Huzzah, the county line is dead! (Barring something unexpected like a longshot SCOTUS intervention.)

This clause would remove like 95% of the annoyances from publishing with law reviews. It would also focus student editors on the areas where they add (not arguably subtract) value.

This is the third time SCOTUS has denied cert in a case alleging the unconstitutionality of a state voting rights act. It seems -- fortunately! -- that this just isn't an issue the Court cares about.

FYI, here's Ruth Greenwood's and my article on SVRAs:

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

I don’t want to hear conservatives complaining that Congress lacks the necessary authority when Democrats next try to pass a law facilitating voting, stopping gerrymandering, reviving the Voting Rights Act, etc.

In Australia, according to Simon Jackman @[email protected], precinct-level results update in real time as the vote is counted. Truly a magical land!

Papers like this testing courts’ and lawyers’ empirical claims about governance are very valuable.

In my contribution to this genre, I skeptically examine the Court’s claims about accountability — in both administrative law and other areas of public law.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

This is the absurd consequence of the county line defenders’ position. If parties have a constitutional right to convey their endorsements, on the ballot, by bracketing candidates, then they could demand an end to the office block ballots used by the other 49 states.

Good to see bipartisan consensus that the federal government can regulate voting qualifications.

(In this case, federal law already bans non-citizen voting, so the Trump/Johnson proposal is apparently to copy, paste, and reenact an existing provision.)

Relatedly, since when do progressive lawyers build their arguments on Trumpist rulings (like Jacobson) that manipulative ballot designs are okay?

Isn’t the point of progressive election lawyering to resist — not expand — those antidemocratic decisions?

This is like one of the classic bad arguments against gerrymandering: If you don't like it, just vote out the gerrymanderers.

The whole point of gerrymandering -- and the county line -- is that they distort election outcomes to protect favored candidates.

A centrist third party could certainly work *given a different electoral system*. It's winner-take-all elections -- not Americans' underlying preferences -- that give us two dominant parties.

Dynamic Democracy, the best book on state politics in years, is the perfect choice for this award.

Hurray! New Jersey’s county line — one of the most manipulative voting policies in modern times — has been struck down.

Harvard Election Law Clinic filed an amicus brief pointing out the enormous distortive effect of the county line.