[EL] ELB News and Commentary 1/9/15

Fri Jan 9 07:29:07 PST 2015

    “Rep. Lewis: ‘People Want To Gut The Voting Rights Act,’ ‘Take Us
    Back To Another Period’” <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69577>

Posted onJanuary 9, 2015 7:27 am 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69577>byRick Hasen 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Video. 
<http://dailycaller.com/2015/01/06/rep-lewis-people-want-to-gut-the-voting-rights-act-video/>

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Posted inVoting Rights Act <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=15>

    “Obama Administration Intervenes In Native American Voting Rights
    Lawsuit” <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69575>

Posted onJanuary 9, 2015 7:23 am 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69575>byRick Hasen 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Think Progress reports. 
<http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/01/07/3609021/jackson-county-lawsuit/>

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Posted inVoting Rights Act <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=15>

    “Tide turns in FEC battle for regulation-free internet”
    <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69573>

Posted onJanuary 9, 2015 7:12 am 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69573>byRick Hasen 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Paul Jossey blogs 
<http://thereplawyer.blogspot.com/2015/01/tide-turns-in-fec-battle-for-regulation.html>.

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Posted incampaign finance <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>,federal 
election commission <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=24>

    “Elizabeth Warren says the system is rigged for the rich. They vote
    way more than the poor.” <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69571>

Posted onJanuary 9, 2015 7:09 am 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69571>byRick Hasen 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Aaron Blake analysis. 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/01/09/elizabeth-warren-says-the-system-is-rigged-for-the-rich-they-vote-way-more-than-the-poor/>

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Posted invoting <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=31>

    “The Realities of Electoral Reform”
    <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69569>

Posted onJanuary 8, 2015 2:49 pm 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69569>byRick Hasen 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Nick Stephanopoulos, Eric McGhee and Steven Rogers have postedthis 
draft<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2545599>on SSRN 
(forthcoming, /Vanderbilt Law Review/).  Here is the abstract:

    What good are theories if they cannot be tested? Election law has
    wrestled with this question over the last generation. Two new
    theories have emerged during this period that reject conventional
    rights-and-interests balancing. In its place, the responsiveness
    theory asserts that legislators’ positions should be sensitive to
    changes in the views of their constituents. Similarly, the alignment
    theory claims that voters’ and legislators’ preferences should be
    congruent.

    Unfortunately, both of these theories share a common flaw: They
    provide no way for anyone to tell whether electoral policies improve
    or worsen responsiveness or alignment. They operate at too normative
    a level to be useful to practically minded courts or policymakers.
    They are caught in clouds of abstraction.

    This Article is an attempt to pull the theories down from the
    clouds. In the last few years, data has become available, for the
    first time, on voters’ and legislators’ preferences at the state
    legislative level. We use this data to calculate responsiveness and
    alignment for both individual legislators and whole legislative
    chambers, across the country and over the last two decades. We also
    pair these calculations with a new database of state electoral
    policies that covers the areas of (1) franchise access, (2) party
    regulation, (3) campaign finance, (4) redistricting, and (5)
    governmental structure. This pairing enables us to estimate the
    policies’ actual effects on responsiveness and alignment.

    Our results mean that laws’ representational impact now is a matter
    of empirics, not conjecture. Courts that wish to decide cases in
    accordance with the responsiveness or alignment theories may do so
    by consulting our findings. Policymakers who aim to enact beneficial
    reforms may do the same. And academics no longer have an excuse for
    debating the theories from a purely normative perspective. Now that
    the “is” has been intertwined with the “ought,” the “is” no longer
    may be ignored.

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Posted intheory <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=41>

    Electionline Exit Interview with Retiring Election Center Head, Doug
    Lewis <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69567>

Posted onJanuary 8, 2015 1:15 pm 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69567>byRick Hasen 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Here. <http://www.electionline.org/index.php/electionline-weekly>

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Posted inelection administration 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>,election law biz 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=51>

    “Challenge to Wisconsin Voter ID Law Heads to Supreme Court”
    <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69565>

Posted onJanuary 8, 2015 12:21 pm 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69565>byRick Hasen 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Tony Mauro reports 
<http://www.nationallawjournal.com/legaltimes/id=1202714369835/Challenge-to-Wisconsin-Voter-ID-Law-Heads-to-Supreme-Court>for 
BLT.

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Posted inelection administration 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>,The Voting Wars 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>,Voting Rights Act 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=15>

    “What ‘Selma’ Gets Right—and Wrong—About Civil Rights History”
    <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69563>

Posted onJanuary 8, 2015 9:20 am 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69563>byRick Hasen 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Ari Berman reflects 
<http://www.thenation.com/blog/194473/what-selma-gets-right-and-wrong-about-civil-rights-history#>.

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Posted inVoting Rights Act <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=15>

    “Everything You Need to Know About Hickenlooper v. Kerr, the
    Guarantee Clause Case Before the Supreme Court”
    <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69561>

Posted onJanuary 8, 2015 9:16 am 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69561>byRick Hasen 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Derek the Muller 
<http://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2015/1/everything-you-need-to-know-about-hickenlooper-v-kerr-the-guarantee-clause-case-before-the-supreme-court>.

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Posted inSupreme Court <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>

    “Racial Voting and Geography in the United States”
    <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69559>

Posted onJanuary 8, 2015 9:15 am 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=69559>byRick Hasen 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Very interesting new draft 
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2546384>from Brian 
Amos and Michael McDonald up on SSRN:

    Voters express varied levels of support for the parties’ candidates
    depending on where they live, be it in the South (Aldrich 1995;
    Carmines and Stimson 1989) or rural and urban sub-regions (Gimple
    and Karns 2006; McKee 2008). To investigate the importance of
    geography to vote choice among racial and ethnic groups, we develop
    a new national dataset of 2008 presidential election results within
    166,260 precincts merged with census demographic data. We apply
    methods of ecological inference to these data to estimate voting
    patterns among racial and ethnic groups nationally, within the South
    and non-South sections, and among rural and urban areas within these
    sections. We find Southern White voters’ support for Obama to be
    less than Whites elsewhere, and that rural Whites similarly support
    Obama less than urban voters. These tendencies are compounded for
    rural Southern Whites, suggesting that these voters are the most
    distinctive. We explore these findings with respect to the continued
    need for voting rights protections in certain areas of the country
    where racially polarized voting is at its highest levels, and
    recommend that Congress adopt a measure of racially polarized voting
    in an updated coverage formula for Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights
    Act, recently struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelby County
    v Holder.

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Posted inVoting Rights Act <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=15>

-- 
Rick Hasen
Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science
UC Irvine School of Law
401 E. Peltason Dr., Suite 1000
Irvine, CA 92697-8000
949.824.3072 - office
949.824.0495 - fax
rhasen at law.uci.edu
http://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/
http://electionlawblog.org

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