Democrats into just five districts, this provision effectively would have made it much harder for progressives to put new initiatives on the ballot without placing a comparable burden on conservatives. While the state’s new redistricting commission will likely rectify much of that gerrymander, geography also plays a role, as two districts in the Detroit area will still contain a disproportionate share of Michigan’s Black and Democratic voters.

The appellate judges also upheld part of the lower court’s decision that blocked the GOP’s requirement that paid signature-gatherers would have to file an affidavit. However, it reversed the lower court by reviving a requirement that petitions must indicate whether the circulator is paid or not.

● Mississippi: Supporters of a ballot measure to adopt early voting have filed a motion in federal court seeking to eventually revive their initiative by intervening in a 2011 lawsuit that established Mississippi’s current congressional map after the state Supreme Court struck down the entire initiative process on dubious grounds in May.

At issue is a constitutional amendment the state adopted in the 1990s that required initiative supporters to gather signatures in each of the state’s congressional districts, which numbered five at the time. The state, however, lost a seat during the 2000 round of reapportionment and has held steady at four districts ever since.

Because of that reduction, the state Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that it was no longer possible to collect signatures from five districts, and in doing so they overturned a 2020 initiative that voters passed to legalize medical marijuana. The justices also thwarted all future initiative efforts and threw into doubt others that have passed over the last two decades.

However, opponents of that decision noted that the state law describing five districts is still on the books. That’s because Mississippi lawmakers were unable to agree on a new map after both the 2000 and 2010 censuses, leading to a federal court to draw a new map without actually effecting a change in state law. These latest litigants also argue that the court failed to uphold a provision of the very same section of the constitution that guarantees the right to file initiatives—one mandating that the legislature “shall in no way restrict or impair the provisions of this section or the powers herein reserved to the people.”

The petitioners are asking the federal court to clarify that its decade-old ruling setting out the existing congressional map was only for the purposes of congressional representation and therefore cannot be used to let the GOP-run legislature “avoid its constitutional duty not to impair or impede Mississippians’ reserved initiative rights.”

Electoral College

● Michigan: Late last month, Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers gave approval to the ballot summary for a nascent effort to qualify an initiative that would add Michigan’s 15 Electoral College votes to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Once the board approves the actual petition form, advocates will be able to begin gathering the roughly 340,000 signatures needed to place the measure on next year’s ballot.

Michigan Republicans, who have won control over the state legislature in every election for the past decade despite Democrats winning more votes in nearly all of them, have steadfastly blocked Democratic lawmakers from trying to pass a law joining the compact, which is why supporters are now turning to the initiative process.

Electoral System Reform

● Nevada: A nonprofit with major funding from tech industry donors has announced it will try to place an initiative on the 2022 ballot that would abolish traditional party primaries and instead adopt a “top-five” primary where the top five vote-getters regardless of party would advance to a ranked-choice voting general election. Supporters would need to gather approximately 141,000 signatures, including roughly 35,000 from each of Nevada’s four congressional districts, to qualify for the ballot.

Secretary of State Elections

● Washington: Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee announced last week that he was appointing state Sen. Steve Hobbs to succeed Republican Secretary of State Kim Wyman, a move that will make Hobbs both the first Democrat to serve as Washington’s chief election official since the 1964 elections and the first person of color to hold this office. This post will next be on the ballot in November of 2022 for a special election for the final two years of Wyman’s term; Wyman herself set her resignation for Friday in order to join the Biden administration to oversee election security.