Election Law Stories
Authors:
Douglas, Joshua A. / Mazo, Eugene D.
Edition:
1st
Copyright Date:
2016
21 chapters
have results for election
Chapter 10: “More Speech” as a First Amendment Violation: Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett and the Challenge to Public Funding 91 results (showing 5 best matches)
- litigation. The law authorized additional payments to participating candidates, and a concomitant adjustment in the spending limits, in light of the spending and fundraising of nonparticipating candidates and of independent expenditures. Specifically, if a non-participating primary candidate spends above the original primary election spending limit, the Citizens Clean Election Commission is to pay “an amount equal to any excess of the reported amount over the primary election spending limit, less six percent for the nonparticipating candidate’s fundraising expenses,” up to three times the initial spending limit to all participating candidates running for the office. Similarly, if, during the general election, a nonparticipating candidate receives contributions which, together with any contributions left over from the primary, exceeds the original general election spending limit, the Commission is to pay each participating candidate in the same race “an amount equal to any excess of...
- litigation was moving through the courts, the United States General Accountability Office completed a study of the Arizona and Maine clean elections systems. It found that over the course of its first five election cycles (1999–2000 to 2007–08) participation in the Arizona program rose steadily, from 24% of legislative candidates in the 2000 primaries and 26% in the 2000 general election to 59% in the 2008 primaries and 64% in the 2008 general election. The proportion of races in an election cycle with at least one candidate participating in the program rose from 53% in 2000 to 82% in 2008. The program was used by candidates of both major parties, albeit more so by Democrats. In 2008, 72% of Democratic legislative candidates took public funding in the primaries and 82% in the general election, compared with 50% of Republicans in the primaries and 52% of Republicans in the general election. ...—80% of general election legislative challengers took public funding in 2008. However,...
- Probably the most important issues for a public funding program are the interconnected ones of who qualifies, how much money is provided and how that is determined, and, whether the public funds are intended to supplement or fully supplant private funds. Typically, a candidate qualifies for public funds either by (i) raising a threshold amount of money from a requisite number of donors, with the size of the contribution that counts toward qualification capped at a relatively low level; (ii) for a general election, by being the nominee of a party whose nominee for a major office in a past election received more than a threshold percentage of the vote; or, (iii) again in a general election, by being a candidate who did not qualify for public funds by virtue of his or her party nomination but who received a sufficient number of votes to qualify for a post-election grant. The primary election component of the presidential public funding system uses the first method, as do most state and...
- Arizona, Connecticut, and Maine have adopted so-called “clean elections” programs for their primaries and general elections. Like the presidential general election scheme, “clean elections” provides full public funding for participating candidates. Candidates qualify for public funds by raising a certain number of very small qualifying contributions. In Arizona, for example, a candidate for the lower house of the legislature in 2008 had to collect 220 qualifying $5 contributions. To cover the cost of gathering the qualifying contributions, the candidate may collect a limited amount of low-dollar “early contributions.” Upon qualifying, a candidate in a contested primary election receives a grant equal to the spending limit. If the candidate wins the primary, she receives a general election grant, again in an amount equal to the spending limit.
- To raise the qualifying contributions a candidate could accept a limited amount ($3230 in the 2008 election cycle) of “early contributions” from individual donors who could give no more than $100 each. Once qualified, the candidate would receive a grant of “clean elections funding” in an amount equal to the “original spending limit” for that election, with different grants (and limits) for the primary and for the general election. After the primary, successful major party candidates who run in contested races receive a general election grant equal to “the original general election Independent candidates are eligible to receive seventy percent of the sum of the primary and general election grants.
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Introduction: The Maturing of Election Law 38 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Though election law is relatively young as an academic field, election law scholars understand that election are not new. Elections have existed since our Founding, and we have always had laws in place to regulate them. In this sense, the so-called “newness” of election law is misleading and perhaps ahistorical. What is new, rather, is that election law has experienced a profound “judicialization” in recent years, the effects of which cannot be underestimated. When no one could decide who should determine the outcome of controversies in our democratic process, the courts stepped in to fill the void. Most election law scholarship today focuses on how the courts have shaped the rules of our political process, especially since the 1960s.
- Election law is a relatively young field. It was born in the 1980s, when the first classes in the subject were taught by scholars such as Richard Briffault at Columbia, Daniel Lowenstein at UCLA, and Roy Schotland at Georgetown. Election law was arguably still in its infancy when the field’s first casebook was published in 1995. In the introduction to that casebook, Dan Lowenstein, its author, wrote about how election law “falls at junctures formed by other subjects.” Election law’s parents were constitutional law and political science. Most law professors who took an interest in election law did so while pursuing their main research interests in constitutional law. On the other hand, for political scientists, election fell between the subfields of public law and American politics. Thus, in its infancy, election law found itself on the periphery of other disciplines, and this new field did not have a natural home within the academy.
- The first ten years of the twenty-first century witnessed election law’s adolescence. By 2001, the field had its own peer-reviewed journal,
- Election law scholars have done something else in addition to publishing casebooks, secondary teaching materials, and law review articles to bring their field to maturity. They have also severed the field’s ties with its parents. In 1999, Pamela Karlan predicted that election law would be “leaving constitutional law’s empire.” Ten years later, that break was complete. By 2010, Heather Gerken confidently pronounced that election law scholars had “declared their independence from constitutional law in a bloodless revolution.” Most election law scholars do not view their discipline as a subfield of constitutional law, in the way that First Amendment scholars or Equal Protection scholars might. Rather, they view election law as a separate discipline.
- The first and most important distinction between election law and constitutional law concerns the object of study. Election law scholars are interested in the institutions of democracy and how they channel politics. In general, election law scholars seek to examine how democratic institutions reflect the preferences of voters and how well they protect the rights of minorities. They are also interested in looking at situations when courts might be encouraged to interfere in “normal” politics, especially in cases where partisan motivations inhibit politicians from improving the political system on their own. The dominant institutions that draw the attention of election law scholars are courts, although there has been a move to look beyond courts, too. Relatedly, some election law scholars part from constitutional law scholars in their attitudes toward individual rights and equality. While these notions interest scholars of constitutional law, there are situations in which election law...
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Chapter 6: LULAC v. Perry: The Frumious Gerry-Mander, Rampant 34 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Of the remaining ten legislators, five were defeated in primary elections, two were defeated in the general election, and three opted not to run for re-election. Information sourced from Legislative Reference Library of Texas, http://perma.cc/YL6V-Y3R4; Office of Sec’y of State, Race Summary Report: 2004 Democratic Primary Election, http://perma.cc/4VCD-SW3Q; Office of Sec’y of State, Race Summary Report: 2004 General Election, http://perma.cc/39PL-FGL8; Office of Sec’y of State, Race Summary Report: 2006 Democratic Party Primary Election, http://perma.cc/FY76
- The Court also declined to open Section 2 to claims that a group’s votes had been diluted based on a deprivation of political influence beyond the opportunity to elect candidates. These sorts of “influence districts” describe areas in which a minority community may not be able to control an election outright, but is nevertheless an important factor in the outcome. In District 24, even if African-Americans had not the election, they had certainly influenced it to a substantial degree. The plaintiffs claimed that a deprivation of that influence was unlawful.
- Of course, it is difficult to determine from election results alone the degree to which partisan motivations may have been responsible for the congressional plan, or the degree to which results from one election may linger. Many criteria for the drawing of district boundaries—including criteria often considered to have little inherent partisan valence—will often result in maps that elect a legislative delegation not reflecting the political composition of the state, due to political demography, partisan waves, or candidate effects.
- note 7. In 1996, at least four Democratic incumbents won re-election in congressional districts preferring Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole to Democratic candidate Bill Clinton. POLIDATA, Presidential Election, 1996, Districts of the 105th Congress: District Summary, President & Congress 1996, Texas (1997), http://perma.cc/QR4L-NKPZ.
- This number reflects the two-party election results for the lone statewide race for state office in 2004—the Office of the Railroad Commissioner. The only other statewide race in 2004 was the U.S. Presidential race, with underlying partisan leanings complicated by the sizable vote for former Texas Governor George W. Bush. Office of the Sec’y of State, Race Summary Report: 2004 General Election, 11/2/2004, http://perma.cc/PWN7-ZR8C.
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Chapter 9: The Citizens United Trilogy: The Myth, the True Tale, and the Story Still to Come 40 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Thanks Citizens United! Outside Election Spending in 2012 Exceeds Previous Eight Elections Combined
- This SCOTUS Destroyed America: How Citizens United is Ruining More than Our Elections
- Freed from the chains of regulation, these shadow parties have begun to dominate the elections process. In the 2012 presidential election, for instance, every serious candidate had a Super PAC wholly dedicated to electing that candidate and usually run by someone closely affiliated with the candidate. In 2014, an off-year election, there were at least ninety-four Super PACs supporting individual candidates. The trend has only become more pronounced in the 2016 presidential election season. The nonprofits and Super PACs associated with presidential candidates are vastly outpacing the official campaigns on the fundraising front.
- spend unlimited sums of money on election-related activities—sprang up, and the heretofore lightly regulated 501(c) organizations (social welfare organizations and other nonprofits) began to play an even more dominant role in elections.
- BCRA made a number of changes to the law, but it left the basic structure of FECA in place. For example, BCRA broadened longstanding prohibitions on the use of corporate and union funds for election-related expenditures. To close a loophole in FECA, Congress crafted BCRA §§ 201 and 203, which prohibited corporations and unions from using their treasury funds to pay for what would henceforth be known as an “electioneering communication”—a “broadcast, cable, or satellite communication” that “refers to a clearly identified candidate for federal office,” is made within sixty days of a general election or thirty days of a primary, and is “targeted to the relevant electorate.”
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Chapter 8: Politics, Money, and Corruption: The Story of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission 46 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The “Buying Time” studies were an important part of both the public relations and legal effort. The studies purported to show that many “issue” ads were in fact viewed by the public as “election ads,” and that ads shown within thirty days of a primary election and sixty days of a general election were in fact usually intended to influence campaigns. This was important to buttress the argument that the express advocacy line failed to effectively separate what they claimed were unprotected “sham” issue ads from protected “true” issue ads, despite assumption that issue ads would be used to influence elections.
- The first was the emergence of a colorful leader and spokesman in Senator McCain. With the help of his votes for campaign finance bills in 1991 and 1992, McCain had weathered the Keating 5 scandal and scored a solid re-election victory in 1992. But his support for a campaign finance bill did not die with re-election. In 1993 he was one of a handful of Republicans to support the primary Senate campaign finance bill, helping to break a filibuster. Two days after the 1994 elections, which handed Republicans control of the Senate, he called Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold and said he wanted to collaborate on “reform” matters.
- established that while true “issue speech” was entitled to First Amendment protection, “election-related” spending was not protected. They then argued that the express advocacy test failed to separate adequately “issue” ads from “election” ads. But the purpose of the test had not been to serve as some type of objective description to separate protected “true issue” speech from unprotected “election” speech. To the contrary, had recognized that “discussion of issues and candidates and advocacy of election or defeat of candidates may often dissolve in practical application.”
- advocate the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate for federal office.” And in footnote 52 of the opinion, the Court added that this definition would restrict the application of the independent expenditure limits to “communications containing express words of advocacy of election or defeat, such as ‘vote for,’ ‘elect,’ ‘support,’ ‘cast your ballot for,’ ‘Smith for Congress,’ ‘vote against,’ ‘defeat,’ ‘reject.’ ”
- , which described such ads simply as ads that “eschew … express terms [that] advocate the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate,” or “skirt[ ] the restriction on express advocacy of election or defeat.” But regulatory advocates used the shorthand colloquialism “issue ad” as a weapon to suggest that ads that might influence elections while eschewing express advocacy were somehow cheating on or undermining . Second, it “implied that such ads were dishonorable, dishonest, and illegitimate by virtue of what the regulatory advocates asserted to be the fact that they were intended to influence candidate elections rather than solely to engage in discussion of issues.”
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Chapter 12: The Shelby County Problem 22 results (showing 5 best matches)
- did not question Congress’s power to proscribe bribery in federal elections, the absence of state action notwithstanding. But while the election in dispute was, in fact, a congressional election, the statute itself referenced the Fifteenth Amendment as the source under which Congress had acted. The Court insisted it was unable to limit the statute to federal elections, and thus allow it to serve another purpose from the one for which it was enacted.
- arose after an African-American man named William Garner was unable to vote in a municipal election in Lexington, Kentucky, on January 31, 1873. State law required voters to pay a poll tax in advance of the election. Garner had tried to do so, but the city tax collector had refused to accept payment “on account of the race and color of Garner.” On Election Day, Garner attempted to vote by presenting an affidavit attesting to his efforts to pay the tax. Hiram Reese and Matthew Foushee were election inspectors who, over the dissent of a colleague, refused to let Garner vote.
- Federal indictments followed that charged Reese and Foushee with violating Sections 3 and 4 of the 1870 Act. Section 3 said a voter’s “offer” to satisfy a prerequisite to voting should be treated as “performance in law of such act,” an election official wrongfully prevent the offer from being “carried into execution.” Section 4 made it a criminal offense “wrongfully [to] refuse or omit to receive … the vote of such citizen,” or to prevent a citizen “from doing any act required to be done” to “qualify him to vote or from voting at an election as aforesaid.”
- Both Congress and the Court responded with remarkable indifference. For a time, the Committee on Elections within the House of Representatives continued to review disputed congressional elections marked by violence, fraud, or discriminatory practices. But these efforts were short-lived
- , the House Committee on Elections announced it was withdrawing from adjudicating congressional election disputes. The Committee explained that to declare a victor “not elected” because of “the disfranchisement of the colored vote” would be “precedent for unseating nearly every member of the House” from the former Confederate states.
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Election Law Stories 9 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Foreword: Election Law Stories, or an Election Law Story?
- Election Law Stories
- Introduction: The Maturing of Election Law
- Chapter 2: Offering A New Vision for Equal Protection: The Story of Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections
- Chapter 3: The Right to Vote in Local Elections: The Story of Kramer v. Union Free School District No. 15
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Chapter 11: The History of Voter ID Laws and the Story of Crawford v. Marion County Election Board 107 results (showing 5 best matches)
- First, with respect to election modernization, the Court explained that both the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) made it important for states to “reexamine” their election procedures. The NVRA has contributed to inflated voter registration rolls, while HAVA—which requires voters who register by mail to show an ID the first time they vote—demonstrates Congress’s attention to issues of election integrity. Both laws thus imply that election processes and security can benefit from “improved technology.”
- This “detailed supervision” of the election process, Justice Scalia said, is contrary to the U.S. Constitution’s delegation of election authority to the states. The states are constitutionally empowered to “weigh the costs and benefits of possible changes to their election codes, and their judgment must prevail unless it imposes a severe and unjustified overall burden upon the right to vote, or is intended to disadvantage a particular class.”
- The New Wave of Election Regulation: Burden without Benefit
- 2006 Missouri Election Was Ground Zero for GOP
- Of course, thirty-one instances of voter fraud is a miniscule number as compared to the hundreds of millions of votes cast across the country during that period. In-person impersonation is so rare in part because it is a poor strategy to alter the results of an election. As compared to other kinds of fraud, such as shenanigans with absentee balloting, in-person impersonation is likely easier to detect because it happens directly in front of a poll worker, and it would require a large conspiracy to swing the results—which all suggests that it does not occur all that often. But the number of incidents of in-person impersonation, while few, is potentially more than zero. Don’t we want our elections to be as fraud-free as possible? Couldn’t this kind of fraud swing an extremely close election? Doesn’t it undermine legitimate voters’ views about the integrity of the election process? And wouldn’t requiring voters to show a photo identification—especially when most voters already have one...
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Chapter 2: Offering A New Vision for Equal Protection: The Story of Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections 40 results (showing 5 best matches)
- between 1879 and 1881 by about 47 percent … [and] led to a further increase between 1881 and 1883 of about 30 percent, an increase of about 30 percent for elections to the U.S House of Representatives between 1880 (a presidential election year) and 1882 (an off-year), and a smaller but still significant increase of about 5.3 percent in the total number of voters participating in gubernatorial elections between 1873 and 1881.”
- Finally, nothing in the language or history of the Twenty-fourth Amendment, which was an affirmative effort to eliminate the poll tax in federal elections, even suggests that in so doing, Congress and the state legislatures attempted impliedly to repeal the operation of the Fourteenth Amendment in this fundamental area. In fact the long history of the Twenty-fourth Amendment leads to just the opposite conclusion. The Hearings before a Committee of Congress contain a long history of bills that had been introduced to abolish the poll tax in both state and federal elections by legislation based upon effectuation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The fact that the measure was finally passed as a constitutional amendment applicable to federal elections shows, at best, that the passage of this Amendment in this manner was a compromise necessary at this time to get some progress in this area.
- Despite the uniform rejection of such arguments by both the district court and in earlier Supreme Court decisions, the appellants did not eschew arguments about the tax’s discriminatory effects. The brief made much of the manner in which the state designed and administered the tax. The appellants argued that its cumulative nature, the timing of payments six months before the election, and the use of exceptions for certain voters (mostly military servicemen) all worsened its disparate impact and further privileged the rights of some voters over others. The appellants pointed to the recent passage of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, which prohibited the poll tax in federal elections, as evidence that not only had the national mood changed, but striking down the poll tax in state elections would be consistent with both this amendment and ...the poll tax or file a certificate of residence every election year. The Court struck down this law as a violation of the Fourteenth, Seventeenth,...
- Harper v. Va. State Bd. of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966) (Black, J., dissenting); at 680–681 (Harlan, J., dissenting) (“The final demise of state poll taxes, already totally proscribed by the Twenty-Fourth Amendment with respect to federal elections and abolished by the States themselves in all but four States with respect to state elections is perhaps in itself not of great moment. But the fact that the coup de grace has been administered by this Court instead of being left to the affected States or to the federal political process should be a matter of continuing concern to all interested in maintaining the proper role of this tribunal under our scheme of government.”).
- in recent years, particularly its decision to use the Equal Protection Clause as the source of the right to vote in state elections. ’s delineation of the right to vote in state and federal elections).
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Foreword: Election Law Stories, or an Election Law Story? 13 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Election Law Story
- The thirteen cases in this book run the gamut of election law. There are three cases on the constitutional right to vote, three redistricting disputes, four campaign finance cases, and three opinions involving election administration. These represent the most-read decisions in a survey course on election law, the disputes most discussed in the media, and the cases that have had the greatest impact on the field. Yet one virtue of this book is that it includes an analysis of many additional election law decisions. Each chapter tells not just the story of the case in question but also explains how that case fits within the broader doctrinal realm. The story of test that courts use to analyze election administration issues. In this way, the book provides an explanation of well more than the thirteen principal selections.
- What follows are the personal histories, litigation struggles, judicial considerations, and political calculations underpinning the most significant Supreme Court decisions involving election law. These stories tell the universal problem of how the Court, in deciding election law cases, must navigate issues of race, class, politics, judicial manageability, and theories of democracy. Our hope is that these stories—and the singular Election Law Story that they entail—help to bring the cases to life in a way that the judicial opinions themselves cannot do.
- The stories presented in this book do not necessarily answer those questions. But they do show a Supreme Court struggling with the problem in the various subtopics that comprise election law, including the right to vote, redistricting, campaign finance, and election administration. To best understand the cases, and how they relate to one another, it is important to keep these various issues in mind: what theory of democracy and representation is the Court choosing, and has it justified that decision? What is behind the choice of tests the Court has adopted? Are the tests judicially manageable, in that they are easy for lower courts to apply in a time-sensitive case as Election Day draws near? Are manageable tests even possible in this field?
- The campaign finance decisions, much like other election law disputes, also involve clashes between political parties and rest on partisan arguments, the third of the “triple threats” to judicial involvement in election law. Generally, Democrats have favored campaign finance reform, while Republicans have opposed it, and the history of campaign finance regulations entails a fascinating political backstory. Politics is also behind every redistricting decision. Two of the cases in this book, , which ended the 2000 presidential election.
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Chapter 3: The Right to Vote in Local Elections: The Story of Kramer v. Union Free School District No. 15 37 results (showing 5 best matches)
- as applying only to general elections. Everyone was affected by general state-wide elections, but school board elections were different. It was not inconsistent with the Equal Protection Clause, Moore argued, for states to require those voting on school policy to have a direct stake in the issues. In “a local election on limited issues,” Moore wrote, “certain local residents have a far greater direct interest than others.”
- did not apply to Kramer’s situation. Lumbard argued that mandating the payment of a poll tax to vote in a statewide election was different from setting a qualification for voting for a local administrative body. did not apply when the states set reasonable qualifications for voting in local government elections. The franchise in local elections—concerning “water supply, sanitation removal, fire protection, and the operation of parks and schools”
- Morris Kramer’s journey from local plaintiff to national figure took place against this backdrop. While the one person, one vote doctrine prevented state governments from drawing legislative districts in a way that would dilute the votes of their citizens, it gave no guidance at all to deciding which persons were to be admitted to the franchise in the first place. Individual states continued to deny the vote to many categories of people. For instance, Texas prevented all members of the armed forces who relocated to the state during their military service from voting in the state’s elections, on the theory that the “concentrated balloting” of military officers might overwhelm small local communities. Tennessee imposed a lengthy durational residency requirement that prevented new residents from voting for a year after their arrival, on the theory that the state wanted to have “knowledgeable” voters and an “informed electorate” participating in its elections.
- in the outcome of a school board election. In 1965, New York provided for three methods of selecting its school boards. In some large cities, the school board was appointed by the mayor or city In other cities, mostly those with less than 125,000 residents, the school board was popularly elected, and all citizens could vote for it at the time of the city’s general or municipal election. Finally, in a third group of school districts, most of them rural and suburban, the school board was elected at a special annual meeting, but only “qualified” voters were eligible to vote for it. To qualify to vote in these Union Free School District elections, Section 2012 of New York’s Education Law required a voter to be a citizen, twenty-one years of age, and a resident of the school district for thirty days.
- Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections
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Chapter 13: Bush v. Gore: The Court Stops the Recount 62 results (showing 5 best matches)
- In 2000, Florida law contained two different ways for a candidate to challenge the count of ballots in an election. The first way was a “protest,” which was an administrative procedure undertaken by the local election officials in a particular county. The second was a “contest,” which was a judicial procedure undertaken by a single state judge. A protest occurred before the result of an election was officially certified. A contest occurred after certification.
- The first issue could be considered a due process problem: in nonpresidential elections, several federal appellate courts had held that it violates due process, at least in some circumstances, for a state court to deviate egregiously from what a state statute requires concerning the counting of ballots. In a presidential election, this kind of judicial alteration of the ballot-counting rules could be considered a violation of the state legislature’s Article II power to choose the manner of appointing the state’s presidential electors. This Article II concern is what had arisen in the election’s first appearance at the U.S. Supreme Court, during the protest phase of the process, and this Article II concern is what continued to drive how Justice Scalia and the two other “super-conservatives” on the Court (Rehnquist and Thomas) looked at the case. But now that the protest phase was finished, and the election had come back to the Court in the form of a contest, the Article II concern...
- But however one feels about the job Bush did as president, the issue at hand is whether he was the one whom the legal system should have identified as the winner of the election. Many duly elected presidents go on to have a less than fully successful term in office; that fact does not make their lawful election any less legitimate. Maybe Bush should be considered in the same way: a duly elected president whose term in office had its blemishes.
- Absentee ballots were the source of additional issues. Florida law contained a set of requirements for absentee ballots to satisfy in order to be counted. For example, an absentee ballot needed the signature of a witness who attested that the absentee ballot was cast properly. Also, although ballots were entitled to be counted if received by local officials up to ten days after Election Day, they needed to be postmarked by Election Day or bear the voter’s own signature dated on or before Election Day.
- But this appearance of great breadth in the court’s remedial authority was arguably deceptive. Could the contest court order a full statewide recount just because there were more undervotes than the certified margin of victory? For example, if the certified statewide margin of victory was 1,000 votes, could the contest court order a manual recount of all six million ballots in the election statewide just because the certification included a reported undervote of 1,001 ballots in the presidential election? While the presence of more undervotes than the certified margin of victory might theoretically “place in doubt the result of the election” within the meaning of the contest statute, without additional evidence there would be no reason to believe that all 1,001 undervotes—which the machines recorded as “no vote” for any presidential candidate—actually contained a vote for Gore, rather than a vote for Bush, or indeed truly no vote at all. In this situation, it would be highly...election
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Chapter 5: Belling the Cat: The Story of Vieth v. Jubelirer 43 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Déjà Vu All Over Again: Courts, Corporate Law, and Election Law
- With respect to congressional elections, the Constitution empowers Congress to dictate the rules for redistricting, but it does not require that Congress so act. Instead, it initially places the authority for redistricting congressional districts in the hands of state legislatures. With respect to non-congressional elections (for example, with respect to state legislative races), the power to redistrict is set not by the United States Constitution, but rather by state law. More often than not, state law vests As a consequence of this dynamic, the dominant redistricting regime across the country is one in which state legislators draw the electoral lines governing the elections that they themselves will be running in, as well as for the elections that their fellow party members will be running in.
- The plaintiffs’ second prong—relating to the “majority of voters and majority of seats”—in turn relies on data that the plurality considered to be judicially unmeasurable. How can a court discern the political affiliation of a wide swath of voters, for example, when “[p]olitical affiliation is not an immutable characteristic, but may shift from one election to the next; and even within a given election, not all voters follow the party line”? Similarly, how, in the context of district-based elections, can a court discern whether a given party has a “majority of votes” statewide? The Court relied on the work of Professors Lowenstein and Steinberg to illustrate this latter point. As the professors had explained:
- The plurality, in other words, insisted that the Constitution does not speak to the need or wisdom of even rough proportionality in elections. There is little doubt that such matters are hugely important; whether to ensure there is some degree of proportionality in elections implicates vital questions of, among other things, political theory and electoral design. But as important as those questions are, “the Constitution does not answer [them].”
- A fourth approach available to those opposed to political gerrymandering—at least, in congressional districting—involves harnessing the power of Congress. Pursuant to its Elections Clause power, Congress could enact statutes that would require sweeping changes in federal elections. Congress did this, for example, when it enacted a statute requiring that all congressional districts have a single member, rather than multiple members.
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Chapter 7: The Nine Lives of Buckley v. Valeo 35 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The strategy worked, helped by the fact that Democrats became more interested in campaign finance reform as large donor money shifted from Democrats to Republicans following Nixon’s 1968 election One of its more controversial provisions limited federal candidate spending on media to $50,000 or less per election. A related bill revived the plan for the public financing of presidential elections, but it was not to go into effect until the 1976 elections.
- Given the government’s ambivalence about the legislation’s constitutionality, lawyers for the reform groups led the defense. Lloyd Cutler and others from the Washington firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering represented intervenors the Center for the Public Financing of Elections and the League of Women Voters. Common Cause was represented by its own counsel, Kenneth Guido and Fred Wertheimer. Former Solicitor General Archibald Cox argued as amicus curiae for Senators Edward M. Kennedy and Hugo Scott. The California Fair Political Practices Commission, the Missouri Elections Commission, the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission, and the New York Board of Elections filed an amicus brief arguing for the constitutionality of the expenditure provisions, noting that thirty-seven states in recent years had adopted statutes limiting campaign expenditures,
- . at 912, 914–18 (Tamm, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). Judge Tamm also dissented on the constitutionality of the public financing provisions and the appointment provisions related to the Federal Election Commission. . at 918–21. Judge MacKinnon, in a separate decision, also dissented on issues related to the Federal Election Commission’s composition and powers.
- upholding the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, “we are left with a package of federal campaign finance laws and regulations that have distorted virtually every aspect of the election process. The 1974 amendments were supposed to de-emphasize the role of money in federal elections. Instead, by severely limiting the size of individual contributions, today’s law has made the search for money a candidate’s central preoccupation.”
- ’s lead with a ruling striking down limits on spending by corporations in ballot measure elections. elections might be permissible to prevent corruption of those candidates,
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Biographies of the Contributors to Election Law Stories 14 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Joshua A. Douglas is the Robert G. Lawson & William H. Fortune Associate Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky. His research focuses on the constitutional right to vote, election administration, judicial interaction with the election process, and post-election disputes. Professor Douglas’s articles have appeared in the Vanderbilt Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, George Washington Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, and the Election Law Journal, among others. His article “Procedural Fairness in Election Contests” was a winner of the Call for Papers at the SEALS conference in 2011–12, and he has been cited extensively by courts, in major law review articles, and in casebooks in the field. With Edward B. Foley and Michael J. Pitts, he is the co-author of the new casebook E
- Richard L. Hasen is Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. He is a nationally recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation, and is co-author, with Daniel Hays Lowenstein and Daniel P. Tokaji, of a leading casebook, E (5th ed. 2012). From 2001–2010, he served (with Dan Lowenstein) as founding co-editor of the field’s leading publication, the peer-reviewed quarterly Election Law Journal. Hasen is the author of more than 80 articles on election law issues. These have appeared in numerous journals, including the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and Supreme Court Review. Hasen was elected to the American Law Institute in 2009, and he was named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by the National Law Journal in 2013. Hasen’s op-eds and commentaries on election law topics have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, and Slate. Hasen also writes and edits the popular Election...
- Bradley A. Smith is the Josiah H. Blackmore II/Shirley M. Nault Professor of Law at Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio. In 2000, he was nominated by President Clinton to fill a Republican-designated seat on the Federal Election Commission, where he served for five years, including as Chairman of the Commission in 2004. Professor Smith’s writings on campaign finance have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Pennsylvania Law Review, George Washington Law Review, Harvard Business Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, Election Law Journal, and numerous other academic publications. His 2001 book U was lauded by columnist George Will as the year’s “most important book on governance.” Professor Smith is the founder and Chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics in Alexandria, Virginia. He is a past member of the Advisory Committee to the ABA’s Standing Committee on Election Law, and currently serves on the Editorial Board of the Election Law Journal and...
- Election Law Stories
- Guy-Uriel E. Charles is the Charles S. Rhyne Professor of Law and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty & Research at Duke University. He is also the founding director of Duke Law’s Center on Law, Race, and Politics. Professor Charles is an expert and frequently comments for the public on issues of election law, campaign finance, redistricting, politics, and race. Before joining Duke Law School’s faculty in 2009, he was the Russell M. and Elizabeth M. Bennett Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. He is co-author with James A. Gardner of the casebook E ...articles in Constitutional Commentary, the Michigan Law Review, Michigan Journal of Race & Law, Georgetown Law Journal, Journal of Politics, California Law Review, and North Carolina Law Review. Professor Charles has taught as a visiting professor at Georgetown, Virginia, and Columbia law schools and has served as a member of the National Research Commission on Elections and Voting and the Century... ...Election...
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Chapter 4: Realizing the Right to Vote: The Story of Thornburg v. Gingles 36 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Aycock harshly criticized the Fusionist government for liberalizing voting rules through a statute that historian Morgan Kousser characterizes as “probably the fairest and most democratic election law in the post-Reconstruction South.” That is not how Aycock saw it. He claimed that the Fusionist election law was designed to help Republicans cheat by providing the “means for registration and voting of minors, dead, imported and convicted Negroes.” He also stoked fears of “Negro domination,” by decrying the election of blacks to office, alongside the standard tales of black men defiling white women.
- Fraud and force were major factors in the election, with the Red Shirts out in force, tampering with registration lists, ballots deliberately put in the wrong box, and questionable results from some counties with large black populations—who inexplicably voted to disfranchise themselves, if the official returns were to be believed. Statewide, the Fusionist vote plummeted, especially in black areas, due to the sinister combination of stringent voting laws, voter intimidation, and outright fraud that characterized the 1900 election. And if that were not enough, Democrats strengthened their grip over local election procedures and redrew the boundaries of legislative districts.
- The most important evidence presented to these three North Carolina judges was the testimony of political scientist Bernie Grofman, who looked at fifty-three sets of election returns involving black candidates from all the challenged multi-member districts. He found statistically significant racial polarization in all of the elections he analyzed, with black and white voters consistently voting for candidates of their own race. More than 80% of whites voted for no black candidates in primary elections, and two-thirds of whites did not vote for black candidates in general elections even when they had won the Democratic primary.
- . During and after the founding era, North Carolina was one of the states in which some African-Americans actually voted. Taxpaying “freemen” could vote in House of Commons elections while men owning at least fifty acres could vote in Senate elections.
- To ensure their success in the 1898 legislative elections, North Carolina Democrats created Red Shirt Clubs, a means of intimidation borrowed from South Carolina. When returning home and learning of the Red Shirt visit, he was likely to conclude that it would be prudent not to vote on Election Day.
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Chapter 1: Reynolds Revisited 13 results (showing 5 best matches)
- and its companion cases on June 10, 1963. The following day, as George Wallace made his notorious stand at the schoolhouse door, the Court scheduled oral arguments for the week of November 12. With the 1964 election looming, the Court stood ready to answer these questions.
- Harper v. Virginia State Bd. of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966).
- Allen v. Virginia State Bd. of Elections, 393 U.S. 544 (1969).
- This was key. Earlier in the oral argument, Charles Rhyne explained that all the Court needed to do was enjoin all state officials connected with elections from carrying out any future elections under the 1901 redistricting Act. Subsequently, the governor would call the legislature into a special session, where it would
- As Pamela Karlan astutely pointed out, “[t]heir real complaint is that their voice is diluted at the post-election process of official decision making.”
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Part IV: Election Administration Your search matches the chapter title
Acknowledgements 2 results
- Election law cases, with their salient topics and partisan ramifications, inherently make for good stories. This is one reason why I was thrilled when Gene Mazo suggested that we edit a book on
- ...teaching, I called Tessa Boury at Foundation Press to ask why election law did not have its own volume in the Law Stories Series. Tessa allowed me to pitch the idea of this book to her, and I then asked Josh Douglas to join me as its co-editor. I owe enormous gratitude to Tessa for not turning away a young professor and to Josh for being a true partner at every stage of this journey. My colleagues at Wake Forest University have been unfailing in their support of this and other endeavors. Those to whom I owe special thanks include Luellen Curry, Michael Curtis, Shannon Gilreath, Jaya Gokhale, Liz Johnson, Barbara Lentz, Harold Lloyd, Chris Knott, Tanya Marsh, Rebecca Morrow, Zoe Niesel, Wilson Parker, Gregory Parks, Charley Rose, Sidney Shapiro, Andrew Verstein, and especially Ronald Wright. I am also grateful to my two deans, Blake Morant and Suzanne Reynolds. The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law gathered the authors of these stories for a book conference in June 2015....
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Title Page 1 result
- Publication Date: April 8th, 2016
- ISBN: 9781634604338
- Subject: Election and Voting Rights
- Series: Law Stories
- Type: Overviews
- Description: One of the most dynamic fields in the legal academy now has its own Stories book. This title offers a rich and detailed account of the most significant cases in election law, including the landmark decisions of Reynolds v. Sims, Bush v. Gore, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and Shelby County v. Holder. The book relies on a unique encapsulated approach to storytelling, as each of its authors surveys an important doctrinal area in the field through the telling of his or her story. The volume’s thirteen cases concern the right to vote, redistricting and gerrymandering, campaign finance, and election administration. The book is suited for courses in the law of democracy at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.