State of Elections

William & Mary Law School | Election Law Society

Virginia

The Show Must Go On: Despite Sharp Budget Cuts, the Virginia State Board of Elections makes sure “Elections still go on.”

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In the present economic climate, no state agency in the country is completely immune from budget crunches. The Virginia State Board of Elections (SBE), Virginia’s non-partisan agency in charge of administering the state’s elections, is no different. Budget cuts have forced the agency to make some tradeoffs in recent years, in both staffing and services. However, the agency is finding ways to cope with the limitations and continues to work to make elections work smoothly, regardless of the economic circumstances.

“I refuse to cry the blues,” SBE Secretary Nancy Rodrigues said. “The reality is there is no money. That is the economy. [However], elections still go on.” [Read more…] about The Show Must Go On: Despite Sharp Budget Cuts, the Virginia State Board of Elections makes sure “Elections still go on.”

Redistricting Without Party Politics?!

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Redistricting Without Party Politics?!  Is that possible?  A plan for redistricting that the Virginia Assembly will adopt as its own is the goal of the team from William & Mary School of Law.  Along with teams from across the state that have entered the Virginia College & University Redistricting Competition, the WM School of Law Team is out to prove that it is possible to come up with a redistricting plan that is practical, objective, and fair.  Although the competition was put together as an academic exercise, it has evolved into more with the Governor’s Bipartisan Commission on Redistricting taking notice and encouraging the exercise.  While the William & Mary School of Law team is under no illusion that their map will be adopted wholesale by the VA Assembly, they are looking forward to the map being a source of comparison for the Assembly as it crafts official redistricting maps.

The competition is sponsored by the Wason Center for Public Policy and the Public Mapping Project.  Teams will be drawing lines for the VA House of Delegates, the VA Senate, and for federal congressional House districts using Public Mapping software.  The criteria for drawing the maps includes districts that are contiguous, fair in representation, equal in population, in compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act, keeping communities of interest together/respecting existing political subdivisions, compact, and electorally competitive.  The judges for the competition will be Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.

Members of the William & Mary Law School Team are: Brian Cannon, Alex Grout, John Holden, Meredith McCoy, Rebekah Miller, Nicholas Mueller, Pete Newman, Sam Robinson, and Brian Rothenberg.

Check back for more info on the team and their ongoing progress!

Barry was mentally unstable www.pro-essay-writer.com and began to drink heavily!

Hotspots: Key Post-Election Disputes in the States

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Keep checking back here for links to the latest state midterm election results and recount coverage

LINKS BY STATE:

Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois (Gubernatorial, House), Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri,New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington

SENATE

Alaska

Joe Miller, the Republican candidate for Senate in Alaska, will probably require a hand recount of the write-in votes before he will concede the race.

Wednesday night, Democrat Scott McAdams conceded the race after only getting 23% of the vote.

Murkowski and Miller are preparing for the next round of ballot counting that will begin next week. Murkowski has set up a separate campaign account to support campaign efforts in the counting process.

Joe Miller is questioning the fairness of the process and has filed a lawsuit in federal court to prevent misspelled ballots being counted for Senator Lisa Murkowski.

The Associated Press reports that a federal court judge has denied Republican Joe Miller’s request for an injunction to stop the counting of incorrectly spelled write-in ballots.

Live coverage of the counting is being streamed online.

The Court has rejected Miller’s request to stop the recount.  The count now shows Murkowski with 98% of the initial write-in vote.

Joe Miller’s prospects for victory are getting slimmer, and the lawyers are starting to leave Alaska.

Alaska election officials have completed the fifth day of counting write-in ballots.  Senator Lisa Murkowski has retained 89% of write-in votes

With almost all votes counted, Senator Lisa Murkowski currently has an edge of over 2,000 votes over Republican Joe Miller.  Murkowski’s total does not include the over 10,000 challenged ballots.

As counting ends, Murkowski is heading back home and is expected to declare victory soon.  8,135 ballots have been challenged, but even if all of those ballots were thrown out by the Court, Murkowski would still be ahead by more than 2,000 votes.

With all but 700 write-in votes counted, Senator Lisa Murkowski has declared victory over Republican candidate Joe Miller.  The AP called the race for Murkowski Wednesday evening.

Joe Miller is asking a federal judge to stop election officials from certifying results declaring Murkowski the winner.  Murkowski leads by about 10,400 votes; Miller has challenged 8,153 of the ballots counted for Murkowski.

A federal judge has granted Joe Miller (R) a temporary injunction preventing election officials from naming Senator Lisa Murkowski the winner.  Miller filed his complaint on the grounds that the counting of misspelled ballots for Murkowski violates state law.  Miller will now bring the issue to state court.

Attorneys for the state of Alaska have asked a judge to decide the case over contested absentee ballots by next week.  The case will be heard Wednesday in state court in Juneau.  Senator Lisa Murkowski is seeking to intervene in the suit.  Her attorneys have said her seniority will be in jeopardy if she is not sworn in when the new Congress meets in January. [Read more…] about Hotspots: Key Post-Election Disputes in the States

Can a Tempest, a Tea Party Make?

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The teapot is still boiling briskly in the City of Falls Church, a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., over recent changes in the regulations governing municipal elections. By a 4-3 vote in January 2010, the then Mayor and City Council was successful in changing city elections from even-numbered years in May to odd-numbered years in November. Appropriately, the City submitted the change to the United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, for review and clearance as required by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Department subsequently reviewed and approved the change. The result is that, during the transition years, Council-Member terms will be shortened by six months. Then, in the May 2010 election, a major shakeup in the government occurred. The new Mayor, Nader Baroukh, a former City Council member who opposed the change, along with re-elected City-Council-members who were also opponents, is making efforts to “undo” the changes and to submit the matter to the citizens of the City in a referendum. Predictably, many residents of the City are hopping mad.  [Read more…] about Can a Tempest, a Tea Party Make?

Could Citizens United be a Paper Tiger?

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Is it possible that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was all bark, no bite?  It may be too early to tell, but at least in the race for Virginia’s 2nd congressional district, the ruling has yet to make a discernible impact.

Citizens United, handed down last January, invalidated portions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 which regulated so-called “electioneering” communications on First Amendment grounds. The reaction to the court’s decision was swift and sharply divided. The Wall Street Journal celebrated the ruling as a victory for free speech, writing, “[i]n a season of marauding government, the Constitution rides to the rescue one more time.” The conservative Cato Institute lauded the ruling, opining that it was a recognition of the principle that “equalizing speech is never a government interest.” On the other end of the spectrum, the New York Times openly lamented the decision, saying it marked a return to “the robber baron era of the 19th century.” People for the American Way went so far as to call for a constitutional amendment overturning the decision. [Read more…] about Could Citizens United be a Paper Tiger?