Altered States

Campus Report ^ | November 4, 2008 | Lance Nation

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Altered States

by: Lance Nation, November 04, 2008

As the presidential race tightens, the possibility of another Bush v. Gore increases. Over the past eight years, no significant election reforms have been enacted at the federal or state level to prevent the chaos of the 2000 election. However, Dr. Edward B. Foley has the “solution” for contested elections.

Director of Election Law @ Moritz, Dr. Foley “[favors] legislation in each state to place the authority to adjudicate election contests in a specialized Elections Court.” This idea stems from the 1962 gubernatorial race in Minnesota. “In the 1962 race for Governor of Minnesota, the state’s supreme court split three-to-two along party lines on a dispute over error correction in the canvassing of returns,” Dr. Foley explained at the Georgetown Law Supreme Court Institute. “The upright citizens of the North Star State were so embarrassed by this politicized ruling that the two candidates subsequently agreed to create their own bipartisan court to adjudicate the recount that followed the canvass.” The bipartisan court created consisted of “two judges, each identifiable as affiliated with one of the two major political parties while simultaneously having an impeccable reputation for judicial integrity, with a third judge selected by the mutual agreement of the first two.”

To test the effectiveness of a bipartisan tribunal in presidential elections, Dr. Foley, assisted by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, created a hypothetical scenario for this year’s presidential race.

The scenario:....