Your weekly source for analysis and insight from experts at the Brennan Center for Justice
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The Briefing
The Briefing will be off celebrating the Fourth of July next week. We’ll be back on July 13.
The New York City Board of Elections is incompetent. Its latest blunder: the board counted 135,000 test ballots during a count this week for the city’s mayoral primary. But the board’s problems have a long history. The New York Times editorial board once called the Board of Elections “at best a semi-functioning anachronism” — 50 years ago.
In 2016, it wrongly purged 200,000 eligible voters from its rolls before the presidential primary. In 2018, high humidity combined with longer than usual two-page ballots resulted in widespread machine breakdowns. Last year, over 80,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified during the presidential primary. And during early voting for November’s general election, the city’s voters waited on grueling four-hour lines in some places.
The board must be reformed, which the Brennan Center has called for
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But the board’s latest blooper could not have come at a worse time. Already, the proponents of the Big Lie are in a feeding frenzy over it. Donald Trump Jr. tweeted
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Let me get this straight? You can be off by 135,000 votes in a New York City mayoral primary alone but if someone loses the White House by less than 45,000 across multiple states in a presidential election you can’t have any questions.
Seems legit... if you live in China.
But let’s set the record straight — again. The 2020 presidential election was safe, secure, and successful. Then-President Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security said so. And so did his attorney general. Every audit of the 2020 election challenging Joe Biden’s victory found that Joe Biden did, in fact, win more votes than Trump. Almost every single one of Trump’s legal challenges to the election failed miserably.
Let me be clear here: What happened in New York City is an embarrassment. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is right to call for a complete recount and the city’s voters deserve better. Fortunately, there were checks like paper ballots in place that will allow audits and recounts to ensure that, at the end of the day, we can confirm the correct winner of this contest.
But ignore the politicians and trolls who continue to undermine confidence in American elections. They are trying to dismantle our democracy with every lie that they tell and every piece of legislation they introduce to make it harder to vote.
Democracy
Why States Should Wait for Census Data to Draw Voting Districts
Every 10 years, states and local governments redraw electoral maps to comply with the constitutional requirement that districts must have roughly the same population. However, Covid-19 has delayed the census numbers needed for the redistricting process. But that doesn’t mean that states should use less specific data to fill the gap. In fact, creating new voting districts using anything other than census data would be ill-advised and even expose states to lawsuits. To ensure fair representation, states should hold off on redrawing their maps until the redistricting data becomes available starting in August 2021. // Read More
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Justice
Biden’s Budget Steps up Spending for Criminal Justice Reform
The president’s new budget includes a 78 percent increase in Justice Department funding for state and local grant programs aimed at spurring positive changes in the criminal legal system. Michael Crowley breaks down Biden’s DOJ budget to see how it’s being used to cut prison populations and implement other reforms. // Read More
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Probation and Parole as Punishment
Community supervision began in the 19th century as a peer-to-peer system of support, in which community members came forward to assure officials that they could help those convicted of crime to live lawfully outside of jail or prison. Much has changed since then. In the latest essay in the Brennan Center’s Punitive Excess
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series, Peggy McGarry writes about the harm inflicted by decades of policy expanding the United States’ probation and parole apparatus. “A different approach to community care is critical if we are to make it a useful tool for preventing future crime and enhancing both family and community well-being,” says McGarry. // Read More
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Constitution
The Fight for LGBTQIA+ Rights Is Far from Over
Pride Month in June commemorates the 1969 Stonewall Uprising against police brutality against gay and trans people in New York City. There have been great strides in the fight for equal rights since then, but more than a half-century later, police brutality, mass incarceration, and the quest for racial justice remain ever salient in our nation’s struggle to embody its stated principles of liberty and equality. “How a system of laws treats its most vulnerable groups is the best barometer to judge said political system,” writes Kelly Wright. // Read More
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Fellows
Protests, Insurrection, and the Second Amendment
This week, the Brennan Center published “Protests, Insurrection, and the Second Amendment,” a series of 13 essays from 14 scholars, edited by Brennan Center Fellow Eric Ruben, that weigh in on heated debate around gun rights and regulation. In one form or another, the writers consider how unfettered gun rights threaten public safety or are built upon shaky philosophical and historical foundations. The authors sound an alarm that armed civilian groups — steeped in NRA revisionism and nostalgic for an America that never existed — warp American traditions, misconstrue framing era philosophy, defy the rule of law, and threaten democratic norms. // Read More
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Coming Up
VIRTUAL EVENT: P&P Live! Theodore R. Johnson | When the Stars Begin to Fall
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Wednesday, June 30 // 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m. ET
When the Stars Begin to Fall
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makes a compelling, ambitious case for a pathway to the national solidarity necessary to mitigate racism. In the book, the Brennan Center’s Theodore R. Johnson posits that a blueprint for national solidarity can be found in the exceptional citizenship long practiced in Black America. Understanding that racism is a structural crime of the state, he argues that overcoming it requires us to recognize that a color-conscious society — not a color-blind one — is the true fulfillment of the American promise. RSVP today
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This event is produced in partnership with Politics and Prose.
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News
Ames Grawert on how the criminal justice landscape has evolved since the 1990s // Washington Post
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Yurij Rudensky on a new redistricting bill in Pennsylvania // Spotlight PA
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Eliza Sweren-Becker on the increased voting restrictions since the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder // Mother Jones
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Have an issue you'd like us to cover? Feedback on this newsletter? Email us at
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The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law is a nonpartisan law and policy institute that works to reform, revitalize – and when necessary defend – our country’s systems of democracy and justice.
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