The future of US elections hinges on an outlandish case before the supreme court | Moira Donegan

The independent state legislature' theory has rarely been put forward, and then only by blatant partisans acting in bad faith

Going into the oral arguments for Moore v Harper on Wednesday, it was easy to forget just how radical and strange it was that the US supreme court was hearing the case in the first place.

Moore v Harper is a challenge by North Carolina's Republican-controlled state legislature to a decision by the state's Democratic-controlled supreme court, which threw out what the court called an excessively gerrymandered congressional district map that the legislature put forward, saying the map violated a state constitutional law guaranteeing free elections. Unhappy, the legislature adopted what used to be a fringe theory: that state courts don't have much jurisdiction over election matters at all.