Rick Hasen
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rickhasen.bsky.social
Rick Hasen
@rickhasen.bsky.social
62K followers 610 following 3.6K posts
Professor, UCLA Law; Director, http://SafeguardingDemocracyProject.org; 2020 CNN, 2024 NBC/MSNBC Election Law Analyst; electionlawblog.org
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rickhasen.bsky.social
My new one @slate.com: "Gavin Newsom Just Proved It: Voters Want Democrats to Fight Fire With Fire" slate.com/news-and-pol...
November 6, 2025 at 8:59 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
CA Supreme Court order.
October 24, 2025 at 11:02 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
Test run for 2026. Here's what I wrote in the NY Times about the federal government potentially interfering with the 2026 elections and what we need to do about it. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/o...
In the end, the American people also have a key role to play in pushing back against Mr. Trump’s meddling. People will need the courage to go vote even in American cities that may have federal agents swarming around them. “Voter protection” in recent decades has not meant protection from government-led violence and intimidation, but it may come down to that. Democrats, Republicans and other members of the public should monitor voting procedures, as allowed by state law, to make sure that state and county election officials stand up to federal pressure and do the right thing as they conduct elections and tabulate ballots. Local civic and business leaders need to back our election administrators, who may find themselves subjected to pressures to bend or break the rules. All of this organizing needs to happen now, not next November. To keep us from sliding further into autocracy, it is civil society we must make great again.
October 24, 2025 at 6:07 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
read @profnickstephan.bsky.social
Misleading Claims About Affected Districts electionlawblog.org?p=152614
Put all this together and Mooppan was off in his estimate of congressional districts that could be affected by Callais by more than 300%. In reality, there are close to seventy congressional districts that are probably protected by Section 2, at present, and could be stripped of this protection depending on what the Court chooses to do.
October 17, 2025 at 9:28 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
A key point:
Although we substantially agree with the definition of rebellion set forth by the district court in Newsom, we emphasize that the critical analysis of a “rebellion” centers on the nature of the resistance to governmental authority. Political opposition is not rebellion. A protest does not become a rebellion merely because the protestors advocate for myriad legal or policy changes, are well organized, call for significant changes to the structure of the U.S. government, use civil disobedience as a form of protest, or exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms as the law currently allows. Nor does a protest become a rebellion merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue participants in the protest. Such conduct exceeds the scope of the First Amendment, of course, and law enforcement has apprehended the perpetrators accordingly. But because rebellions at least use deliberate, organized violence to resist governmental authority, the problematic incidents in this record clearly fall within the considerable daylight between protected speech and rebellion. Applying our tentative understanding of “rebellion” to the district court’s factual findings, and even after affording great deference to the President’s evaluation of the circumstances, we see insufficient evidence of a rebellion or danger of rebellion in Illinois. The spirited, sustained, and occasionally violent actions of demonstrators in protest of the federal government’s immigration policies and actions, without more, does not give rise to a danger of rebellion against the government’s authority. The administration thus has not demonstrated that it is likely to succeed on this issue.
October 16, 2025 at 11:09 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
My conclusion:
When Mr. Trump attacks democratic institutions, he does so in the manner of a car wreck — so flagrantly destructive as to command public attention. When the Supreme Court undermines our democracy, as it seems poised to do in Callais, it feels more like a slow poisoning: the attacks may be harder to notice, but they are just as deadly
October 8, 2025 at 5:41 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
Very Excited to Announce My New Book Project, “Unbent Arc: The Rise and Decline of American Democracy 1964-2024)” electionlawblog.org?p=152307
I’m very excited to be working on this major project, bringing together my many strands of research on democracy and election law.
September 30, 2025 at 2:53 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
Oh. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/27/u...
In the past two years alone, Mr. Giuliani has been indicted and accused of seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election; filed for bankruptcy under the strain of legal bills; was disbarred in New York and Washington; and, last month, was injured in a New Hampshire car crash. This month, the president said that Mr. Giuliani would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
September 27, 2025 at 11:54 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
Otherwise known as Tuesday
September 9, 2025 at 1:47 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
And here is Sotomayor calling out the Court for unexplained orders in the Trump cases and the bind it puts the lower courts in:
The Court’s order is troubling for another reason: It is entirely unexplained. In the last eight months, this Court’s appetite to circumvent the ordinary appellate process and weigh in on important issues has grown exponentially. See, e.g., Trump v. J. G. G., 604 U. S. ___ (2025) (per curiam); Trump v. Wilcox, 605 U. S. ___ (2025); Noem v. Doe, 605 U. S. ___ (2025); United States v. Shilling, 605 U. S. ___ (2025). Its interest in explaining itself, unfortunately, has not. See Trump v. Boyle, 606 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2025) (KAGAN, J., dissenting from grant of application for stay) (slip op., at 2–3). There may be good justification for issuing an unreasoned order in some circumstances. See Labrador v. Poe, 601 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2024) (KAVANAUGH, J., concurring in grant of application for stay) (slip op., at 11–12) (explaining how opinions on emergency applications “can sometimes come at a cost”). Yet, some situations simply cry out for an explanation, such as when the Government’s conduct flagrantly violates the law, or when lower courts and litigants need guidance about the issues on which they should focus. Cite as: 606 U. S. ____ (2025) 21 SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting Here, for instance, the District Court will soon convene a hearing on plaintiffs’ motions for a preliminary injunction and class certification with the benefit of a more fulsome record on which to evaluate plaintiffs’ claims. When it does so, it will have only a concurrence and a dissent from which to reason. Neither the District Court nor the parties will know whether the majority believed the key issue was standing, the merits, or the scope of relief, any one of which could have been the basis for the majority’s order. See, e.g., McMahon v. New York, 606 U. S ___ (2025) (similarly failing to state whether the basis of the Court’s order was standing, merits, or scope of the remedy). For each of those complex issues, it will be anyone’s guess whether the majority thought there were evidentiary defic…
September 8, 2025 at 5:45 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
Ouch SCOTUS
September 3, 2025 at 8:26 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
Always nice to wake up to fan mail in the morning
August 21, 2025 at 2:42 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
Oh it's that time again.
August 18, 2025 at 8:10 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
I haven't really been using AI for any of my research, but I was having trouble finding Ford's statement in 1976 on the Supreme Court's decision in Buckley v. Valeo and tried Google and ChatGPT. 0-2
August 8, 2025 at 7:44 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
As I told @newyorker.com
A Trump official recently described the Administration’s approach in achieving this goal as “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” according to the Times. The implications of this are about “what it means for American democracy to have a constant, no-holds-barred partisan struggle for everything,” Hasen said. “To the extent that you see it in that light,” he continued, “it’s pretty, pretty bad.”
August 5, 2025 at 11:09 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
My piece ends noting that that the Trump administration has promised "maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time" against Democrats, which is far more dangerous than just a redistricting war.
In the current polarized atmosphere in Congress, and with Trump (who would have to sign such legislation) looking to impose “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time” to preserve Republican power, a bipartisan deal to avoid a redistricting war seems most unlikely. But as the Cold War taught us, détente is better than mutually assured destruction for all the parties. Those who suffer the most are the voters, who should not be packed in or cracked out of districts simply because their party is in the minority.
August 5, 2025 at 6:38 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
For all those replying to me that the Republican Congress would never do this, try reading the first paragraph that I wrote which includes: "But even though it’s in everyone’s interest that Congress act, don’t hold your breath."
A sudden war over redistricting has broken out in Texas and looks to spread across the country, with California, New York and elsewhere considering tit-for-tat Democratic partisan gerrymanders to negate the Republican hardball in Texas. Congress, rather than the courts, is in the best position to stop the upcoming race to the bottom. But even though it’s in everyone’s interest that Congress act, don’t hold your breath.
August 5, 2025 at 6:14 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
He seems nice
August 5, 2025 at 1:19 AM
rickhasen.bsky.social
You mean like this?

(responding to: slate.com/news-and-pol...)
August 4, 2025 at 11:59 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
PDATE: Page 36-38 of appellees's brief, referenced in the order above, make it clear that Section 2's constitutionality is being put into question:
August 1, 2025 at 9:48 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
Uuh...
July 31, 2025 at 10:43 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
Oh boy.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/u...
The filing, which is not public, was submitted to the inspector general’s office in electronic form on May 2, and a longer, printed version that included documentary evidence was delivered on May 5, according to people familiar with the filing. The inspector general appears to have done nothing with the information for more than two months, and many in that office did not realize they even had the material until a day or two before the full Senate voted on Mr. Bove’s nomination. He was confirmed Tuesday by a razor-thin margin, 50 to 49. Last Friday, when the whistle-blower group went public about the filing’s existence, the inspector general’s office told lawmakers that it had no such complaint, according to people familiar with the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. The office only found the documents after lawyers for the whistle-blower presented electronic and FedEx delivery receipts for them. The implications of that inaction are potentially significant, given that Republicans have cast skepticism on another Justice Department whistle-blower, Erez Reuveni, describing his account as part of a politically timed effort by Democrats to scuttle a Trump nomination. That someone appears to have come forward about Mr. Bove’s conduct well before his nomination was known would undercut those claims. The complaint, according to people familiar with it, outlines a set of allegations that largely tracks with Mr. Reuveni’s account.
July 31, 2025 at 7:44 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
Well they asked
July 24, 2025 at 9:14 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
I'm quoted in this Aaron Blake piece on @cnn.com

www.cnn.com/2025/07/23/p...
“Communicating with intelligence officials would seem to fall into the scope of official duties,” UCLA law professor Rick Hasen said. Hasen also noted that any theoretical charges would have to overcome a major problem stemming from the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States: They couldn’t use official acts as evidence to prove the crime.
July 23, 2025 at 11:13 PM
rickhasen.bsky.social
I had the wrong Kennedy apparently:
July 23, 2025 at 11:02 PM