"Florida districting fight heads to court, as expected"

Ben Smith reports. It sounds like it will be based on a challenge under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

The redistricting measures will have have to be precleared by the DOJ, because there are parts of Florida covered by VRA section 5. But assuming the measures get preclearance, I have a very hard time believing that the measures themselves violate section 2. (I'll have to wait until I see the complaint and other papers to be sure.) It would seem much more likely to be able to launch an section 2 attack on a particular plan chosen through the process set forth in the measures.

"Echoes of New York's 'Stolen Senate'?"

Ned Foley: "As we watch events unfold this year concerning the unsettled control of the state senate in New York, and the several elections on which that control depends, let's hope that the current resolution contains nothing like the ugliness that afflicted the episode of 1891." The history Ned recounts is of special interest to me because it was a case involving a 4-3 split over application of the Democracy Canon.

Time to Register for the Georgia State Symposium on Citizens United

You can do so, and see a flyer for the event, at this link. I have also posted the most recent version of the schedule here.

"Election Results 2010: Tea Party Spillover?"

The invaluable Initiative and Referendum Institute has issued this Ballotwatch report.

"Financing Direct Democracy: Revisiting the Research on Campaign Spending and Citizen Initiatives"

John M. de Figueiredo, Chang Ho Ji, and Thad Kousser have posted this draft on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The conventional view in the direct democracy literature is that spending against a measure is more effective than spending in favor of a measure, but the empirical results underlying this conclusion have been questioned by recent research. We argue that the conventional finding is driven by the endogenous nature of campaign spending: initiative proponents spend more when their ballot measure is likely to fail. We address this endogeneity by using an instrumental variables approach to analyze a comprehensive dataset of ballot propositions in California from 1976 to 2004. We find that both support and opposition spending on citizen initiatives have strong, statistically significant, and countervailing effects. We confirm this finding by looking at time series data from early polling on a subset of these measures. Both analyses show that spending in favor of citizen initiatives substantially increases their chances of passage, just as opposition spending decreases this likelihood.

"Write-ins favor Murkowski; Miller won't quit"

Write-in counting to commence November 18.