Election Law Commons^™

Innovoting: How Democracy Is Being Reshaped By Women's Innovative Voting Activism & Candidacy, Andrea Schneider, Kali Murray, Amber Wichowsky, Christina Wolbrecht, Mary Kelley, Kara Swanson

Marquette Intellectual Property & Innovation Law Review

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The Promise And Peril Of Local Election Administration, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The administration of elections in the United States—including elections for federal office – is highly decentralized.

Fundamental election law decisions – such as registration and voter identification requirements, and early in-person voting and vote-by-mail rules – are made by the state legislature, but the actual conduct of elections is handled almost entirely by local governments.

Local officials register voters, process absentee ballot applications, design ballots, recruit and train poll workers, manage early voting and election day operations, acquire, maintain and secure voting equipment, and count, canvass, and report the results. In most states, local officials also pay for most of …

The Political (Mis)Representation Of Immigrants In Voting, Ming H. Chen, Hunter Knapp

Publications

Who is a member of the political community? What barriers to inclusion do immigrants face as outsiders to this political community? This Essay describes several barriers facing immigrants and naturalized citizens that impede their political belonging. It critiques these barriers on the basis of immigrants and foreign-born voters having rights of semi-citizenship. By placing naturalization backlogs, voting restrictions, and reapportionment battles in the historical context of voter suppression, it provides a descriptive and normative account of the political misrepresentation of immigrants.

The Political (Mis)Representation Of Immigrants In The Census, Ming Hsu Chen

Publications

Who is a member of the political community? What barriers to inclusion do immigrants face as outsiders to this political community? This article describes several barriers facing immigrants that impede their political belonging. It critiques these barriers not on the basis of immigrants’ rights but based on their rights as current and future members of the political community. This is the second of two Essays. The first Essay focused on voting restrictions impacting Asian American and Latino voters. The second Essay focuses on challenges to including immigrants, Asian Americans, and Latinos in the 2020 Census. Together, the Essays critique the …

Presidential Control Of Elections, Lisa Marshall Manheim

Articles

In recent decades, presidents of both political parties have asserted increasingly aggressive forms of influence over the administrative state. During this same period, Congress has expanded the role that the federal government plays in election administration. The convergence of these two trends leads to a troubling but underexamined phenomenon: presidential control of elections. Relying on their official powers, presidents have the ability to affect the rules that govern elections, including elections meant to check and legitimize presidential powers in the first place. This self-serving arrangement heightens the risk of harms from political entrenchment and subordination of expertise. These harms, in …

Dean's Desk: Iu Maurer Research Focusing On Most Topical Issues Of 2020, Austen L. Parrish

Austen Parrish (2014-2022)

The three major stories of 2020 — the COVID-19 pandemic, the heightened awareness of racial injustice and the election — have made this year one that we will remember. While we couldn’t have envisioned all that would happen at the beginning of the year, our faculty are producing useful and thought-provoking scholarship on all these topics.

I often use my Dean’s Desk columns to celebrate student and alumni achievement, to describe new and innovative programs in our curriculum, or to share how the law school supports and collaborates with community organizations and the courts to provide pro bono legal services …

Recounts And Ballot Challenges In The 2020 Presidential Election: Legal Expert Provides Insights, Bruce Brumberg, Rebecca Green

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Undefeated - Bike To Vote Exhibit Panel, Sally Brown

Undefeated Exhibit Panels

No abstract provided.

Those Who Can Vote Are Duty-Bound To Do So, A. Benjamin Spencer

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Eight Months Later, Ellen D. Katz

Reviews

Rick Hasen’s Election Meltdown provides a concise and scathing analysis of what ails the American electoral process. Rick identifies four “principal dangers”—namely, voter suppression, “pockets of incompetence” in election administration, “dirty tricks,” and “incendiary rhetoric” about stolen or rigged elections. He argues that these dangers have contributed to past dysfunctional elections and are sure to infect future ones. Election Meltdown closes with some proposals to temper the identified dangers so as to make voting less difficult and restore confidence in the electoral process.

More Than The Vote: 16-Year-Old Voting And The Risks Of Legal Adulthood, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

Advocates of 16-year-old voting have not grappled with two significant risks to adolescents of their agenda. First, a right to vote entails a corresponding accessibility to campaigns. Campaign speech is highly protected, and 16-year-old voting invites more unfettered access to minors by commercial, government, and political interests than current law tolerates. Opening 16-year-olds to campaign access undermines a considered legal system of managing the potential exploitation of adolescents, which sometimes includes direct regulation of entities and also gives parents authority in both law and culture to prohibit, manage, or supervise contacts with every kind of person interested in communicating with …

Undefeated - Bicycle Cut-Outs To Promote Voting Exhibit Panel, Sally Brown

Undefeated Exhibit Panels

Undefeated - Bicycle Cut-outs To Promote Voting poster

Includes instructions for cut-out to include artists' names.

Undefeated - Vote Values Exhibit Panel, Sally Brown

Undefeated Exhibit Panels

No abstract provided.

Undefeated - Bicycle Cut-Outs To Promote Voting Exhibit Panel, Sally Brown

Undefeated Exhibit Panels

No abstract provided.

Undefeated - Bike To Vote Exhibit Panel, Hannah Jack

Undefeated Exhibit Panels

Undefeated - Bike to Vote

"[bikes have] done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world" Susan B. Anthony, abolitionist and suffragette

Rail trails brought accessible biking culture to hill WV. Do you have a bike story?

Undefeated - West Virginia Voting Rights Timeline Exhibit Panel, Sally Brown

Undefeated Exhibit Panels

Undefeated - West Virginia Voting Rights Timeline poster

Timeline of West Virginia voting laws and suffrage organization establishment.

Voting By Mail: Issues And Resources, Virginia A. Neisler

Law Librarian Scholarship

As the world navigates the worst pandemic in living memory, America has been faced with the prospect of holding a federal presidential election amid a public health crisis. In the spring of 2020, when the coronavirus began to spread rapidly in the United States, election officials in many states opted to extend absentee voting deadlines or postpone elections altogether to reduce the risk of disease transmission. In anticipation of a resurgence of COVID-19 in the fall, the scheduled November election has caused concern for many officials who have searched for potential solutions to make the upcoming presidential election safer.

Thin And Thick Conceptions Of The Nineteenth Amendment Right To Vote And Congress's Power To Enforce It, Richard L. Hasen, Leah M. Litman

Articles

This Article, prepared for a Georgetown Law Journal symposium on the Nineteenth Amendment’s one-hundred-year anniversary, explores and defends a “thick” conception of the Nineteenth Amendment right to vote and Congress’s power to enforce it. A “thin” conception of the Nineteenth Amendment maintains that the Amendment merely prohibits states from enacting laws that prohibit women from voting once the state decides to hold an election. And a “thin” conception of Congress’s power to enforce the Nineteenth Amendment maintains that Congress may only supply remedies for official acts that violate the Amendment’s substantive guarantees. This Article argues the Nineteenth Amendment does more. …

Not Gill-Ty: Challenging And Providing A Workable Alternative To The Supreme Court's Gerrymandering Standing Analysis In Gill V. Whitford, Colin Neal

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

A New Old Solution: Why The United States Should Vote By Mail-In Ballot, Annie Barouh

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Federal Oversight Of State Primaries: The Troubling Drift From Equal Protection To Association, Jacob Eisler

Mercer Law Review

The latter half of the twentieth century saw a dramatic transformation in the degree and quality of federal judicial oversight of the voting process. With the one-person, one-vote jurisprudence, the Supreme Court of the United States imposed a basic requirement of personal equality in district line-drawing. In the context of race, Gomillion v. Lightfoot became the beachhead in the premise that racial discrimination will not be tolerated in voting procedure. A few decades later, Davis v. Bandemer suggested that fair district line-drawing could require non-discrimination on the grounds of party identification. In each of these domains of court-led intervention, one …

Symposium: Liquidating Elector Discretion, Rebecca Green

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Brief Of Amici Curiae Michael L. Rosin, David G. Post, David F. Forte, Michael Stokes Paulsen, And Sotirios Barber In Support Of Presidential Electors, David F. Forte, Michael L. Rosin, David G. Post, Michael Stokes Paulsen, Sotirios Barber

Law Faculty Briefs and Court Documents

The Framers of the Constitution crafted the Electoral College to be an independent institution with the responsibility of selecting the President and Vice-President. Therefore, they intended each elector to exercise independent judgment in deciding whom to vote for. A state cannot revise the Constitution unilaterally by reducing the elector to a ministerial agent who must vote in a particular way or face a sanction. The question of each elector’s moral or political obligation is not before the Court. Nor is the desirability of the current electoral system. Rather, this case turns on what the Constitution allows, and what it prohibits. …

Presidential Control Over Disputed Elections, Lisa Marshall Manheim

Articles

An election that is “disputed” lacks two qualities after Election Day: a clear winner and a concession. These elections instead depend on legal processes — recounts, court proceedings, and more — for resolution. As a result, when a sitting President, running for reelection, becomes immersed in a disputed presidential election, he potentially enjoys an advantage over his opponent. He can attempt to exploit the powers of the presidency to push these legal proceedings in his favor. As a practical matter, this advantage can be formidable. A sitting president can resort to his extraordinary bully pulpit, for example, to influence public …

Cracks In The Foundation, Lisa Marshall Manheim

Articles

This essay is part of a symposium on Richard L. Hasen’s book, Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy (2020). It discusses how intentional voter suppression runs contrary to a universalist conception of voting and exacerbates the other major threats facing American elections.

Corporate Control, Dual Class, And The Limits Of Judicial Review, Zohar Goshen, Assaf Hamdani

Faculty Scholarship

Companies with a dual-class structure have increasingly been involved in high-profile battles over the reallocation of control rights. Google, for instance, sought to entrench its founders’ control by recapital­izing from a dual-class into a triple-class structure. The CBS board, in contrast, attempted to dilute its controlling shareholder by distributing a voting stock dividend that would empower minority shareholders to block a merger it perceived to be harmful. These cases raise a fundamental question at the heart of corporate law: What is the proper judicial response to self-dealing claims regarding reallocations of corporate control rights?

This Article shows that the reallocation …

Foreword, Sudha Setty

Faculty Scholarship

In November 2019, the Western New England Law Review held its symposium, On Account of Sex: Women’s Suffrage and the Role of Gender in Politics Today. The symposium articles ask us to look at history to see what factors enabled path-breaking activists to secure the right to vote in a time of immense national turmoil. They also ask us to weigh how history should assess the strategic decisions that ultimately gained political rights for some women, but deliberately excluded Black women and other activists.

These historical accounts help us consider how the right to vote is faring, particularly after …

First Amendment (Un)Exceptionalism: A Comparative Taxonomy Of Campaign Finance Reform Proposals In The United States And United Kingdom, Lori A. Ringhand

Scholarly Works

There is an urgent conversation happening among the world’s democracies about how to respond to the combined threat of online electioneering and foreign interference in domestic elections. Despite the shadow such activities cast over the 2016 presidential election in the United States, the US has been largely absent from comparative discussions about how to tackle the problem. This is not just because of a recalcitrant president. The assumption that America’s “First Amendment Exceptionalism” – the idea that American freedom of expression law is simply too much of an outlier to warrant useful comparative consideration – is strong on both sides …

Remembrance, One Person, One Vote: The Enduring Legacy Of Joaquin Avila, Robert Chang

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Joaquin Ávila: Voting Rights Gladiator, Barbara Y. Philips

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.