Democracy\u27s Bureaucracy: The Complicated Case of Voter Registration Lists

This Article calls attention to the development and derailment of a novel cross-governmental bureaucracy for voter registration. It focuses specifically on voter registration lists as the vulnerable backbone of election administration. In short, the constitutional allocation of election authority has left a mobile electorate scattered across fifty different state registration lists. The result is more than a tenth of the electorate likely registered in their former jurisdiction and more than a third not registered at all. The solution, in the vocabulary of election officials, has become “list maintenance”—or, identifying when voters, previously registered at one address, subsequently move or die, often by matching administrative data or coordinating across agencies. Part I traces the rise of national, but not federal, efforts to coordinate voter registration lists across states. In particular, it offers the first comprehensive account of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a non-profit corporation run by state chief election officials to facilitate list maintenance by pooling voter registration and other critical voter data, from state driver’s license records to the federal death file. But after a decade of growth ERIC has begun to unravel: nine Republican states have now quit the bipartisan effort. Part II argues that disjointed voter registration lists are an easily exploited democratic vulnerability, partly due to the unintended effects of federal privacy law. It explains how state voter registration lists often lack a unique national identifier, so efforts to simply compare state voter registration lists produce the appearance of fraud where none exists; how more reliable comparison requires supplementing registration lists with confidential administrative data, subordinating one form of legitimacy for another; and how private interest groups, engaging in what this Article terms “vigilante list maintenance,” increasingly use public, but necessarily incomplete, administrative records to further fan partisan narratives about fraud. Finally, Part III offers a series of policy solutions to both fortify list maintenance from attack and promote enfranchisement. It proposes trimming the scope of federal privacy laws to accommodate election administration; flipping the procedural and substantive framework for list maintenance; and expanding the government’s obligation to update, rather than cancel, registrations as voters move. Ultimately, this Article resists the familiar narrative that pits voter access against electoral integrity; a robust national, but not federal, bureaucracy for voter registration can promote both values

Resonant two-photon ionization spectroscopy of jet-cooled Pt?

Journal ArticleThe gas phase optical spectrum of jet-cooled Pt? has been investigated over the range of 11 300 to 26 300 cm -1 using resonant two-photon ionization spectroscopy in combination with time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Numerous vibronic bands are observed. Analysis of the data gives the location of some 26 excited electronic states, which are characterized by the frequencies of their origin bands, vibrational frequencies, and anharmonicities. Variation of the second color in a two-color resonant two-photon ionization scheme has determined the ionization threshold of Pt? to be 8.68 ?0.02 eV. The observation of the onset of predissociation, characterized by a sharp drop in excited state lifetime, places the dissociation energy of Pt? at 3.14?0.02 eV. In combination with the Pt atomic ionization potential of 8.8?0.2 eV, these results give the bond strength of Pt?+ as D0(Pt--Pt+) = 3.26 ? 0.24 eV. The strength of the chemical bond in Pt?, as compared to Au?, demonstrates that there are significant 5d contributions to the chemical bonding in Pt?

Spectroscopy and electronic structure of jet-cooled Al?

Journal ArticleResonant two-photon ionization spectroscopy has been used to study the jet-cooled Al? molecule. The ground state has been conclusively demonstrated to be of 3IIu symmetry, deriving from the ???rr?u electronic configuration. High resolution studies have established the bond length of the X?IIu state as re (X?IIu) = 2.701 ? 0.002 ?. The third-law estimate of the Al? bond strength has been reevaluated using the observed and calculated properties of the low-lying electronic states to give Do (Al?) = 1.34 ? 0.06 eV. In addition to the previously reported E 2 ??-g 2 ?X?IIu and F 3??-g ?X3IIu band systems, the E' 3?IIg ?X?IIu, F"-X, F'-X, G ?IIg ?X?IIu, H' ??-g ?X?IIU, and H??g ?X?IIu band systems have been observed for the first time. Bands of the G-X, H '-X, and H-X systems have been rotationally resolved and analyzed, providing rotational constants and electronic state symmetries for the upper states of these systems. A discussion of all of the experimentally known states of Al2 is presented, along with comparisons to previous experimental and theoretical work

Rydberg and pulsed field ionization-zero electron kinetic energy spectra of YO

Journal ArticleA spectroscopic study of the Rydberg states of YO accessed from particular rotational levels of the A 2II1/2, v=0 state has been combined with a pulsed field ionization, zero electron kinetic energy (PFI-ZEKE) investigation. The results provide accurate values of the ionization energy of YO, ionization energy I.E.(YO)=49 304.316(31) cm-1 [6.112 958](4) eV], and of the rotational constant (and bond length) of the YO+ cation in its X 1?+, v=0 ground state, B0+=0.4078(3) cm21 [r0=1.7463(6) ?]. The improved value of I.E.(YO) combined with the known ionization energy of atomic yttrium then leads to the result D0 0 (Y+-O)2D0 0 (Y2O=0.1041?0.0001 eV. Combining this result with the value of D0 0 (Y+-O) obtained from guided ion beam mass spectrometry yields an improved value of D0 0 (Y+O)=7.14?0.18 eV. The PFI-ZEKE spectra display an interesting channel-coupling effect so that all rotational levels with J+?J'(A)+0.5 are observed with high intensity, where J+ is the angular momentum of the YO+ cation that is produced and J'(A) is the angular momentum of the A 2II1/2 state that is reached when the first photon is absorbed. This is thought to result from the interaction between the dipole moment of the rotating YO+ core and the Rydberg electron, which can induce changes in l and J+ subject to the dipolar coupling matrix element selection rule, ?J+=?1, ?l=?1. The channel-coupling mechanism also appears to induce an inverse autoionization process in which an unbound electron with a low value of l is captured either by its low-J+1 YO+ cation or by a second YO+ cation with the same value of J+. This inverse autoionization process is extremely sensitive to the electron kinetic energy, leading to narrow peaks in the PFI-ZEKE spectrum which are only slightly broader than the laser linewidth employed for this study (0.25 cm-1)