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Tiered Personhood and the Excluded Voter: The Jurisprudence of Disenfranchisement in Twenty-First Century America
No full textThe modern discourse critiquing vote denial policies in the United States has taken two distinct paths. The first and more recent path has been to critique the effects of legislation like voter identification laws, narrowed early voting opportunities, and similar enactments to hyper-regulate the voting process, effecting, as some argue, the ability for the poor, the elderly, and minorities to vote. The second strain of this voter suppression discourse relates to the express exclusion of persons who have been convicted of felonies from the exercise of the franchise. While both vote denial by effect or by express disenfranchisement have raised numerous civil rights concerns, few scholars have treated these issues in tandem or examined the ideological interconnections between these doctrinally distinct voter suppression doctrines. This essay will use the lens of “tiered personhood” to conceptualize the dual aspects of the voter denial problem as a unified phenomenon of political subordination intended to exclude certain persons from the political community. This essay argues that this voter suppression dynamic creates statuses as between persons based upon the ability to exercise complete or less than complete constitutional rights driven by an ideology of exclusion of those deemed “un-worthy” of full membership in the political community, thus excluding those persons from full citizenship. With the problem framed in this way, the essay will briefly use this lens to analyze the disparate treatment of convicted felons and the disparate impact of voter suppression legislation as parallel mechanisms that serve the same end — the maintenance of an American political underclass. The essay will then propose a sketch of a new model for subverting this underclass dynamic — a communitarian re-conception of American political community based on a premise of inclusion within that community rather than a dynamic of exclusion
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Normalizing Domination
Full text linkIn 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
The Cost of the Vote: Poll Taxes, Voter Identification Laws, and the Price of Democracy
Full text linkThis article argues that photo identification laws represent a continuation of the use of economic forces as a way to block people of lower economic status from participation in the electorate. These laws are similar to other restrictions on the franchise, such as property requirements and poll taxes, because the rules required the voter to demonstrate the ability to meet an economic test – the ability to show a certain property value, the ability to pay a tax, or the ability to obtain a photo ID. The potential effect of such photo-voter identification laws is that the voters at the lowest end of the socioeconomic scale are effectively excluded from voting because they are the least able to afford the cost of voting exacted by the law. This article contends that this type of exclusion is antithetical to the nature of democracy and ultimately constitutes a tyranny of the majority against the minority at the lowest level of socioeconomic status. This article begins by providing an overview of American photo-identification laws and discussing the modern cost of voting to the voter. Then it will discuss the history of voter access in the United States, with a focus on Harper v. Virginia, which held that the ability to pay a poll tax had no relationship with the right to vote and, the paper contends, articulated a vision of the right to vote unencumbered by class bias. The paper will then consider the potential socioeconomic impact of photo identification laws upon voters and how those impacts are similar to historical class-based discrimination. It will examine how the courts have been indifferent to the costs levied upon on the right to vote by voter identification laws – most recently in the Supreme Court’s decision in Crawford v. Marion County – and how that indifference tracks the conflict over the socioeconomic burdens of voting raised in Harper. Finally, the paper will recommend how to reframe the standards articulated in Harper to take into account this structural socioeconomic bias inherent in, and damaging to, the right to vote
The Dignity Problem of American Election Integrity
No full textThis Article argues that these positions about the right to vote may also be framed as concerns about the dignity of citizens (and of institutions) within the political process. Dignity as a philosophical and jurisprudential concept is an admittedly amorphous idea. Dignity may mean many things, yet its subjectivity is often the result of applying a broad idea—that there is intrinsic worth in the human and that such intrinsic human worth ought to be represented in the way that humans treat each other. While this concept is applicable in a number of interpersonal contexts (particularly, the contexts which speak to human rights), this paper will seek to explore it specifically within the concept of the right to vote. That is, when it comes to the right to vote, there is–or should be–a conception of dignity that underlies the ways the process is questions, including the aforementioned contemporary controversies
Bug or Feature: The Long-Intertwined Legacy of Disinformation, Voting, and Race
No full textDiscussion of Richard L. Hasen, Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy (2020)
Polley v. Radcliffe: A New Way to Address an Original Sin
No full textThis essay recites the history of the Polley v. Ratcliff litigation and interrogates its relevance for modern considerations of racial inequality in America. The Polley case began in 1850s with the wrongful kidnapping of the children of Mr. Peyton Polley, an emancipated African slave who lived in Ohio. The litigation continued from 1851 to 1859 without clear resolution. Although this incident has been discussed at length by historians, the litigation itself came to a remarkable conclusion on April 6, 2012. On that day, some 162 years after this Dred Scott-era kidnapping, Judge Darrell Pratt of the Circuit Court of Wayne County, West Virginia, entered a decree declaring that Mr. Polley wrongfully kidnapped children — Harrison, Louisa, and Anna — “were, and are, FREE PERSONS as of March 22, 1859.
This declaration represented a monumental historical moment in West Virginia history, and it represents, as this essay will argue, an opportunity to consider the question of what our societal response to slavery and racism has been over time and what it ought to be in the twenty-first century. The essay considers the various modes through which Americans look at the history of slavery and race-race consciousness, racial reparations, and post racialism — and then it argues that the Polley litigation represents a different model for considering the American history of race, a model akin to truth and reconciliation
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Race, Class, and Structural Discrimination: On Vulnerability in the Political Process
No full textThe goal of this paper is to illustrate this racially intersecting lockout problem and to argue for the importance of attending to this problem within the context of the law of democracy. Specifically, this paper will illuminate the heart of this problem: the intersecting vulnerabilities that poor people of color suffer from within the political and economic process. Such vulnerability lies at the heart of both the historical and present-day discrimination within the franchise (and the structures that affect it). This paper focuses on the idea that vulnerability to the majoritarian forces and inequities in the political process ought to serve as a factor in defining the harms that minority populations suffer within the political process. The contention here is that such vulnerability premised on the confluence of historical factors such as race and socioeconomic status creates a particular risk that the interests of such groups will not be met and that the people within these groups will not be able to participate fully within the political process
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