ELECTION REFORM TOPIC PAPER Resolved: The United States should significantly improve its elections by: strengthening campaign finance laws, abolishing the electoral college, reforming redistricting, increasing voting security, or strengthening the right to vote. Table of Contents Table of Contents 2 Introduction and Topic Significance 3 Issues to Consider 5 Areas of Argumentation 6 Affirmative Cases 6 Overturn Supreme Court Decisions involving campaign finance. 6 Overturn Shelby County v. Holder / Updates to the Voting Rights Act 7 Uphold Whitford et al. v. Gill – Wisconsin Case involving Partisan Gerrymandering 9 A Constitutional Amendment for the Right to Vote 11 Abolish the electoral college / Direct Popular Vote 12 Security/Hacking Concerns 13 Eliminate single member districts/Allow Proportional Representation 16 Other Reforms 18 Affirmative Positions 22 Negative Positions 23 Works Cited 24 Definitions 27 Potential Resolutions 28 Page 2 of 28 Introduction and Topic Significance The 2016 Elections were the first elections without the full protection of the voting rights act in modern history. Ari Berman. “Welcome to the First Presidential Election Since Voting Rights Act Gutted” Rolling Stone. 6/23/2016 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/welcome-to-the-first-presidential-election-since- voting-rights-act-gutted-20160623 As a young civil rights activist, Congressman John Lewis was brutally beaten marching for the right to vote in Selma, Alabama. Lewis's heroism spurred the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the country's most important civil rights law. But three years ago this week, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court invalidated the centerpiece of the law, ruling that states with the longest histories of voting discrimination no longer needed to approve their voting changes with the federal government. "The Supreme Court stuck a dagger into the heart of the Voting Rights Act," Lewis said after the decision. That means the 2016 election is the first presidential contest in 50 years without the full protections of the VRA — and the country is witnessing the greatest rollback of voting rights since the act was passed five decades ago. This year, 17 states have new voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election cycle, including laws that make it harder to register to vote, cut back early voting and require strict forms of government-issued IDs to cast a ballot that millions of Americans don't have. These states comprise 189 electoral votes — nearly half of the Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency — and include crucial swing states like Ohio, Wisconsin and Virginia. Such efforts have been overwhelmingly backed by Republicans to target Democratically leaning constituencies, particularly people of color and young voters. The results of the contentious 2016 elections have renewed calls for significant changes to our electoral system. This topic is ripe for debate because there is a feeling among these advocates that unless significant changes are made to our electoral system, some of the issues are likely to be present in future elections. The high school policy debate community has debated topics related to national elections four times since 1928, but none since 1974-75. The first election topic was debate in 1945 and focused on the voting age (Resolved: That the legal voting age should be reduced to eighteen years). In 1950 a second election topic was debated, this time focusing on Presidential Elections (Resolved: That the president of the United States should be elected by the direct vote of the people). The 1950 resolution proved so popular that it was debated again in 1954 with nearly the exact same wording. (The only difference between the 1950 and 1954 resolution was that in 1954, President was capitalized). An election topic was also discussed in 1974-75, this time focusing on the primary process (Resolved: That the United States should significantly change the method of selecting presidential and vice-presidential candidates.) The high school public forum debate community has also debated topics related to national elections several times. Public Forum Debate has had topics about replacing the electoral Page 3 of 28 college with a direct popular vote in November 2011 (NSDA/NFL resolution), April 2017 (NSDA/NFL resolution), and at the 2007 NCFL Grand Nationals. All of those PF resolutions sustained a good debate on one of cases for a full month. This topic also is unique in that it has the potential to have a more expansive set of actors than a typical domestic topic: There is the typical lawmaking process through Congress and the President, there are Supreme Court rulings, and there are constitutional amendments to be considered. Constitutional amendments add to the ripeness of this topic: There are calls from both the left and the right to invoke Article V of the Constitution to call a convention for proposing amendments to the Constitution1. Along with considering the merits of election reform, students would have the opportunity to debate the worthiness of amending the constitution in various ways. Further, this topic would call for debaters to debate about elections during the 2018 Midterm elections, increasing interest in the upcoming elections and creating excellent politics debates. 1 https://today.law.harvard.edu/states-call-convention-amend-constitution-lessig-debates/ Page 4 of 28 Issues to Consider The main idea behind this topic is for the affirmative to substantially improve the United State’s election system. There are two major issues to consider: First, how many actors should be included in the topic? There are a number of actions that a typical United States Federal Government resolution would address, but a resolution that is only the federal government excludes some interesting affirmatives (efforts to abolish the electoral college, efforts to create a constitutional right to vote). I think this topic is the best when these constitutional reforms are considered in the topic/affirmative ground. This also creates a unique feature, in that debaters are introduced to arguments about amending the constitution. Second, writing this topic to include a direction will be difficult. In past years the committee has avoided bidirectional topics in order to clearly divide affirmative and negative ground. I think this topic proposes a challenge in that election reforms are hard to ascribe single common theme. Additionally, listing a set of purposes or themes may exclude key affirmative cases because it is hard to fit them into the list. For example a topic that includes terms like voting rights and increased participation might arguably exclude cases about campaign-finance and efforts to abolish the electoral college. The paper suggests some answers to these questions. As a starting point, I have suggested the following topic wording: Resolved: The United States should significantly improve its elections by: strengthening campaign finance laws, abolishing the electoral college, reforming redistricting, increasing voting security, or strengthening the right to vote. Page 5 of 28 Areas of Argumentation Affirmative Cases Overturn Supreme Court Decisions involving campaign finance. Several options: Overturn Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission and/or Buckley v. Valeo. In the 1976 decision Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court held that limits on election spending contained in the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 were unconstitutional and “that individuals have a right to spend money independently in elections”2. However, the court upheld contribution limits, noting that the state has an interest in “the prevention of corruption and the appearance of corruption by the real or imagined coercive influence of large financial contributions on candidates positions and on their actions if elected to office.3” In its 2010 ruling, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court held that “freedom of speech prohibited the government form restricting independent political expenditures by non-profit corporations, for-profit corporations, labor unions, and other associations”4. Subsequent to this decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Colombia struck down limits as applied to “independent expenditure committees” in SpeechNow.org v. FEC, finding that the Supreme Court’s analysis in Citizens United to “conclude that the government has no anti-corruption interest in limiting contributions to an independent expenditure group” 5. The net effect of these decisions enabled the creation of so called “SuperPACs” which are allowed to raise and spend an unlimited amount of money on campaign related activities. Numerous individuals have decried effect of the Citizens United and SpeechNow decisions on the American political process, arguing that these decisions have allowed for undisclosed campaign expenditures, expanding the potential for corruption and distorting the voice of the 2 Hasen, Rick. “Should Progressives Worry that Judge Garland Voted to Help Create Super PACs?” Election Law Blog. 3/16/2016. http://electionlawblog.org/?p=80929 2 SpeechNow.org v. FEC. Campaign Legal Center. http://www.campaignlegalcenter.org/case/speechnoworg-v-fec 3 Buckley v. Valeo. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckley_v._Valeo 4 Citizens United v. FEC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC 5 SpeechNow.org v. FEC. Campaign Legal Center. http://www.campaignlegalcenter.org/case/speechnoworg-v-fec