voting rights – Atiba Ellis

On the Move to Case Western

I will be joining the Case Western Reserve University School of Law faculty effective January 1, 2023. Though this is a major transition, I will nonetheless continue my teaching and scholarship around Election Law, Civil Rights, and Race and the Law.

Academics don’t usually like to “self promote,” especially when it comes to big career moves. But this is news about me that I’m thrilled to share:

I will be joining the Case Western Reserve University School of Law faculty as a tenured full professor effective January 1, 2023. Though this is a major transition, I will nonetheless continue my teaching and scholarship around Election Law, Civil Rights, and Race and the Law.

In particular, I will be engaged two exciting projects in the near future at Case which will expand my research, engagement, and public commentary around voter eligibility, democracy, and race. First, I’m excited to share that I am co-authoring a forthcoming new edition of Derrick Bell’s Race Racism and American Law (with Cheryl Harris, Justin Hansford, Amna Akbar, and Audrey McFarland). The completed book will be forthcoming in the next year or so. Second, I look forward to furthering preliminary work I have done towards a book project around voter suppression and American democracy. Both of these projects will inform the contributions I look forward to making at Case.

While I’m saddened to leave my friends at Marquette and am grateful for the five years of community I have had in Wisconsin, my spouse and I are excited to have the opportunity to be on the ground in Ohio. While she forwards her work on military ethics, I look forward to continuing to teach, lecture, and research around the present and future of American democracy.

Constitution Day Cross-Country Tour

I started my Constitution Day tour at my home institution, Marquette, on Monday. There I spoke to the ACS student chapter about constitutional values and the right to vote. Then I hopped on a plane and headed out to Penn State Law School for another discussion of constitutional values and their relationship to voter suppression. That was quite an adventure, as this tweet shows. The final leg of my tour takes me to the left coast and the University of Puget Sound. In fact, I am writing this post just before my flight to Tacoma. If you are in the Tacoma/Seattle area on Thursday at 5:00 pm, I hope you will join me.

Integrity, Equality, & the Fragility of the Right to Vote: A Constitution Day Lecture
University of Puget Sound
Thursday, Sept. 20 5:00 pm in the Rotunda

Constitution Day Lecture Poster2 At the heart of the modern battles over the American right to vote is a tension between two constitutional values. On one side is the original Constitution and the autonomy it grants the states over the franchise. On the other are the Reconstruction Amendments and the modern demands for equality. With few textual caveats, the Constitution of 1789 gave states near-autonomy to shape the right to vote. Many states did so in a way that reflected an antebellum vision of citizenship rooted in popular (in its time) eighteenth-century notions of status, wealth, and identity—a definition that excluded many. This value of autonomy, and the social ordering underlying it, continues to influence the modern contours of voting rights despite the social transformations the United States has undergone. Yet these movements toward social transformation put the value of autonomy in tension with the value of equality, so that within a generation of the framing of the Constitution, the identity of the American citizen became a contested concept. This contest led to the post-Civil War amendment of the Constitution to include doctrines geared towards citizenry equality and the practice of federal intervention to insure enforcement of those doctrines. Thus, from a modern perspective, equality of citizens has become an important (and some may argue more important) a value as state autonomy. Yet this proposition remains a contested concept measured against the value of state autonomy. Thus, state autonomy (and its use to hold to the arguable residuary of an antebellum social order) and post-Reconstruction equality (and its use to form a new social order) continue to be at odds. This talk will offer perspectives on this competition of values within the right-to-vote context and describe how these tensions play out in the modern-day voter suppression debates.

Constitution Day 2018 — Marquette ACS TODAY at 1:00 PM CDT Room 342

Today — September 17 — is Constitution Day, the day the United States celebrates the signing of the Constitution. As part of celebrating Constitution Day, on or about September 17 educational institutions across the country have programming that discusses the Constitution in some way, shape or form.

The right to vote is of paramount importance to our constitutional framework. us-constitution It is this right that makes the US a democratic form of government, it is this right that is, in the words of the Supreme Court, “preservative of all other rights.”

This week I will be presenting a series of lectures regarding the Constitution and the Right to Vote. First off, today at 1:00 PM CDT here at Marquette University Law School, I will be speaking to the American Constitution Society chapter on the Right to Vote. The talk will be in Room 342 of Eckstein Hall.

This will be the first of three talks I will be giving as part of this Constitution Day lecture tour. Stay tuned for details about my talk tomorrow, September 18 at Penn State Law (University Park) and my talk this Thursday, September 20, at the University of Puget Sound.

On the Alabama Special Senate Election: Meme of Voter Fraud Edition

Late Wednesday night, the campaign to elect Judge Roy Moore to the vacant Alabama Senate seat sought to enjoin the Secretary of State for Alabama from certifying the result of the December 14, 2017 special election where Moore lost to Doug Jones. The basis: allegations of rampant voter fraud apparently among and related to African American voters that need to be investigated. Fortunately for us, an Alabama judge denied the motion to enjoin the certification and dismissed the complaint with prejudice.

It is easy to write this off as a last-ditch attempt of a disgraced candidate to stop the inevitable. But we should reflect on the larger context. Once again, the meme of voter fraud — the rampant supposition without proof that illegal voters (largely voters of color) are distorting our elections through voter impersonation — rears its head again as a direct weapon to suppress the votes for Jones. This use of the specter of voter fraud as weapon against the word of voters, particularly minority voters, is nothing new. And it’s the new normal in the post-Trump world.

As you know, Jones defeated Moore largely due to the significant turnout of the Black vote and anemic moderate Republican vote. The day after the election, I argued that this happened despite voter suppression laws seemingly designed to stymie the transformative power that a fully enabled and mobilized African-American vote would represent.

Yet, the day after the election the meme of voter fraud emerged. In this case, the meme apparently starts publicly here, when Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii), who is, apparently, “a famously outspoken Trump supporter,” tweeted this:

Bill Mitchell's tweet alleging voter fraud in the Alabama Senate special election

And there’s the meme of voter fraud in one tweet — the explanation for the higher turnout that swung the election was not lack of enthusiasm for a candidate who allegedly sought sexual relations with teenage girls, or the Alabaman African-American turnout that rivaled 2012 or 2016 turnout (coupled with lagging moderate white conservative turnout). It was voter impersonation — Mississippian voters impersonating Alabaman voters. The comments to this tweet included accusations of election rigging by outsiders, a “mysterious convoy of black buses,” and something completely random about the War on Christmas.

On December 13, Twitter responded with sarcastic comments like this:

Asia Chloe Brown's tweet responding to Bill Mitchell

But with the December 27 complaint by the Moore campaign, the meme is once again elevated to a last-ditch adversarial tool with the apparent end to subvert the will of the people. Yet the campaign’s complaint basically makes the same argument uttered in the tweets and comments. (1) irregular high turnout by black voters raises suspicion of voter fraud; (2) rumors of voter impersonation voter fraud by outsider voters raise concern; (3) outside partisan involvement (what other people call “politics”) raises suspicion; and (4) statistical analyses by election fraud experts raise suspicion. Moreover, in a quite-odd paragraph 22 of the complaint, we also see the Moore campaign seeking vindication of the truthfulness of their candidate in relation to the allegations that he sought sexual relations with teenage girls:

Paragraph 2 of Roy Moore's complaint

This, somehow, bolsters Judge Moore’s credibility.

Clearly this is a last-ditch effort to forestall the conclusion reached by the Alabama Secretary of State, the Republican Party, President Trump, and, in at least this instance, an Alabama judge — that Jones beat Moore fair and square.

And yet, these allegations should be situated in the larger context of the evolution of the meme of voter fraud into a political weapon designed to distort elections, which started as long ago as 2000 in the hotly contested race between then-Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri and the late governor of Missouri, Mel Carnahan. In the face of a loss to a dead man, the Ashcroft camp argued that dead voters in Missouri tipped the balance. Nothing came of this as Ashcroft went on to be Attorney General and, through investigations by his Department of Justice, put in-person voter impersonation voter fraud on the map. And this leant credence to the movement for voter identification laws.

More famously and recently, President Trump argued via Twitter that the participation of “illegal voters” (read, illegal immigrants) were the reason why he lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes. A year later, President Trump has offered nothing in the way of proof to support this allegation. Also, in the election of 2016, Pat McCrory, who lost the governor’s office in North Carolina to then-Attorney General Roy Cooper, alleged a mass conspiracy of voter fraud denied him the election. Like Moore, McCrory filed objections and when those objections were denied, he sought a recount. The recount, and a subsequent audit by the North Carolina Board of Elections showed few irregularities, including several hundred miscast votes by former felons, some double voting, and one — ONE — vote out of the 4.5 million cast in the North Carolina 2016 gubernatorial race that could have been forestalled by voter identification laws. Voting errors are to be expected, and in North Carolina, those errors certainly did not amount to a grand conspiracy by the Democrats — what McCrory alleged — to steal the election.

Moore’s post-election litigation in the face of the door closing on his campaign fits this same pattern. And, true to form, a judge has declined to equate rumor and innuendo with proof — or even concern — sufficient to stop the mechanisms of democracy from working. The influence of political outsiders, the rumors of black votes being bussed in from Mississippi, and higher than expected African American turnout in predominantly African American counties (which, by the way, was at the same rate as for Clinton last year, as I noted earlier) does not equate to a mass conspiracy of voter fraud.

Alleging a mass conspiracy of voter fraud with nothing but rumor is a bad play. No major state or national election has been reversed because of the meme of voter fraud. Yet it persists because it is a political statement. It is a politics that exists around the idea that the meme is real, and therefore such subversion ought to be opposed. This kind of paranoia can motivate voters. And so, it becomes the equivalent of a party line.

On another level, this use of the meme of voter fraud to attempt to thwart an election is really another battle in the war over American identity. In Alabama, we saw the power of the black vote met with unbelievable conspiracy theories. To make such a claim of voter fraud without tangible proof is to engage in identity politics of the worse kind. It is to delegitimize the votes of citizens because of a set presumption against their citizens’ worthiness through complaining about their votes’ validity. This parrots our too tragic history of violence against minority voting by legislative means.

But it is also the old tactics of voter suppression coming into their own in the era of Trump. This won’t be the last you will hear of the meme of voter fraud.

Give Us the Ballot: On the Alabama Special Senate Election, Voter Suppression, and the Black Vote

In May 1957, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a landmark speech in Washington, DC. This address, entitled, “Give Us the Ballot” was King’s vision about how Black voting power could transform the apartheid South. In particular, he said: “Give us the ballot, and we will fill our legislative halls with men of goodwill and send … Continue reading “Give Us the Ballot: On the Alabama Special Senate Election, Voter Suppression, and the Black Vote”

“Give us the ballot, and we will fill our legislative halls with men of goodwill and send to the sacred halls of Congress men who will not sign a ‘Southern Manifesto’ because of their devotion to the manifesto of justice.”

Maybe we had a foretaste of King’s foresight as we watched the African American vote defeat Judge Roy Moore and elect Doug Jones to the U.S. Senate from Alabama, a state at the heart of Trump conservatism. And maybe we also saw a glimpse of how an empowered Black vote can be a threat to establishments that rely on their marginalization.

But let me confess up front that I predicted Moore would win—and win outside of the margin of error–because of how Alabama had been dominated by Trump in the 2016 election and how Alabamans had elected Moore twice to statewide office (after he had been removed once and suspended once from his judgeship for violating the U.S. Constitution).

And I also knew that Alabama’s strict voter identification law, its efforts to make such identification less available, and its efforts to modulate (but not eradicate) the collateral consequences of criminal convictions that bar voting all made Alabama a focal point of the voter suppression wars.

Thus, this election was both a referendum on the divisive gender and racial politics of Donald Trump and a test of the ability of the Black community to surmount the effects of voter suppression. And I was a pessimist about both.

In a world absent the allegations that Moore had romantically pursued teenage girls while a District Attorney, absent his Islamophobic stances, and absent the prominence given to various reactionary claims, e.g., all the amendments after the Tenth are “problematic,” I probably would have been right. But all this came to light, and it demobilized white voters and energized Black voters. And that cost Moore the election.

Exit polls reveal that Black voters overwhelmingly voted for Jones and white voters voted overwhelming for Moore. Here’s the data as summarized by the Washington Post:

Roy Moore Doug Jones Alabama senate election exit poll chart from the Washington Post

This was a perfect storm to cause the defeat of Trump’s chosen candidate in the heart of the Trump campaign’s base.

But the data makes two key points: first, the base of white Republican voters voted overwhelmingly for Moore despite the rhetoric and the accusations. This echoes the outcome of the 2016 election. However, fewer moderate Republicans voted for Moore; they instead supported Jones. Had there been more Republican party unity, or a more respectable candidate, the Republicans would probably have won. And presumably, in the next election cycle, Alabama Republicans will unite behind a more respectable candidate.

But this is not to deny the strength of Black voting power. African American voters were consistent with their performance in 2016 in opposing the Trump-Moore politics. This to me is a glimmer of King’s prophesy of how African Americans would use the vote to oppose white supremacy in the name of justice. They compared Moore to Jones and selected the person who they thought was “a man of goodwill.”

This happened despite the post-Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder era of voter suppression to use voter ID laws, racial gerrymandering, and structural efforts to make it more difficult for poor black Alabaman voters. I have previously discussed Alabama’s voter identification laws and the strong risk that such IDs would be unavailable to poor black voters due to DMV closings in the Black Belt (the counties in Alabama which are over 80% black and where there is high poverty). In a recent academic paper, I extend these arguments to talk about how there is a little-discussed structural problem when it comes to failing to prioritize the right to vote—and that structural misgiving can have voter suppression consequences. I have also discussed the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Alabama legislature’s effort to racially gerrymander state districts to pack black voters and preserve white Republican political power.

In short, Alabama is a front line of the post-Shelby County voter suppression wars.

Black voters turned out despite the barriers, and the efforts of civil rights groups to overcome the barriers deserve praise. Between that and the white voters who damned him by few votes, Moore lost.

It is tempting to argue that Black voters’ ability to organize and vote despite voter suppression means voter suppression claims are overblown. That reasoning is faulty. Being able to surmount an illegitimate difficulty doesn’t make the difficulty any less illegitimate. Moreover, numerous federal courts have used the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to strike down voter identification laws because of their potentially disparate discriminatory impact.

The evidence brought in court included academic studies, the documentation of the intent to suppress minority votes, and the statistical risk of disparate effects. It all supports the claim that strict voter identification laws, arbitrary and last-minute changes in the timing of voting, and arbitrary enforcement have been used in concert to unnecessarily intimidate and unduly burden the right to vote (rather than making voting more efficient or secure). This battle continues in Alabama and elsewhere to secure the legacy of the right to vote.

King foresaw what that legacy could be. He knew that the African American electorate could transform the South if voter suppression barriers were removed and African Americans brought the vote to bear. Roy Moore’s defeat by African American voters gave us a glimpse of this transformative power. But it’s also a reminder that the voter suppression war can still be lost.

And it also forces us to wonder anew if this new era of voter suppression exists because of fear of the Black ballot.

Cross-posted on Race and the Law Prof Blog.

Transformations

While on sabbatical this spring, in addition to beginning my book project, I had the opportunity to work on two papers regarding race and voting in the outgrowth of the 2016 election. While these papers take different methodological approaches, they both address the problems of race in politics in the Era of Trump and how race come to shape political considerations in twenty-first century America.

We live in an era that aspires to put the Jim Crow legacy behind us, and yet racial discrimination continues to dominate our political, legal, and cultural conversations. Recognizing that legacy and thinking seriously about how to end it is the dominant theme of these two papers.

Our doctrines mandating antidiscrimination in the law of politics are designed to protect the minority from domination by a racial majority. While this concept is easy to state, the hard questions arise when politicians improperly consider race in politics, as they have in the wake of Shelby County v. Holder. Race consciousness is impossible to avoid in tasks like calibrating voting qualifications and drawing electoral districts, but courts are currently having to determine when the act of drawing the rules of voting is an act that places an impermissible disadvantage on a racial minority in order to maintain one’s political advantage. This problem lies at the heart of my paper, When Political Domination Becomes Racial Discrimination: NAACP v. McCrory and the Inextricable Problem of Race in Politics. Where doctrine has grappled with political racial domination, with the election of Donald Trump, American politics seems to have entered an era of the open re-emergence of white identity politics. But this centering of whiteness is nothing new, and its enduring power comes in part from the fact that its justifications and subordinations are often explained away. And thus, in the words of Sara Ahmed (who’s article prompted the CUNY Law Review’s publication of the collection in which my article appears) racial domination is explained away as “something else.” In Normalizing Domination, I bring this insight to bear in the law of politics.

Article Abstracts and Full-Text Links

South Carolina Law Review logo When Political Domination Becomes Racial Discrimination: NAACP v. McCrory and the Inextricable Problem of Race in Politics, South Carolina Law Review Vol. 68 (2017).
In North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP v. McCrory, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck down North Carolina’s 2013 omnibus voting law due to its discriminatory effect and the fact it was passed with an intent to abridge the ability of African Americans to vote. This decision represents a landmark victory for voting rights advocates against strict voter identification laws and other similar regulations that foster voter suppression. It also represents a remarkable and extraordinary use of the Arlington Heights doctrine to address the race or politics problem in election law. This Article examines the McCrory decision with an eye towards parsing out how the court arrived at this due care approach. It then confronts the uncertain future of McCrory considering the difficulties in distinguishing impermissible racial motives and permissible political motives, the uncertain judicial future of the post-Shelby County Voting Rights Act, and the academic literature disfavoring race-conscious remedies. The Article concludes optimistically by noting that whether McCrory represents a momentary victory in the larger attack against the Voting Rights Act or whether it stands as good law for the foreseeable future, the opinion offers a well-reasoned approach that accomplishes the ends of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act through offering a race-conscious intersectional approach grounded in the reality of voter suppression in North Carolina.

City University of New York Law Review logo
Normalizing Domination, CUNY Law Review Vol. 20: Iss. 20 (2017).
In the 2016 election, a sufficient majority of white voters in key battleground states elected Donald Trump president. In voting for Trump, these voters, as part of the minority of voters that supported Trump, had to, through their vote, either embrace or ignore his racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic rhetoric. Though it is impossible to know which, their votes nonetheless served to “normalize domination”—that is, their act of legitimizing Trump’s rhetoric made the absurd or incendiary commonplace and acceptable. Even before the 2016 election, institutions and individuals have normalized of the ideology of white supremacy by camouflaging it with other normative values while at the same time allowing it to flourish and reinvent itself. It asserts an epistemology of failing to know racism–a key component of what scholars know as post-racialism – as a means of achieving colorblindness. The late great Derrick Bell recognized how the underlying structure of American politics is defined by domination that embraces white identity politics as central. Thus, the institutions that continue American democracy seek to organize the American political and legal structure to protect such domination. This short essay focuses on this problem through a brief examination of the American law of politics and argues for a new race consciousness can be used as a compass to understand the structure of political domination and thus subvert such domination to create an egalitarian society.

Keeping Up With Atiba: October 2017 Edition

This has been a busy fall semester for me, and it’s only the second week of October! For this fall, I am the Boden Visiting Professor of Law at Marquette University Law School. As part of my position I am participating in several local speaking events over the next few weeks. If you are in the Milwaukee area, I would love to see you at one of these events. If you are reading this post from afar, several of my talks will be available online (see below for details).

Lecture on Gill v. Whitford
American Constitution Society
Thursday, October 12, 12:00 pm
Eckstein Hall, Room 363, Marquette University

I will be discussing the Gill v. Whitford case that was argued last week before the U.S. Supreme Court. I will also discuss how gerrymandering poses significant issues for the right to vote in the United States. Event details here.

What Are Athlete’s Rights? Part 1 – Activism
National Sports Law Institute of Marquette University Law School’s Annual Conference: Maintaining the Integrity & Commercial Value of Sports While Protecting Athlete’s Rights
Friday, October 13, 3:05 – 4:15 pm
Eckstein Hall, Room 144

I have the privilege of participating in a panel discussion on athlete’s activism rights with both legal scholars and practicing sports law attorneys. In particular, I will be discussing the First Amendment context in which protests by athletes occurs and how the recent #TakeAKnee protest and similar contemporary activism against racism has shifted this discussion and unearthed underlying American dilemmas regarding race. Learn more at the conference website.

TEDxOshkosh performance: Using Memes to Break Out of Voter Fraud Talk
Saturday, November 4, 8 am – 6 pm
Grand Opera House in Oshkosh, WI

Voter fraud talk has dominated our last two elections, and policy makers and voters have divergent views of the problem. My talk will show us how the lens of memes can help us focus on the first principles of voting and the evidence around what makes voting effective.

To learn more and to register visit the TEDxOshkosh 2017 website. If you can’t attend, my talk will be available on the website after the event and I will post a link here and on Twitter and Facebook when it becomes available.

Lecture on Civil Rights issues
American Constitution Society
November 9, 12:15 pm
Marquette University. Building and room TBA.

The recent resurgence of the rhetoric of white supremacy and the open reversal of recent gains in antidiscrimination doctrine by the current administration has illustrated the importance of civil rights doctrine and the fragility of the constitutional consensus around American equality. At Marquette Law this semester, I have been teaching a course entitled “Contemporary Perspectives on Civil Rights,” which has explored through the lens of race the key principles behind this antidiscrimination consensus and the tensions in their application across a variety of legal contexts. My talk will explore some of these key principles and tensions and the likelihood of their continued applicability in the Era of Trump.

On the Issues: Voting Rights
November 16, 12:15 pm
Eckstein Hall, Marquette University

I will be speaking with Molly McGrath of the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project. Together, we will discuss how voting laws have changed in recent years, and what impact those changes might be having on our elections. Since the 2010 election, more than 20 states have enacted new voting laws. They range from photo ID requirements, to limits on early voting, to changes in voter registration rules. Supporters of the changes say the goal of the legislation is to guarantee the integrity of elections and prevent voter fraud. But opponents, such as McGrath and myself, say the new laws make it harder to vote, and have a disproportionate impact on minority communities.

Event is free, but registration is required. The talk might be live-streamed, so check back here and on my social media accounts for details.

Keeping Up With Atiba: SEALS 2017 Tropical Storm Edition

First of all—I’m happy to be back on the blog and sharing my work. I’ve taken time away from sabbatical, and over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing big events and projects coming up. But I wanted to kick off this post-sabbatical post by sharing what I’m up to at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools 2017 Annual Conference (SEALS).

So, I’m writing this from 30,000 feet as I look out of the window over the Florida coastline. I can see ocean, beach, and clouds, and my first reaction is—sun, shore, and scholarship—three of my favorite things.

My second thought: I’m flying into a tropical storm!

The delays caused by the storm have been minor, the storm should cross over today and move out tomorrow, so I’m hoping it will not dampen what promises to be an exciting conference. (And frankly, after attending these for years, I thought it only a matter of time before hurricane season caught up with a conference usually held in Florida in August!)

I wanted to highlight specifically the discussion groups and panels I’ll be involved in—if you can make it through the rain, stop by and dry off.

My SEALS Conference Schedule, In Brief

Monday, July 31

3:00 PM: Beyond the Socratic Method in Trusts and Estates

Thursday, August 3

9:00 AM: Reforming the Presidential Selection Process
1:00 PM: Inside the Mind of the Outside Reviewer

Saturday, August 5

Book Projects and Publication in Election Law

SEALS: The Details

Today – Monday, July 31 – at 3:00 PM, I will be participating in a discussion group on teaching innovation in Trusts & Estates Law. In particular, I hope to discuss my work regarding how I have used social media and outside-the-box teaching materials to enliven my intro Trusts & Estates class. Here’s the abstract:

WORKSHOP ON TRUSTS AND ESTATES
Discussion Group: Beyond the Socratic Method in Trusts and Estates
Many trusts and estates courses have historically focused their teaching techniques on the traditional Socratic method, and much of trusts and estates scholarship has focused on the development of doctrine within the field itself. This discussion group will explore pedagogy that is expanding the ways of teaching and studying trusts and estates and related doctrines. The discussion group will address: 1) innovations in teaching, including both skills and doctrine; and 2) incorporating concepts from Elder Law, Family Law, Property, and Professional Responsibility into Trusts and Estates — and vice versa.

I will be presenting at two events on Thursday, August 3:

First, at 9:00 AM, I will be discussing my proposal for a National Primary Day (to unify all primaries on one day) as a means to improve the presidential nomination and selection process. This is part of the Constitutional Law Workshop sponsored by SEALS:

WORKSHOP ON CONSTITUTIONAL LAW
Discussion Group: Reforming the Presidential Nomination Process
This panel discusses the nature of the presidential nomination process and how it might be changed, improved, or reformed. Presidential candidates are winnowed though party primaries, and this winnowing process is controlled by the two major political parties, receiving little influence from ordinary voters and citizens. The timing of our presidential primaries, how our party primaries are conducted, how party convention delegates are chosen, and how the votes of delegates are counted are all issues that parties decide on their own. This panel examines the presidential nomination process, how it unfolds, the role that political parties play in it, and how American citizens might have more of an influence over it going forward.

Second, at 1:00 PM, I will be discussing the Promotion and Tenure process on a panel entitled “Inside the Mind of the Outside Reviewer.” The goal of our workshop is to give attendees a perspective on the process of and importance of the external review process to the overall process of gaining tenure and promotion. Read more in the abstract:

NEW SCHOLARS WORKSHOP
Inside the Mind of the Outside Reviewer
In the promotion and tenure process, mentors stress to junior faculty the need to create a scholarly agenda, to find an original niche in their field, and to place their work well. However, what is not often discussed is one very important data point in the tenure decision, the external reviewer. This panel will discuss the role of the external reviewer in the tenure process, the expectations that external reviewers have, and the strategies that pre-tenure faculty can implement early on to succeed in this critical part of the tenure evaluation process.

Saturday, August 5 at 1:00 PM, I’ll be moderating a discussion group on current book projects in the Election Law field. (I will be presenting my book proposal on voter fraud ideology and American democracy).

DISCUSSION GROUP
Book Projects and Publication in Election Law
As the recent election cycle has shown, issues surrounding election law remain germane to the public concerning the American political process. Election law, as a field, has continued to address these issues through not only scholarship and public intellectual engagement, but also through historical and contemporary book-length works that have examined key cases and issues in the field. This discussion group explores the development of this branch of book-length election law scholarship and provide an opportunity for election law scholars currently working on book-length projects to discuss their current work.

And in the coming days and weeks, I’ll write more about my book and other ongoing projects (including my Boden Visiting Professorship at Marquette University and [new addition] my upcoming TEDx talk this November. Stay tuned!

Keeping Up With Atiba: MAPOC Edition

I am presenting today and tomorrow at the twenty-second Mid-Atlantic People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference. It is being held at the George Washington University Law School in Washington, DC, and the theme of the conference is “Legal and Political Change During the Obama Era.”

Today at 2:00 PM, I commented on a work-in-progress by Professor Khaled Beyhoun of the University of Detroit-Mercy School of Law. His work is entitled “Acting Muslim.” Professor Beyhoun already has a tremendous national and international profile as an expert commentator on Islamophobia, critical theory, and religious freedom. His work in progress promises to be a substantial contribution to the literature on the intersectional nature of racialized religious discrimination, and an important intellectual and litigation tool in the post-Obama era.

Trump tweet on investigating voter fraud

Tomorrow at 3:15 PM, I will be speaking on the fourth and final plenary panel of the conference, “Election 2016: Revelation sand Responses.” I will address what has become an extremely timely topic, “Voter Fraud as Nemesis: Fragility, Distortion, and the 2016 Election.” In this talk, I will discuss the President’s ongoing propaganda campaign asserting the existence of voter fraud by “illegal” voters (notwithstanding any evidence to support his claims) and its interrelationship with the identity politics of post-racialism. This, read through the larger dynamic of voter suppression illustrated by recent voter identification cases like NAACP v. McCrory and Veasey v. Abbott, illustrates a new era of racialized and class-focused political domination. Like others who have commented on Trump’s motives and the endgame of these voter fraud claims, e.g., Professor Erika Wilson’s commentary in yesterday’s Washington Post, I will draw out how this narrative serves to enable voter suppression. However, unlike other recent commentators, I will frame this discussion through the lens of meme theory (an approach I developed in my paper, The Meme of Voter Fraud), to further develop an account of the intersectional nature of this deployment of the voter fraud meme in the post-Shelby County era of voting rights recalibration.

Keeping Up With Atiba: New Years Edition

Happy New Year, and welcome to the first Keeping Up With Atiba installment of 2017! This month I am presenting at two conferences, and I hope you will be able to join me.

Association of American Law Schools (AALS)

This weekend I will be moderating the Minority Groups section’s panel, “Presidential Politics and the Future of the Supreme Court: Post-Election Reflections and Forecasts for the ‘Post-Racial’ Post-Obama White House” (Co-Sponsored by Constitutional Law & Election Law). This promises to be a lively and important discussion. aals-meeting-2017

Description
The 2016 presidential campaign has been characterized as one of the most contentious and surprising in history. This program explores how the landscape of presidential politics has uncovered deep divides among the American population. According to some, the gender, class, and racial representation of the presidential candidates added multidimensional complexity to the task of deciphering the contemporary effects of this divisiveness. The long battle to the White House has ignited heated national conversations on race, immigration, and counterterrorism policy, as well as debates on gun, voting, and reproductive rights. Moreover, Justice Scalia’s death at the height of the campaign season opened the door to an examination of the role of campaign and identity politics in the Supreme Court nomination process. Distinguished experts on race and the law, election law, national security, constitutional law, and immigration, among other areas, offer their reflections on the 2016 presidential election and the new administration, particularly Supreme Court nomination process and what we might expect (or hope for) under the new administration.

Location
Saturday, January 7, 10:30 am – 12:15 pm
Hilton San Francisco Union Square
Continental Ballroom 6, Ballroom Level, Hilton

Speakers
Jennifer M. Chacon, University of California, Irvine School of Law
Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Duke University School of Law
Bertrall Ross, University of California, Berkeley School of Law
Shirin Sinnar, Stanford Law School
Franita Tolson, Florida State University College of Law

Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

For the second year in a row, I will participate in Washington and Lee University’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day events. I will be part of a panel on voting rights entitled “The 2016 Presidential Election: Voting Rights in a ‘Post-Racial’/’Post-Civil Rights’ Era.”

Location
Monday, January 16, 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
Millhiser Moot Courtroom, Washington and Lee University School of Law

Speakers
Chris Seaman (Moderator), Associate Professor of Law, Washington and Lee University School of Law
Atiba Ellis, Professor of Law, West Virginia University College of Law
Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Professor of Law and Harry T. Ice Faculty Fellow, Indiana University Maurer School of Law
Mark Rush, Director of International Education and Waxberg Professor of Politics and Law, Washington and Lee University School of Law

Mid-Atlantic People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference (MAPOC)

Later this month I will participate in this year’s MAPOC conference “Legal and Political Change During the Obama Era.” I will speak as part of the panel “Election 2016: Revelations and Responses” where I am looking MAPOC Convention graphic of Obama forward to reflecting on the open, online class discussion I held at West Virginia University the day
after the the presidential
election.

Location
Saturday, January 28, 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm
The George Washington University Law School, Washington DC

Integrity, Equality, & the Fragility of the Right to Vote: A Constitution Day Lecture University of Puget Sound Thursday, Sept. 20 5:00 pm in the Rotunda

Article Abstracts and Full-Text Links

My SEALS Conference Schedule, In Brief

SEALS: The Details

Integrity, Equality, & the Fragility of the Right to Vote: A Constitution Day Lecture
University of Puget Sound
Thursday, Sept. 20 5:00 pm in the Rotunda