Republicans seized the state Supreme Court after changing how judges are elected. The political implications — and ramifications for everyday life — are huge.

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NEW BERN, N.C. — As the daylight faded on April 12, 2018, a Craven County sheriff’s deputy pulled over a white pickup. Heather French was sitting in the passenger seat.

The deputy began tailing the truck on the other side of the Trent River, in a location he deemed “consistent with [a] drug area.” He eventually pulled over the driver, whose registration had recently expired. During the stop, the deputy called in a K9 unit from the local police department, which sniffed for drugs as night set in. The officers didn’t find drugs on French, but they searched through her wallet and noticed something else: Twenty-nine imitation one dollar bills.

The officers would later say that the material felt unusual and that each bill had a matching serial number and “pink Chinese lettering stamped on it.” They also said the bills looked “very realistic.” The prop money — which French maintains she never passed off as real money, something law enforcement has not contradicted — would become the reason she was stripped of her right to vote.

Over the next five years, French’s eligibility see-sawed with a series of court rulings. They left her eligible to vote in some elections but not others, and illustrated the power of judges to grant, and to claw back, Americans’ most basic rights. 

The rulings also tell a story about the North Carolina Supreme Court, whose Republican majority traces back to changes legislators made in the dying days of 2016. North Carolina is one of eight states where Republican politicians have passed laws that pushed the courts in a conservative direction or helped strengthen Republican control, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation.

These changes have ramifications for those states’ residents and, increasingly, for the country.

In many ways, North Carolina represents the starkest example.

The driver of the truck in New Bern that April evening was John Cuddy, who purchased the prop money online for $2. He told police that he and his wife had used it to tease French, who he described as “pretty much our only friend.” In turn, she’d kept some of it and played a joke on her mother.

“You know, we’re poor. So for us, this is a prank,” French said.

She was arrested and charged with possessing “five or more counterfeit instruments with the intent to injure or defraud any person.”

Prosecutors offered French a misdemeanor plea deal, but she rejected it. “I have no problem admitting when I f— up … That’s not one of those times. I will forever, ever maintain my innocence.” The money, she says, “is clearly fake.”

At a trial on July 6, 2020, her attorney argued the bills were only “play money,” and that no evidence showed French used it to buy anything or defraud anyone. Prosecutors argued that the location of the bills in her wallet was itself evidence of “an intent to defraud.” Judge Joshua W. Willey called the case “circumstantial” but said he was swayed by the location in the wallet.

He sentenced French to three years of probation and to pay court costs and for her court-appointed attorney, a total of over $1,600. Additionally, she would pay a state-mandated $40 each month she was on probation.

When the judge’s ruling came down, the felony on her record meant that French couldn’t cast a ballot.

“I was upset because the presidential election was coming up,” she said. After Trump was elected, she had begun paying closer attention to politics. “I would have given anything to be able to vote.”

The legal case made a rough stretch of French’s life rougher. Hurricane Florence ripped through eastern North Carolina in 2018, badly damaging the mobile home where she lived with her parents. The floor began sinking, mold crept in from the moisture, and the family had to live around holes in the walls, ceilings and floor. Eventually, with government support, she and her parents moved into an RV.

The felony made finding work nearly impossible. She put her energy into helping care for her aging, disabled parents, and began attending classes at Craven Community College. “I plan to pursue a degree in political science, actually, because of this court case,” said French, 32.

So when French received a text last year from a nonprofit, telling her she could now vote despite her criminal record, she was intrigued. But she didn’t do anything right away — French was concerned she might be arrested, like 20 people had been in Florida for voting with criminal records. “I did not want to get slapped with another felony,” she said.

But a second text convinced her to call the county. She was eligible to vote, they told her, due to a ruling in a court case called Community Success Initiative v. Moore.

The same court system that had taken away French’s right to vote in her criminal case had now given it back, in this civil one.

In November 2022, she sat down in the kitchen of the RV and cast a ballot for the first time. She had jotted down notes about the U.S. Senate race, local contests and two state Supreme Court elections, and marked her absentee ballot accordingly.

“I felt like I was finally contributing something positive to society,” she said.

‘Your voice is your vote’

The case that enabled Heather French to vote challenged the state’s felony disenfranchisement law, which bars people on probation, parole or post-release supervision from voting. People remain ineligible if their inability to pay fines and fees extended their supervision, even if they have completed all other terms.

The lawsuit was brought by groups that work with North Carolinians wrapped up in the criminal justice system. A key plaintiff, Community Success Initiative, was founded by Dennis Gaddy, 66.

Voting rights are Gaddy’s heritage. He grew up on a dirt road in rural Fairmont, North Carolina, in the 1960s. He and his mother would drive around the area with stacks of the state’s big, brown voter registration forms, “going up to people who didn’t ever think they could even register to vote, and get them registered by hand.”

His father was the chair of what locals called the “Gaddy Precinct.” After polls closed on election day, the elder Gaddy would transport ballots to the smoke-filled rooms of the local board of elections to be tabulated.

“He guarded those ballots like they were gold,” Gaddy remembered. “So I saw that, smelled all that, was part of all that, knew how important it was.”

Gaddy went to law school and became an attorney, but he was disbarred in 1990 and convicted of a string of felonies in the ensuing years. When Barack Obama became the first Black major party presidential candidate in 2008, Gaddy was still on probation and couldn’t vote.

“It was devastating to me,” he said.

He founded Community Success Initiative to assist people leaving prison with reintegrating into their communities. Regaining the right to register and vote was a key piece of that process. “Your voice is your vote,” Gaddy said. “If you can’t vote, you’re not really a citizen in North Carolina.”

Gaddy estimates 90% of the people he works with are Black men, and he saw how the law deprived many of a political voice. He also had clients deprived of the right to vote even when they’d otherwise be eligible, simply because they couldn’t afford to pay the costs associated with their cases.

The lawsuit filed by Gaddy and others made those issues explicit. “This case is about the General Assembly’s intentional discrimination against Black people and against poor people,” Forward Justice’s Daryl Atkinson, one of the attorneys who argued the case for the plaintiffs, told Public Integrity.

In legal filings and expert testimony, the plaintiffs documented how over 56,000 North Carolinians were stripped of the right to vote due to the state’s felony disenfranchisement laws. Virtually everyone with a felony owes money as part of their case, with the median amount for those on probation around $2,400. Failing to pay those costs can extend probation for years, and, in rare cases, lead to arrest.

“You’ve got to pay to be able to vote in North Carolina. Flat out,” Atkinson said.

Before trial, a three-judge panel found that the requirement imposed an unequal burden, and issued an injunction. That granted the right to vote to roughly 5,000 people who had completed their felony terms except for the payment of fines and fees.

The trial that followed focused on the racially disparate impact of the law. Felony disenfranchisement has a long history in North Carolina, and legal filings pored over the past in exacting detail.

After the Civil War, former Confederates embarked on a campaign to convict Black men of petty crimes and publicly whip them. An 1867 article in the National Anti-Slavery Standard deduced that the whipping campaign’s “real motive … is to guard against their voting in the future, there being a law in North Carolina depriving those publicly whipped of the right to vote.” Crowds would gather every day at the courthouse in Raleigh to watch the violence.

After the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, politicians shifted to tactics that were not explicitly race-based. A version of the state’s current felony disenfranchisement law went on the books in 1877. Modifications to the law in the early 1970s provided more routes to people to get their voting rights restored, but the statute maintains “origins in racial discrimination and still disproportionately negatively affects African Americans in North Carolina,” Clemson University historian Orville Vernon Burton wrote in a filing.

The racial disparities are stark. When the lawsuit was filed, Black people made up 21% of the voting-age population of North Carolina, but over 42% of those disenfranchised. Black residents were denied the vote at nearly triple the rate of white residents.

At trial, Orlando Rodriguez, an attorney for the state legislature, granted that “the rate of felony convictions and, therefore, felony disenfranchisement, they fall crushingly hard on the African American community.” But, the state argued, that misses the point. Because 100% of people with felony convictions are disenfranchised, the law is not discriminatory.

After a four-day trial, the three-judge panel ruled in March 2022 that North Carolina’s “denial of the franchise to people on felony supervision has the intent and effect of discriminating against African Americans, and unconstitutionally denies substantially equal voting power on the basis of race.”

With the stroke of a pen, tens of thousands of people regained their right to vote.

The geography of people under state supervision who were re-enfranchised underscores the disparities. Craven County, where Heather French was prosecuted, had the highest rate of people re-enfranchised of any county with over 100,000 residents. Many of the areas with high rates were among North Carolina’s poorest, while the ruling had less impact in higher-income counties, according to Public Integrity’s analysis of data from the State Board of Elections.

Felony disenfranchisement “seems like a double punishment,” said Ricardo Gonzalez, a 20-year Navy veteran currently on probation, who registered and voted in Elizabeth City after the ruling. “I really do value service. And so part of voting, to me, is service.”

“I voted for every race I could,” said Lewis Whitmire, currently on post-release supervision in Catawba County. “Definitely want to vote in local elections. … The one that affects my life a lot is who the sheriff is.”

“I think everybody should have a right to vote,” said Scott Wright, an avid Trump supporter in Carteret County on probation. He hoped to vote for the former president again in 2024.

“I got [to the voting site] early, because I just want to make sure that I'm going through the right steps,” said Damien Jacobs, who originally heard about the legal case on TV in prison. “You still have a voice.”

But the case wasn’t resolved. The state legislature appealed the ruling that allowed Jacobs and others to vote, putting it before the North Carolina Supreme Court.

The court had recently swung to Republican control, the result of partisan efforts in the state and a number of others to alter how justices reach the bench.

‘A very sudden and brutal use of legislative power’

In 2010, North Carolina Republicans won majorities in both houses of the General Assembly for the first time in over a century. Two years later, they secured the governor’s mansion.

But political consultant John Davis’ eye was on the third branch. “Lose the courts, lose the war,” he wrote in a series of memos titled, “How the North Carolina Republican Party Can Maintain Political Power for 114 Years.” (His memos about Democrats only briefly mentioned state courts that year.)

Davis cast a skeptical eye on the work of the judicial branch. “Lady Justice may be blindfolded, and those scales she holds may be balanced, but if the case impacts the outcome of political races, Lady Justice will take that blindfold off to check the political party of the plaintiffs … then she will adjust the scales accordingly,” he wrote.

Davis argued that politicians would be smart to enact laws “to give Republicans advantages in judicial races.” In 2013, Republicans passed a bill that gutted the state’s public financing for judicial elections, a bête noire of powerful conservative donor Art Pope.

About this series

State supreme courts were once dominated by Democrats. A concerted effort by right-wing groups has changed that — with massive implications for abortion, LGBTQ+ rights and elections.

Read more

“Republicans take over and had a lot of pent-up frustration,” said Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University. “And so they very quickly tried to remake the state in the image that they wanted.”

Then 2016 happened. The same election that swept Donald Trump into the White House also saw Democrat Roy Cooper win the governor’s race in North Carolina. After the results came in, and before Cooper took office, Republicans convened an emergency session of the legislature and passed laws designed to weaken the powers of the state’s executive.

They also introduced a bill to make North Carolina’s judicial elections partisan contests. The state had adopted nonpartisan elections in 2004, a move supported by Democrats. A switch back to partisan contests would make the state the first in nearly a century to adopt that method.

“Is a person more or less partisan, just because their party is listed on the ballot?” GOP Rep. Bert Jones asked during floor debate. “The answer is no. … Folks, we're not kidding anybody. Everybody here knows.”

Rep. Justin P. Burr was interrupted by protestors during his remarks. After legislative leaders directed law enforcement to lock the demonstrators out, Burr said that “the Democratic Party and its elected officials here know that the chances of electing a Democrat judge are increased if their party affiliation is hidden from the average voters.”

Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore did not respond to repeated interview requests from Public Integrity about the bill. The measure passed, with all Republicans who voted supporting the change.  

“It was a very sudden and brutal use of legislative power,” said state Sen. Graig Meyer, who was a Democrat in the House in 2016 and voted against the changes.

Gov.-elect Roy Cooper, who wouldn’t take office until 2017, was watching closely. “They believed that if they could make judicial races partisan again, that they would have a much better opportunity to control the courts and inject right-wing politics into the judicial system,” Cooper told Public Integrity this spring. “And they have been successful.”

IN HIS OWN WORDS

Listen to North Carolina's Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, on Republican's efforts to control the courts.

(Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

Since North Carolina returned to partisan Supreme Court elections, Republicans have won five of six contests. (The only Democratic victory came in a race where two Republicans appeared on the general election ballot and split the conservative vote.)

Results from Burke County, North Carolina, illustrate the difference the party label makes. The area is the longtime home of the Ervin family, a Democratic political dynasty in the state. In the 2014 state Supreme Court race, without party labels, Sam Ervin IV received 62% of the Burke County vote.

When Ervin came up for re-election as an incumbent in 2022, his party affiliation appeared next to his name. In that election, he received just 34% of the vote in Burke County.

Ervin lost statewide in November, as did the Democrat running for another seat, flipping the court from a 4-3 Democratic majority to a 5-2 Republican one.

Same case, different results

The court’s new Republican majority wasted no time making its impact felt. On February 3, they announced they would rehear two politically charged cases the court had decided less than two months before.

In the last three decades, the Supreme Court had reheard just two cases, both lower-profile matters. The cases being reheard in 2023 were anything but. 

One concerned a voter ID law that justices found in December had discriminated against Black voters. The other, also decided in December, involved political maps that the court ruled were unconstitutional gerrymanders.

“None of the facts have changed. The law hasn't changed. None of the circumstances have changed,” said Atkinson, the Forward Justice attorney. “The only thing that has changed is that new people have gotten elected.”

“I think this new Republican majority thinks that they were elected with a mandate to undo what the previous Democratic majority did,” said Billy Corriher of the People’s Parity Project, who has written widely about state high courts in North Carolina and elsewhere.

The court also heard the appeal in Community Success Initiative v. Moore, the felony disenfranchisement case. Attorneys for the state said that the terms of voting after a felony conviction are up to the state legislature, and not guaranteed by the constitution. In a legal filing, they argued that the plaintiffs, who included the North Carolina NAACP, were "tarring the civil rights reformers" of the 1970s by minimizing changes to the law in that decade.

One of the judges sitting on the bench for the case was Justice Phil Berger Jr., the son of the senate Republican leader. The plaintiffs had filed a motion for his disqualification, which argued that “the appearance of impartiality is at its apex when, as here, the judge’s own father is a named defendant.” Berger chose to remain on the bench, as he has in other cases involving his father.

The North Carolina Supreme Court released its opinions in the redistricting, voter ID and felony disenfranchisement cases on the same day: April 28. In each case, the new majority handed a victory to Republicans in the legislature in a 5-2 ruling split along party lines.

In the redistricting case, the majority held that claims of partisan gerrymandering fall outside the purview of the state Supreme Court. The ruling means that the state’s legislative and congressional districts could be redrawn in the coming months — a huge victory for state Republicans, which could also shift several seats in the U.S. Congress.

Common Cause’s Bob Phillips called the ruling “the worst decision, perhaps, the state Supreme Court has ever made.” In her dissent, Justice Anita Earls wrote that “today’s result was preordained on 8 November 2022, when two new members of this Court were elected to establish this Court’s conservative majority.”

In the wake of the ruling, Davis, the political consultant, wrote that “the Republican General Assembly will also likely gerrymander new legislative districts that will guarantee GOP super majorities for the remainder of the decade. And you can count on the 5-2 GOP-majority NC Supreme Court to rule that any new GOP-gerrymandered districts are constitutional.”

In Community Success Initiative v. Moore, the majority found that felony disenfranchisement is required by the state constitution. They ruled that the trial court’s finding of discriminatory intent in the law was due to “legal error” and tossed it aside. Justice Trey Allen adopted the state’s explanation for the disparities, a stark departure for a court that only a few years earlier had acknowledged discriminatory inequalities in the state’s judicial system. “Since a disproportionately large percentage of felons are African American, it stands to reason that African Americans constitute a disproportionate share of felons currently incarcerated,” he wrote.

The decision split not just on partisan lines, but also on racial ones, with the court’s five white justices in the majority, and its two Black justices dissenting. In that dissent, Earls wrote that saying the law has no disproportionate impact "is plainly incorrect" and that requiring people to pay fines and fees before being eligible to vote is "shocking in multiple respects."

The ruling ended the right to vote for North Carolinians on probation, parole and post-release supervision for felonies. 

They’d had it for just 276 days.

At least 49,200 people lost their voting rights that day, according to a Public Integrity analysis of state and federal data. The true number is almost certainly higher, as the data doesn’t reveal how many people had their terms extended because of unpaid fines and fees, or were convicted of a crime in another state.

More than 8,600 registered voters immediately lost their eligibility as a result of the ruling, according to the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

Kevin Slade, 43, had been looking forward to voting in municipal elections later this year. “It'd be a blessing for me to be able to vote,” he said in early May, just three days after the court ruling was handed down.

Slade served 16 years in federal prisons around the United States, after he pleaded guilty to charges connected to selling cocaine in the New Bern area. Slade had been living in a halfway house since December, and looking out at the confluence of the Neuse and Trent Rivers in his hometown felt like a fresh start, even if the ankle monitor he wore was a reminder of his ties to the criminal justice system.

For Slade, the North Carolina Supreme Court’s ruling was a setback. Without changes to the law or the terms of his supervised release, it will be at least five years before he can cast a ballot.

“A year from now, if there's a politician who was planning to do things that can prevent young males and young females from falling into the situation [that] I fell into? I would want to vote for that person,” Slade said. “They took that away from us.”

‘Much more hostile to civil rights’

Early on the morning of May 2, people boarded buses across North Carolina chartered for Raleigh, the state capital. Forty-one people left from a Craven County parking lot that day, just after 7:30 a.m.

When they arrived in Raleigh, they walked over to the Halifax Mall, across the street from the state legislature, and joined the crowd of 700 for the Second Chance Lobby Day.

The state Supreme Court’s rulings, less than a week old, weighed heavily on organizers and participants, there to advocate for policies that help people with criminal records reestablish their lives. A planned voter registration drive was scrapped at the last minute.

Under a bright blue sky with few clouds, Rev. William J. Barber II addressed the crowd. Barber was a driving force in Moral Mondays, a protest movement in North Carolina that began in 2013. Speaking about the previous week’s Supreme Court rulings, Barber said that “according to five of them, democracy is not welcome in North Carolina. Full citizenship is not welcome in North Carolina.”

He ticked through a list of priorities — allowing people with drug felony charges to receive SNAP benefits, reducing criminal court fines, removing criminal charges from records. Barber got the loudest cheer when he mentioned voting rights.

Caitlin Swain, an attorney with Forward Justice, which represented plaintiffs in Community Success Initiative v. Moore, said that RSVPs for the event poured in after the rulings. She was taken aback by the trio of decisions, which she said sent a clear message.

“State courts have just become much more hostile to civil rights,” she said.

Corey Purdie was at the event with his daughter. In 2007, Purdie opened a car wash in New Bern so he could offer jobs to people returning from prison. In the years since, Purdie expanded to helping people with housing, transportation and other needs. His organization, Wash Away Unemployment, was one of the plaintiffs in the case.

He was still reeling from the decision. “It's almost suffocating,” he said. Purdie said the saga would make it more difficult for the people he works with to trust the system and opt to vote, even when they were eligible.

Heather French, who was convicted of a felony over 29 imitation dollar bills in her wallet, took the news hard, tearing up when she learned about the ruling.

“You just don’t feel like a person,” she said. “Ever since I've dealt with being a felon, you don't really realize how little of a person they view you as.”

She and her parents had recently moved into a new home, at the end of a gravel road in unincorporated Craven County. It was a step up from their storm-damaged mobile home and the RV where she cast her ballot in 2022. But money remains tight, and she struggles to pay the $40 fee she owes each month. “One of the most stressful parts of being on probation is worrying about how you're going to pay it,” she said.

At the earliest, French won’t be able to vote until her probation ends in November 2024, after the next presidential election.

But the wait could take far longer. Debt from unpaid court costs and probation fees could extend her probation term. She’s not sure when she’ll be able to pay those — the felony on her record makes steady work hard to get — and regain the right to vote the court took away.

“I know they're the Supreme Court,” French said in her modest home, 100 miles from the state’s neoclassical high court building. “I'm here, I'm the felon, and what am I going to say that's going to matter? But no, I don't think it's right.”

Public Integrity journalist Pratheek Rebala contributed to this article.

The post ‘Lose the courts, lose the war’: The battle over voting in North Carolina appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

State supreme courts have the final word on interpreting state constitutions. Their decisions have massive implications for abortion access, taxes, LGBTQ+ rights, labor, policing and other issues that affect people’s lives.

So why do these courts fly under the radar? That’s partly by design. Justices rarely seek public attention, preferring to let their opinions do the talking. But just because they’re not loud doesn’t mean they’re not powerful.

At the Center Public Integrity, we spent six months looking into eight states where Republican politicians passed laws that pushed state supreme courts in a conservative direction or helped strengthen Republican control.

In the process, we learned how reporters — and other interested people — can dig into high courts in any state.

Explore how judges reach the bench

America has a unique system for picking judges. For one, almost nowhere else in the world, except for the United States, has judicial elections.

But not every state has these elections or uses the same type. Some have “retention elections” — where voters can keep or kick a sitting judge off the bench — while others have partisan elections or nonpartisan ones. Some states have no direct role for voters whatsoever, leaving the matter up to governors and legislatures. (Muddying the waters even further, states often have one method for filling seats on an interim basis, and another for a justice’s first full term.)

You can learn more about your state’s system using this map from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and this one from the National Center for State Courts.

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About this series

State supreme courts were once dominated by Democrats. A concerted effort by right-wing groups has changed that — with massive implications for abortion, LGBTQ+ rights and elections.

Read more

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Any proposed change to judicial selection in your state could represent an attempt by politicians and activists to help their favored judges reach the bench. The National Center for State Courts helpfully tracks proposed legislation.

Our investigation focused on eight states that have passed laws affecting their high courts in recent years, while legislators in many other states are seeking to follow suit.

If your state has made changes to its system of judicial selection, ask questions about them and their impact. Who are the new justices on the bench? Have they flipped partisan control? Are they overturning precedents?

And learn about judges by reading their financial disclosures and exploring when they have and haven’t recused themselves from cases. For example, North Carolina collects financial disclosures here.

Small process changes fuel big results

Some of the changes that we reported on seem minor, like tweaking the membership of a nominating commission. But the people proposing them are often sophisticated political actors who know bureaucratic details won’t grab headlines but can have major implications.

Politicians are unlikely to say they’re making a change for political gain, but you can contextualize changes by seeing what they’ve meant in other states.

Is your state considering adopting partisan elections? Ohio and North Carolina have in recent years.

Are legislators considering weakening the role of the state bar on a nominating commission? They are following in the footsteps of Iowa, Utah and Idaho.

Do they want to dump the nominating commission entirely? That’s what Montana did.

Or maybe your governor wants to add seats to the high court? That would put it in line with Georgia and Arizona.

Data can help tell the story

Your state’s supreme court is worth investigating, whether or not there have been changes to how judges reach the bench. 

Data can help you pinpoint the impact of the decisions made by justices, cutting through the fog of judicial opinions and the legal arguments of the parties.

In our reporting on North Carolina’s Supreme Court, we decided to focus on one case in particular, about felony disenfranchisement. A lower court ruled in 2022 that barring people on probation, parole and post-release supervision from voting was unconstitutional. That instantly restored the voting rights of about 56,000 North Carolinians — before the state’s high court clawed that back this April.

Data from the State Board of Elections that included the names of tens of thousands of people affected by the lower court’s decision was key to the reporting. It allowed us to map where the decision had a disproportionate impact, and to find individual people impacted by the rulings.

Find people directly impacted

It’s one thing to report that a court decision will affect people’s lives. It’s another to document concrete impacts in a specific person’s life. These personal stories will help your reporting resonate with readers and show the human stakes of the decisions made by the people in black robes.

First, it helps to identify significant cases where the ruling may have marked a turning point in someone’s life. Legal experts in the state may be able to help there.

Then, consider a roadmap for how you will find individual people. Think bigger than just the parties directly involved in the case. In our North Carolina reporting, we were able to compare a dataset of people who had their right to vote restored with historical data on voting. This allowed us to identify hundreds of people who voted in the 2022 midterms, thanks to the lower court ruling.

We started calling them. Many had emotional stories about what the experience meant to them.

State supreme court cases impact just about every beat. Whether you cover climate change, education, law enforcement, healthcare or something else entirely, there’s a story to tell about how political and judicial power ripple through people’s lives.

The post State high courts get limited attention. Here’s how to change that. appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

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In 2018, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that the state constitution included a right to abortion, finding that “nothing could be more fundamental to the notion of liberty.”

Just four years later, the court reversed itself. Iowa’s constitution does not, the justices decided, guarantee a right to abortion after all. That 2018 ruling? It had “a one-sided quality to it,” the new majority found. Iowans could no longer rely on a constitutional protection that existed just hours before.

The day the ruling was issued, staff at a Planned Parenthood clinic on Des Moines’ south side were preparing to perform surgical procedures. But their work ground to a halt. Staff had to inform patients already at the clinic that they couldn’t operate, as they scrambled to understand the decision. “It’s devastating,” said Jordawn Williams, the clinic manager. “It’s hard to tell patients that, it’s hard to see their reaction, it’s hard to go through that over and over and over again.”

The state constitution hadn’t changed in the four years between the state Supreme Court’s two rulings. But the justices on the bench had — and so had the role state politicians play in putting them there.

One month after the ruling, Chuck Hurley, the chief counsel of influential Iowa conservative group the Family Leader, took the stage before a sold-out convention center crowd. The gathering, which was attended by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley and then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, was just over the Des Moines River from the Supreme Court. Hurley told the room that “Iowa is on the verge of limiting the barbaric practice of abortion” after the court’s decision. He added, “Governor Reynolds and our legislators played a huge role in that win — by changing the way we select judges in Iowa.”

Iowa is not alone. In less than a decade, Republican politicians in eight states have transformed their state supreme courts — altering the process by which justices reach the bench, or the size of the court. The moves have pushed the courts to the right or solidified conservative control.

The changes take different forms. North Carolina and Ohio made their judicial elections partisan contests. Arizona and Georgia expanded the number of justices. And Iowa, Idaho, Montana and Utah granted Republican governors greater control over the process of picking justices.

This paved the way for rulings in Iowa and North Carolina that overturned precedents and rulings from just a few years, or months, before.

But while individual rulings have attracted public scrutiny, the changes to the courts have flown under the radar. That’s despite the key role that state courts, which hear 95% of all cases in the U.S., play in American democracy.

“It's hard to flip a whole state legislature. It's really expensive to win a governor's race. But it's not as hard, frankly, to turn over a state supreme court,” said Michael Kang of Northwestern University.

Other Republican-led states have taken notice. In 2023, 15 legislatures considered bills to increase partisan influence in judicial selection, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

The shifts on state supreme courts resonate far beyond the ornate chambers where justices confer and issue rulings. State constitutions often grant rights that aren’t guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution, and state supreme court justices have the final say on what those are.

Civil rights, taxes, LGBTQ+ rights, labor law, policing and more — all of it hangs on which justices take the bench. This year alone, five recently reconstituted state supreme courts have heard or are due to hear cases about abortion restrictions.

What’s underway now is part of a long-term project by conservatives to transform state courts, dating back to the 1980s and efforts such as Republican strategist Karl Rove’s campaign to unseat liberals in Texas. It was supercharged by an Iowa campaign in 2010 to remove three justices who overturned a ban on same-sex marriage.

That election “changed the dynamic. It opened the court up as a site for political gain,” said Rachel Paine Caufield, a professor at Drake University. “In Iowa, they've really done a good job of pinpointing specific changes that very few people would pay attention to, but will be very effective.”

After the changes to the state’s nominating commission, “there's no question that the direction of the court has shifted. It's a much more conservative court,” Caufield added.

That’s true nationwide, too. In 1980, just 30% of state high court justices in the U.S. were Republican, according to data compiled by Stanford researcher Brett Oliver Parker and shared with the Center for Public Integrity. (The analysis excludes justices whose party could not be determined, but keeps those who are independents.) The same data shows that by 2013, that figure crossed 50%.

About this series

State supreme courts were once dominated by Democrats. A concerted effort by right-wing groups has changed that — with massive implications for abortion, LGBTQ+ rights and elections.

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This year, data from the progressive legal organization Alliance for Justice shows, over 60% of state high court justices are Republican.

That’s sharply out of step with the country’s political leanings. Roughly 30% of Americans told pollsters this year that they consider themselves Republican, with independents and Democrats accounting for the rest.

“All the energy on this issue is on the right,” said law professor Brian Fitzpatrick of Vanderbilt University. He points to data that indicates attorneys lean left; lawyers play a key role in many states where commissions nominate judicial candidates. “It’s the Republicans that are not happy with the status quo,” he said.

In the states examined by Public Integrity where there has been turnover on the bench, the courts added conservatives — or replaced Republican moderates with more right-wing justices.

Politicians have come to regard courts less as a check on power than a part of the state’s governing coalition, academics and activists say. In two states, more than ideology binds judges to politicians: Ohio Supreme Court Justice Pat DeWine is the son of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, and North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Phil Berger Jr. is the son of the state’s most powerful Republican politician, state Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger.

The decisions made by justices shape the lives of residents in direct, dramatic fashion. 

In Arizona, the high court stripped in-state tuition from more than 2,000 students in DACA, the program that protects people brought to the country as children from deportation.

In Iowa, the court ruled that pretext stops by police — including those based partly on race — were legal in some circumstances, and that the justices lacked the authority to order regulation of the harmful nitrates flowing into Iowa rivers and fouling drinking water.

And this spring in North Carolina, a fresh Republican majority took the highly unusual step of rehearing two politically charged cases decided the previous term. The state’s Supreme Court also overturned a lower court ruling that had restored the voting rights of tens of thousands of people with felonies.

For those who registered and voted after the lower court’s ruling, the thought of losing the franchise was painful. “It's like they give us a taste, and then they snatch it back,” said Anton Sluder, 31, who lives in western North Carolina.

Around the nation, the stakes are high. State supreme court justices, said Jake Faleschini of Alliance for Justice, “are the most important political actors in this country that no one's ever heard of.”

‘The Republican Party has wised up’

States have four basic methods of selecting judges: appointment by a governor or legislature, partisan elections, non-partisan elections and nominating commissions that recommend a slate of candidates elected officials must pick from (often dubbed merit selection).

The patchwork emerged out of different moments in American history. At the country’s founding, politicians appointed many judges. In the early 1800s, states adopted elections to empower independent judiciaries. In the mid-20th century, nonpartisan elections swept across the country, an attempt to sever the connection between political machines and judges. In later decades, nominating commissions became a popular method of injecting the process with transparency and legal expertise.

Herbert Kritzer, an emeritus professor at the University of Minnesota, has studied states that changed their method of judicial selection. “In the roughly 20 years before 2000, the dominant motivation was more good government, legal professionalism, etc. Post-2000 it was very, very heavily policy, political,” he said. 

Academic research has demolished the perception that judges stand apart from politics. Legal scholars Michael Kang and Joanna Shepherd have consistently found that “judges’ voting in cases tends to favor the interests of their campaign contributors in a predictable and statistically meaningful way,” as they wrote in one paper.

Their work has documented that judges favor their own parties when ruling on election cases, and that “campaign contributions from the Republican Party and its allies are associated with an increased likelihood Republican elected judges will vote in favor of their party’s interests.” Their research also found that judges who receive contributions from business groups are more likely to favor business interests on the bench.

“Judges respond to incentives, and a lot of those incentives are financial ones,” Kang said in an interview. “The money does matter.”

Or, as former West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Richard Neely said in 2006, “It’s very hard not to dance with the one who brung you.”

That’s not to say the details of individual cases don’t matter: Justices frequently vote unanimously — including in the many cases that don’t touch on hot-button social or political issues. Kang and Shepherd also found that judges were more likely to rule against their own party in election cases when the other party brought a strong case.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

Listen to Michael Kang of Northwestern University talk about the politics of flipping a state supreme court.

(Photo credit: Courtesy Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law)

Notably, they found that justices rule in a less partisan manner when they’re not running for reelection.

The fact that the U.S. Supreme Court hears fewer cases, and has left issues like abortion up to states, has empowered state high courts. That has not been lost on legislators and governors.

“These institutions are too damn powerful for politicians to let them be independent and run amok,” said James Gibson of Washington University in St. Louis. “They'll do anything to try to control them.”

State elected officials who altered how judges reach the bench are often reacting to shifting political landscapes and controversial rulings. Conservative groups have actively pushed for these changes, Public Integrity found. The result is that courts have gradually trended to the right.

Democrats have rallied to support candidates in elections, like the Wisconsin Supreme Court race this spring, but have not been active in altering the methods of selecting justices. (The exception is Illinois, where a Democratic-led effort in 2021 to address population imbalances in court districts also gave the party a leg up in judicial elections.)

National political organizations like the Republican State Leadership Committee have been key to the long-term project. The group unveiled an effort in 2014, dubbed the Judicial Fairness Initiative, declaring that “Republicans have had a significant amount of success at the state level. … Unfortunately, that’s running into a hard stop with judges who aren’t in touch with the public.”

The organization’s website says it has spent more than $29 million in judicial races across the country, in Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Wisconsin and elsewhere.

The group credited a "clean sweep" in the 2022 elections in North Carolina and Ohio to its spending, saying that it was working to "ensure that the redistricting fights ahead in those states are ruled on by strong conservatives.” The RSLC did not respond to requests for comment.

The RSLC spent over $1 million in 2012 to boost North Carolina Supreme Court justice Paul Newby; in 2023, Newby penned a ruling that hands legislative Republicans near-unlimited power to gerrymander political districts.

Conservative megadonors have been paying attention, too. In an invitation to a secret 2010 meeting convened by billionaire Charles Koch, the agenda included a discussion of state judicial elections as an opportunity “for advocates of free enterprise to have their voices heard." In Iowa in 2019, a Koch-aligned group backed changes to the state’s nominating commission, running Facebook ads that said, “Iowa's judicial branch is controlled by an oligarchy of attorneys. Don’t you deserve a voice?"

The Federalist Society, which helped elevate conservatives to the U.S. Supreme Court, also has ties to dozens of state supreme court justices. A 2019 review by Billy Corriher of the People’s Parity Project linked a majority of state supreme court justices in eight states to the group. “The Federalist Society is very influential at the state level,” Corriher said.

Vanderbilt’s Fitzpatrick has done research showing that nominating commissions and nonpartisan elections produce more liberal judges, that partisan elections produce more moderate judges, and that appointments result in more conservative judges.

Fitzpatrick, who clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, favors appointments, the most reliable path to conservative justices. He said a switch Tennessee made in 2014 to an appointment system was “in light of this emerging research,” and the legislator who pushed for changes in Iowa cited Fitzpatrick’s work.

“The Republican Party has wised up to the fact that some of these selection methods are producing courts that are out of step with their states,” Fitzpatrick said.

Backlash in the heartland

Iowa’s Supreme Court has been notably progressive dating back to its first ruling, in 1839. That case established that a Black man who had escaped slavery in Missouri was a free man in Iowa.

But progressive rulings have provoked furious conservative backlash twice in the state in recent decades.

In 2009, the court unanimously ruled that gay couples have a right to marry, making Iowa one of only three states in the country where same-sex marriage was legal.

After the ruling, legislators kicked around proposals to expand the size of the court, set term limits and change the nominating system, though none passed.

Conservatives won a different sort of victory: Iowans voted out three Iowa Supreme Court justices who were on the ballot in retention elections in 2010. Before that, no Iowa high court justice had ever lost such an election.

Justices again angered conservatives with their 2018 decision finding that the Iowa Constitution contained a fundamental right to abortion, and striking down a 72-hour waiting period for the procedure.

The next year, Iowa Rep. Steven Holt, a Republican, introduced a bill overhauling the state’s nominating commission. The group recommends a slate of candidates that the governor is required to select a justice from. Its membership was balanced: eight people chosen by the governor and eight by the state bar association, with a member of the state Supreme Court serving as the chair.

The nominating commission was a product of the state’s 1962 constitution. Typically, it would require a constitutional amendment to alter the commission. But an obscure provision stated that, after 1973, the bar for changing the nominating commission would be lowered so a bill would be enough.

The language had no practical impact for decades — until Republicans seized on it in 2019. Holt called the provision “a very strange escape clause.”

His original idea was to completely remove members of the state bar from the commission. That met the approval of Vanderbilt’s Fitzpatrick, who wrote an op-ed in support. The Koch-aligned Americans for Prosperity pushed legislators to support Holt's bill, and the Judicial Crisis Network, the conservative legal organization tied to the Federalist Society, launched a website that told Iowans that “our courts are soft on crime, big on abortion, and a gold-mine for trial lawyers.”

But the bill drew significant opposition from former justices, a former Republican state chairman and a host of advocacy groups — from the Sierra Club to legal organizations to the Iowa City Area Chamber of Commerce.

"Let’s face it, that's what this is about: They want to get conservative judges on the Supreme Court so they hopefully will overturn some of the rulings that our majority party doesn't like," Democratic Rep. Mary Wolfe said in a TV debate.

During the 2019 session, Holt’s proposal appeared to lose momentum. But on the second-to-last day of the session, it reemerged — this time attached to an appropriations bill securing funding for flood recovery.

The new version no longer completely cut out the state bar from the nominating commission, but it still handed majority power to the governor. It mimics a change Florida made in 2001 that has reshaped that state’s high court.

“This is not a power grab, this is a majority party in this chamber exercising our authority,” Holt said on the floor of the statehouse. "A little more voice to the governor is important because that means a little more voice for the people."

The bill passed, and Gov. Kim Reynolds signed it.

“They wanted to empower a Republican governor. And this was one way to do it,” said Drake University’s Caufield.

Two months after signing the bill, Reynolds boasted that "the tide is turning in Iowa’s Supreme Court. In just two short years, we’ve moved the needle from left to right." Reynolds has since put her imprint on the court, selecting three new justices.

A law firm that tracks the court's rulings said that it seems to have “less appetite,” after the addition of Reynolds’ appointees, for finding the Iowa Constitution grants rights beyond the U.S. Constitution. In surveys conducted by the state bar, Iowa lawyers have given the court’s justices declining marks for whether they decide cases “on basis of applicable law and fact, not affected by outside influence.”

The bench is now fully made up of Republican appointees. Four of the five justices who were in the majority in finding a constitutional right to abortion in 2018 were no longer on the bench four years later, when the court removed that right.

The 2022 case’s conclusion also allowed implementation of a 24-hour waiting period for abortions, which was passed by the legislature after the court struck down the 72-hour waiting period.

“It was certainly a surprise to many to see such a reversal of rights in such a short period of time,” said Mazie Stilwell, the public affairs director for Planned Parenthood in Iowa, which was a party in both cases. She said the change in the nominating commission “gave tremendous leeway to Governor Reynolds to be able to really create the courts that she wanted to see.”

Stilwell said the decision would be felt most acutely by rural residents, Iowans of color and poor residents. It forced many to delay care. Second trimester abortions at Planned Parenthood locations in the upper Midwest rose by 40%, Stilwell said, due to new restrictions.

The court heard another abortion case in 2023, which sought a ban on abortions after six weeks. Justices deadlocked in a 3-3 ruling in June.

“This lack of action disregards the will of Iowa voters and lawmakers who will not rest until the unborn are protected by law,” Reynolds said after the ruling. The president of the Family Leader said that the three justices who ruled against the abortion restrictions “should resign, be impeached or be ousted.” 

In July, Reynolds called a special session of the legislature. Since the legal case concerned procedural issues, Iowa Republicans passed a nearly identical six-week ban, which Reynolds signed into law on July 14. It’s likely the high court will have the final say on the restrictions.

In another 2023 decision, justices ruled that Iowans could only seek monetary damages from the government in situations where the legislature had explicitly allowed it. That overturned a precedent set by the court in 2017, removing another constitutional right.

Two years after Iowa made its changes, state politicians in Montana went after their own nominating commission. There, Republican legislators completely abolished it. The state has nonpartisan elections, but now the governor — himself a Republican — has nearly unchecked power to appoint judges to open seats, though the state Senate still plays a role in confirming certain appointments. 

As in Iowa, some Republicans came out against the changes. Former Montana attorney general and governor Marc Racicot wrote an editorial stating that the bill would consolidate power “solely in the hands of one person — the governor — who could appoint any lawyer with zero regard for his or her qualifications, experience, integrity, record or judicial disposition.” Proponents of the bill argued that the status quo was already partisan.

“It felt like there was either tacit or explicit permission to really hyperpartisan-ize the courts in ways that previously had been taboo,” said Alex Rate of the ACLU of Montana.

The high court has continued to frustrate Republicans by striking down laws making it harder to vote and limiting abortion. That’s because there have been no vacancies for the governor to fill. Yet.

“Where the court fits into the political evolution of Montana is an open question,” the University of Montana’s Lee Banville said.

Controlling the third branch

In two states, Republican politicians eyed their state supreme courts and decided the solution was to expand them.

While adding justices to the U.S. Supreme Court has been political kryptonite for nearly a century, Arizona and Georgia did just that at the state level in 2016. The two states are separated by different climates, political cultures and 1,300 miles, but both have been trending purple in recent years and have undergone significant demographic change.

Adding justices gave Republicans a chance to entrench a majority in Arizona that will persist long after they ceded the governor’s mansion to a Democrat in 2022. In Georgia, it created an opportunity to end a then-current majority of Democratic appointees.

“At the state level, conservatives have been packing their courts for years,” said the Brennan Center’s Douglas Keith.

J.D. Mesnard, the Arizona representative who sponsored the legislation to expand that court from five to seven seats, admitted the party affiliation of the governor was on his mind when he spoke at a committee hearing in 2016. “I’ll just candidly say if there were [a] different person appointing, I might feel less comfortable,” he said.

All five of the state’s justices opposed the change, but Mesnard’s bill passed without Democratic support.

By 2019, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey had appointed a majority of the Supreme Court, partly thanks to the two new seats on the bench he was able to fill. In 2020, he set the record for judicial appointments by an Arizona governor.

Not everything came easy: Ducey had to maneuver in 2019 to push through a candidate for the high court that the state’s nominating commission initially rejected, replacing four members of the commission with enough sympathetic votes to recommend conservative attorney Bill Montgomery.

Ducey was explicit about the role conservatives should play in the courts. At a Federalist Society event in 2019, Ducey said he had recently spoken with co-chairman Leonard Leo and told him “the Federalist Society has now fixed the judicial branch.”

Arizona’s court already had a majority of Republicans, but the expansion bolstered it and gave the bench a libertarian bent. “It's not just that we've expanded the court, but very intentionally, I think, put much more conservative, ideological people on the court,” said David Lujan, a former Democratic state senator who commented while president of the Children’s Action Alliance. He now heads an agency in Gov. Katie Hobbs' administration.

Hobbs will have a chance to put her imprint on the courts, but it’s unlikely the high court will be made up of a majority of Democratic appointees anytime soon.

Mesnard, now a state senator, said he wanted to spread out power among a greater number of justices. “I was just forthright with the fact that you really can't separate the political implications from a decision like that,” he said. “There was just no way to.” Mesnard sponsored other bills to add supervisors to populous counties, create a lieutenant governor and add seats to the legislature.

Since Arizona expanded its bench, the Supreme Court has ruled that voters can’t repeal tax cuts enacted by the legislature and blocked a ballot measure passed by Arizona voters to bolster funding for K-12 schools. “​​Our public schools have a billion dollars less in revenue each year without that funding,” said Lujan, who helped write the measure.

A third ruling denied in-state tuition to students receiving DACA, substantially increasing the cost of attending the state's public colleges and universities for 2,000 students.

“I know for a fact that people had to drop out,” said Karina Ruiz of the Arizona DREAM Act Coalition. “I don't know that the Supreme Court in the state of Arizona realized the real harm that they caused, with this decision, in people's lives.”

The impact was deeply felt at the Maricopa County Community College District, the defendant in the case. The district counted 574 DACA recipients in its student body in spring 2018, the semester that the Supreme Court’s ruling came out. By fall of 2019, that number had fallen to just 115, a drop of four-fifths. 

Four years after the ruling, Arizonans passed a ballot measure that will allow many non-citizen high school graduates to receive in-state tuition going forward.

In 2016, the year Arizona added two members to its Supreme Court, Georgia did the same, expanding its bench from seven to nine justices. Advocates for the change argued that the state’s growing population and economy necessitated additional justices to help bring down the workload.

The court’s growth meant that then-Gov. Nathan Deal would have the opportunity to appoint a majority of the bench during his term. (Georgia has judicial elections, but in practice most judges are initially appointed by the governor.) The bench flipped from a majority of Democratic appointees to a majority of Republican ones.

“If you look at Georgia in 2016, there was a Republican supermajority in the legislature. There was a Republican in the governor's mansion,” said Georgia State University’s Michael Fix. “This was their way to control the third branch of government.”

Georgia’s Supreme Court heard a case on a six-week abortion ban in March. A ruling is expected later this year.

In another Republican-controlled state, Ohio, legislators were dissatisfied with nonpartisan general elections chipping away at a Republican majority on the high court, which had shrunk from 7-0 to 4-3 in recent years. So they proposed in 2021 to make elections partisan.

In debates over the bill, Republican state Sen. Theresa Gavarone called nonpartisan judicial elections a “ruse.” Sitting Supreme Court Justice Pat DeWine, the son of the governor, penned an op-ed supporting the change. Echoing arguments made in North Carolina, DeWine wrote that “rather than hiding party affiliation from the voters, we are far better served by trusting voters with the information and allowing them to make their own decisions.”

While Republicans had maintained a majority on the Ohio Supreme Court, it was close enough that a single vote could swing a case. Indeed, in a series of 2022 rulings, Republican Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor sided with Democrats on gerrymandered political maps.

O’Connor was forced to retire due to age limits. Republicans swept the 2022 races, the first with a partisan label on the ballot. Observers expect the court’s new members will not share O’Connor’s independent streak.

Adding partisan labels “encourages the candidates and voters to think about these justices as partisan actors,” said Common Cause Ohio’s Catherine Turcer. “And that's a real problem when it comes to wanting an independent, impartial judiciary.”

Lawrence Baum, a political science professor at the Ohio State University, said it’s unclear precisely how the new justices will vote. “But there's every reason to think that they will be reliable on ideological issues, as well as partisan issues. We'll just have to wait and see just how reliable they are.”

The wait may not be long. The justices will hear a case concerning a six-week abortion ban this term.

And in June, the four Republican justices sided with Republican legislators seeking to schedule a ballot initiative in August. The measure would increase the threshold for passing future initiatives to 60 percent — and would make it significantly harder for voters to add a right to abortion to the Ohio Constitution with a measure on the ballot in November.

More states lining up to change their courts

Utah and Idaho are the latest states to the party, with each changing how justices reach the bench in 2023.

Utah’s move followed major losses for conservatives at the high court, which had blocked laws banning nearly all abortions and stopping transgender girls from playing high school sports.

The state’s new law reshapes Utah’s nominating commission, handing the governor greater power and stripping the state bar of any input. The bill was sponsored by a state senator whose father runs the largest eviction law firm in Utah, and who had previously introduced legislation that would allow such firms, among others, to avoid unfriendly judges.

“There's no longer any attempt to at least have different voices heard on the nominating commission,” said Erik A. Christiansen, president of the Utah State Bar. The bill also removed a requirement that Democrats play a role on the commission. “That's a pretty strong indicator that they're going to appoint more people who are strictly Republicans,” Christiansen said.

In neighboring Idaho, Republican legislators were seething after the state Supreme Court struck down a law in 2021 that made it more difficult for citizens to place an initiative on the ballot.

This year, legislators passed a bill to transform the state’s nominating commission. As in Iowa and Utah, they granted more power to the governor and weakened the bar’s influence. Under the new structure, the governor will have a role in choosing eight of the commission’s nine members.

State Sen. Abby Lee, who introduced the bill, said during debate, “This is a change to wrest a little bit of influence from the state bar. I admit that. I am not against the bar, but I do think they have had an outsized influence."

Former Idaho Supreme Court Chief Justice Jim Jones could hardly believe that line of reasoning. “Well, she’s dead wrong,” he told Public Integrity.

Jones is concerned about the future of the state's high court. He said political affiliation had only rarely factored into court rulings when he was a judge, but recent changes in Idaho could lead to it resembling “some other states where they have judiciaries that are essentially arms of one or the other parties,” he said, citing North Carolina. Jones, a former Republican attorney general, deemed recent proposals to reshape courts in Idaho "thinly-veiled payback" for the Supreme Court's ruling on initiatives.

In many states, plans to tilt courts to the right percolate for years before becoming law. This year, legislators in over ten states introduced ultimately unsuccessful bills that sought to make judicial selection more partisan, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center — proposals that could come back in future sessions.

Moving to partisan elections has been especially popular, with Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Montana, Arkansas, Oklahoma and West Virginia all considering legislation to do that. “State legislators are taking lessons from what's happened in Ohio and North Carolina,” said Brennan’s Keith.

Other states looked at increasing partisan influence over nominating commissions or in judicial appointments. Nearly all states that considered changes are run by Republicans.

But it’s not only the states making changes where ripple effects could be felt. 

State supreme court justices are poised to play a decisive role in the 2024 election. Legal scholars point out that such courts have unique authority over voting. 

“Most law when it comes to elections is state law,” said Rebecca Green of William & Mary Law School. In 2022, Wisconsin’s Supreme Court banned drop boxes, and Pennsylvania’s high court ruled that undated mail ballots could not be counted.

After the 2020 presidential election, attorneys tied to the Trump campaign and its allies filed 76 legal cases, the overwhelming number of them in state courts, and many challenging the outcome. Trump and his allies lost nearly every case. But not every ruling was unanimous.

With different circumstances and justices, state supreme courts could deliver different decisions.

“These courts are going to decide the next presidential election,” Washington University’s Gibson predicted. “I don't think there's any doubt whatsoever about that. And so everybody knows that, and everybody’s gearing up.”

Public Integrity journalist Ileana Garnand contributed to this article.

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