voting

CHICAGO — Young adults have filled streets across the country on a scale not seen since the 1960s to protest for racial justice after the death of George Floyd. But whether that energy translates to increased turnout in November is another question.

They could make a difference in the presidential race — polls show President Trump is deeply unpopular with young voters — with control of the Senate and hundreds of local races also at stake. But some activists are concerned that their focus will be on specific causes instead of voting.

“In a normal election year, turning out the youth vote is challenging,” said Carolyn DeWitt, president and executive director of Rock the Vote, which works to build political power among young people. “That’s even more true now. People’s minds are not on it.”

Voters under 30 have historically turned out to vote at much lower rates than older voters, though the 2018 midterm election saw the highest turnout in a quarter-century among voters ages 18-29 — a spike attributed in part to youth-led movements such as March for Our Lives against gun violence.

There are signs that young people are getting more politically engaged. DeWitt said more people registered to vote through Rock the Vote’s online platforms last week — some 50,000 — than in any other week this year. The organization’s social media accounts had as many impressions between Monday and Friday of last week as they typically have in an entire month, with more than 1 million.

“It will just be incredibly important to us to make sure we’re protesting now and voting later,” DeWitt said.

That is not assured. The coronavirus crisis has halted traditional campaigning as well as big concerts and festivals, the kinds of places where campaigns and groups like Rock the Vote and HeadCount typically recruit young voters. On top of that, lawmakers’ efforts to change voting laws in some states could restrict younger voters, including college students.

Joe Biden’s Democratic presidential campaign is banking on these voters supporting him when the choice is a binary one between him and Trump. But that is not guaranteed.

“Our bar can’t be: Are you better than Trump?” said Cliff Albright, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, which works to register voters and organize black communities. “For folks who are angry, who are in the streets, or who are at home and not engaged, you just telling me you’re better than this nut — that’s not enough.”

Many young people are still unfamiliar with Biden, “and they certainly don’t know where he stands on issues,” said Heather Greven, spokesperson for NextGen America. The group plans to spend at least $45 million to target young voters in battleground states.

Biden said during a recent virtual fundraiser that he thought the protests would energize young people to turn out for him. “Now they are engaged,” Biden said. “They feel it. They taste it. And they’re angry and they’re determined.”

His campaign hasn’t made major changes to its youth outreach amid the protests, which started after a white Minneapolis officer pressed his knee into the neck of Floyd, a black man who was handcuffed and crying out that he couldn’t breathe. Instead, Biden has stuck largely with an initiative known as League 46 that combines groups such as Students for Biden and Young Professionals for Biden.

In an effort to appeal to younger, liberal voters, Biden has put progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on a climate change task force. But he doesn’t support some of the proposals that energized supporters of his primary rival Bernie Sanders, such as “Medicare for All.”

Ja’Mal Green, 24, an activist in Chicago, said he and other young people were disappointed by Biden’s rejection of a call to “defund the police,” which has become a rallying cry for protesters. The former vice president said Monday that an overhaul of policing is needed but can be done by putting conditions on federal funds.

That position may reassure older and moderate voters who helped Biden win the nomination, Green said, but young people want to see more change.

“If not, they’ll just say ‘to hell with the election,’” he said.

Many of the young people taking to the streets are focused on public officials with a more direct impact on their lives such as mayors, police chiefs and district attorneys because “they see that’s where the change is,” said Green, a Black Lives Matter leader who joined protesters in Minneapolis.

There were also protests in Louisville, Ky., over the death of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old black woman fatally shot by police in her home in March.

Tom Bergan, 22, attended a protest last week in Louisville, where he is a HeadCount field organizer. In pre-pandemic days, HeadCount focused on registering young people at concerts and festivals, but that’s shifted to more online organizing since COVID-19. For Friday’s protests, Bergan printed off large QR codes that he hoisted on a poster board. Anyone who scanned the code on their phone was connected to an online voter registration page.

Bergan said the crowd was enthusiastic, with many already registered to vote, and much of the conversations were around Taylor’s death and local changes such as the decision to limit no-knock warrants. He said the moment reminds him of 2018, when he volunteered with HeadCount during a March for Our Lives in St. Louis, as thousands of young people turned out in cold, rainy weather.

That fall, turnout among voters ages 18-29 was nearly double what it was in 2014, with 28% of eligible young voters casting ballots, according to CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. They were much more likely to support Democratic than Republican congressional candidates, 64% to 34%, according to an AP VoteCast survey of more than 115,000 midterm voters nationwide.

That turnout is still less than in 2016 or 2012, presidential election years when about 45% of young voters turned out, according to CIRCLE, a drop from 2008, when Barack Obama was on the ballot and turnout soared to a level not seen since 1992.

Will 2020 bring another peak?

“That’s the big ‘if,’ and we don’t really know until November,” Bergan said.

Aug. 26 (UPI) — President Donald Trump‘s wish to end mail-in voting is only part of his grander vision for fundamentally changing the election process, experts say.

Mail-in voting has been the target of the president for years and it is again garnering his attention. As president he does not have a direct role in election administration but by sowing mistrust in the results he is still capable of ushering in change.

“The president has no role with respect to election administration or setting election rules of anything of that nature,” Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy and partnerships with Campaign Legal Center, told UPI. “The Constitution is crystal clear that the primary responsibility for setting election rules lies with the states, subject to modifications from Congress.”

Trump alleges that mail-in voting is rife with fraud, a claim that has routinely been disproven by election audits and federal investigations, Diaz said.

“His own Department of Justice during his first term said there was no evidence of any widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election,” Diaz said. “Countless studies and investigations and attempts have turned up virtually nothing. Isolated incidents that haven’t affected the outcome of elections at most. There is no basis to support any of the president’s views on vote-by-mail or the integrity of our election system in general.”

About one-third of voters participated in the 2024 general election by casting mail-in ballots.

Universal vote-by-mail

When Trump takes to social media or the podium to air his grievances with voting by mail, he does so in broad terms. Charles Stewart, director of the MIT Election Lab and professor of political science, told UPI that Trump’s issue is actually with universal vote-by-mail.

Eight states and Washington, D.C., conduct universal vote-by-mail, meaning they send mail-in ballots to all registered voters without requests. Those states are California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Utah. Whether a voter intends to vote by mail or not, they still receive a ballot.

Universal vote-by-mail expanded to California, Vermont, Nevada, Hawaii and Washington, D.C., in 2020 or later. Stewart said some of the expansion was in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There ended up being a bit of a back-and-forth in the early days between Democratic activists and Republicans about whether everybody in America should be mailed a ballot,” Stewart said. “That has morphed over the years into this kind of partisan divide over this practice of mailing everybody a ballot.”

Utah, the only universal vote-by-mail state that leans Republican, passed a bill earlier this year to change its mail-in voting process. Voters will no longer automatically receive a ballot in the mail beginning in 2029. Instead, they must request one.

“Thus far, for all the political talk at the top about discouraging vote-by-mail, once voters have taken a bite of that apple, they like the apple,” Stewart said. “Once the candidates and their advisers, their campaign advisers, have learned to campaign with mail being a predominant part of the election they also have a hard time giving it up. In Utah they’re going to roll back mail voting but there’s still going to be a lot of mail voting.”

Challenges for administrators and voters

Whether Trump hopes to see an end to universal vote-by-mail or mail-in voting in general, he cannot achieve either through executive order. It would require an act by U.S. Congress.

Ending vote-by-mail in any fashion would be a major disruption for election administrators at the state level, Stewart said.

“It would certainly be a great reevaluation of how they administer things,” he said. “They would have to very quickly turn on a logistical dime to make it work. They did it in 2020 on the other side.”

Some of the logistical challenges that universal vote-by-mail states and states with heavy mail-in voting participation would face include finding additional poll workers and polling places, along with the costs associated with these additions. This would raise the costs of election administration for taxpayers.

“Many of these places will have some memory of doing elections in person but they will not have the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of local voting locations that will be needed on Election Day,” Stewart said. “They will have to recruit and deploy on Election Day, so there will be a real, major scrambling to make this happen. They will have no choice in the matter but it will be very expensive and very disruptive.”

Losing access to the option to vote by mail would also be consequential for many voters who otherwise may not be able to participate in their elections.

Sophia Lin Lakin, director ACLU Voting Rights Project, told UPI that mail-in voting is crucial for people with disabilities and mobility issues, seniors and people who lack reliable access to transportation.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, voters who are 65 and older voted by mail at the highest rate of any age group in the 2022 midterm elections. About 38% voted by mail.

Mail-in voting also levels the playing field of participation for voters across the socioeconomic spectrum. Voters with family incomes ranging between under $10,000 and more than $150,000 per year voted by mail at similar rates, between 24% and 36%.

“Many Americans juggle multiple jobs or irregular schedules and mail-in voting provides the flexibility needed for those voters to participate in democracy without sacrificing a paycheck,” Lakin said. “Ending it would disenfranchise many communities that already face systemic barriers to voting.”

Trump administration’s other election changes

The Trump administration has already taken other measures to change the election process in the United States while continuing the pattern of sowing doubt in the election he lost in 2020.

In March, Trump issued an executive order to restrict the acceptance of mail-in ballots received after Election Day and tighten the proof of citizenship requirements for voter eligibility. It also threatened to withhold federal funding from states that fail to comply.

A federal judge granted an injunction to stop the proof-of-citizenship requirement from taking effect.

Trump’s order charged the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Government Efficiency with scanning state voter registration rolls and federal immigration databases in an effort to identify foreign nationals.

The president has applied political pressure to lawmakers in Texas and other states to redraw their congressional maps to be more favorable for Republicans ahead of the 2026 midterm election.

Trump’s legislative agenda, passed in July, reduced funding for national cybersecurity, raising concern that U.S. elections, among other things, could be more vulnerable to interference from bad actors. The Trump administration has fired more than 100 employees from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal government’s chief cybersecurity arm.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has cut the leadership and many of the employees working in the voting section of the Civil Rights Division. The voting section enforces federal voting rights laws including parts of the Voting Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act, Help America Vote and the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.

The voting section has halted all investigations into potential Voting Rights Act violations.

Voting section

Pamela Karlan, professor of law at Stanford Law School, told UPI that the Trump administration’s overhaul of election law enforcement is unlike anything ever seen in American history.

Karlan served as the former principal deputy assistant attorney general under former President Joe Biden‘s administration.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a time where they just outright stopped enforcing the Voting Rights Act,” Karlan said. “There has been more vigorous enforcement during some administrations than others. That has not traditionally been a partisan issue. But I don’t think we’ve ever had an administration that was outright not committed to enforcing any part of the Voting Rights Act.”

“The idea that the voting section isn’t in the game is really troubling, because the voting section has brought and won some of the most important voting rights cases in our history,” she continued.

Reducing the staff in the voting section and its overall capabilities greatly puts overseas voters and deployed military service members at risk of not being able to participate in elections.

“Almost every election cycle the voting action has had to deal with problems of getting ballots to overseas voters and to military voters in a timely manner,” Karlan said. “Almost every federal election cycle, the department has a bunch of UOCAVA responsibilities and really nobody else is going to enforce that.”

Karlan sees little opportunity for recourse if the voting section does not enforce election laws or actively protect the rights of voters, short of action by Congress. She still expects most election administrators will follow the law but the small few who do not will present significant problems.

“For the most part, state and local jurisdictions comply with the law,” she said. “Prior to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act we had rampant violations of the Constitution when it came to voting rights. Massive disenfranchisement. Purposeful vote dilution and the like.”

“Most election officials want to comply with federal law,” she continued. “But when it comes to the outliers, the lack of any federal enforcement is deeply problematic.”

United States President Donald Trump has stepped up his attacks against mail-in voting, which he claims was rigged in the 2020 elections, and has pledged to get rid of the postal voting system.

“We are now the only country in the world that uses mail-in voting,” he posted on his Truth Social platform on Monday.

His post echoed grievances about mail-in voting he had aired days earlier in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity.  After meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday in Alaska, Trump told Hannity that Putin said the 2020 US presidential election was “rigged” because of mail-in voting. It wasn’t. Trump lost that election. Officials in his own administration told him that.

Hours after his post, Trump slightly softened his language during a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“And do you know that we’re the only country in the world – I believe, I may be wrong – but just about the only country in the world that uses [mail-in voting]. Because of what’s happened, massive fraud all over the place,” Trump said.

Mail-in voting provides more opportunities for fraud than in-person voting, researchers said, but it’s still rare, and election officials have safeguards in place.

Trump said during Monday’s remarks at the White House that his administration is preparing an executive order “to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt”.

We asked the White House for evidence to support Trump’s statement about other countries and received no response.

Data compiled by a Sweden-based organisation that advocates for democracy globally found in an October report that 34 countries or territories allow mail-in voting, which it refers to as “postal voting”.

Dozens of countries allow at least some mail-in voting

The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance found that of those 34 countries or territories, 12 allow all voters to vote by mail and 22 permit only some voters to vote this way.

“Europe has the largest number of countries that make in-country postal voting available to all or some voters,” the report said.

No two countries have exactly the same postal voting system, said Annika Silva-Leander, the organisation’s North America head.

Silva-Leander noted some differences:

• Ballot tracking: Ballot tracking allows voters and election officials to track ballots throughout the voting process to reduce fraud. Although that is common in the US, many countries don’t have it.
• Different state systems: Many countries have the same postal voting system for the entire nation. In the US, the system differs from state to state. The majority of states allow voting by mail, including primarily Republican-voting, Democratic-voting and battleground states.
• Mailing ballots to all voters is unusual: In most countries, postal voting supplements voting at polling stations, but some US states, such as Washington, rely largely on postal voting.
• Ballot curing: This is a US process that allows voters to fix a problem, such as forgetting to sign the envelope, after casting their ballots. This process is not available in most countries.

The US has had voting by mail since its 1861-1865 Civil War. Voting by mail also has a long history across the globe.

Australia introduced postal voting more than a century ago, Graeme Orr, an expert on international electoral law at the University of Queensland in Australia, previously told PolitiFact.

All Canadians are eligible to use mail-in voting, said York University Associate Professor Cary Wu, who cowrote a 2024 paper about the effect of Trump’s antimail-voting messaging on Canadians’ views of postal voting.

“Voting by mail has long been a vital component of the democratic process in Canada,” Wu said.

Although the option of submitting a ballot by mail was extended to all Canadian voters in 1993, it was not commonly used in general elections before the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the United Kingdom, on-demand postal voting was part of a wider modernisation in electoral administration in the early 2000s, according to a 2021 paper by UK researchers. Postal voting’s expansion was driven largely by a desire to increase turnout. Using data from the 2019 British Election Study, researchers found older voters and people with disabilities were more likely to opt for postal voting’s convenience.

US states set mail-in voting laws

In his Truth Social post, Trump wrote: “The States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes” and must do what the president tells them.

Election law Professor Rick Hasen at the University of California at Los Angeles wrote on his blog that Trump’s statement is “wrong and dangerous”.

“The Constitution does not give the President any control over federal elections,” Hasen wrote, adding that federal courts have recognised those limits.

The US Constitution’s Article 1, Section 4 says the regulation of elections is a power of the states.

“The president plays literally no role in elections, and that’s by design of the founders,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Despite often criticising voting by mail, Trump himself occasionally cast a mail-in ballot, and in 2024, Trump invited Republicans to cast mail-in ballots.

We asked the White House for details about the forthcoming executive order he described, including whether it seeks to entirely ban mail-in voting. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields did not address that question but said Trump wants to require voter IDs and prevent “cheating through lax and incompetent voting laws in states like California and New York.”

There is no evidence of widespread cheating in California and New York, two of the most populous states that consistently vote for Democrats for president. Most states require voter IDs although the rules vary.

Our ruling

Trump didn’t explain his evidence and hours later softened his language when he said he “may be wrong”.

In 2024, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance found that 34 countries or territories allow postal voting. For example, Australia has had mail-in voting for a century, and all Canadians are eligible to vote by mail.

We rate this statement false.

President Trump said Monday he would renew his assault on mail-in voting after Russia’s autocratic leader, Vladimir Putin, told him to do so at their meeting in Alaska last week.

The president provided few details, but wrote on social media that he would “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.”

Already in March, Trump had issued an executive order directing the Justice Department to “take all necessary action” to prevent mail-in ballots received after election day from being counted. The order also attempted to impose a proof of citizenship requirement for voter registration.

Those portions of the executive action has been enjoined by courts over constitutional concerns. But another provision, directing the independent U.S. Election Assistance Commission to shift its guidance on voting machines banning the use of certain bar codes and quick-response codes, has been allowed to proceed.

The U.S. Constitution states that the timing, place and manner of elections “shall be prescribed in each state” by local legislatures, and that Congress has the ability to pass laws altering state election regulations. The president is given no authority to prescribe or govern election procedures.

Trump’s action comes on the heels of his meeting with Putin in Anchorage, where the Russian leader told him that mail-in ballots led to his electoral defeat in 2020, according to the president.

The U.S. intelligence community has assessed that Putin attempted to influence the last three U.S. presidential elections in Trump’s favor.

“Vladimir Putin said something — one of the most interesting things. He said, ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting,’” Trump told Fox News in an interview.

Trump has criticized mail-in voting since entering politics in 2015. But his presidential campaign embraced the practice leading up to the 2024 election, encouraging his supporters — especially those affected by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina — to take advantage of mail-in voting opportunities.

“Absentee voting, early voting and election day voting are all good options,” Trump said at the time. “Republicans must make a plan, register and vote!”

Aug. 12 (UPI) — The U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to rehear a case that will have implications on the Voting Rights Act when its next term begins in October.

The high court posted an order in the case Louisiana vs. Callais on Aug. 1, directing the parties involved to file supplemental briefs. The court heard arguments in the case in March but did not hand down a decision, setting the stage for reargument at a later date.

Louisiana vs. Callais is a case over redistricting Louisiana’s congressional map.

There are six congressional districts in Louisiana. The state legislature passed a redistricted map in 2024 that included two districts where a majority of voters are Black: District 2 and District 6, represented by Rep. Troy Carter and Rep. Cleo Fields respectively.

Fields, a Democrat from Baton Rouge, was elected to represent the second majority Black district in 2024.

About one-third of Louisiana’s population is Black, reflected in the newly-drawn congressional map.

The plaintiffs, a group of voters in Louisiana, argue that race was the prevailing consideration in redistricting, violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Stuart Naifeh, manager of the Redistricting Project at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, argued the case in favor of the map before the Supreme Court in March. He told UPI that fair representation is at stake in this case.

“It’s not about proportional representation,” Naifeh said. “It’s about places where unless you create a district to provide an opportunity to have representatives of your choice a particular group will not have a fair opportunity to do that because of the race-infused politics that exist in those places.”

The issue at hand in Louisiana vs. Callais, according to Naifeh, is whether the redistricting map adopted in January 2024 is a remedy to a Voting Rights Act violation or if it is itself racial gerrymandering as plaintiffs claim.

“The question that they asked us to brief is somewhat general. In some ways it’s asking us to rebrief the same issue,” Naifeh said. “But then it refers to a specific section of the plaintiff’s brief where they argue, at least in Louisiana, that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act can no longer be applied without violating the Constitution.”

“So you can’t draw a second majority-Black district without violating the Constitution, is the argument that they have made,” he added.

The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, represents a key victory for Civil Rights advocates. It was passed to address racial discrimination in voting. Section 2 prohibits discrimination in voting policies and procedures on the basis of race, color or minority status.

The previous version of the congressional map, drawn in 2020, included just one majority-Black district. That map was determined to have violated the Voting Rights Act because it diluted the role of Black voters in electing representatives.

Former Gov. John Bel Edwards vetoed that map in 2022 but the Republican-led legislature held a special session to override his veto.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a group of voters then filed a complaint to challenge the map, arguing that it was an instance of unconstitutional gerrymandering.

A federal judge ruled in favor of the NAACP and co-plaintiffs but their ruling was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court. It put enforcement of the federal judge’s decision on hold as another redistricting case was mulled by the high court Allen vs. Milligan.

The Allen vs. Milligan case was based on a congressional redistricting plan out of Alabama in which a majority of Black voters were placed into a single district, using a “race-neutral benchmark” theory and “modern computer technology” to draw its congressional map.

Plaintiffs argued that this plan, like the 2020 redistricting plan in Louisiana, violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

The Supreme Court ultimately ruled 5-4 in favor of Black voters in Alabama and subsequently Louisiana. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined in part by Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal judges.

In Roberts’ opinion, he noted that there is sometimes difficulty in discerning between “racial predominance” and “racial consciousness.”

“When it comes to considering race in the context of districting, we have made clear that there is a difference ‘between being aware of racial considerations and being motivated by them,'” Roberts wrote. “The former is permissible; the latter is usually not. That is because ‘[r]edistricting legislatures will — almost always be aware of racial demographics,’ but such ‘race consciousness does not lead inevitably to impermissible race discrimination.'”

Naifeh highlights Kavanaugh’s partial concurrence with the majority opinion as a key factor in redistricting cases going forward, including Louisiana vs. Callais.

Kavanaugh agreed with the minority opinion of Justice Clarence Thomas that while “race-based redistricting” may be required in some circumstances, it should not continue indefinitely.

“The authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future,” Kavanaugh wrote. “But Alabama did not raise that temporal argument in this Court, and I therefore would not consider it at this time.”

A victory for Naifeh, the NAACP and Black voters in Louisiana does not rely solely on the proposed congressional map remaining intact, Naifeh said.

“Victory, for Black voters in Louisiana in particular, is that they continue to have the opportunity to elect candidates of choice and are not shut out of having a voice in the political process on account of race, which was the situation until the state adopted this new map,” he said. “We don’t see victory as meaning the state keeps this particular map.”

Looking beyond Louisiana vs. Callais, Naifeh notes that race continues to be a “salient factor” in elections across the country. It remains a motivator in political platforms and civic engagement.

“We still have parts of this country where race is a very salient factor in elections and it’s not because of the Voting Rights Act,” Naifeh said. “Where race is still such a salient part of the electoral process we continue to need the Voting Rights Act. That’s what it was designed to address. So I worry that we will have a country where race is still such a salient part of elections and there is no remedy. The court needs to recognize that race continues to play a role in elections in many places.”

California is in a standoff with Texas over redistricting that could decide the balance of power in Congress for the end of Donald Trump’s presidency — a high-stakes gambit with risks for both sides. But if the courts have their say, Texas, facing accusations of racial discrimination, may find itself at a distinct legal disadvantage.

Partisanship unleashed

Both efforts by Texas Republicans and California Democrats are blatantly partisan, proposing a mid-decade redrawing of district lines for the express purpose of benefiting their party in the 2026 midterm elections.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is working with a Democratic supermajority in the Legislature on “trigger” legislation that would schedule a ballot initiative this fall for the new maps. It was a direct response to a Texas plan, supported by Trump and currently in motion in the Austin statehouse, to potentially flip five seats in the upcoming election from blue to red.

The Supreme Court has ruled that judges are powerless to review partisan gerrymandering, even if, as it wrote in 2019, the practice is “incompatible with democratic principles.”

The court ruled in Rucho vs. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering “is incompatible with the 1st Amendment, that the government shouldn’t do this, and that legislatures and people who undertake this aren’t complying with the letter of the Constitution,” said Chad Dunn, a professor and legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project who has argued multiple cases before the Supreme Court. “But it concluded that doesn’t mean the U.S. Supreme Court is the solution to it.”

What courts can still do, however, is enforce the core provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which bars states from redistricting that “packs” or “cracks” minority groups in ways that dilute their voting power.

“Texas doesn’t need to have a good reason or a legitimate reason to engage in mid-decade redistricting — even if it’s clear that Texas is doing this for pure partisan reasons, nothing in federal law at the moment, at least, would preclude that,” said Richard Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University. “But Texas cannot redistrict in a way that would violate the Voting Rights Act.”

Vestiges of a landmark law

In 2023, addressing a redistricting fight in Alabama over Black voter representation, the current makeup of the high court ruled in Allen vs. Milligan that discriminating against minority voters in gerrymandering is unconstitutional, ordering the Southern state to create a second minority-majority district.

Today, Texas’ proposed maps may face a similar challenge, amid accusations that they are “cracking” racially diverse communities while preserving white-majority districts, legal scholars said. Already, the state’s 2021 congressional maps are under legal scrutiny over discrimination concerns.

“The Supreme Court affirmed two years ago that the Voting Rights Act works the way we all thought it worked,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. “That’s part of the reason for current litigation in Texas, and will undoubtedly be a part of continuing litigation if Texas redraws their lines and goes ahead with it.”

The groundwork for the current Texas plan appears to have been laid with a letter from Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department, who threatened Texas with legal action over three “coalition districts” that she argued were unconstitutional. Coalition districts feature multiple minority communities, none of which comprises the majority.

The resulting maps proposed by Texas redraw all three.

J. Morgan Kousser, a Caltech professor who recently testified in the ongoing case over Texas’ 2021 redistricting effort, said the politics of race in Texas specifically, and the South generally, make its redistricting challenges plain to see but harder to solve.

How do you distinguish between partisanship, which is allowed, and racism, which is not, in states where partisanship falls so neatly down racial lines?

That dilemma may become Texas’ greatest legal problem, as well as its saving grace in court, Kousser said.

“In Texas, as in most Southern states, the connection between race and party is so close that it is exceedingly difficult to distinguish between them,” he said. “That seems to give a get-out-of-jail free card, essentially, to anybody who can claim this is partisan, rather than racial.”

Today, nine states face ongoing litigation concerning potential violations of the Voting Rights Act, a law that turned 60 years old this week. Seven are in the South — states that had for decades been subject to a pre-clearance requirement at the Justice Department before being allowed to change state voting laws.

The Supreme Court struck down the requirement, in the case of Shelby County vs. Holder, in 2013.

California moves forward

Newsom has been vocal in his stance that California should position itself to be the national bulwark against the Texas plan.

Last week, the Democratic caucuses of the state Legislature heard a presentation by the UCLA Voting Rights Project on how California might legally gerrymander its own maps for the 2026 midterms.

Matt Barreto, the co-founder of the project and a professor of political science and Chicana/o and Central American studies, said his organization’s position is that gerrymandering “should not be allowed by any state,” he said.

But “if other states are playing the game, the governor is saying he wants to play the game too,” Barreto added.

He said that although five seats have been discussed to match what Texas is doing, he sees a pathway for California to create seven seats that would be safely Democratic.

That includes potential redraws in Orange County, San Diego, the Inland Empire and the northern part of the state. Barreto said there are many districts that currently skew as much as 80% Democratic, and by pulling some of those blue voters into nearby red districts, they could be flipped without risk to the current incumbents, though some new districts may have odd shapes.

For example, districts in the north could become elongated to reach into blue Sacramento or the Bay Area, “using the exact same standards that Texas does,” he said.

Legislators seemed receptive to the idea.

“We’ve taken basic American rights for granted for too long,and I think we’re ill equipped to protect them,” said Assemblymember Maggy Krell (D-Sacramento), who attended the meeting.

“To me, this is much bigger than Texas,” she said.

State Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Santa Ana), who has worked on redistricting in the past, echoed that support for Newsom, saying he was not “comfortable” with the idea of gerrymandering but felt “compelled” in the current circumstances.

“In order to respond to what’s going on in Texas in particular,” Umberg said, “we should behave in a like manner.”

Barreto, the UCLA professor, warned that if any redistricting happens in California, “no matter what, there’s going to be a lawsuit.”

Dunn said that it’s possible voters could sue under the Voting Rights Act in California, claiming the new districts violate their right to fair representation — even white voters, who have more traditionally been on the other side of such legal actions.

The 1965 law is “for everybody, of every race and ethnicity,” Dunn said. A lawsuit “could be on behalf of the places where the white community is in the minority.”

The prospect of that litigation and the chaos it could cause gives pause to some voting rights experts who see the current situation as a race to the bottom that could ultimately harm democracy by undermining voters’ trust in the system.

“It’s mutual destruction,” said Mindy Romero, a voting expert and professor at USC, of the Texas-California standoff.

The best outcome of the current situation, she said, would be for Congress to take action to prohibit partisan gerrymandering nationwide. This week, Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin), who represents a district north of Sacramento that would be vulnerable in redistricting, introduced legislation that would bar mid-decade redistricting. So far, it has gained little support.

“Just like lots of other things, Congress is dropping the ball by not addressing this national problem,” said Richard Hasen, a UCLA professor of political science and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project.

“When it comes to congressional redistricting, fairness should be evaluated on a national basis, since the decisions made in California or Texas affect the whole country,” he said.

What else you should be reading:

The must-read: Tired of waiting for the city, Angelenos paint their own crosswalks. Some become permanent
The what happened: Federal agents use Penske rental truck as ‘Trojan Horse’ to raid Los Angeles Home Depot
The L.A. Times special: Inside the high-stakes clandestine poker world that led to a Hollywood Hills murder

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

The concerns Gary Chapman raises [“Casting a Vote of Caution on Online Voting,” March 20] about the security of online voting are legitimate, but they ultimately will prove trivial when a technical solution is found.

His concerns about relative voter participation, however, are transparently partisan.

The fear on the left is that this particular technological advance will increase the relative participation of the “wrong,” presumably more conservative, voters. But when a change in electoral processes, e.g., “motor voter” registration, disproportionately benefits the right people, the left is in favor of it.

In a National Public Radio discussion I heard a few weeks ago on this topic, even some of the opponents of Internet voting conceded that the digital divide is shrinking. Sales of computers for use in the home are projected to grow faster among ethnic minorities than among whites. Even without that, an argument could be made that Internet voting might disproportionately increase minority voting: It isn’t hard to imagine that there are lower-income voters who have better access to an Internet-connected computer than they have to transportation to polling places.

The intent of Internet voting is not to disenfranchise anyone. It is, instead, to make it easier for anyone–everyone–to vote.

JONATHAN BALL

Altadena

The United Kingdom is set to make an historic change to its electoral system.

The government has announced a plan to lower the voting age from 18 to 16. It says the move will modernise and strengthen British democracy.

But critics say this is more than just democratic reform.

So, what’s really behind the decision? Is this about democratic renewal or short-term political gain? And has lowering the voting age worked elsewhere?

Presenter: Adrian Finighan

Guests:

Afzal Khan – Labour Member of Parliament in the UK

Yannis Koutsomitis – European affairs analyst

Alex Deane – Political analyst and conservative commentator

Last month, New York City’s mayoral race drew national attention when Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani secured a stunning victory over former governor and political veteran Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, thanks to the relatively new system of ranked-choice voting. Less noticed were the 28 contested New York City Council races on the same ballot, 10 of which also had no candidate receiving more than 50% of the vote.

In most places, including in most of California, such messy results would trigger a costly runoff between the top two finishers in each race. But not in New York City, where voters rank every candidate in order of preference on their ballots. If no one receives more than 50% of the first-choice votes, whichever candidate received the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and voters whose ballots had that person in the top position are then counted as supporters of their second choice. This process of elimination and consolidation continues until one candidate receives more than 50% of the vote.

Perhaps Mamdani would have won the primary in a runoff against Cuomo, but he didn’t have to. This voting system reflected the will of the people without dragging out campaign season or asking voters to head to the polls an extra time.

Advocates say ranked-choice voting ensures your vote isn’t wasted if your top choice is eliminated. Proponents also contend that the system discourages negative campaigning (instead fostering cross-endorsements), improves representation for women and people of color, promotes more viable competition, reduces election costs and eliminates the “spoiler effect” from vote siphoning.

Ranked-choice voting is gaining traction, particularly in U.S. cities. Currently, 63 jurisdictions nationwide use some form of ranked-choice voting, including seven in California: Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, Redondo Beach, San Francisco and San Leandro.

Polling shows strong support for ranked-choice voting among residents of California cities that have it, and most of those cities increased the diversity of their governing bodies after implementation. These systems have already saved money for California taxpayers by eliminating costly runoff elections.

What would change if California implemented ranked-choice voting for state offices, or if general elections in the city of Los Angeles were decided this way? It would play out differently than in New York.

Unlike New York, which holds party primaries, most California jurisdictions hold nonpartisan primary elections in which all parties run on the same ticket — known as a top-two or jungle primary. This means when a candidate loses in a state or local primary, they can’t just switch parties or run as an independent to get on the general election ballot, as Cuomo now could.

California’s nonpartisan elections also mean that a candidate’s party affiliation plays a competitive role in primaries, unlike in New York City. Because of this, candidates will sometimes strategically register with the dominant party before they run in California, as Rick Caruso did in 2022. This wouldn’t necessarily change under ranked-choice voting, but some candidates might feel less inclined to employ this tactic if they think they have a chance at getting a voter’s second- or third-choice votes while running as a candidate of their preferred party.

There are two other crucial differences between California elections and New York races, one at the local level and one at the state level.

Locally, most jurisdictions, including the city of Los Angeles, hold a general election only if no candidate wins more than 50% of the primary vote. Thus ranked-choice voting would eliminate the need for primary elections altogether in most California races. This would save jurisdictions money and probably increase voter turnout, given that more people traditionally vote in general elections than in primaries.

In contrast, California uses a top-two primary system for most state and federal races, which advances the top two vote-getters, regardless of party affiliation or margin of victory, to the general election. While this avoids costly runoffs, it often results in one-party general elections, especially in heavily partisan districts. Ranked-choice voting wouldn’t prevent that scenario, but it might give underrepresented parties a better shot at advancing in competitive races.

Less known is whether ranked-choice voting would alter the political makeup of representation if broadly implemented in California. Strategic crossover voting — in which Republicans and Democrats rank moderate candidates from the other party — could lead to more centrist outcomes. Likewise, in areas where one party dominates, consistent second-choice support for moderate candidates from other parties could move the controlling party toward the center. Conversely, in areas with many hard-left or hard-right voters, ranked-choice voting could push moderates to adopt more extreme positions to gain second- or third-choice support.

The combination of ranked-choice voting with California’s nonpartisan system would likely produce unique strategic incentives and political realignments unimaginable in cities with partisan primaries.

Campaign styles could also change. Candidates may tone down attacks and even form alliances with like-minded rivals, as progressives did in New York, to earn second-choice votes.

Those unknowns may make some state and local leaders hesitant to change the way we vote. After all, those who’ve won office through the current system are often the least eager to change it. But hesitation shouldn’t overshadow the potential benefits: lower costs, broader engagement, more representative outcomes and less divisive politics.

If California is serious about reforming its increasingly expensive and polarized electoral system, ranked-choice voting is worth a closer look.

Sean McMorris is the California Common Cause program manager for transparency, ethics and accountability.