One week left to submit an abstract for our Scholarship Roundtable in April!

The last New York City mayoral candidate to secure over 1 million votes was John Lindsay in 1969. Zohran Mamdani will be the seventh New York City mayor ever to receive more than 1 million votes.

Mamdani, an immigrant who will become the city’s first Muslim mayor, has said that his election “is an opportunity for us to make clear that immigrants don’t just belong in the five boroughs of New York City — we also belong in City Hall.”

BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York City mayoral race, NBC News projects. nbcnews.to/4nIzNUC

If you want the granular look at how the NYC mayoral candidates perform in neighborhoods across the city, you'll want to watch this precinct-level map, which will update as results start coming in.

whew, per the Board of Elections, we've hit 2M votes in New York City

Polls don't close until 9 p.m., but here's a gift link to the results page for the NYC mayoral election to bookmark to watch once they do. (No needle for this one.)

NEW: State constitutions and state high courts are central in defining how, and by whom, elections are run — and who gets to participate in them. Check out @cisozaki.bsky.social’s Election Day 2025 edition of our series on state constitutional trends.

🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨 This is the President openly announcing that he will violate court orders - two courts had concluded that the Trump regime withholding SNAP funding was illegal - and that the government had to pay out (at least reduced) SNAP benefits starting this week

I know people sometimes forget, but your local elections ARE CRUCIAL. Your schools & libraries depend on local elections. Your AG choice is the one who will stand up to unjust federal actions. We've seen mayors stand up. And if you want to shift your party, the local elections are where you do it.

NEW: Programs meant to protect the vulnerable from poverty & housing insecurity are often challenged by landlords claiming they're unconstitutional takings of private property. But state courts have largely rejected these claims. @uwlawdemocracy.bsky.social's @bridgetlavender.bsky.social explains:

Property owners have increasingly used state law to challenge programs and policies meant to assist the poor. As Staff Attorney @bridgetlavender.bsky.social explains in the State Court Report, state efforts to defend these policies have been mostly successful. statecourtreport.org/our-work/ana...

"[M]emories of the bad times still haunt me. When they do, I remember ... the birds who always came to visit when no one else would."

Palate cleanse. Some humans are terrible, but more of us are great.

Live coverage of the NYC mayoral race continues today as the candidates make their final appeals to voters across the five boroughs.

More and more, property owners go to state court to challenge programs meant to assist the poor, such as eviction moratoriums and mandated charity care. But efforts to defend these policies have been mostly successful. I wrote about it for @statecourtreport.org ⬇️ statecourtreport.org/our-work/ana...

In analyzing Miller's comments, @politifact.bsky.social cites our piece explaining that "while Supremacy Clause immunity grants federal officials a partial shield from state prosecution, that immunity is not absolute." For more, see the full explainer: statedemocracy.law.wisc.edu/featured/202...

Tomorrow, voters in six states will consider ballot measures regarding redistricting, voting, gun laws, parental rights, taxes, and more. @erings.bsky.social breaks down key measures we're tracking, including CA's Prop 50, which could impact control of the US House after the 2026 elections.

LAW STUDENTS: The ACLU's State Supreme Court Initiative has an internship posting for Spring 2026. www.aclu.org/careers/inte...

Locked Out: Voting and Politics Behind Bars

We filed a brief yesterday explaining that the Constitution’s structure envisions an active role for states in redressing the constitutional violations of federal actors and, historically, state-level causes of action were the primary way for individuals to recover for injuries by federal actors.

This recent piece by @uwlawdemocracy.bsky.social's Harrison Stark explains how state laws offer redress to victims of excessive force, retaliatory investigations, unlawful property destruction, and other unconstitutional federal actions.

They have fired the staff of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report and 70 Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, who are disease detectives that respond to outbreaks around the world. I cannot emphasize enough how dangerous it is to dismantle our disease surveillance infrastructure.

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

"We took the freedom of speech away," says the president

California recently banned law enforcement—including ICE—from masking up while on the job. At least other 5 other states have proposed similar laws. My latest piece explores whether these laws can actually be applied to federal agents.

As states start to pass laws banning law enforcement from wearing masks, @bridgetlavender.bsky.social has an explainer on the constitutionality of such laws as applied to ICE and other federal law enforcement officers: statedemocracy.law.wisc.edu/featured/202.... The short answer: it's complicated.

NEW: TX is asking NY courts to declare NY's reproductive health care shield law unconstitutional in an attempt to enforce its abortion ban across state lines. @law.ucla.edu's @lindsaywiley.bsky.social lays out a legal case for why NY (and other shield states) can and should reject such overreach.

NEW: Hawaii's Supreme Court keeps releasing opinions that denounce the U.S. Supreme Court. The latest? A new ruling that requires the police to record all interrogations from now on. The author took it as an opportunity to say Hawaii's court will protect due process—while SCOTUS isn't:

This is extraordinarily lawless and is happening all over the country, and because of the Supreme Court there is no remedy for whatsoever. The Constitution, if you can keep it, huh.

I always love reading @prisonjournalism.bsky.social’s work, and this one brought tears to my eyes this afternoon.

The US government holds a tremendous amount of data about US citizens. Now, The Trump administration is trying to access that data and link it together. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/u...

i'm excited to read the supreme court opinion explaining that the founders INTENDED for the president to be able to coerce his staff to produce fake evidence of voter fraud in an election he lost so he could cling to power indefinitely bsky.app/profile/char...

🚨🚨Calling all North Carolina voters!! Here is a list of every voter that Jefferson Griffin is trying to disenfranchise, please if you are a NC voter check to see if your name is on here, you have 15 days to cure your ballot to make sure your vote counts. thegriffinlist.com/assets/griff...

NC Court of Appeals rules 2-1 for Judge Jefferson Griffin. The court didn't throw out 65,000 ballots, but it's requiring all of those voters to jump through more hoops to have their vote counted. NONE of these voters broke the rules. appellate.nccourts.org/opinions/?c=... #ncpol

One of many moments in Omar El Akkad’s new book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” that will stop you in your tracks.

Shameful, Skadden.

We are sending people for indefinite detention without trial at a foreign gulag because they have tattoos about soccer teams and about loving their mothers.

This is election denial, plain and simple. Justice Allison Riggs won. Two recounts confirmed it. Now, her opponent wants to toss out tens of thousands of valid votes to overturn the will of the people. This is what undermining democracy looks like. We must fight back. #ncpol

"The right to vote is not absolute. The right to vote is subject to the state's need to protect the INTEGRITY OF ELECTIONS." How does this guy say that with a staight face? He claims that a ruling for Griffin wouldn't be a "severe burden" on the right to vote.

The NC Court of Appeals is hearing arguments RIGHT NOW in Jefferson Griffin's lawsuit to overturn the 2024 high court election result. Watch here: track-mg.mobilize.us/CL0/https:%2... #ncpol

TODAY @ 10AM ET: The NC Court of Appeals hears argument in Judge Griffin's bid to have 65K+ ballots thrown out. Livestream: www.youtube.com/channel/UC5R... ACLU brief: assets.aclu.org/live/uploads...

Today a 54-year-old woman died on Rikers Island. She was locked up for a misdemeanor. In the past 30 days, 4 people who've been held on Rikers have died. And the NYC jail population — just over 7,000 — is higher today than anytime since 2019. gothamist.com/news/woman-d...

Read this declaration. A professional soccer player has been imprisoned in El Salvador and forced into hard labor on the basis of soccer-related tattoos and a single, innocent hand gesture. This is why the administration is withholding due process. It knows its targets could prove their innocence.

Yes! Amicus briefs can be so influential, especially in state supreme court cases. Your state supreme court hears dozens of cases affecting your rights every year with sometimes only minimal briefing. Amici can make points parties can’t, or won’t, and can absolutely change the outcome of a case!

NEW: In the latest threat to direct democracy, Ron DeSantis and his legislative allies seek to kill the citizen initiative process. @brennancenter.bsky.social's Alice Clapman discusses his "blatant and unconstitutional attempts to grab power from Florida voters":

The history here is instructive: before Roe, prosecutions tended to focus on non-physicians, and disproportionately on midwives, especially those who weren't white. We see the same now--and for strategic reasons. This isn't the first prosecution Paxton could bring but the one his office chose.

Totally agree with this. Flying a person to a third country that they may never have been to, directly into a prison where they are going to be forced to do hard labor, is not a deportation; it's something else entirely.