About Us
Voting – in our country people have tried to rock it, stuff it, defraud it, gerrymander it, disenfranchise it, expand it, turn it out, recount it, and stop it.How we vote, the whole crazy process from months before the polls open to months after they have closed, has increasingly come under the microscope of lawyers, judges, campaigns, and average citizens in the past decade.We’re interested too.
We dedicate this blog to how Americans vote. We will focus our microscope closer than the four year presidential pageantry and the buzz of national campaign finance law coverage on the evening news.It’s voting at the local level, determined by state and local level election laws and practices, that make the difference in our perennial exercise of democracy. Our goal is to cover every state in the union – to examine the particulars of how they’re voting, redistricting, and recounting.We recognize the ambition inherent in such a goal and know we can’t do it on Day One or without help. So we invite you to help us get there. While you will find facts and opinions in our posts, the purpose of this blog is not to advance any political agenda, candidate, or party.We want to inform our readers and ourselves about interesting aspects of election law in our United States. Comments? If you would like to make a comment to our posts, please email wmstateofelections@gmail.com. We won’t put every comment up b/c wise people have advised against doing so. But we will post responsive and considered comments that advance the discussion. Who We Are:
This blog is a run by the students of the Election Law Society at William & Mary Law School.But it wouldn’t last long without help from lots of institutions and great people like our guest bloggers, the Election Law Program and their Advisory Committee, the Institute of Bill of Rights Law, and our neighbors, the National Center for State Courts. If we’re not covering your state, you can help us. We are in the process of developing as broad of coverage as possible with the contributions of students from many different parts of the country. If you are interested in adding to the discussion for your state, ELS invites you to become a contributor to our site. Also, you can send us an individual submission on an state election law issue that you want to address. Please contact us for more information at wmstateofelections@gmail.com. Thanks for your interest and support! Yours, Election Law Society William & Mary Law School Editors Patrick Genova hails from the well-paved streets of Virginia Beach, Virginia. He is a recent graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia where he majored in psychology with a minor in creative writing. While at VCU Patrick was Treasurer and Membership Director of Psi Chi- the International Honor Society in Psychology. His interests include voter equality, and partisan redistricting. When Patrick isn’t blogging he enjoys fine foods and terrible music. John Loughney is a graduate from the University of Maryland with a BA in French. He loves adventure novels, crossword puzzles, playing blues and jazz on his guitar, scuba diving, fencing epee, traveling, and writing love letters in French. He’s an old-school kind of guy who enjoys gin and tonics and quality conversation. He may be the only young person left who doesn’t use Facebook. His role models include Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai, Kermit the Frog, Eric Clapton, and Vladimir Putin. He hopes to practice law internationally, distill his own whiskey, and build custom guitars from scratch. He has experience as a journalist, editor, and translator, and contributes to the Election Law Society his great motivation to eradicate hanging prepositions. Brett Piersma graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a B.A. in History and an M.Ed. in Education. He taught Advanced Placement American Government and European History in California for ten years before attending William and Mary Law School. He has facilitated the California History-Social Science Project, co-authored 11 workbooks for educators, and was a MetLife Fellow for the Teacher’s Network Leadership Institute. He has earned two Teacher’s Network Disseminator Grants, presented at several state and national conferences, and won the UCSB History Associates Outstanding History Instruction award. Among his many interests are the problems of non-voting, the unintentional consequences of political reform, and the impact of federalism and game theory on campaigns. Advisory Editors Amelia Vance graduated magna cum laude from McDaniel College in Maryland. While attending McDaniel, Amelia was Head Delegate for McDaniel’s Model United Nations team, co-president of Allies (McDaniel College’s Gay-Straight Alliance), and participated in Model European Union and the McDaniel College Departments of Theatre and Music. She also worked full time for the Obama campaign in Michigan and North Carolina in fall 2008, and interned with the U.S. State Department and Michigan Representative Sandy Levin. Amelia plans to work in the federal government after law school. Amanda Lowther is originally from Orlando, Florida, although she spent parts of her childhood in rural Alabama and living as an ex-pat in Ulsan, South Korea. She graduated in 2010 from University of North Florida in Jacksonville, Florida, with a B.A. in history, minoring in mass communication and education. Amanda was a member of the University Chorus at American University (where she spent her freshman year) and sang for then-President Bush (and on national television) for TNT’s Christmas in Washington program. At UNF, Amanda was a charter sister and eventually president of the Gamma Chapter of Theta Alpha, a Christian sorority. Amanda was inspired to come to law school by her Media Law and Ethics professor at UNF, who sparked her interest in the First Amendment and other issues in the laws governing media outlets.
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