Election Law Commons^™

Bring The Masks And Sanitizer: The Surprising Bipartisan Consensus About Safety Measures For In-Person Voting During The Coronavirus Pandemic, Joshua A. Douglas, Michael A. Zilis

Georgia Law Review

Requiring masks at the polls might implicate a clash
between two vital rights: the constitutional right to vote and the
right to protect one’s health. Yet the debate during the 2020
election over requirements to wear a mask at the polls obscured
one key fact: a majority of Americans supported a mask
mandate for voting. That is the new insight we provide in this
Essay: when surveyed, Americans strongly supported safety
measures for in-person voting, and that support was high
regardless of partisanship. One implication of our results is
that by making some widely supported safety modifications,
state election officials …

Trump V. Mazars Usa, Llp: The Case Of The Chief Justice And The Congressional Subpoenas, Rodger D. Citron

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Time To Mail It In? A Survey Of 2020 Voting Rights Issues In Arkansas And Recommendations For More Inclusive Elections, Kim Vu-Dinh

Faculty Scholarship

The highly contagious COVID-19 pandemic, combined with over fifty lawsuits brought by former President Donald Trump, made the general election of 2020 one of the most controversial in the history of the United States. Accusations of voter disenfranchisement proliferated across the nation and were initiated by members of both sides of the political spectrum, even before Election Day. Arkansas was no exception to this rule. In 2020, multiple Arkansas lawsuits highlighted the weaknesses of the state’s voter infrastructure, particularly with regard to the absentee ballot process. Voting-by-mail was particularly important in the pandemic year when long lines became a public …

Reconstructing The Voting Rights Act: Subnational Action And Voting Rights Post-1965, Sean M. Holly

Honors Theses

The discussion of suffrage and the development of the U.S. electorate is misguidedly based solely around federal action; constitutional amendments and federal legislation are commonly revered as primary determinants of the right to vote. This tendency poses a specific problem with contemporary discussions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Specifically, discussions of the VRA ignores the ability of subnational actors to innovate politically and readjust their vehicles of political development in the wake of federal supposition of state powers. The Voting Rights Act did not destroy state authority regarding the right to vote; it merely disrupted their vehicles of …

Undue Deference To States In The 2020 Election Litigation, Joshua A. Douglas

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on so much of our lives, including how to run our elections. Yet the federal courts have refused to respond appropriately to the dilemma that many voters faced when trying to participate in the 2020 election. Instead, the courts—particularly the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts—invoked a narrow test that unduly defers to state election administration and fails to protect adequately the fundamental right to vote.

Wisconsin’S 3/5 Compromise: Prison Gerrymandering In Wisconsin Dilutes Minority Votes To Inflate White Districts’ Population, Adam Johnson

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Minority Rights And The Electoral College: What Minority, Whose Rights?, David Schultz

Georgia Law Review

The Electoral College as a method of selecting U.S.
presidents was allegedly set up to protect one type of minority
rights—those of slave states and small states—but over time
it has operated to deny the rights of racial and other minorities,
especially given the winner-take-all system of electoral vote
allocation used in forty-eight states. This Essay examines the
history and current operation of the Electoral College, detailing
how, despite its changes, it continues to privilege some forms of
minority rights at the expense of others. The Essay also
indicates how in its current form in forty-eight states, the
Electoral College …

The People's Court: On The Intellectual Origins Of American Judicial Power, Ian C. Bartrum

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This article enters into the modern debate between “consti- tutional departmentalists”—who contend that the executive and legislative branches share constitutional interpretive authority with the courts—and what are sometimes called “judicial supremacists.” After exploring the relevant history of political ideas, I join the modern minority of voices in the latter camp.

This is an intellectual history of two evolving political ideas—popular sovereignty and the separation of powers—which merged in the making of American judicial power, and I argue we can only understand the structural function of judicial review by bringing these ideas together into an integrated whole. Or, put another way, …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

In Defense Of The Foundation Stone: Deterring Post-Election Abuse Of The Legal Process, Joyce G. Lewis, Adam M. Sparks

Georgia Law Review

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the American way of
life and revolutionized the way we vote. Record voter turnout in
2020, including among first-time voters and voters of color, was
met with unprecedented legal challenges seeking to nullify
millions of votes. A coordinated effort to amplify groundless
accusations of voting fraud, shorthanded as “the Big Lie,” was
advanced in multiple states through scores of lawsuits.
Although the cases themselves were dismissed as lacking merit
and as failing to state actionable claims, their impact upon
public confidence in free and fair elections was palpable and
the resources of the courts and …

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.

Democracy On A Shoestring, Joshua Sellers, Roger Michalski

Faculty Articles

Democracy requires money. Voters must be registered, voting rolls updated, election dates advertised, voting technology purchased and tested, poll workers trained, ballots designed, votes counted and verified, and on and on. Despite the importance of election expenditures, we have a shamefully inadequate amount of information about how much our elections cost. This Article, based on a novel and painstakingly hand-coded dataset, provides much needed information on election expenditures across multiple years from four states: California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida. These states, given their unique characteristics, provide a compelling sample set. In what we believe to be a completely novel approach …

A Political Canary: An Empirical Study Of The Correlation Between Hatch Act Complaints And How The Electoral College Votes, Raimund Stieger

Upper Level Writing Requirement Research Papers

The American public witnesses hundreds, if not thousands, of violations of the Hatch Act—an administrative law designed to keep partisan politics out of Government—each year. This study aimed to determine whether there is a correlation between the number of Hatch Act complaints reported in the fiscal year leading up to a Presidential election and how divisive the political landscape is during that Presidential election. Political divisiveness was defined as how close the winning Presidential candidate was to receive fifty percent of the electoral college. To assess the theory that an increase in Hatch Act complaints is an early indicator of …

Don't Change The Subject: How State Election Laws Can Nullify Ballot Questions, Cole Gordner

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Procedural election laws regulate the conduct of state elections and provide for greater transparency and fairness in statewide ballots. These laws ensure that the public votes separately on incongruous bills and protects the electorate from uncertainties contained in omnibus packages. As demonstrated by a slew of recent court cases, however, interest groups that are opposed to the objective of a ballot question are utilizing these election laws with greater frequency either to prevent a state electorate from voting on an initiative or to overturn a ballot question that was already decided in the initiative’s favor. This practice is subverting the …

Prohibiting The Punishment Of Poverty: The Abolition Of Wealth-Based Criminal Disenfranchisement, Amy Ciardiello

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The majority of U.S. states disenfranchise formerly incarcerated individuals because of their poverty by conditioning re-enfranchisement on the full payment of legal financial obligations. This Note discusses the practice of wealth-based criminal disenfranchisement where the inability to pay legal financial obligations, including fines, fees, restitution, interest payments, court debts, and other economic penalties, prohibits low-income, formerly incarcerated individuals from voting. This Note argues this issue has not been adequately addressed due to unsuccessful legislative reforms and failed legal challenges. An examination of state policies, federal and state legislative reforms, and litigation shows that a more drastic state legislative solution is …

Reducing Election Litigation, Derek T. Muller

Journal Articles

Election litigation has exploded, and judges have increasingly been asked to evaluate ever-finer points of election administration. This Article posits some reasons that the judiciary has done so, and it offers potential ways to reduce election litigation.

Part I examines the increase in litigation and attributes at least some of that increase to several causes: increased campaign expenditures on litigation; increased partisanship in state legislatures yielded more contentious election laws; the decline of preclearance under the Voting Rights Act after Shelby County v. Holder; and Supreme Court extensions of the Anderson v. Celebrezze framework to broad areas of election …

The Role Of Opposition In A Democracy: A Bibliometric Analysis, Abhinav Shrivastava Mr., Richa Dwivedi Ms.

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Globally, democracy is under threat with the prevalence of authoritarian regime all over the world and the role of opposition in a democracy is an under studied subject and has not received adequate importance by researchers all over the world. The present study focuses on the bibliometrics analysis of the role of opposition in democratic system in order to understand the research status of the subject globally using SCOPUS and Web of Science databases.

The analysis shows that research has been undertaken by various organisations and researchers however, the present time demands more attention on the role of opposition so …

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 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 …

"The Cornerstone Of The Stability Of Our Government": The Forgotten Penalty Clause And Electoral Reform In The Aftermath Of The 2020 Election, Delaram Takyar

Publications

The 2020 presidential election, which was preceded by months of efforts by Republican party members to disenfranchise voters during a global pandemic, highlighted the United States' historic need for electoral reform. The tools for this reform might already exist in the Penalty Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides a built-in remedy—reduced representation in Congress—in cases where a state abridges the voting rights of its citizens. This Remark provides an overview of the history of the long-neglected Penalty Clause, including a discussion of how important its drafters viewed its role, as well as practical proposals for ways it could be …