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 activities 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 Hassen. 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 Voting 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.

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