Michael Wines

No more, however. This spring, the Texas Legislature outlawed polling places that did not stay open for the entire 12-day early-voting period. When the state’s elections take place in three weeks, those nine sites — which logged many of the nearly 14,000 ballots that full-time students cast last year — will be shuttered. So will six campus polling places at colleges in Fort Worth, two in Brownsville, on the Mexico border, and other polling places at schools statewide.

“It was a beautiful thing, a lot of people out there in those long lines,” said Grant Loveless, a 20-year-old majoring in psychology and political science who voted last November at a campus in central Austin. “It would hurt a lot of students if you take those polling places away.”

The story at Austin Community College is but one example of a political drama playing out nationwide: After decades of treating elections as an afterthought, college students have begun voting in force.

Their turnout in the 2018 midterms — 40.3% of 10 million students tracked by Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy &amp; Higher Education — was more than double the rate in the 2014 midterms, easily exceeding an already robust increase in national turnout. Energized by issues like climate change and the Trump presidency, students have suddenly emerged as a potentially crucial voting bloc in the 2020 general election.

And almost as suddenly, Republican politicians around the country are throwing up roadblocks between students and voting booths.

Not coincidentally, the barriers are rising fastest in political battlegrounds and places like Texas where one-party control is eroding. Students lean strongly Democratic: In a March poll by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, 45% of college students age 18-24 identified as Democrats, compared to 29% who called themselves independents and 24% Republicans.

Some states have wrestled with voting eligibility for out-of-state students in the past. And the politicians enacting the roadblocks often say they are raising barriers to election fraud, not ballots.

“The threat to election integrity in Texas is real, and the need to provide additional safeguards is increasing,” the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, said last year in announcing one of his office’s periodic crackdowns on illegal voting. But evidence of widespread fraud is nonexistent, and the restrictions fit an increasingly unabashed pattern of Republican politicians’ efforts to discourage voters likely to oppose them.

“Efforts to deprive any American of a convenient way to vote will have a chilling effect on voting,” said Nancy Thomas, director of the Tufts institute. “And efforts to chill college students’ voting are despicable — and very frustrating.”

The headline example is in New Hampshire. There, a Republican-backed law took effect this fall requiring newly registered voters who drive to establish “domicile” in the state by securing New Hampshire driver’s licenses and auto registrations, which can cost hundreds of dollars annually.

The dots are not hard to connect: According to the Tufts study, 6 in 10 New Hampshire college students come from outside the state, a rate among the nation’s highest. As early as 2011, the state’s Republican House speaker at the time, William O’Brien, promised to clamp down on unrestricted voting by students, calling them “kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience.”

Florida’s Republican secretary of state outlawed early-voting sites at state universities in 2014, only to see 60,000 voters cast on-campus ballots in 2018 after a federal court overturned the ban. This year, the state Legislature effectively reinstated it, slipping a clause into a new elections law that requires all early-voting sites to offer “sufficient nonpermitted parking” — an amenity in short supply on densely packed campuses.

North Carolina Republicans enacted a voter ID law last year that recognized student identification cards as valid — but its requirements proved so cumbersome that major state universities were unable to comply. A later revision relaxed the rules, but much confusion remains, and fewer than half the state’s 180-plus accredited schools have sought to certify their IDs for voting.

Wisconsin Republicans also have imposed tough restrictions on using student IDs for voting purposes. The state requires poll workers to check signatures only on student IDs, although some schools issuing modern IDs that serve as debit cards and dorm room keys have removed signatures, which they consider a security risk.

The law also requires that IDs used for voting expire within two years, while most college ID cards have four-year expiration dates. And even students with acceptable IDs must show proof of enrollment before being allowed to vote.

“Universities have had to decide one by one whether they want to modify their IDs to make them acceptable, issue a second ID for voting purposes or do nothing,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And they’ve all gone in different directions.”

While legislators call the rules anti-fraud measures, Wisconsin has not recorded a case of intentional student voter fraud in memory, Burden said. But a healthy turnout of legitimate student voters could easily tip the political balance in many closely divided states.

Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., won election in 2016 by 1,017 votes over her Republican rival, Kelly Ayotte. Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, a Democrat, won that year by about 10,000 votes in a state with nearly 500,000 undergraduates. And Trump carried Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes; the University of Wisconsin system alone enrolls more than 170,000 students.

Some critics suggest that opposition to campus-voting restrictions is overblown — that students can find other IDs to establish their identities, that campus polling sites are a luxury not afforded other voters.

But local election officials generally put polls where they are needed most, in packed places like universities and apartment complexes or locations like nursing homes where access is difficult.

Repeated studies have shown that making voting convenient improves turnout. And while it is difficult to say with certainty what causes turnout to decline, anecdotal evidence suggests that barriers to student voting have done just that. Nationwide, student turnout in the 2016 presidential election exceeded that of the 2012 presidential vote — but according to the Tufts institute, it fell sharply in Wisconsin, where the state’s voter ID law first applied to students that year.

Hurdles to student voting are hardly limited to politically competitive states. Most notably, the voter ID law in deeply Republican Tennessee does not recognize student ID cards as valid for voting, and legislators have removed out-of-state driver’s licenses from the list of valid identifications.

A Tennessee law requiring election officials to help register high school students is commonly skirted via a loophole, said Lisa Quigley, the top aide to Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., a voting rights advocate. And cities like Nashville and Knoxville, with large concentrations of college students, have no campus early voting polling places, she said.

Tennessee ranks 50th in voter turnout among the states and the District of Columbia. “We’re terrible at voting,” Quigley said. “And it’s intentional.”

Only Texas’ turnout is worse. And as in Tennessee, voting is particularly difficult for the young.

Texas law requires educators to distribute voter registration forms to high school students, but the requirement appears to be ignored by most of the state’s 3,700 secondary schools. And while many states allow students to preregister at 16 or 17, and even vote in primaries if they turn 18 by Election Day in November, Texas bars students from registering until two months before their 18th birthday, the nation’s most restrictive rule.

The state’s voter ID law — among the most onerous, though softened by court rulings — still excludes college and university ID cards and only allows the use of out-of-state driver’s licenses that many students carry if voters sign a form swearing that they could not reasonably acquire an accepted ID and explaining why.

Some Texas schools have sought for years to lower those barriers. At the University of Texas at Austin, a group called TX Votes has greatly increased turnout by rallying students against voting restrictions and enlisting scores of campus groups in voting and registration campaigns.

Austin Community College, whose 39,000 full-time and 33,000 part-time students sprawl over campuses in four Texas counties, pursues a similar strategy. The system’s student body is drawn largely from working-class and minority families.

In addition to sponsoring the campus voting, it gives its employees two hours off during every election to cast ballots.

It is not the only Texas college to set up campus voting. North of Austin, Southwestern University collected ballots from more than half of its 1,500 students last November in a one-day visit by a mobile polling place. Tarrant County, whose largest city is Fort Worth, racked up 11,000 votes at mobile campus sites; Cameron County, in southern Texas, opened three campus sites and reaped nearly 2,800 votes.

Dollar for dollar, mobile voting sites were “the most effective program we had,” said Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk and chief elections official.

State legislators took a dimmer view. Last spring, state Rep. Greg Bonnen, a Republican from suburban Houston, filed legislation to require that all polling places remain open during the whole early-voting period, eliminating pop-up polls. He argued that local politicians were using the sites to attract supportive voters for pet projects like school bond issues.

The Texas Association of Election Administrators opposed the change, and Democratic legislators proposed to exclude college campuses, nursing homes and other sites from the requirement. But Republicans rejected the changes and passed the bill on largely party-line votes.

There are efforts to push back at the restrictions on student voting. The elections administrator in Dallas County, Toni Pippins-Poole, decided after the Legislature outlawed temporary polls to spend the money needed to make pop-up voting sites on eight college campuses permanent.

In New Hampshire, the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is suing to undo the State Legislature’s domicile law. The League of Women Voters and the Andrew Goodman Foundation, a Mahwah, New Jersey, nonprofit group focused on protecting voting rights for young people, are contesting Florida’s parking requirements for polls in federal court.

Purdue University said last month that it would temporarily not charge out-of-state students a fee for ID cards, which are valid for voting in Indiana. Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., Purdue’s president and the state’s Republican governor from 2005 to 2013, said he wanted to encourage civic literacy among students.

Advocates for student voters argue that those are the exceptions.

“Everyone 18 years and older has a right, if not a duty, to participate in our electoral system,” said Maxim Thorne, managing director of the Goodman Foundation. “We should be having conversations about how to make it easier, how to make it more welcoming, how to make it worthy of our time and effort. And what we’re seeing is the reverse.”

This article originally appeared in

The Student Vote Is Surging. So Are Efforts to Suppress It.

AUSTIN, Texas — At Austin Community College, civics is an unwritten part of the curriculum — so much so that for years the school has tapped its own funds to set up temporary early-voting sites on nine of its 11 campuses.

The suit, sponsored by a nonprofit group allied with the Democratic Party, claimed that the House map “may be the most extreme and brazen partisan gerrymander in American history” and asked that new districts be drawn in time for primary elections in March. North Carolina voting is split close to evenly between Democrats and Republicans, but Republicans control 10 of the state’s 13 seats in the House of Representatives.

Such suits normally require months and even years of litigation. But the plaintiffs are seeking to build on the three-judge panel’s unanimous ruling Sept. 3 that partisan gerrymanders of state legislative districts violated the state Constitution’s guarantee of free elections.

That ruling — and the repeated admission by Republicans that the House map had been drawn to lock in the party’s dominance — opens a clear path to a rapid verdict in the suit, R. Stanton Jones, a lawyer with Washington-based law firm Arnold &amp; Porter who represents the plaintiffs, said in an email.

“This case is as straightforward as they come,” Jones wrote, “and the gerrymandered congressional map should be struck down immediately and replaced with a new, fair map for the 2020 elections.”

The suit was filed by Democrats from each of the state’s 13 congressional districts. The sponsor of the lawsuit, the National Redistricting Foundation, is an arm of a Democratic group led by former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. that is seeking to challenge Republican control of the next round of redistricting in 2021.

“For nearly a decade, the people of North Carolina have been forced to vote on manipulated electoral maps that were drawn by Republicans in the Legislature to create a partisan outcome,” Holder said in a statement. “It’s time for this era of gerrymandering in North Carolina to come to an end.”

State Sen. Philip E. Berger, the Republican Senate president, charged in another statement that the lawsuit was part of a national strategy by Holder to create “a Democratic legislative majority created by Democratic judges.”

The lawsuit is one of only a few challenges to partisan gerrymandering in state courts, but many legal experts anticipate that several similar suits will be filed in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June that it had no authority to review maps drawn for political advantage. As in North Carolina, the vast majority of state constitutions have provisions that might support challenges to partisan maps.

The lawsuit filed Friday challenges a House map drawn by Republicans in 2016 after some districts were found to be racially gerrymandered. Democrats claim that House districts have been crafted to assure Republican dominance since party leaders first drew them in 2011. The suit argues that the map violates state Constitution clauses guaranteeing free elections, freedom of speech and assembly, and equal protection under the law.

If the suit succeeds, it could open the way for Democratic gains in North Carolina. After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a Republican gerrymander of that state’s congressional map last year, Democrats captured nine of 18 House seats, a gain of four from 2016.

North Carolina’s Republican leaders have long said that they drew the state’s congressional map for maximum political gain. One of the principal drafters of the most recent version of the House boundaries boasted in 2016 that he had given Republicans a 10-3 edge in seats “because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” But Republicans say Democrats gerrymandered the state in their direction for decades when they controlled the Legislature.

Since the House map was first drafted in 2011, it has become an exercise in political recidivism — challenged often in court, struck down three times, but always emerging with a pronounced bias favoring Republicans.

Beginning in 2013, critics charged in state and later federal courts that two of the 13 House districts were racial gerrymanders. The state court disagreed, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the complaints and ordered the districts redrawn in 2016.

Republican leaders not only complied but also said that the new maps would avoid any accusations of racial bias by being drawn strictly for political gain. That led critics to sue again, charging this time that the entire House map was a partisan gerrymander. A three-judge federal panel struck the map down on those grounds two times before the Supreme Court reversed the panel in June.

Separately Friday, the former chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, Robin Hayes, agreed to plead guilty to federal charges of lying to the FBI about a scheme to influence the state insurance commissioner. Hayes and three other men were indicted in April on conspiracy and bribery charges stemming from what prosecutors say was an effort to win favorable treatment for an insurance company controlled by one of the men.

Gerrymandering Suit Targets North Carolina's House Map

Weeks after a North Carolina court panel ruled that a state legislative map gerrymandered by Republicans violated the state Constitution, a new lawsuit filed in the same court Friday took aim at another gerrymander — this time, the map of the state’s 13 congressional districts.

It sounds like a lot, experts say, until the realization that a single state, Pennsylvania, plans to spend at least $125 million to upgrade its voting machines.

And that expense addresses just one vulnerability in an elections system whose security procedures — including vulnerable files of registered voters and inadequate systems for postelection audits — can be even creakier than its voting machines.

State and local election officials are left “rolling the dice” between replacing their antiquated paperless voting machines or upgrading outdated registration databases, said Lawrence Norden, the director of the Election Reform Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

“Two hundred and fifty million dollars across over 8,000 election jurisdictions doesn’t come close to paying for these things in a single year, let alone for elections beyond 2020,” he said in an email.

The Brennan Center has estimated that state and local agencies would need nearly $2.2 billion over the next five years to adequately shield elections from tampering.

How much Congress will appropriate for election security this year remains unclear. The House has approved $600 million, but the two chambers are likely to settle on a compromise amount in a legislative conference this fall.

Congress allotted $380 million to the states in 2018, money that has largely been spent or committed to security improvements by the 2020 election season, with much remaining to be done.

That allocation provided $14.1 million of the more than $125 million that Pennsylvania plans to spend on voting equipment, and about $6 million for new voting machines in Louisiana that could cost $95 million.

Colorado received more than $6.3 million from the 2018 grant, and “we have plans to use every penny,” Secretary of State Jena Griswold said. But she said a lengthy list of security measures was still unfunded, including safeguards against ransomware attacks; improvements for the state’s voter-registration database; protection for county election offices that connect to that database and for computers linked to county offices; an artificial-intelligence system to detect threats to election offices; and a cybersecurity staff to work with counties.

“And that’s speaking for a state with some of the best cybersecurity safeguards in the nation,” Griswold said. “When you look at other states that don’t have recently purchased voting equipment, don’t have equipment that’s not completely separated from the internet, don’t have audits — for them, the need is even more pressing.”

Beyond their immediate needs, Griswold and other state officials said, election agencies will need a steady infusion of money to keep their security measures current against the ever-improving skills of potential intruders.

The $250 million allotment in the Senate was the first sign of movement in a standoff over voting security that had stymied a sheaf of legislation even before Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in November.

Since then, the House has passed two sweeping proposals to tighten the elections infrastructure, one of which, the Securing America’s Federal Elections Act, recommended the $600 million the House appropriated separately. Other proposals that have yet to pass either chamber would allot up to $1 billion on security before the 2020 election.

Other congressional proposals that have gone nowhere include bipartisan efforts to force social media companies like Facebook to disclose who is paying for political content on their sites and to set rules for cooperation between state election officials and federal intelligence agencies.

Those bills and others have largely been bottled up by Sen. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader. McConnell, who after months of criticism for inaction agreed to sponsor the $250 million security package approved last week, said the appropriation would continue the “enormous strides” the Trump administration had made toward more secure elections.

Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, one of the leading Democrats on voting security issues, called the measure a “joke.”

“This amendment doesn’t even require the funding be spent on election security,” he said in a statement. “Giving states taxpayer money to buy hackable, paperless machines or systems with poor cybersecurity is a waste.”

That underscored one of the key partisan differences that has blocked voting legislation. Calling it federal intrusion in local elections, McConnell of Kentucky and some other Republicans oppose proposals to tighten oversight of the voting infrastructure, such as limiting the purchase of voting machines to devices that produce a paper ballot. Democrats and other Republicans see such rules as central to shielding systems from outside interference.

“We don’t have basic standards for cybersecurity around elections,” Norden, of the Brennan Center, said. “There are zero federal regulations on voting system vendors — even requirements to report that they’ve been hacked. You’re not going to deal with that through the appropriations process.”

McConnell argues, and experts agree, that the states have vastly improved security measures since the 2016 elections. The Department of Homeland Security, the lead federal agency on the issue, is offering cybersecurity screenings and advice in all 50 states. By the 2020 general election, the share of voters who use machines that produce no paper trail, recently about 1 in 4, will shrink to perhaps 1 in 10.

But many experts say much more needs to be done. The Brennan Center report estimated that states need nearly a half-billion dollars to modernize and secure their electronic files of registered voters, a target of Russian intelligence in all 50 states in 2016.

Millions of dollars more are needed to build backup systems, from copies of voter lists at individual polling places to stacks of paper ballots, that could be used if attackers disabled digital voting systems. Postelection audits in many states are either antiquated or missing altogether; conducting modern audits nationwide would cost about $20 million a year, according to the report.

Still more money would be needed to train election officials in each of the nation’s 8,000 to 10,000 election districts, many in rural areas that lack money for security measures.

And because hackers and foreign intelligence operatives are constantly honing their skills, state officials say, election offices need regular infusions of money — the Brennan Center has suggested $175 million every two years — to update their own safeguards.

“That gives us the ability to plan out as well when we can expect funding so we’re not attached to the political whims from year to year,” Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state, said at a cybersecurity summit in Washington last week.

To Keep Votes Safe, $250 Million Only Goes So Far

WASHINGTON — If the full Senate, as expected, approves a recent committee decision to spend $250 million more to protect the 2020 elections from outside interference, Congress will have devoted at least $630 million toward that goal since Russia sought to influence the last presidential election.

Five dormitories lie in the 6th District, seven in the 13th. All are in unassailably Republican territory, as the line splits both the university and the city’s mostly Democratic 285,000 residents between two conservative rural bastions.

Nikolaus Knight, a senior and political science major, was assigned to a new dormitory after his freshman year — and had to re-register to vote as a result. “We had the power as a student body to sway an election,” he said. “And our voice as a campus was stripped away when we were cut in half.”

This is the power of mapmaking by the state’s Republican Legislature, which drew new political borders three years ago that allowed Republicans to capture 10 of this state’s 13 House seats last fall, even though nearly half of all House votes went to Democratic candidates.

Nobody disputes that the North Carolina map was drafted to elect a maximum number of Republicans to the House, not even the Republicans themselves. The map has a 10-3 Republican tilt, one of its drafters said, “because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments over whether such partisanship violates the Constitution. One case involves the Republican-drawn map in North Carolina. A companion case centers on Maryland’s 6th Congressional District, which Democrats admit they redrew in 2011 to make it harder for the Republican incumbent there to win re-election.

The two cases hold the potential to set the course of American politics for generations. A decision to rein in partisan gerrymanders could reshape House maps in a number of states, largely but not exclusively to the benefit of Democrats. A decision not to rein in the mapmakers would give both political parties carte blanche to entrench themselves and hogtie their opponents when state legislatures draw the next decade’s House districts in 2021.

The justices have dodged the issue of gerrymandering for decades, gridlocked over whether it is even possible to distinguish acceptably partisan maps from unconstitutional ones.

Chief Justice John Roberts worried aloud last year that creating a legal standard to identify partisan gerrymanders would turn the court into a sort of electoral kingmaker.

But now the North Carolina House map could force him and other justices to confront the issue head-on. The redrawing of Maryland’s House map by Democrats was also baldly political, ousting a 20-year Republican incumbent by infusing the rural 6th District with tens of thousands of urban Democrats. But compared with the lawmakers in North Carolina, the Maryland Democrats were restrained, turning down maps that would have wiped out the state’s other Republican-leaning House district as well.

Created three years ago, the North Carolina map was drawn for overtly partisan reasons. Indeed, the Republican chairman of the state House Elections Committee, Rep. David R. Lewis, opened the drafting session by saying, “I acknowledge freely that this would be a political gerrymander.” Republicans ordered that the next map create “as many districts as possible in which GOP candidates would be able to successfully compete for office.”

The result, drawn by the master Republican redistricting strategist Thomas B. Hofeller, met that mandate. It anchored three overwhelmingly Democratic districts in liberal cities — Charlotte, Raleigh and Durham. The remaining urban strongholds, in Asheville, Fayetteville and Greensboro-Winston-Salem, were filleted along party lines, with their most Democratic areas absorbed by otherwise rural Republican territories.

Democrats in the state had done their share of gerrymandering in the past, but it was nowhere near what the Republicans were now doing.

The map eliminated any competition for House seats in all but the most exceptional circumstances. In November, amid the strongest national Democratic electoral performance since Watergate, only one of the 10 Republican-held House seats was in serious jeopardy (that race, in the 9th Congressional District, was marred by election fraud complaints and will be rerun this summer). Democrats won the three districts that were gerrymandered in their favor by an average of 45 percentage points.

That highlights collateral damage from gerrymanders that is sometimes overlooked: Not only do they entrench a majority party, but they weaken the opposition as well. Candidates do not want to run losing races and donors and parties do not want to support them.

Pete Glidewell can testify to that. Glidewell, a real estate agent and Democratic activist in Elon, about 15 miles from Greensboro, ran in 2016 against the incumbent Republican in the newly drawn 6th Congressional District, Mark Walker. Walker had won in 2014 with nearly 59 percent of the vote. Glidewell was the only Democrat to oppose him.

“I thought I was better qualified than him,” he said. “I still do.”

Glidewell soon got a call from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the arm of the Democratic Party that doles out money and tactical support to House candidates. They were seeking a donation.

“I said, ‘Ma’am, I am actually running for Congress in this district and I wish you’d pass along that I need as much help as you say you do,'” he recalled. But to the committee, Glidewell was a lost cause. “They wouldn’t talk to me,” he said.

In the campaign that followed, Glidewell’s largest contribution, $5,400, came from his wife. His campaign cost $93,300, most of it spent on internet advertising, yard signs and car magnets.

“No television,” he said. “We couldn’t afford it.”

Walker’s campaign spent more than that — $94,716, to be precise — on fundraising consultants alone.

That November, Walker shellacked Glidewell, 59 percent to 41 percent, and had more than $225,000 in unspent donations in the bank. Other incumbent House members have leftover funds from past campaigns, too — $2.4 million, in one case.

“So it’s even more impossible to get a credible opponent,” Glidewell said.

Tim Moreland is a Democratic political operative in Guilford County, where Greensboro is located. He said that uncompetitive districts lead to lazy incumbents, less-qualified challengers and election campaigns that provide little clarity.

“We get a lot of politicians who have been in seats for a very long time,” he said. “They’ve never had to run a competitive election, or raise a lot of money, or work to build relationships with the other party. Input from the average voter matters less and less.”

Some academics dispute it, but political veterans say gerrymanders widen political divisions because incumbents have no incentive to court moderates and swing voters.

“If the most competitive race you’ve got is against some right-wing or left-wing person in the primary, and you don’t have to worry about the general election, you end up with representatives who aren’t really representative,” Thomas Mills, a onetime Democratic campaign consultant who ran his own losing campaign for a gerrymandered House seat in 2016, said in an interview.

The case against partisan gerrymanders is not merely a Democratic one. Republican candidates in North Carolina’s three safe Democratic House seats also were disenfranchised, along with their supporters. So were Republicans in Maryland’s 6th District.

The plaintiffs in the North Carolina and Maryland cases argue that the maps violate the Constitution in a number of ways. They say the maps effectively punish supporters of gerrymandered candidates for expressing their political preference, violating both the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal treatment under the law.

And they say the maps pervert Article One of the Constitution, whose rationale for frequent House elections was to make the chamber’s members more responsive to the American people. But with a gerrymander, they argue, the people have almost no voice.

Yet even if a majority of the justices agree, that may not carry the day for the opponents of gerrymanders. The question of how to spot rigged maps still remains: Since no political map is completely free of bias, how do judges distinguish between the acceptable and the unacceptable?

Defenders of North Carolina and Maryland’s maps say the court has no business trying and will shred its reputation for above-the-fray fairness if it starts deciding whether maps favor one party or another. Partisan gerrymandering, they say, is a political issue best addressed by the politicians in Congress and the states.

But that is precisely the issue, voting-rights advocates say: Gerrymanders are creations of lawmakers, who have seldom had much interest in curbing their own power.

And the modern tools of map-drawing — powerful computers and software, and an unprecedented cascade of data on voters — have allowed drafters to turn political districts into near-impregnable fortresses that can sustain a party’s hold on power from one redistricting cycle to the next.

“Because of the availability of data, we can aggregate voting patterns and organize them in a way that the political system can be controlled by decision-makers,” said Douglas Berger, a Durham lawyer and a plaintiff in one of the North Carolina lawsuits.

He speaks from experience. His firm’s political action committee uses data analytics to assess a candidate’s prospects with ever-greater precision before deciding whether to donate to a campaign. Partly because of that, the PAC largely steers clear of supporting North Carolina candidates for the House.

Yet technology may also provide an answer to the conundrum that has kept the court from acting.

Social scientists have devised a host of new yardsticks in recent years for gauging partisan leanings in maps. Perhaps most important among them is that advances in computing now permit experts to randomly generate thousands and even millions of hypothetical maps, all drawn using the same criteria, that can be compared with the maps challenged in gerrymander trials. Mathematical formulas can then calculate whether a challenged map is part of the pack in its partisan tilt or is at the extremes — a “statistical outlier,” in redistricting parlance.

That already has been done in the federal trial challenging the North Carolina gerrymander. There, an expert witness for the plaintiffs randomly generated 3,000 simulated congressional district maps using the same demographic data as the official map that has regularly awarded Republicans 10 of 13 seats.

None of the 3,000 gave the party more than nine seats.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/us/supreme-court-gerrymandering-north-carolina.html" id="db98fc77-d761-38fb-aaa0-9bc3b2fb7454">The New York Times</a>.

GREENSBORO, N.C. — On the east side of Greensboro, the boundary separating North Carolina’s 6th and 13th congressional districts takes an abrupt detour. The line yanks hard to the west until it reaches Laurel Street, turns northward and disappears into the brown-brick campus of North Carolina A&amp;T; State University, where it neatly bisects the nation’s largest historically black college.

Will the Supreme Court End Gerrymandering? Arguments Begin This Week

Here in Lincoln County, a fir-carpeted swath of rural northern Wisconsin, that is starting to look like no simple task.

In March 2017, the county board of supervisors passed a resolution urging the state to create a nonpartisan panel to take over mapmaking from politicians in the state Legislature. That kick-started a movement that has now seen 47 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties — representing three-fourths of the population — issue similar resolutions. Atop that, voters in eight counties, including Lincoln, have overwhelmingly endorsed nonpartisan mapmaking in referendum votes.

That is striking, because many of those counties, including Lincoln, are Republican bastions in a state where Republicans have so deftly filleted the state legislative map that a Democratic landslide in November barely dinged their dominance.

“History tells us that our legislators are not going to have the courage to do the right thing unless they get nothing but pressure,” said Hans Breitenmoser, a dairy farmer and Lincoln County supervisor. “And the only way to do that is a grassroots movement.”

But 2 1/2 years of grassroots appeals have hardly budged the Republican majority in the state Legislature that rigged the state’s political maps to begin with.

In a statement last month, State House Speaker Robin Vos, one of those maps’ chief architects, said that legislation to finally set up a nonpartisan redistricting panel of the kind Lincoln County and others were endorsing would hand over the Legislature’s lawful authority to ”an unelected, unaccountable board of bureaucrats.”

A bill to create a nonpartisan panel, introduced in June, has drawn only four of the State Assembly’s 64 Republicans as co-sponsors. An identical bill in the State Senate has no Republican backers at all.

The reason is obvious, said Kenneth Mayer, a University of Wisconsin political scientist and an expert on gerrymandered maps: Nonbinding referendums and resolutions — even those with overwhelming public support — are the equivalent of Nerf guns in a political battle that demands heavy artillery.

“Is there any evidence that anyone has lost an election because they oppose a nonpartisan redistricting process?” he asked. “When people start losing their seats because of a policy position, that’s when they get religion. And I don’t think there’s much evidence that that has happened.”

Some measure of gerrymandering has traditionally been practiced by both parties; in Maryland and Illinois, for example, Democratic majorities have ignored or rejected pleas to take politics out of map-drawing. But by far the greatest resistance to fair maps has come from Republicans, who mounted a wildly successful campaign in 2010 to control the statehouses across the country that draw political districts. Since then, the party has embraced gerrymanders, some of them so extreme that they effectively consign opponents to permanent minority status.

Wisconsin is but one indicator that a citizen-led crusade against gerrymandering, a movement that had begun to score major victories before the Supreme Court’s decision in June, may find the struggle harder now, and success more elusive. The easy battles have largely been won, experts say. And with the Supreme Court’s refusal to regulate partisan maps, they say, the politicians who benefit most from them are less subject to outside pressure than ever.

“The low-hanging fruit has been picked and eaten,” Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political science professor and election analyst, said of the campaign against gerrymandering.

There has been some progress. Last year, voters in four Republican-controlled states approved ballot initiatives that diluted partisan control of mapmaking. The legislature in a fifth state, Colorado, handed map-drawing to a nonpartisan panel to head off another grassroots drive for a constitutional amendment.

And in Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court stepped in last year where federal courts had held back, ruling that a congressional map gerrymandered by Republicans violated the State Constitution.

This year, other ballot initiatives are underway or contemplated in Virginia, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Arkansas, all states where Republicans control mapmaking. And anti-gerrymandering forces are pressing a lawsuit in North Carolina’s state court system, aimed at undoing a gerrymandered state legislative map.

But opponents already are working to undo some of those redistricting initiatives. A group tied to the National Republican Redistricting Trust, an arm of the Republican Party, filed a suit last week arguing that a citizen redistricting commission approved by Michigan voters last year is “blatantly unconstitutional.”

In Missouri, a Republican effort to cripple a citizen redistricting initiative that was approved last year passed the State House, though it died in the Senate. Utah Republicans are considering changing a nonbinding redistricting initiative that voters approved last year, just as they already have altered two other unrelated ballot measures. Last week, New Hampshire’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu, vetoed legislation broadly backed by both parties that would have established independent redistricting there.

And in Arizona, where voters approved a nonpartisan redistricting initiative in 2000, Democrats accuse Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, of packing political allies onto the panel that vets prospective members of the Independent Redistricting Commission that will draw maps in 2021.

Because the free-speech and election provisions of most state constitutions are stronger than those in the federal Constitution, state-based lawsuits against gerrymandering, like those in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, are at least plausible in most states. But 38 of the 50 state supreme courts are elected, often in highly partisan contests that limit the prospects for those kinds of suits to reach favorable rulings.

A total of 18 states allow residents to place constitutional amendments on the ballot for voter approval, and a number of those states have already moved to nonpartisan mapmaking. In some of the remaining states, the route to getting an anti-gerrymandering measure on the ballot is strewn with technical hurdles.

In the large number of states where ballot initiatives are not allowed, changing legislators’ minds, suing them or voting them out of office are the only ways to rein in partisan maps. And in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, legislators have even less incentive to surrender their redistricting power — particularly the power to draw congressional maps — unless legislators elsewhere do the same and create new momentum among voters.

For example, Democrats in Maryland, where the congressional map has been gerrymandered against Republicans, have said that they would not be inclined to adopt nonpartisan redistricting and risk reducing the Democratic presence in the House of Representatives unless Republican legislatures in other states did the same.

In Virginia, the Republican-run General Assembly easily approved a proposed constitutional amendment in November establishing nonpartisan redistricting procedures — perhaps, analysts say, because they saw a chance that Democrats might seize a majority in elections this fall. Should Democrats take power, some analysts say, they may well be unwilling to grant the second vote of approval needed to place the issue on the 2020 ballot.

“Why would they give up a power the electorate would have just given them?” Sabato asked. “They were screwed by the Republicans in 2011” — in the last round of redistricting — “and being politicians, they’ll want to return the favor in 2021.”

No state epitomizes the potential roadblocks more than Wisconsin, where the electorate is all but equally split between the left and right, but the Legislature has remained lopsidedly Republican since the last political maps were drawn in 2011.

The state Constitution does not allow a citizens’ ballot initiative to make redistricting nonpartisan. Anti-gerrymandering advocates say a lawsuit in state courts challenging the Legislature’s maps would be a waste of time; bitterly fought judicial elections, notable for heavy spending by out-of-state interests, have produced a solidly pro-Republican state Supreme Court.

Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat elected in last year’s landslide, can veto laws implementing Republican-drawn maps in 2021 if he deems the maps too partisan. But news reports this month indicated that conservative activists in the state were discussing a plan to enact redistricting through a joint resolution, which cannot be vetoed, rather than through a law.

Republican legislative leaders called the report “rumor-mongering by Democratic activists” and said neither the Legislature’s Republican caucus nor its lawyers had discussed the idea. Neither Vos, the House Speaker, nor the State Senate majority leader, Scott Fitzgerald, responded to questions from The Associated Press and The New York Times about whether they had in fact ruled that tactic out.

The Legislature’s 2011 gerrymandered maps drew a muted backlash years ago. In 2013 and 2014, supervisors in eight counties approved resolutions calling on the Legislature to make a plan for drawing nonpartisan maps, and voters in one heavily Democratic county backed the idea in a referendum. But not until 2017, when Breitenmoser brought the idea of a resolution to fellow Lincoln County supervisors, did other counties start to pay attention.

Breitenmoser is a Democrat, but he said his interest in redistricting was driven not by partisan politics but by local concerns like the state of Lincoln County’s roads, which receive so little state money that the board has levied a $20 annual fee on vehicles registered in the county to compensate.

The more he probed the redistricting issue, Breitenmoser said, the more strongly he believed that the Legislature was not responding to counties’ concerns, in part because legislators’ districts are drawn to shield them from serious election challenges. “It doesn’t take a political scientist to understand that the way lines are drawn benefits no one except the people who drew the lines,” he said.

Breitenmoser’s resolution, a nonbinding expression of sentiment, passed the 27-member Lincoln County board in March 2017 with only a sprinkling of opposition. It quickly drew applause from the Wisconsin Farmers Union, and won support that September from 56 of the 66 county representatives at the Wisconsin Counties Association. Supervisors in other counties began calling him for advice on passing their own resolutions.

The 47 resolutions passed to date largely call for Wisconsin to follow neighboring Iowa, which leaves map drawing to nonpartisan experts but allows legislators to make changes — not behind closed doors, but in public. Iowa’s method, first used in 1980, is widely considered a model for nonpartisan map-drawing.

The counties, their association and the Farmers’ Union all have telegraphed their positions of support to leaders in Madison, the state capital. Lincoln County, at least, has heard nothing in response.

“You know, the system we have has worked very well for them,” Breitenmoser said.

It may continue to. The counties’ progress in recruiting new supporters of nonpartisan maps has been glacial.

The four Republican sponsors of the anti-gerrymandering legislation that was filed in June were three more than backed the same bill in the previous legislative session. Among the new sponsors was Rep. Loren Oldenburg, a farmer who represents Vernon County, abutting the Mississippi River in the state’s southwest.

Oldenburg signed on after Vernon County, which passed a redistricting resolution in 2017, followed up with a referendum in April. In that plebiscite, 71% of voters supported nonpartisan redistricting.

“I was very pleasantly surprised,” Dennis Brault, the chairman of the Vernon County board, said of Oldenburg’s decision. “I think a lot of it had to do with the referendum. It made a difference.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/us/gerrymandering-redistricting-wisconsin.html" id="6e4cb621-1a57-32d9-a6e0-73322b985d7f">The New York Times</a>.

In the War Against Gerrymandering, an Army of Voters Meets a Dug-in Foe

MERRILL, Wis. — When the Supreme Court concluded this summer that it had no authority to strike down partisan political maps, no matter how outrageous, Chief Justice John Roberts offered solace to those who call the maps dangerous to democracy. Maybe federal judges cannot outlaw gerrymanders, he wrote in the court’s majority opinion. But voters surely could.

Jenniffer González-Colón is Puerto Rico’s representative in Congress, and something of a metaphor for Puerto Rico itself, a territory with 3.2 million residents caught in a perpetual state of purgatory. They are U.S. citizens in name, but lack many of the benefits of citizenship, including full representation on Capitol Hill.

González-Colón’s news releases refer to her as “congresswoman,” but her official title is resident commissioner, which means she has far less power than others in the House of Representatives. She can propose legislation and vote on bills in committees and on the House floor, but with a telling asterisk: Should her ballot be the deciding one, the House votes again — this time without her participation.

“If it counts, it doesn’t count,” Luis Bacó, González-Colón’s former chief of staff and a top aide to two previous commissioners, said in an interview. “Honestly, it’s more of a pain in the neck than anything else.”

A similar situation exists for the District of Columbia and other territories such as Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Those in the territories also do not have the ability to vote in presidential elections.

Still, Rosselló’s departure and the resignation this week of his acting representative in Washington leaves González-Colón as the only link between its residents and the Capitol. It also opens an opportunity to replace him as governor, an ambition she is widely believed to harbor.

González-Colón and Rosselló are members of the same Puerto Rican political party and even ran on the same 2016 ticket, but the relationship has not always been amicable. Her ties to the governor’s Washington representatives were strained, and when Rosselló tumbled into scandal this month with the publication of vulgar messages between him and his staff, she called the messages shameful and urged him to drop any plans for reelection.

She said this week that no one had consulted her about her replacing Rosselló, a possibility should she be appointed to the now-vacant post of secretary of state, first in the line of succession. (Wanda Vázquez, the secretary of justice, is now first in line to replace Rosselló, but faces opposition.) And González-Colón refused to talk about running for the office in 2020, saying, “I don’t think public officials should be wondering or speculating about what can happen, or about their political ambitions” during the crisis.

But in the same breath, she noted that her campaign to become resident commissioner garnered more votes in 2016 than any other candidate for office in the territory.

Were Puerto Rico a state, it would have two senators and four seats in the House. González-Colón is in fact a passionate advocate of statehood, and the American flag outside her House office sports 51 stars.

Until that happens, her real job is more akin to a foreign ambassador than a member of Congress, said former Rep. Luis Gutiérrez, a Chicago Democrat who moved to Puerto Rico after his retirement last year.

“It sounds a little strange,” he said, “but they’re a kind of lobbyist-in-chief/ambassador for the people of Puerto Rico. To the extent they do that well, there can be some relative success in the job.”

The island, however, is in need of much more than relative success in Congress. Just since González-Colón took office in 2017 for a four-year term, Puerto Rico has been stricken with a fiscal crisis that led Congress to place its budget under federal oversight, two major hurricanes that wrecked its already crumbling infrastructure, and corruption and political scandals that led this week to Rosselló’s resignation.

According to Census Bureau estimates, Puerto Rico lost more than 200,000 residents — 6% of its population — between 2016 and 2018. Most moved to the U.S. mainland for more stable and better-paying jobs.

“My sister is living in Alaska,” González-Colón said in an interview this week. “A lot of specialists and professionals in the health industry are leaving the island, putting more stress to a very difficult situation.”

That outflow has raised political awareness of Puerto Rico’s situation in places like Florida and the East Coast where most of the newcomers have settled. Recruiting support for the island elsewhere, however, is a never-ending and sometimes thankless labor.

González-Colón has organized a stream of visits by congressional delegations from both parties — including 15 Democrats led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — to view the island’s hurricane damage, a strategy she called her most effective tool for winning new backers. She won an exemption to add a third congressional committee to her assigned duties, giving her added clout in the only venue where her vote actually counts.

A vice president of the island’s Republican Party, González-Colón runs a leadership political action committee that doled out money to 14 Republican members of the House in the last election cycle. And she campaigned last year for Republican candidates in six states, from Florida to Nebraska, who had supported efforts to help the island.

“That’s the way you show them that you care, the same way they did for me,” she said.

Being a Republican in a Democrat-ruled House rived by partisanship has been less than helpful to her cause. While she was not a Trump supporter in 2016 — Puerto Rico’s delegation to the Republican National Convention cast its votes for Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida — she nevertheless is the chair of a group, Latinos for Trump, that is backing the president’s reelection campaign.

She has called her relationship with President Donald Trump “phenomenal,” saying he had consistently backed and signed legislation that helped the island. In turn, Trump has praised her on Twitter as “wonderful to deal with and a great representative of the people.”

But in practice, she has tried to straddle the political divide. The website Govtrack.us rated her among the least conservative Republicans in the last Congress. She recruited or joined Democratic sponsors of legislation far more often than most of her Republican colleagues.

That said, the results sometimes have been mixed. With help from the Republican-led Senate, González-Colón won crucial Medicaid funding for the island last year, and Congress overcame partisan differences this spring to send Puerto Rico more than $36 billion in hurricane relief aid.

But the tax legislation that Republicans enacted in 2017 stripped the island of a crucial tax break, treating subsidiaries of U.S. companies there as if they were based in foreign countries. And her signature legislation, a bill granting the island statehood, has been declared dead on arrival by her own party’s top official, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

That, she said, made her sad, but undeterred. “Statehood is going to happen,” she said, “the same way as the right for women to vote, for people of color to vote, and many others. This is a civil rights issue.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/us/puerto-rico-gonzalez-colon.html" id="7c5368d3-003b-3e45-af2a-dda514412e21">The New York Times</a>.

WASHINGTON — With the resignation of Gov. Ricardo Rosselló of Puerto Rico, the mantle of political seniority on the island could rest on a woman who has many obligations and virtually no power to fulfill them beyond her ability to harangue others into helping her.

She's Puerto Rico's Only Link to Washington. She Could Be Its Future Governor.

The panel wrote that it was joining “the growing chorus of federal courts” that have held that drawing districts to unfairly favor the party in power is unconstitutional. The judges said the maps violated Democratic voters’ constitutional rights.

But the impact of the ruling ultimately will turn on an opinion by the Supreme Court, which is weighing decisions in two other partisan gerrymander cases involving congressional districts in North Carolina and Maryland. The high court’s decision in those cases, expected by the end of June, could reinforce the Michigan ruling, force alterations to it, or even overrule it entirely.

WASHINGTON — A panel of three federal judges ruled on Thursday that 34 congressional and state legislative districts in Michigan are extreme partisan gerrymanders and unconstitutional. The judges ordered state lawmakers to redraw maps in time for elections in 2020.

Michael Wines

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