A great new piece from Bolts on the mechanics of LA’s attempt to serve eligible voters experiencing homelessness.
Category Archives: political equality
My Forthcoming Yale Law Journal Feature: “The Stagnation, Retrogression, and Potential Pro-Voter Transformation of U.S. Election Law”
I have written this draft, forthcoming this spring in Volume 134 of the Yale Law Journal. I consider it my most important law review article (or at least the most important that I’ve written in some time). It offers a 30,000-foot view of the state of election law doctrine, politics, and theory. The piece is still in progress, so comments are welcome. Here is the abstract:
American election law is in something of a funk. This Feature explains why, what it means, and how to move forward.
Part I of this Feature describes election law’s stagnation. After a few decades of protecting voting rights, courts (and especially the Supreme Court), acting along ideological—and now partisan—lines, have pulled back on voter protections in most areas of election law and deprived other actors including Congress, election administrators, and state courts of the ability to more fully protect voters rights. Politically, pro-voter election reform has stalled out in a polarized and gridlocked Congress, and the voting wars in the states mean that ease of access to the ballot depends in part on where in the United States one lives. Election law scholarship too has stagnated, failing to generate meaningful theoretical advances about the key purposes of election law.
Part II considers the retrogression of election law doctrine, politics, and theory to a focus on the very basics of democracy: the requirement of fair vote counts, peaceful transitions of power, and voter access to reliable information. Courts on a bipartisan basis in the aftermath of the 2020 election rejected illegitimate attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential election victory. Yet the courts’ ability to thwart attempted election subversion remains a question mark in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Trump v. Anderson and Trump v. United States. Politically, Congress came together at the end of 2022 to pass the Electoral Count Reform Act to deter future attempts to manipulate electoral college rules in order to subvert election results, but future bipartisan action to prevent retrogression seems less likely. Further, because of the collapse of local journalism and the rise of cheap speech, voters face a decreased ability to obtain reliable information to make voting decisions consistent with their interests and preferences. Meanwhile, parties have become potential paths for subversion. Party-centered election law theory and the First Amendment “marketplace of ideas” theory have not yet incorporated these emerging challenges.
Part III considers the potential to transform election law doctrine, politics, and theory in a pro-voter direction despite high current levels of polarization, the misperceived partisan consequences of pro-voter election reforms, and new, serious technological and political challenges to democratic governance. Election law alone is not up to the task of saving American democracy. But it can help counter stagnation and thwart retrogression. The first order of business must be to assure continued free and fair elections and peaceful transitions of power. But the new election law must be more ambitiously and unambiguously pro-voter. The pro-voter approach to election law is one grounded in political equality and based on four principles: all eligible voters should have the ability to easily register and vote in a fair election with the capacity for reasoned decisionmaking; each voter’s vote is entitled to equal weight; the winners of fair elections are recognized and able to take office peacefully; and political power is fairly distributed across groups in society, with particular protection for those groups who have faced historical discrimination in voting and representation.
Kleinfeld & Sachs, “Give Parents the Vote”
Joshua Kleinfeld and Stephen Sachs have posted this paper, forthcoming in Notre Dame Law Reivew, on SSRN. Here’s the abstract:
Many of America’s most significant policy problems, from failing schools to the aftershocks of COVID shutdowns to national debt to climate change, share a common factor: the weak political power of children. Children are 23% of all citizens; they have distinct interests; and they already count for electoral districting. But because they lack the maturity to vote for themselves, their interests don’t count proportionally at the polls. The result is policy that observably disserves children’s interests and violates a deep principle of democratic fairness: that citizens, through voting, can make political power respond to their interests.
Yet there’s a fix. We should entrust children’s interests in the voting booth to the same people we entrust with those interests everywhere else: their parents. Voting parents should be able to cast proxy ballots on behalf of their minor children. So should the court-appointed guardians of those who can’t vote due to mental incapacity. This proposal would be pragmatically feasible, constitutionally permissible, and breathtakingly significant: perhaps no single intervention would, at a stroke, more profoundly alter the incentives of American parties and politicians. And, crucially, it would be entirely a matter of state law. Giving parents the vote is a reform that any state can adopt, both for its own elections and for its representation in Congress and the Electoral College.
The article mentions J.D. Vance’s support for the idea.
“Transgender voters say they face photo ID barrier”
Photo ID concerns across the pond.
“Changes sought in Florida felon voting process”
Unfortunately, even the changes contemplated are small – modifications in how individuals with convictions can apply for an advisory opinion on whether they’ve managed to figure out how much they owe the state in fines and fees.
“States were incredibly successful at reallocating incarcerated people to their home addresses in 2020”
The Prison Gerrymandering Project crunches the numbers, and finds that even with the delayed census data this cycle, most of the states that sought to count incarcerated individuals at their home address rather than the prison address managed to get clean addresses that did the job.
“A Critical and Historical Analysis of Ohio’s Post-Millennium Regression to Major-Party Monopoly”
New in the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, from Capital’s Mark Brown: a review of recent ballot access battles in Ohio. I suspect there’s even more to add to the “major-party monopoly” argument if you add the legislature’s all-out gerrymandering war with the state Supreme Court, and the attempt to raise the threshold for citizen amendments.
Young Latino voters will be vital to the outcome of the 2024 election
Brookings with a post on the “nuanced relationship between young Latinos and the dominant parties,” in their series on younger voters.
With a very different focus on laws aimed at college voters, CNN also has a piece today on the recognition of the role that younger voters play.
Montana state legislator sues over censure
The lawsuit filed today in state court by Rep. Zephyr – Montana’s first openly transgender lawmaker — and several of her constituents contends that her censure and subsequent barring from Capitol grounds violates the Montana state constitution.
I’m still hoping this isn’t a trend.
“A top GOP lawyer wants to crack down on the college vote. States already are.”
Zachary Roth on efforts targeting a younger segment of the electorate.
“Voting in Other Languages: Registration Hindered By Lack of Translation”
A deep dive on language access in New York.
Previewing the democratic casualties sure to accompany SCOTUS OT 23
In advance of next week, Politico offers a thorough preview of the two election law cases on the Supreme Court’s docket this term. Both cases, it notes, are appeals from lower court decisions that threw out political maps drawn by GOP-controlled legislatures. Doctrinal nuances aside, as a practical matter, “the results of the cases could open the door to even more gerrymandering by legislators around the country, and they could also give legislatures even more power within their states to determine rules for voting — including how, when and where voters could cast their ballots.”
Why Governing is Also a Path to Restoring Our Democracy
Senator Klobuchar summarized the Build Back Better plan on Twitter, “Millions of good-paying jobs. New roads and bridges. Broadband access for everyone. Lower costs for childcare, elder care, and community college. We’re going to get this bill to the President’s desk. That’s how we build back better.” She might have added, “This is also how we build back faith in American democracy.”
Passing government programs that address the needs of everyday Americans is itself an important part of the process of restoring both faith in our democratic institutions and functionality to our democratic processes. The basic lesson of the so-called policy feedback literature is that the choices we make in how we govern the economy, health, and education can either reverse or reinforce inequities in civic and political capacity.
As Pete Buttigieg remarked awhile back, “a lot of the mistrust in our country right now is the result of policy failure. And that policy failure is largely about a generation of intentional disinvestment in the things that we share and need together.” He is right. Policymaking has second-order effects on citizens’ attitudes about, and relations to, democracy—effects that can either instill civic and political engagement or breed endemic apathy. The specific direction of the policy feedback depends not only on the generosity and universality of those policies, but also on their visibility and the efficiency of their implementation.
Laws regulating election procedures are not the only, or even the most important, influences on enhancing political participation, fostering political capacity, or restoring faith in our democratic institutions. A government that gets things done for its people, and broadcasts clearly when it has done so, is another. Thus, while today’s announcement that a group of Democratic Senators, including Amy Klobuchar, have a new, paired down voting rights bill is promising, we should all note that the Build Back Better plan is itself a “democracy-reform” package—an opportunity to demonstrate policy responsiveness and an important step toward restoring faith in our democratic institutions.
Newsom recall lawsuit
Politico has a story on a new federal lawsuit raising a constitutional challenge to the procedures that California uses for its gubernatorial recall. The lawsuit follows upon a NY Times op-ed from last week by Erwin Chemerinsky and Aaron Edlin, which argued that California’s procedures violate the one-person-one-vote doctrine of Reynolds v. Sims (and related precedents) because Gov. Newsom can receive more votes in the first (recall) phase of process than the leading candidate does in the second (replacement) phase of the process. Because only a plurality, and not a majority, is required in the second (replacement) phase, Newsom could fall just short of a majority in the first (recall) phase and then be replaced by a candidate whose plurality is far short of a majority and thus far lower than the number of votes in favor of retaining Newsom. As the op-ed observed, the problem could be solved by permitting Newsom to be one of the candidates eligible in the second (replacement) phase of the process, but given the way the California procedure is designed, if there is a majority of votes to recall Newsom in the first phase of the process, he’s ineligible from being a candidate in the second phase.
The California procedure does seem seriously flawed, to put it mildly. (I confess that I haven’t focused on it specifically before.) In general, I strongly favor majority-winner rather than plurality-winner elections. That point was the main theme of my book Presidential Elections and Majority Rule. It’s also the core of the claim that Congress should adopt a majority-winner requirement for congressional elections, as argued in the forthcoming article Requiring Majority Winners for Congressional Elections: Harnessing Federalism to Combat Extremism.
But it is one thing to say that majority-winner elections are desirable policy, and quite another to say that they are constitutionally mandated by virtue of the one-person-one-vote doctrine. Perhaps the particular California procedure is constitutionally flawed in a way that would not requiring judicial invalidation of all plurality-winner elections–although the idea that a candidate who is defeated in a first phase of a two-part electoral process is ineligible to be on the ballot in the second stage of the process was upheld in another case from California, involving the state’s “sore loser” law: Storer v. Brown, 415 U.S. 724 (1974). Thus, it’s not clear to me that the recall system is unconstitutional just because Newsom can’t compete in the second phase of the process after he’s disqualified in the first phase.
Both phases, considered separately, seem to comply with the basic idea of one-person-one-vote: each voter’s vote counts equally, first for determining whether Newsom is recalled and second for determining the winner of the plurality replacement election (for which Newsom is ineligible by virtue of being recalled). I could imagine the judicial activism of the Warren Court, which propagated the one-person-one-vote doctrine, invalidating the California recall system just because it offended the Court’s views of how democracy should work. But I’m not sure that the current Roberts Court will be as eager to apply the one-person-one-vote jurisprudence as aggressively as its Warren Court authors would.
Still, the case and issue seem interesting and important, and my own views on the specific constitutional question remain tentative as I’m just considering it for the first time. I very much welcome others weighing in on the merits of the pending suit.