Paul Smith on Election Law 2020
Check out this
post by Paul Smith, part of this blog put
together in advance of a conference by the Yale chapter of the American
Constitution Society on the Constitution in 2020.
Perspectives on Politics Publishes Interesting
Symposium on Election Administration
Volume
2, No. 3 (Sept. 2004) just arrived in my mailbox. The articles
unfortunately are not on line, but here is a list of the articles from
the Table of
Contents:
Symposium: U.S. Elections--How the Rules You Choose and the Way You
Count Determine the Winners You Get
Introduction
Henry E. Brady
Punishment and Democracy: Disenfranchisement of Nonincarcerated
Felons in the United States
Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen
Voter Registration and Turnout in the United States
Benjamin Highton
Punch Card Technology and the Racial Gap in Residual Votes
Justin Buchler, Matthew Jarvis, and John E. McNulty
The Wrong Man is President! Overvotes in the 2000 Presidential
Election in Florida
Walter R. Mebane, Jr.
Did Illegal Overseas Absentee Ballots Decide the 2000 U.S.
Presidential Election?
Kosuke Imai and Gary King
Pildes on "The Constitutionalization of Democratic
Politics"
Rick Pildes has written this
Supreme Court Foreword
in the Harvard Law Review (Volume 118, No. 1 (2004)). This is a very
important piece that ties together some of Rick's larger ideas about
the role of courts in regulating the political process. A must read.
Issacharoff on Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act
Sam Issacharoff has written Is
Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act a Victim of Its Own Success?,
104 Columbia Law Review 1710 (2004). Here is the abstract:
With the 2007 renewal date for section 5 of the Voting Rights
Act now approaching, the question must be addressed whether the legal
and practical preconditions for this extraordinary statute still exist.
This Essay suggests that there were four preconditions necessary for
the striking successes that section 5 had in transforming politics in
its covered jurisdictions: the urgency of swift intervention to
counteract the complete exclusion of black citizens from political life
in the South; the ease of the administrative remedy; the absence of
political competition in the one-party covered jurisdictions; and the
lack of any incentive toward partisan manipulation of the preclearance
powers exercised by the Department of Justice. Each of these factors
has been changed by the creation of a robust political environment in
the jurisdictions covered by section 5, particularly by the
establishment of an important core of influential black elected
officials. This leads to the question whether the success of section 5
has compromised its mission, as reflected in the major decisions under
section 5 following the post-2000 reapportionment. The Essay concludes
by questioning whether section 5 has served its purpose and may now be
impeding the type of political developments that would have been a
distant aspiration when the Voting Rights Act was first passed.
Nagle on Counting Votes
John Copeland Nagle has published How Not
to Count Votes,
104 Columbia Law Review 1732 (2004), a book review on books about the
1876 election with much to say about the 2000 election. Here is the
abstract:
Rutherford B. Hayes defeated Samuel Tilden by one electoral
vote in the presidential election of 1876. In Fraud of the Century:
Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876,
Roy Morris, Jr. concludes that the election was stolen from Tilden by
Republican partisans serving on the canvassing boards in the three
Southern states—Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina—that were still
under the control of Republican governments backed by the federal army.
But in Centennial Crisis: The Disputed Election of 1876, Chief Justice
William H. Rehnquist defends the integrity and the actions of the
Supreme Court Justices who served on the special Electoral Commission
that Congress established to resolve the disputed claims about the
election. The 1876 election, and the analogous difficulties attending
the 2000 election, demonstrate the need to consider who counts votes in
contested elections, and how to best balance the sometimes competing
needs of independence, expertise, and timeliness.
Hayden Gets Tenure
Congratulations to Grant Hayden,
who was recently awarded tenure by Hofstra University. Grant has
written some very interesting articles on the one person, one vote
rule. His article, Resolving the Dilemma of Minority Representation,
will be published by the California Law Review in December.
You can find details about this very interesting conference on
voting and campaign finance issues here.
It is sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings
Institution, the Campaign Legal Center and the Reform Institute.