Election Law Commons^™

Increasing Youth Participation: The Case For A National Voter Pre-Registration Law, Ceridwen Cherry

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Lagging youth participation rates threaten participatory democracy and undermine the representation of young people's interests in elected government. However, the percentage of registered youth who actually cast ballots is very high. The correlation between registration and actual voter participation suggests that when given assistance and greater opportunities to register, young citizens will vote. This Note proposes a national pre-registration law that would allow voter registration to begin at age sixteen. Such a law would be feasible, constitutional, and politically viable and may increase not only the voter participation of young people, but also the socioeconomic diversity of the electorate.

Voting Technology And The Quest For Trustworthy Elections, Candice Hoke

Law Faculty Contributions to Books

This chapter reviews four dimensions of the still-unresolved voting technology quandary. It begins by briefly reviewing the Florida Bush v. Gore background that, combined with the tradition of state governmental control over election administration, spawned the contours and limitations of new federal regulatory apparatus. It also surveys some illustrative voting system malfunctions and their consequences surfacing predominantly from 2009–12.

The second part of this chapter, Federal Compulsion to Adopt Software-Based Voting Technologies, explains the misconceptions about software and digital equipment that led to both the flawed federal mandates and the ineffectual regulatory structure.

The third part of this chapter, Litigation …

Latino Voters 2012 And Beyond: Will The Fastest Growing And Evolving Electoral Group Shape U.S. Politics?, Sylvia R. Lazos

Scholarly Works

The author reviews two recent books, Marisa A. Abrajano’s Campaigning to the New American Electorate: Advertising to Latino Voters (2010) and Marisa A. Abrajano’s and R. Michael Alvarez’s New Faces New Voices: The Hispanic Electorate in America (2010). These books are part of a growing literature that scientifically studies the evolving Latino electorate, and attempts to answer difficult questions about this ethnic group’s electorate cohesiveness and how candidates might be able to influence the Latino electorate. A careful read of Abrajano’s recent books brings additional understanding to Latino voter behavior, and by implication, how this key group will influence the …

The Hunt For Noncitizen Voters, Fatma E. Marouf

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

On Overreaching, Or Why Rick Perry May Save The Voting Rights Act But Destroy Affirmative Action, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

The State of Texas is presently staking out two positions that are not typically pursued by a single litigant. On the one hand, Texas is seeking the invalidation of the Voting Rights Act, and, on the other, the State is now defending the validity of the expansive race-based affirmative action policy it uses at its flagship university. This Essay presses the claim that Texas has increased the chance it will lose in bothTexas v. Holder andFisher v. University of Texas because it has opted to stake out markedly extreme positions in each. I argue that Texas would be more likely …

Democrats At Doj: Why Partisan Use Of The Voting Rights Act Might Not Be So Bad After All, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

In notable ways, the ongoing dispute over redistricting in Texas offers a mirror image to one of the major redistricting battles of the last decade, only with Democratic and Republican roles reversed. In both Texas v. United States and Georgia v. Ashcroft, a state attorney general (AG) decided he would not ask the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) to approve new redistricting plans enacted in his state. In both cases, the state AGs were well aware that the Voting Rights Act (VRA) required them to obtain federal approval, known as preclearance, before changing any aspect of their state's election …

What Do We Want In A Presidential Primary - An Election Law Perspective, Chad Flanders

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Although the 2008 presidential primaries were in many ways a resounding success in terms of turnout, attention, and sheer excitement, many noted the pressing need for reform. States were rushing to hold their primaries sooner than ever, giving rise to "Super-Duper Tuesday," where twenty-four states had their primaries on the same day. The Democratic nominee at one point looked like it might be decided by the votes of so-called "Superdelegates"-party regulars beholden to no one. As the Democratic nomination contest wore on, Rush Limbaugh, in "Operation Chaos," encouraged his "dittoheads" to raid the party primaries of the Democrats, tilting the …

The Optical Scan Voting Machine And The 65 And Older Staten Island Voter, Matthew C. Desaro

MPA Capstone Projects 2006 - 2015

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) was signed into law with the explicit goals of: (1) creating a program by which States could utilize federal funds to replace punch card voting systems, (2) establishing the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to act as the administrator for Federal elections and provide assistance to States in the compliance with the new Federal election standards, and (3) establishing those new Federal standards for which the States would now have to abide. For New York State, the last State to conform to the new requirements and only after a court order was issued …

Consumer Assent To Standard Form Contracts And The Voting Analogy, Wayne Barnes

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Note, Making Ballot Initiatives Work: Some Assembly Required, Portia Pedro

Faculty Scholarship

For over one hundred years, the ballot initiative or proposition has been touted as a solution to some of the problems in the representative system of democracy in the United States. Depending on a state’s ballot initiative system, this mechanism enables citizens to make laws, to create or eliminate rights, or to amend the state’s constitution through a popular vote. Popular initiatives were initially intended to allow ordinary citizens to intervene in the democratic process when their representative officials were not carrying out their wishes. These proposition processes were supposed to create a space for public deliberation. By allowing the …

Voting As Veto, Michael S. Kang

Michigan Law Review

This Article introduces an alternate conception of voting as vetobased on "negative preferences" against a voter's least preferred outcomes-that enriches voting theory and practice otherwise dominated by a conception of voting as a means of expressing a voter's ideal preferences. Indeed, the familiar binary choices presented in American political elections obscure the pervasiveness of negative preferences, which are descriptively salient in voting under all types of circumstances. Negative preferences have been overlooked, despite their theoretical and practical importance across many domains, leaving important questions unexplored in the literature. The Article develops a normative and positive account of voting as veto …

Long Lines At Polling Stations? Observations From An Election Day Field Study, Douglas M. Spencer, Zachary S. Markovits

Publications

This pilot study represents the first systematic attempt to determine how common lines are on Election Day, at what times of day lines are most likely to form, what are the bottlenecks in the voting process, and how long it takes an average citizen to cast his or her ballot. This study highlights the importance of evaluating polling station operations as a three-step process: arrival, check-in, and casting a ballot. We collected data during the 2008 presidential primary election in California, measuring the efficiency of the operational components of 30 polling stations across three counties. We found statistically significant, and …

The Dilemma Of Direct Democracy, Craig M. Burnett, Elizabeth Garrett, Mathew D. Mccubbins

Faculty Scholarship

The dilemma of direct democracy is that voters may not always be able to make welfare- improving decisions. Lupia’s seminal work has led us to believe that voters can substitute voting cues for substantive policy knowledge. Lupia, however, emphasized that cues were valuable under certain conditions and not others. In what follows, we present three main findings regarding voters and what they know about California’s Proposition 7. First, much like Lupia reported, we show voters who are able to recall endorsements for or against a ballot measure vote similarly to people who recall certain basic facts about the initiative. We …

Election Law, Christopher R. Nolen

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

E-Voting And Forensics: Prying Open The Black Box, Candice Hoke, Sean Peisert, Matt Bishop, Mark Graff, David Jefferson

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Over the past six years, the nation has moved rapidly from punch cards and levers to electronic voting systems. These new systems have occasionally presented election officials with puzzling technical irregularities. The national experience has included unexpected and unexplained incidents in each phase of the election process: preparations, balloting, tabulation, and reporting results. Quick technical or managerial assessment can often identify the cause of the problem, leading to a simple and effective solution. But other times, the cause and scope of anomalies cannot be determined. In this paper, we describe the application of a model of forensics to the types …

One Person, One Vote, One Application: District Court Decision In Ray V. Texas Upholds Texas Absentee Voting Law That Disenfranchises Elderly And Disabled Voters, Sean Flynn

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Poll Workers, Election Administration, And The Problem Of Implicit Bias, Antony Page, Michael J. Pitts

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Racial bias in election administration-more specifically, in the interaction between poll workers and voters at a polling place on election day-may be implicit, or unconscious. Indeed, the operation of a polling place may present an "optimal" setting for unconscious racial bias. Poll workers sometimes have legal discretion to decide whether or not a prospective voter gets to cast a ballot, and they operate in an environment where they may have to make quick decisions, based on little information, with few concrete incentives for accuracy, and with little opportunity to learn from their errors. Even where the letter of the law …

Withdrawal: The Roberts Court And The Retreat From Election Law, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

Last Term the Supreme Court handed down four decisions that upheld diverse efforts by state governments to regulate the electoral process. The Court turned back challenges to New York’s method for nominating judicial candidates, Washington’s modified blanket primary system, Indiana’s voter identification requirement, and Alabama’s use of gubernatorial appointment to fill county commission vacancies in Mobile County. Unlike other recent election decisions, these were not close cases. All nine Justices supported the New York holding, while supermajorities voted in favor of the result in the others. This consensus, moreover, emerged even as the Court voted to reverse unanimous decisions by …

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly: Three Proposals To Introduce The Nationwide Popular Vote In U.S. Presidential Elections, Alexander S. Belenky

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

The idea of reforming the Electoral College recurs each time a presidential election nears. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of respondents support abolishing the Electoral College in favor of direct popular election of the President. Yet, it is doubtful whether these polls really imply that such a move would be best for the country. Despite the seeming simplicity of direct popular presidential election, its introduction in the United States—a country in which the clear separation of powers between the states and the federal government has existed for more than two centuries—would have hidden drawbacks that the media and pollsters …

Reforming The Electorial College One State At A Time, Thomas W. Hiltachk

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

The genius of our United States Constitution is the delicate balance our Founding Fathers struck between empowering a national government and preserving the inherent sovereignty of individual states. Any proposed governmental reform that would interfere with that balance should be looked upon skeptically. Recent proposals to do away with the Electoral College in favor of a national popular vote for President deserve such careful examination. But that does not mean that reform is out of reach. We have only to look to the Constitution itself to find that the answer lies in the self-interest of each state. I am an …

Democratic Principle And Electoral College Reform, Ethan J. Leib, Eli J. Mark

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

The Electoral College is a relic from another time and is in tension with the modern constitutional command of “one person, one vote.” But the Electoral College is, nevertheless, ensconced in our Constitution—and, as a result, we would need to amend the document to alter or abolish it from our political fabric. Still, some states are toying with state-based Electoral College reforms. Thus, irrespective of whether voters in those states favor the abolition of the Electoral College through a federal constitutional amendment, they must critically examine the democratic merits of these statebased reform options. Categorically rejecting all state-based reform is …

Ideological Endowment: The Staying Power Of The Electoral College And The Weaknesses Of The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, Daniel P. Rathbun

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

The National Popular Vote (“NPV”) movement is designed to eliminate the federalist impact of the Electoral College without amending the Constitution. By fashioning an interstate compact to grant participating states’ electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, NPV proponents suppose they can induce states to forfeit their electoral “weights” and replace the current, federalist election process with a fully majoritarian one. But by leaving the Electoral College in place, the NPV movement is setting itself up for a double pushback: first, in the form of immediate legal resistance, and second, through states’ long-term involvement in a meaningfully …

Equal Voice By Half Measures, John Mark Hansen

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

In democratic theory, the ballot is the most perfect expression of the democratic commitment to the moral equality of persons. Every citizen, whether old or young, rich or poor, sophisticated or simple, enjoys the same endowment in an election: a single vote. The ballot not only gives citizens their voice in government, it also makes their voices equal. In practice, however, democracies have erected all sorts of impediments to the ideal of equal voice, such as restrictions on suffrage, legislative malapportionments, and discriminatory gerrymanders. Among the most egregious impediments, however, are surely the systems of indirect election purported to filter …

Awarding Presidential Electors By Congressional District: Wrong For California, Wrong For The Nation, Sam Hirsch

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

The unfairness of the proposed California Presidential Election Reform Act is obvious: in a close election, the Act virtually assures that California’s fifty-five electoral votes, which would be expected to go entirely to the Democratic presidential candidate under the traditional statewide-winner-takeall system, will instead be split, with more than a third of them going to the Republican candidate. Implementing this “reform” in the nation’s largest Democratic state, but not in any of the large Republican states (like Texas), is roughly the equivalent of handing over to the Republicans the state of Illinois. What is less obvious is that the Act …

An Unsafe Harbor: Recounts, Contests, And The Electoral College, Daniel P. Tokaji

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Although recent proposals for modifying the Electoral College process have focused mainly on how electoral votes are assigned, another problem with the current system has received less attention: the timetable for resolving post-election disputes over electors. Under 3 U.S.C. § 5, the so-called “safe harbor” provision of federal law, a state can be assured of having its chosen slate of electors recognized only if post-election disputes are resolved within thirty-five days of Election Day. As a practical matter, this provision doesn’t provide states enough time to complete recount and contest proceedings in the event of a close, contested election. This …

Let's Not Jump To Conclusions: Approaching Felon Disenfranchisement Challenges Under The Voting Rights Act, Thomas G. Varnum

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 invalidates voting qualifications that deny the right to vote on account of race or color. This Article confronts a split among the federal appellate courts concerning whether felons may rely on Section 2 when challenging felon disenfranchisement laws. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals allows felon disenfranchisement challenges under Section 2; however, the Second and Eleventh Circuits foresee unconstitutional consequences and thus do not. After discussing the background of voting rights jurisprudence, history of felon disenfranchisement laws, and evolution of Section 2, this Article identifies the points of contention among the …

Why Counting Votes Doesn't Add Up: A Response To Cox And Miles' Judging The Voting Rights Act, Ellen D. Katz, Anna Baldwin

Articles

In Judging the Voting Rights Act, Professors Adam B. Cox and Thomas J. Miles report that judges are more likely to find liability under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) when they are African American, appointed by a Democratic president, or sit on an appellate panel with a judge who is African American or a Democratic appointee. Cox and Miles posit that their findings “contrast” and “cast doubt” on much of the “conventional wisdom” about the Voting Rights Act, by which they mean the core findings we reported in Documenting Discrimination in Voting: Judicial Findings Under Section 2 …

The Court's Failure To Re-Enfranchise Felons Requires Congressional Remediation, Otis H. King, Jonathan A. Weiss

Pace Law Review

No abstract provided.

Testimony Before The U.S. House Of Representatives, Elections Subcommittee Of The House Administration Committee, Concerning The Importance Of Independent Post-Election Auditing And Reviewing Impediments To Election Auditing And Greater Transparency., Candice Hoke

Law Faculty Presentations and Testimony

Mandatory election audits are a critical step for restoring public confidence in the electoral system and for learning what problems exist (in equipment, systems, and personnel) so that they might be effectively corrected. Unfortunately, the promise of auditing will be severely undermined if the federal auditing entity lacks independence from the election administrative authority. Secretaries of State can play a number of crucial additional roles that will facilitate efficient and effective election audits, but because of the appearance of conflicts of interest should not be supervising and conducting federal audits. The federal audit effort will be greatly enhanced if the …

Voter Identification, Spencer Overton

Michigan Law Review

In the wake of closely contested elections, calls for laws that require voters to present photo identification as a condition to cast a ballot have become pervasive. Advocates tend to rely on two rhetorical devices: (1) anecdotes about a couple of elections tainted by voter fraud; and (2) "common sense" arguments that voters should produce photo identification because identification is required to board airplanes, buy alcohol, and engage in other activities. This Article explains the analytical shortcomings of anecdote, analogy, and intuition, and applies a cost-benefit approach generally overlooked in election law scholarship. Rather than rushing to impose a photo-identification …