Ruth Greenwood

A nearly four-year-old legal effort by Black voters to convince a court to prevent former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party from potentially intimidating…

A legal fight over how Georgia elects its utility regulators may soon come before the nation’s highest court in a case that could reverberate beyond…

Another battle over legislative district voting maps is underway in Wisconsin. A liberal-leaning legal coalition representing 19 state residents has filed a lawsuit. The suit…

A credible case can be made that the Supreme Court’s decision last June to eliminate the constitutional right to an abortion was crucial to the…

When the U.S. Supreme Court decided an important voting rights case earlier this year, its ruling made it more difficult for voters to challenge restrictive state voting laws.  Now, the state of Texas is making an argument that, if adopted, would further hobble use of what remains of the Voting Rights Act. ...In a one-paragraph concurring opinion in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the voting rights case decided last summer, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch said the court’s previous cases assumed that private parties had the right to bring lawsuits challenging state election laws under Section 2 of the VRA, but it was an “open question” the Supreme Court had not yet decided. Justice Clarence Thomas was the only other member to sign on to Gorsuch’s concurrence.  “If it hadn’t been for the Gorsuch line in Brnovich, I would have thought it was kind of a crazy argument,” said Ruth Greenwood, director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, of the Texas brief.

The final proposal for Wisconsin’s next political maps from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ redistricting commission would narrow, but still maintain, Republican legislative and congressional majorities in the state. ... Ruth Greenwood, director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, said she doesn’t believe the commission’s maps are fair for Democratic voters, adding that predicted efficiency gaps “show a large and durable skew in favor of Republican voters” for both the Assembly and Senate map proposals. PlanScore, a program that predicts precinct-level votes for districts based on past election results and U.S. Census data led by the Campaign Legal Center, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for nonpartisan maps, found that under the commission’s proposal Democratic candidates would take 35% of state Senate seats and 39% of Assembly seats with a near 50-50 Democratic and Republican vote share. Greenwood said this may be due to the commission’s prioritization of compactness over partisan fairness. Greenwood noted that the first priority Evers listed in his original executive order creating the commission was that maps shall, whenever possible, be “free from partisan bias and partisan advantage.” “That is not reflected in the resulting plans,” Greenwood said. Greenwood said last month Republicans’ proposal “essentially bakes in almost the same level of partisan advantage” as current districts.

A Senate committee will take public comment Thursday on the Republican proposal for [Wisconsin's] next 10-year political boundaries, maps that would likely ensure another decade of GOP majorities in the state Legislature. For Republicans, the GOP proposal for the state's legislative and congressional boundaries aligns with plans to retain the core of existing districts, but for Democrats and those seeking nonpartisan maps, the offering is just more of the same. ... PlanScore, a program that predicts precinct-level votes for districts based on past election results and U.S. Census data led by the Campaign Legal Center, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for nonpartisan maps, found the GOP proposal "essentially bakes in almost the same level of partisan advantage" as current districts, said Ruth Greenwood, director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School.

Republican legislative leaders unveiled their proposed redistricting maps Wednesday, as did the People’s Maps Commission, which provided updated versions of draft maps it had previously released. Both the GOP and the commission — formed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers but made up of a diverse group of community members who drew on extensive public input — say their maps are fair and nonpartisan. Democrats jumped on Republicans’ maps, put forward in a redistricting bill, as being overtly partisan and even more gerrymandered than the maps that have been in place for the last decade. Over the past 10 years, Republicans in the Assembly, who received less than half of the total votes statewide, secured around two-thirds of the districts thanks to the maps they drew after the last census. ... Ruth Greenwood, director of Harvard Law School’s Election Law Clinic and a self-declared “map enthusiast” and “political junkie” used the PlanScore and said that the Legislature’s maps “would almost certainly ensure a GOP majority in the Legislature for another decade.” Greenwood ran the GOP-drawn maps through PlanScore — a program that predicts precinct-level votes for districts based on past election results and U.S. Census data — and labeled the maps as unfair. PlanScore uses four metrics, and the Wisconsin GOP’s legislative maps in all four categories were labeled as having “a Republican skew.”