Election Law Commons^™

Anti-Speech Acts And The First Amendment, Richard K. Sherwin

Articles & Chapters

In many states today, there are laws on the books designed to protect the legitimacy and fairness of elections by barring the knowing or reckless dissemination of demonstrably false statements. Regulating this kind of deliberate deception protects the public against the erosion of First Amendment freedoms – such as the freedom to think and express one’s own thoughts and to meaningfully deliberate in an electoral process free from deliberate efforts to flood the zone of public discourse with confusion and mistrust based on deliberate and provable falsehoods. Some of these regulations, however, have been successfully challenged on First Amendment grounds. …

A New Stage In The Struggle For Voting Rights, Lynn Adelman

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bridges Of Law, Ideology, And Commitment, Steven L. Winter Walter S. Gibbs Distinguished Professor Of Constitutional Law

Law Faculty Research Publications

Law has a distinctive temporal structure—an ontology—that defines it as a social institution. Law knits together past, present, purpose, and projected future into a demand for action. Robert Cover captures this dynamic in his metaphor of law as a bridge to an imagined future. Law’s orientation to the future necessarily poses the question of commitment or complicity. For law can shape the future only when people act to make it real. Cover’s bridge metaphor provides a lens through which to explore the complexities of law’s ontology and the pathologies that arise from its neglect or misuse. A bridge carries us …

Brief Of Professor Derek T. Muller As Amici Curiae In Support Of No Party, Michael Francisco, Michael A. Brody, Derek T. Muller

Court Briefs

No. 22-11299
Marjorie Taylor Greene v. Secretary of State for the State of Georgia

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia
No. 1:22-cv-01294-AT

From the Summary of Argument

Appellees present an issue that seeks something unprecedented: that this Court be the first federal appeals court in history to approve the State’s power to disqualify a congressional candidate. But States lack the power to exclude a congressional candidate from the ballot over a qualification that a candidate might ultimately meet when she presents her credentials to Congress. The district court’s decision should be reversed.

Returning The House Of Representatives To The People: An Apportionment Amendment Proposal Advocating For The Cube Root Rule, Michael Didomenico

Et Cetera

Since the approval of the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, the number of representatives in the United States House of Representatives has been capped at 435. While the “People’s House” has seen no growth since 1929, the United States population has nearly tripled since that time to 332 million people in 2022. Without additional representatives to accommodate this larger population, Americans have diluted voting power, representatives are more distant from the constituents they supposedly represent, partisanship stonewalls any productive legislation from being passed, an imbalanced Electoral College clouds the will of the people in selecting their president, and a lack …

Back To Basics: How International Election Observation Standards Can Strengthen Democracy In The United States, Ward Evans

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Maybe We Don't Need To Find Waldo After All: Why Preventing Voter Fraud Is Not A Compelling Interest, Brandon T. Goldstein

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

This Note takes the position, counter to established jurisprudence, that the prevention of voter fraud is not a compelling state interest that can independently justify restrictions on the right to vote. It will seek to do so through two mechanisms. First, it will argue that the right to vote is unjustifiably treated differently than other rights by courts, using a comparison to the Second Amendment right to bear arms. Second, it will argue that current jurisprudence holding the prevention of voter fraud to be a compelling interest misunderstands the inherent means-ends distinction in voting rights standards. The prevention of voter …

Do Voter Id Requirements Impact Voter Turnout In Minnesota And Wisconsin?, Jacob Berg

Political Science Theses and Capstones

After the 2020 General Election there was wide disagreement over the process of how elections are administrated specifically related to voter ID laws. Prior research that attempts to answer the question has mixed results and there has been controversy over how to approach the research. The use of demographic data from the American Community Survey, turnout data from the Minnesota Secretary of State office, and the Wisconsin Election Commission. I made use of different statistical tests to evaluate if there was a connection between voter ID and voter turnout. Preliminary results are mixed for the relation between voter ID and …

Pursuit Of The Vote: Factors Utilized In Resisting Discrimination In Democratic Elections, Matthew Nicholson

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

Suffrage movements make use of various social and political factors to pressure their governments to expand the scope of voting rights. Using McAdam’s political process model, I will analyze how disenfranchised groups’ use of nonviolent demonstration, appeals to international pressure, and appeals to religion, affects their success. This will also highlight patterns that emerge when groups are willing to instigate violence in pursuit of their goals. Most studies examine these variables in the context of the pursuit of independence or revolution, whereas this study focuses on groups wishing to remain within a system given their desired reforms. I will analyze …

The Case Against Florida Statute §98.0751, Lyndsey Gallwitz

Akron Law Review

Felony disenfranchisement laws prevent millions of American citizens from voting. While the recent legal trend has been to eradicate felony disenfranchisement, each state currently has a unique framework, and the issue remains unsettled nationwide. In 2018, the state of Florida passed a constitutional amendment that allowed felons to regain their right to vote once their sentence was finished. Soon after, the Governor DeSantis signed Fla. Stat. Ann. § 98.0751 into law, which required felons to pay off all court cost before their right to vote will be restored. This new law prevented thousands of otherwise eligible felons from voting in …

Beyond Citizens United: Democratizing The Economy In The Wake Of The Small-Dollar Revolution, Jay Hedges

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

Citizens United increases the power of corporations over our political process. Under current corporate governance laws, permission for corporations to behave as political actors ignores the consent of a particularly important constituency of these business entities—labor. This neglect of workers reveals three democratic crises resulting from the corporate structure in the United States, which have only intensified following Citizens United. First, while the political speaking-power of corporations has been substantially increased, these entities lack legitimacy to speak on behalf of their labor constituency. Second, the use of corporate profits, generated by the corporation’s labor force, as the means …

Deterioration Of The Tenth Amendment: Why Federalism’S Hierarchy Must Be Restored, Giana Depaul

Helm's School of Government Conference - 2021-2024

No abstract provided.

“A Mystifying And Distorting Factor”: The Electoral College And American Democracy, Katherine Shaw

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College. By Jesse Wegman.

"A Mystifying And Distorting Factor": The Electoral College And American Democracy, Katherine A. Shaw

Articles

A Review of Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College. By Jesse Wegman.

The Electoral Count Mess: The Electoral Count Act Of 1887 Is Unconstitutional, And Other Fun Facts (Plus A Few Random Academic Speculations) About Counting Electoral Votes, Jack M. Beermann, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, and in light of the controversy that arose in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, we explain the constitutional process for counting electoral votes. In short, every four years, the Twelfth Amendment requires the President of the Senate (usually the Vice President of the United States) to open certificates provided by state presidential electors and count the votes contained therein. The Constitution allows no role for Congress in this process, and thus the provisions of the Electoral Count Act purporting to grant Congress the power, by concurrent resolution, to reject a state's electoral votes are unconstitutional. …

The Ghost Of John Hart Ely, Ryan D. Doerfler, Samuel Moyn

Vanderbilt Law Review

The ghost of John Hart Ely haunts the American liberal constitutional imagination. Despite the failure long ago of any progressive constitutional vision in an increasingly conservative Supreme Court, Ely’s conjectures about the superiority of judges relative to legislatures in the protection of minorities and the policing of the democratic process remain second nature. Indeed, they have been credible enough among liberals to underwrite an anxious or even hostile attitude toward judicial reform. In order to exorcise Ely’s ghost and lay it to rest, this Article challenges his twin conjectures. First, the Article argues that there is little historical and no …

The Territorial And District Representation Amendment: A Proposal, Colin P.A. Jones

Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law

This article will propose and explain a draft amendment to the United States Constitution that would secure an intermediate degree of political representation for Americans living in U.S. territories. While concerned principally with U.S. territories, the amendment would also address Congressional representation for the District of Columbia.

Law School News: Two Rwu Law Lawmakers Fight To 'Let R.I. Vote' 03-24-2022, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Reforming State Electoral College Laws To Depolarize American Politics, M. Akram Faizer

Cleveland State Law Review

Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee involved the Supreme Court gutting the remaining vestiges of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), such that jurisdictions will have free rein to impose partisan burdens on franchise rights that have a disproportionate negative effect on racial minority voters who, based on racial political polarization, prefer Democratic Party candidates over their Republican opponents. Brnovich follows the highly divisive 2020 presidential election that Joe Biden won against former President Trump based on very narrow margins in highly contested swing states, notwithstanding a nationwide popular margin of more than 8 million votes. This blurring of the lines between …

Sb 221: The Creation Of Election Leadership Committees, Nolan Hendricks, Pj Spina

Georgia State University Law Review

The Act primarily provides for the creation of leadership committees that accept contributions and make expenditures for the purpose of affecting the outcome of elections or advocating for the election or defeat of candidates. The governor, lieutenant governor, or a political party’s nominee for those positions, and the Democratic and Republican leaders in the state Senate and House would control and chair such committees: specifically, one person designated by the majority caucus of the House of Representatives, one by the minority caucus of the House of Representatives, one by the majority caucus of the Senate, and one by the minority …