Election Law Commons^™

The Jekyll And Hyde Of First Amendment Limits On The Regulation Of Judicial Campaign Speech, Charles G. Geyh

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Race, Federalism, And Voting Rights, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Guy-Uriel Charles

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Voting Rights Act In Winter: The Death Of A Superstatute, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Guy-Uriel Charles

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The Voting Rights Act ("VRA "), the most successful civil rights statute in American history, is dying. In the recent Shelby County decision, the U.S. Supreme Court signaled that the anti-discrimination model, long understood as the basis for the VRA as originally enacted, is no longer the best way to understand today's voting rights questions. As a result, voting rights activists need to face up to the fact that voting rights law and policy are at a critical moment of transition. It is likely the case that the superstatute we once knew as the VRA is no more and is …

Citizens Disunited: Mccutcheon V. Federal Election Commission, Adam Lamparello

Indiana Law Journal

The wealthy are democracy’s darlings, the middle class are its stepchildren, and the poor are its orphans. Corporate giants line the pockets of senatorial candidates—and purchase influence—while average citizens walk into a polling station and cast a largely symbolic vote. Stated simply, money creates a soft inequality by dominating the political process. Like the “soft bigotry of low expectations,”69 the soft inequality embedded in our political system has created a liberty gap between the prosperous and the poor. McCutcheon was an opportunity to bridge this gap. Instead, the Court enshrined the status quo by holding that Congress could only regulate …

(Mis)Trusting States To Run Election, Joshua A. Douglas

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This Article critically examines recent Supreme Court election law jurisprudence, with a particular eye toward cases involving state election administration—a hotbed of litigation at the Court in recent years. Election administration entails the rules of operating an election and encompasses laws such as voter identification requirements, regulation of primaries, and other "nuts-and-bolts" aspects of the voting process. The Article focuses primarily on the last decade, mainly because that is when states have increasingly enacted stricter election regulations, supposedly in the name of "election integrity," but more likely to gain partisan advantage for the ruling party. In addition, during the first …

Nevada Youth Learn About Voting Rights, Rachel J. Anderson

Scholarly Works

Prof. Rachel Anderson describes the second Youth Voting Rights Project, an event created by Prof. Anderson in collaboration with Dr. Zachary Robbins, Clark County School District principal, to help educate Nevadan high school and middle school students on the topic of election law.

Prof. Anderson also comments on the controversy surrounding Voter ID laws and the question of whether and to what degree the United States has made progress in fulfilling the promise of the Voting Rights Act.

The Young And The Restless: How The Twenty-Sixth Amendment Could Play A Role In The Current Debate Over Voting Laws, Nancy Turner

American University Law Review

The Twenty-Sixth Amendment is commonly understood as lowering the voting age to eighteen. However, a close look at the Amendment's language and history indicates that the Twenty-Sixth Amendment does more than just grant a right. Properly read, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment acts as an antidiscrimination law similar to the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments. Accordingly, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment possesses the power not just to invalidate legislation that explicitly contravenes its purpose, but also to neutralize facially neutral legislation that was enacted with a discriminatory intent. Using Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment jurisprudence as a guide, this Comment proposes a framework for structuring …

Administering Section 2 Of The Voting Rights Act After Shelby County, Christopher S. Elmendorf, Douglas M. Spencer

Publications

Until the Supreme Court put an end to it in Shelby County v. Holder, section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was widely regarded as an effective, low-cost tool for blocking potentially discriminatory changes to election laws and administrative practices. The provision the Supreme Court left standing, section 2, is generally seen as expensive, cumbersome, and almost wholly ineffective at blocking changes before they take effect. This Article argues that the courts, in partnership with the Department of Justice, could reform section 2 so that it fills much of the gap left by the Supreme Court's evisceration of section …

Governing And Deciding Who Governs, Josh Chafetz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that, "Campaign finance restrictions that pursue other objectives [than eradicating quid pro quo corruption or its appearance], we have explained, impermissibly inject the Government 'into the debate over who should govern.' And those who govern should be the last people to help decide who should govern."

This passage sounds great — after all, who could object to an attempt to purge official self-dealing, especially in the election-law context? And therein lies its insidiousness: this rousing language masks a programmatic attempt by Roberts and his colleagues to distance themselves rhetorically …

An Empirical Analysis Of State Supreme Court Candidate Fundraising, Michael Briach

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

As political elections are becoming more expensive, judicial elections are also following this trend. This project focuses on elections at the state supreme court level. There are three different methods used to select state supreme court justices, which are: partisan, nonpartisan, and merit selections. The intent of this project is to provide an empirical analysis of the differences in amounts raised between judicial selection methods. This will be done by examining the amount of money that is raised by state supreme court candidates in Ohio, compared to Florida. Ohio is a state that uses partisan elections, while Florida uses the …

Toward A Fundamental Right To Evade Law? Protecting The Rule Of Unequal Racial And Economic Power In Shelby County And State Farm, Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

To rationalize its ruling on voting rights, Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder develops a constitutional vision of passivity in the face of institutionalized power to violate the law. This essay compares Shelby County to State Farm Mutual Automobile v. Campbell, a 2003 Supreme Court ruling involving a different subject area, state punitive damage awards. In both, the Court asserts newly articulated judicial power to override other branches, not to protect human rights, but rather to expand institutionalized immunity from those rights. On the surface, the Court’s rejection of state sovereignty in State Farm (protecting multistate corporations from high punitive damages) …

Campaign Finance And The Ecology Of Democratic Speech, Michael Kent Curtis, Eugene D. Mazo

Kentucky Law Journal

Biologists have contributed to our understanding of the world's ecosystems, explaining how the natural world is populated by different species, which are able to thrive and blossom because of the existence of other species in the rightproportion. In similar fashion, the authors of this article believe that the political world has an ecosystem. It is an ecosystem where free speech may thrive or wither, and its fate rests on the delicate balance of political influence between citizens and corporations. This balance is disturbed when concentrations of wealth funnel into the democratic process through campaign spending. The Supreme Court, through its …

Two-Time Presidents And The Vice-Presidency, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

Does the Constitution limit the ability of a twice-before-elected President to serve as Vice-President? This question, as it turns out, presents an intricate constitutional puzzle, the solution of which requires working through four separate sub-inquiries: Is a two-term President totally ineligible for the Vice-Presidency? Is such a person barred from election to the Vice-Presidency even if that person remains appointable to that office? Is a twice-before-elected President, even if properly placed in the Vice-Presidency, incapable of succeeding from that office to the Presidency? And even if such a succession can occur, must the resulting term of service as President expire …

The Price Of Corruption, Usha Rodrigues

Scholarly Works

The Supreme Court recently held that campaign contributions under $5200 do not create a “cognizable risk of corruption.” It was wrong. This Essay describes a nexus of timely contributions and special-interest legislation. In the most noteworthy case, a CEO made a first-time $1000 donation to a member of Congress. The next day that representative introduced a securities bill tailored to the interests of the CEO’s firm.

Armed with this real-world account of how small-dollar campaign contributions coincided with favorable legislative action, the Essay reads McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission with a critical eye. In McCutcheon the Supreme Court assumed that …

Fighting Foreign-Corporate Political Access: Applying Corporate Veil-Piercing Doctrine To Domestic-Subsidiary Contributions, Ryan Rott

Michigan Law Review

Campaign finance regulations limit speech. The laws preclude foreign nationals, including foreign corporations, from participating in U.S. politics via campaign contributions. The unusual characteristics of corporations, however, may allow foreign corporations to exploit a loophole in the regulatory regime. A foreign corporation may contribute to political campaigns by acquiring a domestic subsidiary and dominating it. This Note addresses how these unusual corporate behaviors enable foreign corporations to illegally corrupt the political process. This Note concludes that to close the loophole without violating the free speech rights of domestic subsidiaries, Congress should enact legislation which would apply corporate veil-piercing theory to …

The Uncertain Future Of The Corporate Contribution Ban, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Concern about the role of corporate money in democracy has been a longstanding theme in American politics. In the late nineteenth century, the states began to adopt laws restricting the use of corporate funds in elections. The first permanent federal campaign finance law – the Tillman Act of 1907 – targeted corporations by prohibiting federally-chartered corporations from making contributions in any election and prohibiting all corporations from making contributions in federal elections. Subsequently amended, continued, and strengthened by the Federal Corrupt Practices Act of 1925, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, and the Bipartisan …

Unmistakably Clear: Human Rights, The Right To Representation, And Remedial Voting Rights Of People Of Color, Matthew H. Charity

Faculty Scholarship

The Author critiques the Supreme Court’s analysis in its Shelby County v. Holder decision, which found the preclearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional by applying a disparate treatment analysis to how States were treated under the Act. Such a reading of the Act makes a number of tacit and explicit assumptions with regard to the choice by the Federal Government and by the States of whose rights governmental actors must protect. The Court reached its conclusion by decontextualizing the Civil Rights movement and the Voting Rights Act from decolonization and post-World War II expressions of human rights, a …

A Quantum Congress, Jorge R. Roig

Scholarly Works

This article tries to address the problem of a corrupt and broken electoral system that has been captured by special interests through big money spending in political campaigns, while at the same time preserving the spirit of the Free Speech Clause of our Constitution. In doing so, this article first reviews and summarizes the different alternatives proposed as potential fixes for the campaign finance problem. It then explains why none of the proposed alternatives can accomplish the dual goals set out above. Finally, the article briefly sketches a proposal for a fundamental reworking of our representative democracy by substituting legislative …

Reynolds Reconsidered, Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Transparency Rules In U.S. Elections Need Updating To Reflect 21st Century Realities, Rebecca Green

Popular Media

No abstract provided.