Manuscript Submission Deadline: June 15, 2020.
Before submission, please refer to the Election Law Journal author submission guidelines.
The recent primary elections in Wisconsin exposed the problems of trying to hold an election during a pandemic and demonstrated the difficulties in having an unusual volume of ballots cast by mail when the voting infrastructure was not prepared. It is quite possible that most states will be facing a similar situation in November, but with substantially higher turnout than experienced in Wisconsin. The Election Law Journal would like to publish research articles that could help form the debate on how best to conduct elections during a pandemic.
All manuscripts should be submitted online by June 15, 2020. All submissions will be subject to rigorous peer review, but our goal is an expedited review process that will get as many articles in print before the election as possible (and to make them available online as soon as final versions are ready for publication). We encourage submissions of original research articles and meta-analyses (see below).
Suggested topics include, among others:
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of moving to an all-vote-by-mail system in terms of election administration? What is known about the rates of spoiled ballots and the threats of voter fraud? What are the best ways to address these concerns?
• Will the pandemic force a delay in the U.S. Census, perhaps pushing reapportionment and redistricting out of the normal cycle? Are there technical solutions and legal issues concerning this possibility that are not receiving enough attention?
• What legal issues are raised by the possibility that 20 million students may be attending colleges and universities remotely in the fall? Could they claim residence in their college town? Is this something that is amenable to national legislation? (Set aside the practical political reality that national legislation on this topic would never happen, so this is posed as a legal question).
• Finally, the journal would be interested in meta-analyses of voting by mail. What do we know about what would happen if this was implemented on a broader scale? What are the partisan implications? What are the relative rates of spoiled ballot and the potential to remedy the errors under different voting methods? What are the relative levels of and potential for voter fraud with the various methods?
Visit Election Law Journal to learn more, read past issues, and view author submission guidelines.
Queries to the editor to propose a topic prior to submission are encouraged. Please contact Editor-in-Chief, David Canon with any questions or for any further details.