Election Law Stories
Authors:
Douglas, Joshua A. / Mazo, Eugene D.
Edition:
1st
Copyright Date:
2016
23 chapters
have results for election law stories
Introduction: The Maturing of Election Law 42 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Although Foundation Press has published more than thirty-five books in its Law Stories Series, a book called
- Our goal in publishing this volume was ultimately to make election law accessible. As the reader will see, the stories behind major election law cases matter a great deal, even if they are rarely told. Students are often tested on the holdings of major cases, while the stories that led to them are either forgotten or never entirely revealed. When a court’s decision concerns the regulation of the political process, we believe that the story is just as important. For this reason, we gathered some of the leading scholars in our field and asked them to tell us the stories behind its canonical cases. We did not want these stories to be relegated to a footnote. We wanted them to be placed front and center.
- Beyond its five major casebooks, however, election law for a long time did not possess any published secondary sources for classroom instruction. This situation was rectified when Daniel Tokaji published an election law Nutshell guide in 2013
- In putting this book together, we sought to create a tool that would bring famous election law cases to life for our students. Yet we aimed to do more than just tell the never-before-heard stories behind landmark cases. We also wanted to design a book that would be adopted for classroom instruction by providing our readers with a unique way to learn substantive doctrine. We call our pedagogical method the “encapsulated approach” to storytelling, and we requested each of our authors to employ it in their respective stories. Through the telling of each story, each author was asked not only to tell a great story, but also to survey the doctrinal area to which his or her story belongs.
- Though election law is relatively young as an academic field, election law scholars understand that election laws 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.
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Election Law Stories 12 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Foreword: Election Law Stories, or an Election Law Story?
- Election Law Stories
- Chapter 11: The History of Voter ID Laws and the Story of Crawford v. Marion County Election Board
- Biographies of the Contributors to Election Law Stories
- Chapter 2: Offering A New Vision for Equal Protection: The Story of Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections
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Foreword: Election Law Stories, or an Election Law Story? 16 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Election Law Story
- 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 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 . The story of presents much of the case law that led up to that seminal decision. 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.
- 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 Court, of course, is itself not immune to politics and ideology, adding another partisan layer to the difficulties that election law cases present. Yet when the Court entered the “political thicket” in the 1960s, it did so through a bipartisan coalition led by Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice William Brennan (both appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower), and accompanied by Justices William Douglas and Hugo Black (both Franklin D. Roosevelt appointees who were New Deal Democrats). This judicial bipartisanship continued for about half a century, with Republican appointees like Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens often joining Democratic appointees such as Thurgood Marshall and Byron White to decide election law disputes. Since 2010, however, the Court’s 5–4 splits in major election law cases such as ...there was a confirmation of his successor; these previous 5–4 splits show how a new Justice may have a huge impact on the Court and its resolution of election...
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Chapter 6: LULAC v. Perry: The Frumious Gerry-Mander, Rampant 65 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Professor of Law, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. I would like to thank the other authors of these Election Law Stories for their suggestions and comments, and particularly Professor Ned Foley for his insightful feedback. All errors, of course, are my own.
- 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
- House Democrats Say Revolt Won’t Hurt Re-Election Bids
- 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.
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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
- This book had its genesis in a phone conversation. In my first year of 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...
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Chapter 12: The Shelby County Problem 37 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Ralph W. Aigler Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School. Thanks to the participants at the Election Law Stories roundtable at Moritz College of Law for helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks also Daniel Osher for excellent research assistance, and to the University of Michigan Law School, which provided generous financial support for this project through the Cook Endowment.
- 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.”
- 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.
- Some observers celebrated, commending the Court for restoring “normalcy” to election law and curbing a regime they thought had outlasted its purpose.
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Chapter 11: The History of Voter ID Laws and the Story of Crawford v. Marion County Election Board 197 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Judge Posner backed up his better understanding of the burdens of voter ID laws in an October 2014 dissent regarding Wisconsin’s strict photo ID requirement, which a three-judge panel had upheld. In a scathing, thirty-one-page dissent to the Seventh Circuit’s denial of en banc review, Judge Posner “systematically demolishes every argument mustered in support of voter ID laws.” Posner pointed to a stronger factual record in the Wisconsin case regarding the burden on voters as well as a “changed political culture in the United States” in terms of who supports and opposes these laws. Although the Supreme Court put Wisconsin’s law on hold for the 2014 election, it ultimately allowed Wisconsin to implement the law for future elections. Yet the key takeaway for the story of is that one of the most influential jurists who upheld Indiana’s law suggested that he probably should have ruled the other way—which might have altered the history of voter ID laws across the country.
- decision was certainly not the end of the story on voter ID. In fact, the debate in the aftermath has been even more active and partisan. States across the country took Indiana’s lead and enacted strict photo ID requirements for their elections. By 2016, more than thirty states had passed voter ID provisions, up from twenty states in 2004, and virtually all of the new laws are of the “strict” variety. Meanwhile, Judge Posner, who wrote the Seventh Circuit’s opinion upholding Indiana’s law, suggested that he “may well have been wrong in And plaintiffs continue to press claims that these laws are unconstitutional as well as invalid under both the federal Voting Rights Act and state constitutions. This Part . One key takeaway is that this story is still not complete.
- litigation requires a deep dive into national and Indiana politics. It is the tale of Kit Bond, a U.S. Senator from Missouri, who was deeply concerned about the election results in his state in 2000 and claimed that Republican John Ashcroft lost his U.S. Senate election race only because of voting by dead people and dogs. In response, Bond slipped a voter ID measure into the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002. This provision proved to be the initial catalyst for states like Indiana to go even further with their own stricter photo ID requirements. It is the story of aspiring Indiana Republican politicians who regained control of the Governor’s mansion and both legislative houses and sought to enact a voting law that could help their side in future elections. It contains important figures such as Indiana Representative Bill Crawford, the longest-serving black state lawmaker in U.S. history, who stood up for Democrats and African-Americans to protest a law he believed would lead to...
- These were the various problems that confronted the U.S. Supreme Court when it upheld Indiana’s strict photo ID law in 2008 in
- Reports of fraud during a Democratic primary election in East Chicago, Indiana also may have motivated the state’s Republicans to push this law, although the problems in that election stemmed from absentee balloting, not the kind of in-person impersonation that a voter ID law would prevent. Connie Lawson, then a state Senator who would become Indiana’s Secretary of State, remembers seeing a newspaper report about dead people voting in that election and thinking that a photo ID law would help to stop this kind of fraud. advocating for the law noted that there was “widespread evidence of corruption” in the East Chicago election and that The state also relied on this East Chicago voter fraud when defending the photo ID law in court.
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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 111 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The author of this Story was of counsel on the Brief for Amici Curiae Professors of Constitutional and Election Law in Support of Respondents.
- (Jan. 11, 2015), http://www.courant.com/politics/hc-citizen-election-program-proposals-20150111-story.html.
- 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...
- , on August 21, 2008, three incumbent Arizona legislators seeking reelection, led by House Majority Whip John McComish, and joined by three other candidates running for seats in the legislature brought suit in the Arizona federal district court to invalidate the matching funds provision of the clean elections law. Each claimed to have reported spending over the primary election spending limit, thereby triggering matching funds for their publicly-financed opponents. On August 26, they moved for a temporary restraining order against the award of any matching funds to their opponents. After a hearing on August 28, Judge Roslyn O. Silver denied the motion. In early September, Dean Martin, the Arizona state treasurer who had been litigating the trigger funds issue in a separate suit since 2004, was permitted to intervene on the side of the plaintiffs, and the Clean Elections Institute, a public interest organization committed to the support of the Clean Elections program, intervened on...
- 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,...
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Biographies of the Contributors to Election Law Stories 16 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Election Law Stories
- 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 Law
- 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 ...Prado of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and practiced litigation at the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld. He earned his B.A. and J.D...
- 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...
- 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 . He has published 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...
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Chapter 3: The Right to Vote in Local Elections: The Story of Kramer v. Union Free School District No. 15 54 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Wake Forest University. I first presented this story at the Conference on Election Law Stories, and I am indebted to Ned Foley, Steve Huefner, Daphne Meimaridis, and Dan Tokaji of the Election Law @ Moritz program at Ohio State for hosting this event in June 2015. I presented it again at the Fourth Annual Local Government Works-in-Progress Conference, and I owe thanks to David Troutt, Kenneth Stahl, and my hosts at the Center on Law in Metropolitan Equity at Rutgers Law School in November 2015. Richard Briffault attended both conferences and gave me prescient comments on each occasion. Others who provided feedback include Paul Diller and my Wake Forest colleagues Andrew Verstein and Ronald Wright. I thank Aimee Durant and Alysia Yi for research assistance, Liz McCurry Johnson for superb library assistance, and the estimable Josh Douglas for being a terrific collaborator on this book. My greatest thanks go to Morris Kramer for telling me his
- note 174, at 359–66 (recounting how Fortas’s friend, Louis Wolfson, had offered to pay Fortas and how the story wound up in magazine story).
- 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.”
- 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.
- called to take Kramer’s picture, he refused to pose for the photo unless Murray Miller was also included. Kramer considered Miller to be the real hero of his case. A related election law case, It struck down a Louisiana statute that restricted voting in an election to approve revenue bonds to taxpaying property owners.
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Chapter 2: Offering A New Vision for Equal Protection: The Story of Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections 50 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Betty T. Ferguson Professor of Voting Rights, Florida State University College of Law. Thanks to Jason Byrd, Christopher Cabral, and Derrick McBurrows for excellent research assistance. Special thanks to the editors, Josh Douglas and Eugene Mazo, for putting together an amazing conference on
- Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections
- 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 ...Virginia law passed in response to the Twenty-Fourth Amendment that required federal voters to either pay the poll tax or file a certificate of...election
- Nevertheless, the role that race played in these political disputes should not be understated. The competition between the Populists and the Democrats put African-Americans in the position of powerbrokers as both parties solicited African-American votes in key elections. In many ways, the disenfranchising constitutional conventions of the 1890s and early 1900s were designed to neutralize both the rising power of the Populist Party (at least prior to 1896) and the ability of African-Americans to tip the balance of power between competing white factions. Notably, the alignment between Republicans and Populists in some states led to the election of many African-Americans to local offices well into the 1890s. ...members of the Populist Party to abandon the African-American vote by 1898. Similarly, some states saw conservative Democrats lobbying for African-American support only to later, once the election had passed, lobby for their disenfranchisement. Yet even these moments... ...story...
- This strategy, then legal under state law, had the effect of increasing voter participation in state elections, according to one political scientist,
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Chapter 4: Realizing the Right to Vote: The Story of Thornburg v. Gingles 73 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Charles W. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Professor of Constitutional Law, The Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law. The author is indebted to Rebecca Barnard, Hayden Capace, Greg Djordjevic, and Wes Harty for their excellent research assistance. This chapter benefitted from the suggestions of Heather Gerken, Franita Tolson, and the other participants in the “Election Law Stories” workshop held at Ohio State in June 2015, and as well as participants in a faculty workshop at the University of Wisconsin Law School in September 2015. Special thanks to Rick Pildes and Brad Snyder for their comments on an earlier draft.
- 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.
- Making Sense of Section 2: Of Biased Votes, Unconstitutional Elections, and Common Law Statutes
- 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 district court devoted the bulk of its opinion (roughly two-thirds) to detailed factual findings concerning the challenged districts, the history of voting discrimination in North Carolina, the effects of discrimination in other areas, voting procedures that harm black voters, the election of blacks to office, racial polarization, black turnout, and the state’s justifications for its districting plan. The court’s conclusions of law were remarkably brief for a case of this complexity. In less than one page of text in the Federal Supplement, the court concluded that all the challenged districts violated Section 2. In a supplemental opinion issued less than three months later, the district court unanimously accepted a remedial plan adopted by the General Assembly, which was used for elections later that year.
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Chapter 5: Belling the Cat: The Story of Vieth v. Jubelirer 74 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Déjà Vu All Over Again: Courts, Corporate Law, and Election Law
- Another phrase contained in the Black’s Law definition—the “practice of dividing a geographical area into electoral districts”—is itself a definition for a common term: “redistricting.” The Constitution requires redistricting at least once every ten years to reflect shifts in population. 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 ...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,...
- Election Law Stories
- As the history of political gerrymandering quickly reveals, these theoretical questions—and the profound difficulty of resolving them—have significant practical effects. Attempts at resolving these sorts of questions have dominated the development of the law of political gerrymandering, which in turn has affected the constraints (or lack thereof) facing legislatures as they draw the maps that will govern elections.
- Teaching Election Law
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Chapter 9: The Citizens United Trilogy: The Myth, the True Tale, and the Story Still to Come 91 results (showing 5 best matches)
- (Aug. 27, 2010, 11:21 AM), http://www.whas11.com/story/news/politics/2014/10/09/15379496; Edward-Isaac Dovere, (July 23, 2010), http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/ofa-embraces-tea-party-blueprint-for-august-push-94601.html; Derrick Harris,
- The false story is the one everyone knows. Many believe that and thus well before the media sounded the alarm bell. Unsurprisingly, as best we can tell, the Court’s ruling appears to have had little effect on the share of corporate spending on elections.
- In a recent special election in Florida, the campaigns of the two congressional candidates controlled less than one-third of the total money spent on the election. dominant story of the money/politics landscape for the next presidential cycle.
- The third story about did not directly prohibit 20th century-style media regulations, the opinion suggests that these laws are in its crosshairs. Just as important, the case raised a question to which there is no easy answer: is there a manageable and constitutional way to regulate election-related activities that play out online?
- Three other key features of FECA are worth noting. First, as ultimately construed by the Court, FECA prohibited corporate- and union-funded “communications that expressly advocate the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate,” no matter the distribution medium—books, TV, radio, etc. Second, FECA featured a “media exemption,” which provided that none of the following should count as expenditures: “any news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication, unless such facilities are owned or controlled by any political party, political committee, or candidate.” Thus, while the law prohibited a corporation like McDonalds from using its treasury funds to run an ad supporting a candidate, the
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Chapter 8: Politics, Money, and Corruption: The Story of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission 77 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.
- of reasons why Congress might think the law a good idea. Between the many government hearings on the bill, the Senate and House reports on the 1996 election, and the lengthy floor debates, it is unclear what developing a record added, but its compilation certainly slowed the case and made the district court panel’s job more difficult.
- 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.”
- opinion came with a four page chart purporting to sort out the various holdings. Even then, what the court actually decided was almost inscrutable. The Los Angeles Times ran the story under the headline, “Soft Money Ban Upheld.” The Hartford Courant ran the story under the headline, “Soft Money Ban Fails Legal Test.”
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Chapter 1: Reynolds Revisited 42 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Professor of Law and Harry T. Ice Fellow, Indiana University Maurer School of Law. We are very thankful to the librarians at the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division for their help as we pored over the Justices papers, and to Jennifer Morgan, librarian at Maurer, for her invaluable help in locating government documents. Finally, special thanks to Josh Douglas and Eugene Mazo for putting together this volume and for their editorial work, and to the Ohio State Moritz College of Law for hosting a conference on
- This chapter tells the story of and makes sense of the revolution it engendered. This is a story of politics and politicians who will go to any lengths to stay in power. It is a story of voters who are bit players in the democratic process. It is a story of partisanship. It is a story of race. It is a story of determining whether the Constitution has anything to say about apportioning power between and among groups. This is also a story of a time when the Supreme Court professed judicial impotence to remedy the ills of society but felt compelled to take on pressing democratic problems. Above all, this is a story about Chief Justice Warren and his leadership at a time when the Court found itself in the midst of a civil rights revolution.
- Crucial to our larger story is the reaction that this Great Migration engendered. As blacks moved from the rural South to the urban North, whites began to exit the cities and settle in the suburbs. Federal housing and highway policies played a central role in this story, favoring the demands and interests of middle class whites while ignoring the needs of the now-racialized cities. this continuous flight from the cities. The story of the suburbs in the postwar period is a story of race and exit. It is an old and familiar story.
- There was one exception to this strategy: Georgia’s primary election law and the county-unit rule. The law, known as the Neill Primary Act, dated back to 1917 and governed state-wide primary races, such as governor, lieutenant governor, and U.S. Senator. Under the law, unit votes were assigned to the various counties according to population. The eight most populous counties received six unit votes each; the next thirty counties received four unit votes each; and the rest of the counties received two units a piece. In turn, the candidate who won the county’s popular vote received all the unit votes from that county; and the candidate who received the most unit votes won the nomination. When the law was enacted, the state of Georgia had 159 counties, of which 121 were rural counties with less than thirty percent of the population. These rural counties controlled 242 unit votes, or around sixty percent of the total of 410 unit votes. In contrast, by 1960 the eight most populous...
- The story of is really the story of Chief Justice Warren’s odyssey. This is a great yet misunderstood story. In 1948, as Governor of California and Republican nominee for the vice presidency, Warren gave a speech that essentially killed efforts to redistrict in the state. He argued against a strict population basis for representation and for the value of counties. “Many California counties are far more important in the life of the State than their population bears to the entire population of the State.” Governor Warren explained, “It is for this reason that I have never been in favor of restricting the representation in the senate to a strictly population basis.”
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Chapter 13: Bush v. Gore: The Court Stops the Recount 70 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 main issue that arose in the litigation of the 2000 election was over how to handle these hanging and dimpled chads. The voting machines could not identify them as votes, but arguably they were still valid under Florida law nonetheless. But how to tell? Was any dimpled chad on a ballot a valid vote? What if the voter had successfully and completely dislodged chads for all other races on the ballot, but left a dimpled chad only in the presidential race? Maybe the dimple then was evidence of the voter’s hesitancy and, upon second thought, the voter decided not to cast a vote for that candidate and then failed to select any other candidate in the presidential race. In this situation, should the ballot be recorded as a “no vote” for president? In any presidential election, there are at least some voters who decline to cast a vote for president and instead confine their choices to “down-ballot” races (for representative to Congress, the state legislature, and so forth). Maybe, at...
- , there continues to be a debate over how much of an impact it will have in the development of election law jurisprudence. Some say little, and point to the much-vilified sentence to say that the Court wanted it that way. Others observe that is already having an effect in lower courts on the development of equal protection law as it applies to various aspects of election administration, including early voting.
- 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.
- suggested that conceivably they might have made a difference in the outcome of the election. , there were 680 absentee ballots that should not have been counted under Florida law but
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Chapter 7: The Nine Lives of Buckley v. Valeo 73 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The story of FECA just told is a story of crusaders against corruption teaming up with politicians acting in their self-interest and using a sophisticated legislation, litigation, and media strategy to pass far-reaching campaign finance legislation. It is a story of triumph of the forces of progressive reform against corruption. But it is not the only story to be told of the era.
- 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.”
- This Chapter tells the story of , beginning with an examination of the legislation that prompted the litigation, the 1974 Amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA). It situates the legislation and litigation in the context of the early 1970s, a time when there was increasing public distrust of politicians and social turmoil, driven especially by controversy over the Vietnam War, changes wrought by the civil rights and women’s rights movements, and a series of political scandals culminating with Watergate and the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
- 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,
- Common Cause’s strategy was a mixture of lobbying Congress for reform, litigating over enforcement of existing campaign finance laws, and engaging the press in a sophisticated public relations strategy. The media covered stories of possible corruption with relish, drawing on the data mined by Common Cause and other groups.
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Part IV: Election Administration Your search matches the chapter title
- 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.
