CASE STUDIES

SCOTUS Victory in Moore V. Harper

Supreme Court Rejects Theory That Would Have Transformed American Elections

In June 2022, The Supreme Court of the United State ruled 6-3 to reject the “Independent State Legislature Theory” (ISL) in Moore v. Harper.

Had the ISL been affirmed, legislative majorities would have been empowered to determine not only election processes and maps but also election outcomes, with few if any state-level checks on their power. In Federal elections, SCOTUS itself would have been made the only check on each state’s legislature. The argument had long been considered too radical to reach SCOTUS, but in the aftermath of the 2020 election where a variant of the ISL doctrine was central to efforts to block certification, four justices voted to take the case. Conservative legal icon Judge Michael Luttig called this “the most important case for American democracy in the almost two and a half centuries since America’s founding.”

Our grantee States United served as co-counsel to two of the chief litigants — the Governor of North Carolina and the State Board of Elections — whose positions were upheld by SCOTUS. Additionally, our grantee Protect Democracy, in partnership with the Brennan Center, recruited and organized a fusillade of amicus briefs by leading conservative legal scholars and former judges, successfully urging SCOTUS to reject this dangerous theory.