Archives for April 2014

This afternoon, the Harvard Law and Policy Review was privileged to host a panel on voting rights. The panelists (James Blacksher, Heather Smith, Rachel Schneider, and Ronnie Cho) discussed the implications of recent Supreme Court decisions and restrictive voting laws on voter registration and the franchise. Although the panelists discussed the significant setbacks that voting rights have faced in recent years (with one panelist joking that American elections would soon need to be monitored by international rights groups), they also proposed potential ways to counteract the steady rolling back of voting rights in America.

Existing voting regulations are outdated. Registration is paper-based in a digital world, and we still vote on Tuesdays in November, an arrangement designed to minimize disrupting farmers’ schedules. Some positive reforms could increase voting and facilitate voters’ engagement with the political process, like online registration, longer voting times (including reinstatement of early and Sunday voting in areas that have cut it back), and increasing the government’s responsibility to actively encourage citizens to vote instead of placing the onus on the citizen to shoulder the burdens of registration and voting. A more pressing concern, however, is fighting back against laws that increase limitations on voting rights. Attempts to stop people from registering to vote or make it more difficult to vote at all have proliferated across the country, while the movement to facilitate participation in the voting process by modernizing these regulations has been stilted.

[Read more…] about Elections in America: Voting Rights

 

HLPR’s Spring 2014 Symposium on Elections in America, held on Saturday, April 5, began with a panel on electoral districting.  Districting is one of the most consequential aspects of elections—often deciding outcomes, ensuring perennial incumbency, and strengthening or weakening the political influence of particular communities—yet it is also one of the least transparent processes in our democracy.  In most states, legislators are free to draw boundaries to preserve their own job security, with little public scrutiny.  Our panel featured four speakers, Shira Center, Myrna Pérez, Micah Altman, and Angelo Ancheta, each of whom is an expert on districting in his or her own right, while also bringing a unique perspective on the topic.

Shira Center, Politics Editor for DC’s Roll Call and Resident Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, is an expert on congressional races and spearheaded Roll Call’s redistricting coverage.  After nearly a decade covering politics and campaigns across the country, she has developed comprehensive knowledge of the geography and demographics of congressional districts.  Ms. Center described the political consequences of redistricting, demonstrating its practical impact on Capitol Hill.  She shared her reporting about the “Five Ugliest Districts”—bizarre-looking, convoluted districts drawn carefully to include and exclude particular people.  Sometimes, Ms. Center noted, legislators’ districting requests could be as specific as ensuring that their aunt is in their district, or even a particularly symbolic flagpole.

[Read more…] about Elections in America: Expert Panel Discusses Need to Separate the Districting Process from Self-Interested Legislators

 

This year’s keynote speaker was Congressman John Sarbanes (D-MD). Congressman Sarbanes is the author of the Government by the People Act (H.R. 20), which would create a new public campaign financing system to give candidates a way to wage campaigns without taking donations from special interests.

The congressman spoke about how, because his district is close to DC, he enjoys being “one of the few members who can come back home every night” to hear from his constituents, many of whom are very distrustful of Congress. Those conversations worry him because, “I don’t think you can sustain a democracy when the democratic institutions on which it’s based are held in such low esteem by the public.” He attributes that negative impression in part to a sense among ordinary people that their opinions don’t matter to their representatives in a world in which special interests fund campaigns.

[Read more…] about Elections in America Symposium Keynote Address: Congressman Sarbanes

 

The HLPR Elections in America Symposium, held on April 5, 2014, opened with welcoming remarks by Dean Martha Minow of Harvard Law School. Dean Minow noted the particular timeliness and relevance of the symposium, in light of the recent Supreme Court decision in McCutcheon v. FEC. Reflecting on the problems that plague the American electoral system, she asserted that the continuing viability of elections lies in the hands of this generation. Dean Minow made a call to action, declaring that fixing the problems associated with the electoral system is crucial for establishing accountability in our political process.

By Tom Watts

This morning, the Supreme Court decided McCutcheon v. FEC, which struck down aggregate contribution limits in campaign finance laws (laws that limit the total amount an individual can give to all campaigns put together). This decision continues the trend of striking down campaign finance laws, a trend made famous in Citizens United v. FEC; many are already comparing McCutcheon to Citizens United (such as Salon and the National Journal). Three points are immediately notable about the impact of McCutcheon on the future of campaign finance law.

First, while Citizens United denied that campaign finance laws could be justified by several specified interests (such as distorting the public discourse with large amounts of corporate money) and allowed the justification of preventing quid pro quo corruption, it did not explicitly say that preventing quid pro quo corruption was the only possible interest. In principle, there might have been some other justification that the government simply had not yet put forward. McCutcheon eliminates this possibility: “Any regulation must . . . target what we have called ‘quid pro quo’ corruption or its appearance.” It concedes, “Many people might find those [other] objectives attractive,” but asserts that just as the First Amendment protects other “repugnant” things, such as Nazi parades, it also must protect money in politics. The obvious difference, though, is that a restriction on Nazi parades is a restriction on the content of the speech; these restrictions on money in politics are regulation of the process (akin to a restriction on parades in general).

[Read more…] about McCutcheon v. FEC