Browsing by Author "Pitts, Michael J."

Now showing 1 - 10 of 23
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    Against Residency Requirements
    (2014) Pitts, Michael J.; Robert H. McKinley School of Law
    This article argues against laws which mandate that candidates and elected officials reside in a particular geographic area as a condition of election or office-holding (i.e., residency requirements). The article considers various rationales for residency requirements — some of which have been endorsed by federal and state courts — and concludes that those rationales by-and-large do not hold up under scrutiny. The article also considers the costs of residency requirements and concludes that the costs of such requirements outweigh any purported benefits. The article then ponders why residency requirements have continued to exist despite weak justifications for their use, and concludes that residency requirements likely persist because they insulate incumbent partisans from electoral competition. As such, a politics as markets approach might suggest the elimination of residency requirements.
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    Defining "Partisan" Law Enforcement
    (2007) Pitts, Michael J.
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    Documenting Disfranchisement: Voter Identification During Indiana's 2008 General Election
    (2009) Pitts, Michael J.; Neumann, Matthew D.
    This article presents and examines previously unavailable data regarding the extent to which Indiana’s photo identification requirement prevented prospective voters from casting a countable ballot at the 2008 general election. The article presents research that shows more than a thousand persons went to the polls and cast a provisional ballot due to a lack of valid identification and that the vast majority of those provisional ballots went uncounted. Thus, this research helps fill a gap in the plaintiffs’ case in Crawford v. Marion County Election Bd, 128 S. Ct. 1610 (2008) where the plaintiffs challenging photo identification were criticized for their failure to generate firm evidence of disfranchisement. In addition, when viewed in conjunction with previous research from Indiana’s 2008 primary election, this research provides the first opportunity to search for trends in the operation of photo identification. Moreover, the research presented here allows for a comparison of the impact of Indiana’s voter identification law with the impact of voter identification laws in other States and shows Indiana to be among the Nation’s leaders in rejecting provisional ballots for lack of valid identification. Finally, the research presented here has implications for the larger debate generated by Yale’s Heather Gerken about creating a Democracy Index that leads to data-driven election reform because it demonstrates the barriers to gathering data about photo identification and, therefore, highlights what might be a significant hurdle to creating a viable, credible Democracy Index.
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    Empirically Measuring the Impact of Photo ID Over Time and Its Impact on Women
    (2014) Pitts, Michael J.; Robert H. McKinney School of Law
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    Introduction: A Symposium on the Law of Democracy
    (2010) Pitts, Michael J.
    This brief essay is the introduction to the Indiana Law Review's symposium issue on the law of democracy. The issue contains articles in the areas of campaign finance, election administration, and voting rights. The introduction provides context for the symposium and briefly summarizes the articles written by Heather Gerken (keynote), Edward Foley, Nathaniel Persily, Daniel Tokaji, Angelo Ancheta, Kareem Crayton, Michael Kang, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, and Allison Hayward.
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    Judicial Enforcement of a Grand Election Bargain
    (2016) Pitts, Michael J.
    This Article seeks to combine these strains of the literature to argue for a world where, at the very least, a state's adoption of a strict photo identification law, such as Indiana's photo identification law, would result in that state's advance registration requirement being declared unconstitutional by either the federal or state judiciary. In arguing for this result, this Article endorses Professor Tokaji's grand bargain as a matter of policy, but remains skeptical that such a grand bargain could ultimately be forged in Congress (or even at the state legislative level). This Article also sympathizes with those commentators who desire the judiciary to enjoin advance voter registration requirements, but views very broad judicial intervention as unlikely. Instead, this Article advocates for a more limited judicial role that might ultimately serve as a way station to ultimately achieving a system of election administration that universally embraces Election Day registration.