CNN reports on a possible election recount in Virginia: The Republican in Virginia’s attorney general race will request a recount after the official results released Monday showed state Sen. Mark Obenshain behind Democratic state Sen. Mark Herring by a razor-thin margin of about .007%. Obenshain lost by 165 votes out of 2.2 million, marking the […]
Archive | Election Law
Could VA AG Race Go to Federal Court?
The Virginia Attorney General’s race remains too close to call. At last count, Democratic State Senator Mark R. Herring had a slim lead over Republican State Senator Mark D. Obenshain. If the lead evaporates, will Democrats take the contest to federal court? Rick Hasen thinks they might. His article in Slate begins: The race for […]
Posner’s “About Face” on Crawford Continues Turning About
Two weeks ago, Jonathan noted that in an interview with Mike Sacks of the Huffington Post, Judge Richard Posner said that he thought he’d been wrong to uphold Indiana’s voter ID statute in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. In more recent comments (here at The New Republic which are clarified here at the Wall […]
Judge Posner’s About Face on Crawford
In an interview Friday with HuffPostLive, Judge Richard Posner said he now believes the Supreme Court was wrong to uphold Indiana’s voter identification law in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. This is particularly noteworthy because, in Crawford, the Supreme Court upheld a 2-1 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit written by […]
Corsi’s Life of Political Crime
By Jonathan H. Adler on September 8, 2013 11:30 am in Election Law, First Amendment, Restrictions on Campaign Contrbs. and Expenses
If you want to get together with friends to talk about politics, hear speakers on policy issues, and perhaps create a website promoting policy ideas, do you need to register as a political actin committee even if you don’t endorse candidates or get involved in elections? In Ohio the answer can be “yes,” as Ed […]
House Democrat to Challenge IRS Tax-Exemption Rules
The Washington Post reports that Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) will file suit today against the Internal Revenue Service’s regulations governing what organizations qualify for tax exempt status. Current law says the organizations must engage “exclusively” in social welfare activities, but IRS tax code requires only that they are “primarily engaged” in such purposes. That discrepancy has […]
San Diego’s Recall Election and California Constitution Art. 3, Sec. 3.5
San Diego’s mayor, Bob Filner, has been accused of widespread sexual harassment (and even assault). He is the subject of a recall petition, and today marks the official beginning of the signature-gathering period. But San Diego’s laws governing recall are both somewhat confusingly-written, and remarkably stringent. The city attorney has already issued three legal opinions […]
All the Senator’s Men
Over two dozen former aides to Senator Max Baucus are now tax lobbyists in Washington, D.C., Ezra Klein reports. This is significant because Senator Baucus is Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and any reform of the tax code will go through him. This makes those with Baucus’s ear in high demand. Access to politicians […]
The Virginia GOP’s Rotten Electoral Vote Plan
James Taranto is not persuaded by some of the arguments against the GOP plan to change Virginia’s method of awarding electoral votes from winner-take-all to allocating votes based on the winner of each congressional district and awarding the remaining two votes to the candidate who wins the most districts. Nonetheless, he opposes the plan because […]
Citizens United and the Fall of the Roman Republic
By Ilya Somin on November 27, 2012 7:49 pm in Election Law, Elections, First Amendment, Freedom of Speech, Restrictions on Campaign Contrbs. and Expenses
In a recent Slate article, Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni claim that the history of the fall of the Roman Republic strengthens the case against the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, which ruled that the First Amendment protects corporate and union political speech against restriction by government. The influence of money in politics, they […]
Posner Defends the Electoral College
The ever-iconoclastic Judge Richard Posner has a column in Slate defending the Electoral College. Although the Electoral College is somewhat undemocratic, in that a candidate may win the election without securing a majority of the popular vote, Posner identifies five practical reasons for keeping it in place. I am not sure I agree with all […]
Is it Unjust to Require Children to Pass a Knowledge Test to Vote, but Not Adults?
By Ilya Somin on November 8, 2012 12:27 am in Election Law, Elections, Political Ignorance, Voting Rights for Children
Canadian legal blogger Leonid Sirota has posted an interesting response to my post advocating extension of the franchise to politically knowledgeable children. He argues that it is unjust to require children to pass a knowledge test for voting, but not adults. He would therefore prefer to lower the voting age to 16 instead: Pour ma […]
Explaining Obama’s Victory
Beginning today, pundits are going to offer a wide range of explanations for Obama’s victory. But I think the simplest and most obvious is that he won because the economy had improved just enough since 2008 to give him the edge. As I pointed out back in September, standard models of presidential election outcomes based […]
Suffer the Little Children to Vote
By Ilya Somin on November 6, 2012 11:05 am in Democracy, Election Law, Political Ignorance, Voting Rights for Children
On this election day, as on most others, we will hear a lot about the need to increase turnout and the dangers of voter suppression. But few will even consider questioning the systematic exclusion of a huge part of our population from the franchise: children under the age of 18. We allow even the most […]
An Election Recount without Voter Registrations?
The North Dakota Senate election could be close — close enough to trigger a recount. Given that control of the Senate could be at stake, the party lawyers will no doubt descend ready for battle. But in ND there’s a twist: No voter registration. As Sasha Issenberg explains in Slate, North Dakota is the only […]