Elections

On October 30, 2024, exactly six days before Americans cast ballots in the presidential election, the Supreme Court issued an unsigned order with no written explanation. By a 6-3 party-line vote, the conservative majority reinstated Virginia’s eleventh-hour voter purge program, overruling both a federal district court and a unanimous panel of the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The ruling allowed the state to strip roughly 1,600 people from the voter rolls on the eve of the election. But the most alarming aspect of the Court’s intervention wasn’t merely the timing or the outcome. It was that Congress had explicitly passed a federal statute thirty-one years earlier specifically forbidding states from doing what Virginia did — and six Supreme Court justices erased that protection in two sentences without bothering to explain why. ...

Every election season, candidates for office get a break that ordinary advertisers do not. Federal law requires TV and radio stations to sell them airtime at the “lowest unit charge,” the cheapest rate the station gives any other customer. The point is to protect candidates from being priced out of reaching voters. Congress wrote that protection for “a legally qualified candidate.” This fall, the Supreme Court has twice used its emergency docket to keep it flowing to party committees, while a federal appeals court’s ruling that the law says otherwise sits on ice through the November 3 midterms. ...

For sixty years, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been the main legal tool minority voters have to challenge maps that dilute their political power — the thing that forces states to draw a second majority-Black district when residential segregation and racially polarized voting mean one district isn’t enough to give Black voters a real chance to elect anyone. On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court redefined what it takes to win that kind of claim, in a way that Justice Kagan says renders Section 2 “all but a dead letter.” ...

Federal law caps how much an individual donor can give directly to a candidate at $7,000. That limit exists for an obvious reason: a candidate who owes their campaign to one wealthy check is a candidate who answers to that donor first. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court opened a door around that limit large enough to drive a truck through — by ruling that political parties can spend essentially unlimited amounts in direct coordination with the candidates they’re backing. ...