The Litigation Landscape Concerning Voter List Maintenance
The Ohio State University’s Contribution to the MEDSL Project
The MIT Election Data and Science Lab helps highlight new research and interesting ideas in election science, including through research grants under our ongoing Practice-Oriented Research program.
Our post today comes from Matthew Cooper and Steven Huefner, professors at the Election Law Program at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, based on their ongoing research funded by this program. The information and opinions expressed in this column represent their own research, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the MIT Election Lab or MIT.
For over two decades, a core activity of the Election Law Program at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law (Election Law at OSU, or ELOSU) has been to maintain a database of major court cases involving matters of election law (the Major Pending Cases database). Building on that expertise, ELOSU is delighted to be participating in the MIT Election Data Science Lab project examining how U.S. states are maintaining their voter registration lists and how states are responding to challenges to those list maintenance systems. ELOSU’s contribution will be to analyze the body of judicial controversies that have raised issues involving voter list maintenance over the past two decades.
ELOSU began its work on the MEDSL project by identifying and cataloging approximately 300 cases litigated in state and federal courts throughout the United States since 2003 in which some aspect of a state or local election administration’s creation, updating, management, or use of its voter registration database has been at issue. In this phase of the project, a team of OSU law students working under the direction of Professor Matt Cooper, an ELOSU Senior Fellow, has been reviewing search results from the Bloomberg Law database and recording relevant information in a master spreadsheet. The information recorded has included: the parties to each case, the court and case number, the date filed, a summary of the legal issues, a summary of the court disposition, a description of any expert reports or other evidence submitted, a summary of any appellate proceedings, and additional notes. In this phase, which is now almost complete, ELOSU also has incorporated some redundancy in the form of students checking the work of other students to reduce the chance of overlooking any relevant cases.
The project is now turning to the second phase, in which the ELOSU team will analyze and catalogue the nature of the specific legal challenges to voter list maintenance practices brought in each case. In this phase, the ELOSU team will focus on the evidence, including expert reports, presented to the courts to support or refute the specific claims made concerning voter list maintenance, and on how the court or the parties resolved these claims.
After cataloging these legal challenges, the underlying evidence, and the outcomes, ELOSU expects in the third phase of the project to develop a factual assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of these state voter list maintenance systems, as measured in terms of their ability to withstand neutral judicial scrutiny. Using the same database, the project also plans to assess the legal and political crosswinds currently affecting these systems, and to distinguish between specious and valid claims. In all these ways, the project aims to achieve immediate impact by equipping practitioners and policymakers with the tools and understanding both to improve the security and accuracy of voter lists and, when appropriate, to defend list maintenance systems against unfounded and destabilizing attacks. The project also looks forward to integrating these lessons from litigation history with the results of the various additional research teams pursuing other dimensions of voter list maintenance practices.
