SYMPOSIUM – 2022 – SAFEGUARDING THE FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT TO VOTE
The Post-Trump Rightward Lurch in Election Law
by Michael Kang on April 29, 2022
The United States Supreme Court’s decisions last Term, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee and Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta, mark only the beginning of a conservative transformation of election law under the Court’s post-Trump personnel. This Essay argues that although neither decision itself is immediately transformative, both decisions boldly discard ideological compromises not long ago held as obviously sensible by the right and instead point toward a conservative deregulation of minority voting rights and campaign finance disclosure in the near future.
Volume 74 (2021-2022)
The Right to Vote
Baselines and Defaults
by Yasmin Dawood on April 29, 2022
An election undoubtedly requires some rules to ensure that it is ‘free and fair,’ but at what point do these rules diminish the equal opportunity of minority voters to cast a ballot? This Essay addresses these questions by examining the baselines that undergird the right to vote. The author identifies three kinds of baselines—legal, contextual, and normative—and explores the implications of each for voting rights protection.
Volume 74 (2021-2022)
Weaponizing the Electoral System
by Samuel Issacharoff on April 15, 2022
This Essay will examine the fragility of election structures that depend on bipartisan agreement to certain ground rules. I argue that democracies depend on two critical features: (1) a commitment to repeat play; and (2) institutional guardrails such that the majority (or even plurality) will win according to preset rules, but not win too much. The populist fervor of the times threatens both. This Essay explores how close to the abyss the election system came in 2020, and how delicate the balance remains going forward.