The New Yorker: How to Fix Our Remaining Election Vulnerabilities

Heading into the 2022 midterms, one of the biggest questions was to what degree the machinery of future elections would be controlled by politicians who campaigned on the premise that the 2020 Presidential vote was rigged. If enough Trumpian candidates won, the former President would have the chance in 2024 to do what he tried to do last time: steal the Presidency. And, indeed, the New York Times found that more than two hundred candidates who called the 2020 result into question were elected to various offices two weeks ago. …

I recently spoke by phone with Richard L. Hasen, who is the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at U.C.L.A. and an expert in elections law, about what the 2022 results mean for 2024, and what longer-term threats to American democracy remain. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed potential weak spots in the next Presidential election, what a landmark case before the Supreme Court could mean for how the United States conducts future elections, and why laws trying to restrict voting access so often fail. …

Good-government groups such as Common Cause have been going after gerrymanders in both Democratic and Republican states for some time. The Supreme Court, in a 2019 case, held that federal courts can’t hear claims of partisan gerrymandering. The Court said that there’s just no standard to apply, and so federal courts are closed—there are other ways of dealing with these problems. Some states have created redistricting commissions; others have state courts that have policed partisan gerrymandering.

That’s what happened in Moore v. Harper. After Common Cause lost in the U.S. Supreme Court, the group argued before the state Supreme Court in North Carolina that partisan gerrymandering violates the state constitution, and they won on that claim. The state Supreme Court ordered North Carolina to redraw its districts, to make them a little fairer in a state that is pretty evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.