Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Davis v. Bandemer ruling in 1986, partisan gerrymandering for statewide electoral advantage has been held to be justiciable. The existing Supreme Court standard, culminating in Vieth v. Jubelirer and LULAC v. Perry, holds that a test for gerrymandering should demonstrate both intents and effects and that partisan gerrymandering may be…
A generation ago, the Supreme Court upended the voting rights world. In the breakthrough case of Thornburg v. Gingles, the Court held that minority groups that are residentially segregated and electorally polarized are entitled to districts in which they can elect their preferred candidates. But while the legal standard for vote dilution has been clear…
Bush v. Gore decided a presidential election and is the most dramatic election case in our lifetime, but cases like it are decided every year at the state level. Ordinary state courts regularly decide questions of election rules and administration that effectively determine electoral outcomes hanging immediately in the balance. Election cases like Bush v. Gore…
This Article updates previous findings concerning the relationship between voter identification laws and perceptions of voter fraud. Courts have established that voter identification laws can be justified as measures that safeguard “voter confidence.” We demonstrate once again, but with the benefit of new survey data, that people who live in states with voter identification laws…
People with disabilities are the ticking time bomb of the electorate. An estimated thirty to thirty-five percent of all voters in the next twenty-five years will need some form of accommodation. Despite the significant and growing population of voters with disabilities, they do not vote in proportion to their numbers. We can consider voters with…
Theories of representation often assert that citizens prefer representatives who are of the same racial or ethnic background as themselves. Examining surveys of over 80,000 individuals, this Article quantifies the preference for coethnic representation among whites, blacks, and Hispanics. The large sample size provides sufficient statistical power to study constituents in districts with minority representatives,…
The first decade of election law cases at the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Roberts brought election law down a strongly conservative path in cases involving issues from campaign finance to voting rights to election administration. Nonetheless, the Roberts Court, while dominated by a majority of five conservative Justices until the recent…
