President Donald Trump has long criticized the integrity of mail ballots. But leading up to the 2024 election, Republicans spent millions of dollars encouraging supporters to vote early, including by mail, hoping to bank votes ahead of Election Day. Even Trump encouraged his supporters to use them.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

“ABSENTEE VOTING, EARLY VOTING, AND ELECTION DAY VOTING ARE ALL GOOD OPTIONS,” Trump, then the Republican nominee, posted on social media in April 2024.

That embrace didn’t last. In a new social media post this week that was full of false claims about elections — and signaled solidarity on the topic with Russian President Vladimir Putin — Trump promised to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS,” among other things, and wrote that an executive order “to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections” is coming.

Trump is only the latest to swing between support and skepticism of mail voting, a method that has divided the parties for decades.

Mail voting has been in use in American elections since the Civil War, though even then, as now, there were differences in how states administered it. Today, all states allow some form of it, and 28 states allow voters to cast ballots by mail for any reason. Eight states, including Republican-dominated Utah, as well as Washington D.C. allow all elections to be conducted entirely by mail.

A bipartisan 2005 report from a commission headed by former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, a Republican, concluded that absentee ballots were the greatest potential source of fraud, a finding often cited by critics of the method.

Voter fraud happens, but experts agree that it’s exceedingly rare and leaves a long paper trail. Election officials have multiple safeguards designed to catch any attempt.

Since 2008, an MIT Election Lab project called the Survey of the Performance of American Elections conducted after every federal election has asked voters whether they support running all elections by mail. Republican support was typically flat, while growing numbers of Democrats and independents supported the idea. Then, in 2020, when the pandemic supercharged mail ballot use, Democratic support spiked, while Republican support declined.

The partisan gap shrank considerably in 2024, the survey found, even as mail ballot use dropped from pandemic-fueled heights. But it’s still a bigger gap than it was before the pandemic. The survey also found Republicans are more likely than Democrats to believe that voter fraud, including absentee ballot fraud, happens frequently.

Public opinion, of course, shifts. As Votebeat has reported, Republicans in 1991 made Arizona one of the first states in the country to allow voting by mail with no excuse, and the option has been wildly popular. But by 2022, against the backdrop of Trump’s claims about mail-in ballots, Republicans in the state were trying (so far unsuccessfully) to eliminate the option.

Even Carter and the Carter Center urged states to expand mail voting in 2020 during the pandemic, stressing the commission’s earlier conclusion that fraud was rare when safeguards were in place.

It isn’t clear what steps Trump will take to attempt to limit use of mail ballots. Under the Constitution, states have authority over the “time, place and manner of elections.” Congress also has some authority. Any attempt by Trump to eliminate mail voting by fiat would be quickly challenged in the courts, and legal experts stress it would be unlikely to succeed. Federal judges have already blocked key provisions of an executive order on elections Trump issued in March, citing his lack of authority over elections.

Comments from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt this week signaled a legislative effort could be in the works.

“The White House continues to work on this, and when Congress comes back to Washington I’m sure there will be many discussions with our friends on Capitol Hill, and also our friends in state legislatures across the country, to ensure that we’re protecting the integrity of the vote for the American people,” she said.

Ultimately, the fight isn’t just in the courts — it’s in public perception. And there, the verdict is far from settled.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Redistricting — the art of drawing the district boundaries that determine representation — is messy, opaque, confusing, and inherently political. It typically happens only once a decade in each state, after the census produces new demographic data.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

But that once-a-decade cadence now looks like the next political norm to fall.

It’s customary for the party in control of redistricting to draw maps that weaken the voting power of the opposition while maximizing its own political advantage. Gains in technology and data have made it possible to draw lines ever more precisely. “I define redistricting as the only legalized form of vote-stealing left in the United States today,” said the late Thomas Hofeller, a prominent Republican redistricting consultant — in 1991.

Even so, recent events suggest the current no-holds-barred political climate could take the partisan machinations of redistricting to a higher level.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott cited constitutional concerns when he called a special session of the state Legislature to draw new congressional maps, but there is also a clear political motive that Republicans haven’t been shy about discussing. Republicans currently hold a narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. The midterm elections are nearing, and the party in power typically loses seats. President Donald Trump, a Republican, has said that the Texas GOP should seek to redraw the lines in a way that allows them to add as many as five seats to the Republican column. A proposed map released this week aims to fulfill that objective.

Trump is reportedly also urging other Republican-controlled states, including Missouri, to consider redistricting in a way that would boost the GOP’s chances of picking up seats, though that could mean some incumbents will have to run in more competitive districts. Ohio is engaged in a legally mandated redistricting that Republicans, who control the process, also hope will yield more seats.

This has set off a sort of redistricting arms race, with Democratic leaders in other states saying they could redraw lines to offset Republican gains. Importantly, leaders in some states that have tried to make redistricting less partisan — by shifting control to commissions or adopting other limitations — are suggesting they intend to sidestep them.

For example, California has used an independent redistricting commission for decades, but Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said the heavily Democratic state must respond to the push in Texas by drawing new maps that benefit Democrats.

They’re not screwing around,” Newsom said. “We can’t afford to screw around either. We have got to fight fire with fire.”

Newsom and other Democratic leaders have said they’re seeking workarounds that would allow a midcycle redistricting in the state. For example, the state attorney general said he believes lawmakers could draw new maps that would be put before voters in a special election.

Democratic governors in Illinois, New York, and New Jersey have also said they’re exploring options, but the barriers are higher than in Texas.

In most of the states under Democratic control, maps already heavily favor Democrats — as in Illinois — or the legislature has limited authority over redistricting. Changing that on a timeline that would allow new maps for the midterms would be difficult.

One thing is certain: Any new maps are likely to face court challenges over how political power is distributed among districts. Those will come at a time when the Supreme Court may be poised to consider another challenge to the landmark Voting Rights Act.

At the end of the last term, the justices didn’t rule on a high-profile Louisiana redistricting case, instead announcing they would hear new arguments on it during the 2025-26 term.

Other redistricting cases, too, could be headed to the court. In the end, it’s hard to tell what will happen, except that voters — who have packed Texas legislative hearings on the redistricting proposal, even before proposed maps were released — may not have much say.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Several provisions of President Donald Trump’s executive order on elections have run into obstacles in court. But others are quietly moving ahead, at least for now, with big potential implications for state and local election officials and the voting systems they rely on.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

In Montgomery County, Ohio, for example, residents can choose to mark their ballots either by hand, or using a ballot-marking device that prints out a paper ballot with a summary of their choices, alongside a machine-readable code reflecting those choices. Voters can verify their selections before submitting their ballots into a tabulator, which scans the code and records the votes.

At least 85% of voters in a typical election choose the option that relies on the machine-readable codes, Jeff Rezabek, the county elections director, estimated.

So Rezabek is closely watching what happens with a provision in the executive order that calls for mostly banning the use of such codes (except where required for disability access), and what it would mean for the millions of dollars’ worth of already-certified voting equipment he can’t easily or quickly replace.

Experts consider systems with a voter-verifiable paper record to be the gold standard for election security. But some critics have argued that when these systems use a code for faster counting, voters have no way of knowing whether the code accurately reflect their choices, even though the results can be checked later.

The executive order instructs the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to work the barcode ban into a revision of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines, the certification standards that most states rely on for their voting equipment. And the multistep process of altering the standards is already beginning.

An initial step is set for July 2, when the U.S. EAC has called a meeting of its Technical Guidelines Development Committee, a group of mainly election officials and technical experts.

The EAC’s meeting notice says the technical committee, which currently has several vacancies, will consider a draft of updated guidelines at that meeting.

EAC Chairman Donald Palmer, in an emailed response to questions from Votebeat, said there have “been security concerns expressed by the Executive Branch, state legislatures, and stakeholders on both sides of the aisle” about the use of barcodes and QR codes, and the July 2 meeting is a required step in the EAC’s regular update process.

“With this review, the EAC is being responsive to election officials’ needs and the evolving security demands of our elections,” he said. “Gathering feedback from our boards and the public is a chance for the community to provide its essential input on those changes.”

Building voting systems to new standards, testing them in federally accredited laboratories, and certifying them takes a long time. The last set of revised guidelines, VVSG 2.0, were adopted in 2021, but no systems certified under those guidelines have yet hit the market, though some are going through the process now.

It isn’t clear what the EAC will do if the technical committee declines to endorse revised guidelines on the barcodes. But election officials know the general public isn’t closely following the federal rule-making process, and may not understand that equipment certified under the previous guidelines can be used securely and produce accurate results. They are worried that the executive order has already sown public doubt about the integrity of voting equipment.

“It doesn’t entirely matter what happens through the standards process because voters are not going to hear that part,” said Amy Cohen, executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors. “Voters are hearing the president said this, and so that optics challenge is going to be very difficult for elections in 2025 and beyond.”

State lawmakers, too, could also try to act on their own to carry out the president’s priorities, regardless of what happens with the executive order. That could prove expensive for local jurisdictions. Rezabek said Ohio state lawmakers recently considered legislation that would require localities to use election equipment certified to VVSG 2.0, which would require buying new machines.

“Then we’re in trouble because one, I have no funding,” he said. And even if he did, he said, “the manufacturer doesn’t have it to give to us.”

Rezabek, a former Republican state lawmaker, worked with Ohio’s election officials association to address their concerns and lobby state legislators against that. They haven’t adopted such a requirement — yet.

Election officials in other states are also worried. In Texas, state Elections Director Christina Adkins told county election officials on a call this month that her office has been “in discussions,” with the EAC, which she said “understands the impact of any decisions they make in this area.”

“I want to make it very clear, though, that we are bound to the federal certifications,” Adkins said. “Our state law requires that, so any changes to the federal certifications would generally apply to Texas systems as well.”

Some counties are already moving to replace equipment because of the executive order. In Williamson County, Texas, commissioners voted to spend more than $1 million to replace their current voting system, which relies on barcodes, with equipment that does not, according to local news reports.

Los Angeles County, the nation’s largest voting jurisdiction, uses customized voting equipment, and publicly posts a key to deciphering its QR code, to reassure the public that the codes can be checked to verify that they accurately reflect voters’ choices.

Election officials have been “assessing the impact” of having to modify or replace more than 31,000 ballot marking devices that are valued at more than $141 million, county elections chief Dean Logan wrote in court filings connected to one of the lawsuits challenging the executive order.

Money is just one consideration.

“Even if the EAC goes forward, changes these standards, and tries to apply them to existing voting systems, the time frame for making that kind of significant change to a voting system … that is usually a multiple year process to do that,” Logan said in an interview with Votebeat. “So part of what is not well-constructed in that order is understanding the timeline.”

Votebeat Texas reporter Natalia Contreras contributed.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

For weeks, we’ve been telling you about the return of the SAVE Act, long-pending federal legislation that would require people to provide documented proof of U.S. citizenship before they could register to vote.

This news analysis was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get future editions, including the latest reporting from Votebeat bureaus and curated news from other publications, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

That Republican-backed bill passed the U.S. House this month, again, along mostly partisan lines.

The bill would create a new requirement for registering to vote for most Americans. But voting rights watchdogs and other opponents of the legislation are highlighting the potential impact on one group in particular: married women who have changed their names. And these concerns appear to be resonating.

“House Republicans just passed a bill that would disenfranchise 70 million married American women,” U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, posted on social media, in one example. “Under the SAVE Act, women who took their spouse’s last name and don’t have an updated passport or birth certificate would be turned away at the polls.”

That’s a far-reaching claim that deserves a closer look.

What is the SAVE Act, and what would it require?

Right now, federal law requires everyone registering to vote to swear, under penalty of perjury, that they are a citizen. Voting by noncitizens is already illegal — punishable by severe criminal penalties, including prison time and loss of residency status — and experts say it’s rare.

Nevertheless, many Republicans and conservatives have argued both that any number of noncitizens casting ballots is too many, and that noncitizens could conceivably vote in large numbers, affecting the outcome of elections. And they’ve pushed for state and federal legislation to tighten access to the ballot through proof-of-citizenship requirements, among other measures.

The SAVE Act passed the U.S. House on April 10 with 220 votes in favor, including four Democrats, and 208 votes against. It faces a difficult path in the U.S. Senate. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has vowed that Democrats will block it, and some Republican senators have said it has little chance of becoming law this session.

The bill would require anyone registering to vote to provide documented proof of citizenship. The text of the legislation mentions U.S. passports or a certified copy of a birth certificate as types of acceptable proof.

What’s behind the concern over married women?

Voting rights advocates point to research showing millions of Americans may not have easy access to such documentation, and say the requirement would potentially disenfranchise many eligible voters.

That includes some 70 million women, according to Ocasio-Cortez’s post. The numbers she cited, which are circulating widely, track with an analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress that relies partly on data from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center about the number of married women who have changed their names.

These women have a legal name that differs from the names on their birth certificates, the analysis notes. Voting rights advocates and others say married women, as well as other eligible voters who have changed their names legally, could struggle to provide documented proof of citizenship bearing their current legal names.

What do SAVE Act supporters say about this?

Supporters of the SAVE Act say those concerns are overblown.

In an op-ed published in the conservative online magazine the Federalist this week, U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, the Texas Republican who sponsored the legislation, said most people who have changed their name have updated passports or other documentation.

He also pointed to a provision in the bill that “explicitly directs states to establish a process allowing them to register to vote despite a name discrepancy.” That provision directs states to establish a process for applicants who cannot provide documented proof of citizenship to submit other evidence to support their eligibility, or sign an affidavit attesting to their citizenship status.

Proponents of the bill say the other evidence could include documents such as a marriage license or court decree documenting the name change, but opponents say it’s too vague.

In New Hampshire, where a new proof-of-citizenship requirement went into force earlier this year, voting rights watchdogs said some residents attempting to register to vote were stymied when they didn’t have documentation that matched their legal name. It’s unclear how many were affected.

This is an issue we’re continuing to track as more states debate measures to tighten voter registration, and we’re also inviting readers to share their views on the movement to require proof of citizenship for voting.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s interim editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

The government’s approach to voting rights is changing fast under the new administration, and a complex, closely watched redistricting case out of Louisiana shows just how fast.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

On Jan. 16, the U.S. solicitor general, who represents the government in court, asked the Supreme Court to allow the federal government to participate in upcoming oral arguments in the Louisiana case.

But on Jan. 24, four days after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, the acting solicitor general withdrew that request. Her filing said the government no longer supported its earlier argument that the district court had erred in its ruling.

“Following the change in Administration, the Department of Justice has reconsidered the government’s position in these cases,” the Jan. 24 filing read. “The purpose of this letter is to notify the Court that the previously filed brief no longer represents the position of the United States.”

Two different positions. Eight days apart.

The case will continue regardless of the federal government’s participation, and as always, the justices are free to consider whatever legal arguments they choose. But the government’s shift under the new administration shows how quickly the legal ground is shifting on voting rights cases. As Votebeat reported in January, the Justice Department has also withdrawn from a voting rights case it had brought last year against Virginia over the removal of names from voter rolls.

Such about-faces aren’t unprecedented after a new president takes office — the first Trump administration and the Biden administration also changed the government’s positions on some matters before the courts. But they’re not common either, lawyers said.

“The solicitor general tries to maintain continuity, and has credibility with the justices based on that continuity,” said Justin Levitt, a constitutional law expert and a professor at Loyola Law School.

At this point, even judges are anticipating changing positions from the government on voting rights cases, and asking the Justice Department to clarify its intentions — something that Levitt noted is unusual.

Take a long-running redistricting case underway in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. In that case, the Justice Department alleged that Texas’ political maps violated the Voting Rights Act. But a week after Trump took office, judges noted that the department had ordered a pause on ongoing civil-rights litigation and asked the government to state whether it intends to pursue its claims. The Justice Department promised an answer by mid-March.

And after the new U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, was sworn in this month, she received a formal request from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking that the Justice Department drop an ongoing lawsuit over Georgia’s 2021 overhaul of its election laws.

Under Biden, the Justice Department had contended that the law “was enacted with a racially discriminatory purpose” and violated the Voting Rights Act, Raffensperger noted. But he said record turnout in Georgia since the law was passed shows those allegations are untrue.

As in the Louisiana, Virginia, and Texas cases, there are private plaintiffs involved. If the Justice Department withdraws from the suit against Georgia, legal wrangling will continue.

And private parties, such as voting rights and civil rights groups, are frequently in the vanguard in such cases, notes Danielle Lang, the senior director of voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center and a lawyer who represents some plaintiffs in the Virginia case.

Under some previous administrations, the Justice Department has brought few voting rights cases, Lang said.

Still, she said, “it’s unusual for there to be such telegraphing that a department is going to make such about-faces.”

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s interim editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

After a volatile and eventful start, everyone is trying to figure out what to expect from the new Trump administration and the GOP-controlled Congress. That includes secretaries of state from around the country, who gathered in Washington this week for a conference that included a session on “What to Expect in the 119th Congress.”

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

The panel included staff members for committees that oversee election legislation: the House Administration Committee and the Senate Rules Committee. The forecast is still taking shape, but one priority is clear: the House has signaled it will again consider legislation known as the SAVE Act, which would require people who are registering to vote to provide documented proof of citizenship.

The House passed the legislation last year, but it stalled in the Senate. Thomas Lane, the elections counsel for the Republican majority on the House Administration Committee, noted that the bill was one of a dozen included in the so-called rules package adopted when the new Congress began in January. That means it’s essentially on a fast track, and difficult to amend.

Voting rights watchdogs have criticized the bill as unnecessary and harmful to eligible voters who may lack such documents through no fault of their own, pointing out there is no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting. Voters must already attest they are citizens when registering, under the penalty of perjury. With noncitizen voting being extraordinarily rare, experts say, the legislation would place too many burdens on both voters and election officials, for little gain.

But leading up to the 2024 presidential election, Republicans, including President Donald Trump, repeatedly promoted the notion that noncitizen voting was a big enough problem to influence the outcome, and worthy of urgent legislative action. At one point, Trump asked congressional Republicans to insist on passage of the bill as part of a deal to keep the government open; that ultimately didn’t happen.

Lane, one of four congressional staff members on the panel, said the SAVE Act will be a priority for the House this time. He acknowledged a push to consider what a voter identification requirement would look like and potentially revisit at least parts of other voting laws. Among them is a provision in the National Voter Registration Act that requires states to stop systematic cleaning of voter rolls 90 days before a federal election, a sticking point in ongoing litigation against Virginia.

It is far less clear what legislation might be able to draw the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster in the Senate, where Republicans have 53 seats. Tiffany Ge, the majority staff director for the Senate Rules Committee, chaired by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., stressed during the panel that federalism is fundamental to election administration, and said it’s important for states and localities to have the flexibility to do things in ways that make sense for them.

During the last Congress, McConnell was an original co-sponsor of Senate legislation that would have let states include a requirement on mail voter registration forms that applicants provide proof of citizenship, though the bill didn’t pass. That could suggest a legislative route he, at least, might support.

Speaking from the audience, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, raised several concerns about the SAVE Act, pointing out that not everyone has documents showing proof of citizenship, and said he objected to the part of the legislation that establishes criminal penalties for an election administrator who registers someone lacking the documentation. “They’re doing their best out there,” he said.

Arizona is currently the only state enforcing a requirement for voters to provide documented proof of citizenship. Other states, including New Hampshire and Louisiana, have now passed legislation requiring it, and several state legislatures are considering it or intend to do so, including in Texas and Michigan. Arizona voters who don’t provide it cannot vote in state and local elections.

That means Fontes is more familiar than most with the challenges of administering such a requirement: Arizona officials last year realized a database glitch meant around 200,000 voters were listed as having provided proof of citizenship when they had not. Separately, a Votebeat analysis of voters restricted to federal elections found voters living on Native land and on or near college campuses were more likely to have not provided the documentation.

Although Fontes said he agrees with the intent of restricting participation in elections to citizens, “there are some real issues.” It’s still unclear how Congress will address them.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s interim editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

The tense final days of President Joe Biden’s administration and the frenetic early hours of President Donald Trump’s second term muddied the waters on critical issues that could reshape our democracy.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

First, Biden. News of his final days in office centered on his use of presidential pardon power and his announcement that he considered the Equal Rights Amendment to have been ratified by the states, a legally controversial opinion that still requires more steps before it goes into effect. The proposed constitutional amendment enshrining gender equity was approved by Congress and sent to the states more than 50 years ago.

Then Trump came into office, and immediately raised his own set of constitutional questions. He issued sweeping pardons to people charged or convicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

He also rescinded a raft of Biden’s executive orders, including one related to the census, signaling that he may revisit an abortive effort from his first term to alter the scope of the decennial count.

The 2021 Biden order had reaffirmed the U.S. Census Bureau’s longstanding practice of counting people “without regard to immigration status.” It cited the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which calls for representatives to be apportioned by “counting the whole number of persons in each State.”

“There are very few constitutional clauses that are as clear as that,” said Michael Li, a senior counsel in the democracy program of the Brennan Center for Justice. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts have long held this to clearly mean that every resident of a state must be included in the count, whether they’re citizens, legal permanent residents, or living in the U.S. under other circumstances.

The census numbers are used for many purposes, including allocating resources to states and determining congressional representation, which means that the Trump-Biden back-and-forth has high stakes.

During his first term, Trump had tried to use the 2020 census to ask questions and amass data on people’s citizenship status. That was seen as a step toward letting states draw voting districts based on the number of voting-age citizens rather than total population. In 2016, Li points out, the Supreme Court left open the possibility for states to use such alternative methods.

The Supreme Court shut down Trump’s effort to include the citizenship question on the 2020 census, but it didn’t preclude adding such a question in the future.

Trump’s second term won’t include a decennial census, but preparations for the next one must start long before 2030, and Trump’s revocation of Biden’s order signals that he intends to influence it, especially on the issue of citizenship.

Indeed, look at Trump’s move in the context of his own executive order limiting birthright citizenship to the children born to American citizens or legal permanent residents.

This order challenges the longstanding reading of the 14th Amendment, which says in the first sentence: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” That amendment also guarantees equal protection of the law to “any person.”

Writing for the majority in the 2016 Supreme Court ruling Li referenced, Evenwel v. Abbott, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg quoted founding father Alexander Hamilton as saying, “There can be no truer principle than this — that every individual of the community at large has an equal right to the protection of government.”

Naturally, challenges to the legality of Trump’s citizenship order are coming in fast. At least 22 states have signed on as plaintiffs in a wave of lawsuits. On Jan. 23, a federal judge temporarily blocked it, describing it as “blatantly unconstitutional.”

It’s impossible to say how these presidential decisions and challenges will play out in the long term. But they will almost certainly cast Americans into renewed and crucial battles over who counts in our democracy. The outcome of these battles could reshape representation for everyone.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s interim editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

After the 2020 redistricting cycle, a set of local political maps stood out to voting rights advocates and the U.S. Department of Justice: Galveston County, Texas. Now, the lawsuit over those maps has taken an interesting twist, and it highlights the way long standing legal precedents are under challenge right now.

First, the backstory: Galveston County used redistricting to break up the sole majority-minority district for its commissioners court, thrusting Black and Latino voters into majority-white districts where they would have no real opportunity to elect their candidates of choice. The lawsuit over Galveston County’s redistricting became the first local redistricting case this cycle to prompt the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene.

Last month, the plaintiffs won a decisive victory. A federal judge ruled the county’s redistricting violated the Voting Rights Act, and, in a 157-page ruling, made clear it wasn’t an especially close call.

“This is not a typical redistricting case. What happened here was stark and jarring,” wrote the U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey Brown, a former state Supreme Court justice who was nominated to the federal bench in 2019 by former President Donald Trump. “Looking at the totality of the circumstances, it was a clear violation of § 2 of the Voting Rights Act. And it must be overturned.”

Brown ordered new maps in Galveston. The county — predictably — appealed, arguing it hadn’t violated the Voting Rights Act. And here’s where things get a little less predictable.

A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, by most measures the most conservative appellate court in the country at the moment, unanimously affirmed Judge Brown’s ruling, finding it was correct under the law.

Brown also correctly abided by a precedent set by the 5th Circuit itself decades ago, in which the court decided that Black and Latino voters can be combined for the sake of the legal analysis, as long as they vote cohesively. In other words, if there aren’t enough Black voters or Latino voters, or voters of another protected class, to make up a majority of the district by themselves, they can be put together when plaintiffs can show their political interests align.

That’s what happened in Galveston. The panel of 5th Circuit judges acknowledged that plaintiffs met the tests to proceed with the lawsuit on behalf of what, in legal jargon, is referred to as a “coalition claim.”

But there’s a but.

The 5th Circuit panel, it turns out, isn’t so sure that the long-standing precedent was, in fact, decided correctly by the 5th Circuit, an issue Galveston had raised.

“[T]his panel is bound by it under the rule of orderliness,” they wrote, “But the court’s decisions in this respect are wrong as a matter of law.”

The panel affirmed the district court order, requiring new maps, but first, it wants to poll all the judges on the 5th Circuit to see if a majority want to hold what’s known as an en banc hearing, to revisit that decades-old precedent, “at the earliest possible date.”

So where does that leave the voters of Galveston County, who need new commissioner district maps pretty quickly, since the 2024 election is coming up fast?

“At the current moment, everything the district court said is stayed,” said Mark Gaber of the

Campaign Legal Center, who represents some of the plaintiffs in the case, though he said he expects the 5th Circuit to move relatively quickly. Still, he said, it’s hard to be sure what will happen.

“It’s not usual to see a six-page affirmance saying, ‘We wish we didn’t have to do this,’” he said, adding, “The facts are so clear-cut, the only way out is if the law doesn’t allow this.”

Michael Li of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, a redistricting expert, said the precedent is a straightforward one, and if the 5th Circuit decides to move forward with an en banc hearing, “it’s probably not a very good sign.”

Earlier this year, defying expectations, the Supreme Court issued a strong ruling upholding voting rights precedents in another voting rights case, this one out of Alabama. The decision was celebrated by voting rights advocates, but challenges to precedents haven’t ended. In addition to the Galveston case, for example, Louisiana last week signaled it plans to bring another challenge to the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act in connection with its redistricting.

Li acknowledged the country is in a moment where voting rights laws and precedents are “potentially changing,” and points out the current Supreme Court is upending precedents in many areas. Just because the justices didn’t do so in the Alabama case doesn’t mean changes aren’t coming, in other words.

“You could do it in a big way,” he said, “or you could do it in death by a thousand cuts.”

A heads up: Happy Thanksgiving from Votebeat! We’re taking next week off from this newsletter for the holiday. We’ll be back on Dec. 2 with our usual analysis of important voting news.

Back Then

Want to read more about redistricting? Check out this 2012 article from the Atlantic, “The League of Dangerous Mapmakers,” for a look at how the process has been manipulated for centuries for political advantage.

New From Votebeat

From Votebeat Arizona: Mohave County supervisors to decide on hand-counting ballots in 2024

From Votebeat Texas: Harris County election shows progress. But challenges remain ahead of 2024.

In Other Voting News

• In a leaked videotaped interview, a onetime lawyer for former President Donald Trump told prosecutors that a top presidential aide told her Trump would not leave the White House “under any circumstances,” the Washington Post reported. The videotape of lawyer Jenna Ellis was made in connection with a Georgia case related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
• The New Georgia Project, a high-profile voting rights nonprofit in Georgia started by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, is conducting an internal probe in response to questions about financial irregularities and misuse of funds and fired its executive director, Politico reported.
• Social media company Meta will allow its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, to host ads questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election, a change in policy first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
• Pennsylvania’s Jewish community is still lobbying to move the state’s 2023 primary election to a date other than the first full day of Passover, April 23, when many religious Jews will be unable to cast a ballot, KDKA reported. State lawmakers have considered proposals to move it, but hit an impasse last month and time to do so is running short.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s story editor and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter.Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization committed to reporting the nuanced truth about elections and voting at a time of crisis in America.