Tim Moore is the Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives. Rebecca Harper is a voter in North Carolina. Last year, North Carolina’s Republican-dominated state legislature—led by Moore—passed, on a party-line vote, an extreme partisan gerrymander to lock in a supermajority of the state’s 14 congressional seats. Harper, along with other voters and non-profit groups, successfully contested the map in state court, contending that the map violated the state constitution’s “free elections clause,” among other provisions. But Moore wasn’t willing to accept the state court’s ruling, so he asked the U.S. Supreme Court to get involved. Before the U.S. Supreme Court, Moore has invoked the so-called “independent state legislature theory,” the dangerous theory that state legislatures have near exclusive power to set the rules for federal elections.

The ISLT would have catastrophic effects for our elections if it became the law of the land. It would kneecap the state-level movement to end partisan gerrymandering. But it could also endanger the right to a secret ballot in many state constitutions, the right to cast an absentee ballot in at least sixteen states, ranked-choice voting regimes in Alaska and Maine, automatic voter registration in Michigan and Nevada, and on and on. In all, the theory could upend more than 170 constitutional provisions and more than 650 state statutes that protect your right to vote and make sure that elections are free and fair. That’s a recipe to upend elections if there ever were one. -- Ethan