As results begin to come in, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ new precinct-level analysis of 2020 voting in several battleground counties will provide context for the election as it unfolds in the swing states that will likely determine the presidency: Allegheny (Pittsburgh) and Philadelphia counties in Pennsylvania; Columbus, Durham, and Mecklenburg counties in North Carolina; Cuyahoga (Cleveland) and Lorain counties in Ohio; Fulton County (Atlanta) in Georgia; Maricopa County in Arizona; Milwaukee County in Wisconsin; and Wayne County (Detroit) in Michigan. 

The data provide a landscape, an interactive map, that shows who participated in the 2020 election, and whose ballots were more likely to be counted.  

Key findings

Neighborhoods that make up battleground counties are marked by extreme inequalities in voter turnout. Two voters may reside just a few miles from one another, in roughly equally populated neighborhoods, but one’s community may exercise only a quarter of the voting strength of the other voter’s neighborhood.  

Such turnout disparities, while common in US metropolitan areas, are far more consequential in battleground counties considering the number of potential votes left on the table. Joe Biden’s 2020 Electoral College victory came from fewer than 45,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, despite his winning nearly 7 million more votes than Donald Trump nationwide.  

The analysis shows that voters in low-turnout precincts are also more likely to encounter problems voting, including having their ballots rejected. Geographic inequalities in political voice are thus cumulative. The analysis illustrates the potential value of improving election data transparency: our interactive map allows people to see their community’s level of participation, as well as how they compare with other neighborhoods, not only in terms of voter turnout, but also the likelihood that people will have problems casting ballots, or having their ballot rejected, compared to other communities.  

Precinct-level analysis provides a far more detailed picture of how the process of voting and validating ballots impacts the representation of specific communities. Thousands of ballots in these counties were rejected in 2020 due to problems verifying voter eligibility, and tens of thousands of eligible voters never made it to the polls. 

The racial turnout gap  

Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, a central measure to assess participatory and political equality in the US has been the difference in voter turnout across people of different races, also known as the racial turnout gap.

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that election laws ranging from redistricting outcomes, to registration list management, methods of voting, and identification requirements can have differential impacts on racial groups in terms of propensity to vote, ability to vote, and the probability that votes are counted. 

The continuing relevance of race is reflected in systemic turnout inequalities observed across communities of color. In Figure 1 below, precincts are categorized according to the racial identities, based on Census categories, of the majority of the citizen voting age population (CVAP) in that precinct.   

The results show that 2020 turnout was highest in majority-White precincts and lowest in majority-Black and majority-Hispanic precincts, with majority-Asian/Pacific Islander (API) and Plural (no racial majority) precincts in between. Controlling for state- and county-level effects does not erase the observed turnout gap between majority-White and majority-minority precincts.  

In other words, even if inequalities in voting access, differences in electoral competition, and other political factors cause inequalities in turnout, the differences observed in Figure 1 are not just a function of which county or state a person lives in.  

Rather, these observed inequalities are a function of the types of communities that people live in, and their prevalence. As Figure 1 shows, while the average turnout differences across racial communities are stark, there are high- and low-turnout precincts within each group as well. Many majority-Black precincts turned out at rates higher than the average majority-White precinct in 2020. Similarly, turnout rates in some majority-Hispanic precincts were close to the average turnout in majority-White precincts.   

But turnout inequalities across racial groups are intensified by the greater proportion of low-turnout precincts that are majority-Black or majority-Hispanic, relative to majority-White precincts. In about one-quarter of majority-Black precincts (484) in these pivotal counties, fewer than half of registered voters cast a ballot in 2020. Similarly, while the total number of majority-White precincts where fewer than half of those registered voted (107) was larger than the number of majority-Hispanic precincts (86) with turnout less than 50 percent, that is nearly one third of all majority-Hispanic precincts, compared to just 3 percent of majority-White precincts.  

Cumulative voting inequalities  

People living in low-turnout precincts in battleground counties were also more likely to have their ballots rejected in the 2020 general election.  As Figure 2 demonstrates, average turnout is highest in the third of precincts with the lowest ballot incident rates, and lowest in the upper third. That is, the frequency of ballots not cast, as well as ballots cast but not counted, are correlated. This correlation remains statistically significant after controlling for both regional effects (differences across state and county) and the racial composition of precincts. 

That is, both within and across these counties, people living in communities that suffer from lower turnout are also subject to higher rates of ballot rejection and related incidents, including having to use a supplemental or provisional ballot, which is one cause of higher rejection rates. Political representation is weaker in these communities, relative to communities with high turnout and low rejection rates.     

 Looking again through the lens of which Census-defined racial groups make up CVAP majorities in precincts, we compare the percentage of precincts that are in the upper third or “high-incident” precincts across racial groups.

As Figure 3 illustrates, we find substantial inequalities in rejection rates across communities of different racial composition. The intuition behind Figure 3 is that if race were not a factor in rejection rates, we would expect each of these bars to top out at 33 percent, or one third of all the precincts in each jurisdiction. Instead, we observe that around 40 percent of majority-Black and -Hispanic precincts are in the high-incident category, compared to less than 20 percent of majority-White precincts. The percentage of high-incident Asian/Pacific Islander precincts is also below equality expectations, while racial plurality precincts are quite close to the expected 33 percent mark.    

The statistical picture is alarming, and constitutes an observable, legitimate threat to electoral integrity. Majority-Black and Hispanic communities cast fewer votes, but are also more likely to have problems with votes cast. It was beyond the scope of this analysis to determine if the greater frequency of ballot problems in these communities results from more ineligible voters attempting to vote, or higher rates of voter or administrative error, but other studies have suggested that processing errors contribute to racialized disenfranchisement. 

Challenges and solutions

These political inequalities are responsive to procedural solutions. Improving data transparency, which would allow for better monitoring and assessment of the whole electoral ecosystem, would improve electoral integrity, and possibly confidence in elections.  

Consider the range of turnout within majority-Black neighborhoods. Residents of Philadelphia’s Cedarbrook neighborhood and the Cleveland suburb of Bedford Heights are 90 and 81 percent Black, respectively, and both exhibit high turnout rates (84 and 82 percent, respectively). By contrast, in neighborhoods like Kensington precinct 15, part of Philadelphia’s 25^th Ward, and Cleveland’s Ward 5, precinct b, less than one-third of registered voters cast ballots.  

What separates these high- and low-turnout communities is poverty: nearly two-thirds of the population in Kensington and Ward 5 live below the poverty level, compared to just 10 percent in Cedarbrook and 11 percent in Bedford Heights. More than any other social condition, concentrated poverty erodes the cooperative networks on which democratic participation depends. 

While inequalities in voter turnout are more persistent and rooted in deeper social inequities, democratic capacity can be cultivated even in hostile conditions. Local civic organizations can also benefit from greater data transparency and data sharing in partnership with local election administrators.  

Pilot programs in Cleveland’s 5^th Ward show how integrating data science into relational organizing campaigns can improve contact and commitment rates among low-propensity voters with the ability to update and maintain more accurate voter files, especially in the weeks leading up to Election Day when mobilization efforts peak.  

This analysis is the latest example of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ commitment to harnessing science and scientists as guardians of democracy and provides a powerful foundation to advance equity and meaningful public participation in the future.    

An interim report from the LA Governance Reform Project released earlier this summer provides a crucial starting point for a public conversation to address reforming the Los Angeles City Council in the wake of racism and corruption of the redistricting process that was revealed in an October 2022 report by the Los Angeles Times.

The report makes three important recommendations: ethics reform, the establishment of an independent redistricting commission, and enlarging the size of the council. In the words of the authors, they “hope that this process adds momentum to a longer-term commitment to governance reform in Los Angeles, with due consideration for a host of improvements that might make a difference.”

As an expert in redistricting and electoral system design, I hope to expand the conversation about what effective electoral reform requires. The group’s recommendations on ethics reform and the establishment of an independent redistricting commission are well-reasoned and evidence-based, but I am concerned that the recommendations on increasing the size of the council to 25 members, including four seats elected citywide or “at-large,” errs too far in the direction of what is deemed politically viable, falling short of what is politically necessary to achieve their stated goals of creating “a city structure that is responsive, accountable, representative, and equitable.”

The research team’s recommendation of a 25-seat council is based on looking only at average council sizes in the United States. This makes our largest city councils, New York (51) and Chicago (50), appear to be outliers. The appropriate comparison is with other large, global cities, which shows what comparative urbanists have known for some time, that council sizes in large US cities are unusually small. The current 15-seat council in Los Angeles is ridiculously small for its population by global standards, among the smallest per-capita councils in the world (see Figure 1).

As Figure 1 shows, Chicago and New York are not outliers compared to other global cities. A 45- or 50-seat council for Los Angeles would bring the city closer to several other economic and cultural capitals like Amsterdam, Dublin, and Rio, but still be well below Paris’ 163-seat council, or the enormous 231-seat council in Cape Town, South Africa. At the other end of the scale, many of the world’s global cities including London, Mexico City, and Tokyo, are agglomerations of multiple smaller municipalities. Chicago and New York fit well within the normal range of 45-100 seats typical of large, cosmopolitan cities. A 45-seat LA council would be at the low end of global norms, given the city’s population and global status.

The small councils characteristic of many US cities partially reflect the legacy of institutional racism, specifically early 20^th-century Progressive reformers’ efforts to exclude ethnic and racial minorities from political power. Equitable racial representation must be a priority in LA council reform, as racial divisions within the city were at the heart of the redistricting scandal.

US cities have achieved approximate proportional representation for protected racial groups through the design of single-seat, minority-opportunity districts, enforced through the Voting Rights Act. However, this solution only works where groups are geographically concentrated and where there are relatively few communities of interest to represent. Los Angeles today is one of the most diverse cities in the world, where hundreds of racial, ethnic, and language groups make up the city’s population. It is difficult to see how 21 single-seat districts, in which only one coalition achieves representation in a district, will adequately address the competition over racial representation that Los Angeles faces.

The city of New York increased its council size from 35 to 51 in 1991, facing some of the same problems, and in the hopes of advancing similar democratic goals. The General Counsel to the New York City Districting Commission, an attorney from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, focused specifically on problems of interracial conflict and the inevitable trade-offs required when only one racial group can be represented within a multiracial district. These trade-offs, and the carving up of populations along racial lines to determine who gets represented, were the topic of discussion in the now infamous LA city council phone call.

That NAACP attorney, Judith Reed, recommended that New York adopt multi-seat, proportional districts, which would allow multiple representatives to serve a single constituency, incentivizing multiracial coalitions to work together. Instead, the Commission adopted a single-seat districting strategy, forcing them to address questions like, “Is a geographically dispersed minority ‘better off’ with white voters, who may or may not have any sympathy for Latino interests, or with other minority groups, with whom there is the presumption of destructive competition?” Today, New York, like many large US cities, continues to struggle with interracial conflict, low turnout, and largely uncompetitive single-seat districts. They are trying other reforms to induce competition and improve representation, like ranked choice voting schemes in primaries, but the fundamental problems with single-seat representation remain.

Los Angeles has an opportunity to break out of these constraints. Research in the US and abroad has shown that multi-seat districts are less prone to gerrymandering and other forms of manipulation, which is the motivation for reform in LA. Most large, global cities rely on multi-seat, proportional districting and achieve robust representation across racial, gender, language, and other boundaries. Coalitions and parties across the ideological spectrum run, and seat, more candidates of color, and more women, than we often find in US municipal elections. For example, in Amsterdam, five major political parties, including the Greens and Socialists on the left and Christian Unity on the right, in addition to the smaller, ethnic rights DENK party, run and seat candidates of color on the city council. Los Angeles, by contrast, is effectively a one-party regime.

Consider the opportunities that a 45-seat council, built out of eight five-seat districts drawn by an independent commission, would offer residents. Each multiracial district would reflect geographic interests beyond race, while ensuring representation for any coalition, racial or multiracial, successfully organizing just 20 percent of voters, because that is all it would take to win one of five seats.

In line with the LA Governance Reform Projects recommendations, an additional five seats could be elected citywide to incentivize broader coalition building. But instead of using the worst electoral system devised for minority representation—at-large plurality voting—these seats could be elected using the same method as the district elections, commonly known as an open list system.

A common method of election in large cities around the world, the list system was first proposed in the US in 1844 by Thomas Gilpin for Philadelphia elections. From a voter’s perspective, little changes, as you simply vote for a single candidate from a slate of candidates. The vote counts toward the candidate AND the candidate’s slate (the other candidates they are running with), which determines how many seats the slate wins in each district. Competing candidates of color then do not risk “splitting” minority voters. Broader, multiracial coalitions that transcend district boundaries are also rewarded with more seats.

Even a modest proposal of eight three-seat districts and one five-seat citywide district, for a total council size of 29, would likely be more equitable for racial representation than the proposal from the Governance Reform Project. Every voter would have a variety of candidates competing for their support, and every district could represent up to three competing electoral coalitions, better reflecting the true diversity of Los Angeles.

Public opposition to enlarging the council and demands on the capacity of the mayor’s office are cited as major impediments to more effective electoral reform. But a larger city council does not require an expanded role for the mayor or mayor’s staff, as many of the global cities already mentioned rely effectively on a council-manager form of government, with relatively decentralized administrative agencies. As for public opposition to a larger council, that is a question of political will. If the advantages of improved descriptive representation and government accountability are adequately communicated by the reform coalition, I am confident that an initiative on the 2024 ballot would have a fighting chance. 

Residents of one of the most diverse cities on the planet could vanquish part of the legacy of institutional racism that continues to plague the politics of our nation. Whether or not a reform coalition is able to mobilize support to adopt meaningful reform depends on the level of community engagement that we will see over the next year. At this stage, Angelenos deserve to at least be informed about how the rest of the world addresses the challenges of equitable racial representation and municipal governance.

What is relational organizing?

Relational organizing involves semi-structured, one-on-one conversations with community members that strengthen interpersonal relationships, which in turn strengthens both individual political engagement and amplifies community voices on local, state, and national issues.

Greater Cleveland Congregations (GCC), a nonpartisan organization of faith communities and partner organizations working to achieve social justice in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, has been using relational organizing and a neighborhood captain program in recent elections, and is working in partnership with UCS to expand its relational organizing capacity by developing an integrated voter engagement (IVE) system.

The neighborhood captain program relies on the power of people’s existing social networks, encouraging people to start conversations with people they know. GCC recruits and trains neighborhood captains to reach out to infrequent voters in their neighborhoods, listen actively, and build support for greater political participation. Potential voters are asked about their commitment and encouraged to vote as part of a broader program of community engagement and leadership building.

Our new in-depth analysis of recent results clearly shows that an IVE system can improve voter turnout in historically marginalized or underserved communities. By using data-centered outreach that integrates voter files with information retrieved from relational organizing, this system helps to build power that can yield benefits for those communities, despite the structural barriers to participation that create inequities.

What the evidence shows

The report, Building Relationships, Building Power, includes the following notable findings:

Organizing yielded positive results. On average, contact success—defined as getting the persons contacted to commit to voting—for each active neighborhood captain across elections was approximately 50 voter households.

Turnout inequalities were reduced. In the November 2022 election, overall turnout in Cleveland’s 5^th Ward was just 15 percent—half that of the city as a whole. But among those who committed to voting through the neighborhood captains’ efforts, turnout was 42 percent.

Youth turnout increased. The youngest voting cohort in the Cuyahoga County voter file—born after 1992—voted at an overall rate of about 17 percent, but younger voters who committed to voting through relational organizing were nearly twice as likely to vote, close to the average turnout rate for Cleveland in 2022. 

Organizers can use election science and technology to build power

The data generated from this project allow us to forecast the effects on voter turnout if we could scale up GCC’s relational organizing model. For example, using the same average conversion rates and adjusted 2020 turnout rates, we estimate that voter turnout in 2024 could be increased by 10 points over the last presidential election in the county’s lowest turnout precincts, bringing them more in line with average turnout rates across the city.

These findings clearly show how relational organizing can help overcome persistent inequalities in voter turnout. We need greater application of technologies like integrated voter engagement, combined with strong relationships with local election administrators.  Every community can benefit by incorporating integrated voter engagement into their election efforts. Together we can improve participation and the health of our democracy at a time when we desperately need it.

This is a landmark case with a lot to unpack, and I will have more to say in the future (especially about the Court’s continuing struggle to reconcile the principles of proportionality and political equality), but what’s immediately notable is the central role that election science played in the outcome of this case, and the potential for the Court’s interpretation of that science to shape future Voting Rights Act cases. Importantly, the high court reaffirmed the constitutionality of what is known as the Gingles test for identifying and remedying racial discrimination in redistricting, which came as surprise for most of the nation’s election law scholars and voting rights advocates.  

A fair application of scientific standards 

First, the high court upheld the scientific standards used to analyze racial vote dilution, which led the majority to a fair ruling. Second, the use of a specific method, namely algorithmic-generated mapping simulations, played a central role in all of the opinions offered by the Court, which placed clear limits on their application.  

It may seem unusual to point this out, but I am not the only observer who was surprised to see this Supreme Court squarely address the question before it through such a straightforward application of established scientific standards and analysis.  

For background: The Gingles test, established in the 1986 racial vote-dilution case Thornburg v Gingles, is a three-prong test that the Court developed to assess whether a districting plan violates section two of the Voting Rights Act:  

“First, [the] ‘minority group’ [whose interest the plaintiff represents] must be ‘sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority’ in some reasonably configured legislative district. Second, the minority group must be ‘politically cohesive.’ And third, a district’s white majority must ‘vote sufficiently as a bloc’ to usually ‘defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.’” [Cooper v. Harris, 581 U. S. 285, 301–302] 

The establishment of the Gingles test represented a major voting rights litigation advancement.  It offers an evidence-based framework through which racially polarized voting can be demonstrated, and it shows how altering the proportion of like-minded voters within district boundaries can alter electoral outcomes by diluting the voting strength of targeted voters. 

The Alabama legislature’s decision to remove one of two African-American opportunity districts from their Congressional delegation by splitting the Black Belt population in the southern part of the state was a fairly clear case of vote dilution. Alabama’s argument in Allen v Milligan was fundamentally a challenge to this test which the Court has relied on for nearly four decades. Alabama had argued that the use of racial demographic and voting data in the Gingles test unconstitutionally made race the predominant factor in determining redistricting outcomes. The Court’s response to the challenge was unambiguous. It ruled that Alabama’s approach would require abandoning this precedent and overruling the interpretation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as set out in nearly a dozen of previous cases. As the majority ruling put it: “We decline to take that step.” 

For voting rights advocates, this ruling came as a pleasant surprise. As election scholar Guy-Uriel E. Charles’ noted: “It has been such a long time since I’ve expected a majority of the Court to fairly apply its prior voting rights precedents, to interpret the VRA without malice, and to read the record fairly that I have forgotten what that looks like.” 

Chief Justice Roberts was clearly averse to the sort of legal upheaval that Alabama’s re-interpretation of the Voting Rights Act would have produced. Instead, this is the first time the Roberts Court has made a decision that requires the drawing of a new minority-opportunity district.  

At least for now, science—and justice—prevailed. 

I say “for now” because, while the majority opinion reaffirmed that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “demands consideration of race” given that the question of whether additional majority-minority districts can be drawn necessarily involves a “quintessentially race-conscious calculus,” Justice Kavanaugh did not concur with this section of the decision. He claimed in his own opinion that “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.” Further, the majority opinion made it clear that this decision, far from expanding voting rights, anticipates a reduction in successful voting rights litigation. The majority wrote: “as residential segregation decreases—as it has ‘sharply’ done since the 1970s—satisfying traditional districting criteria such as the compactness requirement ‘becomes more difficult.’” 

Appropriate limits on applying mapping simulations 

Chief Justice Roberts is no fan of math. In 2017, during oral arguments in the partisan gerrymandering case Gill v Whitford, the Chief Justice referred to methods for estimating partisan vote dilution (including one proposed by my research team) as “sociological gobbledygook.” Yesterday’s opinion was similarly critical of the use of ensembles of algorithmically-generated districting maps as a means to evaluate valid alternatives.  

The opinion correctly notes one of the primary limitations of the approach. Citing amicus briefs from computational scientists who note that it is “effectively impossible to generate a complete enumeration of all potential districting plans,” the Supreme Court dismissed the claim that a large number, or any number, of ensembles of maps could constitute an accurate reflection of what the actual distribution of all possible maps could be.  

This is an important clarification, because it is intuitive for a judge (and even some statisticians) to look at a “normal” distribution of simulated maps and see outliers as evidence of a map that is “abnormal” or intentionally biased, for example. But since the 1960s, when mapping algorithms were first developed, it has been known that automated algorithms cannot be counted on to search the landscape of possible legal redistricting plans in an unbiased manner. 

Lower courts should take note. Alabama took the erroneous reliance on automated algorithms a preposterous step further, claiming that their so-called “blinded” (i.e. excluding racial data) simulations should be used as a benchmark for maps that are, by their circular definition, racially neutral, on the false premise that racial blindness is the equivalent of racial neutrality in the generation of districting maps. 

This is not to say that ensembles are not an important technology. Ensembles are especially useful in revealing the consequences of specific tradeoffs incorporated into the redistricting process. The process must try to balance conflicting criteria: contiguity, population equality, compactness, concurrence with other government boundaries, respect for communities of interest, and, as computational scientist Moon Duchin explained as an expert in the case, the “non-negotiable” criterion of political equality, that is, equally weighted votes, for those protected under the Voting Rights Act. 

In this case, at least, science won out, preserving Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and supporting the federal government’s obligation to protect voters from racial discrimination, as required by the 15^th Amendment.  Allen is a historic decision with a lot more to unpack, but today science advocates and defenders of democracy across the country have reason to celebrate. 

There are two ways to describe the electoral reforms included in the omnibus bill that recently passed in the US Senate and is now hopefully on its way to passage in the House of Representatives: 1) they are the most important voting rights and electoral reforms in a generation; and 2) a last-minute compromise, they represent the bare-minimum protections needed to prevent another US insurrection and largely leave in place the nation’s shell of a democracy.  

Both descriptions are correct. 

Starting on page 1,934 of the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill, the “Electoral Count Reform Act” and the “Presidential Transition Improvement Act” tighten up procedural ambiguities and provide protections against future conspiracies to subvert presidential elections. The bipartisan effort, put forth in the very final days of the 117^th Congress, is a direct response to former President Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election, which culminated in the January 6^th Capitol Insurrection. 

What the legislation does 

The new legislation: 

–Prohibits state legislatures from changing how electors can be selected after an election, with exceptions only for “force majeure events that are extraordinary and catastrophic” (such as natural disasters that prevent voting);  

–Sets a firm date for the selection of electors; 

–Provides expedited judicial review of challenges to electors;  

–Raises the Congressional threshold for challenging state electors from a single member to one-fifth of the members of both chambers; 

–Clarifies that the Vice President “shall have no power to solely determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes over the proper certificate of ascertainment of appointment of electors, the validity of electors, or the votes of electors”; and 

–Provides $75 million in election security provisions, including election monitoring programs to enforce the Voting Rights Act. 

All these provisions directly address the tactics deployed by the Trump team to overturn the 2020 election: getting GOP-controlled state legislatures to claim that state elections had “failed” so that they could choose alternate electors; challenging the certification of electors through frivolous lawsuits; Congressional challenges to elector certification; and finally, the effort to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to reject certified state electors and replace them with the alternate electors. 

The importance of implementing these protections before the 2024 election cannot be overstated, especially in the event that Trump once again secures the GOP nomination. We ought to celebrate this bipartisan victory in the Senate where it passed by a 68-29 vote, including votes from 18 Republicans.  

Further bipartisan opportunities for reform

Given the GOP’s razor-thin majority in US House of Representatives in the coming session, there will be considerable pressure for the shrinking centrist wing of the GOP to find common ground with Democrats.  Although it is unclear how much the incoming US Congress might be able to accomplish, there is no question about the reforms needed for our democracy, many of which do have some modicum of bipartisan support. Among these vital reforms are the need to:  

–Require regular public disclosure of county-level ballot data when early voting starts, including the number of ballots generated, mailed, transferred to and from precincts, ballots in the chain of custody (along with ballot tracking requirements), ballots processed, ballots rejected, reasons for rejection, and ballots accepted; 

–Require the use of voting machines that provide paper ballots; 

–Require election jurisdictions to conduct true risk-limiting audits; 

–Specify security procedures for challenging ballots, to prevent attempts to halt ballot processing at the precinct- and county-level; and 

–Fully fund these requirements with the $400 million request included in President Biden’s 2023 Budget, which also includes election-related capital investments like upgrades to registration databases, voting systems, and physical structures; support for recruitment, training, and retention of election workers; and physical and cyber security. 

All of these reforms aim squarely at improving the electoral integrity of the existing system and should have support from those Republicans who supported the Electoral Count Reform Act measures.  

Further pro-democracy reforms we need

Of course, all the administrative reforms listed above would still leave in place most of the restrictive election laws being implemented by state legislatures, the judicial dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, and the institutionalized anti-Black violence of our party system, distorting representation in ways that retard democratic capacity. Successful reconstruction of democracy in the United States requires both organizational and structural reforms. To more thoroughly reform our democracy and realize our nation’s democratic capacity, here are at least some of the most important additional reforms we badly need to make: 

–Reinstall a Voting Rights Act that protects voters from racial discrimination, and ensure that all voters, regardless of race or what state they live in, have equal access to the ballot; 

–Require all states to provide automatic voter registration (AVR) and universal vote by mail (UVBM), evidence-based measures that reduce discrimination and increase participation; 

–Expand the size of districts and representative assemblies, including the House of Representatives, to more accurately reflect the political diversity of the electorate;  

–Use proportional electoral formulas to more accurately represent political minorities and reduce racial and partisan bias, including for the US Senate, one of the most biased elected assemblies in the world; and 

–Restore the organizational basis of our hollowed out political parties by strengthening the associational ties between under-represented constituencies and party leadership through relational organizing and movement-building. 

These and other reforms are needed if we, as a nation, hope to achieve the promise of a multiracial, multiparty democracy.  

So, let’s celebrate the protections embodied in the new Electoral Count Reform Act, while remembering that we still have much left to accomplish. 

On its face, the case hinges on an abstract legal debate over the meaning of the word “legislature” in Article I, Section 4 of the US Constitution. But, as the culmination of nearly two decades of conflict over the scientific measurement of electoral discrimination, it is hard to exaggerate the threat Moore v Harper poses. Authoritarian forces are now trying to leverage this case to literally undermine the federal structure of the US Constitution and democracy as we know it. State legislatures would be virtually unrestrained in their pursuit of partisan advantage in Congress.

Gerrymandering in the courts

In our 2016 book Gerrymandering in America, my colleagues and I investigated the structural origins of the legal conflict over gerrymandering. We focused on a 2004 Supreme Court case called Veith v Jubelirer. In that case, the US Supreme Court ruled that, while partisan gerrymandering posed a threat to political equality as protected under the 14^th Amendment, there was no consensus about what standards should be used to identify and remedy the constitutional violation that gerrymandering presents. 

A proliferation of scientific activity and analysis followed that decision, producing a number of alternative and largely complementary ways to measure bias and discriminatory intent that were frequently used by the lower courts.

But then two more major gerrymandering cases came before the US Supreme court, Gill v Whitford and Rucho v Common Cause, decided in 2018 and 2019 respectively. In the latter case, the Supreme Court threw up its hands in a controversial 5-4 partisan decision, declaring that “partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts [emphasis added].” That ruling effectively left partisan gerrymandering claims to be decided by the states.

In response to that decision, several state supreme courts, including North Carolina’s, accepted the challenge and struck down extreme gerrymanders, relying on evidence-based demonstrations that legislatures had drawn district boundaries that discriminated against targeted voters. In numerous states, on numerous occasions, state supreme courts ruled that partisan state legislatures failed to meet established scientific standards for holding free and fair elections.

But then many of the same anti-democratic forces who had worked to gerrymander North Carolina for years began to push something they call the “independent state legislature theory.”

Tortured logic and anti-democratic outcomes

If adopted by the Supreme Court, the so-called independent state legislature theory would insulate state legislatures from the rulings of their own state courts. As this great video from the Brennan Center for Justice explains, the tortured logic advocated in Moore v Harper would allow state legislatures across the country to ignore the established science of voting rights, create greater barriers to voting, corrupt election outcomes, and undermine trust in the electoral process.

It is equally important to recognize who is behind this doctrine: groups with ties to those who actively sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election; national groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Trump-linked America First Legal Foundation, and the Federalist Society-linked Taxpayers for Honest Elections; and megadonors such as Art Pope and others in Koch Network.

Recognizing the threat posed by this radical doctrine, conservative and progressive scholars alike have written amicus (friend-of-the-court) briefs to defend the Constitution. Stripping state courts of their authority to regulate federal elections could have tremendous procedural and substantive impacts, including the elimination of voter registration protections, early voting, and voting by mail. The federal courts could be flooded with litigation over what sorts of state court intervention would count as a violation of the new doctrine–an outcome that would itself undermine confidence in our election systems. Moreover, as scholar Rick Hasen has pointed out in his amicus brief (one of over 70 that have been submitted in this case to date), such a radical embrace of state legislative power would provide greater incentive for legislative parties to explicitly ignore the will of voters, including by sending alternative slates of electors to the Electoral College after a presidential election.

Even aside from the direct subversion of presidential elections, this radical doctrine contradicts the constitutional separation of powers between state and federal governments. It greatly facilitates the prospect that representatives to Congress could be selected by state legislatures rather than by the will of the people through elections. Allowing state legislatures to determine the composition of the House directly violates the Framers’ intent that the composition of the House of Representatives “ought to be dependent on the people alone.”

What you can do

You can help prevent this authoritarian power grab. The decision is expected this spring or summer, and we need to prepare for mass protest if necessary. In anticipation, and to put public pressure now on Congress (which could pass national election protections) and the courts, you can take the following actions to start educating your community about the issue:

–Talk with at least 10 of your family members, neighbors, co-workers, friends, and colleagues in civic and faith-based communities about the harms of Moore v Harper;

–Host or attend house parties and other events to support community education and investment in the #MapOurFuture movement to #PutPeopleOverPolitics. Find resources at scsj.org/mooreresources;

–Write editorial letters and use social media to bring attention to how the Moore decision could affect your community and the issues you care about;

–Tag @CommonCause and @CommonCauseNC on social media to share your activism and amplify your efforts. Together we can show the strength everyday people have to resist this authoritarian attack on our democracy.

The good news is that a majority of voters still appears to support democracy as we know it. While several Trumpist candidates did prevail (Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida, Sen.s J.D. Vance and Ron Johnson in Ohio and Wisconsin, respectively), many of the most virulent candidates went down “harder than Donald Trump at the Mar a Lago waffle station,” in the words of strategist Rick Wilson.

More importantly, the national investment in protecting everyone’s right to vote is paying off. Yesterday, despite a few isolated events, elections went forward without major outbreaks of violence or disruption. I credit that to the work of thousands of volunteers and election experts from hundreds of organizations who provided oversight, guidance, and protections to voters and election officials across the country.  The Department of Justice’s oversight also likely contributed to the safety and security of the millions who turned out yesterday to vote.

Election protection will continue until all elections are decided, and we need to continue to support these organizations. We have to be vigilant about guaranteeing that every vote is counted, especially in states such as Arizona and Nevada where ballots are still being counted and tight races may determine partisan control of the Senate.

Strong turnout

What’s to come

In the House, several contests remain undecided, although it appears that the Republican Party will win a slim majority of seats. If that pattern holds, it means that partisan gerrymandering will have played a major role in securing that majority. We may even see an election inversion, where a majority of voters support Democratic candidates nationally, but Republicans win a majority of seats.

On the one hand, gerrymandering was limited in this cycle through more use of independent redistricting commissions and court-litigated mapping. On the other hand, federal courts allowed four states (Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, and Mississippi) to hold Congressional elections using illegal, gerrymandered maps that will be relitigated next year. And the prospects for relitigating are not great: the Ohio Supreme Court gained new Republican members as did the North Carolina Supreme Court, so we should expect those GOP-controlled legislatures to try to push through even worse gerrymanders.

The upshot is that the lame duck Congress must prioritize electoral integrity, pass a revised Electoral Count Act, and move to secure adequate election infrastructure prior to the end of the term. Unfortunately, even with a closely divided House and Senate, electoral reform is not an area where we are likely to see bipartisan cooperation.

If you are voting today–the final day to cast your ballot in the 2022 general election–you will join 44 million other US citizens who have already cast their votes either by mail (24.3 million) or through early voting (20 million). Political scientist Michael McDonald forecasts that approximately 117 million of us will have participated by the end of the day, for an overall eligible turnout rate of about 49 percent. That is 73 percent of the 2020 electorate–a historically high turnout for a midterm election, which we should all be celebrating.

With so many ballots being cast, election officials face the challenge of processing them accurately and in a timely manner. This is especially the case in large cities, where there may be hundreds of thousands of ballots for county elections officials to process. Table 1 shows how many mail ballots have already been returned in select cities that the Center for Science and Democracy is monitoring to ensure fair and accurate counts:

Fewer ballots by mail

Overall, fewer by-mail ballots will be processed this year, compared to 2020, for several reasons. First, fewer people are voting (73 percent) compared to 2020, which is expected in a mid-term election with no presidential race on the ballot. Second, several states have changed election laws since 2020, which has changed the way that some people are voting. Third, with the reduced threat of the Covid pandemic, some people are choosing to vote in person even though they voted by mail in 2020. We can see evidence of these patterns in Figure 1, which shows the by-mail ballots received before Election Day as a percentage of total by-mail ballots counted in 2020.

More data about by-mail ballots

While all of these places will receive more by-mail ballots today, and for most states ballots that are postmarked by today, the total number of ballots is down more for some places than others. Atlanta is showing the greatest decline, and part of the reason may be that Georgia made it more difficult to vote by mail this year. However, Georgia counties, including Fulton, also saw record-breaking early in-person voting, suggesting that overall turnout is still going to be high. Post-election analyses will reveal whether or not such changes impact turnout among different types of voters.

Philadelphia is also showing lower by-mail returns, especially relative to Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) in the same state. Both places had similar vote by-mail returns in 2020, but this year fewer Philadelphians requested to vote by-mail (164k, compared to 190k in Allegheny), and the return rate is lower. Philadelphia has been a target of Republican lawsuits seeking to disqualify by-mail ballots that have date errors on outer envelopes. More than 2,000 such ballots were disqualified in the city last week. Again, we will have to assess final election tallies to determine the impact of such lawsuits on whose votes get counted.

On the other hand, by-mail ballots are coming in at a high rate in Wisconsin, even after more restrictive laws were implemented against voter registration drives. This is in large measure a function of Wisconsin’s historically high turnout rates, estimated to be approximately 66 percent of eligible voters this year. Similarly, Michigan and Nevada have made it easier for voters in Detroit and Las Vegas to vote this year.

Along with Philadelphia, Detroit and these other cities are being targeted for voter suppression and intimidation using a variety of methods, ranging from lawsuits to disenfranchise those who have already voted, to disinformation aimed at voters of color, and open intimidation. For these and other reasons, the Department of Justice is monitoring polling across 24 states (including every city above with the exception of Pittsburgh) to protect the rights of all citizens to access the ballot.

Federal and local law enforcement are also working to protect those on the front line of elections, the election workers themselves, who have received an unprecedented level of threats and intimidation in this election cycle from people motivated by election conspiracy theories. Community-led organizations, voting rights groups and organizations like the Government Accountability Project are also working to ensure that election workers have the tools they need to protect the integrity of our votes in the face of threats to subvert elections.

Expect delays

What this means for the outcome of the election is that close races, attempts to disqualify ballots, and threats against election workers may prolong the conclusion of this election for days or even weeks to come. Recall that in these same locations, election outcomes were not known on election night in 2020. Michigan and Wisconsin took an extra day. Nevada and Pennsylvania took 4 days. Arizona took 9 days, and Georgia took 16 days. And that was without the concerted effort we are seeing this year to intimidate voters and disqualify ballots.

So, it is going to be a long night, or many nights, for election workers and observers across the country. This is a different election in many ways. But we have an obligation to ensure that all of our votes are counted. That is not up for debate. We need to hang tight, to protect our most fundamental right.

Of course, high overall turnout expectations can mask the discriminatory effects of formal barriers to voting erected since 2020, state-led efforts to target and suppress specific communities of voters through newly appointed “election crimes” law enforcers, as is occurring in Florida, and privately-led disinformation and voter intimidation tactics that are well underway in states like Arizona. That is, even if mass mobilization and early voting increases total turnout, restrictive laws and voter intimidation may still reduce the participation of targeted voters, in violation of the Voting Rights Act and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act.

Ensuring free and fair elections requires monitoring early election returns and analyzing post-election results using established scientific standards. At the Center for Science and Democracy, we have identified some key statistics in key states for you to keep an eye on.  

Early voting statistics in targeted communities

Comparing early voting results across regions and time can be an effective way to estimate the impact of efforts to manipulate voters. Reports from multiple news agencies earlier this year revealed that the former president’s co-conspirators have attempted to train thousands of election challengers in hopes of causing chaos in Democratic Party strongholds in states with close races. As a result, many observers are paying close attention to election returns in cities like Atlanta, Detroit, Cleveland, Houston, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Phoenix. Table 1 displays early voting (by-mail and in-person, respectively) trends from 2018, 2020, and 2022 (through late October) in these communities.

Table 1. Trends in by-mail and early in-person voting in select communities (counties)

(Source: EAVS data and @ElectProject)

Some places are sustaining increased voting by-mail that started during 2020 (Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Milwaukee). Nevada has also moved to universal-vote-by-mail since 2020. In other places, however, early voting patterns seem to have returned to 2018 levels. Georgia voters face new difficulties put in place that may be driving a huge reduction in voting-by-mail in Atlanta, while in-person voting remains high. Similarly, early voting of all kinds in Cleveland looks even lower than 2018 levels, with only 143,000 voters requesting ballots this year, compared to over 156,000 by-mail ballots counted in 2018. In Arizona, voters have long relied on absentee ballots for voting, but it is not yet clear how newer restrictions will impact early in-person voters. As early votes keep coming in, the impact of changing laws will become more clear. In addition to comparing across time, it is also likely that within-state comparisons with nearby counties can reveal voting inequalities if they emerge within different populations.

Post-election ballot processing in targeted communities

Election conspiracy groups like True the Vote are “watching” (and occasionally showing up armed and masked at) ballot dropboxes in states like Arizona in order to make allegations of voter fraud with local law enforcement. Similar groups across the country, including those associated with seditionists like the Oath Keepers, have embraced the thoroughly discredited film “2000 Mules” that claims people were paid to travel among drop boxes and stuff them with fraudulent ballots during the 2020 presidential vote, which never happened.

The real goal with both True the Vote and Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell’s operation is to challenge ballots in these Democratic strongholds. If those efforts are successful, they will show up in higher ballot rejection rates. There is considerable variation in rejection rates between regions, and our exploration in 2020 showed that voters of color already face higher rejection rates. This will be a crucial statistic to monitor as ballots are being processed post-election. Comparison across time (Table 2, again using EAVS data), and across communities within states will be necessary to determine whether some types of voters are more likely to have their ballots rejected.

Table 2. Ballot Rejection Rates (as percent of total), 2018 and 2020

Obviously, this is not the first time in this country that one group has attempted to terrorize others at the polls for political purposes. Voters must be defiant in the face of intimidation. And in the spirit of Halloween, some Arizona voters are considering dropping off their ballots today dressed as mules, or jackasses, in a show of pro-voter defiance against True the Vote and other election trolls. It would totally restore my faith in humanity to see masses of asses dropping off ballots today:

Precinct-level voting patterns

Finally, more granular analysis of data will be possible once precinct-level election returns are released in most jurisdictions after Election Day. Since candidate vote totals will also be available, it will be possible to determine how changes in voting patterns impacted election outcomes. A number of analytic techniques can be used on precinct-level data in order to estimate voting inequalities and possibilities of election manipulation. For example, comparing the correlation between turnout and candidate or party vote shares has been used to reveal instances of election fraud. Figure 1 demonstrates how this technique can work on an example where there is not evidence of ballot stuffing, the 2018 Georgia Governor’s election results from Fulton County.

In this example, a clear pattern of greater support for Brian Kemp (y-axis) in high turnout (x-axis) precincts is evident, as Kemp only won in precincts where turnout was greater than 50 percent. By contrast, Stacey Abrams won many Fulton County precincts by 90 percent or better, across a range of low and high turnout precincts. However, we do not see classic “ballot stuffing” patterns where candidates are receiving extremely high vote shares in extremely high turnout precincts. This type of precinct-level analysis can also be used to identify irregularities in early voting and differential impacts on types of voters concentrated in particular precincts.

Courageous, cool, and confident

Protecting our elections is a cause that everybody can contribute to, and it starts with being courageous enough to defend voters in your community. Do not give in to voter intimidation, and be prepared to call out bad actors who may be keeping others from feeling safe to exercise their right to vote. These intimidation tactics may seem more explicit compared to the recent past, but they are among the oldest tricks in the book. Moreover, challenges to votes based on amateur tactics, including baseless allegations of vote “harvesting,” may be illegal abridgements of the right to vote. If you observe possible intimidation or disruption of the electoral process, you can call 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683) and speak with an Election Protection volunteer. The Brennan Center has also published a resource guide for election administrators and those who are prepared to defend our right to vote.

Second, be cool. Be cool until every vote is counted. The ballots are going to take a while to count, especially where voting by-mail is permitted without restrictions. Several state legislatures have actually forbidden election administrators from processing mail ballots until Election Day, intentionally delaying the vote count. Having the sort of information provided above, nearly all of which you can collect from your local election administration, can go a long way toward countering the sort of disinformation voters will inevitably encounter between Election Day and the release of official vote counts.

Third, be confident. We will get through this election season, even if it requires litigation and expert testimony based on election returns, even if there is chaos instigated by election trolls, even if it is necessary to mobilize and take to the streets, in the event that subversives attempt to overturn or render an election indecisive. We don’t know if anything that dramatic will happen, and it probably won’t. The best we can do now is encourage everyone to vote, wait for the votes to be counted, and be confident that we have the means to protect the integrity of our elections. And maybe dress up like a jackass. Happy Halloween.

In a case now before the US Supreme Court, the Alabama legislature is pushing a radical new theory to reduce minority representation. Will the Supreme Court accept it, throwing out 40 years of science-based protections against racial gerrymandering? Here is my take on the recent oral arguments before the court in this consequential case known as Merrill v Milligan.

First a bit of background. In November of last year, civil rights groups sued Alabama after the state released a proposed Congressional districting map. The lawsuit claimed that the state had violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by drawing districts that dilute the value of Black votes.

Previously, Alabama’s Congressional map had included two minority opportunity districts out of seven, or 29 percent of the districts in a state where approximately 26 percent of eligible voters are Black, and where elections continue to exhibit racially polarized voting. The proposed new map packs Black voters into one single western district in which 57 percent of the voting age population is Black, likely more than the percentage needed for Black voters in the district to elect their candidate of choice. Meanwhile, the new map splits Black voters in Montgomery and to the southeast into several other districts so that the Black population stands at around 30 percent in each (see Figure 1).

The case before the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court had ordered a stay on a lower court’s decision that would have required the Alabama legislature to redraw the map in time for the 2022 election. Finally, earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case. Defending the new map, Alabama’s solicitor general argued that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is “at war with itself and the Constitution” by requiring states to consider race in the districting process, which he claimed was prohibited by the 14^th and 15^th Amendments. As evidence to support this claim, Alabama points to the fact that it generated thousands of simulated maps, or ensembles, using computer algorithms that draw districts according to whatever criteria are built into the algorithm, ranging from hard constraints like population equality and contiguity, to softer criteria such as minimizing county boundary splits and maximizing “compactness,” which refers to the geometric shape of districts. As algorithms are adjusted to weight multiple criteria differently, they will produce different maps.

The Alabama solicitor general claimed that if the state relied on a “racially-blind” algorithm (that included no consideration of racial data), their ensembles returned maps with only one majority-Black district, and that two majority-Black districts were generated by algorithms only if they were forced to consider the racial distribution of voters. Justice Alito seemed most interested in this line of reasoning, asking plaintiffs’ counsel how it could be possible that any map with two majority-black districts could be “reasonably configured” if it doesn’t emerge from “a computer simulation that takes into account all of the traditional race-neutral districting factors?”

Two critical errors

The state’s arguments, along with Justice Alito’s questioning, reveal two critical errors. The first involves confusion over the evidence, or what redistricting algorithms actually produce. Statistics produced by redistricting algorithms are designed to reveal the likelihood of intentional gerrymandering, based on a sample of alternative maps. Typically, the characteristics of a proposed map (level of partisan or racial bias, average compactness, etc.) are compared to the range of those characteristics in simulated alternative maps to determine whether the proposed map deviates statistically and significantly from the average characteristic values. In other words, if a proposed map is an outlier on characteristics relative to the sample of alternatives, that is taken as evidence that the mapmaker(s) intended those results.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Abha Khanna was correct to point out that “these simulations…are not any kind of gold standard” and that the results of simulations are a function of “decisions going into the process and about which considerations to take into account and how to quantify them.” Indeed, there is reason to be cautious when using simulation results even when used as intended. My friend and co-author Anthony McGann put it succinctly in our research team’s last book, Gerrymandering the States:

Suppose I cheat at cards by intentionally dealing myself a winning hand. I am not very good at it, and people see me cheating. I, however, have a cunning defense. I hire a mathematician who uses precisely the same logic as is used to argue that gerrymandering is unintentional. My mathematician argues there is a slightly greater than 5 percent chance that an unbiased dealer would have dealt me cards at least as good as the ones I dealt myself. Therefore, I did not intentionally cheat. Of course, this defense is preposterous. The fact that it is plausible that an honest dealer could deal me cards as good as the ones I got is irrelevant. It does not prove that I did in fact get them honestly. My opponent’s case does not depend on the cards I received being implausibly good, but on the fact that I was seen cheating.

But what Alabama is trying to get away with is even more preposterous. They would have us believe that, after explicitly excluding racial data, their “blinded” simulations should be used as a benchmark for maps that are, by their circular definition, racially neutral. As both the solicitor general and Justice Alito acknowledged, their theory rests on a premise that racial blindness is the equivalent of racial neutrality in the generation of districting maps. This represents a second, deeper error.

Racial blindness is not racial neutrality. The key here is that the Voting Rights Act is explicitly designed to ensure representation for voters of color in a country where racially polarized voting is persistent. According to Section 2, for a voting standard, practice, or procedure to be race neutral, it must not deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group. In fact, most of the discriminatory laws that Section 2 has been used to dismantle have been racially “blind” in design: inequality in the apportioning of populations to districts, use of at-large bloc voting systems, failure to comply with national voter registration laws, and the like. Under the 14th and 15^th amendments to the Constitution, Congress is given the power to legislatively protect voters from racial discrimination in voting. Those practices were outlawed because, even though blind, they were not racially neutral in the context (racially polarized voting) in which they operated. They failed to provide voters with an equal opportunity to determine electoral outcomes. The key here is that the racial neutrality of any voting standard or procedure must be judged by its empirical impact on the future representation of voters, not whether race is explicitly incorporated into its design.

The very fact that we hope to achieve multiple standards simultaneously through districting means that standards will often be in conflict with one another and that there will be tradeoffs to consider. The standard of compactness, for example, is a “racially blind” statistic derived using a wide variety of geometric measures, that may or may not be racially neutral. My research team is one among many that have demonstrated how highly compact districts can violate voting rights by packing homogenous voters into districts where they waste votes relative to more efficiently apportioned populations. Compactness may be valuable for other reasons, but there is no way to know whether overly compact districts are discriminatory until we empirically estimate the impact of a given districting configuration on future voting patterns. Plus, it important to note that there is no constitutional right to compact districts.

What the science shows

What current empirical data do tell us is that excluding racial geography from districting criteria is likely to result in districts that require racial minorities to build larger coalitions with white voters, and reduce the number of districts where voters of color can effectively choose their preferred candidates. Moon Duchin, a leading mathematician engaged in ensemble simulations, has also concluded that “race-blind districting would devastate minority political opportunity no matter how it is deployed, just due to the mathematics of single-member districts.”

Professor Duchin’s point is worth further explanation: In electoral systems where only one candidate and one party per district receive representation (i.e. win), electoral outcomes inherently discriminate against numeric minorities (losers) in those districts, resulting in a “seat bonus” for the largest voting bloc in the state. Imagine the extreme example of an Alabama districting simulation that happened to produce seven Congressional districts that looked like the state as a whole, a map in which roughly one quarter of voters in each district were Black. Under such a map, if racially polarized voting persists, Black voters would never elect a single representative, and the white voting bloc would always win every seat.

For nearly forty years, the procedure used to identify and remedy this type of racial vote dilution in redistricting cases, known as the Gingles test, has taken the single-seat system as a given. And given the discriminatory potential of this type of “racially blind” system, the test begins by taking racial geography into account. Its first requirement is to identify whether a “reasonably configured” district would allow a minority group to elect a candidate of their choice. The ”racially-blind” approach advocated by Alabama would replace this contextually sensitive, evidence-based approach with a sweeping, radical misinterpretation of the Voting Rights Act and a rejection of the constitutionally protected principle of political equality as applied to elections.

What’s next

Fortunately, in oral arguments, it did not seem as though a majority of the Court accepted Alabama’s radical theory. However, it is likely that the conservative majority will uphold Alabama’s discriminatory map, by rejecting plaintiffs’ claim that a second Voting Rights Act district could be “reasonably configured” or compact. Following Justice Alito’s lead, they may decide that compactness trumps racial equality, but only in this specific context, without attempting to justify the more sweeping claim that blindness is equivalent to neutrality.

Unfortunately, even if the Court makes such a narrow ruling in this case, its use of compactness or other criteria as an excuse to allow discrimination will represent another blow to the integrity of the Voting Rights Act and the established science used to protect voters of color in a country where racially polarized voting is persistent.

In the face of an increasingly hostile Supreme Court, defenders of voting rights need to identify and advocate for alternative remedies for protecting political equality. No electoral system can guarantee the right to cast an equally weighted vote, but the adoption of multi-seat, proportional electoral systems, which can be calibrated to be race-neutral, would greatly reduce the incentive and impact of various forms of gerrymandering. Other innovations such as candidate list systems, and the allowance of alliance or “fusion” ballots that allow multiple parties to support those lists, may also work protect political equality and voter choice while incentivizing the formation of multiracial coalitions. There are a number of institutional options, some of which may already have the support of conservative justices, that have been shown to outperform our single-seat district system in terms of accurately reflecting the racial composition of the electorate. It is past time to start taking these reform options more seriously.

Reaching out to voters

Beginning with a sample of approximately 1,900 registered adults who had not frequently participated in local elections, precinct captains and volunteers were able to verify current information for just over half (1,114). Although few organizers encountered a hostile neighbor, many residents had either moved, had their phone disconnected, or refused to answer any questions. Among those whose residency was verified, about one third were not home. Volunteers were able to at least leave a message for over 400 respondents in the sample, and approximately one third of verified residents were successfully contacted about the upcoming mayoral elections.

Voters who were successfully contacted by organizers turned out at a higher frequency (34%) than those who were not (26%). Further, feedback from organizers indicates that fewer than one in six (16%) voters who were not reached–either because they refused organizers’ communication attempts, had disconnected phones, or had moved–turned out to vote in 2021. Findings like these demonstrate the importance of regularly updating registration and eligibility data so that organizers can maximize the impact of their efforts, as well as the importance of reducing refusal rates through proper organizer training. Just leaving a personal message for voters about the election may be enough to marginally increase turnout.

Increasing turnout among unlikely voters

Because people who are already more likely to vote may be more responsive to mobilization efforts, we compare the impact of organizer contact among those who voted in the 2020 general election with those who did not. Voting in the general election greatly increased the likelihood of voting in the mayoral election. Nevertheless, when organizers successfully get a definitive commitment to vote from their neighbors (when respondents say that on a scale of 0-5 their likelihood of voting is a “5”), turnout increases considerably. Turnout was much higher (57%) among those who voted in the 2020 general election and reported that they would definitely vote in the mayoral election, compared to those who voted in 2020 but did not fully commit to voting in 2021 (36%).

Only 5 percent of those who did not vote in 2020 but said they would definitely vote in 2021 ended up casting ballots. Yet, getting that commitment still mattered a great deal: not a single person voted in 2021 who did not vote in 2020 and did not commit to voting. A 5-point increase in turnout among some of the least-likely voting neighbors would mark a substantial improvement in election equality if these efforts were scaled up across the city of Cleveland.

Important–and challenging–findings

These findings demonstrate both the effectiveness of relational organizing and the challenges that organizers face in their efforts to create a more equitable playing field. First, the good news is that neighborhood contact does appear to pay off: multivariate analysis suggests that voter turnout in the 2021 mayoral election was approximately 8 percent higher among those contacted, controlling for previous voting behavior and other precinct-level characteristics.

By talking with neighbors about their concerns, neighborhood organizers are able to better connect potential voters to the electoral process. In turn, GCC and partner organizations bring these concerns to candidates, as they did during the mayoral campaign, at a forum for the candidates held at Shiloh Baptist Church, held in Cleveland’s Central neighborhood. The most important topics to discuss, from the perspective of neighbors in these selected precincts, focused on violence, policing, and housing maintenance.

The need for high-quality and shared data

The analysis also reveals how voting inequalities persist despite targeted mobilization efforts, and how data science can improve future relational organizing. First, improving the quality of contact data can save enormous time and effort. It is crucial that community organizations build stronger relationships and data sharing strategies with county election agencies so that neighborhood databases can be maintained. Address-based, neighborhood analytics are the natural unit of analysis, through which individuals may come and go, and voting behaviors can change, sometimes rapidly, between elections. Data sharing and regular updating of precinct/neighborhood-based records can ensure more effective engagement and relationship building.

Second, organizers need sufficient resources and training to target and repeat follow-ups with hard-to-reach populations. Neighbors who have already acquired some voting habits are much more responsive to outreach efforts. For example, 81 percent of 2020 voters who were contacted committed to definitely vote, compared to only 64 percent of those who did not vote in 2020 and, as we saw, the actual turnout rate was much lower among self-reported “committed” voters who did not vote in the 2020 election (5% compared to 57% of those who had voted in 2020).

Building relationships with those who have been left out of the data-intense networks of modern campaign strategy is going to require more long-term conversations and more direct communication with those competing to represent them in city government. Making elections more competitive is another important goal to consider if we seek to give more people something to vote for. The 2021 canvassing effort establishes an important benchmark to evaluate future organizing efforts.

Last week, a bipartisan group of Senators proposed a set of amendments to the Electoral Count Act with the intent of preventing the next attempt to subvert a presidential election in 2024. Do these revisions achieve the minimal protections needed to secure the integrity of future presidential elections?

While no reform can guarantee a free and fair election, the provisions in this bill do address many of the specific threats UCS and others have raised  Most recently, on July 6, UCS released a report, “Achieving Multiracial, Multiparty Democracy.” Authored by leading political scientists, experts, and organizers, the report recommended securing election integrity as the number one priority over the summer.

Specifically, we urged Congress and other lawmakers to implement “impartial, evidence-based rules that specify how votes are to be counted and tallied, the conditions under which authority over election certification may transfer to state officials, and similar areas of discretion in the certification process. Further, federal laws that restrict the sort of frivolous lawsuits used to spread disinformation after the 2020 election, as well as laws to punish the spread of false election information, intimidation of voters and election administrators, and threats of political violence, also need to be in place if we hope to secure the 2024 election cycle from targeted subversion.”

The proposed bipartisan bill is not perfect. But it does include essential protections that should be put in place as soon as possible. Congress and President Biden should move swiftly to implement this legislation.

Here are the proposed bill’s major improvements to current election law:

Reducing the potential for subversion by state legislatures

The first section of the bill addresses how states appoint electors. It requires that electors be appointed “in pursuance of the laws…enacted prior to election day.” This is designed to prohibit state legislators from enacting ad hoc laws to select new electors after votes are counted. Further, the bill assigns the governor or “executive” of each state the responsibility for transmitting the electors to the US Archivist, and that that transmission “shall be treated as conclusive with respect to the determination of electors…”

Strengthening judicial review

The law would require challenges to the electors to go straight to the federal district court of jurisdiction for a given state. The determination of federal courts shall be conclusive, meaning that a rogue Congress could not ignore the decision.

Clarifying the role of the Vice President

Under the section “Powers of the President of the Senate” the bill defines the role of the Vice President as “ministerial in nature” and explicitly denies him or her the power to solely “determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes over the proper list of electors…”

Raising the bar for Congressional objections

The bill significantly raises the bar for filing an objection to certification of electors, from a single member to one-fifth of the members of each chamber. While this would not have stopped the 138 House Republicans (32 percent) who objected to certifying the Arizona or Pennsylvania electors, there would not have been enough support in the Senate to attempt to reject electors in 2020.

Preventing state legislatures from trying to undermine certification

Crucially, the law also tries to prevent state legislatures from calling a “failed election,” a potential tactic for derailing Congressional certification. Under the new provisions, states that cannot finalize an election will not be allowed to have their electors count toward determining the majority of electors, one of several mechanisms that would favor selection of the “apparent successful candidate,” in the absence of legal challenges that might change election outcomes.

All in all, the bill includes significant reforms that go a long way toward ensuring the security of future elections. There are numerous shortcomings, including a lack of essential funding to strengthen the infrastructure of our elections at the local level, where the fight will begin. Nevertheless, many of these provisions are precisely the sort of structural restraints on political discretion that experts have been calling for all year. That’s why Congress and President Biden should now move swiftly to enact them.

Today the UCS Center for Science and Democracy is releasing a long-awaited task force report, “Achieving Multiracial, Multiparty Democracy,” which lays out a positive vision and pathway toward achieving substantive electoral reforms in the United States.

This report reflects a collaboration among scholars, election experts and professional organizers. It is possibly the first of its kind to:

1) assess challenges facing democracy reform in the US

2) identify how to build a successful pro-democracy coalition, and

3) suggest institutional reforms based on historical and comparative political science.

The task force grew out of a day-long course sponsored by the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP), and the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2021.

In assessing the current reform landscape, it is clear that there is no national pro-democracy movement among the coalitions that constitute the current party system. It has been impossible to pass any national voting rights protections, even after an attempt to violently overturn the 2020 election. Moreover, many well-financed reform advocates in the country appear to have little expertise or interest in strengthening democratic institutions, opting instead to try to force the election of “moderate” representatives while weakening political parties. By contrast, our report focuses on the necessity of strengthening political organizations as a foundation for institutional reform.

Our recommendations, for the public, election experts, and major stakeholders (community organizations, election administrators, voting rights and reform organizations, and philanthropic funders) follow a logic that places community-led political organizations at the center of reform. For a stronger democracy, we must:

• Secure the integrity of future elections through stronger partnerships between community organizations and local election agencies;
• Increase political participation through relational and deep organizing practices that focus on the 80 million voters who stayed at home in 2020;
• Lower local and state-placed barriers that make it difficult for candidates and third parties to qualify for ballots and funding;
• Expand diversity of representation by increasing assembly sizes in local and state legislatures;
• Design electoral districts to ensure that all voters are represented;
• Design capacity for more deliberative policymaking

The expansion of democracy in the United States and across the world has historically relied on the energy of social movements to mobilize and upset status quo coalitions. We find ourselves again in a period of shifting partisan alignments, which present direct challenges to existing institutions and opportunities to improve democratic performance. We do not wish to repeat the mistakes of the past, as compromises in previous reform efforts have helped create our current crisis. In this new era of reform, we have charted a path forward to bring us closer to our democratic ideals, without compromising effectiveness or exploiting those most in need of a seat at the table.

When the January 6^th Select Committee hearings began, I urged participants to highlight the threat of future election violence as a tactic that will be used to overturn future elections. To date, the hearings have demonstrated how the Trump conspirators’ legal tactics relied on coercion and violence, from the intimidation of election workers in the Moss family to the former president’s personal involvement in targeted attacks against local and state officials, in order to sow enough chaos that they might get state legislators to select fake electors and subvert the 2020 election.

It is increasingly clear that, as Committee Chair Thompson warned, we will not have “close calls” but “a catastrophe” if conspirators successfully infiltrate administrative positions to oversee and certify future elections. More to the point, Committee member Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) concluded in response to threats to his own family and countless election officials, “There’s violence in the future, I’m going to tell you. And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can’t expect any differently,”

We now have a sharper image of precisely what the strategy to overturn the next election looks like. Cleta Mitchell, a leading co-conspirator who was on the phone call when former president Trump asked the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” enough votes to declare him the winner, and who initiated the request to John Eastman to outline the legal strategy for overturning the 2020 election, is leading an ALEC- and RNC-affiliated effort, ironically branded as an Election Integrity Network, that not-so-subtly identifies several stages where election observers and workers will disrupt the election process:

1. Target non-profit groups engaged in election activities and use “who are they really?” narratives to spread distrust and disinformation,
2. Seek opportunities to remove “ineligible” voters from registration databases, 
3. Challenge local rules governing the custody, transportation, and location of ballots, voting materials, and tabulating equipment,
4. “Get knee deep in voting by mail and absentee voting in your county”–a literal quote from their guide
5. “Prepare for observing and reporting improper (ballot) curing…” that is, the process of identifying and correcting ballot errors.

The list goes on, and might not sound so threatening if it were not coming from the central figures who attempted to subvert the last presidential election. Their goal is to challenge, disrupt, and delay the certification of election results, especially the processing of mail ballots.

If Congress fails to take action this summer to implement standards and procedures for the fair and accurate processing and certification of future election results, we are in grave danger. But regardless of what Congress does, we need honest and accurate election integrity implemented locally to preempt these attacks, ensure that election results are certified well ahead of deadlines, and mitigate the harms done to voters.

Start here by contacting your local election office to find out who your administrators are and ask them how you can serve to ensure fair and accurate election outcomes. Depending on your skill set and capacity, there are a variety of roles that you can plug into (in addition to voting!):

Participate in planning and emergency election management

People who are skilled at organizational management, administration, or systems and design thinking can aid local election offices in planning and emergency management. Help to plug your local agency into the network of Centers for Election Excellence at the US Alliance for Election Excellence. The Alliance provides tools, training, and resources for local administrators, including cybersecurity and emergency management protocols. Every polling place and ballot processing facility should have a plan for potential conflict and disruption of services.

Bringing together election officers with designers, technologists, and others with expertise is one of the most powerful ways that the science community can build out a resilient election infrastructure for the future. That could involve linking up your local administrators with management technology, like the support that US Digital Response is providing, or helping to design voter-friendly election websites by utilizing templates such as those provided by the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL). As Whitney May, Director of Government Services for CTCL stated in a recent High Turnout Wide Margins podcast, as groups like hers come under attack (CTCL administered third party grants to elections offices in 2020, including the contribution from Mark Zuckerberg) in 2022 and beyond, the best response is for everyone working to ensure free and fair elections to celebrate their work and show that “we’re sticking together, we have each others’ backs.”

Help manage and monitor registration and vote-by-mail databases

Anyone with experience using spreadsheets, basic statistical programing, or database management can help their local election agencies keep voter registration and vote-by-mail databases updated and error-free. These databases require constant updating, especially around election time, and third-party monitoring and assistance can ensure that new voters are added to the system without error, that those who request absentee or mail ballots receive them, and that all ballots are generated and get to voters in a timely matter.

Find out what information is contained in your jurisdiction’s voter files, and help local agencies be able to produce regularly updated (daily or weekly in the months leading up to an election), machine-readable updates at the individual or precinct level. A good deal of data on previous years’ registration patterns is typically easily available to use as benchmarks. You can help with quality control using simple precinct-level analyses and graphical descriptions of registration levels for precincts, party registration levels, and the like.

Reporting these data can set expectations about patterns of turnout and partisan vote distributions, while analysis of outliers is a great check against administrative errors. Having real data available is one of the most effective means of mitigating the spread of disinformation.

Regular monitoring of mail ballot applications can also help ensure that applications are not rejected due to administrative or other errors. You can work with your local election administrators to set up systems to ensure that voters are quickly notified of any problems with registration or application status and given the timely opportunity to make sure they retain eligibility.

Conduct and share turnout forensics

Similarly, those experienced with using databases and geographic information systems (GIS) can put those skills to work on election results as they come in before, during, and after Election Day. Election forensics refers to a suite of data-driven methods and tools used to identify irregularities in election returns, and many are relatively easy to implement with local election agencies.

With regularly provided reports of ballots returned, processed, and rejected, and post-election party and candidate vote shares at the precinct-level, simple graphical methods (histograms, timeline plots, etc.) can increase transparency, identify irregularities to report to election administrators, and make it easier to counter disinformation.

Crucially, these same methods can be used to identify inequalities in ballot rejection rates, and improve ballot curing processes by providing additional oversight and capacity to fix administrative errors.

Engage potential voters susceptible to authoritarian messages

You can help ensure election integrity whether or not you have the skills needed for the above actions. Everyone can and should be making sure that people use their right to vote as we head into November. As my colleague Sophia Marjanovic recently articulated, you can help stop the spread of disinformation and engage infrequent (or “low-propensity”) voters through deep engagement in your own community.

Identify those who are susceptible to disinformation within your own social networks (relatives, co-workers, neighbors), as well as potential voters located in low-turnout precincts. We need messengers to counter narratives among low-propensity voters that cast doubt on the electoral process.

Publicly track and report election information/disinformation

Finally, you should share any analysis that you conduct with local news sources and be a resource for local reporters. Also report any irregularities or evidence of discriminatory practices or outcomes with the Election Protection Network. They have a hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683), that you can share with others. Be part of the election protection network in your community. To learn more about how you can counter disinformation in your community, you can access the UCS Disinformation Toolkit.

The opponents of democracy will seek to disrupt and delay vote counts at local election agencies across the country in their effort to manipulate the certification of election results at the state level. We all have a responsibility to make sure that the votes of our neighbors are counted and certified in a timely manner, and to ensure that no eligible voters are excluded from the process.

The hearings need to look ahead and lay out, in clear terms, what we have learned about the threat of future election violence—and exactly how the same groups involved in the insurrection are now poised to instigate violence in future elections. Because our democracy is under far graver threat than most people realize, the hearings must show it, allowing voters to see how they can prepare themselves and protect our democracy.

My hope for the hearings

I am fairly confident that the hearings will provide a comprehensive account of what Protect Democracy’s Grant Tudor has aptly described as the “bracing” scope of the attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential election, including:

“using government resources to promote the president’s reelection; soliciting state and local officials to commit election fraud; pressuring the vice president to delay or block the counting of electoral votes; enlisting the Justice Department to sanction the overturning of election results; refusing to officially green-light the operational transition of administrations; devising plans to employ the military to seize ballots and voting machines; strategizing with members of Congress to assemble fake slates of electors; and then inciting a lethal riot at the eleventh hour.”

I am less confident, but hopeful, that the hearings will clearly articulate, and produce some consensus about, what Congress must do over the next several months to keep the law itself from being used as a weapon to bludgeon our democracy, especially in 2024.

For example, UCLA’s Rick Hasen recently articulated how revising the Electoral Count Act could go a long way toward resolving the legal ambiguities that anti-democratic politicians may use as justification for choosing which votes get certified. Hasen and others have repeatedly pointed out that federal requirements regarding paper ballots and other procedural safeguards could greatly strengthen the integrity of our elections.

The need for federal election protections are a necessary, but insufficient, focus of the hearings. Professor Hasen is not overstating the matter when he concludes, “If these hearings don’t spur action by this summer or fall, expect Congress to do nothing before the 2024 elections, at which point American democracy will be in great danger.”

But, whether Congress takes action or not—and they may not—the public needs to understand the nature of the threat we face in the coming elections.

Congressional action is needed

The evidence is increasingly clear that we are likely to face attempts to subvert the next election through voter intimidation, violence, and the induced chaos that ensues. As POLITICO recently reported, Trump loyalists and partisan operatives are amassing an “army” of “volunteers prepared to challenge voters at Democratic-majority polling places, developing a website to connect those workers to local lawyers and establishing a network of party-friendly district attorneys who could intervene to block vote counts at certain precincts.” Targeting large cities in battleground states such as Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Atlanta (cities with a high concentration of voters of color), people are reportedly now being trained to initiate legal conflicts at the polling place that can disrupt voting and then use those actions “as a vehicle for rejecting vote counts from that precinct.”

What are the odds that “legal conflict” initiated by trained subversives, hopped up on “stop the steal” conspiracy theories, might result in physical conflict? The US has a long history of partisan “observers” intimidating marginalized groups to weaken their political power, but we have not seen anything on this scale in recent memory.

The Department of Homeland Security has already warned that “those harboring grievances over the 2020 election and fueled by misinformation may feel compelled to respond to the election season using violence.” There is a heightened threat that voters will be terrorized in 2022 and 2024, and the Congressional hearings need to be clear on this point.

In this regard, even a revision of Electoral Count Act would come too late to protect against violence because it would be primarily focused instead on shutting down the legal strategy to subvert elections. Violence and intimidation are likely to come before the lawsuits, brought to us by the foot soldiers of the election subversion army.

Additional federal legislation could help prevent outbreaks of election-related violence. The US House of Representatives passed the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022 on May 18^th with a vote of 222 to 203, largely along party lines. The Act requires federal law enforcement agencies (Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the FBI) to set up the infrastructure to combat domestic terrorism and, in particular, white supremacy-based hate crimes and acts of terror.

The Union of Concerned Scientists supports the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, as do many of the nation’s leading voting rights organizations, such as The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Congress should also provide greater resources for the groundwork efforts of these groups to prevent voter intimidation, coercion, and violence. For example, the Election Protection coalition is among the largest organizations nationwide working to ensure that every voter can cast a vote and have it counted. Americans need to learn more about election protection from the hearings.

Congress, the Department of Homeland Security, and other relevant federal agencies also need to provide greater resources for emergency preparations, including violence and attacks on election administration. Local election agencies should be incorporating best practices and lessons learned from international experiences with election-related violence.

Finally, the hearings need to inform the public about how to enforce their rights as voters. We need public deliberation about what limits should be placed on the actions of military officers, law enforcement, militia members, and armed vigilantes around polling places. Most battleground states do not explicitly ban firearms at polling places, but existing federal protections against intimidation can be enforced by a vigilant public.

The evidence strongly suggests that voters and communities are being targeted for political violence and it is imperative that they understand what is coming and how to prepare for it. The House Committee hearings provide a unique opportunity for the public to see how the failed insurrection on January 6th set in motion a series of events that is likely to result in coordinated violence and disruption in upcoming elections.

The insurrection isn’t over. Being better informed about future threats can help protect voters from intimidation and violence.

When courts adopt districting maps as a result of political authorities failing to do so, they tend to be inherently conservative. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court did just that, adopting a plan that they assessed had the “least changes” from the existing (2011) maps, while adjusting for malapportionment in order to make districts roughly equal in population. In adopting this fast-track legislation (elections are in four months), the Court recognized that, while the addition of one majority-Black district in Milwaukee (changing from 6 to 7) conformed to observed population changes, a Voting Rights Act claim regarding racial gerrymandering could be brought after the adoption of the new maps.

Striking down the plan, the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) faulted both the Governor (the map proposer) and the lower court (the adopter) for failing to implement a full analysis of what are known as the Gingles criteria for assessing racial gerrymandering claims: 1) that a group of minority voters are geographically compact enough to create a district (majority-minority), 2) that they vote as a cohesive bloc, and 3) that a white majority regularly votes cohesively so as to prevent the minority coalition from electing their candidate of choice. The three-pronged Gingles test, and the statistical methods used to analyze these conditions, have become the scientific foundation for resolving racial gerrymandering disputes under the Voting Rights Act. Crucially, as noted in Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, there is “no precedent requiring a court conducting a malapportionment analysis to embark on an independent inquiry into matters that the parties have conceded or not contested, like the Gingles preconditions here.”

Further erosion of the Voting Rights Act

Why would the conservative SCOTUS majority create such a precedent now? For one thing, the decision provided another opportunity to reassert their opposition to proportionality as a standard for evaluating any equal protection claims, something the conservative majority has amplified in recent federal partisan gerrymandering cases. More importantly, by accusing the Wisconsin court of failing to apply a full Voting Rights Act analysis to the state’s mechanism for achieving protection for Black voters (creating a new single-seat majority-Black district), the conservative majority asserted its own, narrow definition of how a state redistricting plan should be evaluated, namely: “whether a race-neutral alternative that did not add a seventh majority-black district would deny black voters equal political opportunity.”

It appears that the conservative SCOTUS majority seeks “race-neutral” alternatives to considering racial composition and voting behavior–the basic data used in the Gingles tests. By undermining the Gingles criteria, they are free to use the remaining “totality of circumstances” criteria to evaluate whether state legislatures are otherwise violating their interpretation of “equal political opportunity.”

The decision reads as an intention to expand the protection of state legislatures that the Court majority articulated earlier in the case Brnovich v DNC. Writing for the majority in that decision, Justice Alito emphasized that any circumstance that has “logical bearing” on voting opportunity could be used to justify laws that have a disparate impact on voters of color, such as alternative voting methods. For example, voters of color lacking equal opportunity through one voting method might find opportunity if they pursue some other voting method. State legislatures need not even show that an enacted law actually protects voters from a real harm. They can simply assert a state interest in protecting “election integrity,” for example, from the threat of (mostly non-existent) voter fraud.

Such logic explicitly rejects the “least-restrictive means requirement” which forces a state to prove that the interest served by its voting rule “could not be accomplished in any other less burdensome way.”

In practice, this means that state legislative majorities will now be protected from having to minimize the burdens they place of voters of color. The path is being cleared to lay siege on what remains of the Voting Rights Act. We should be preparing for that moment.

In the aftermath of the January 6^th insurrection, a coalition to defend democracy against those who attempted to subvert the certification of the 2020 election appeared to take shape. Leaders from both major political parties denounced the seditionists. Vice President Mike Pence reconvened the chambers that night, announcing that “the world will again witness the resilience and strength of our democracy, even in the wake of unprecedented violence and vandalism in this Capitol.” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy placed blame squarely at the soon-to-be former president’s feet: “The President bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proclaimed “This failed attempt to obstruct the Congress, this failed insurrection, only underscores how crucial the task before us is for our republic.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi invoked the anthem of St. Francis, the patron saint of her city of San Francisco, calling for Congress to be a channel of peace and healing. She also addressed the seditionists directly: “To those who engaged in the gleeful desecration of this, our temple of democracy, American democracy, justice will be done.”

By the end of the night, or rather early the next morning, the count was clear: of the 524 voting members of Congress, a nearly three-quarters supermajority (377) voted to certify the Electoral College results, while 147 Republican members voted to reject the election results of at least one state. The supermajority democracy coalition containing the sedition caucus would be short lived. Not only did Kevin McCarthy eventually align with seditionists in the certification vote that night, he had been brought to heel by the end of the month. Mitch McConnell has led GOP Senators in opposition against a 9/11 style commission to analyze the 1/6 insurrection, while preventing passage of national voting rights protections through use of the filibuster.

This sort of acquiescence to authoritarians on the part of establishment politicians is often a key factor in the demise of democracies. But the challenges to maintaining what democracy we have run much deeper into the political system. The problem is not the voters, as supermajorities support fundamental changes to strengthen democracy. What is missing is the elite coordination necessary to enact those reforms. In its place we have at least three loosely organized, often competing reform efforts, none of which amounts to a movement, each of which lacks either the political commitment, the technical effectiveness, or the organizational momentum to sustain a Congressional winning coalition.

The election integrity reformers

The broadest reform efforts are centered around access to voting and electoral integrity, including the Freedom to Vote Act (FTVA) and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (JLVRAA), which Democrats in Congress have been working on for several years. The FTVA began as the For the People Act, first passed by Democrats in the House in March of 2019. The core of the legislation centers around national standards for voter registration, expanding eligibility and access, including absentee and early voting, in addition to restraints on partisan gerrymandering, as well as election administration security measures, campaign finance, and ethics reforms.  Revisions in the FTVA removed some of the campaign finance and ethics content, while adding language to reduce the risk of election subversion. The JLVRAA would modernize the Voting Rights Act of 1965, replacing sections that have been neutered by Supreme Court decisions over the last decade, and codifying into law judicial standards that have evolved for identifying and remedying racial voting discrimination.

Many of the provisions in these bills reflect the experience of election administrators, the expertise of political scientists and legal scholars who study voting systems, and the organizational support of hundreds of voting rights and related pro-democracy groups. The bills address real problems, including barriers to voting being erected by GOP controlled state legislatures across the county. Moreover, lowering the threshold for participation by reducing the cost of voting in states with restrictive election laws would marginally improve the United States’ abysmal voter turnout, potentially expanding the composition and diversity of the electorate.

But the winning coalition to implement these or similar administrative democracy reforms before 2022 has failed to emerge. Given Senator Manchin and other Democratic leaders’ inability to persuade ten Republican Senators (compromises made on the JLVRAA yielded a single GOP vote, Senator Murkowski of Alaska) to support them, the only hope for these reforms is for Senate Democrats to restore the filibuster to its original rare use (a “talking” filibuster), coupled with some majority rule process to invoke cloture (stop debate). Yet if a procedural move were a viable strategy, Democrats should have already played it. It is likely that Senator Schumer has not had the Democratic votes he needs for democracy reform. We will know within the next few weeks, as the Majority Leader has indicated that he is moving forward on the procedural vote.

Despite a loud nationwide campaign, and repeated signaling from the Biden administration, Democratic leadership has, to date, prioritized fiscal policy. Democratic senators quickly rallied to suspend the filibuster in December to raise the debt ceiling. That economic coalition likely extends far beyond the 14 Republican Senators who supported the procedural vote. Indeed, with some notable exceptions like Major League Baseball, many corporate interests have been hesitant to offer more than lip service in support of the current legislation. The US Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest business lobby, is still financially supporting members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 election.

The emergent conservative “compromise” to the Democratic bills is a minimalist administrative reform, aimed at updating the Electoral Count Act, while leaving intact current voter suppression efforts. Democratic legislators hopefully recognize the danger of compromising on voting rights with an opposition committed to attacking the legitimacy of elections. But minimalists have a long tradition of support to draw on in American political science and constitutional law, based in part on an a priori commitment to “the value of the two-party system” and the preservation of the thing they have built careers studying.

Nevertheless, an alternative coalition emerging under the weight of the two-party systems’ increasing dysfunction is the joining together of some minimalists with corporate elites and advocacy organizations in support of ballot reform.

The ballot reformers

The big exception to conservative reform opposition is the effort, primarily in state legislatures, to change electoral formulas (the method that converts votes to seats) and partisan primaries. This well-financed, highly organized effort seeks to leverage anti-party sentiment and the narrative that “both sides” of partisan politics can be transcended through the adoption of “non-partisan” or “open” or “blanket” primaries, or ranked-choice voting (RCV), or a combination of the two in the form of “Final Five” where the top five candidates are selected to compete in a runoff, where voters then rank remaining candidates, and a majority winner (of valid remaining ballots) is selected. More eclectic groups of ballot reformers advocate for other variations that require scoring multiple candidates, such as approval, range, or STAR voting.

Ballot reform organizations paint a vision of centrist or “post-partisan” politics with names like the National Association of Non-Partisan Reformers and the Institute for Political Innovation. Well-known liberals like Andrew Yang, “Never Trumpers” like Adam Kinzinger, indeed pretty much everyone, including me, has supported some form of RCV. There are some odd bedfellows, as the groups working hardest on the branding, such as IPI’s Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter, rail against the “entrenched duopoly” of Republican and Democratic parties, targeting “start up” political entrepreneurs with their reform message. Meanwhile, the constitutional scholars who know something about elections support RCV and similar reforms because they understand that such changes will not disrupt the two-party system. For example, in Richard Pildes’ view, it is polarizing candidates that are the problem. Force voters to elect “centrists” and the two-party system will return to functionality. As a group, this coalition is committed to no parties, or only two parties.

Unfortunately, research shows that these reforms do not deliver what they promise, earning the title (coined by comparative political scientist Matthew Shugart) of “junk reform.” For one, primary voters are not so different from general election voters, but without partisan cues their choices are more confused. Second, as professor Lindsey Cormack and others have shown, RCV can fail to ensure a majority winner or even counter spoiler effects. Worse, some versions of RCV essentially revert to plurality voting, resulting in discriminatory outcomes against minorities. About the best thing that can be said is that these ballot reforms have marginal effects, as noted in several recent studies. As for encouraging centrism, a recent article by Jonathan Cervas and Bernard Grofman suggests that Donald Trump would have benefited from ranked choice voting in 2020.

This problem is not just one of over-selling: another recovering RCV supporter, political scientist Jack Santucci has pointed out that ballot reformers are epistemically committed to a one-dimensional model of political competition, a model that is especially problematic during a period of party realignment. The model holds that weakening party selection (open primaries), and/or requiring voters to score and aggregate preferences across multiple candidates will yield candidates more closely aligned with the average, or median voter, on the assumption that voters are clustered around the center across a single Left-Right dimension,. Thus, under RCV, Cervas and Grofman find that Donald Trump would have benefited from the second choices of Libertarians to his “right.” But only in a one-dimensional world would Donald Trump ever be considered “centrist.” Real politics is multi-dimensional, with primaries and candidate selection determining issue salience, not just candidate extremism.

As ballot reform funder Kathryn Murdoch puts it: “The theory of change is that essentially, when you switch the system to be better for voters, rather than for parties, you have more representation and therefore less angry people…” The problem with this theory is that you can’t have more representation without more representatives, and ballot reform efforts are committed to retaining single-seat electoral districts, where a single representative, and a single party, wins 100% of the representation. Attempts to reconcile this paradox of maximizing “voter choice” while retaining the two-party system result in ever-more Ptolemaic schemes (consider Edward Foley’s “self districting” with RCV proposal). Single-seat districts may be ideal if the goal is to reduce the dimensionality of politics to say, socialism versus capitalism, then try to maximize “less angry people” along that dimension, but multi-dimensional politics and the fluid coalitions it encourages are a necessary component of robust democracy.

The party system reformers

A third potential reform coalition is basically the flip side of the ballot reformers. Ballot reformers tend to ask too much of voters, as seen in the elaborate schemes like OP + RCV, STAR, and approval voting. These reforms basically ask voters to pick a better coalition. Advocates of proportional electoral system reform flip that around—give voters representation, then have their representatives form the coalition. And unlike ballot reform, electoral system reform would almost certainly achieve its objectives. The problem is that there is neither the political support nor the organizational momentum to make it happen.

Scholarship in comparative politics has demonstrated that electoral systems—the number of seats being contested per district (district magnitude), the number of seats in an assembly or legislature, and the rules that allocate seats from votes (electoral formula)—are jointly predictive of the number of political parties that contest and win seats in national legislatures. Advocates for various forms of proportional representation (PR), or larger district magnitudes and assembly sizes, coupled with a proportional electoral formula, argue that the “doom loop” that boiled over on 1/6 is a function of the two-party system, that there is no hope for meaningful bipartisan reform, and that to avoid further damage to our democracy, we need to adopt PR. A more proportional electoral system would allow Republican legislators to extricate themselves from those in the party who have abandoned democracy, creating a multi-party governing coalition able to cordon off factions that promote violence. As Shugart puts it:

The need for PR is to let the free-market small-d democrats in the currently existing parties act independently of their more extreme wings. This is precisely what PR systems permit–each side’s extreme can be its own party rather than a wing of one majority-seeking party, without raising concerns over “spoilers” that arise under plurality elections.

Proportional representation has gained popularity among three important groups to create this coalition. First, the mainstream press, including the New York Times and Washington Post, have paid more attention to PR, largely through the hard work of FairVote and similar groups (which seem to have turned their resources toward bipartisan RCV adoption). Second, conservative policy scholars, and organizations ranging from the American Enterprise Institute to the Manhattan Institute are also making the case for PR. Third, US academics, including election law scholars like Fred McBride,  Guy-Uriel Charles, and others working atop the shoulders of Lani Guinier, have advanced the idea that PR provides a remedy to overcome the weakness of our crumbling protections against racial voter discrimination. Professors Santucci, Shugart and I are exploring the impact of electoral system design on racial representation.

Many political scientists trained in American politics are no longer wedded to the two-party system, and Lee Drutman, who has thought about PR in the US more than most, is working with the New America Foundation’s Political Reform program to grow political support for PR through the Fix Our House campaign. Drutman argues that a pro-democracy coalition is “hiding in plain sight” among Democrats, Never Trumpers and the many voters unaligned with either major party. What we need, the thinking goes, is a national movement to get us there before the country fractures in half.

As for legislative coalitions, there are none in sight. The Fair Representation Act, which would adopt PR (with STV) for Congress, can’t get out of committee. If Republicans can’t even bring themselves to update the Voting Rights Act, and Democratic leadership hides behind Joe Manchin on voting rights, who is there to support PR? If the combined failures of the two-party system, a global recession, a global pandemic followed by massive economic disruption, nationwide demonstrations for racial justice, and an attempted insurrection are not significant enough “shocks” to prompt big structural reform, it is hard to see what would be.

It is understandably easier to see democracy dying. As Nonviolent Action Lab Director Jay Ulfelder recently opined, “One of the most important facts to emerge from comparative analysis of all attempts at democracy worldwide so far is that the vast majority eventually revert to authoritarian rule, at least for a time.” Maybe this is our time. The Democratic Party could easily lose 25-50 House seats in 2022, and likely the Senate, under the current rules without any violence or insurrection. That would put us in a very different place, though it is important to keep in mind that it hasn’t been that long since large swaths of this country were governed though authoritarian rule.

Party system reformers also neglect the fact that while electoral systems are very predictive of party systems, the politics of electoral reform requires a partisan movement, a component of the new party system, to put it in place. In other words, structural reform requires party building, and as Dr. Andrea Benjamin has shown, that requires community building.

Where we go from here

As it always has, the path to democratic restoration and growth lies in the capacity of everyday people to break the shackles of political alienation and apathy. Despite century-high turnout estimates, 80 million people who could have voted in the 2020 election did not participate. We can change that, and changing it is the key to effective and reliable reform.

Reform-wise, lowering the threshold to participation, or the costs of voting, whether they are eligibility barriers, language barriers, or barriers to ballot access, must remain a priority. It is absurd that, as a democracy, we don’t have basic equality in voting access and election integrity regardless of what state a citizen lives in. But equally important is lowering the threshold of representation. Nurturing communities of political interest requires making it easier to politically organize, to qualify parties on ballots, and to provide more opportunities to run for and win office.

Successful electoral reform efforts must be integrated into the broader project of building community power. Reform will take on different forms in different communities. In some places the electoral system may not even require change. Changing the composition of the electorate will be powerful enough.

But changing the composition of the electorate requires both local groundwork and a system that provides enough incentives to give people something to vote for. Plugging in and creating opportunities for people who are typically ignored by electoral campaigns is going to be expensive and labor intensive, but it is a theory of change that actually works. The best news is, regardless of what happens with any national legislation, we can get started now.

The act would protect future elections from subversion, provide equal opportunities for all citizens to participate, require fair districting standards are met, strengthen transparency over money in politics, and facilitate the impartial administration of elections.

Failure to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, however, would “heighten post-election disputes, weaken government legitimacy, and damage America’s international reputation as a beacon of democracy in the world.” Indeed, without the basic protections provided by the Freedom to Vote Act, the US may fail to meet “the minimum condition for electoral democracy—free and fair elections…”

In short, the costs of not suspending the filibuster in the face of these threats far outweigh any potential long-term benefits. As the letter states, “to lose our democracy but preserve the filibuster in its current form—in which a minority can block popular legislation without even having to hold the floor—would be a short-sighted mistake of historic proportions.”

We urge the Senate to take action now against those seeking to undermine and subvert our democracy.

The three sessions from the day-long course are now available to view. We welcome feedback, additional conversations, and further analysis — all of which will be taken seriously in our approach, which emphasizes listening to, rather than lecturing to, those impacted most by our democratic deficits. Our goals are to issue a task-force report, coordinate outreach, and plan capacity-building events over the next few months and into 2022. We hope you enjoy, and engage, in this conversation with many of the country’s leading experts and practitioners:

President Biden and the Democratic leadership have spent months focusing their energy on getting infrastructure legislation passed. The time has come to pivot to focus the nation’s attention on our constitutional infrastructure and protecting our right to vote. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is currently setting the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act for a floor vote, in a final attempt to garner bipartisan support for a suite of voting rights infrastructure bills that have included the For the People Act and most recently, the Freedom to Vote Act.

The act, named after the late congressmember and civil rights activist John Lewis, would update and restore protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), arguably the most significant civil rights statute ever passed by Congress. Following the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby v Holder that dismantled important VRA requirements, many conservative state legislatures have passed sweeping laws designed to suppress voting that disproportionately impact minorities, the elderly, and young voters. In its 2013 decision, the Supreme Court urged Congress to take action and update the VRA. And, this summer, the Supreme Court further weakened protections against identifying and remedying voting rights violations under section 2 of the VRA in Brnovich v DRC.

Key components of the bill include:

• Requiring that proposed changes to election laws are pre-cleared through the Department of Justice for any jurisdictions with a record of legal violations within a period of 25 years
• Authorizing federal courts to place jurisdictions under such “pre-clearance” provisions for results-based voting rights violations
• Authorizing the Department of Justice to request federal observers for elections where there is a demonstrable threat of racial voting discrimination
• Requiring reasonable public notice for voting and election law changes
• Revising and tailoring the preliminary injunction standard for voting rights actions to recognize that there will be cases where there is a need for immediate injunctive relief, and
• Increasing accessibility and protections for Native American and Alaska Native voters.

A bipartisan history

As the new bill goes to the Senate floor, it is worth remembering that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed the House of Representatives 328 to 74 with strong bipartisan support. The first reauthorization vote passed in 1969 with broad Republican support; Richard Nixon signed it into law. Bipartisan supermajorities in the House and Senate reauthorized the VRA again in 1975, 1992, and 2006. After the 2006 reauthorization, which included unanimous Senate approval, Senator Mitch McConnell remarked that he was pleased to see the country “continue its progress towards becoming a society in which every person, of every background, can realize the American Dream.”

But in December of 2019, when the late John Lewis, Georgia’s long-time Congressman and Freedom Rider who was beaten by police during Selma’s Bloody Sunday, banged the House gavel to mark passage of the next reauthorization, it marked an historic turning point in the safety of our democracy.

At that moment, it was not the content of the reauthorization that was historic, but the vote. The bill passed 228 to 187 on an almost pure partisan vote, with just a single Republican (Brian Fitzpatrick) joining Democratic members in support. The vote offered a clear signal that our political parties were divided over the most fundamental of our constitutional rights—the right to cast an equally weighted vote. At that time, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even bring the bill up for debate.

We are now closing in on the end of the 2021 legislative cycle, a year that began with an insurrection on the Capitol and numerous legal attempts to overturn the results of the presidential election. We have, at most, a few months to address the spread of voting rights violations and the continuing erosion of our democracy. The Senate needs to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and a suite of other democratic protections, in time for them to be implemented before the 2022 elections. If no Republicans will support these bills, it is imperative that the Senate suspend or amend the anti-democratic, supermajoritarian rules of that chamber, and acknowledge the absurdity of expecting the enemies of democracy to aid in its defense.

Republicans just rejected that chance. Today, the Senate voted to set debate rules on the Freedom to Vote Act, the compromise bill from Senators Manchin, Warnock, Klobuchar, Merkley, Tester, King, Padilla, and Kaine, as well as Majority Leader Schumer, which Senator Manchin has been pitching across the aisle for bipartisan support. The bill was specifically crafted as a compromise, removing elements of the Democrats’ more expansive For the People Act, such as the requirement that states establish independent redistricting commissions to curb gerrymandering. Instead, the legislation provides more extensive judicial oversight, while allowing states to work out how they meet national election standards to:

• guarantee the right to vote in federal elections, prohibiting states from passing “retrogressive” laws that make voting harder;
• establish federal protections for elections officials and standards for the handling of election equipment and records;
• ensure multiple options for ballot access, including mail and early in-person voting;
• require states to count provisional ballots cast by eligible voters in the wrong precinct but in the correct county;
• require a 30-minute limit on wait times for in-person voting; and
• provide specific legal and quantitative standards to prohibit partisan gerrymandering.

The new legislation also adds provisions meant to curb state-level efforts to allow officials to override election results. Republicans, who historically helped lead the effort to secure democracy in the United States since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, now lack the courage to reject efforts within their own party to subvert voting rights and the integrity of our elections, unlike Democrats, who took a stand against white supremacists and segregationists in their own party in 1965.

The country faces a turning point in the history of our democracy. Senate Democratic leadership must take the next step and alter the filibuster to allow a majority vote on the most fundamental of constitutional rights. This legislation may not be enough, but without it, our democracy is not likely to withstand the coming attempt to subvert our elections. And make no mistake, it is coming.

This week marks the 10th time that Americans have commemorated National Voter Registration Day, an occasion designed to encourage the one in four adult citizens who are unregistered to become part of those who can participate in elections. So far this year at least 18 states have enacted laws that will make it harder for Americans to vote. And even when the right to vote is formally protected, the costs of doing so prevent many from making it to the polls, including STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students, who are less likely to vote.

We need to reengineer the voting process to make it easier for everyone. While the focus is on the unregistered—and justifiably so—it is crucial to also direct our attention on the U.S.’s more than 4,500 local election officials (LEOs), who “determine who can vote, where they can vote, and how they can vote,” as a 2014 report from the think tank Demos put it. They determine whether voter registration applications are valid, in accordance with state and federal law. Hence we should give a shout out today to LEOs, who, until quite recently, toiled anonymously behind the scenes to ensure that elections went off without a hitch. Nearly 60 percent of states fill these positions through partisan elections, which can affect how LEOs carry out their tasks, but there are also strong professional norms.

During the 2020 election, many local election officials scrambled to implement state-mandated changes, such as providing no-excuse absentee mail ballots to all registered voters, as a means of ensuring that people could vote without risking exposure to COVID. Oftentimes LEOs made these efforts without additional resources and did so while being accused malfeasance. For example, according to the New York Times, Scott County, Iowa’s auditor and commissioner of elections and her staff put in about 200 hours of overtime while running an election that generated a nearly 80 percent turnout rate. But that election also brought out angry and threatening voters and led to the resignation of that election official. According to a recent report from the Brennan Center for Justice, by this past spring a third of surveyed election officials felt unsafe because of their job and nearly 20 percent were concerned about threats against their life.

By late December 2020, 21 election directors and deputy directors of more than a dozen of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties had either quit or were in the process of doing so. A Democracy Fund survey of roughly 850 local election officials reported that about one out of every six were planning to retire in the next three years. While retirements are a normal part of life, these numbers are higher than normal and indicative of the current partisan rancor. Of particular concern is the possibility that those leaving will be replaced by believers in former president Donald Trump’s “Big Lie.” In fall 2020, prior to the election, Steve Bannon encouraged Trump supporters to try to become local election officials, according to Forbes. At this time of unprecedented threats against electoral integrity, let us remember the local election officials, who are on the front lines of preserving our voting rights, and tell Congress that it is time to pass legislation to protect those who protect our democracy.

Then let us vote—and vote in numbers large enough to prevent those who would subvert the democratic process from using marginal irregularities in elections to spread doubt about their outcomes. How do we get more people to participate? The scientific evidence on how to increase voter registration, participation and integrity is clear: make it easy and transparent. States that have implemented automatic voter registration, universal vote by mail, early in-person voting and similar procedures that reduce the cost of voting have a higher turnout and lower inequalities in voting than states with more restrictive election laws. More than 50 percent of eligible Californians voted in the state’s gubernatorial recall effort this month—an extraordinary turnout for an off-year special election and one that was partly made possible by the fact that every eligible registered voter was automatically mailed a ballot, whether or not they requested one. This week California signed permanent universal vote by mail into law.

We need to keep pressuring state legislatures to adopt such transformative reforms, especially in states with more restrictive election laws, and tell Congress to enact federal protections, including the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. Members of Congress are scheduled to vote on the Freedom to Vote Act this week. That legislation would expand voter registration, require a minimum number of days and hours for early voting, and create a nationwide right to vote by mail.

After National Voter Registration Day, in the days, weeks and months that follow, in the short time that we have for Congress to act, we urge you to write, e-mail and phone your representatives and senators to support legislation that will allow every eligible American to be registered and vote.

The new bill relies on a large body of evidence demonstrating existing disparities, revises the data and methods used to determine whether a jurisdiction must get preclearance before changing election laws, codifies some scientific methods of identifying discrimination that have grown out of decades of case law, and provides guidance to courts on how to apply some of the tests that shape current voting rights litigation.  

Overall, the proposed restoration reflects many advances in the use of science to protect voting rights. But it is far from clear that a Supreme Court majority which seems to deny both the scientific basis of discrimination and the central vision of the Voting Rights Act, is prepared to uphold it. Further, there are additional, scientifically justified protections that should be included in this bill to protect voters’ most fundamental constitutional right. 

An extensive series of hearings and a House Administration Committee Report, “Ensuring Free and Fair Access to the Ballot”, provide the empirical and evidentiary basis for the continuing need to protect voters of color from state intrusion upon their voting rights. For example, Janai Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund noted that “there have been at least nine federal court decisions finding that states or localities enacted racially discriminatory voting laws or practices intentionally” since the 2013 Shelby v Holder decision did away with preclearance requirements for states with a history of discrimination. The Report identified numerous examples of current disparities: 

• “voter list maintenance and voter purge processes can be, and are, wielded in a discriminatory manner and have a disproportionate impact on minority voters.” 
• “minority voters are less likely than White voters to have [required voter identification] and are more likely to lack the documents required to obtain these IDs.” 
• “significant gaps remain in adherence to the law and the provision of fair access to multi-lingual voting materials and assistance” 

• “evidence [of the] the disproportionate, discriminatory effect polling place closures, consolidations, and relocations and under resourcing has on access to the ballot for minority voters.” 
• “discriminatory redistricting, vote dilution, annexations, deannexations, drawing of jurisdictional boundaries, and changes to the method of election…” 

The existing body of research suggests that such racial disparities are a real and continuing threat to election integrity: analysis of cell-phone data and precinct analyses show that voters in Black neighborhoods wait 20-30% longer to vote in-person compared to voters in White neighborhoods; a new Brennan Center analysis by Peter Miller, Kevin Morris and Coryn Grange shows that even as turnout has increased in recent elections, the racial turnout gap has also increased in jurisdictions previously covered under the Voting Rights Act; and as my recently co-authored book Gerrymandering the States demonstrates, biased political representation can amplify the inequalities that affect people throughout their day to day lives in terms of environmental, public health, and other outcomes. 

The JLVRAA addresses these threats through a number of sound, science-based improvements. Most notably, the bill establishes several practice-based preclearance requirements for all jurisdictions seeking to require new identification requirements, adopt new districting plans, eliminate polling places, or implement new voter role purging policies. States are also specifically prohibited from using partisan advantage as a justification for vote denial. The well-established test (known as the Gingles test) for determining whether a geographically cohesive bloc of minority voters is dominated by a bloc of White voters through a racial gerrymander, is codified into the JLVRAA.  

A new rolling formula is specified which continually updates the data used to determine if a jurisdiction is “covered” for past discrimination and requires preclearance before changing election laws: if, in the past twenty-five years, (1) fifteen or more voting rights violations occurred in the State or (2) ten or more voting rights violations occurred and one of those was committed by the State (as opposed to a sub-state government). A county is covered if it commits three violations in the same period, and coverage lasts for ten years. 

Additionally, the bill explicitly rejects five factors proposed by Justice Alito in his recent Brnovich v DNC decision for determining unacceptable vote deprivation, replacing them with a more empirical and precedent-grounded two-part test that requires plaintiffs to establish that a practice 1) causes a racial disparity through 2) interaction with historical and social conditions of discrimination. This is an important correction, as Justice Alito’s factors weighed heavily in favor of states and against the rights of voters of color. For example, Justice Alito urged courts to look at the “practical” over the “statistical” significance of racial disparities in rejected ballots. He considers it a “statistical manipulation” to claim that a group with a 1% rejection rate suffers “twice” the rate of rejection of a group with a 0.5% rejection rate (which, of course, is accurate), when both groups have 99% or more of their ballots accepted. 

If, out of two groups of 200 voters, one group had a single ballot rejected, and another had two voters’ ballots rejected, one could see Justice Alito’s point, and some top legal scholars saw this argument coming, given the specifics of the Brnovich case. But even in the Brnovich case, the Court was not considering three, but thousands of rejected ballots, enough to determine the outcome of an election. If that isn’t practically significant, I don’t know what is. Thus, the re-assertion of the importance of statistically significant racial disparities, with a determination of causality through empirical examination of social and historical conditions of discrimination, is crucial. 

For all these improvements, several shortcomings remain in the bill. For one, as law professor Nick Stephanopoulos and others argued in testimony during the hearings, states should have to empirically justify challenged practices, and show that the practice, and its disparate impact, is causally linked to the harm they claim a compelling state interest in preventing. For example, such a test would prohibit states from claiming protection against voter fraud unless they can show that voter fraud is a significant problem that would be curtailed through their practice (the bill already explicitly rejects the “mere invocation” of voter fraud as a consideration).  

Additionally, while the JLVRAA explicitly endorses coalition districts –where a coalition of minority voters (Black and Hispanic voters, for example)—as satisfying the conditions for a Gingles test, it also specifies that the minority voters must constitute a majority in a single-member district. Whether this reflects a move to thwart a constitutional challenge or just the Democratic Party’s attraction to safe, single-seat districts, it is not scientifically justified: “crossover” districts with coalitions of minority and like-minded White voters have been shown to provide an effective remedy against racial vote dilution. Perhaps the Democratic Party leadership does not grasp the emergency situation that we find ourselves in.

Even the best science may be unable to restore the racial voting rights regime that courts have used to protect democracy and voters of color in the US for 50 years. The current Supreme Court majority has effectively turned the vision of the Voting Rights Act on its head, leading the voting rights scholar Guy-Uriel Charles to conclude that “the Court majority is more interested in protecting the electoral rules of the states from undue intrusion by voters of color.”  

On that point, another way of strengthening the JLVRAA would be, as Travis Crum has suggested, to federalize it and secure its protections from the federal government as well as state governments. Yet another is to press more strongly for universal, practice-based requirements directed at federal elections, such as those included in the For the People Act, and non-race-specific remedies for vote dilution such as those included in the Fair Representation Act. Color-blindness in remedies should be more attractive to a Court that chooses to ignore color in the causes or consequences of restrictive election laws.

The Senate will take up this great task soon. Let us all hope that they can put together some set of protections for voters of color while we still can. 

Thanks to the work of many dedicated scientists, programmers, and other experts familiar with census and election data, anybody with a little time and some basic computer skills can generate and download new and proposed districting plans, identify geographic communities of interest, and help assess alternative, unbiased plans to compare with those designed by partisan actors. The following sources provide an array of tools that you can use to protect and advance democracy in this redistricting cycle: 

The Redistricting Data Hub is a one-stop shop for all things redistricting. In addition to data, the Hub provides great resources for explaining the redistricting process and a comprehensive set of links to district mapping tools. The availability of these tools has greatly expanded since the last redistricting cycle, allowing the public to make their own maps that comply with state redistricting criteria. Options include the web-based Districtr designed by the research team at the MCGG Redistricting Lab, and DistrictBuilder (2.0), both of which provide support for organizations looking to collaborate on public mapping projects. 

Christopher T. Kenny and Cory McCartan, working with data from the Voting and Election Science Team (VEST), have already done the work of joining together census data with precinct-level election data in an open-source, reproducible workflow. Code for generating the data, along with scripts for joining the data to geographic shapefiles and instructions for use, are included at their repository. This is all the data you need to make maps and estimate partisan bias with the publicly available mapping tools above. 

The team at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, in collaboration with RepresentUs and the Election Innovation Lab, will be evaluating bias in proposed maps across the states, as will PlanScore, a project of the Campaign Legal Center that allows users to upload their own plans with geospatial files and produce several estimates of partisan bias. There has never been so much space for ordinary people to become part of the redistricting process.  

Honestly, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist, or even a political scientist, to meaningfully participate in redistricting using these tools. As my co-authors and I show in our recently published book Gerrymandering the States, despite the Supreme Court’s confusion over “sociological gobbledygook”, partisan bias in any districting plan can be estimated using pencil and paper. If you have a proposed map with updated census data and a measure of the average two-party vote shares in those districts (aggregating precinct data from previous elections), you can use the following simple formula: 

Bias = (proportion of seats with Democratic vote share 5% more than statewide average) – (proportion of seats with Republican vote share 5% more than statewide average) 

This formula answers a straightforward question: Does a districting plan create more Democratic or more Republican leaning districts relative to the average level of support the parties get in a state (or county, or city council, etc.)? We find that the correlation between this simple measure of the distribution of support and more complex measures of symmetry used in the book is over .9 (where 1.0 = perfect correlation).  

Beyond public mapping, grassroots voting rights and community groups need basic scientific skills in the short term during the current legislative and redistricting cycles leading up to the 2022 elections. And given the problems with undercounts of hard-to-reach populations, it is imperative that groups working with census data follow protocols that have been established by experts in the field. 

Science advocates can take multiple specific actions in the months ahead:

• Advocate for and engage in public input opportunities underscoring the need for transparent, science-based methods of map development;
• Be a critical voice in calling out legislation that is not evidence-based;
• Leverage your voice as a technical expert in the local media to encourage public participation and put your state’s mapmakers on notice that the community will be watching for a fair, transparent redistricting process;
• Reach out to your state or city/town’s local group working to advocate for fair maps and ask if your unique skill sets can be of support;
• As a scientist or other expert, you can join more than 900 signatories and endorse this scientists’ letter.

Finally, there is a more fundamental contribution that scientists can make to these efforts: scientists are authorities on the scientific method. One of the core commitments of that method is experimentalism, and the link between experimentalism and democracy is direct: democracy is a form of collective decision making, based on the same design principles of open and transparent consideration of independently verifiable information. Jack Knight and James Johnson make the case in their paper The Priority of Democracy: “We trust or value experimental outcomes insofar as they emerge under proper conditions, and we expend much effort in monitoring those conditions. The priority of democratic institutional arrangements emerges because they embody the sorts of reflexivity needed to monitor the conditions under which alternative institutions and practices, including democratic procedures themselves, generate normatively attractive outcomes.”

Scientists are the front-line defenders of those values, and as such, we have a unique ability–and obligation–to stand up for the priority of democracy.