As the midterm elections approach, President Donald Trump has made speeches and issued executive orders about the security of U.S. elections. He's made unfounded claims about fraudulent mail-in ballots and hasn't personally ruled out sending federal law enforcement to polling locations.
All of this comes after states pursued mid-decade redistricting efforts to tilt the scales in their majority parties' favor. But what effect will all of this have on turnout? And what happens after the midterms? WAMC's Lucas Willard spoke with Richard Briffault, a legal scholar at Columbia Law School, to learn more.
Read the full transcript below:
Richard Briffault: Administration's criticism is focused on mail-in voting, but it is also focused on these wild and unsubstantiated allegations of significant amounts of non-citizen voting. Now, there's not much they can do about that. They've been demanding voting rolls from the states, states purge their rolls, the states have largely ignored this. I think a lot of this is set up for maybe challenging the results after. But you do get the atmospherics to talk about ICE, to talk about armed forces at the polls - it's hard to say. We don't know what's going to happen on election day. But a lot of this, I think, is about making people nervous about that.
Lucas Willard: And what kinds of litigation would you expect, depending on the results? Would you expect what we saw similar in 2021, or even a more intense effort?
Richard Briffault: A lot of the thing may turn on just what the results are and how big or how narrow the margins are in key races, but you may see efforts to delegitimate the results and then possibly legal challenges, possibly efforts to efforts to seize ballots. There was talk about that in 2020. There've been actions to do that recently, but for older elections, for pre-existing elections, to get the records of those elections. And I think local elections administrators, state election administrators, judges are being very educated as to what kind of evidence a government has to provide as any justification for seizing ballots. Seizing ballots would be a very dramatic and very dangerous thing because, if ballots are taken, you kind of lose the chain of custody and the guarantees that they're honest are lost. Now, not clear any of this will happen. I mean, I think people should vote. They should vote the way they normally vote. Or if they're a little nervous about mail-in voting, a lot of states have early voting. I know in New York, I think early voting starts this coming weekend. That is, early in-person voting. I think people should go ahead and vote and not be afraid to vote. As I say, a lot of this I think is atmospheric, and then we'll see what happens.
Lucas Willard: So, the last time, Richard, that you and I spoke, this was when New York was in the midst of its redistricting battle, and this is something that dragged on for years, really. We saw another push for mid-decade redistricting in the run-up to the midterms here in states across the country. Do you think that there will be an actual noticeable effect at the polls this November? How many of these redistricting changes have actually succeeded? There's been a lot of court battles over these across the country.
Richard Briffault: Yeah, I mean, a lot of redistricting has happened. A few of them were rebuffed in court. A pro-Democratic gerrymander was invalidated by the Virginia Supreme Court. A pro-Republican one was blocked by the Missouri Supreme Court. Another pro-republican one was simply not done by the Indiana legislature. Not every every legislature has complied. A number have been done. Again, pro-Republican ones, most dramatically in Texas and in Florida, a number undoing the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana and Alabama and Tennessee, and the biggest pro-Democratic one was in California. It remains to be seen how effective these are going to be, again - we're relying on poll data. We really won't know until after election day. The poll data suggests that, given the unpopularity of the president and the kind of swing away from Republicans, some of the pro-Republican gerrymanders won't work, and that Democrats will still survive in some of those districts. And again, we're not going to know until the actual election. The polls suggest that, purely based on the gerrymanders themselves, the assumption was that the Republicans might have picked up a net number of maybe close to 10 seats. The current poll data suggests the numbers are going to be a lot lower than that, but again, we won't know until after the election.
Lucas Willard: Do all of these efforts to redistrict mid-decade affect, psychologically at least, how voters see their elections being actually carried out fairly? Does it actually instill doubt that the states don't have their backs when you have majority political parties pushing for election boundaries that actually favor their party?
Richard Briffault: You know, it's hard to know what voters think. It does tend to kind of delegitimate the whole process. I mean, we have reached a stage where instead of voters picking their representatives, the representatives are picking their voters, and that just kind of undermines the whole purpose of the elections. So we don't know. In some cases, we've seen some of this backfire in terms of the gerrymandered against groups like Black voters in Alabama, for example, just you know, redoubling their efforts, redoubling their campaigns to see if they can still win. I guess another pro-republican gerrymander was in North Carolina, and that one also seems to maybe be backfiring by kind of redoubling the efforts of the officials and the parties targeted to fight back. So, we don't know. Certainly it makes the whole thing look a lot less small-D democratic, and the whole idea of using districts as a way of representing communities is undone if the districts are totally manipulated. So, it really is a challenge to the whole idea of representative elections through districts.
