“Political Participation, Expressive Association, and Judicial Review”

Joshua Sellers has posted this draft on SSRN (American University Law Review). Here is the abstract:

Increasingly novel legal conflicts over electoral participation and voting rights are on the rise. For instance, multiple aspects of Georgia’s election system have been challenged, including the state’s “exact match” policy. An Arizona law imposing harsh penalties on initiative petition circulators who fail to respond to subpoenas is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit. And a Tennessee law that strictly regulated voter registration drives was recently enjoined and ultimately repealed. As states implement unprecedented methods of election administration, courts, in turn, are tasked with determining just what the “right to vote” entails and to what extent it encompasses efforts by organizations to engage voters in the political process. This Essay explores this dynamic and considers how more intensive methods of election administration may, paradoxically, result in a broader conception of the right to vote that the First Amendment expressly protects.

Part I of this Essay summarizes the unresolved — and potentially dispositive — doctrinal debate over the appropriate level of judicial scrutiny to be applied to state laws implicating both voting and expressive association. Part II examines the doctrinal irresolution in the context of two recent cases, Miracle v. Hobbs in Arizona and League of Women Voters v. Hargett in Tennessee. Viewed together, these cases illustrate the contingent nature of organizations’ ability to engage voters; an ambiguity of great consequence as we approach Election 2020. Part III outlines the short and long-term political significance of whether a capacious or circumscribed conception of the right to vote in this context prevails.

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