Academic literature on the topic 'Discriminatory voting laws'

In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act that mandated federal oversight of election laws in discriminatory jurisdictions, prompting a spate of controversial new voting rules. Utilizing difference-in-differences to examine the act’s 1975 revision, I provide the first estimates of the effects of “preclearance” oversight. I find that preclearance increased long-run voter turnout by 4–8 percentage points, due to lasting gains in minority participation. Surprisingly, Democratic support dropped sharply in areas subject to oversight. Using historical survey and newspaper data, I provide evidence that this was the result of political backlash among racially conservative whites. (JEL D72, J15, K16)

The summer of 2016 showed that racial discrimination in voting is alive and well, as federal courts across the country struck down state statutes that disproportionately disenfranchise minority voters, including voter ID laws, restrictions on early voting, and racially gerrymandered legislative districts. However, at the local level, discriminatory practices in the nation’s approximately 89,000 political subdivisions have gone largely uninvestigated and challenged. Recent conflicts between communities of color and law enforcement have highlighted the failure of local governments in places like Ferguson, Missouri to adequately represent the interests of minority voters. These failures of representation, which occur in progressive states like California as well as in more conservative states, are due in part to local election laws and practices that dilute minority voting strength. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act provides a cause of action against vote dilution, but such cases are unusually complicated, expensive, and time-consuming with no promise of damages and highly uncertain recovery of attorneys’ fees to a prevailing plaintiff. As a result, few plaintiffs outside the federal Department of Justice and major civil rights groups have mustered the resources to prosecute cases under the federal Voting Rights Act. Although states could pass their own laws against vote dilution that would encourage more private plaintiffs to investigate and prosecute offending local governments, only California has passed such a law. The California Voting Rights Act (CVRA) addresses only a single discriminatory practice—the pervasive use of at-large methods of election in jurisdictions where racially polarized voting systematically defeats minority candidates. The CVRA has revealed that (1) vote dilution is widespread; (2) case-by-case litigation can have a deterrent effect under conditions that encourage private enforcement; and (3) more enforcement is needed to prevent local governments from evading scrutiny or backsliding. But, because the CVRA’s effectiveness is limited to only one class of practices in only one state, to increase the level of enforcement there is a need for new voting rights plaintiffs with the resources both to bring cases under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and to monitor compliance with judgments and settlements. State attorneys general can fill this need, and possess some advantages relative to both the United States Department of Justice (e.g., a narrower geographic focus and the ability to collect attorneys’ fees under the Voting Rights Act) and private plaintiffs (e.g., an imprimatur of law enforcement, in-house investigatory resources, and a “bully pulpit”). With the election of Donald Trump and the confirmation of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, the need to find more resources to combat discrimination in voting is imperative as the Department of Justice appears poised to abandon Obama Administration’s enforcement efforts in favor of investigating groundless allegations of voter fraud. To date, no state attorney general has ever brought a Section 2 claim against a political subdivision, but this Article makes the case that state attorneys general can, and should, enforce the federal Voting Rights Act against local governments to protect minority voters.

On January 8, 2008, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments inCrawford v. Marion County Election Board, a case related to the discriminatory effects of voter-identification laws in the state of Indiana. Indiana has one of the most stringent voting requirements in the nation, as voters are required to present an up-to-date photo identification issued by the federal or state government in order to cast a ballot. Plaintiffs argued that the Indiana requirements prevent significant and unequal obstacles to the right to vote. The state argued that Indiana had the right to enforce strict requirements to prevent fraud and uphold confidence in the electoral process. Similar laws have also been proposed in many other states, typically related to charges of vote fraud, and often times tied into the divisive debate regarding undocumented immigrants or African American felons. Therefore the recent decision of the Court has tremendous implications to the future of photo-identification laws across the United States.

A creature of state law, voter registration is a point of national contention and a subject that frequents partisan debate. Federal legislation—meant to unsew a patchwork quilt of discriminatory practices against voters—complicated the voter registration process. States have changed their voter registration laws in the wake of Supreme Court opinions and prolonged litigation. But an opportunity endures for states to take further accountability for their younger voting-age populations without more federal intervention. By amending their election codes to require that high school graduates choose whether to register to vote, states can act as legislative laboratories and court their prom night voters to guarantee the fundamental right to vote.

AbstractThe right to vote is the most important political right in international human rights law. Framed within the broader right of political participation, it is the only right in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights not guaranteed as a universal human right but rather as a citizen's right. While limitations on the right to vote are permissible in respect of citizenship and age, residency-based restrictions are not explicitly provided. However, recent judgments of the European Court of Human Rights endorse a view that voting rights may be conditioned on residency on the grounds of an individual's bond to their country-of-origin and the extent to which laws passed by that government would affect them. This article questions this proposition and explores whether disenfranchisement based solely on residency constitutes an unreasonable and discriminatory restriction to the essence of the right.

The article provides a comparative analysis of the electoral legislation of the EU countries and Ukraine at the local level and on the basis of this analysis, the proposals to improve the electoral legislation of Ukraine take into account the experience of the European Union. The main forms of direct democracy in most EU member countries and Ukraine are fixed at the constitutional level, and the procedure of preparing and holding elections is regulated by special election laws. Domestic electoral legislation is overloaded with detailed norms of procedural aspects, unlike the legislation of EU countries, in which much more attention is paid to the issues of transparency of party financial funds and transparency of election campaign financing, as well as protection of national minorities’ interests. The main ways of exercising the right to vote not at the place of inclusion in the voter lists in the EU member states were characterized: voting by absentee ballots at specially designated polling stations, voting on the territory of diplomatic and consular missions, voting by mail, proxy voting, mobile voting, voting via the Internet, distance voting. It is noted that the norms in which the institution of a cash deposit is enshrined are discriminatory since they violate the principle of equality of suffrage and create a situation in which candidates are excluded from the political arena on the basis of the property criterion. Relevant for EU countries is the adoption of measures to create appropriate conditions for the full implementation of the principle of equality of citizens before the law, in particular, to overcome the actual inequality of opportunities between women and men. In order to bring Ukrainian legislation in line with international standards set by the European Union, we propose: to grant the right to vote in local elections to citizens of other states or stateless persons who permanently reside on the territory of the respective territorial community and permanently pay local taxes and fees have common local interests related to everyday life, infrastructure, communication, recreation; to introduce electronic voting; not to apply the institution of cash deposit at the local level; to introduce individual (party) gender quotas, following the French example.

Sex work regulation is often debated from the perspective of state control: legalization vs decriminalization, ‘end demand’ vs criminalization. Ultimately, these debates center the State as the most significant arbiter in sex workers’ ability to conduct business. This paper contends that while state legislation has a significant effect on the material lives of sex workers, the terms of service of the US-based, privatized financial industry has a more immediate and widespread affect. Most sex workers make use of online payment applications as well as social media, even though both are highly discriminatory toward sex workers, regardless of the legal status of one’s employment as a sex worker, or even the laws in which the worker conducts their business. Rather than being treated as a luxury or privilege, access to both the worldwide web and the global network of banking are essential rights that enable full participation in contemporary society. Through an analysis of platform governance and revenue chokepoints, this paper argues that payment intermediaries function as an extra-legal regulation of sex work that has a more profound effect on sex workers’ material reality than State legislation, as these intermediaries control how they are able to secure business and be paid for it without having to answer to a voting demographic. Most of the world’s major social media and payment processing applications are based in the United States, which enables it to export the repercussions of the stigmatization and criminalization of sex work even within the boundaries of countries with differing legislation.

Starting from the observation that at the multilateral level shareholder activism is considered as an important aspect of good corporate governance, this paper examines several legal and economic obstacles to institutional investor activism in the EU and in the US. We find that investors in the US seem to have easier access to proxy voting than in the EU (although recent EU legislation should remove several of the present legal obstacles) even though the SEC allows only long-term relevant shareholders to include nominees on the corporate proxy; that conflicts of interest might limit the activism of several categories of institutional investors both in the US and in the EU; that some national legislations in the EU limit the ability of institutional investors to coordinate their voting policies; that recent EU legislation has introduced discriminatory requirements for some institutional investors when they acquire control of listed and non-listed companies; that recourse to stock lending and other forms of separation of financial risk from voting rights seems to be practiced more by controlling shareholders at the expense of institutional investors than the opposite, something which should be clearer in the near future with an upcoming EU legislation which should extend the transparency requirements for all shareholders to borrowed securities, cash-settled derivatives and other instruments that allow to exercise voting influence in a company; and that proposed EU legislation provides transparency requirements and permanent limitations to naked short selling largely in excess of the US regulatory framework.

The mid-1960s witnessed a landmark change in the area of civil rights policy in the United States. After a series of tortuous internal battles, with Southern legislators using all available procedural tools to maintain their states' discriminatory Jim Crow legal systems, the United States Congress adopted two statutes—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—which insured civil and political equality for all Americans. The Acts of 1964 and 1965 were the culmination of a decade-long struggle by black Americans to secure the citizenship rights that had been denied to them for more than a half century. Beginning with the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Supreme Court decision, the civil rights movement built momentum, as formal organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) grew in strength and informal (grass roots) organizations spread throughout the South and the Nation. As national public opinion shifted increasingly toward providing new civil rights guarantees for blacks, Congress responded with new legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (the first civil rights law since 1875), the Civil Rights Act of 1960, and a legislative proposal to prohibit the poll tax in 1962 (which would be ratified by three-quarters of the states in 1964 and become the 24th Amendment to the United States Constitution).

In 1965, Victoria Gray struggled to sustain the Citizenship Education Program during the ongoing Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) Congressional challenge. At the same time, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took a prominent role in a campaign centered in Selma, Alabama, aimed at prompting federal action to end discriminatory voter registration laws and practices. As marchers filed out of Selma on the way to Montgomery, Septima Clark organized local women with handwriting lessons in preparation for voter registration. Following passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Clark, Gray, and local teachers adapted the CEP to prioritize voter education and organization and local anti-poverty initiatives.