Election Law and the Presidency: An Introduction and Overview

Americans now fully appreciate that presidential candidates are vying for a majority of the Electoral College votes, rather than the individual votes of constituents. Modern campaigns are organized around this goal, and commentators are focused on this reality. As a result, there has been an increased cry to reform the electoral process. After all, if every other public official in the land is elected by receiving more votes than their competitors, why should the President of the United States be elected in this apparently undemocratic fashion? The process appears even more unusual in that electors are chosen pursuant to state law rather than according to any standardized national rules. For example, Maine and Nebraska voters choose their electors by a combination of statewide and congressional district results, while the remaining forty-eight states and Washington, D.C., award their electors to the candidate who wins statewide. Further, all states award their electors to the candidate with a plurality of votes—irrespective of the margin of victory.8 However peculiar the American presidential election system appears, it is exactly how our Founders wanted it

Could Terrorists Derail a Presidential Election?

The article begins by expressing surprise that there is no safeguard for regularly scheduled elections and that if an election would have to be cancelled or postponed it is unknown what would happen. It then discusses what happened to elections during 9/11/2001 and the lack of statutory guidance ensuing from there, and discusses how some states have addressed the problem of an affected election, and questions what would happen to the presidential election in the face of such events. It questions whether Congress should attempt to legislate for such an event and gives a suggestion for what can be done in the event of a failed election on the part of Congress and some guidelines for that action and concludes by stating that Congress must address this issue

The State of Israel\u27s Constitution; A Comparison of Civilized Nations

The art of constitution-making is never one-dimensional. In regard to the United States\u27 model, it has recently been argued that “[d]espite the enormous literature on the critical period, including the foreign affairs imperatives behind the movement for reform, it is not fully understood that the animus behind the reform effort that culminated in the new Constitution was a desire to ensure that the United States would be in a position to meet its international commitments and thereby earn international recognition.” While there are obvious differences, and while this concept is perhaps of even greater importance and more poignantly felt for a nation that has so long been plagued with issues of de facto and de jure recognition, many of the same factors that would make it incomplete to view the purpose of the American Constitution as a strictly internal document hold true for our strongest ally in the Middle East. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the young country experienced diplomatic isolation and Arab League boycotts. Today, Israel has diplomatic ties with 154 out of the other 191 member states of the United Nations, as well as with non-member Vatican City. This paper argues that the developing Israeli constitutionalism (this term is used broadly to cover not only the Basic Laws but also the quasi-constitutional founding documents and semi-constitutional proclamations of the Israeli Supreme Court) is also to a large extent about facilitating the admission of the new nation into the community of civilized states. From treaty making and economic development, to existential security issues, Israel recognized early on that it needed to quickly develop a strong and responsible federal government capable of enforcing compliance. It established a judiciary with capability of maintaining and enforcing the law of nations, and even challenging the state itself. More importantly though, while in the American model the framers were looking for and trying to gain trust in an economic sense, the Israelis are more focused on gaining international respect, especially on civil rights issues