During the litigation surrounding the 2020 election, the independent state legislature theory (ISLT) emerged as a potentially crucial factor in the presidential election. The ISLT rests on the Electors and Elections Clauses of the Constitution, which assign decisions about federal elections to state legislatures. Proponents of the ISLT, including Supreme Court Justices, assert that state constitutions’ substantive provisions cannot apply to state election laws governing federal elections; that state courts’ statutory interpretations of such laws must be rigidly textualist and are reviewable, apparently de novo, by federal courts; and/or that delegations of decisionmaking authority to nonlegislative bodies may be limited, albeit in unspecified ways. The ISLT is at issue in current litigation involving congressional redistricting that the Supreme Court will hear during its October 2022 Term.

This Article charts the emergence of this unprecedented reading of the Electors and Elections Clauses and examines both its justifications and its practical implications. Its central claim is that the ISLT, particularly in its maximalist form, is an unprecedented, unconstitutional, and potentially chaos-inducing intrusion into state election law. Those promoting the ISLT skip the crucial step of statutory interpretation—asking what the state legislature actually did. As a result, the ISLT undermines its own claims to promote political accountability and predictability by failing to engage in the question of whether a legislature has in fact rejected the state constitution and other aspects of state law. The Article concludes with suggestions for the Supreme Court, Congress, state actors, and litigants to protect the continued independence of state election law.

在围绕 2020 年大选展开的诉讼中，独立国家立法理论 (ISLT) 成为总统选举的潜在关键因素。ISLT 以宪法的选举人和选举条款为基础，这些条款将有关联邦选举的决定分配给州立法机构。ISLT 的支持者，包括最高法院法官，断言州宪法的实质性条款不能适用于管辖联邦选举的州选举法；州法院对此类法律的法定解释必须是严格的文本主义的，并且联邦法院显然可以重新审查；和/或授权给非立法机构的决策权可能会受到限制，尽管方式不明。

本文描绘了这种对选举人和选举条款的前所未有的解读的出现，并考察了它的理由和实际意义。它的核心主张是，ISLT，特别是其最高主义形式，是对州选举法的前所未有的、违宪的和可能引发混乱的入侵。那些提倡 ISLT 的人跳过了法定解释的关键步骤——询问州立法机关实际做了什么。因此，ISLT 没有参与立法机关是否实际上拒绝了州宪法和州法律的其他方面的问题，从而破坏了自己促进政治问责制和可预测性的主张。文章最后提出了对最高法院、国会、国家行为者的建议，