About the Case

The Virginia Constitution requires that the legislature give priority to specific, non-partisan criteria in drawing legislative districts, including compactness. The intent of this requirement is to make it more difficult to gerrymander electoral districts by preventing legislators from drawing districts that are unreasonably spread out, or have excessively contorted boundaries. In 2015, a group of individual voters in Virginia challenged the 2011 Virginia General Assembly maps as violating the state constitution, arguing that the map drawers subordinated compactness and prioritized partisan criteria in order to achieve self-interested political objectives.

The state court below found the question of whether constitutional redistricting criteria were subordinated for partisan gain “fairly debatable,” and deferred to the legislature. Plaintiffs are challenging the ruling in the Virginia Supreme Court. On behalf of the League of Women Voters of Virignia, Campaign Legal Center(CLC) and Sidley Austin LLP filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the plaintiffs, highlighting the increasing threat of partisan gerrymandering to fair representation and effective democracy, and the egregious gerrymander of the Virginia House of Delegates map.

What’s at Stake

Partisan gerrymandering is fundamentally undemocratic, and poses a critical threat to effective democracy. Because of technological advancements, map drawers are able to target voters with surgical precision, and can move individual voters in or out of a particular district in order to maximize partisan advantage. Yet this same technology makes fulfilling the constitutional requirement of compactness a straightforward procedure, even while ensuring that opposing parties are treated symmetrically under the districting plan.

In 2011, Virginia legislators engaged in an open and extreme partisan gerrymander of the General Assembly maps. The efficiency gap, a mathematical analysis of how effectively voters from each party are distributed among voting districts, demonstrates that the 2011 and 2013 House of Delegates maps exhibit a strong and durable pro-Republican bias. The notably large efficiency gaps in Virginia illustrate the extent to which legislators successfully elevated political considerations over non-partisan criteria in order to create an entrenched Republican majority in the House of Delegates. 

As partisan gerrymandering becomes more effective, its effects become more problematic. Gerrymandered districts are less competitive and when representatives don’t face any real electoral threat, they are less accountable to their electorate. Political discourse in turn becomes more polarized, and voters disengage as they realize that political outcomes are predetermined by district lines. In the 2015 elections, 62% of House of Delegate candidates ran unopposed, and in another 9% there was only token third party opposition. Only six of the 100 Delegate races, and five of the 40 Senate races were truly competitive, and all 122 incumbents won re-election. At the same time, the state of Virginia had one of its lowest voter turnout rates on record, with only 29.1% of registered voters casting a ballot.

It is doubtful the 2011 Virginia General Assembly map could have been drawn without subordinating other redistricting criteria to partisan priorities. Partisan gerrymandering has undermined representative democracy in Virginia by allowing politicians to choose their own voters. Removing the power to influence the outcome of elections and hold representatives accountable to the people is antithetical to the founding principles of American democracy.

Summary

Texas Democratic Party v. King Street Patriots is a challenge to Texas’s ban on corporate contributions and its disclosure requirements for political action committees.

A Texas state trial court and appellate court have heard the case and upheld the Texas campaign finance laws at issue. The case, now before the Texas Supreme Court, could find its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. CLC has filed friend-of-the-court briefs at each stage of the case in support of the challenged provisions of Texas campaign finance law.

Background

During the 2010 election, a Houston, Texas-based tea party group called the King Street Patriots (KSP) trained and dispatched poll watchers, allegedly in coordination with the Texas Republican Party. An offshoot from KSP has developed into a larger organization, True the Vote, which has taken the lead under the Trump Administration to investigate “voter fraud” in the 2016 Election.

In 2010, after KSP sent hundreds of observers to assist with poll watching, the Texas Democratic Party filed suit claiming that this effort represented an illegal in-kind corporate contribution to the Texas Republican Party and calling for the group to register and disclose its donors as a political committee.

KSP counterclaimed – challenging numerous provisions of Texas campaign finance laws, including the state restrictions on corporate contributions, and the disclosure and organizational requirements applicable to political committees. The parties have agreed to address the constitutionality of the laws first, before determining whether KSP violated the laws.

KSP is represented by James Bopp Jr., who is challenging campaign finance regulations nationwide.  Bopp brought the landmark Citizens United v. FEC (2010) case.

A state district court rejected KSP’s challenge to Texas campaign finance law, and in Oct. 2014, the Third District Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court decision. On Nov. 10, 2015, CLC filed an amicus brief urging the Texas Supreme Court to affirm these decisions. Later on Feb. 8, 2017, the Texas Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the case.

UPDATE: On June 30, 2017, the Texas Supreme Court reaffirmed that corporate contribution restrictions are constitutional under binding Supreme Court precedent, and found that the state definitions of “political contribution” and “campaign contribution” are not unconstitutionally vague. The court declined to consider the facial constitutionality of the “political committee” definitions, finding that the challenge was premature and remanding for the lower court to rule on the plaintiffs’ as-applied challenges.

What’s at Stake?

This is a highly anticipated campaign finance case because it raises the question of whether corporate contribution restrictions are constitutional after Citizens United, which struck down a corporate expenditure restriction.  If it reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, the case could also impact the federal corporate contribution ban and the laws of 21 other states that currently prohibit corporations from contributing money to candidates.

If KSP wins, it would also be a big victory for political “dark money,” and would open the floodgates to secret campaign contributions in the elections of the country’s second largest state.  The case will either maintain Texas’s campaign finance laws or will go a long way towards dismantling them.

 

About the Case

In December 2016, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association (HJTA) filed suit in Sacramento Superior Court challenging S.B. 1107, legislation which amended California’s Political Reform Act to empower the state and local governments to establish citizen-funded elections.

What’s at Stake?

Many states and municipalities across the country have adopted public financing programs for their elections. Courts have long recognized that public financing can help combat actual and apparent corruption, and also facilitate communication between elected officials and a broader swath of voters beyond wealthy donors. HJTA’s suit seeks to deprive California’s municipalities—and the state as a whole—of the opportunity to adopt public financing programs, if they so choose.

Case Details

In 1974, California voters enacted the Political Reform Act (PRA), a comprehensive reform package passed as a statewide initiative in the wake of the Watergate scandal. In 1988, the PRA was amended by another ballot initiative, Proposition 73, which banned the public financing of elections in California. The California Supreme Court later held that the ban could not apply to charter cities, but—prior to S.B. 1107’s enactment—the ban still applied to non-charter cities, as well as to legislative and statewide elections.

S.B. 1107 amended the PRA to provide California municipalities and the state as a whole with the option of adopting public financing programs. Under the California Constitution and the terms of the PRA, a legislative amendment to the PRA must (1) pass the state legislature with a two-thirds majority vote, and (2) further the PRA’s purposes. S.B. 1107 received the requisite two-thirds support in both legislative chambers, but HJTA contends that the bill is invalid because it does not further the purposes of the PRA.

The PRA’s purposes are expressed in the law itself, and include 1) combating political corruption by reducing candidates’ reliance on large contributions from lobbyists and special interests “who thereby gain disproportionate influence over governmental decisions;” 2) creating more responsive state and local governments that serve “citizens equally, without regard to their wealth;” and 3) ensuring fair elections by abolishing “laws and practices [that] unfairly favor incumbents.” By giving California municipalities the ability to adopt public financing programs, S.B. 1107 advances each of these objectives.

Background

In the landmark campaign finance case Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court held that public financing can “reduce the harmful influence of large contributions on our political process,” “facilitate and enlarge public discussion and participation in the electoral process” and “relieve…candidates from the rigors of soliciting private contributions.” Federal courts have continued to recognize the democratic benefits of public financing in recent years.

Moreover, a substantial body of research demonstrates that the impact of citizen-funded elections is consistent with the PRA’s core purposes. Researchers at the Campaign Finance Institute, for example, found that New York City’s matching funds program, after being expanded in 2001, significantly increased the number of small individual donors and their proportional importance to City Council candidates.

The same team also found that the city’s public financing program sparked an increase in campaign contributions from individuals living in socioeconomically and racially diverse neighborhoods, suggesting that the program spurred participating candidates to interact with a larger and more diverse segment of the city’s population. Additionally, a 2008 survey found that state legislative candidates accepting full public funding devoted significantly more time to direct voter outreach and non-fundraising campaign activities, such as canvassing and public speaking, than candidates who did not participate in public financing.

Finally, analysis of elections in jurisdictions with public financing show these systems bolster measures of electoral competiveness, and may even weaken incumbents’ advantages over challengers. Maine’s clean elections law immediately increased the number of candidates and decreased the margin of victory in state senate elections in districts where a candidate accepted public funding. Connecticut reported similar increases in the number of legislative candidates and contested races after introducing its public financing program in 2008. More broadly, the National Institute for Money in State Politics found that far more state legislative elections in 2013-14 in states with citizen-funded elections were contested (87% vs. 61%) and were monetarily competitive (41% vs. 18%) than in states without public financing.

CLC filed a friend-of-the-court brief on June 28, 2017, arguing that given the judicial findings and academic research referenced above, providing California’s state and local governments with the option of implementing citizen-funded elections clearly furthers the PRA’s purposes. S.B. 1107 was therefore passed in accordance with state law and appropriately modernizes the Political Reform Act.