🚨Today is publication day for my book, "Aligning Election Law"! . The book argues that promoting alignment between governmental outputs and popular preferences should be an overarching goal of election law. You can buy the book at the link below.

“The mugger asked for a billion dollars, the keys to my house, and my first-born. I got him to agree to $200M (for now). I’m such a savvy negotiator.”.

But I thought Republicans had to re-redistrict Texas to avoid racial gerrymandering. Surely that wasn’t a facade for a more potent partisan gerrymander?.

The decision to reargue Callais is confusing. The most plausible rationale for reargument is getting into the Section 2 merits of the preceding lawsuit. But this case simply isn't about Section 2. So it's a terrible vehicle for a blockbuster ruling about the VRA.

For a paper showings this empirically, see here. Over hundreds of IRV elections, in the U.S. and abroad, the Condocet winner was elected about 99% of the time.

My idea is a student-faculty partnership in which students, say, cull the submissions from 3000 to 300 (e.g., the pieces that got HLR memos), and faculty then choose among those articles. Students could keep their Bluebooking-citechecking role.

My reaction to the HLR leak is that they take article selection extraordinarily seriously. 400+ memos totaling 2000+ pages? And that’s just one stage of their process?. Geesh. When I ran YLS’s international law journal, we just met and talked about submissions.

Looks like there’s little voting polarization by favorite baseball team. I now have a new favorite example for why racial vote dilution is a thing but many other potential kinds of dilution — like by baseball team — aren’t.

Link to my book: Link to WaPo on BBB:

In a highly polarized environment, whichever party is in power tends to pursue policies that are too liberal or conservative for the electorate as a whole. So we often get a combination of partisan alignment with policy misalignment.

Yet voters hate the unified Republican government's main agenda item, by a margin of about 2-to-1. So if this bill is approved, stark policy *misalignment* will ensue. Unfortunately, this is a common pattern in modern American politics.

The unpopularity of the Republican megabill highlights the distinctions between different kinds of alignment (the subject of my recent book). In partisan terms, the unified Republican government aligns with voters' preferences. Voters wanted a Republican President and Congress.

This is a huge victory for democracy. The county line was one of the most distortive policies in modern politics. I’m proud to have played a small role in ending it.

This is one of many stories considering how Trump could use the government’s power to injure Musk — without ever mentioning the legality of these tactics. They’d all be illegal! As with Trump’s attacks on Harvard, he can’t try to hurt Musk because of his political views.

And alternative maps that don't consider election results (but do satisfy all federal and state requirements) are almost never this uncompetitive. Relative to them, the plan is stark outlier.

The plan was adopted pursuant to a "least change" criterion, which carried forward the prior plan's anticompetitive intent. Under the plan, the median margin of victory has been close to thirty points -- a landslide by any measure. Only one district (CD 3) has been competitive.

This new suit brought by @ElectionClinic, Law Forward, and Stafford Rosenbaum alleges that Wisconsin's congressional plan is an unconstitutional anti-competitive gerrymander. The plan mirrors its 2011 predecessor, which a federal court found had the aim of protecting incumbents.

So if the administration *does* try to order the FEC to do anything, the court is ready to intervene. "This Court’s doors are open to the parties if changed circumstances show concrete action or impact on the FEC’s or its Commissioners’ independence.".

While the court (reasonably) held that there was no impending attack on the FEC's independence and bipartisanship, the court agreed with @ElectionClinic's amicus brief (filed on behalf of Commissioner Weintraub) that these aspects of the agency are vital.