Don’t Just Make Redistricters More Accountable to the People, Make Them the People

This thesis investigated the heat transfer of internally oil cooled rotors in permanent magnet electric machines which are, among other things, used in hybrid vehicles or zero emission vehicles. The magnets become sensitive and can be demagnetized at high working temperatures, hence the need of cooling. The scope of this work included CFD simulations in STAR-CCM+. Three different 3D multiphase models simulating the oil propagation in the rotor were performed. A Lagrangian multiphase model combined with a fluid film model was the most suitable model for simulating the spray of the oil and the film thickness along the inner rotor wall. It was noticed that periodic boundaries caused problems for the fluid film model, therefore a complete geometry was preferred over a truncated model. The 3D solutions provided thicker film thicknesses than the analytical solutions from the fluid film thickness theory. The maximum analytical thickness was of the same order of magnitude as the surface average film thickness provided by the multiphase models. This thickness was assumed to be constant when used as the base for the fluid region in the 2D one-phase models.The study showed that aluminum was the most suitable rotor material due to its high conductive capacity, which provided a more even distribution of the temperature in the solid and hence resulted in lower overall temperatures. The cooling power increased linearly with the volumetric flow rate, however the heat transfer coefficient decreased for the higher flow rates. A volumetric flow rate of 10dl/min was recommended. A 2D model was compared to a preliminary experiment and showed that these were not correlated. The conclusion was that more experiments and simulations are needed in order to confirm the validity of the 2D model

Administering Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act After Shelby County

Until the Supreme Court put an end to it in Shelby County v. Holder, section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was widely regarded as an effective, low-cost tool for blocking potentially discriminatory changes to election laws and administrative practices. The provision the Supreme Court left standing, section 2, is generally seen as expensive, cumbersome, and almost wholly ineffective at blocking changes before they take effect. This Article argues that the courts, in partnership with the Department of Justice, could reform section 2 so that it fills much of the gap left by the Supreme Court\u27s evisceration of section 5. The proposed reformation of section 2 rests on two insights: first, that national survey data often contains as much or more information than precinct-level vote margins about the core factual matters in section 2 cases; and second, that the courts have authority to regularize section 2 adjudication by creating rebuttable presumptions. Most section 2 cases currently turn on costly, case-specific estimates of voter preferences generated from precinct-level vote totals and demographic information. Judicial decisions provide little guidance about how future cases-each relying on data from a different set of elections-are likely to be resolved. By creating evidentiary presumptions whose application in any given case would be determined using national survey data and a common statistical model, the courts could greatly reduce the cost and uncertainty of section 2 litigation. This approach would also reduce the dependence of vote dilution claims on often-unreliable techniques of ecological inference and would make coalitional claims brought jointly by two or more minority groups much easier to litigate

Foreword: Theorizing Contemporary Legal Thought

This is a co-authored foreword to a symposium in Law & Contemporary Problems titled Theorizing Contemporary Legal Thought. It includes a discussion of the background of the project, a brief summary of the articles included in the issue, and a very short statement from Desautels-Stein and Kennedy on the loss of faith indicative of Contemporary Legal Thought

Election Law and White Identity Politics

The role of race in American politics looms large in several election law doctrines. Regrettably, though, these doctrines’ analyses of race, racial identity, and the relationships between race and politics often lack sophistication, historical context, or foresight. The political status quo is treated as race-neutral, when in fact it is anything but. Specifically, the doctrines rely upon sanguine theories of democracy uncorrupted by white identity–based political calculations, while in fact such calculations, made on the part of both voters and political parties, are pervasive. In this Article, I appraise the doctrine pertaining to majority-minority voting districts, racial gerrymandering doctrine, the doctrine governing ballot access disputes, and campaign finance doctrine through the lens of white identity politics. Drawing from research in political science, sociology, and history, I argue that these doctrines are blighted by what I identify as “racial blind spots” that are inconsonant with political reality. Given the role that courts play in enunciating these doctrines, their failure to meaningfully engage with the significance of white identity politics renders their governing frameworks and remedial prescriptions inapt. The Article concludes by offering a number of suggestions, both doctrinal and legislative, for how to mitigate white identity politics

From Educational Adequacy to Representational Adequacy: A New Template for Legal Attacks on Partisan Gerrymanders

For decades, legal attacks on partisan gerrymanders have foundered on a manageability dilemma: doctrinal standards the Supreme Court has regarded as judicially discoverable have been rejected as unmanageable, whereas the more manageable standards on offer have been dismissed as insufficiently tethered to the Constitution—that is, as undiscoverable. This Article contends that a solution to the dilemma may be found in a seemingly unlikely place: the body of state constitutional law concerned with the adequacy of state systems of public education. The justiciability barriers to partisan gerrymandering claims have near analogues in educational adequacy cases, yet only a minority of the state courts have deemed educational adequacy claims nonjusticiable. Other courts have dealt with putatively standardless education claims by holding that the legislature must adopt educational standards, together with a system of testing, school finance, and accountability reasonably designed to realize those standards. If the legislature drags its feet, courts have issued provisional remedies, which the legislature is free to update or replace. I explain how the same strategy could be adapted for a new generation of “representational adequacy” claims under broadly worded provisions found in many state constitutions. I also suggest that by anchoring claims to the generally worded provisions about representation found in state constitutions (or possibly Article I of the U.S. Constitution), litigants could mitigate the downside risk of success under the Equal Protection Clause—namely, the inducement of responsiveness-dampening bipartisan gerrymanders. The Online Appendix provides a state-by-state breakdown of constitutional provisions and relevant precedents, highlighting twenty-two states that appear ripe for representational adequacy litigation

Shaw vs. Reno and the World of Redistricting and Representation

Justice O ' Connor's majority opinion in the 1993U.S. Supreme Court case of Shaw v. Reno has widely been seen as withdrawing judicial protection of minority voting rights -- a welcome development to those who believe as a matter of faith that discriminatory electoral rules, racist appeals in elections, and racially polarized voting are things of the distant past, but less hopeful to close students of redistricting and election campaigns of the last two decades. Deeply ambiguous, the opinion has spawned a wide range of interpretations, from assertions that it bans redistricters from taking the race of voters into account at all, even when they place them in majority-white districts, to contentions that it merely asks for further information about the basis for establishing certain "ugly" districts that have majorities of African Americans or Latinos. In this paper, which is based on research that I carried out for Shaw v. Hunt, the remand version of Shaw v. Reno, and Vera v. Richards, its Texas counterpart, I try to restore a sense of reality to the often factually incorrect assertions or implications of Justice O'Connor's opinion, not only by a close textual reading of the briefs and opinions in the Supreme Court case, but also by looking in considerable detail at the actual redistricting processes in North Carolina and Texas during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Were race, partisanship, and individual politicians' interests taken into account in redrawing districts before 1991, or were all previous reapportionments pristine exercises in civic virtue? Might the states in the 1990s have had compelling interests in redressing past racially discriminatory practices? Were the motives of the 1991-92redistrictings so uncomplicated that they can be easily and unambiguously determined by a quick glance at a map? For North Carolina, I also examine whether white and black public opinion and the voting records of white and black members of Congress differ systematically from each other. Do black voters need black faces to represent them? Shaw's vagueness affords the Supreme Court the possibility of gracefully backing away from its separate but unequal standards, standards that allow whites standing to sue without having to prove that the electoral rules at issue have a racially discriminatory effect and without having to show in detail that they were adopted with a racially discriminatory intent. In the final section, I outline five escape routes from Shaw, all of which are based on its factual inadequacies

SOME POLITICS ARE STILL LOCAL: STRATEGIC POSITION TAKING IN CONGRESS & ELECTIONS

In today's congressional elections, politicians are increasingly presumed to run on the same party-driven platforms, offering voters the same choices throughout the country. Many argue that "local" issues---policy priorities important to a specific constituency---barely register. My dissertation challenges this expectation. I demonstrate that---even though House elections attend more to national issues than before---candidates still often "go local." To measure the degree to which a candidate's campaign is locally-oriented, I employ text data on policy positions extracted from campaign websites for candidates who ran for the U.S. House of Representatives across the 2018 and 2020 elections. Pairing this original data collection with a variety of methods for quantitative text analysis, I show that our theories of strategic candidate behavior must be updated to better reflect what locally-oriented campaigning looks like in today's era of nationalized politics. I go on to demonstrate that politicians who employ locally-oriented rhetoric in their campaigns carry forward this same position taking behavior into the legislative arena. This finding underscores a critical, but underemphasize, continuity between an incumbent's electoral and legislative behavior. In sum, this dissertation aims to refocus the discipline's attention in an era of nationalized expectations back towards local considerations, reminding scholars that local politics are still relevant in modern campaigns.Doctor of Philosoph

The State of the Parties (Seventh Edition)

Continuing a three-decade tradition, The State of the Parties 7th edition brings together leading experts to evaluate change and continuity in American electoral politics. Political parties in America have never been more contentious and divided than they are right now. Even splits within the parties themselves have the power to elevate relatively unknown candidates to power and topple established incumbents. With sections devoted to polarization and the electorate, polarization and political elites, tea party politics, super PACS, and partisan resources and partisan activities, the contributors survey the American political landscape. They pay special attention to polarization between and within the parties in the aftermath of the 2012 election, demographic changes to America\u27s political parties, the effects of new media and campaign finance laws on national and local electoral results, the Tea Party\u27s rise and, as always, the implications of all these factors on future policymaking and electoral prospects. The State of the Parties 7th edition offers an indispensable guide to American politics for scholars, students, and practitioners.https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/state_of_the_parties7/1000/thumbnail.jp