By David B. Rivkin, Jr., and Andrew M. Grossman

April 24, 2022, in the Wall Street Journal

Pennsylvania lawmakers in 2019 decided to allow mail-in voting for the first time. They enacted a statute providing that “a completed mail-in ballot must be received in the office of the county board of elections no later than eight o’clock P.M. on the day of the primary or election.” In 2020 the state Democratic Party went to court, arguing that in light of the Covid pandemic, the deadline “results in an as-applied infringement” of the right to vote.

The Democrat-dominated Pennsylvania Supreme Court—its members are chosen in partisan elections—sided with the party and ordered a deadline extension, even as it acknowledged the statutory language was clear and unambiguous. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal, so the 2020 election was conducted under this and other new, judge-imposed rules.

Usually there’s no reason for the high court to review a state-court decision about state law. But election law is different. The U.S. Constitution mandates that state legislatures make the laws governing federal elections for Congress and the presidency. The Pennsylvania ruling was therefore unconstitutional. But the justices in Washington, perhaps chastened by the enduring political controversy over Bush v. Gore (2000), seem reluctant to take up such cases close to an election. Fortunately, they will soon have an opportunity to address the issue and to avert the possibility of an electoral meltdown in 2024.

Pennsylvania wasn’t alone in 2020. Faced with Republican control of many state legislatures, the Democrats and their allies took advantage of the pandemic to upend that year’s voting process. Longstanding wish-list items like near-universal voting by mail, ballot “harvesting,” drop boxes, extended deadlines, and loosened identification and signature-match requirements came to pass in much of the country, often by state court order.

The pandemic disruption may be behind us, but litigation over election rules continues. One reason is the success of the Democrats’ 2020 efforts, which their current cases treat as setting a new legal baseline. Returning to ordinary pre-pandemic procedures, they claim, amounts to unlawful “voter suppression.”

But there’s another reason for the state-court litigation explosion: redistricting after the 2020 Census. If state judges are willing to second-guess voting laws, why not the maps too? New maps are often litigated, but what’s different this time is the number of cases asking courts to toss out alleged partisan gerrymanders. The U.S. Supreme Court closed the door to such claims under the federal Constitution in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), reasoning that there was no “clear, manageable, and politically neutral” standard for courts to apply. The same objection applies to suits brought under state law, but Rucho didn’t address that question.

So they proliferated. Many states where Democrats could pick up House seats with a different map have faced lawsuits based on open-ended state constitutional provisions, such as North Carolina’s proclaiming “all elections shall be free.” Several states’ top courts have tossed out legislature-enacted maps; the North Carolina justices even authorized a lower court to hire its own mapmakers. Republicans won state-court decisions against Democratic gerrymanders in Maryland and New York state.

None of this passes constitutional muster. State courts can interpret and apply laws governing federal elections and consider challenges to them under federal law, including the Constitution. But they have no authority to strike those laws down under state constitutions, let alone a freestanding power to contrive their own voting rules and congressional maps. The U.S. Constitution often assigns powers and duties to the “states” generally, but Article I’s Elections Clause directs that the “times, places and manner” of conducting congressional elections shall “be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof,” unless overridden by Congress. The Electors Clause similarly vests the “manner” of choosing presidential electors in “the legislature.”

In McPherson v. Blacker (1892), the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that the Electors Clause “leaves it to the legislature exclusively to define the method” of choosing electors and that this power “cannot be taken from them or modified by their state constitutions.” In State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (2015), it held that “redistricting is a legislative function, to be performed in accordance with the State’s prescriptions for lawmaking.”

Still, it’s no wonder plaintiffs and state judges have felt emboldened to buck these limitations. The decision of a state supreme court can be appealed only to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has shied away from such cases. Around the same time the justices declined to hear the 2020 Pennsylvania case, they turned back a request to block North Carolina officials from altering legislatively enacted mail-in ballot deadlines. This year, they denied emergency requests to block judge-made maps in North Carolina and Pennsylvania from being used in November.

Election-law cases present unique timing considerations, given the potentially disruptive consequences of changing laws or maps with an election approaching. When courts make changes weeks before a filing deadline or Election Day, the justices’ ability to right the wrong is severely constrained. There’s rarely a serious basis to press the issue after votes have been cast. Those circumstances apply in most election-law cases.

But unlike state-court orders meddling with voting procedures, which typically apply to one election only, congressional maps remain in place until they’re altered, which usually isn’t for a decade. So there’s no timing issue to prevent the court from hearing a redistricting case.

Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented from last month’s denial of the North Carolina stay application, arguing that the case was a good vehicle to consider the power of state courts to rework federal-election laws. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately to say that the court should take a case raising the issue, but this one came too close to the 2022 election. North Carolina’s House speaker has petitioned the court to take the case in its next term. If it does, a decision would likely come next summer, nearly a year and a half before the 2024 election.

The court’s failure to resolve this issue could spell catastrophe. If the 2024 presidential vote is close in decisive states, the result will be an onslaught of litigation combining all the worst features of the 2000 and 2020 election controversies. The court’s precedents in this area all point toward legislature supremacy but leave the door cracked enough for canny litigants, abetted by state judges, to shove it open and seize electoral advantage. To avoid a constitutional crisis, the justices need to articulate with clarity that state courts can’t rely on state constitutions or their own judicial power to alter either congressional redistricting maps or voting rules in federal elections.

Mr. Rivkin served at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Mr. Grossman is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. Both practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-avert-a-2024-election-disaster-supreme-court-mail-in-ballot-drop-box-covid-election-rules-pennsylvania-new-york-north-carolina-11650820394

Democrats want to impose federal rules on elections for president. Congress doesn’t have that power.

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Jason Snead

Feb. 16, 2021, in the Wall Street Journal

House Democrats have made election “reform” their top legislative priority. House Resolution 1, styled the For the People Act, would vitiate existing state election laws, federalize the rules of congressional and presidential elections, and effectively do the same for state elections, which are often conducted on the same ballot. Critics have noted that the proposed rules are designed to benefit Democrats. They’re also unconstitutional.

The key problem is that the Constitution doesn’t give Congress the authority to regulate all federal elections in the same way. Congress has significant power over congressional elections. The Elections Clause of Article I, Section 4 provides that state legislatures “shall prescribe” the “times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives,” but also authorizes Congress to “make or alter such regulations.”

Yet Congress has only limited authority over the conduct of presidential elections. They are governed by the Electors Clause in Article II, Section 1, which provides: “Congress may determine the time of choosing the electors, and the day on which they shall give their votes; which day shall be the same throughout the United States.” Congress’s timing determination is binding on the states, as the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held last year in Carson v. Simon, which rejected Minnesota’s modification of its ballot-receipt deadline. (The Honest Elections Project sponsored the litigation, and Mr. Rivkin was the plaintiffs’ lead attorney.)

But the Electors Clause gives state legislatures plenary power over the manner of selecting presidential electors. It does not permit lawmakers to promulgate a comprehensive federal elections code. Nor does the 15th Amendment, which bars racial discrimination in voting, or the other amendments extending the franchise. Each grants Congress the power to enforce its guarantees through “appropriate legislation.” But as the Supreme Court explained in City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), “Congress does not enforce a constitutional right by changing what the right is.” None of these amendments guarantee the right to vote in any particular way—such as by mail versus in person—so Congress can’t rightly be said to be enforcing them through H.R.1. And none of them repeal the Electors Clause.

Although all 50 state legislatures have provided for popular election of presidential electors, the legislatures could change state law and appoint electors directly. H.R.1 violates the Electors Clause on its face, purporting to govern not merely the time, place and manner of congressional elections, but also regulating presidential elections in exactly the same prescriptive matter as congressional elections.

The profound difference between the Electors Clause and the Elections Clause was no accident. The 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia considered many possible methods of choosing the chief executive: direct popular election, selection by one or both houses of Congress, even a vote of state governors. Ultimately, delegates settled on a college of electors, chosen in a manner to be determined by the legislature of each state, to avoid the president’s selection by Congress. As Pennsylvania’s Gouverneur Morris said at the convention, “if the Executive be chosen by the [national] legislature, he will not be independent [of] it; and if not independent, usurpation and tyranny on the part of the legislature will be the consequence.”

Another delegate, South Carolina’s Charles Pinckney, explained later: “In the Federal Convention great care was used to provide for the election of the president of the United States independently of Congress; to take the business as far as possible out of their hands.” Congress, Pinckney continued, “had no right to meddle with it at all.” The only exception is that the House chooses the president if no candidate commands an Electoral College majority.

The Supreme Court has recognized state legislatures’ primacy in regulating presidential elections. In McPherson v. Blacker (1892), the justices upheld Michigan’s apportionment of presidential electors by congressional district, holding that the Constitution “leaves it to the [state] legislature exclusively to define the method” of appointing electors. Subsequent rulings have adhered to that principle. In Burroughs v. U.S. (1934), the court held that Congress’s authority is limited to enacting laws that don’t “interfere with the power of a state to appoint electors or the manner in which their appointment shall be made.”

The court restated this principle as recently as 2000, holding unanimously in Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board that the Florida Supreme Court couldn’t change state election laws on its own authority, without action by the Legislature.

Even if lawmakers cured the constitutional deficiency of H.R.1 by applying it only to congressional elections, it would still be bad policy. Voting systems are vast and complex. Even minor, well-intentioned changes can have significant unintended consequences. Few know this better than election officials themselves. According to a recent report by Pennsylvania’s county commissioners, “uncertainty regarding court challenges” and “confusion because of ever-changing guidance” from Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar contributed to the November delays and problems experienced by counties across the commonwealth. It took Philadelphia two weeks to count 700,000 ballots.

By contrast, Florida has spent two decades bolstering its election system after the debacle of 2000. The Sunshine State processed 11 million ballots in November and reported accurate results on election night. More states should be doing what Florida does.

But H.R.1 would put Florida’s success at risk. Its law requires voters to show identification and return absentee ballots by Election Day, bans organized ballot trafficking, and requires that voters cure problems with their mail-in ballots no later than two days after an election. Common-sense measures like these help the state deliver honest elections with prompt and accurate results even in the face of a pandemic. For H.R.1’s drafters, though, these are instruments of “voter suppression.” The bill would dilute or prohibit all these measures.

Keeping states in charge of elections also limits the damage when policy changes fail. States can experiment with voting improvements, learn from missteps, and replicate successes. Not so with a one-size-fits-all system. Any troubles caused by a national voting law will instantly affect all 50 states, none of which will have the freedom to correct them. Imposing unconstitutional voting changes on the whole nation would politicize the machinery of democracy and risk permanently tainting the credibility of elections.

Mr. Rivkin practices appellate and constitutional law in Washington. He served in the White House Counsel’s Office and Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Mr. Snead is executive director of the Honest Elections Project.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-unconstitutional-voting-reform-11613497134