If we’re ever going to reform our very broken, very corrupt political system and get our democracy back on track, March 31, 2022, could go down in history as the date it all started to turn. On that single day, two very different judges in two very different states both did something unusual: They said no to political bosses from both parties and rejected their schemes to rig elections.
In New York, state Supreme Court Justice Patrick McAllister declared the new congressional and legislative district maps drawn by Democrats in the state Senate and Assembly to be unconstitutional. He ordered them to start over. In Florida, Judge Mark Walker struck down three state election laws: one regulating the availability and supervision of ballot drop boxes, one imposing delivery requirements on third-party voter registration groups, and one barring certain activities at or near polling places and drop boxes. Walker also ordered that Florida submit any future changes to these policies for federal preclearance for a period of 10 years.
In both cases, the judges took a look at the corrupt, partisan laws each party was promoting and said, “No, not anymore.” Now, McAllister happens to be a Republican shooting down Democratic schemes and Walker happens to be an Obama appointee shooting down Republican schemes, so maybe they are both guilty of the same partisanship that produced the new voting laws and maps that came before them. But it may also be a sign that even people who benefit from the system are sick and tired of the dysfunction and polarization of our government and finally prepared to do something about it.
They’re not the only ones. In Ohio, the state’s Supreme Court rejected the maps drawn by the Republican legislature three different times. The four majority justices, led by Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, said that Ohio’s Redistricting Commission was creating chaos by repeatedly drawing maps that violated the state constitution’s mandate for political fairness. The U.S. Supreme Court threw out the map preferred by Wisconsin’s Democratic governor.
Now, this is hardly the first time in history courts have ever rejected legislative maps. But when judges in the third- and fourth-biggest states reject both the state’s new legislative map and the state’s new voting laws on the same day, they offer a glimmer of hope, a bit of momentum to build on. What we need to see now is more of it — more challenges to the status quo, more concerned citizens making their voices heard. We’ve seen how easily the likes of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders can whip up a crowd into a pointless frenzy that feels liberating but accomplishes nothing. Now is the time to establish practical targets and goals and make use of this anger that all of us feel to one degree or another.
There’s a popular saying in politics that pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. It means that you can benefit from the system but if you take it too far, it eventually backfires. Hopefully, that’s what’s happening here. Whether it’s highly partisan voting laws in states like Florida, Georgia and Texas that seek to reduce turnout or corruptly drawn legislative maps in states like New York, Wisconsin or Maryland that seek to control how each election will turn out, perhaps we’ve hit the tipping point. Perhaps this is when voters, rather than tuning out, start showing up — not to sanction our system as it stands, but to finally demand reform.
It will be years before we’ll know if March 31, 2022, is truly an important day in American history. But revolutions often start with a voice here, a protest there. Or a couple of rulings that resonate and create a larger meaning that the rest of us can grab ahold of and say, “Yes, we demand more.”
Tusk is a venture capitalist and political strategist who runs the Mobile Voting Project.
