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Fulfillment Of The Mandailing Community Suffrage Right In The 2020 Regional Head Election, Chandra Fhutu Neva, Dewi Gunawati, Triyanto Triyanto

Jurnal Civics: Media Kajian Kewarganegaraan

Modern society presents a problem where it is increasingly common for minority groups/cultural groups/indigenous groups to show their identity to fulfill their collective right to vote in politics. This study aims to describe the form of democracy that is still hampered because the fulfillment of the voting rights of the Mandailing community is still limited. This research is qualitative descriptive research conducted in the Mandailing community in Kecamataan Sungai Kanan. Data was collected through interviews, observation, and documentation. The collected data is then analyzed using Creswell's techniques which consist of organizing and preparing the data, reading the data, the coding …

One Person, How Many Votes? Measuring Prison Malapportionment, Ian Bollag-Miller

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

“One-person, one-vote” is a fundamental principle of democracy. In practice, however, vote distribution among population groups is often less than equal. Even in established democracies, prison malapportionment—the distribution of legislative seats by counting incarcerated people in their prisons’ districts rather than their home districts—is one example of a practice that distorts voter representation. Prison malapportionment allows less populous districts that house prisons to maximize their voting power at the expense of more densely populated districts from which many incarcerated people previously lived. While there has been significant scholarship on the causes and effects of prison malapportionment, there is no standard …

Depoliticizing The Supreme Court Through Term Limits: A Worthwhile Reform Effort, Kara King

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

The United States Supreme Court is in a legitimacy crisis. Americans are losing faith in the Supreme Court as an independent branch of government. As a result, policymakers and academics have put forth several proposals to reform the Court. The concept of an eighteen-year term limit maintains some bipartisan support and stands out as the most likely reform. This Article argues that term limits could help depoliticize the nomination process, bring greater stability to the Court, and restore confidence in the Court.

Taking History Seriously: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Reflections On Progressive Lawyering, And Section 3 Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Andrew G. Celli Jr.

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

History has lessons to teach, and lawyers can learn from and use history in ways other than by cherry-picking from it. This Article contends that, while American history may be vexed, progressive lawyers can fully embrace history and hold it up into the light for consideration, all in service of progressive ends.

This Article describes a recent litigation that illustrates the point. In March 2022, the Author, together with other lawyers and a non-partisan pro-democracy group, represented voters from Georgia’s fourteenth congressional district in their effort to disqualify U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from the Georgia ballot—based upon Section 3 …

Increasing Voter Investment In American Democracy: Proposals For Reform, Adam Drake

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

Millions of Americans choose to stay home every election cycle. Polling suggests that these nonvoters are either apathetic with respect to the democratic process or feel alienated from the United States government. Reforms to the democratic system should focus on alleviating these sentiments, ultimately encouraging more voters to show up to the polls. As turnout increases, so too does the legitimacy and stability of the U.S. government.

With that goal in mind, this Article advocates for a five- prong approach to reforming the electoral system. The first proposed step is to eliminate unnecessary barriers to voting by establishing federal automatic …

I Hope Tilden Was Right, Jerry H. Goldfeder

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

No abstract provided.

Updating Anderson-Burdick To Evaluate Partisan Manipulation

Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

This Article analyzes jurisprudence concerning the judicial review of election laws. It suggests that the United States Supreme Court’s approach should acknowledge the realities of political partisanship when reviewing challenged laws and regulations. Specifically, this Article proposes a judicial test to evaluate election laws for partisan biases using factors modeled on those employed by the Court in Gingles v. Thornburg. Simply put, the manipulation of election laws to pursue partisan advantages poses the greatest threat to our democracy. Accordingly, this Article concludes that protecting our democracy from election practices that benefit one party over another in the guise of …

Indigenous Americans Became Red: Racism As Justification For Exploitation Of Native Americans, Robert V. Dodge

Journal of Indigenous Research

This article presents how an admixture of humans first arrived in the western world during the last Ice Age and spread throughout both continents, developing more complex cultures and agriculture, then civilizations. The arrival of Columbus began colonization by white European countries, justified by bringing the indigenous population Christianity and European civilization. Native people were dehumanized by white settlers out of greed for their land, which was said to have been used unproductively. A contention of early British colonists was that Indians were born white but their uncivilized life prevented them from remaining so, giving them a range of hues. …

A New Supreme Court Case Threatens Another Body Blow To Our Democracy, Katherine A. Shaw, Leah Litman, Carolyn Shapiro

Online Publications

When the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, the justices in the majority insisted they were merely returning the issue of abortion to the democratic process. But a case the court has announced it will hear in its October term could make that democratic process a lot less democratic.

Race And Regulation Podcast Episode 4 - Creating An Inclusive National Politics, Guy-Uriel Charles

Penn Program on Regulation Podcasts

Throughout American history, racial inequality and political inequality have gone hand-in-hand. Building a truly representative democracy today and in the future will depend on ending racial discrimination in voting. In this episode, election law expert Guy-Uriel Charles of Harvard Law School argues that voting cannot be made a universal and fundamental right for all without nationalizing American election law and blocking states from adopting rules for redistricting and voting that exclude and disenfranchise minority voters. This episode is based on Prof. Charles’s 2021 Distinguished Lecture on Regulation at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

Book Review: Freedom Libraries: The Untold Story Of Libraries For African Americans In The South By Mike Selby, Claire Kelley

School of Information Student Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Quickly End Ny’S Suppressive Ballot Policy, Rachel Landy, Jarrett Berg

Online Publications

Earlier this year, with the 2022 midterm elections looming, New York’s Democratic members of Congress sued their own state Board of Elections in federal court for unconstitutional practices that disqualify ballots cast by duly registered voters. Chief among the alleged violations of New Yorkers’ right to vote is the practice of fully disqualifying so-called “wrong church” ballots cast by lost or misdirected voters at poll sites other than the ones to which they are assigned.

Crime And Unequal Punishment: Proving Discriminatory Intent In Felony Disenfranchisement, Abel Huskinson, Kaitlyn Long

Brigham Young University Prelaw Review

Felony disenfranchisement, or barring convicted felons from voting, is a punishment used in almost every state. Although states differ in their severity of felony disenfranchisement, these laws resulted in 5.1 million Americans being unable to participate in the 2020 national election. The Supreme Court found in Hunter v. Underwood that felony disenfranchisement laws would violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment if they contained “both [an] impermissible racial motivation and racially discriminatory impact.” Recent scholarship has found felony disenfranchisement to disproportionately affect marginalized racial groups. As such, it becomes the burden of felony disenfranchisement constitutional challenges to prove …

I Exist, Therefore I Should Vote: Political Human Rights, Voter Suppression And Undermining Democracy In The U.S., Davita S. Glasberg, William T. Armaline, Bandana Purkayastha

Societies Without Borders

The right to vote is clearly delineated among the rights identified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the US has long held itself as the beacon of that democracy and enfranchisement. Yet, a long history persists of practices and policies of voter suppression and gerrymandering that targets the rights of Black, brown, and indigenous populations in the US, a history that has in recent years escalated. We use the framework of the Human Rights Enterprise to unpack this history and to explore why efforts of voter suppression are intensifying at this particular moment in history.

Gender, Voting Rights, And The Nineteenth Amendment, Paula A. Monopoli

Faculty Scholarship

One hundred years after the woman suffrage amendment became part of the United States Constitution, a federal court has held—for the first time—that a plaintiff must establish intentional discrimination to prevail on a direct constitutional claim under the Nineteenth Amendment. In adopting that threshold standard, the court simply reasoned by strict textual analogy to the Fifteenth Amendment and asserted that “there is no reason to read the Nineteenth Amendment differently from the Fifteenth Amendment.” This paper’s thesis is that, to the contrary, the Nineteenth Amendment is deserving of judicial analysis independent of the Fifteenth Amendment because it has a distinct …

Circuit Circus: Defying Scotus And Disenfranchising Black Voters, Charquia Wright

Scholarly Publications

Law students are uniformly taught thatfederal circuit courts cannot and will not overrule Supreme Court precedent under any circumstance. This is not true. They can, with little fear of corrective mechanisms like en banc oversight, Supreme Court review, or congressional override. And in certain circumstances, they are bound to do so by the law of the circuit. Under the prudential law of the circuit doctrine in-circuit precedent binds circuit courts, even in scenarios where conflicting long-standing Supreme Court precedent exists. Circuits can only depart from erroneous circuit precedent ifa later-decided SCOTUS or en banc decision obviates the circuit precedent. This …

Black Women And Voter Suppression, Carla Laroche

Scholarly Articles

Black women who are eligible to vote do so at consistently high rates during elections in the United States. For thousands of Black women, however, racism, sexism, and criminal convictions intersect to require them to navigate a maze of laws and policies that keep them from voting. With the alarming rate of convictions and incarceration of Black women, criminal law intersects with civil rights to bar their involvement in the electoral process. This voting ban is known as felony disenfranchisement, but it amounts to voter suppression.

By reconceptualizing voter suppression based on criminal convictions through the experiences of Black women’s …

Voting Rights For People With Diminished Mental Capacity, Courtney Schiffler

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Dangerous Independent State Legislature Theory, Jason Marisam

Faculty Scholarship

In 2020, conservative justices and the Trump Campaign championed a theory, known as the independent state legislature doctrine, that claims voting rights protections in state constitutions do not apply to the election rules that state legislatures set for the federal elections in their states. Under the theory, state courts cannot review and enjoin these state election laws for state constitutional violations. This Article exposes the flaws and dangers of the independent state legislature theory. It deconstructs the justifications for its utility, revealing them as undertheorized and based on flawed assumptions of legislative behavior and flawed understandings of constitutional and institutional …

Survival Voting And Minority Political Rights, Douglas M. Spencer, Lisa Grow Sun, Brigham Daniels, Chantel Sloan, Natalie Blades

Publications

The health of American democracy has literally been challenged. The global pandemic has powerfully exposed a long-standing truth: electoral policies that are frequently referred to as "convenience voting" are really a mode of "survival voting" for millions of Americans. As our data show, racial minorities are overrepresented among voters whose health is most vulnerable, and politicians have leveraged these health disparities to subordinate the political voice of racial minorities.

To date, data about racial disparities in health has played a very limited role in assessing voting rights. A new health lens on the racial impacts of voting rules would beneficially …

Using Short Bursts To Optimize Redistricting In Georgia, Vedika Vishweshwar

CMC Senior Theses

Identifying extreme outliers in large state spaces is a difficult prob-
lem. I consider this problem in the context of finding political district-
ing plans that maximize the number of districts in which the majority
of the population is from a minority group, such as African Americans.
Since the set of all possible districting plans is enormous and unfeasi-
ble to examine in practice, this paper proposes a sampling method to
find these outlying plans. Specifically, this paper experiments with short
bursts in the context of minority voting rights in Georgia. Short bursts
are a type of Markov Chain in …