Ari Berman of Mother Jones is worried about what happens next in the states for voting rights:
After record turnout in 2020, Republican-controlled states appear to be in a race to the bottom to see who can pass the most egregious new barriers to voting.
According to a new analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, 253 bills to restrict voting access have been introduced in 43 states already this year. Georgia is ground zero for the GOP’s escalating war on voting, targeting the voting methods that were used most by Democratic voters in 2020 and which contributed to flipping the state blue and electing two Democratic senators.
A flip through that Brennan Center list confirmed that North Carolina Republicans have not yet added to it. Likely, they are already sharpening their redistricting scalpels for when the Trump-delayed census data arrives in the fall this year. Having to pass new voting restrictions over Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto no doubt also gives them pause.
Linda Greenhouse (NYT) wonders what’s next from the Supreme Court on voting rights. The ruling this week to deny Pennsylvania Republicans’ efforts to further litigate the 2020 election was not reassuring. Three justices would have taken the case: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. Their dissents provided “both a road map and a rationale for the Supreme Court’s future intervention in the quintessentially state matter of how to conduct elections.”
Such intervention could interfere with state courts’ role in quashing the kinds of legislative disenfrancisement defeated repeatedly over the last decade in North Carolina and federal courts. Only those fights focused both on gerrymandering and on voting law.
Greenhouse writes:
When state high-court judges are elected, as they are in many states, they typically run in statewide races that are not subject to the gerrymandering that has entrenched Republican power in states that are much more balanced politically than the makeup of their legislatures reflects. What better way to disable the state courts in their democracy-protecting role than to push them to the sidelines when it comes to federal elections.
North Carolina is one state that elects judges. And like the Georgia voting laws Berman mentioned, North Carolina Republicans keep jiggering with voting methods looking for any advantage after they lose races.
Former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley was the first black woman to win a statewide office in 2008 (on the NC Court of Appeals, below):
Gov. Bev Perdue appointed Beasley to the state Supreme Court in 2012 and she won a full term in 2014, a year Democrats lost across the country (below).
Gov. Roy Cooper made Beasley Chief Justice in 2019, but she lost her reelection bid by a hair in 2020. COVID-19 hampered campaigning statewide (result below):
Look carefully at the three race results above pulled from the state returns website. Can you spot the difference?
After 2016, the Republican-controlled NC legislature changed how judges races were displayed on the ballot. They switched them from nonpartisan to partisan races after Associate Justice Michael Morgan won his seat on the court in 2016. (Republicans had already applied the change to lower court races.) Like Beasley, Morgan is Black (2016 result below).
In one sense, one cannot fault the change. Voters tend not to vote in races where they do not know the candidates, especially when there is no party identification. A quick check I made last week showed voting in these judicial races was over 10 percent higher in 2020 than in 2016. But that did not help Beasley. Republicans gained two seats last November. Democrats’ 6-1 state Supreme Court majority shrank to 4-3.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that Beasley’s name has been mentioned as a possible Biden Supreme Court nominee. Unless Cheri Beasley runs for North Carolina’s open U.S. Senate seat in 2022. She is rumored to be considering it.
Meanwhile, states across the country brace for more Republican election law fiddling for advantage.