Nicholas Stephanopoulos

🚨Today is publication day for my book, "Aligning Election Law"! The book argues that promoting alignment between governmental outputs and popular preferences should be an overarching goal of election law. You can buy the book at the link below. global.oup.com/academic/produ…

Very nice to see Andrew Gelman - who helped develop the "Gelman-King" bias of district maps - acknowledging that the metric doesn't work in uncompetitive states. Other scholars defended the measure's use in Utah, but the court saw through these claims. statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/13/cou…

Nice NYT coverage of our wins in Newburgh and Mount Pleasant, remedying vote dilution in both towns with innovative new electoral systems. nytimes.com/2026/03/11/nyr…

This major new volume on campaign finance is now out. My contribution (papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…) argues that, even if legislative quid pro quos are rare, quintessential corruption remains common in the context of government contracts. global.oup.com/academic/produ…

You can now explore different electoral scenarios on @planscore. For Dems to capture the House, they need to win the popular vote by about 1 point. The House's bias is tiny if 2026 is like 2024 (or more pro-Rep), but grows if 2026 is a better Dem year. electionlawblog.org/?p=154769

PlanScore just added scenarios to play with the implications of various swings in vote share for US House elections. For instance, it thinks current generic ballot (7 point shift from 2024 = D+5 generic ballot) implies about 230 seats for Democrats. planscore.org/#!predict7D-us…

This NPR segment on which population counts for redistricting (npr.org/2026/03/09/nx-…) relies on a 2021 paper I wrote with Jowei Chen. We found that changing the unit of apportionment would have significant racial -- but more muted partisan -- effects. californialawreview.org/print/democrac…

This forgets that the Union has more than two states. California counters Texas -- but not Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and (soon) Florida.

If only there was some way we could know what the Court was thinking -- some process through which the Court could justify its actions. Ah well.

3. The Court could think that any remedial district drawn *here* -- where the trial court never considered whether a reasonably-configured crossover district could be created -- would be unlawful. But why should a shoddy trial court ruling have any constitutional significance?

What explains the Court's stay in the Staten Island case? 1. The Court could think that race-conscious districting is inherently unlawful. That's what Alito says in his concurrence (contradicting his own opinion in, e.g., Milligan). But no other justice joined Alito.

Check out this very cool update to @planscore: You can now move a slider back and forth to simulate how a map would perform under any electoral environment. For more, see this post by @michalmigurski: medium.com/planscore/plan…

This was fun to do!

This is great news. Curbing grade inflation isn’t rocket science — most law schools manage to do it — and a mandatory curve is the most obvious solution.

📽️NEW: Harvard Law professor @ProfNickStephan joins Marc Elias to break down the gerrymandering schemes and Supreme Court cases pushing the Voting Rights Act to the brink of collapse. They explain how you can stay informed and defend democracy👇 youtu.be/hKX4zDe4pMU

After Bost, standing could largely disappear as an issue in election law cases -- at least if plaintiffs can get a candidate to join the suit. If only we had known this in Whitford, the whole history of partisan gerrymandering might be different.

I wrote this essay for NYU's democracy project on the critical need to curb "misalignment" in American politics. Notably, misalignment is pervasive even when (as in 2024) the presidential candidate preferred by voters wins the election.

From @ProfNickStephan @Harvard_Law "Curbing Misalignment in American Politics" -

@WDMelections @ColumLRev My computer scientist collaborators will post all the data soon.

@ProfNickStephan @ColumLRev Well written article. Are the district map datasets used to create the graphs and conclusions available publicly? I didn't see a link.

I just posted "Redistricting Without Tradeoffs," forthcoming in @columlrev, on SSRN. The article relies on enormous sets of computer-generated district maps to show that tradeoffs between redistricting criteria are much less common than is often thought.