Election Law and Voting Rights: Registration, Ballot Access, Redistricting, and Campaign Finance

Summary. How elections are actually administered, what the Voting Rights Act still requires, how districts are drawn and challenged, what restrictions on voting are permitted, and how money is regulated.

Part I: Who runs elections

There is no national election. There are thousands of local elections administered by counties and municipalities under state law, using state-purchased equipment, staffed largely by temporary workers, and supervised by a state official — usually a secretary of state — whose authority varies enormously.

The Constitution allocates the power. The Elections Clause gives state legislatures the power to prescribe the times, places, and manner of congressional elections, subject to Congress's power to make or alter such regulations. The Electors Clause gives legislatures the power to direct the manner of appointing presidential electors. The Qualifications of voters in federal elections track those for the most numerous branch of the state legislature.

That allocation is not unlimited. In Moore v. Harper, the Supreme Court rejected the strongest form of the independent state legislature theory, holding that the Elections Clause does not insulate state legislatures from ordinary judicial review under state constitutions — while noting that state courts may not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review.

Layered on top are federal statutes: the Voting Rights Act; the National Voter Registration Act, which governs registration opportunities and constrains list maintenance; the Help America Vote America Act, which mandated provisional ballots, statewide registration databases, and equipment standards; the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act; and the Civil Rights Acts.

And the Constitution itself, through the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Nineteenth, the Twenty-Fourth's ban on poll taxes, and the Twenty-Sixth.

Part II: The Voting Rights Act

Section 2 prohibits any voting standard, practice, or procedure that results in a denial or abridgement of the right to vote on account of race or color, and provides that a violation is established where the political processes are not equally open to members of a protected class.

For vote dilution claims, Thornburg v. Gingles supplies the three preconditions: the minority group must be sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a district; it must be politically cohesive; and the majority must vote sufficiently as a bloc usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidate. If all three are met, the court examines the totality of circumstances.

That framework survives. Allen v. Milligan rejected an invitation to reshape it and affirmed a finding that Alabama's congressional map likely violated Section 2.

For vote denial claims — restrictions on the manner of voting rather than district lines — Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee identified guideposts: the size of the burden, the degree of departure from standard practice as of 1982, the size of any disparity in impact, the opportunities provided by the system as a whole, and the strength of the state's interests. The decision made vote-denial claims materially harder.

Section 5 once required covered jurisdictions to obtain preclearance before changing any voting practice, administered under 28 C.F.R. part 51. Shelby County v. Holder held the coverage formula unconstitutional as based on decades-old data, leaving Section 5 intact but with nothing to which it applies absent new legislation.

The practical consequence: the burden shifted from jurisdictions justifying changes in advance to plaintiffs challenging them afterward, and litigation moved from preclearance to Section 2 and constitutional claims.

Part III: Districts

One person, one vote. Baker v. Carr held that legislative apportionment claims are justiciable, and Reynolds v. Sims required that seats in both houses of a bicameral state legislature be apportioned on a population basis. Congressional districts must be nearly exactly equal; state and local districts allow modest deviations, generally tolerated up to about ten percent absent evidence of improper purpose.

Racial gerrymandering is subject to strict scrutiny where race predominated over traditional districting principles — a doctrine that sits in permanent tension with Section 2's requirement that race be considered enough to avoid dilution. Mapmakers navigate between the two.

Partisan gerrymandering is a different matter. Rucho v. Common Cause held partisan gerrymandering claims nonjusticiable in federal court — beyond the reach of federal courts for lack of judicially manageable standards.

But the field did not close. Rucho expressly noted that state constitutions and state courts may provide remedies, and several state supreme courts have found partisan gerrymanders to violate state constitutional provisions. Moore v. Harper confirms that state courts may do so. Partisan gerrymandering litigation is now a state-law field, and the answer differs by state.

Independent redistricting commissions exist in a growing number of states, with varying degrees of independence and varying rules about criteria and public participation.

Part IV: Restrictions on voting, and how they are judged

The governing framework is a sliding scale. Anderson v. Celebrezze and Burdick v. Takushi together produce the Anderson–Burdick test: a court weighs the character and magnitude of the burden against the precise interests the state asserts, considering the extent to which those interests make the burden necessary.

Severe burdens require the regulation to be narrowly drawn to advance a compelling interest. Reasonable, nondiscriminatory restrictions are generally justified by the state's important regulatory interests.

Voter identification. Crawford v. Marion County Election Board upheld Indiana's photo identification requirement against a facial challenge, finding the burden on most voters slight and the state's interests in preventing fraud and safeguarding confidence legitimate. As-applied challenges remain available, and state constitutional challenges have succeeded where federal ones failed.

Other recurring subjects: registration deadlines; list maintenance and purges, constrained by the National Voter Registration Act's requirements about notice and the timing of removals; early voting periods; absentee eligibility and witness or notary requirements; drop boxes; ballot collection; signature matching and the process for curing a rejected signature; polling place consolidation; and felony disenfranchisement, which varies from automatic restoration on release to permanent loss absent executive clemency. See Expungement, Record Sealing, and Restoring Rights After a Conviction.

And equal treatment within a state. Bush v. Gore held that a statewide recount without uniform standards for evaluating ballots violated equal protection — a holding the Court described as limited to the circumstances, but whose principle that a state may not value one person's vote over another's by arbitrary and disparate treatment has been invoked repeatedly since.

Part V: The mechanics that decide elections

Registration. Deadlines range from same-day to thirty days before. Automatic registration through motor vehicle agencies exists in many states. Check your registration well before the deadline, because the most common cause of a problem on election day is a registration that lapsed, moved, or was never processed.

List maintenance. States must maintain accurate rolls and must do so under constraints: removals for change of residence generally require notice and a waiting period spanning two federal general elections, and systematic removal programs must be completed 90 days before a federal election.

Absentee and mail voting. Rules vary from all-mail elections to excuse-required absentee voting. The rejection rate for technical defects is the underappreciated fact — signature mismatches, missing witness signatures, late arrival, the wrong envelope. Many states now require notice and an opportunity to cure, and knowing whether yours does is worth more than any other single piece of information for a mail voter.

Provisional ballots exist federally: a voter whose eligibility is questioned may cast one, and it counts if eligibility is later confirmed. Ask for one rather than leaving, and get the receipt with the tracking information.

Poll watchers and challengers are permitted, with rules about who may challenge, on what grounds, and how a challenge is resolved. Voter intimidation is separately prohibited by federal and state law.

Recounts and contests. Automatic recounts triggered by margin thresholds; requested recounts with deposit requirements; and election contests, a distinct judicial or legislative proceeding alleging that the result was wrong because of illegal votes, excluded legal votes, fraud, or error. Deadlines are extremely short — sometimes days.

Part VI: Getting on the ballot

Candidates must generally satisfy qualifications (age, residency, citizenship), file a declaration by a deadline, pay a fee or submit nominating petitions with a required number of valid signatures, and comply with financial disclosure.

The signature process is where campaigns fail, and the failure modes are consistent: signatures from non-registered voters or voters in the wrong district; incomplete addresses; circulator affidavit defects; and missing the geographic distribution requirements some states impose. Gather far more than the minimum — experienced campaigns target two to three times the requirement — and check signatures against the voter file as they come in.

Minor parties and independents face higher thresholds, and the constitutional analysis runs through Anderson–Burdick: the state's interest in avoiding ballot clutter and ensuring a modicum of support, weighed against the burden on candidates, voters, and associational rights.

Challenges to petitions are common, fast, and technical, with very short deadlines. A campaign that has not planned for a challenge has planned to lose one.

Part VII: Campaign finance

The architecture rests on Buckley v. Valeo, which upheld contribution limits as serving the interest in preventing corruption and its appearance, struck down limits on independent expenditures and on a candidate's spending of personal funds as burdening core political speech, and upheld disclosure requirements.

The distinction between contributions and expenditures is the load-bearing wall of the whole field, and everything since builds on it.

Citizens United v. FEC held that the government may not prohibit independent expenditures by corporations and unions, while upholding disclosure and disclaimer requirements. Independent-expenditure-only committees followed, permitted to accept unlimited contributions so long as they do not contribute to or coordinate with candidates.

The current architecture, in outline:

Contribution limits to candidates, party committees, and traditional political action committees — indexed and varying by recipient.
No limits on independent expenditures, or on contributions to independent-expenditure-only committees.
Coordination with a candidate converts an expenditure into a contribution, subject to limits. The coordination rules are where the real compliance risk lies, and they are more detailed than most participants realize.
Disclosure — registration, periodic reports of receipts and disbursements, and disclaimers on communications.
Source prohibitions — foreign nationals, federal contractors, and corporate treasury contributions to candidates in federal elections.

The definitional framework for federal campaign finance appears in the regulations at 11 C.F.R. part 100, and state systems are entirely separate, with their own limits, reporting schedules, and enforcement bodies. A campaign for state or local office complies with state law, not federal law, and the two differ substantially.

Ballot measure committees are treated differently again: the anti-corruption rationale for contribution limits applies weakly where there is no candidate, so limits on ballot measure contributions are generally unconstitutional, while disclosure survives.

Part VIII: The timing doctrine

The most practically important rule in election litigation is about the calendar.

Purcell v. Gonzalez cautioned that federal courts should ordinarily not alter election rules on the eve of an election, because late changes can confuse voters and burden administration. The principle has been applied with increasing force.

The consequence for anyone with a claim: file early. A meritorious challenge brought two weeks before an election may fail on timing alone, while the same claim brought in the spring would be heard on the merits.

And the corollary for administrators: changes made close to an election are vulnerable in both directions — a court may decline to enjoin a new rule because of Purcell, or may enjoin the change itself as the late alteration.

Part IX: How an election actually runs

Doctrine is downstream of administration, and the administration is more improvised than most people imagine.

The people. A county election office typically has a handful of permanent staff and, on election day, hundreds or thousands of temporary poll workers — often retirees, trained for a few hours, working a sixteen-hour day, applying a procedures manual most have read once. Almost every "irregularity" reported on election day is a trained-once worker misapplying a rule, not a plot. That is not a reason for complacency; it is a reason for the specific fixes that actually help: better training, clearer manuals, and poll workers who know how to call the county for a ruling rather than improvising.

The equipment. Standards were set federally after 2000, and most jurisdictions now use paper-based systems — hand-marked paper ballots counted by optical scanners, or ballot-marking devices producing a paper record. The paper is the point. It permits a recount that examines something other than the machine's own tally, and it permits risk-limiting audits, which sample ballots statistically until the result is confirmed to a stated confidence level. These audits are now required or authorized in a growing number of states and are the single most cost-effective integrity measure available.

Chain of custody. Ballots, memory cards, and equipment travel under documented custody with seals, logs, and bipartisan handling. Custody documentation is what makes a recount or an audit meaningful, and it is also the first thing examined when a result is contested.

Canvass and certification. Election night results are unofficial. In the days and weeks that follow, officials process provisional ballots, cure mail ballot defects where the law permits, receive late-arriving military and overseas ballots, reconcile totals, and then canvass — a formal review — before certifying. Certification is generally a ministerial act; officials do not have discretion to refuse because they dislike the outcome, and courts have consistently said so.

Post-election audits follow in most states, and then contests and recounts if any.

Why this matters legally. Nearly every election dispute is really a dispute about one of these steps: who was allowed to vote, whether a ballot was properly cast, whether it was properly counted, and whether the process was documented. A claim that cannot be tied to a specific step and a specific number of ballots is not a claim a court can act on, which is why the great majority of post-election lawsuits fail on evidence rather than on law.

Part X: Money, in practice

The doctrine above describes what the Constitution permits. What campaigns actually deal with is a compliance regime, and it has a shape.

The entities:

A candidate committee, one per candidate per office, which raises subject to limits and reports.
Party committees, at national, state, and local levels, with their own limits and, in some contexts, coordinated spending allowances.
Traditional political action committees, which take limited contributions and give limited contributions.
Independent-expenditure-only committees, which take unlimited contributions and may spend without limit on communications not coordinated with candidates.
Nonprofit organizations that engage in some political activity, subject to tax-law limits on their primary purpose and, for charities, an absolute prohibition on candidate campaign intervention. See Nonprofit Formation and Tax-Exempt Status Under Section 501(c)(3).
Ballot measure committees, where the absence of a candidate removes the anti-corruption rationale for contribution limits while leaving disclosure intact.

The compliance failures that actually happen, in order of frequency:

Late reports. Deadlines are numerous and unforgiving, penalties are automatic, and the resulting news story usually costs more than the fine.
Accepting a prohibited or excessive contribution — over the limit, from a corporation where prohibited, from a foreign national, or in the name of another. Excessive contributions must be refunded or reattributed within a stated period; the fix exists and it has a deadline.
Personal use of campaign funds. The line is whether the expense would exist irrespective of the campaign. Mortgage, groceries, and clothing are personal; a campaign office and a campaign vehicle lease are not.
Missing or defective disclaimers on communications.
Coordination. The single most consequential compliance risk, because it converts an unlimited independent expenditure into an excessive contribution. The rules turn on the content of the communication, the timing, and whether there was conduct — a request, substantial discussion, common vendors, or a former staffer with material information. Build the wall and document it.
Sloppy recordkeeping. Contributor occupation and employer must be collected above a threshold, and reconstructing them later is expensive and often impossible.

One structural point worth stating plainly. Disclosure is the part of the system with the broadest judicial support — Buckley upheld it, and Citizens United upheld it again by a large majority while striking the expenditure prohibition. The practical center of gravity in campaign finance is therefore reporting, not limits, and a campaign that treats reporting as an afterthought has misread the field.

Part XI: Election litigation, honestly described

Election cases are unlike other litigation in four ways, and understanding them is worth more than knowing any single doctrine.

They are fast. Ballot access challenges, emergency injunctions, and contests run on days-to-weeks schedules. Discovery is compressed or nonexistent. Briefing is overnight. A lawyer who cannot move at that speed cannot do this work.

Timing is a merits question. Under Purcell, when you file affects whether you win. The same claim is strong in March and unwinnable in October. File early is not tactical advice; it is the doctrine.

Remedies are constrained. Courts are reluctant to void an election, extremely reluctant to change rules mid-election, and generally unwilling to disenfranchise voters who followed the rules as they existed. The realistic remedies are prospective: an injunction against a rule for future elections, an order to count particular ballots, an order allowing a cure process, or a new election in a narrow set of cases involving proven irregularities sufficient to change the outcome.

The evidence standard is unforgiving and correctly so. A contest generally requires proof of enough illegal or uncounted votes to change the result — a number, tied to identified ballots. Generalized allegations, statistical anomalies without a mechanism, and affidavits describing confusion do not meet it. Courts across the political spectrum have said this consistently, and the pattern of dismissals reflects evidentiary failure far more often than any legal doctrine.

Who can sue. Voters have standing to challenge burdens on their own right to vote; candidates have standing regarding their own ballot access and, sometimes, competitive injury; parties and organizations may sue on their own behalf or on behalf of members; and states and localities appear as defendants and sometimes as plaintiffs. Generalized grievances about election administration, unmoored from a personal injury, do not confer standing — which disposes of a large share of filings.

And a note on where the action is. After Rucho and Moore v. Harper, a growing share of significant election litigation is in state courts under state constitutions. Anyone framing an election claim should ask the state-law question first.

Part XII: Practical advice

For voters:

Check your registration at least a month before every election, every year.
Know the deadlines — registration, absentee request, absentee return.
If voting by mail, follow the envelope instructions exactly, sign where indicated, and return early. Learn whether your state notifies you of a defect and permits a cure, and how.
Track your ballot where tracking exists.
If told you are not on the list, ask for a provisional ballot and get the receipt.
Report intimidation to election officials and to the election protection hotlines operating in every state.

For candidates:

Read the candidate handbook issued by the state or county. It is authoritative and free.
Gather two to three times the required signatures, and validate as you go.
Open the committee and the bank account before raising a dollar.
Calendar every reporting deadline. Late reports generate penalties and stories.
Understand coordination, and build a wall between the campaign and any supportive independent committee.
Put disclaimers on everything.

For anyone contemplating litigation:

File early. Purcell punishes delay.
Identify whether the claim is federal or state. After Rucho, partisan gerrymandering is a state-law claim.
Standing matters — voters, candidates, and organizations each have distinct theories.
Election contests have deadlines measured in days. Know them before election night.

Part XIII: Redistricting from the inside

Every ten years, after the census, every state redraws congressional and legislative lines, and thousands of local jurisdictions redraw theirs. It is the most consequential recurring exercise in American election law and the one fewest people participate in.

The criteria, which vary by state but recur:

Equal population, nearly exact for congressional districts, with modest tolerance for state and local ones.
Compliance with the Voting Rights Act, which under Gingles may require drawing a district in which a politically cohesive minority group can elect its preferred candidate, where the group is sufficiently large and geographically compact.
Contiguity — every part of a district connected to every other.
Compactness, measured by various geometric formulas, none of which is definitive.
Respect for political subdivisions — counties, cities, precincts.
Communities of interest, the criterion where public testimony matters most and where ordinary people have the most to contribute.
In some states, prohibitions on favoring a party or an incumbent.

The tension nobody resolves. Section 2 sometimes requires considering race; the Equal Protection Clause forbids race from predominating over traditional criteria. Mapmakers work in the space between, and litigation follows almost every cycle.

Where the public can actually matter:

Testify about communities of interest. Commissions and legislatures hold hearings, and the testimony that changes maps is specific: "These six neighborhoods share a school district, a hospital, a transit line, and a watershed; they have organized together on these three issues; splitting them at this street divides a community that functions as one." Not "keep our area together."

Submit a map. Free public mapping tools now exist, and a citizen-drawn map that satisfies the criteria is taken seriously in many states, particularly at the local level where nobody else submits anything.

Watch the local maps. County commissions, city councils, and school boards redistrict too, on shorter timelines with almost no public attention, and those bodies make the decisions that touch daily life most directly. This is where a single engaged person has the most leverage in all of election law.

Understand the timeline. Census data, then map drawing, then adoption, then litigation, then implementation — compressed into roughly a year, with public comment windows measured in weeks. If you learn about it when the map is adopted, you are a year late.

Part XIV: The offices nobody runs for

National attention concentrates on a handful of races. The offices that determine most of what government does to a person's daily life are decided by a few hundred votes and are frequently uncontested.

School boards set curriculum, budgets, attendance zones, and disciplinary policy, and they are the body most likely to be the subject of a special education dispute. See Special Education Law.

County commissions control zoning, roads, the sheriff's budget, public health, and — in most states — election administration itself.

City councils control land use, police policy, code enforcement, and the rules that govern landlords and tenants. See Residential Landlord-Tenant Law.

Judges, in the many states that elect them, at trial and appellate levels.

Prosecutors and sheriffs, whose charging and enforcement policies shape criminal justice locally more than any statute.

Special districts — water, fire, hospital, transit, drainage, library, mosquito abatement — which levy taxes and hold real regulatory power and whose elections frequently draw turnout in the single digits.

Two facts about these races that are worth knowing:

The barrier to entry is low. Many require a few dozen signatures, a small filing fee, and a campaign budget that would not cover a week of consulting on a congressional race. A substantial share are uncontested, meaning the winner is decided by whoever files.

The rules are still real. Candidate qualification, petition validity, campaign finance registration and reporting, and disclaimer requirements apply to a school board race in most states just as they do to a governor's race — often administered by a county clerk with a checklist. The candidate handbook from the county is the single most useful document, it is free, and reading it prevents essentially every avoidable disqualification.

And the ballot measure route. In states with initiative and referendum, an ordinary person can put a law on the ballot — subject to signature requirements, single-subject rules, title and summary review, and pre-election challenges that are technical and fast. The signature threshold is the barrier, and the drafting is where measures fail: a measure that violates a single-subject rule or whose summary is found misleading never reaches voters.

Part XV: Voters with particular obstacles

A general account of election law obscures the fact that the rules land very differently depending on circumstances. Six situations with specific answers.

Voters with disabilities. Federal law requires accessible polling places and at least one accessible voting system per polling place permitting a private and independent vote. Curbside voting is available in many states. A voter who needs assistance may generally bring a person of their choice, with limited exceptions — commonly the voter's employer or union agent. Accessible absentee options now exist in many states, including electronic ballot delivery. Ask the county in advance, in writing, rather than discovering the problem at the polls.

Voters who moved. The National Voter Registration Act constrains removals for change of address: a jurisdiction generally must send notice and wait through two federal general elections before removing a voter who has not responded. A voter who moved within the same jurisdiction can usually still vote, sometimes at the old precinct, sometimes after updating on-site. Ask; do not leave.

Voters with a criminal record. Rules vary from no loss of the vote at all, to restoration on release, to restoration after completing supervision, to permanent loss absent clemency. Some states additionally require payment of fines and restitution. The most common error is a person believing they cannot vote when they can — and the second most common is a jurisdiction failing to notify a person whose rights were automatically restored. See Clearing Your Criminal Record.

Voters experiencing homelessness. Residence for voting purposes generally means the place a person habitually returns to, and states have accommodated non-traditional addresses — shelters, described locations, service providers as mailing addresses. Identification requirements are the practical obstacle. Local election protection organizations know the workarounds.

Military and overseas voters. Federal law entitles them to absentee registration and voting, requires ballots to be transmitted a set period before an election, and permits a federal write-in absentee ballot as a backstop. Send the annual absentee ballot request early; it covers a full election cycle in most states. See Veterans Benefits.

Voters with limited English proficiency. Federal law requires bilingual materials and assistance in jurisdictions meeting population thresholds, and permits any voter needing assistance to bring a person of their choice.

Students. A student may generally choose to register at school or at a permanent home address, and may not be required to choose one over the other — though identification and residency documentation requirements can be practical obstacles, and voting in the wrong jurisdiction is a real problem. Choose one, register there, and stay consistent.

Part XVI: What the fights are actually about

Reading the doctrine in sequence can obscure the shape of the disagreement, so it is worth stating it plainly, without pretending there is no dispute.

There is a genuine trade-off between access and integrity, and it is not resolved by asserting that one side is acting in bad faith. Every rule that makes voting easier — same-day registration, no-excuse absentee voting, drop boxes, extended hours — slightly increases the administrative surface on which errors and, rarely, fraud can occur. Every rule that tightens verification — identification requirements, signature matching, witness requirements, shorter windows — excludes some eligible voters who cannot readily comply. Both effects are real, and both are usually small; the disagreement is about their relative size and about which error is worse.

The empirical record, as best it can be summarized: documented in-person impersonation fraud is very rare; absentee ballot fraud is rarer than critics assert and less rare than defenders sometimes claim, and it has been the mechanism in the handful of modern elections actually overturned; the measurable turnout effect of identification requirements is smaller than early predictions and not zero; and the largest source of lost votes is not fraud or identification but administrative failure — registrations not processed, mail ballots rejected for technical defects, and voters at the wrong polling place.

Which suggests a set of measures that address both concerns simultaneously, and which is why they attract unusual bipartisan support: paper ballots with risk-limiting audits; accurate, well-maintained voter rolls with lawful notice before removal; notice and cure processes for mail ballot defects; adequate poll worker training and pay; and enough funding to run elections professionally rather than heroically.

On the constitutional side, the deeper disagreement is structural. Rucho reflects a genuine difficulty: a court that polices partisan advantage in districting must choose a baseline of fairness that the Constitution does not supply. The response — that state constitutions can supply one, and that Moore v. Harper preserves state courts' authority to apply it — is where the field has gone.

And on campaign finance, the disagreement traces directly to Buckley's distinction between contributions and expenditures. One view holds that spending money to speak is speech, and that limiting it limits political participation. The other holds that unlimited independent spending produces obligation and access that function as corruption whether or not any quid pro quo occurs. Both are coherent positions, the Court has adopted the first, and disclosure is the ground on which nearly everyone still agrees.

For a practitioner, the useful conclusion is neither cynicism nor complacency: the rules are real, they are administered by people, they change between cycles, and the difference between a right in principle and a vote actually counted is usually a deadline, a signature, and a notice nobody read.

Part XVII: A calendar for anyone who cares about this

Every January. Check your registration. Check every adult in your household. It takes four minutes and it prevents the single most common problem.

Six months before any election. If you are considering running, get the candidate handbook from the county and read the filing requirements and deadlines. Filing windows are short and they close.

Ninety days before. If a rule change is going to be challenged, this is roughly the last comfortable moment under the timing doctrine. File early.

Sixty days before. Candidates: confirm petition validity, committee registration, and the reporting calendar. Voters: request an absentee ballot if you use one.

Thirty days before. The registration deadline in many states. Confirm your polling place, which changes more often than people expect.

Two weeks before. Return a mail ballot. Do not wait — late arrival is the largest single category of rejected mail ballots.

One week before. Track your ballot if tracking exists. If it shows a defect, cure it immediately where your state allows curing.

Election day. If you are told you are not on the list, ask for a provisional ballot and keep the receipt. Report intimidation to officials and to an election protection hotline.

The week after. If you voted provisionally or by mail, confirm your ballot was counted. Most states now provide a way to check.

Certification and audit period. Results become official. Post-election audits run. Contests, if any, must be filed on deadlines measured in days.

In redistricting years. Watch for hearings — state and, especially, local. Testify about communities of interest. Submit a map. This is where an ordinary person has the most influence available anywhere in election law, and almost nobody uses it.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Voting Rights Act still in effect? Yes. Section 2 remains fully enforceable. Section 5 preclearance is dormant because the coverage formula was struck down in Shelby County.

Can partisan gerrymandering be challenged? Not in federal court after Rucho — but state constitutional claims in state courts remain available and have succeeded.

Are voter identification laws legal? The Supreme Court upheld Indiana's against a facial challenge in Crawford. As-applied and state constitutional challenges remain available.

What happens if my mail ballot signature does not match? Many states require notice and an opportunity to cure. Find out whether yours does, and how much time you have.

They said I am not registered. What do I do? Ask for a provisional ballot, cast it, and keep the receipt.

Why do election cases get dismissed on timing? The Purcell principle counsels against altering election rules close to an election. File early.