Election Policy Roundup #27: The Long View on Election Reform

Walter Olson

Number 27 in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy, focusing this time on issues of electoral reform that will endure beyond the midterm battles of the moment:

• Reform failure: One reason reaction has been muted to the Supreme Court’s new decision in NRSC v. FEC, striking down limits on party coordination of spending with candidates, is that many close observers on the left and center agreed that the existing rules were counterproductive [Samuel Issacharoff, NYU Law Democracy Project (calling ruling a “welcome correction” and citing what “Pam Karlan and I have called the hydraulics of campaign finance regulation: money under pressure does not disappear, it finds the path of least resistance”); Richard Pildes, Rick Hasen]. 
• “In my view, there are plausible policy reasons to specify that all ballots should be in hand, not simply in the mail, by Election Day. But the Supreme Court was not presented today with that, or any, policy question” [my statement on the Supreme Court’s Watson v. RNC for Cato, together with Stephen Richer’s statement]. More from me: Maintaining accurate and up-to-date voter rolls should be ranked as a real reform priority, and Maryland is falling short [Free State Notes; also, why Maryland’s recent primary mail ballot foul-up didn’t pose a practical integrity issue, though it was embarrassing and confused voters (Alexander Shur, Votebeat; Christine Condon, Maryland Matters)]. 
• “Report: ‘Understanding How Proportional Representation Might Work in New York City’ ” [Jack Santucci (and John Ketcham}]; Discontent with California’s top-two system contributing to interest in multiparty options [Dennis Lytton, Liberal Currents]; Rob Richie discusses the proportional-ish voting method known as cumulative voting, as well as the promise of ranked-choice balloting in presidential primaries [Expand Democracy]; A caution from the Netherlands on the difficulties of national coalition formation under proportional representation [Tarunabh Khaitan and Mike Winterwerp, Social Europe]. 
• I and others have generally praised as admirable the Nebraska–Maine approach of divvying up a state’s electoral votes based on congressional district. But what if it has a dark sibling that would enable a state to use gerrymandered districts to hand most or even all of its electoral votes to a candidate who loses its popular vote? [Henry Noyes, Marquette Law Review via Electoral Law Blog]
• Reformers of an earlier day structured the Federal Election Commission so appointees from no one party could control it, which made for either partisan fairness or a kludgy guarantee of ineffectiveness, depending on who you ask. Will that structure survive the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Slaughter? [Bob Bauer, Executive Functions] 
• Meaningful representation of coherent geographical areas in national election processes seems to be less and less valued as time goes on, as witnessed by both the race to the bottom on gerrymandering and the continued momentum behind the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact electoral vote deal [Philip Wallach, American Enterprise Institute, with a discussion of “general ticket voting,” banned since the Apportionment Act of 1842, which was designed to award the party that won overall in a state its entire House delegation].