Election Law (IRTS-7028)

Administering Elections provides a digest of contemporary American election administration using a systems perspective. The authors provide insight into the interconnected nature of all components of elections administration, and sheds like on the potential consequences of reforms that fail to account for this.

Legal scholars and historians debate the consequences of the flawed election of 2000.

Available to law students & faculty only via Westlaw. Provides a snapshot of key election and voting rights issues from practitioners highly experienced in a wide variety of areas. Part 1 details the election administration processes, challenges, and opportunities at the local and national level. Included are chapters on the FEC, enforcing federal election law, using census data to prove citizenship, and administrative challenges for recounts, contests; and postelection audits. Part 2 details the Voting Rights Act and discusses rights of language-minority voters, voter suppression tactics including voter ID laws, immigration voting rights, and redistricting issues to watch during the current redistricting cycle. Part 3 details the challenges of redistricting and includes state legislative reapportionment, Section 2 vote-dilution litigation, and corporate districting and the Voting Rights Act.

The 2000 presidential race resulted in the highest-profile ballot battle in over a century. But it is far from the only American election determined by a handful of votes and marred by claims of fraud. Since the founding of the nation, violence frequently erupted as the votes were being counted, and more than a few elections produced manifestly unfair results. Despite America's claim to be the world's greatest democracy, its adherence to the basic tenets of democratic elections-the ability to count ballots accurately and fairly even when the stakes are high-has always been shaky. A rigged gubernatorial election in New York in 1792 nearly ended in calls for another revolution, and an 1899 gubernatorial race even resulted in an assassination. Though acts of violence have decreased in frequency over the past century, fairness and accuracy in ballot counting nonetheless remains a basic problem in American political life. In Ballot Battles, Edward Foley presents a sweeping history of election controversies in the United States, tracing how their evolution generated legal precedents that ultimately transformed how we determine who wins and who loses. While weaving a narrative spanning over two centuries, Foley repeatedly returns to an originating event: because the Founding Fathers despised parties and never envisioned the emergence of a party system, they wrote a constitution that did not provide clear solutions for high-stakes and highly-contested elections in which two parties could pool resources against one another. Moreover, in the American political system that actually developed, politicians are beholden to the parties which they represent - and elected officials have typically had an outsized say in determining the outcomes of extremely close elections that involve recounts. This underlying structural problem, more than anything else, explains why intense ballot battles that leave one side feeling aggrieved will continue to occur for the foreseeable future. American democracy has improved dramatically over the last two centuries. But the same cannot be said for the ways in which we determine who wins the very close races. From the founding until today, there has been little progress toward fixing the problem. Indeed, supporters of John Jay in 1792 and opponents of Lyndon Johnson in the 1948 Texas Senate race would find it easy to commiserate with Al Gore after the 2000 election. Ballot Battles is not only the first full chronicle of contested elections in the US. It also provides a powerful explanation of why the American election system has been-and remains-so ineffective at deciding the tightest races in a way that all sides will agree is fair.

This handbook provides an overview of U.S. campaign and election reform efforts, past and present, from the introduction of the secret ballot to touch-screen voting. * Includes extensive quotations from reform advocates, along with excerpts from legislation and court cases related to changing campaign and election procedures. Summaries of recent research on voter turnout provide a means of evaluating legislation intended to increase voter registration and turnout rates

Election 2000 made America aware that its voting system was rife with problems. In a country that prides itself on its self-governing ability, Election 2000 pointed to a crack in the foundation of the mechanism by which the majority of those who participate in the political process chose their leaders. Since the Bush vs. Gore decision chartered the course of history in America, scholars and practitioners alike have struggled to arrive at a comprehensive plan of attack for improving the voting process. The President has signed into law a reform measure enacted by the United States Congress that is being billed as a sweeping bi-partisan effort to effectuate that change. The question is, will America really see a significant and fundamental improvement in the voting process, one that ensures the equal protection of voting rights for all of its citizens?

This behind-the-scenes assessment of the 2000 election dissects the challenging task of running an election and examines fundamental issues about fairness and equality, presenting a strong case for the need to reform elections in Florida and nationwide. Featuring insights and experiences of local election and political party officials in Florida and essays by advocates of election reform and noted political scientists, this book exposes problems associated with participatory democracy, prescribes remedies for these problems, and discusses the consequences.

Election interference is one of the most widely discussed international phenomena of the last five years. Russian covert interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election elevated the topic into a national priority, but that experience was far from an isolated one. Evidence of election interference by foreign states or their proxies has become a regular feature of national elections and is likely to get worse in the near future. Information and communication technologies afford those who would interfere with new tools that can operate in ways previously unimaginable: Twitter bots, Facebook advertisements, closed social media platforms, algorithms that prioritize extreme views, disinformation, misinformation, and malware that steals secret campaign communications. Defending Democracies examines the problem through an interdisciplinary lens and focuses on: (i) defining the problem of foreign election interference, (ii) exploring the solutions that international law might bring to bear, and (iii) considering alternative regulatory frameworks for understanding and addressing the problem. The result is a deeply urgent examination of an old problem on social media steroids, one that implicates the most central institution of liberal democracy: elections. The volume seeks to bring domestic and international perspectives on elections and election law into conversation with other disciplinary frameworks, escaping the typical biases of lawyers who prefer international legal solutions for issues of international relations. Taken together, the chapters in this volume represent a more faithful representation of the broad array of solutions that might be deployed, including international and domestic, legal and extra-legal, ambitious and cautious.

Promulgated by the American Law Institute, the same people who brought you the Restatements of the Law, this text centers on election administration. Part I provides principles for use by jurisdictions that wish to use absentee-voting or early-voting options as a supplement to in-person precinct-based voting on Election Day. Part II concerns principles applicable to disputed elections generally. Part III specifically concerns procedures necessary for disputed presidential elections given their uniquely challenging scheduling constraints.