Editorials: Beware of Robots Telling You How to Vote | Mark Buchanan/Bloomberg

Voting is partially a social endeavor, in which people consider the opinions of others when making up their own minds. Increasingly, though, they’re being influenced by an inhuman force: software robots specifically designed to deceive them. Lest democracy be undermined, humans need help in distinguishing their brethren from the bots. Two years ago, in a report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the social networking site Twitter estimated that more than 23 million of its active user accounts were being run by “bots” — software agents or bits of code that act on their own to respond to news and world events. They interact with real users, never revealing their true nature.

Editorials: Restoring Voting Rights to the Disenfranchised | Hill Harper/NBC News

As the Republican National Convention comes to a close and the Democrats gear up for next week, there is one looming question about the focus each party will place on voting rights—an issue that was not front and center during the presidential debates but should be at the forefront of national discussion as we approach the general election. If and when they do turn to voting rights, there is much to address—most especially concerning the restoration of voting rights for returning citizens. Our democracy is strengthened when as many eligible citizens as possible are able to freely participate in elections. However, in 2016, many states are holding firm to laws that deny Americans the right to vote because of a prior criminal conviction from their past. So-called “felony disenfranchisement” laws hurt people with criminal histories and their home communities. Publicly available data demonstrates that an estimated 5.85 million Americans are currently disenfranchised as a result of these arcane laws.

Editorials: Political Reality Smacks Down Texas’ Voter ID Law | Noah Feldman/Bloomberg View

In time for the presidential election, an appeals court has determined that Texas’ voter identification law is discriminatory. Those without a government-issued photo ID will therefore have their votes counted on the basis of other evidence of residency. If Texas turns out to be in play in November, the result could have a small but meaningful effect in Hillary Clinton’s favor. More important, the decision has great symbolic significance in an election in which Donald Trump has focused on illegal immigration. In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a voter ID law in Indiana as a permissible way to avoid voter fraud. The different result in Texas — a state with distinctly different demographics — highlights how much things have changed in the last eight years. A federal district court had previously found that the Texas law, S.B. 14, violated both the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution, and a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld part of the decision. Texas then asked the entire court to sit and reconsider the result. In the meantime, the 5th Circuit issued a stay that kept the law in place. The plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to reinstate the lower court decision and block the law. In an unusual move, the justices told the 5th Circuit that if it didn’t decide the case by July 20, 2016, the court would be willing to consider a motion to block the law. The Fifth Circuit got the message — and issued its carefully crafted opinion on July 20.

Editorials: Judge provides a necessary safety net for voters | Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Wisconsin’s voter ID law was a mistake from the start; a political talking point dressed up as policy, aiming to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. And although the law isn’t particularly onerous for most people, there are some for whom obtaining the necessary ID is substantially difficult. So difficult that some won’t — or won’t be able to — go through the hassle of getting one. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman threw those people a lifeline, or “safety net,” as he called it. Adelman issued a preliminary ruling allowing Wisconsin voters without photo identification to cast ballots by swearing to their identity. Good for Adelman; allowing people to use affidavits to vote opens the ballot door to those who otherwise might not cast a ballot.

Editorials: The 5th Circuit left an opening for Texas to lose control of its discriminatory voting laws. | Rick Hasen/Slate

This week’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit—holding that Texas’ strict voter identification law violates the Voting Rights Act—is good news for those who believe such laws are discriminatory and do nothing to prevent voter fraud. But there is potentially much better news buried within the eight separate opinions of the 203-page ruling, which comes from one of the most conservative courts in the nation. There you’ll find a road map for returning Texas’ voting rules to the supervision of the federal government. That’s something that states like Texas—which has passed laws that handicap a portion of its voting-age population—have proved they still need. Let’s start with the most straightforward part of the 5th Circuit decision. Texas passed one of the strictest voter identification laws in the nation in 2011—a law notorious, for example, for allowing citizens to show a concealed weapons permit but not student identification in order to vote. The suit challenging the law argued, among other things, that members of protected minority groups in Texas, who are more likely to be poor, are also more likely to lack the right kind of identification and to face extra hurdles (such as traveling 100 miles or more) to get a “free” piece of identification from the state.

Editorials: Kansas Zealot Helps Shape the G.O.P.’s Right-Wing Platform | The New York Times

One of the most fervid ideologues expected at the Republican convention this week — the Kansas secretary of state, Kris Kobach — has been busy shaping extremist positions in the party platform to suppress immigration, gun controls and same-sex marriage. But he also found time last week to do actual damage to Kansans with a devious, 11th-hour policy that would disqualify 17,000 of them as state voters, even though they are allowed by law to vote in federal elections. At issue is Mr. Kobach’s zealous enforcement of a notorious law he urged Kansas Republicans to pass that requires new voters to prove their citizenship with a passport, birth certificate or naturalization papers. Federal law imposes no such burden. But Mr. Kobach continues to try to force the state requirement onto the books — brazenly persisting in the face of recent federal and state court findings that these legitimate voters are being suppressed and must be allowed their full ballot rights.

Editorials: Virginia Needs to Fix Its Racist Voting Law | Dale E. Ho/The New York Times

The Virginia Supreme Court will hear arguments on Tuesday in a lawsuit that aims to strip the right to vote from more than 206,000 people, including one in five African-American adults in the state. If state lawmakers win, they will keep Virginia trapped in a shameful part of history: when former Confederate states passed felon disenfranchisement laws after Reconstruction to suppress black political power. Under Virginia’s Constitution, a person with a single felony offense can’t vote unless the governor restores his or her voting rights. This wasn’t always the case. Virginia’s 1870 Constitution, passed during Reconstruction, barred voting for those convicted of corruption or treason. But delegates to Virginia’s 1902 constitutional convention adopted new voting restrictions, including a ban on voting for all felons, poll taxes and a literacy test. They were not shy about their intentions. Virginia’s new constitution would “eliminate the darkey as a political factor,” explained Carter Glass, a convention delegate and, later as a United States senator, an author of the Glass-Steagall banking law. Their goal was to ensure “complete supremacy of the white race in the affairs of government.”

Editorials: Potential Arizona voter data hack gets whimper of an explanation | News-Herald

Arizona voters deserve to know if their personal information on file with the state of Arizona remains safe from identify thieves. If there is any threat to the security of the voter registration database, it deserves not only an investigation but full disclosure of the outcome. Right now, every voter in the state has legitimate reason to at least wonder if their personal information has been compromised. A couple of weeks ago, the FBI investigated a hacking threat against the state’s voter registration database and deemed the threat credible, labeling it an “8 out of 10” on the severity scale. The database contains not only names and addresses but also driver license numbers, partial Social Security numbers and other personal information that identity thieves can match with other partial personal information and commit fraud. As the investigation progressed, the state shut down its voter registration website.

Editorials: Why the rush? In defence of Australia’s slow election count | Ben Raue/The Guardian

Bill Shorten has expressed interest in moving to electronic voting to prevent delays in future Australian election results. Malcolm Turnbull agrees with this sentiment. Electronic voting would not actually speed up a very close result, and it carries the risk of undermining trust in our electoral system. Electronic voting in most cases is unnecessary, expensive and impractical. It also has numerous problems that shouldn’t be underestimated. Firstly, any voting system needs to be anonymous, secure and transparent – and this is difficult to do using an electronic system. There are numerous objections to the anonymity, security and transparency of electronic voting (in particular, voting over the internet) on technical grounds that I won’t go into here. The majority of voters cast a vote at a local polling place on election day. This system works pretty well – votes are counted quickly and the system is well understood. It would come at a tremendous cost to set up electronic voting facilities in every school and church hall across the country for a single day of voting. It would be more practical to introduce electronic pre-poll voting at booths in capital cities, as currently happens for Australian Capital Territory elections and New Zealand elections, but these votes are already counted on election night, so this wouldn’t do much to speed up a result.

Editorials: E-voting is still the wrong answer to the wrong question | Stilgherrian/ZDNet

Here we go again. There’s been an election in Australia, so once more, with all the regularity of a cuckoo clock, politicians and pundits alike are proposing that electronic voting is the answer. So, here we go again, explaining why it’s a bad idea. First, if e-voting is the answer, what is the actual question? Here’s what troubles people this time. … Broadly speaking, there’s two kinds of e-voting: voting over the internet, and voting in person at polling stations where votes are recorded on computers rather than paper ballots. Whichever kind of e-voting we’re talking about, it has to solve a conundrum. How do we provide the complete transparency of process needed to eliminate fraud, while still maintaining the secrecy of individuals’ votes? As I wrote in 2011, transparency is the tricky bit. “Our paper voting system is easy to understand. Anyone with working eyesight and who can read and count can scrutineer the process. No special skills are required,” I wrote.

Editorials: Russia Has the Most Boring Election of 2016 | Leonid Bershidsky/Bloomberg

The thrilling spectacles offered by the U.S. presidential election, the U.K. referendum on leaving the European Union and even Austria’s cliffhanger presidential vote have overshadowed an election campaign in Russia, which will get a new parliament on Sept. 18. That’s because, even though they have all the the trappings of democracy, the Russian elections are mostly theater, whose actors are shadows from the country’s brief experiment with competitive politics. In theory, the elections shouldn’t be boring. The previous ones, in 2011, gave rise to the most meaningful and vigorous protests against Vladimir Putin’s corrupt system of his more than 15 years in power. Then, tens of thousands of Muscovites took to the streets to protest what they saw as the falsification of vote results: Statistical analysis suggested that United Russia, the pro-Putin party, owed its majority to widespread ballot-stuffing. It even appeared briefly that the Kremlin — occupied then by Putin’s stand-in, Dmitri Medvedev — was unsettled enough to change a few things. Gubernatorial elections, which had been abolished, were allowed again, and the authorities took care to make voting more transparent for the 2012 presidential election, organizing a live video feed from every polling station and making sure not to obstruct observers’ work. Putin, however, saw the protests as a U.S.-inspired threat of a revolution like the one would shake Ukraine in 2013-2014. As soon as his third presidential term began — after he pulled off an undeniable electoral triumph — he started tightening the screws, using the parliament — the State Duma — to pass legislation that sharply limited the freedoms of assembly and expression. The chamber came to be known as an “amok printer” because of the speed at which it spewed out repressive laws.

Editorials: Why Internet Voting Is a Nonstarter | Avi Rubin/JHU Engineering Magazine

I began my college studies in computer science in 1985, and I watched as the Internet transformed the world over the last 25 years. As a computer scientist, I have an acute appreciation for the benefits of our global, interconnected network. I love the Internet. By all accounts, I am an early adopter. I was the first of all my friends with a cellphone and a mobile email reading device. I was the first to buy an Apple Newton; I hacked my own TiVo when the product was first introduced, and I use a smart doorbell and thermostat at home. I embrace technology and progress. Let’s put it all online. Find a way to automate this. Give me a high-tech way to do that. I do online banking, store my medical records in the cloud, and use wireless payments at the mall. My car, a 2013 Tesla, has its own Internet connection, and I navigate my boat with my iPad. So why am I stuck in the Dark Ages when it comes to voting? Why do I believe in paper ballots instead of direct-recording electronic voting machines? And why do I believe that we will not be able to securely vote on the Internet in the foreseeable future?

Editorials: The Purge of Ohio’s Infrequent Voters | The New York Times

Should voting sporadically in past elections be grounds to remove a voter from the election rolls? This is the issue being fought out in Ohio, the crucial swing state where a federal court recently upheld the controversial purging of scores of thousands of voters from the rolls for failing to participate in three consecutive federal elections. Updating voter rolls for accuracy, change of address and death is a routine task carried out by elections officials everywhere, but only a few states remove voters for reasons of inactivity. Ohio’s purge prompted a lawsuit by civil liberties groups accusing the Republican-controlled state government of engaging in suppression of minority and poor voters who tended to favor Democratic candidates. But last month, a federal district judge found that the policy of the Ohio secretary of state, Jon Husted, of purging a voter after six years of inactivity and failure to reply to a state warning did not violate “the integrity of the election process.” An appeal is being considered.

Editorials: Scaremongering over voting rights restoration in Virginia | The Washington Post

In April, Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) ordered voting rights restored to 206,000 ex-convicts in Virginia, a move in line with similar recent reforms in more than 20 states that have lifted the stigma of disenfranchisement from citizens who have served their sentences and paid their debts to society. The fact that Virginia’s list of newly eligible voters was prepared in haste and that it contained errors — including murderers still behind bars — is evidence of incompetence and slapdash execution. It is not an argument that the order is illegal or unconstitutional, as critics would have Virginians believe. Those critics, including top Republicans in Richmond as well as some prosecutors, insist that the state constitution allows the governor to restore voting and other civil rights to ex-convicts only on an individualized basis. As evidence, they point to the actions of recent governors who, while seeking to expand and accelerate the restoration of voting rights to former inmates, refrained from establishing a fully automatic system for doing so.

Editorials: Democrats Get Serious About Voting Rights | Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg View

The Democrats are going on the offensive to make voting easier. The draft language in the party’s 2016 platform is much stronger than it was in 2012, and that’s mostly good for democracy. The party’s shift from its defensive crouch started in the states, with the adoption of automatic-voter registration rules in Oregon, California, West Virginia, Connecticut, Vermont and Illinois. Hillary Clinton endorsed these efforts last summer, and now the national Democratic platform is being written accordingly. The smorgasbord of measures includes an expected call to restore Voting Rights Act provisions that the Supreme Court weakened as well as a relatively new fight at the national party level for “voting rights for those who have served their sentences,” referring to former felons. Currently, many states delay restoring the vote to ex-felons, and some states have a lifetime ban.

Editorials: Electronic voting may be risky, but what about vote counting? | Robert Merkel/The Conversation

Several advantages of online voting were identified in a recent post by Conversation columnist and software researcher David Glance who backed the introduction of such a scheme in Australia. He is correct that an online voting system would be faster, more convenient and have fewer accidental informal votes. It would also reduce the donkey vote problem (though the “donkey vote” bias can also be dealt with by the use of Robson rotation on printed ballots). But in my view he dismisses the very real risks not only of actual election tampering, but something equally important – the confidence that Australian elections aren’t being tampered with. A vote-counting system not only needs to be secure against threats to its integrity, it needs to be seen to be secure against such threats. The right technologies, deployed in the right way, can assist with speeding up vote counts without putting the integrity of our voting system at risk. The place for that technology is not as a replacement for the paper ballot.

Editorials: Could GOP Voter Suppression Tactics Inadvertently Hurt Trump? | Jaime Estades/Roll Call

This November, we’ll have the first presidential election since the Supreme Court gutted some protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act back in 2013. Since then, every change in states freed from federal oversight was designed to make it harder for minorities, the poor, the elderly and the young to vote — most likely for Democrats, in states governed by Republicans. Only, it is not only minorities who will be affected. An unintended consequence of this suppression could be that poor, working-class white voters who want to register for the first time to vote for Donald Trump could find themselves shut out under the same rules designed to make it harder for more left-leaning minority voters to cast ballots. It was only after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act that African Americans and other minority voters began to enjoy the protection of federal law. Under that law, states with a history of minority voter suppression had to get “pre-clearance” for all changes in voting procedures and poll locations to make sure these changes didn’t keep eligible voters from casting ballots.

Editorials: Could Voting Restrictions Be Trump’s Ace in the Hole? | Zachary Roth/NBC

Donald Trump has made clear he’s a big supporter of strict voting laws. He worries that people can “sneak in through the cracks” of the system and vote “many, many times,” and that “illegal immigrants” are voting. “Look, you’ve got to have real security with the voting system,” Trump has said. That attitude makes sense. Trump may be trailing in the polls, and his cash-strapped campaign may be struggling to build a viable operation in key swing states. But the new wave of Republican-backed restrictions on voting — which look set to keep Democratic voters from the polls — could wind up being Trump’s ace in the hole if the race is close this fall. Tight voting laws also could boost the GOP in a host of House, Senate, governor, and state legislative races. That’s in part because many of the states that have imposed the strictest voting rules — think Wisconsin with its controversial ID law, or North Carolina, with a multipronged measure that critics call a “monster voter suppression law” — are pivotal battlegrounds. It’s also because minorities and young people — the very voters who are most turned off by Trump and the GOP, and on whom Hillary Clinton will be counting on for a strong turnout — are the ones most likely to be tripped up by barriers to the polls.

Editorials: Toward a more perfect vote count in future California campaigns | The Sacramento Bee

Nearly a month after the June 7 primary, California still is tallying ballots, a task that regularly dumbfounds the uninitiated with its snail-like immunity to speed. “Yes, They’re Still Counting the Presidential Primary Votes,” The New York Times carped last week, wondering how the cradle of high tech could have such inefficient elections. A week before, The Washington Post quoted Sen. Bernie Sanders supporters speculating that Sanders actually had won the Democratic primary but no one knew because of the slow vote count. In fact, California election results are the way they are because this state bends over backwards not to disenfranchise voters. This year, some in the Sanders camp actually worsened matters by switching parties at the last minute and casting provisional ballots, which have to be individually verified.

Editorials: The Struggle to Vote in Kansas | The New York Times

The right to vote is turning into a tooth-and-claw saga in Kansas, thanks to right-wing ideologues’ determination to force new voters to produce a passport, a birth certificate or naturalization papers as proof of citizenship. This is unheard-of in most of the nation, where aspiring voters are required only to swear to being citizens under penalty of prosecution for fraud. But in Kansas, the requirement that citizenship be documented has become a grave electoral impediment that is being challenged on two legal fronts. In the first, a federal district judge in May ordered the state to register thousands of people who had been denied federal voting privileges because they did not produce proof of citizenship when they tried to register at motor vehicle offices. Judge Julie Robinson ruled that the requirement violated the National Voter Registration Act provision that “only the minimum amount of information” is needed to certify a voter. The state is appealing her ruling.

Editorials: Voting Rights / Lawrence Journal World

There is nothing more important to American democracy than the participation of its citizens through voting. Voting in local, state and federal elections is a precious right that unfortunately is the subject of considerable confusion in Kansas these days. With the primary election less than a month away, Kansas remains mired in a number of court battles over which registered voters are allowed to vote and in which contests. Last week, a federal judge refused to block a decision by the executive director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to require voters in Kansas, Georgia and Alabama to present proof of citizenship to complete their registrations using a federal form. In other states, the federal voter registration form requires voters to swear under penalty of perjury that they are citizens but doesn’t require citizenship proof such as a birth certificate or passport. Legal action challenging the EAC decision still is active, but the judge said the decision should stand until the case is decided at trial.

Editorials: Why elections are bad for democracy | David Van Reybrouck/The Guardian

Brexit is a turning point in the history of western democracy. Never before has such a drastic decision been taken through so primitive a procedure – a one-round referendum based on a simple majority. Never before has the fate of a country – of an entire continent, in fact – been changed by the single swing of such a blunt axe, wielded by disenchanted and poorly informed citizens. But this is just the latest in a series of worrying blows to the health of democracy. On the surface, everything still seems fine. A few years ago, the World Values Survey, a large-scale international research project, asked more than 73,000 people in 57 countries if they believed democracy was a good way to govern a country – and nearly 92% said yes. But that same survey found that in the past 10 years, around the world, there has been a considerable increase in calls for a strong leader “who does not have to bother with parliament and elections” – and that trust in governments and political parties has reached a historical low. It would appear that people like the idea of democracy but loathe the reality. Trust in the institutions of democracy is also visibly declining. In the past five years, the European Union’s official research bureau found that less than 30% of Europeans had faith in their national parliaments and governments – some of the lowest figures in years, and an indication that almost three-quarters of people distrust their countries’ most important political institutions. Everywhere in the west, political parties – the key players in our democracies – are among the least trusted institutions in society. Although a certain scepticism is an essential component of citizenship in a free society, we are justified in asking how widespread this distrust might be and at what point healthy scepticism tips over into outright aversion.

Editorials: Iowa Supreme Court fails voters | Quad City Times

The Iowa Supreme Court issued the mother of all cop-outs Thursday. And, in so doing, reinforced Gov. Terry Branstad’s draconian voter disenfranchisement of more than 50,000 Iowans. In a 4-3 decision, rendered along partisan lines, Chief Justice Mark Cady strains to avoid upsetting the apple cart, a problem created by the vagueness of “infamy” as the state Constitution’s standard for disenfranchisement. Yes, words change, Cady admits. Victorian psuedo-scientific voting bans on “idiots” and the “insane,” appearing in the original state Constitution, are long gone, he notes. And, yes, Iowa’s excessively harsh approach to voting rights disproportionately affects black communities thanks to flaws in the application of justice, Cady concedes. But, he concludes, the courts — the body designed to interpret words written by long-dead men — shouldn’t get involved in a provision that cedes access to the most important democratic right to the whims of a governor. It’s the very court that, just two years ago, redefined the outdated term, “infamy,” to exclude misdemeanor convictions that included jail time. And it’s the very court that, in its landmark 2009 ruling legalizing gay marriage, recognized the Constitution’s living, breathing status. Astonishing.

Editorials: Only 58% of Indigenous Australians are registered to vote. We should be asking why | Paul Daley/The Guardian

The last week of the federal election campaign opened with news that Indigenous people in Western Australia’s Kimberley region are seven times more likely to take their own lives than other Australians. If ever a revelation might halt an election in its tracks, prompt politicians and the media who trail them around Australia on their set-piece campaign operations, to pause and reflect for a day – even an hour or a moment – then a disclosure of such tragic human import should, surely, have done so. But the major party caravans just bumped along, each attacking the other with fallacious claims about alleged changes to Medicare and border protection policies. While policy argument was anchored in the illusory, there was no substantive, mainstream political engagement with this real tragedy in the Kimberley. The social, political and economic indicators of Indigenous Australian wellbeing have, since the 1950s, been an acute source of international embarrassment to Australian federal and state politicians. Indeed, international opprobrium – which rightly lumped Australia’s treatment of its first people in with South Africa’s apartheid regime – were, together with the burgeoning civil rights movement, instrumental in delivering the federal vote to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in 1962.

Editorials: The Secret Power Behind Local Elections | Chisun Lee and Lawrence Norden/The New York Times

When the history of elections in 2016 is written, one of the central points is likely to be how little voters knew about the donors who influenced the contests. At the federal level, “dark money” groups — chiefly social welfare nonprofits and trade associations that aren’t required to disclose their donors and, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, can spend unlimited amounts on political advertising — have spent three times more in this election than they did at a comparable point in 2012. Yet the rise of dark money may matter less in the race for president or Congress than for, say, the utilities commission in Arizona. Voters probably know much less about the candidates in contests like that, which get little news coverage but whose winner will have enormous power to affect energy company profits and what homeowners pay for electricity. For a relative pittance — less than $100,000 — corporations and others can use dark money to shape the outcome of a low-level race in which they have a direct stake. Over the last year, the Brennan Center analyzed outside spending from before and after the 2010 Citizens United decision in six states — Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Maine and Massachusetts — with almost 20 percent of the nation’s population. We also examined dozens of state and local elections where dark money could be linked to a particular interest.

Editorials: Brexit, “Regrexit,” and the impact of political ignorance | Ilya Somin/The Washington Post

Since last week’s Brexit vote, new evidence has emerged suggesting that the result many have been influenced by widespread political ignorance. In the immediate aftermath of the vote, there was a massive spike in internet searches in Britain asking questions like “What is the EU?” and “What does it mean to leave the EU?” Obviously, reasonably well-informed voters should have known the answers to these questions before they went to the polls instead of after. The aftermath of Brexit has also spawned the so-called “Regrexit” phenomenon: Britons who voted for Brexit, but now regret doing so because they feel they were misinformed about the likely consequences, or did not consider them carefully enough. A petition on the British Parliament website calling for a revote has collected over 3.4 million signatures (Parliament is required to consider any petition that gets over 100,000 signatures, though it does not have to grant it).

Editorials: Drawing the Line | Elizabeth Kolbert/The New Yorker

Sometime around October 20, 1788, Patrick Henry rode from his seventeen-hundred-acre farm in Prince Edward, Virginia, to a session of the General Assembly in Richmond. Henry is now famous for having declared, on the eve of the Revolution, “Give me liberty, or give me death!”—a phrase it’s doubtful that he ever uttered—but in the late seventeen-eighties he was best known as a leader of the Anti-Federalists. He and his faction had tried to sink the Constitution, only to be outmaneuvered by the likes of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. When Henry arrived in the state capital, his adversaries assumed he would seek revenge. They just weren’t sure how. “He appears to be involved in gloomy mystery,” one of them reported. The Constitution had left it to state lawmakers to determine how elections should be held, and in Virginia the Anti-Federalists controlled the legislature. Knowing that his enemy Madison was planning a run for the House of Representatives, Henry set to work. First, he and his confederates resolved that Virginia’s congressmen would be elected from districts. (Several other states had chosen to elect their representatives on a statewide basis, a practice that persisted until Congress intervened, in 1842.) Next, they stipulated that each representative from Virginia would have to run from the district where he resided. Finally, they stuck in the shiv. They drew the Fifth District, around Madison’s home in the town of Orange, to include as many Anti-Federalists as possible.

Editorials: Brexit: a journey into the unknown for a country never before so divided | Andrew Rawnsley/The Guardian

In the speech announcing his resignation, David Cameron included a list of the things he was proud to have done as prime minister. I suspect you glazed over at that point. So will future biographers of his premiership. He has just become one of those leaders who will be remembered for a single enormous mistake. Neville Chamberlain had achievements to his name before appeasement. There was more to Anthony Eden than the Suez debacle. Lord North had a career before he lost America. But each of those premiers is defined by their one towering disaster. So it will be with David Cameron, the prime minister who accidentally ruptured more than four decades of his country’s economic, security and foreign policy by losing the referendum on Europe. That will be the inscription etched deep on his tombstone. He staked his reputation and gambled his country’s place in the world on a referendum for which his party ached but the public hardly clamoured. He timed the vote and chose a moment that has proved to be a calamity for the cause to which he became a belated, and thus not very convincing, champion. He destroyed his premiership because he misjudged the politics and mishandled his enemies. The man who arrived as leader of his party pledging to purge its obsession with “banging on about Europe” has blown himself up over Europe. And potentially much else besides. With Nicola Sturgeon seizing on the perfect rationale for another attempt to gain independence for Scotland, he may also be remembered as the man who unravelled the United Kingdom, achieving the double whammy of expelling his country from one union and breaking an even older one.

Editorials: Brexit earthquake has happened, and the rubble will take years to clear | Rafael Behr/The Guardian

There is a difference between measuring the height of a drop and the sensation of falling; between the sight of a wave and hearing it crash on to the shore; between the knowledge of what fire can do and feeling the heat as the flames catch. The theoretical possibility that Britain might leave the European Union, nominally the only question under consideration on the ballot paper, turns out to prefigure nothing of the shock when the country actually votes to do it. Politics as practised for a generation is upended; traditional party allegiances are shredded; the prime minister’s authority is bust – and that is just the parochial domestic fallout. A whole continent looks on in trepidation. It was meant to be unthinkable, now the thought has become action. Europe cannot be the same again. The signs were always there, even if the opinion polls nudged Remainers towards false optimism at the very end of the campaign. Brexit had taken the lead at times and always hovered in the margin of error. But the statistical probability of an earthquake doesn’t describe the disorienting feeling of the ground lurching violently beneath your feet.

Editorials: Get Ready: The Next ‘Citizens United’ Is Coming | Carrie Levine/ Politico

Most Americans last heard from conservative lawyer Jim Bopp six years ago when he crafted a case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that won the Supreme Court’s favor and helped uncork a torrent of cash—some of it secret—that continues pouring into elections. But Bopp is back. The Terre Haute, Indiana-based attorney, who was literally laughed at by a judge when he made his first arguments in Citizens United, is now the lead lawyer in the most prominent of a series of lawsuits attempting to further destroy political contribution limits. The case, brought by the Republican Party of Louisiana, addresses restrictions on how state and local political parties use “soft money” contributions to influence federal elections. Bopp’s clients argue that if independent outside groups such as super PACs are permitted to raise and spend unlimited amounts of such money, there’s no reason why state political parties, acting independently of federal candidates, should be treated differently. Political parties are “disadvantaged” compared with super PACs, Bopp said in an interview with the Center for Public Integrity. “They want to compete, and they want to do this activity without the severe restrictions that they suffer under,” said Bopp.