Derek Muller’s “The Democracy Ratchet”

Available on SSRN.  From the abstract:

Litigants seeking to lift burdens on the right to vote and judges adjudicating these claims have an unremarkable problem—what is the benchmark for measuring the nature of these burdens? Legal theories abound for claims under the constellation of rights known as the “right to vote.” And when a legislature changes a voting practice or procedure, courts may have an easy benchmark—they can consider what the right to vote looked like before and after the enactment of the new law, and they can evaluate a litigant’s claim on that basis.  Recently, federal courts have been relying on this benchmark for the principal causes of action litigants might raise after a new law has been enacted—a Section 2 challenge under the Voting Rights Act, a freedom of association claim subject to the Burdick balancing test, and an Equal Protection analysis derived from Bush v. Gore. And frequently, courts have found that new laws that eliminate once-available voting practices or procedures fail.

I describe this new practice as the Democracy Ratchet. But it is only recently that a convergence of factors have driven courts to (often unwittingly) adopt the Democracy Ratchet more broadly. So while a legislature can expand such opportunities, courts scrutinize cutbacks on such opportunities with deep skepticism—deeper than had no such opportunity ever existed. The ratchet tightens options, squeezing the discretion that legislatures once had.

This Article seeks to solve the puzzle of how courts have scrutinized, and should scrutinize, legislative changes to election laws….

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