I have written this post for the ACS Blog. It begins: “Following an order issued earlier in the week by the three-judge court hearing the election contest in the Coleman-Franken dispute, most observers believe that Norm Coleman will lose his election contest before that court. Coleman has already promised an appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court. If he loses there, it may be off to the United States Supreme Court and then possibly even to federal district court in a new lawsuit. In this post, I explore what is likely to happen in the federal courts if Coleman continues to litigate the outcome of the Minnesota U.S. Senate race beyond the state Supreme Court.”
The last part of the post talks about the limited circumstances in which a federal court interferes with a state court election contest on grounds that the state court’s change in the rules constitutes a due process violation. The leading case here is the Eleventh Circuit’s Roe v. Alabama case. That case, and the issues surrounding it, are fascinating, and I explore them in much greater detail in Part IV of The Democracy Canon.