Redistricting

● Virginia: Virginia's state Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal of a lower court ruling that rejected a challenge to some of the Old Dominion’s state Senate and state House districts in March. Plaintiffs in this case argue that 11 of the 140 districts in both chambers illegally protected incumbents by violating a state constitutional provision requiring that districts be "compact."

Although Virginia had a divided government during the last round of legislative redistricting, the two parties reached a deal where the Republican-run House aggressively gerrymandered its own districts and the Democratic-run Senate much more modestly gerrymandered the upper chamber's map. How do we know the Democratic map was so much weaker than the GOP’s? Because Democrats immediately lost control of the Senate in the very first election held under the new lines in 2011, and Republicans have narrowly held it ever since while also enjoying a two-to-one advantage in the House. As a result, Republican House Speaker Bill Howell has unsurprisingly vowed to defend both maps in court.

It's unclear if the conservative-leaning majority on the high court would even consider striking down district maps that have thus far helped Republicans more than Democrats. And because compactness is not a well-defined legal term, the court could use that infirmity to turn back this challenge.

But if the court does require some districts to be redrawn, what then happens next will depend heavily on the outcome of Nov. 7's gubernatorial election. If Democrat Ralph Northam beats Republican Ed Gillespie, he could veto any redrawn maps that favor Republicans, forcing the court to draw nonpartisan districts instead. (Indeed, a very similar situation unfolded last year when Virginia’s congressional map was found to be unconstitutional.) But even if this compactness challenge fails, there is still an ongoing racial gerrymandering lawsuit working its way through the federal courts that could invalidate several state House seats.

Ballot Measures

● Maine: In a setback for electoral reform, a group of Democratic defectors in Maine's state House capitulated to Republicans and helped pass a measure that, for all intents and purposes, does away with the instant-runoff voting (IRV) system that voters approved in a 2016 ballot initiative. The Democratic-majority House passed a bill by a 68-63 margin that would put IRV on hold until the end of 2021, at which point it would get automatically repealed unless legislators pass a state constitutional amendment validating IRV before then. However, Republicans, who oppose IRV, will almost certainly maintain enough seats in the legislature to deny Democrats the two-thirds majorities they’d need to pass an amendment any time in the next four years.

The GOP-controlled state Senate also passed this delay-and-repeal bill, and it now goes to Republican Gov. Paul LePage, who has previously signaled his willingness to sign a repeal law. Opponents of IRV claim that the bill was necessary because the state Supreme Court issued a non-binding opinion back in May saying that the law was unconstitutional for state-level general elections, sparking a near-certain risk of lawsuits. That argument doesn’t hold up, though, because the state simply could have eschewed IRV for state elections while still using it for state primaries and federal races, since the court didn’t say IRV was impermissible in those races.

Indeed, that’s exactly what Maine was on course to do when, back in June, the legislature was unexpectedly unable to reach any sort of compromise over this issue, making it appear that IRV would indeed be used where possible. That makes this latest development even more frustrating.

But the fight's not over. IRV supporters have vowed to use a so-called veto referendum to block this effort at repeal. Under Maine law, IRV backers will have 90 days after the passage of the delay-and-repeal bill to gather valid signatures equivalent to 10 percent of the votes cast in the 2014 governor's race, or roughly 61,000 in total. Once those are verified, this latest law itself would be suspended until the referendum could take place, which would likely be in June of 2018. Consequently, if the referendum makes the ballot, Maine voters could use IRV in primaries next June while simultaneously voting on whether to keep the new electoral system itself.

Election Integrity

● Georgia: In a bombshell development, technicians working for election administrators in Georgia erased a critical data server that is at the center of a lawsuit about a major security vulnerability that left this system open to potential hacking. The breach not only exposed sensitive voter records like Social Security numbers for millions of registered voters in the Peach State, it rendered electronic voting machines vulnerable to the sort of tampering that could be used to skew election results—vote hacking Armageddon.

Consequently, over the summer, election reform advocates filed a lawsuit to require Georgia to replace its outdated equipment and improve security, with the chief intention of forcing the state to end the use of electronic voting machines that produce no paper backup records. However, technicians at Kennesaw State University, which is under contract with the Secretary of State, wiped the infamous server clean mere days after the lawsuit was filed, destroying a key piece of evidence that could shatter the plaintiffs' case.

It's unclear, though, who ordered the data wipe. Predictably, Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp denies any knowledge or role in the matter. However, Kemp is the main defendant in the lawsuit, and his office had accidentally disclosed millions of sensitive voter records in 2015 in a separate incident. Kemp also has a long record of trying to suppress the rights of black voters, and he’s now running for governor, but malfeasance like this demonstrates what's at stake in the election to succeed him in 2018, in which former Democratic Rep. John Barrow is running.

Elections

● Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio & Rhode Island: EMILY's List, a prominent group devoted to electing pro-choice Democratic women to office, announced endorsements of candidates running for the top election-administrator job in four states in 2018. EMILY’s initial round of endorsements for secretary of state includes voting rights attorney Gena Griswold, who is challenging Republican incumbent Wayne Williams in Colorado, and state Rep. Kathleen Clyde, who is running for a GOP-held open seat in Ohio. They’re also backing incumbents Maggie Toulouse Oliver in New Mexico Nellie Gorbea in Rhode Island.

Ohio is especially pivotal because the party that wins two out of three of the offices of governor, secretary of state, and state auditor in 2018 will control a majority on the commission responsible for state legislative redistricting after 2020—and potentially also congressional redistricting if a ballot initiative reform attempt passes next year. Outgoing Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted, who is running for governor in 2018, has also used his office to purge hundreds of thousands of voter registrations simply for infrequent voting, and litigation over these purges will soon go before the Supreme Court.

● Virginia: Virginia doesn't allow voters to directly initiate laws or referendums, but voting rights will indeed be on the ballot when voters elect their next governor on Nov. 7. Republican candidate Ed Gillespie's recent ads attacking Democratic Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam over felony disenfranchisement demonstrate how Gillespie would take Virginia back to an ugly chapter of its Jim Crow history if he gets elected.

Back in 2016, outgoing Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe began using his executive authority to unilaterally restore voting rights to all Virginians—roughly 200,000 in total—who had served their sentences, including parole and probation. As of April 2017, McAuliffe had restored voting rights to 152,000 disenfranchised citizens.

As part of a campaign where nakedly racist appeals have taken center stage, Gillespie's ads (here and here) have resorted to scaremongering about how Democrats support restoring the franchise even to those convicted of violent crimes. Of course, voting is a right, not a privilege, but that’s not how Republicans see it. Earlier in 2017, GOP legislators tried and failed to make the restoration of rights conditional upon the repayment of all court fines, fees, and restitution, something that would disproportionately disenfranchise poor Virginians for life as an effective poll tax.

Before McAuliffe's executive orders, the Sentencing Project estimated that Virginia disenfranchised one in five of African Americans, five times higher than the rate of those who are not black. If Northam wins this election, he has promised to continue McAuliffe's policy of automatically restoring voting rights for all those who complete their sentences. But Gillespie's GOP would effectively restore part of a Jim Crow-era restriction that was literally created to "eliminate the darkey as a political factor," as one white-supremacist legislator stated at the time.

This election is also the first gubernatorial contest in the nation that will help determine partisan control over redistricting after the 2020 census. As a former Republican National Committee chairman, Gillespie served as one of the architects of the GOP's successful 2010 effort to capture control over redistricting in state after state to gerrymander in majorities that defied the will of the voters.

If Gillespie becomes governor, Republicans would only need to maintain their majorities in 2019 in the state legislature, where the districts already strongly favor them, in order to be able to gerrymander the legislative and congressional lines again in 2021. However, if Northam prevails in 2017, he could veto future gerrymanders and force the courts to draw nonpartisan districts instead. With this in mind, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee is spending another $250,000 to support Northam over the last two weeks, bringing their total investment to $1 million for this race.

Election Administration

● Arizona: A new report from the office of state Attorney General Mark Brnovich concludes that Secretary of State Michele Reagan, a fellow Republican, broke the law by failing to send election pamphlets to approximately 400,000 voters during a 2016 statewide ballot-measure election regarding education funding. Reagan's office failed to send out the guides, which contain both impartial information regarding the issue at stake as well as arguments both for and against, to roughly 200,000 of 1.9 million households in the state, and that failure might have had a real impact: The measure ultimately passed by just 19,000 votes out of 1.1 million cast.

Reagan's staffers used a flawed new method for determining which voters who receive early voting ballots were supposed to get pamphlets. Furthermore, Brnovich's office found that Reagan violated the law by withholding information regarding the missing pamphlets for 19 days and only revealed the major failure six days before the election—after the attorney general's office received a complaint. By that point, almost half of voters had already cast ballots. However, investigators say that a “gap” in state law means there will be no penalty for Reagan.

But this is not the first time Reagan's office has come under fire for incompetence, and it could give her opponents an opening in next year's election. She already faces a primary challenge from the right from state Sen. Steve Montenegro, but state Senate Minority Leader Katie Hobbs gives Democrats a chance of picking up the office with a candidate who would be a much friendlier advocate for voting rights.