Guy-Uriel Charles

The Supreme Court appears ready to strike another blow at the Voting Rights Act. In a 5-4 decision Monday night, they upheld a congressional map a lower court had tossed out. Host Scott Tong discusses the implications with Harvard Law professor Guy-Uriel Charles.

President Joe Biden’s first U.S. Supreme Court appointment won’t alter the 6-3 conservative majority, but her presence could spawn subtle changes on both the left and right sides of the bench. Adding the court’s first Black woman to replace the retiring Stephen Breyer, as Biden has said he intends to do, could prompt conservative justices to adjust how they approach cases involving race and gender. ... The potential impact of a new justice might depend a lot on “personality and background,” said Harvard Law professor Guy-Uriel Charles.

For anyone hoping that voting and elections post-2020 would become less polarized, the recent Take Back Virginia rally outside Richmond was not a good sign. ... But he also waited until after he had secured the Republican nomination for governor this year before he acknowledged that Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. "There's a reckoning that the Republican Party is going to have to come to terms with," said Guy-Uriel Charles, an election law expert at Harvard University. "It's going to have to figure out to what extent is it going to play with these types of insurrectionist, unserious, democracy-harming set of narratives."

Republican lawmakers redrawing states’ political lines are adopting a “colorblind” redistricting strategy aimed at inoculating maps against Democratic lawsuits that argue they dilute minority voting power. ... Democrats may now sue at their own peril, said Guy-Uriel E. Charles, a Harvard Law School Professor. The conservative U.S. Supreme Court has pared back the power of the Voting Rights Act, and in future litigation it could support the Republican argument, making federal law mostly useless in challenging racial gerrymandering. “Once the Republicans have confirmation from the Supreme Court that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is only violated where there’s intentional use of race to violate the voting power of voters of color, then you’re home free,” he said.

...To gain a sense of how the election played out and what the results may mean going forward, the Gazette interviewed Harvard faculty members who study political history...and election law (Guy-Uriel Charles, Bennett Boskey Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School). Below, they evaluate the results and what those may herald for the 2020 presidential race..."I was surprised and pleased that voters in Florida opted to restore voting rights to ex-felons who have completed their sentences. In fact, there was additional good news as voters in Michigan and Nevada decided to make voting easier in their states by adopting same-day registration and registering voters when they obtain or renew their drivers’ licenses."