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ARTICLE CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1043 I. THE RIGHTTO VOTE BEFORE THE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT 1052 A. The Original Constitution 1052 B. The Fourteenth Amendment 1054 C. Federal Legislation 1057 1. Enfranchisement Statutes [...], In the legal histories of Reconstruction, the Fifteenth Amendment is usually an afterthought compared to the Fourteenth Amendment. This oversight is perplexing: the Fifteenth Amendment ushered in a brief period of multiracial democracy and laid the constitutional foundation for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This Article helps to complete the historical record, providing a thorough accounting of the Fifteenth Amendment's text, history, and purpose. This Article situates the Fifteenth Amendment within the broad array of constitutional provisions, federal statutes, fundamental conditions, and state laws that enfranchised--and disenfranchised--Black men during Reconstruction. It then dives into the congressional debate, cataloging every version of the Amendment that was voted on. Next, this Article turns to the ratification debate, an intense partisan affair that culminated in Congress compelling four Southern States' ratification as part of their readmission to the Union. Uncovering the Fifteenth Amendment's past has important implications for today's doctrinal questions. This Article, however, does not focus on answering those questions, but instead centers on the issues debated by the ratifying generation. The Reconstruction Framers were united in their goal of enfranchising Black men nationwide, but they were deeply divided over how best to achieve that goal and whether other disenfranchised groups--women, Irish Americans, and Chinese immigrants--should be covered by the Amendment as well. In addition, the Reconstruction Framers debated whether and how the Amendment could be circumvented and whether officeholding should be explicitly protected. This Article argues that the Fifteenth Amendment's original understanding went beyond forbidding facially discriminatory voting qualifications; the Fifteenth Amendment also prohibited the use of racial proxies and, albeit less clearly, protected the right to hold office. But more fundamentally, the Fifteenth Amendment rejected the original Constitution's theory of democracy, which delegated to States the authority to decide who deserved the franchise based on whether they had a sufficient stake in the community or their interests were virtually represented. In short, the Fifteenth Amendment is the first constitutional provision to embrace the idea that the right to vote is preservative of all other rights.

Introduction 933 I. Line-warming Activities 935 II. Recent Bans on Line-warming 937 A. Florida SB 90 940 B. Georgia SB 202 941 III. Fighting the Restrictions 941 A. Standing 942 [...]

INTRODUCTION 352 I. CAN WE RELY ON THE JUDICIARY TO PROTECT THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS ITSELF? 352 A. The Pre-Warren Court Era: A Failure to Protect Democracy 353 B. The Warren [...]

"'We will not allow these cultural clear cutters to take [our rights] away and be removed to a racist reservation that exists in their mind.'... The Indian Wars of years [...]

INTRODUCTION The United States has extraordinarily low voter turnout compared to other liberal democracies. (1) Turnout soared in the 2020 presidential election to its highest point in over 120 years [...]

INTRODUCTION. 1304 I. THE LANDSCAPE OF FELONY DISENFRANCHISEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES. 1306 A. History of Voting and Disenfranchisement. 1306 B. Current Disenfranchisement Laws. 1308 C. The Pernicious Effects of [...]

Introduction 948 I. Back to the Drawing Board: Second-Bite Lawmaking as a Trans-Substantive Phenomenon 955 A. Case Studies in Successive Lawmaking 955 1. Voting Rights as the Paradigm Example 955 [...], Lawmakers can be quite persistent as they battle to advance their favored agendas, even after unsuccessfully defending against constitutional challenge. When a law is struck down because it is constitutionally defective, the architects of the defeated law frequently go back to the drawing board and try again, making modifications they hope will allow the new version to survive another round of litigation. Sometimes this second bite at the lawmaking apple looks like the very embodiment of good faith interbranch dialogue. But sometimes these repeated efforts reflect the deliberate evasion of constitutional duty across multiple cycles of lawmaking and litigation--or as Justice Kagan recently put it, the "pouring of old poison into new bottles." To distinguish between these two different types of official persistence, we must first understand second-bite lawmaking as a pervasive and trans-substantive phenomenon--one that calls for an adjudicative framework well suited to its unique features. This Article is the first to serve that purpose, offering three case studies in the areas of voting rights, free speech, and religious liberty. The case studies demonstrate that as government defendants repeatedly try to produce a law that will withstand judicial review, they learn how to conceal the defects that were fatal to prior versions. Courts will thus eventually be presented with laws that have been scrubbed clean of their predecessors' most obvious flaws. When examining these sanitized versions, how should courts weigh the failed attempts at constitutionally legitimate lawmaking that preceded them? This Article considers what guidance the Supreme Court has offered on this question. Carefully examining cases in which the Court has expressly considered the appropriate implications to draw from prior iterations of a challenged law, this Article reveals that over time, the Supreme Court has abandoned what was once a tolerably sensible approach to second-bite lawmaking. The Court's latest pronouncement threatens to eviscerate the substantive constitutional principles at stake in these multiphasal disputes.

INTRODUCTION 136 I. FIRST-PAST-THE-POST, SINGLE-MEMBER DISTRICTS AND THE POTENT FOR MINORITY RULE. 142 A. Intentional Partisan Gerrymandering 144 B. Geospatial Political Sorting and "Unintentional Gerrymandering" 152 C. Previous Attempts to [...], Many state legislatures lack democratic legitimacy in that they comprise legislators who, in total, do not accurately reflect the views of the state's voters. In several states, for instance, the party that wins a minority of votes for the statehouse routinely wins the seat total by large margins. This reality leads to all kinds of problems, including a disconnect between voters' policy preferences and the policies that their state legislature produces. There are two key factors that aid this phenomenon: intentional partisan gerrymandering and "unintentional gerrymandering," the latter of which arises due to the geospatial sorting of voters. As much as reformers try to take the politics out of district drawing, under current geopolitical alignments, voters in more densely populated areas will be at a disadvantage at translating their votes into seats in the state legislature. Hence, to better align voters' preferences with legislative outcomes, more substantial reform may be needed than merely depoliticizing districting. As a proposal for such reform, this article uses a bill that has been proposed at the federal level--the Fair Representation Act--as a template for reforming state legislatures. By using multi-member districts and ranked-choice voting, the FRA aims to provide more diverse and balanced representation in the House of Representatives. States could do the same for their legislatures, although the means of implementing such reform would vary by state, and there are a number of threshold questions each state would need to resolve for itself about such a system's scope and details. This paper walks through those steps and choices in an attempt to illustrate how FRA-type reform at the state level could make state democracy more representative.

INTRODUCTION Over the past decade, voting rights have resurfaced as a modern political and civil rights struggle. The last reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ("VRA") in 2006 [...], November 3, 2020, culminated in an election cycle like none other. The partisan divide reached its peak, with a packed Democratic primary, a divisive Republican candidate, and a hyperaware electorate. The right to vote resurfaced as a contentious, newly partisan issue. Questions of voter suppression and issues surrounding the ease of voting dominated the news cycle, reigniting issues of race at the ballot box. And, on top of it all, a global pandemic was raging. The combination of these circumstances resulted in the most litigious election in recent memory. As a quintessential swing state, North Carolina was at the center of national attention, placing intense scrutiny on the North Carolina State Board of Elections, the General Assembly, and federal and state courts. This Recent Development first provides a review of the 2020 election changes instituted by the North Carolina State Board of Elections and the General Assembly, comparing them with those of other states. The judicial response to the multitude of lawsuits filed is then considered, specifically focusing on whether North Carolina federal and state courts protected the right to vote, public health, or neither. Upon analysis, this Recent Development argues that North Carolina fell in the middle of the pack when protecting the right to vote--the state and courts enacted and upheld several imperative changes, but did not implement policies that significantly eased burdens when voting during a global pandemic. However, regardless of the positive changes made leading up to November 3, North Carolina immediately reverted to its old ways, forgetting--or ignoring-to protect marginalized communities' right to vote.

Table of Contents I. Background - The Fight for the Franchise 125 A. The Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights 125 B. The Rise of Voter Fraud Prevention 126 C. [...], Local election commissions in the United States disenfranchise Americans when they erroneously reject voters' mail-in ballots for failed signature matches. Disenfranchisement is not only problematic because it is dangerous to the health of American democracy, but also because signature matching violates the procedural due process protections voters are entitled to when they exercise their right to vote. Furthermore, the practice of signature matching is one of many ballot access restrictions that disproportionately impact minority voters under the guise of voter fraud prevention. Expanding the Election Assistance Commission's mandate to allow it to develop more accurate methods of ballot verification can reduce the risk of erroneously depriving a person of the right to vote. Currently, most voting-rights-related suits are brought under the Fourteenth Amendment as equal protection or substantive due process claims. The few procedural due process claims that are made assert that the right to vote is protected as a liberty interest. The right to vote is more properly framed as a property interest because eligible people are entitled to the right through state statutes. Moreover, an executive agency is well equipped to solve a procedural due process problem because the law demands that the agency's rules and regulations be supported with adequate data and sound reasoning, thereby reducing the risk of erroneous deprivation of the right at stake. Ensuring that every eligible voter who wishes to cast a ballot can do so is essential to maintaining the public's faith in democracy, and thereby essential to maintaining democracy itself.

INTRODUCTION 2041 I. A PROMISE UNFULFILLED?-. SECTION 2, THE GUARANTEE CLAUSE, AND THE GHOST OF MADISON'S CONSTITUTION 2046 II. IGNORING THE SECOND FOUNDING: SECTION 2 AND THE GUARANTEE CLAUSE IN [...]

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. MULTIMEMBER RCV AS A SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF THE COURT-ORDERED MAP A. RCV, Wasted Votes, and Multimember Districts B. The Problem of the Court-Ordered [...], Thus far, legal debates about the rise of ranked-choice voting have centered on whether legislatures can lawfully adopt the practice. This Note turns attention to the courts and the question of remedies. It proposes that courts impose ranked-choice voting as a redistricting remedy. Ranked-choice voting allows courts to cure redistricting violations without also requiring that they draw copious numbers of districts, a process the Supreme Court has described as a "political thicket." By keeping courts away from the fact-specific, often arbitrary judgments involved in redistricting, ranked-choice voting makes for the redistricting remedy that best protects the integrity of the judicial role.

INTRODUCTION The modern era of voting rights may soon be coming to an end. For more than thirty years, courts have agreed on the baseline for comparison in a racial [...], A critical issue in any racial vote-dilution case is the proportionality (or lack thereof) of a minority group's representation: how well (or poorly) minority voters are represented relative to their share of the population. In an important recent opinion, Judge Easterbrook proposed replacing this proportionality benchmark with what we call the "race-blind baseline." Under this approach, minority voters' representation would be compared not to their population share but rather to the fraction of seats they would control if districts were drawn randomly and without the use of racial data. Long critical of the proportionality benchmark, conservative advocates have been quick to embrace Judge Easterbrook's idea. The current Supreme Court, which has already dismantled part of the Voting Rights Act, may also be interested in adopting the race-blind baseline. Yet until now, no one has explored this benchmark's implications: how it would affect minority representation as well as the partisan balance of power. In this Article, we tackle these questions for the first time. We do so using a technique--the random generation of district maps by a computer algorithm--that has become the gold standard in partisan-gerrymandering cases, but that has not yet been systematically deployed in the context of race and redistricting. We find, first, that in most states, a nonracial redisricting process would yield substantially fewer districts where minority voters are able to elect their preferred candidates. Judge Easterbrook's proposal would thus cause a considerable drop in minority representation. Second, we show that the minority opportunity districts that arise when lines are drawn randomly are quite different from the ones that now exist. They are less likely to pack minority voters and more apt to represent them through coalitions with white voters. And third, contradicting the conventional wisdom about the link between minority and partisan representation, we demonstrate that Democrats would not benefit from the elimination of opportunity districts under the race-blind baseline. Rather, in the southern states where the benchmark would have the biggest impact, it is Republicans who would gain a partisan edge. AUTHORS. Jowei Chen is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan. Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos is Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. We are grateful to Chris Elmendorf, Rick Pildes, and the workshop participants at Harvard Law School, the Loyola University Chicago School of Law, Princeton University, the UC Berkeley School of Law, the University of Chicago Law School, the University of Miami Law School, and Vanderbilt Law School for their helpful comments.

"My dear friends: your vote is precious, almost sacred. It is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have to create a more perfect union." Representative John Lewis (1) I. INTRODUCTION [...], Racial oppression in American democracy is older than America itself. While most existing scholarship focuses on the historical disenfranchisement of Black and Latinx voters, this Note tells the story of the voting rights of a smaller, but still noteworthy marginalized American community: Alaska Natives. By contextualizing the history of Alaska Native disenfranchisement within the broader national landscape, this Note seeks to illuminate the ways in which the Alaska Native experience is similar to, and unique from, the experiences of other marginalized American communities. Although this history and present are rife with troubling discrimination, inequity, and non-compliance, this Note is ultimately a hopeful one, concluding that Alaska can--and must--take the burdensome but necessary steps required to fully establish and protect the voting rights of its Native people.

INTRODUCTION I. CONGRESS'S MANDATE: GOOD INTENTIONS AND UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES A. An Extension of the Voting Rights Act B. Paving the Road to Political Dysfunction II. AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK FOR EVALUATING [...]