Skip to main content

America Votes! A Guide to Modern Election Law and Voting Rights, 2d ed.

ABA's Section of State and Local Government Law, has recently published the second edition of America Votes!. This book, edited by Benjamin E. Griffith, is comprised of seventeen chapters, each written by a legal expert. The first section covers issues pertaining to redistricting, beginning with a discussion of different methods of defining "population," such as the U.S. Census, American Community Survey, and the Redistricting Data Program (RDP), as well as the constitutional implications with respect to defining "populations." Other matters discussed as a part of redistricting include the impact that non-citizens have on redistricting, recent court challenges to redrawing congressional districts, advice to attorneys, alternatives to redistricting, and citizen involvement. The second section looks at the Voting Rights Act, focusing specifically on protections for language minority voters, the new 2011 guidelines for Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was amended by the Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006, among other issues. Finally, the last section contains chapters that focus on matters related to voter registration and ballot access. An index and table of cases are includes along with a helpful chart in the chapter covering voter technology, which illustrates contradictory state laws governing election fraud and integrity. This book is now located in the law library's new titles shelf across from the circulation desk.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le...

Lessons for Today from the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda

“Man’s inhumanity to man is not only perpetrated by the vitriolic actions of those who are bad. It is also perpetrated by the vitiating inaction of those who are good.” –Martin Luther King Jr.   Last week, I had the pleasure of attending  Professor Zachary D. Kaufman ’s presentation on  Lessons for Today from the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda  hosted by the  Johannesburg Holocaust & Geno cide Ce ntre . Among the many takeaways highlighted by Professor Kaufman and drawn from  Lessons from Rwanda: Post-Genocide Law and Policy   were ten simple yet profound lessons:   Lesson #1: Hate speech is dangerous.   To illustrate the role that hate speech played in the Rwandan genocide, Professor Kaufman discussed multiple forms of  propaganda , such as Kangura, Radio Rwanda, and RTLM “hate radio.”   He concludes that we must have limits, including with respect to social media, and further asserts that social media must do a better jo...

Texas Subsequent History Table Ceases Publication

This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table will be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition) history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table . The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.  For example, practitioners may prefer to use as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that simply presents no error that requ...