| Subject: Electionlawblog news and commentary 2/7/06 |
| From: Rick Hasen |
| Date: 2/7/2006, 9:22 AM |
| To: election-law |
I'll be part of the
AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project Launch. Regular blogging to
resume Thursday.
Ned Foley has posted this
interesting comment on the Moritz election law website. He offers a
proposed test to separate genuine issue advocacy from electioneering
for courts to apply on remand: "Thus, on remand, the standard for
defining the scope of the carve-out should go something like this:
after considering an advertisement's overall content as well as the
public context in which it was broadcast, if – but only if – it
would be unreasonable to view the ad as containing an implicit
electoral message, then the ad is constitutionally entitled to an
exemption from BCRA's source-of-funding restriction."
A number of items have recently arrived, which I'll note here briefly.
1. The latest issue of PS: Political Science and Politics is a must read for students of election law. In addition to Benjamin Highton's articles on voter turnout during the 2004 presidential election Ohio counties with long lines (posted for free here) and Baodong Liu's article on biracial voting coalitions in New Orleans (posted for free here), the issue features a debate between Alan Abramowitz, Brad Alexander, and Matthew Gunning on the one hand and Michael McDonald on the other on whether redistricting is responsible for the lack of competitive elections.
2. Michael Dimino has written Counter-Majoritarian Power and Judges' Political Speech, 58 Florida Law Review 320 (2006).
3. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission has issued its FY 2005 Annual Report.
4. The Voting Rights Initiative at the University of Michigan Law School has issued its Final Report, "Documenting Discrimination in Voting: Judicial Findings Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act since 1982.
5. Michael Carrier has written, "Vote Counting, Technology, and Unintended Consequences, 79 St. John's Law Review 645 (2005).
6. Albert May has written, "Swift Boat Vets in 2004: Press Coverage of an Independent Campaign, 4 University of North Carolina First Amendment Law Review 66 (2005).
7. Michael Pitts has written, "Let's Not Call the Whole Thing Off
Just Yet: A Response to Samuel Issacharoff's Suggestion to Scuttle
Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act," 84 Nebraska Law Review 605 (2005).
USA Today offers this
report.
The "Brad Blog" offers this very
interesting report.
-- Rick Hasen William H. Hannon Distinguished Professor of Law Loyola Law School 919 Albany Street Los Angeles, CA 90015-1211 (213)736-1466 - voice (213)380-3769 - fax rick.hasen@lls.edu http://www.lls.edu/academics/faculty/hasen.html http://electionlawblog.org