Author: bakhtawar

A bipartisan coalition of high-level Wisconsin politicians has launched an initiative to educate voters about in-person and mail-in voting during the COVID-19 pandemic. The initiative, VoteSafe WI, supports both in-person voting and absentee voting by mail for the August partisan primary and November general election. Voting by mail has been recently criticized by some Republicans, including … Continue reading Wisconsin: “Bipartisan Group To Promote In-Person And Mail-In Voting During Pandemic” Continue Reading →

Yesterday I summarized my forthcoming work with Jowei Chen on the implications of race-blind redistricting for minority representation. Today I’ll talk about our partisan representation findings: how the major parties would be affected if district lines were drawn on a non-racial basis. To investigate this question, we ran one more round of simulations for each state. As before, we instructed the algorithm … Continue reading Race-Blind Redistricting and Partisan Representation Continue Reading →

Ever since Maine voters approved the use of ranked-choice voting, the system has been under legal attack. Here’s a story about the latest lawsuit. The Fulcrum: The latest suit argues that allowing ranked-choice voting in this fall would deny many voters full participation in the election. The argument is based largely on a study of … Continue reading More Legal Challenges to Ranked-Choice Voting Continue Reading →

Emmet Witkovsky-Eldred and Nina Totenberg for NPR: Voting rights advocates are batting 0-4 at the U.S. Supreme Court so far this year. A record number of election-related lawsuits are piling up in courts around the country as concerns mount about the safety of voting in person because of the coronavirus and the availability and reliability of … Continue reading “As Concerns About Voting Build, The Supreme Court Refuses To Step In” Continue Reading →

Elections workers described a cascade of failures as they struggled to activate and operate Georgia’s new high-tech voting system. Next came a barrage of partisan blame-throwing: The Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, accused the liberal-leaning Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta, of botching the election, while Democratic leaders saw the fiasco as just … Continue reading “Anatomy of an Election ‘Meltdown’ in Georgia” Continue Reading →

American intelligence officials issued a public warning on Friday that China was “expanding its influence efforts” in the United States ahead of the presidential election, along with Russia and Iran, but Democrats briefed on the matter said the threat was far more urgent than what the administration described. The warning came from William R. Evanina, … Continue reading “U.S. Warns Russia, China and Iran Are Trying to Interfere in the Election. Democrats Say It’s Far Worse.” Continue Reading →

[Sunday update: This segment was delayed because of coverage of John Lewis’s funeral procession crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge.] Tune in at 11 am eastern, and especially about the role of the media. See recommendations 5 and 6 of our Fair Elections During a Crisis report:   See Campaign: https://electionlawblog.org/?p=113449Contact Information:Rick HasenTags:, Wire, United States, English Continue Reading →

On the second Friday in June, a group of political operatives, former government and military officials, and academics quietly convened online for what became a disturbing exercise in the fragility of American democracy. The group, which included Democrats and Republicans, gathered to game out possible results of the November election, grappling with questions that seem … Continue reading “A bipartisan group secretly gathered to game out a contested Trump-Biden election. It wasn’t pretty” Continue Reading →

We also need responsible behavior from mainstream media outlets. It is too much to hope that Twitter or Facebook will take down all posts that attempt to suppress the vote, circulate false claims of fraud and spread other misleading information. However, legitimate newspapers and broadcast and cable-news networks should begin well in advance of the … Continue reading “How to minimize 2020 election chaos” Continue Reading →

A Republican lawmaker who played a prominent role in North Carolina’s redistricting process announced Friday that he will not seek reelection this fall and will instead retire from his post at the end of the year. Citing a “great personal sacrifice and loss of valuable time with my family, as well as my livelihood,” North … Continue reading North Carolina “Republican who had prominent role in redistricting to retire” Continue Reading →