“Julián Castro won’t qualify for the next Democratic presidential primary debate, the only candidate still in the race who participated in the October debate to miss out on November’s,” Politico reports.

Ten candidates are projected to participate in the debate on November 20: Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Tom Steyer, Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang.

A year before the 2020 presidential election, Democratic groups are filing lawsuits in new and emerging battleground states, challenging election laws and procedures they say disproportionately affect young and minority voters.

Those groups have filed seven lawsuits in recent weeks, challenging election laws in five states. And more suits are coming, said Marc Elias, the Democratic election law expert whose firm is overseeing the litigation.

In Georgia, Texas and Arizona, coalitions of Democratic groups are challenging state laws that will list Republican candidates first in any given race. Social science research has found that a candidate listed first on a ballot can benefit by as much as 2.5 percentage points, through what researchers call the primacy effect.

“Especially given the history of Republican efforts at voter suppression in Georgia, the result from the last election should not determine who wins the next one,” said Nikema Williams, who heads the Georgia Democratic Party.

In a major victory for privacy rights, a federal court in Boston today ruled that the government’s suspicionless searches of international travelers’ smartphones and laptops at airports and other U.S. ports of entry violate the Fourth Amendment. The ruling came in a lawsuit, Alasaad v. McAleenan, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and ACLU of Massachusetts, on behalf of 11 travelers whose smartphones and laptops were searched without individualized suspicion at U.S. ports of entry.

“This ruling significantly advances Fourth Amendment protections for the millions of international travelers who enter the United States every year,” said Esha Bhandari, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “By putting an end to the government’s ability to conduct suspicionless fishing expeditions, the court reaffirms that the border is not a lawless place and that we don’t lose our privacy rights when we travel.”

“This is a great day for travelers who now can cross the international border without fear that the government will, in the absence of any suspicion, ransack the extraordinarily sensitive information we all carry in our electronic devices," said Sophia Cope, EFF senior staff attorney.