Design automation based on fluid dynamics

This article was accepted and presented at the 9th International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2017).Microfluidic devices provide researchers with numerous advantages such as high throughput, increased sensitivity and accuracy, lower cost, and reduced reaction time. However, design, fabrication, and running a microfluidic device are still heavily reliant on expertise. Recent studies suggest micro-milling can be a semi-automatic, inexpensive, and simple alternative to common fabrication methods. Micro-milling does not require a clean-room, mask aligner, spin-coater, and Plasma bonder, thus cutting down the cost and time of fabrication significantly. Moreover, through this protocol researchers can easily fabricate microfluidic devices in an automated fashion eschewing levels of expertise required for typical fabrication methods, such as photolithography, soft-lithography, and etching. However, designing a microfluidic chip that meets a certain set of requirements is still heavily dependent on a microfluidic expert, several days of simulation, and numerous experiments to reach the required performance. To address this, studies have reported random automated design of microfluidic devices based on numerical simulations for micro-mixing. However, random design generation is heavily reliant on time-consuming simulations carried out beforehand, and is prone to error due to the accuracy limitations of the numerical method. On the other hand, by using micro-milling for ultra-fast and inexpensive fabrication of microfluidic devices and Taguchi design of experiments for state-space exploration of all of the geometric parameters, we are able to generate a database of geometries, flow rates, and flow properties required for a single primitive to carry out a specified microfluidic task

Election Law and Civil Discourse: The Promise of ADR

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

(Mis)Trusting States to Run Elections

Recent Supreme Court election law jurisprudence reflects an unspoken, pernicious trend. Without identifying a specific new rule, the Court has been unjustifiably deferring to state laws regarding election administration, thereby giving states tremendous power to regulate elections. At the same time, the Court has diminished Congress’s oversight role. That is a mistake. Placing too much power in states to administer elections is both constitutionally wrong and practically dangerous. During the past few years the Court has considered many controversial election-related issues, from voter identification to campaign finance to race relations and the Voting Rights Act. The majorities in these cases have generally deferred to states to run elections as they see fit. The Court has employed light-touch judicial review to state election administration laws while at the same time subjecting federal election rules to higher scrutiny. The Court has been deferring to states in two ways, one substantive and the other procedural. Substantively, the Court has accepted almost any assertion of a state interest to protect the integrity of the election, failing to dig deeper into the actual rationale for the state’s regulation of the voting process. Procedurally, the Court has discouraged facial challenges to state voting laws but has sustained facial challenges to congressional enactments, thereby using a procedural mechanism to uphold state rules and invalidate federal laws. The Court’s broad deference to state voting rules is concerning for two main reasons. First, it is doctrinally inconsistent with the structure of the United States Constitution. Second, it is alarming given the increasing number of restrictive and partisan-laden voting laws states are enacting. The U.S. Constitution provides that states run elections but that Congress has important oversight responsibilities. The current judicial approach elevates a state’s role and minimizes the ability of Congress to oversee the election process. The Court’s approach is also dangerous, as it emboldens state legislatures to enact partisan voting rules in an effort to influence electoral outcomes. This Article critically examines recent Supreme Court election law jurisprudence, with a particular eye toward cases involving state election administration—a hotbed of litigation at the Court in recent years. This Article concludes that the Court is using these judicial mechanisms to defer to states in how they run elections, and it attempts to explain why the Court is taking this approach, situating the case law within the Roberts Court’s overall concept of federalism. The deference to state election administration, accompanied by vigorous judicial scrutiny of federal election laws, is both incorrect and dangerous. The Court is unwarranted in putting so much trust in the states. It should instead scrutinize more carefully a state’s rules involving election administration and require both states and Congress to articulate the specific justifications for a voting regulation

Discouraging Election Contests

This essay offers a few proposals for discouraging losing candidates from contesting the certified result of an election. The ultimate goal in any election, of course, is to ensure that a state declares as the winner the person who actually received the most votes. But when an election is close, a candidate on the losing side might see an incentive to continue the fight in the courts on the off-chance that it would change the outcome. The candidate could challenge, for example, certain provisional or absentee ballot—even if the likelihood that the candidate will win is slim (but still theoretically present). This type of contest has the potential to damage the integrity and perceived legitimacy of both the election system and the ultimate winner. This essay suggest three initial proposals, ranging from the boldest—an outright ban on election contests—to more modest hurdles for candidates who wish to pursue a post-election challenge

Congress Must Count the Votes: The Danger of Not Including a State\u27s Electoral College Votes During a Disputed Presidential Election

Imagine this (nightmare) scenario: In the November 2020 election, one party wins control of both Houses of Congress, and the presidency comes down to a disputed election in a state that typically leans toward the other party. Let\u27s say that Republicans take back a majority of the House of Representatives, retain control of the Senate, and the presidency will depend on a swing state like Pennsylvania-a state that voted for the Democratic nominee from 1992 through 2012 but the Republican nominee in 2016. Assume also that Congress, now fully under Republican control, receives two competing slates of electoral college votes from Pennsylvania stemming from ballot counting disputes: one slate for Donald Trump and the other for Joe Biden. Or perhaps Congress receives only one slate of electoral college votes, in favor of Biden, but Trump and other Republicans claim that voter fraud make the totals from Pennsylvania inaccurate. On January 6, 2021, Congress will count the electoral college votes and announce the winner of the presidency. During a dispute, can Congress refuse to count any electoral college votes from a particular state that is embroiled in controversy? Could Congress simply ignore Pennsylvania\u27s submission in this scenario? The short answer is that although Congress has the statutory authority to disregard a state\u27s electoral votes entirely, that option should generally be off the table. In the unfortunate situation that a disputed presidential election ends up in Congress, the two Houses could theoretically refuse to count any electoral college votes from a particular state under the federal Electoral Count Act (ECA), which provides rules for Congress to follow when resolving a disputed presidential election. To be sure, the ECA already includes a presumption that Congress must count electoral college votes unless both Houses agree not to count them. But there are no standards to guide Congress\u27s decision, meaning that both Houses could reject a state\u27s submission based on pure partisanship. In addition, the ambiguous language of the statute leaves open the possibility that Congress could fail to credit a state\u27s electoral college votes even if only one House rejects them. Instead, the presumption, though not absolute, should be almost impenetrable: absent evidence of bribery or the like, and unless there is strong bipartisan agreement in both Houses, Congress should count votes from all fifty states (and D.C.), even if one or more states are disputed. This short essay explains why a refusal to count electoral college votes-absent a bipartisan agreement that actual evidence proves bribery or something similar-would be wrong as a matter of democratic principle and would violate core constitutional norms

State Judges and the Right to Vote

State courts are paramount in defining the constitutional right to vote. This primacy of state courts exists in part because the right to vote is a state-based right protected under state constitutions. In addition, election administration is largely state-driven, with states regulating most of the rules for casting and counting ballots. State law thus guarantees—and state courts interpret—the voting rights that we cherish so much as a society. State courts that issue rulings broadly defining the constitutional right to vote best protect the most fundamental right in our democracy; state decisions that constrain voting to a narrower scope do harm to that ideal. Following this Introduction in Part I, Part II shows how our outsized focus on federal courts, at the expense of state courts, is misplaced. It first examines the importance of state courts in deciding constitutional law issues. It then compares the differences in media and scholarly attention for federal versus state right-to-vote decisions, demonstrating how our discussion over voting rights cases is disproportionately skewed toward federal courts even though state judges do more of the work in this realm. Part III dives into the state cases in three specific areas as representative samples: voter ID, felon disenfranchisement, and the voting process; this final category includes decisions on electronic voting machines, extending polling hours on Election Day, and counting absentee ballots. By examining over thirty state court cases issued in the last decade, this Part demonstrates just how involved state courts have been in shaping the meaning of the constitutional right to vote. It also shows how state judges differ on whether they interpret the right to vote broadly or narrowly—that is, whether judges robustly construe their constitutions as going beyond the federal constitution in protecting voters, or instead narrowly view their constitutions as merely coterminous with the U.S. Constitution. Part IV then looks at whether a judge’s ideology or the judicial selection method may correlate with the scope of a right-to-vote decision. Although further quantitative empirical studies are needed, as a preliminary finding, the evidence in Part IV shows that liberal-leaning judges are more likely to construe the right to vote broadly as compared to conservative jurists, especially for partisan-laden issues such as voter ID. In addition, appointed judges seem more likely than elected judges to define the right to vote robustly, at least for certain topics such as felon disenfranchisement. This analysis can contribute to the existing debate over who we want as judges as well as offer insights on the preferable method of judicial selection. Ultimately, providing the most robust protection for the constitutional right to vote requires us, as scholars and advocates, to understand both how state courts construe these rights and how ideology and judicial selection may influence the state judges who issue these opinions. This Article begins that process

In Defense of Lowering the Voting Age

This Essay outlines the various policy arguments in favor of lowering the voting age to sixteen. Part I presents a very brief history of the voting age in U.S. elections. It notes that setting the voting age at eighteen is, in many ways, a historical accident, so lowering the voting age for local elections does not cut against historical norms. Part II explains that there are no constitutional barriers to local jurisdictions lowering the voting age for their own elections. Part III highlights the benefits to democracy and representation that lowering the voting age will engender. Turning eighteen represents a tumultuous time for most young adults as they leave home either to enter the workforce or go off to college. Sixteen, by contrast, is a period of relative stability when young people are invested in their communities and are learning about civic engagement in school. Lowering the voting age can, therefore, create a habit of voting and increase overall turnout in later years. Finally, Part IV presents psychological studies demonstrating that, by age sixteen, individuals possess the cognitive capabilities required to perform an act that takes forethought and deliberation like voting. That is, sixteen-year olds are as good as, say, forty-year-olds at making the deliberative decisions necessary for democratic participation. Part IV also refutes the claim that lowering the voting age will create additional votes for parents, as prior experience shows that young people do not simply follow their parents in the voting booth. In sum, lowering the voting age is a sound mechanism to improve our elections. It brings additional, competent individuals with a stake in electoral outcomes into the democratic process and guarantees them a voice