This edited volume, the first book published in the new Cambridge Studies in Election Law and Democracy series, explores a set of related concerns about election law and voting rights, election performance and reform, and their relationship to racial exclusion and hierarchy. The volume emerged from a conference entitled “The Future of Elections Scholarship: Policy Challenges and a Research Agenda for Reform” organized in 2009 by the Cambridge, Massachusetts—based Tobin Project, in collaboration with the American Law Institute. As one of the primary objectives of the Tobin Project is to bring independent social science research to bear on pressing public policy issues, the conference and volume have a decidedly pragmatic focus. The legal scholars, political scientists, and policy leaders who attended the conference and contributed to Race, Reform, and Regulation of the Electoral Process frame their research around a range of legal and public policy debates lying at the intersection of law, politics, and democracy.

This contribution is timely. In the last 15 years, debates over election law and voting rights have garnered wide public attention through a number of high-profile controversies: the Bush v. Gore decision resolving the contested 2000 presidential election; partisan accusations of voter intimidation and fraud in the 2004 and 2008 elections; related debates over voter identification requirements, voter registration fraud, and felony disenfranchisement laws; and the Supreme Court's decision in the Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder case, overturning the coverage formula within Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. The volume persuasively demonstrates that while the public can hold conflicting beliefs and information about election law and voting rights, the underlying issues are tied directly to the meaning of citizenship, democratic rights and obligations, and the nation's legacy of racial subordination.

The volume is divided into three sections, each introduced by a contextual essay that situates the respective chapters in response to one another, the literature in the field, and relevant public policy and legal concerns.

The first section explores the relationship among race, voting rights, and election law. As Jennifer Hochschild explains in her introductory essay, the contributors all consider the extent to which “old forms of racial and ethnic stratification are changing” (p. 7) and the implications of such an assessment for voting rights law and jurisprudence. Richard Pildes's essay “Voting Rights: The Next Generation” discusses a range of issues and concerns with the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the preclearance requirements of Section 5, anticipating nearly all of the challenges to the legislation in the Shelby County v. Holder case recently decided by the Supreme Court in June 2013. Pildes argues that while the VRA played an indispensible role in addressing patterns of voter suppression that were endemic to the South 50 years ago, it “might no longer offer the most effective means of securing access to the ballot box,” especially with regard to voting technology problems and felon disenfranchisement laws (p. 17). He suggests that “the model of nationwide laws that apply uniformly throughout the country and universal terms that extend coverage to all voters,” rather than targeting particular jurisdictions, offers the most robust framework for protecting and enhancing the franchise (p. 31). By contrast, Pamela Karlan raises persuasive concerns about the need to maintain the Section 5 standards of the VRA, citing the long history of antiblack exclusions from political participation and power. Both essays should prove valuable to policymakers and advocates in the aftermath of the Shelby decision.

The second section explores judicial regulation of the electoral process and the role of institutions within election law more generally. In the introductory essay, David Schleicher provides an extremely useful synthesis of the field of election law in the last 20 years, arguing that scholarship on the institutional regulation of the electoral process has turned away from large theoretical questions and toward the “regulatory arcana” of election law.

Schleicher frames the contributions to this section of the volume as a renewed effort to engage structural questions in the formation and reproduction of election law. These contributions include an essay by Heather Gerken and Michael Kang outlining a series of policy proposals that would “harness politics to fix politics” by improving the performance of electoral systems through a series of modest reforms in administrative law that connect “political self-interest to reform goals” (p. 98). The other essays in the section take up similar concerns about the ways that election law structures the boundaries and character of democratic participation. Collectively, they provide a useful road map to the range of administrative, judicial, and legislative policy reforms and standards of evaluation that will likely shape debates over election law in the future.

The third section addresses election performance and reform.

Alex Keyssar's contextual essay observes that because of the many crises and controversies that have haunted elections in the United States recently, the pace of reform to electoral systems has been quite slow. The four essays in this section address various possibilities for accelerating such reform. Alan Gerber reviews the literature on the randomized-field-experiment model that he and Donald Green helped to develop and considers the particular role of social psychology in strengthening the effectiveness of voter mobilization strategies. Meanwhile, Archon Fung discusses the use of crowd sourcing to expand citizen monitoring of elections through the platform myfairelection.com.

In the concluding essay to the volume, Bruce Cain revisits the chapters in light of a broader move toward “new election law institutionalism,” casting competing efforts in electoral reform debates as claims between “more democracy” or “less democracy” and making visible the trade-offs that exist in striking an appropriate balance between the two positions.

For teaching purposes, the volume will certainly be relevant for courses focused on election law and contemporary policy debates on voting rights. Policymakers, practioners, and public policy scholars may also be drawn to some of the essays in the final section, especially Fung's chapter on the role of technology in monitoring polling place irregularities and an empirically rich essay by Joshua Fougere, Stephen Anasolabehere, and Nathaniel Persily on public opinion toward (and public information about) the drawing of electoral boundaries.

In addition, the volume as a whole models an approach to scholarship in political science and public law that is empirically rich, theoretically sophisticated, and publically relevant.

One limitation to the project concerns the decision to treat the race-based dimensions of voting rights, election law, and performance in a single section, rather than trying to weave it throughout the volume as a whole (as the title might suggest). Race and racial hierarchy continue to animate public debates over democratic inclusion, fitness for citizenship, and partisan alignment. Attention to these questions is largely absent in the sections on election law and electoral performance, even though racial meaning and identification shape both of these areas in important ways. Future scholarship in election law and reform will benefit from placing race at the center of such analyses.

In sum, Race, Reform, and Regulation of the Electoral Process demonstrates the promise of drawing scholars from a range of disciplinary and methodological orientations into a sustained examination of a central topic within U.S. politics and law. It reveals that current debates over issues such as voter identification requirements, gerrymandering, voter turnout, voting systems, and disenfranchisement are not simply sites of partisan wrangling and gamesmanship. Instead, they reach to the core of foundational questions of national identity, institutional authority, and self-determination.