Search Results for: Louisiana

The Washington Post reports.

Via Electionline Weekly email (not yet on web):

I. In Focus This Week

Director’s Note: As the announcement below indicates, I will be leaving Pew shortly to start a new adventure among my friends and colleagues in the elections world. I’ll have more details on the transition in the coming weeks – as well as lots (and lots!) of words of gratitude and reflection on 10 years at Pew – but for now I want to thank each and every one of you for your support through the years. Stay tuned! Doug Chapin

Chapin to Join Humphrey School
Special to electionline.org

The Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota announced today that Doug Chapin, a leading national voice on election policy, will be the new Director of its Program for Excellence in Election Administration, which is part of the School’s Center for the Study of Policy and Governance (CSPG).

“We are excited to have Doug join us,” said Larry Jacobs, Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies and Director of CSPG. “He has always been a valued advisor to Humphrey in our efforts to professionalize the practice of election administration, and I look forward to working with him as we seek to realize that vision.”

Chapin comes to the Humphrey School after 10 years at The Pew Charitable Trusts, where he served as Director of Election Initiatives for the Pew Center on the States. Under his leadership, Pew’s elections team successfully lobbied for enactment of military and overseas voting reform in Congress and state legislatures, enlisted dozens of states and technology partners like Google, Microsoft and Facebook to provide official voting information online and via mobile technology, and worked with election officials, academics and technical experts to design and implement efforts to upgrade the nation’s voter registration systems.

“I look forward to working with states and localities across the nation on programs that identify and share the best and most innovative approaches to election administration,” said Chapin. “I have long advocated for a more formal approach to recruiting and developing the next generation of election officials, and the Humphrey School is the perfect place to make those ideas into reality.”

Prior to serving at Pew, Chapin was an attorney in private practice specializing in election and ethics law. He also served as Elections Counsel to the Democrats on the U.S. Senate Rules Committee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on federal election legislation and participated in the review of the disputed 1996 Senate election in Louisiana.

Chapin is a frequent speaker on voting technology, voter registration, election law issues and the status of election reform efforts nationwide, and has taught courses on election administration and the law as an adjunct professor at American University, Georgetown University Law Center and William and Mary’s Marshall-Wythe School of Law. He holds a law degree from Georgetown University, a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a bachelor’s degree in politics from Princeton University.

See this press release about a new NVRA suit.

Worth watching.

The Fix reports.

Nate Persily sent the following announcement to the election law listserv via email (reprinted with permission):

The website DrawCongress.org is now live. On this website you will see congressional redistricting plans drawn by students in my Redistricting and Gerrymandering Course at Columbia. Thus far, we have plans up for Virginia, New Jersey, Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, Oklahoma, Iowa, and Arkansas. Each posted plan includes a statewide map, individual district maps, plan statistics and reports, and a block equivalency file that can be downloaded and placed into any mapping program. In the coming months students at Harvard and Yale will also be placing maps up on the site and we invite others to do so as well. Anyone interested in doing so should contact me at npersi-at-law.columbia.edu.

Very exciting!

Vernon Palmer has posted this draft at BePress. Here is the abstract:

This article is an empirical investigation of the relation between campaign contributions and the ability of elected judges to remain impartial in their rulings. Its principal aim is to assess the risk to impartiality that unrecused rulings in favor of contributors may entail. The tense if not conflictual relationship between campaign support and judicial detachment became a national issue in 2009 when the Supreme Court ruled, for the first time, in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., that a state judge’s refusal to disqualify himself after receiving extraordinary campaign support from a litigant violated the Due Process Clause of the Constitution. The present study, building upon the approach charted in Caperton, focuses in depth upon one state supreme court’s experience with contributor cases. The study follows the voting behavior of the seven Justices of the Louisiana Supreme Court (as constituted in 2006) over a 14-year period. The carefully checked database, consisting of more than 10,000 entries derived from 177 cases involving contributors, presents striking insights about the risks involved in unrecused voting. The entire database is included with the article. Far from undermining Caperton’s thesis, it demonstrates that far smaller contributions also create a risk of actual bias and that the relative size of a donation, in comparison to overall campaign funds and expenditures, is not a necessary component of the risk. The value-added of this empirical contribution to the national issue is essentially three-fold. First, it lays out a detailed factual tableau concerning the size, scope and timing of contributions. Here is a mine of vital information that may serve as a predicate for analysis and reform. Second, in line with the “risk” calculus charted in Caperton, the article presents statistical measurements and new methods of comparison to gauge the likelihood of actual bias in judicial voting behavior. The statistical calculations based on the data were verified and replicated by the Center for Empirical Research in the Law in St. Louis. Third, it carries the analysis beyond the relatively easy Caperton facts and examines the risk factor in the everyday cases before the courts. Thus, it addresses the typical and more difficult questions needing to be discussed and dealt with in the future, whether by the Supreme Court in revisiting the constitutional issue or by state legislatures, state courts and professional bodies in their reform efforts.

So reports Richard Winger.
CLARIFICATION: Doug Johnson points out that the DOJ precleared the application of this commission to congressional redistricting, approved through Prop 20, not Prop 11.

Project Vote has issued this press release.

I first noted Nevada Ethics Commission v. Carrigan back in December. Today the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, to be heard in April.
Florida filed an amicus brief urging the Court to take the case, on behalf of Florida, Alabama, Colorado, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, and Texas. The question is whether laws governing recusal of elected officials in voting on matters in which they might have a personal interest are subject to strict scrutiny if challenged on First Amendment grounds. The states argue that the Court should reverse the Nevada Supreme Court case and make clear that such conflict of interest provisions do not violate the First Amendment.
I’ll have more to say about the case after I’ve read through the briefs, but my first reaction is that I am not at all convinced that the act of voting by an elected official (as opposed to speaking about a measure before or after a vote) is protected First Amendment activity at all. I think it is likely that the Court will reverse in this case.

I first noted Nevada Ethics Commission v. Corrigan back in December. Today the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, to be heard in April.
Florida filed an amicus brief urging the Court to take the case, on behalf of Florida, Alabama, Colorado, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, and Texas. The question is whether laws governing recusal of elected officials in voting on matters in which they might have a personal interest are subject to strict scrutiny if challenged on First Amendment grounds. The states argue that the Court should reverse the Nevada Supreme Court case and make clear that such conflict of interest provisions do not violate the First Amendment.
I’ll have more to say about the case after I’ve read through the briefs, but my first reaction is that I am not at all convinced that the act of voting by an elected official (as opposed to speaking about a measure before or after a vote) is protected First Amendment activity at all. I think it is likely that the Court will reverse in this case.

NYT: “By that new count, Texas will gain four new seats, Florida will gain two, while New York and Ohio each lose two. Fourteen other states gained or lost one seat. The gainers included Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, Utah and Nevada, and the losers included Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Louisiana.”
Washington Post: “The westward movement of the U.S. population means six districts in states that went for Obama will shift to states that went for McCain — a small but significant shift that could help a GOP presidential candidate in 2012, provided they can hold those states for the party.”
See also the official census data.

The Initiative and Referendum Institute has issued this report. Some highlights:
155 ballot propositions in36 states in November.
42 initiatives, 1 referendum,109 legislative measures, and 3 votes on constitutional conventions.
Most: Oklahoma 11; Louisiana and Arizona 10; California, Colorado, and Washington 9; Florida and Oregon 7. For the year: California 14, Louisiana 12, Arizona and Oregon 11.
2010 ballot propositions not on November ballot: 24 propositions in 10 states, including 4 initiatives and 3 referendums.
2010 totals: 179 propositions in 37 states, including 46 initiatives

Arriving Thursday: “In advance of the mid-term elections, Demos and Common Cause will release a new report that finds election policies in 10 swing states could disenfranchise voters and impact election results. The report, called ‚ Voting in 2010: Ten Swing States, looks at Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio, summarizing each state’s practices, and providing a set of recommendations for improvement.”

In Louisiana. With a throwback proposal at the end: “Several years ago, the Old State Capitol held an old-time political event that cut out the bureaucracy of deciding who should or shouldn’t be allowed to debate. The OST sponsored a picnic where candidates could give stump speeches. The only limit was on time.”

Anthony Johnstone has posted this draft on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The constitutional initiative power provided in 1972 Montana Constitution is basic to its plan to increase the democratic responsiveness of a state government weighed down by detailed and inflexible constitutional provisions and interpretations that had accumulated since statehood. It serves, in other words, as a direct practical guarantee of the primary provisions of the Constitution’s Declaration of Rights: popular sovereignty and self-government. Popular sovereignty exercised through the constitutional initiative can lead to a paradox, however. While the constitutional initiative can make government more responsive to voters by constraining legislative policymaking or removing constraints on policymaking imposed by judicial review, it also can complicate the constitutional text over time so as to leave state government less responsive in the end. The originators of the constitutional initiative in Montana foresaw this possibility, what one delegate called “a Constitution that looks like California and Louisiana.”
This article discusses the function of the constitutional initiative as a direct expression of the popular sovereignty guaranteed by the Montana Constitution. Part I explores the historical roots of the constitutional initiative power and process in earlier Montana constitutions and elsewhere. Part II records the origin of the constitutional initiative in the debates that preceded, constituted, and followed the 1972 Constitutional Convention and ratification process. Part III describes voters’ use of the constitutional initiative and the Supreme Court’s active supervision of amendment procedures. Circulation of constitutional initiative petitions is the most common form of direct democracy in Montana, but at the polls voters more frequently shape the Constitution by approving amendments referred by the Legislature. Both processes focus on fiscal policy and individual rights. Part IV assesses the constitutional initiative in historical and national contexts and considers its future in Montana. The relative infrequency of constitutional initiatives could change as petitioners drive supply through the professionalization of signature gathering and voters drive demand through attempts to make the legislative and judicial branches more responsive on specific issues. Thus, the future of the Montana Constitution depends on the state government’s fidelity to the principles of popular sovereignty in the current Constitution.

Steve Rankin comments.

The Rose Report gives this very detailed analysis.

On March 26, I featured this guest post from Ellen Katz. Edward Blum sends along this response:

Ellen Katz’s post to this blog last week, “The Misguided Effort to Explain Obama to the Court–or–Why Obama Really Matters and What the Court Should do About It” asserts that “John Kerry did significantly better among white voters in covered states in 2004 than did Obama last year.” This is not fully accurate.
First, Prof. Katz asserts that no state wholly covered by the VRA voted for Obama; this is incorrect. Virginia supported Obama making him the first Democratic presidential nominee to carry the state since 1964. Virginia is usually identified as a state wholly covered by Section 5 even though several Virginia counties and independent cities have bailed out from under Section 5. The value of Katz’s observation is further undermined by Obama’s victory in North Carolina. More importantly, as to whether Obama received less of the white vote than did John Kerry in states subject to Section 5, here are the results:
Three states (Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi) saw the share of the white vote going to the Democratic presidential candidate decline from 2004 to 2008. In Florida and Georgia, Barack Obama and John Kerry received the same shares of the white vote. In North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia, Obama’s share of the white vote exceeded that received by Kerry.
The declines were 3 percentage points (Mississippi), 7 points (Alabama) and 10 points (Louisiana). In terms of absolute numbers, these declines are more than offset by the gains of 8 percentage points in North Carolina, 7 in Virginia, 4 in South Carolina and 1 in Texas. South Carolina has a larger white electorate than Mississippi, Virginia has a larger white electorate than Alabama, and North Carolina’s white electorate is several times larger than that of Mississippi. See this chart.

Kristen Clarke has posted this draft on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Some commentators have begun pointing to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential victory as singular evidence that we have overcome and resolved the problem of race in America. In particular, some have suggested that his victory marks the beginning of a “post-racial” era in which race bears less significance or consequence. In this Article, I focus on a particular aspect of this ongoing debate – the presence of racially polarized voting in the 2008 presidential election cycle. The commentary surrounding Obama’s electoral success provides some insights into prevailing attitudes about the pace of racial progress. There is a more immediate and pragmatic issue for those who study and litigate vote dilution claims under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965: the probative value of the 2008 presidential contest on future efforts to measure racially polarized voting, one of the critical pieces of evidence that plaintiffs must offer to support traditional Section 2 vote dilution challenges. Here, I offer some preliminary observations regarding the implications of Obama’s electoral success for voting rights litigants and find that no overarching conclusions about racially polarized voting can be drawn from it. Initial analysis of the 2008 presidential election outcome reveals a mixed pattern of racially polarized voting in some jurisdictions and significant cross-racial coalition building in others. Notably, exit polling results from the November 2008 general election reveal stark racial polarization in the Deep South states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina alongside encouragingly high levels of white crossover voting in the New England states of Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Maine. While Obama’s victory most certainly represents significant progress in the ongoing effort to achieve real political equality, courts should hesitate to substitute Obama’s electoral success for a more localized inquiry into the possible existence of racially polarized voting.

Andrew Appel has sent along the following comments via email:

Sequoia Voting Systems, Inc. has made false statements about me in two recent press releases. They claim that I violated a Protective Order; they claim that I was ordered to apologize to Sequoia; and they claim that the Court ordered sanctions against me. None of these is true.
On November 21, 2008, I agreed to a consent decree, apologizing to the Court, not to Sequoia, “to the extent the terms of the protective order were not complied with.” Judge Feinberg said on the record that this is “not a sanction.” Judge Feinberg never concluded that I violated the order, notwithstanding her preliminary statements (quoted by Sequoia) about her preliminary inclinations prior to the full hearing.
The Protective Order in question is a complicated and ambiguous document (much more so than other Protective Orders that I have been bound by when serving as an expert witness in other cases, such as the New York v. Microsoft antitrust case). The P.O. has two goals, broadly speaking: (1) for an unlimited time, to prevent leakage of Sequoia’s trade-secret Source Code and other trade-secret Confidential Information (2) for a limited time, to prevent the release of, and public discussion of, the conclusions of my examination–until 30 days after I delivered it to the Court, to the State defendants, and to Sequoia–so that those parties could have time to prepare their response.
I have never leaked Seqouia’s trade-secret Source Code. I did not release my report before the date ordered by the Court. I did not discuss my conclusions in the media before that date.
Sequoia is making its accusations based on two incidents that Sequoia interprets as violations of the Protective Order, but that I do not believe are violations. (1) In August 2008, I asked Professor Edward Felten, who was also serving as an expert witness for the Plaintiffs, to review my report. Since the report did not contain trade-secret information, and since his review of my report did not constitute “publicizing in any media”, there is no violation there. (2) One day before the authorized release date, in an affidavit filed in a Louisiana Court, I mentioned the existence of that report and characterized in one or two sentences one conclusion of that report; this conclusion overlapped with statements I had already in public over a year previously. There was no public discussion of this affidavit either in the media or in the blogosphere, and certainly not in the 24 hours between the time it was filed in a Louisiana Court and the time that the New Jersey Court authorized public release of my report. Thus I believe there is no violation there either.
Sequoia may believe that these are violations; the Court did not reach any such conclusion. Sequoia should not continue to falsely claim that the Court sanctioned me for these incidents, nor that the Court ordered me to apologize to Sequoia, or that I did so. None of these assertions is true.
Andrew W. Appel
Princeton, New Jersey
December 24, 2008

The NYT reports here on Anh Cao’s victory over William Jefferson. The AP bio of Cao available here notes that the Saigon-born Republican will be the first Vietnamese American member of Congress.

You can find it here.

The Times Picayune offers this report, which begins: “Tulane Law School” dean has apologized to the Louisiana Supreme Court for what he called ‘numerous errors’ underlying a recent Tulane Law Review article about a study that showed a high correlation between lawyer and litigant campaign contributions to justices and decisions favoring the donors.” Howard Bashman has more information.

That’s the lead story in the new Electionline Weekly.

The Times-Picayune offers this report, which begins: “A national voting rights organization says Louisiana election officials are violating federal law by dropping voters who have registered in other states. But state officials said Friday they are in compliance with all federal and state voting laws.”

The NY Times offers this interesting report.