Australia established the secret ballot (initially called in the U.S. “the Australian ballot”) and was one of the first countries to enact universal suffrage.  Australia also established mandatory voting nationwide in 1924.  While there has been some writing on how… Continue reading

Next time someone asks you why we can’t yet have secure enough electronic voting if we can have ATM machines, send them to this story.  

A new Washington Post-Pew Research Center Poll, here, on the recent failure of gun legislation, casts broader light on the political polarization that began in the 1980s and has increasingly characterized American democracy ever since.  In sorting out the… Continue reading

Early voting (EV) is a recent development in American democracy. The 2008 election was the first time EV was used extensively in presidential elections.  And in the 2012 election, the courts began to confront for the first time the issue… Continue reading

A couple months ago, the SCOTUS blog ran a Symposium on the constitutional issues concerning Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. In light of today’s Supreme Court decision to address those issues in the Shelby County case, here’s an… Continue reading

The well-known federal district judge, Myron Thompson, recently finished presiding over one of the largest and most important recent trials in which the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section sought to convict numerous state legislators and campaign contributors of federal… Continue reading

Her enigmatic, knowing smile comes to mind each time I re-read Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion. How much of his opinion reflects his own purely internal legal analysis, how much his concern for perceptions about the institutional authority and legitimacy of… Continue reading

We will know, of course, in a couple of hours. But in all the commentary on the health-care cases, I do not recall seeing the following possibility explored (though surely someone else must have had this thought). So I wanted… Continue reading

In holding Montana’s ban on corporate electioneering unconstitutional today, the Supreme Court stuck to its guns about Citizens United and put the lie to shallow, but frequently repeated, theories about how much public opinion constrains the Court. According to these… Continue reading

Thomas E. Perez, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, is speaking today at an academic forum for students and faculty at NYU Law School.  I am the host and moderator for… Continue reading

Under the broad heading of Living in a Citizens United World, the NY Times has a longer-than-usual editorial entitled “When Other Voices Are Drowned Out.”  The key sentence is this:  “But when outside spending is unlimited, and political speech depends… Continue reading

The cert. petition pending before the Supreme Court concerning the criminal conviction of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman raises important issues concerning whether campaign contributions can ever be treated as bribes and, if so, under what circumstances.  Rick Hasen has… Continue reading

Several months ago I wrote to argue against the constantly-repeated storyline that cast Citizens United as responsible for the explosion of SuperPacs in this election cycle.  Though I have written critically about the Court’s decision, I was also skeptical of… Continue reading