Red Shift: How State Legislatures Dismantled the Right to Vote, book manuscript in preparation, with support from:
Library of Congress Kluge Fellowship, 2022
HBCU Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, 2026-2026
Steven M. Polan Fellowship, Brennan Center for Justice, 2026-2026

This book manuscript recounts how American state legislators have rolled back state constitutional voting and election protections. Constitutions in forty-nine states guarantee the right to vote. Many state constitutional voting protections date to the civil rights era. However, after the civil rights era, increased congressional polarization and deadlock and a rightward shift in Supreme Court jurisprudence deferred election administration to the states. This book project suggests that Republican state lawmakers, increasingly representing depopulating, white rural districts, sought to entrench their legislative seat share by dismantling civil-rights-era state constitutional voting protections.

Specifically, over the last few decades, conservative state lawmakers have dismantled state constitutional voting protections in three ways. First, legislators suppress the vote by raising barriers to voting. The Supreme Court’s decisions in Shelby in 2013, Abbott in 2018, and Brnovich in 2021 weakened federal elections oversight under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, deferring election authority to state lawmakers, who passed dozens of voting restriction bills, in 2021 and 2022 imposing identification and citizenship ballot access requirements, reducing polling locations and hours, limiting early and absentee voting, and reducing voting rolls. Second, legislators skew the vote by drawing biased district boundaries to ease their reflection. The Court’s 2018 Abbott and 2019 Rucho decisions deferred legislative districting powers to state legislators, who weakened independent districting bodies and engaged in further rounds of gerrymandering. Finally, legislators subvert the vote by stymying state executive or judicial election oversight. For example, in 2021, Pennsylvania Republicans attempted to flip their state’s Electoral College vote to Donald Trump and in 2022, North Carolina Republicans asserted they could ignore state courts and unilaterally draw congressional districts. The United States Supreme Court rejected North Carolina Republicans’ claims in the 2023 Moore decision but affirmed state legislators’ authority to allocate presidential electors without regard to the popular vote. As the Republican Party struggled to win democratic majorities, the Party used coinciding Senate and White House control to stack the federal courts, which helped the Party entrench itself in the state legislatures.

Hidden Laws: How State Constitutions Stabilize American Politics, Yale University Press, 2021

The federal Constitution is relatively stable. Americans have ratified only 27 of the 11,970 proposed constitutional amendments, never convened to replace the Constitution, and rarely significantly reinterpret the document. In contrast, Americans have called 411 state constitutional revision assemblies, ratified 144 state constitutions, held 255 state constitutional conventions, proposed 11,635 amendments to the current state constitutions, ratified 7,695, and repeatedly reinterpreted these documents. What explains this difference?

Hidden Laws argues that through “conflict decentralization,” state constitutional revision resolves national constitutional controversies, guiding and sometimes preempting national political change. A few brief clauses in the federal Constitution create overlapping, concurrent powers shared by the state and federal governments. This brevity grants elites and reformers broad interpretive leeway to construct and often enlarge this overlap, strategically channeling national reform pressure and power to the states. State constitutions have the flexibility the federal Constitution lacks — all states impose lower amendment thresholds and, with smaller legislatures, can better coordinate to propose revision by amendment, convention, or commission. While there are incentives for reformers to attempt both state and national reform, the most common outcome is state reform without national reform. State constitutional revision is a steady, constant, quiet background process in American politics, the heretofore largely unnoticed channel for most American constitutional development. The book elaborates this claim with original datasets of all 12,000 proposed federal constitutional amendments and all 411 state constitutional revision bodies from 1776-2020, backed by chronological case studies.

State constitutional revision data xls file