Turning to the States: Why Voting Rights Advocates Should Bring Voter ID Challenges to State Courts and How to Identify a Friendly Forum—Lessons from the Post-Crawford Decisions
Carolyn F. Rice * | 24.2 | Comment | Citation: Carolyn F. Rice, Turning to the States: Why Voting Rights Advocates Should Bring Voter ID Challenges to State Courts and How to Identify a Friendly Forum—Lessons from the Post-Crawford Decisions, 24 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 541 (2022).
Voter fraud has never been significantly documented in the United States. Yet on January 6, 2021, hundreds of protestors stormed the United States Capitol to protest election results that they believed to be fraudulent. As Carolyn F. Rice describes in this Comment, the January 6th insurrection was merely the culmination of “a lie set in motion more than a century ago in order to disenfranchise poor, elderly, disabled, and minority voters.” To this day, conservative lawmakers continue to push for increasingly restrictive voter ID laws in the name of protecting elections from voter fraud. It does not matter that evidence of in-person voter fraud is “notoriously scant,” because, as Rice demonstrates, restricting some voters’ access to the polls is the true motive for many legislators. Taking aim at the “myth of voter fraud” and the threat that it poses to American democracy by disenfranchising voters and by weakening the public’s faith in elections, this Comment urges voting rights advocates to challenge voter ID laws in state courts—and proposes potential pathways for doing so.
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* Carolyn F. Rice (Juris Doctor, 2021, University of Pennsylvania Law School; Bachelor of Arts, 2015, University of Michigan) served as an Articles Editor for Volume 23 of the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law. She would like to thank Professor Deuel Ross for his guidance in developing this research. She would also like to thank Professor Seth Kreimer for inspiring her interest in state constitutional litigation as a means to advance civil rights. Finally, Carolyn thanks Gary Rice—her first and favorite editor.