Hi and welcome to Amicus. I'm Dahlia Lithwick, Slate Supreme Court correspondent. And on this

issue of the show, we're having a special all-election law issue trying to unpack at least some of the

voting problems you'll be hearing about between now and Tuesday. As you may have noticed, there's

been a huge flurry of activity surrounding the new state voting laws in the weeks leading up to Election Day.

And in a series of unexplained and inexplicable decisions, the Supreme Court just in the last few weeks, blocked a voter ID law that would have gone into effect in Wisconsin, allowed new voting regulations in North Carolina and Ohio to go into effect

and reinstated a very controversial Texas voter ID law, a decision that led Ruth Bader Ginsburg

to write a powerful dissent. She noted that up to 600,000 Texas voters may be disenfranchised

and that there's a terrible threat to voter confidence when you mess with the election system.

To help us sort all of this out, I am joined today by Richard Hassan.

He teaches election law at UC Irvine Law School.

He's the author of the book The Voting Wars.

He blogs at the election law blog and is a regular contributor to Slate.

Rick is the busiest man on the planet this time of year. So welcome to Amicus Rick.

Oh, it's a pleasure to be with you.

So, Rick, I think one thing listeners are probably wondering is where's the big bang in Supreme Court litigation over election law? Where does it start? And my theory is that it starts a little bit with Shelby County, where the Supreme Court strikes down a portion of the V. Rights Act. But actually, it starts kind of before that with Crawford, where the Supreme Court upholds a voter ID law. But actually, it starts even before that in 2000 with Bush v. Gore. So help us unpack what

changed in that 2000 election that made election law the booming industry it is for young lawyers

today. Yeah, I think that what we saw in, it's not just the case of Bush v. Gore, there are actually

dozens of lawsuits that were filed. And what it revealed is not only that there were problems

with voting technology, older listeners will remember the hanging chads and all of these

punch card ballots where it was hard to tell how somebody voted.

There were all those kinds of problems. But there are also holes in the law. It wasn't clear

how long there was to have a recount. It wasn't clear who decides what the rules should be.

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