Law Commons^™

Passive Voter Suppression: Campaign Mobilization And The Effective Disfranchisement Of The Poor, Bertrall L. Ross Ii, Douglas M. Spencer

Northwestern University Law Review

A recent spate of election laws tightened registration rules, reduced convenient voting opportunities, and required voters to show specific types of identification in order to vote. Because these laws make voting more difficult, critics have analogized them to Jim Crow Era voter suppression laws.

We challenge the analogy that current restrictive voting laws are a reincarnation of Jim Crow Era voter suppression. While there are some notable similarities, the analogy obscures a more apt comparison to a different form of voter suppression—one that operates to effectively disfranchise an entire class of people, just as the old form did for African …

When Soft Law Meets Hard Politics: Taming The Wild West Of Nonprofit Political Involvement, Lloyd Histoshi Mayer

Journal Articles

Beginning in the 1990s and continuing to today, many of the legal and psychological barriers to nonprofits becoming involved in electoral politics have fallen. At the same time, political divisions have sharpened, causing candidates, political parties, and their supporters to scramble ever more aggressively for any possible edge in winner-take-all political contests. In the face of these developments, many nonprofits have violated the remaining legal rules applicable to their political activity with little fear of negative consequences, especially given vague rules and a paucity of enforcement resources. Such violations include underreporting of political activity in government filings, fly-by-night organizations that …