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2022 Edition – A Democracy Crisis In The Making

This report is a partnership between the States United Democracy Center, Law Forward and Protect Democracy: “…We issued our first Report less than four months after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, itself a violent attempt to subvert the voters’ choice. In that Report, we identified 148 bills that had been filed that would allow state legislatures to politicize, criminalize, or interfere with elections. Today, at roughly the same point in the calendar year, legislatures in 33 states are considering 229 bills that do the same—175 introduced in this calendar year alone and 54 that rolled over from the last calendar year. A total of 50 bills have been enacted or adopted, 32 last year and 18 thus far this year…”

See also Washington Post: “…The court will likely validate in some form the “independent state legislature” theory, which could expand the power of state legislatures over elections in radically anti-democratic ways….The case, Moore v. Harper, concerns whether the North Carolina state legislature is precluded from executing an extreme partisan gerrymander by state courts’ interpretation of the state constitution. If the Supreme Court rules in the legislature’s favor, the court could endorse some version of the theory, which holds that state legislatures have near-plenary control over election rules. This is supposedly grounded in “originalist” readings of the Constitution. But recent scholarship has debunked this, documenting that founding-era understandings gave a central role to state constitutions and courts in overseeing states’ setting of election rules…”

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