 Continuing to populate the webinar, but in the interest of giving our amazing panelists the maximum amount of time to discuss these important issues, we'll go ahead and get started. And as is our tradition, we like to start with a statement honoring place. The University of Washington acknowledges the Coast Salish peoples of this land, the land which touches the shared waters of all the tribes and vans within. It's a Suquamish, Tulalip and Muckleshoot nations. So on behalf of the University of Washington School of Law, I'm Mario Barnes, the Tony Rembideen, and I wanna welcome you on behalf of the Law School and its faculty, staff and students to this gathering for what I think is both an incredibly important topic where we will be really fortunate to hear from an August and well-informed group of speakers. It doesn't take me to point out that we are living in an unprecedented time, a time which includes next Tuesday a historic election, which has many unusual contours and that yes, it's an election to consider president, vice president, elected officials locally in the state house and the national government, but it's against a backdrop of events that I think most would agree that in our lifetimes, we've not seen this confluence of events. Just a few days ago, we had a Supreme Court Justice confirmed without bipartisan support and in a manner that raises controversies about the independence and legitimacy of our highest court. At this point, we have multiple states embroiled in litigation that is headed to or recently entered into federal courts related to state and presidential elections. And when we look at the national election hanging in the balance, there are larger questions about equality, democracy, fairness and rule of law. That will affect every corner of this nation and beyond the results of which next Tuesday will. And all of that against the backdrop of an unprecedented global pandemic. And so we could not be in a time where we needed a more informed discussion of these issues to include a discussion of voting rights of how the election results won't be contested and what it will mean after Tuesday to our nation when we think about all of the kind of issues that have been raised related to voter equity and access to ballots in the polls. And so I'm really excited to have our panelists engage in a rich discussion over a broad set of topics and I will introduce our panelists and get out of your way. And so I'm so pleased that Zar Saeed, our Associate Dean of Research, Faculty Development and Charles I. Stone, Professor of Law will be your moderator. We have joining her on the panel, Naomi Ishisaka, the Assistant Managing Editor for Diversity, Inclusion and Staff Development and a columnist for the Seattle Times. Lisa Marshall Mannheim, the Charles I. Stone, Associate Professor of Law at UW Law. Peter Nicholas, the William L. Dwyer Chair in Law at UW Law and Brianne Schuster, Staff Attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you for giving your time and energy to a conversation that I know our community really needs at this time. I turn it over to Associate Dean Saeed. Thank you, Dean Barnes. Let's start with Professor Mannheim. If you could provide us with an overview of where we'll be going today. Thanks. And thanks for everyone who's joining us today as well as everybody of course who's joining us on the panel. So when it comes to the laws surrounding the 2020 election, one way of thinking about them is as falling into three general categories. So there's the legal issues that are relevant in a sense or at least most relevant before election day. Then there are the legal issues that become relevant after election day. And then finally, if we look forward, there are the legal issues and the legal discussions and controversies that are likely to arise, not with respect to this election cycle, but going forward. And so of course, to talk about all of those would take a very, very long time. However, we're trying to touch on all of them today. And it's just in terms of a basic overview. I was hoping you have just a minute on each. So this election cycle, the 2020 election cycle, when it comes to the legal disputes and the legal issues that have arisen before the election, there are, I mean, there's a ton of them. But if we were to summarize them, most of them or at least a large percentage of them relate to the pandemic and the sorts of accommodations that jurisdictions either are willing to and able to make or are not able to or willing to make in light of the pandemic. So what we've had across the country is we've had jurisdictions changing their laws in any number of ways. One way of confirming that this has had some effect for what it's worth is in the really dramatic rise in early voting we've seen so far. So we have already surpassed 50%, I think we're at 60 plus percent of the total voting that occurred in 2016. So we've already surpassed that in a place like Texas. There's actually been more people voting in Texas already than there were in the entire 2016 election, which just helps to confirm not only the interest in the election, but also some of the changes to the laws. A number of jurisdictions have not made changes that people have requested and in response to that people have brought lawsuits. Summarizing all those lawsuits would again take a while, but one way of understanding the gist of what the courts have done with those lawsuits and in particular what the federal courts have done is they basically said, again, this is very broad, but they basically said, number one, we're generally going to defer to the states and specifically the state legislatures in terms of how the laws should change, number one. And number two, they've said also it's getting too close to the election. So even if these laws are not constitutional, even if they are themselves unlawful, we're not going to change them this, or order them to be changed this close to the election. So that's some of what's been going on pre-election. When it comes to the legal disputes that are likely to arise in a sense after election day, it's really hard for us to know for sure what those are going to look like. And this is true every election cycle. You might think about it this way, every election is imperfect. If we insisted on perfect elections, then we would just not have elections. It's impossible to run a perfect election. That being said, usually we don't care that much about at least innocuous imperfections. And the reason why is because it all sort of, it generally doesn't matter in terms of the outcome. But when the outcome potentially turns on what one might argue is an imperfection of the election, then suddenly it's like you're taking a microscope and you're putting it right at that election and specifically at those specific issues that potentially may affect the outcome going forward. And because we don't know what the votes are gonna be yet, we don't know which elections are gonna be close. We don't know where that microscope is gonna be aimed. And so as a result, it's hard for us to know now exactly what those disputes will be. I have plenty of predictions about what they might be, but we don't know for sure. The final category is sort of reforms looking forward. And I'm not gonna try to summarize that now. Instead of what I'll just say is right at the outset, I wanted to say that we don't have to run elections the way we're running elections right now. Other countries do not. We in the past have, as a country, have run elections in different ways. And from my perspective, what's going on right now on a number of different levels is highly troubling. So while I would say that I predict and expect that the election will go forward next week and things will proceed, to me, a lot of what's going on right now does not feel sustainable. And so it seems like the push going forward for reform is likely to be pretty strong. Thank you. That's an incredibly helpful overview. And it teased up nicely Ms. Ishisaka's comments. We'd love to hear from you about what's going on before the election from your unique vantage point. Yeah, I really appreciate that intro and also just a caveat on the journalist not a legal person. So I just say I'm very excited to learn from all of you because you have a lot of expertise that I don't. So I'm very excited to be part of this panel but definitely not a legal person, I'm a journalist. So I'm a journalist on a lot of topics. But I would say one of the things that is really important to remember when we think about this election is that we've had hundreds of years of ways in which certain people were advantaged in the electoral process and other people are disadvantaged and that continues today, right? And so the things that you're seeing now, I mean, we certainly have a pandemic and that's impacting people's ability to vote for sure. But we also have things that are a continuation of efforts that have long been in place to make sure that some people have access to the vote and some people don't. And so what we've seen is for people that wait over an hour to vote, for example, people of color are more likely to wait over an hour than white people by a ratio of seven to one, right? And you see that throughout the electoral process, right? The people who get purged off of voter rolls, the places where there are fewer ballot locations, all those things, if you overlay race, you'll see them tie together. And I think that's a really important thing to always remember and to keep our focus on. And that said, I wrote about this in July that we were kind of looking down the barrel at some pretty dismal voter disenfranchisement coming into this pandemic election. And I think what's been kind of heartening to watch is people kind of took matters into their own hands and decided to enfranchise themselves as I wrote about this week. The number of early voting, as Lisa said, has just exceeded all expectations. And I think part of what's happened is that people have seen the ways in which the law has been used to kind of keep them out of the process and they're really not having it. And they've also seen that anything can happen in this year and in this life and that they didn't wanna leave anything to chance. And so I think all those things happening together paint a somewhat hopeful picture, but then also keeping an eye on the fact that, as Lisa said, we don't have to do things this way. We've kind of carved out this hodgepodge of systems, this sort of Byzantine set of systems that I think an outside observer would kind of look at if they came from another country or another planet and say, why would you do it this way? I think it's a really good question. I think particularly us in Washington, I think I've heard a lot of people say, well, we don't have any of these problems in Washington. Why should we care? And obviously we live in a nation made up of states and what happens in North Carolina desperately affects us. What happens in Texas affects us, right? We can't just kind of sit here in Washington being what was just regarded as the number two easiest state to vote in and just say, well, we're good. So good luck with that. We're all interconnected. And so I think it's important to keep all those things in mind at the same time. Thank you. Let's turn to the other two panelists we haven't heard from just yet to weigh in on this issue of voting rights and any other thoughts you may have. Maybe first to you, Professor Nicholas. Sure. So one of the things I'd like to talk about is the potential aftermath of an election, especially if it's a closely contested one and in particular the precedent of Bush versus Gore, which many people know from a number of decades ago, was a bit of a surprise opinion in terms of the doctrine. And why do I say that's a surprise? Well, you had a conservative leaning Supreme Court set of justices who tend never to be super excited about the Equal Protection Clause when we're talking about the rights of marginalized groups like sexual minorities, women, African-Americans, and so on. And all of a sudden we get a really robust interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause in a narrowly decided opinion. Now, to be fair to the majority, as a con law professor, I would have given them an A for their clever use of Supreme Court precedent to come up with that decision. They basically took a number of cases that liberal Supreme Court justices had written over the years dealing with the fundamental right to vote and assembled them in a way that came up with this issue about the right to have your ballots counted equally. So the precedent is out there and what it suggests is that if we have another close election in a state like Florida or somewhere like that, to the extent there are any differences in how different parts of the state on a county by county basis are counting the votes, we're gonna see something bubble its way up to the court. So there's the legal precedent, then there's what we might call the political precedent, okay? So that was what we would still have called a fairly moderate conservative Supreme Court, but even people like justices Kennedy and O'Connor who we often think of as these independent moderate justices came home to roost so to speak and voted on the side of the Republican candidate for president over the last few years, we've seen Chief Justice Roberts serve as a swing vote, but he is at the end of the day also conservative and he's no longer a swing vote with the way the court has moved. So I think that the most important thing really is that the vote not be as close as it was back in Bush versus Gore, because I think that precedent is going to be very difficult for a Democratic candidate to overcome. Oh, did we lose your audience? I think we lost your audience in the last couple of sentences. Okay, so what I was just saying is that I think the ultimate takeaway is just the hope really that this election is not close because as I think Professor Mannheim pointed out and as I've seen in studying electoral voting privileges, our elections work great when things are not close and most of the time they're not close but when they're that close and when they're that close on a national election or a statewide election, it's really hard for our voting rules to work well. Gosh, I'm glad that we got your audio fixed so you could share a note of hope. Before we turn it over to Ms. Schuster for her thoughts, I just wanted to encourage the audience to drop questions into the chat function or the Q&A as it might appear to you. We'd love to hear those from you. Ms. Schuster? Yes, thank you. And I'm glad we could end on hope because I feel like I just have more bad news to pile on but we'll try to find some hope too. There's a lot of wonderful work that's happening and we'll continue to happen and I do have a lot of hope that both our election systems are going to be changing after we kind of see how this is playing out both federally and locally. One of the things that and I think that Naomi touched upon in other panelists is that we've in some ways, in many ways, this is an unprecedented election but the way in which we've seen the efforts to suppress people's right to vote have been really rooted in the history of our country. In the founding of our constitution, we forbid black people from voting, we forbid women from voting and we're still seeing a lot of the suppression of the same communities. We're just seeing different tools being used. So now instead of having an explicit provision of you can't vote based on race, we have you can't vote unless you have an ID or you can't vote unless you have a specific address that you can prove that you live there. And so we're still certainly disenfranchising people based on race and while Washington in many ways is a better place to vote or an easier place to vote, it still has a lot of problematic policies and one that really stands out to me is we still forbid people with felony convictions from voting and that's really clearly rooted in racism and in preventing, well, at the time, black men because women couldn't vote but in preventing people of color from voting. And so that's something that we still I think really need to work on here in Washington among other things to make sure that people on tribal land are able to vote, that people that are houseless and don't have a stable place to receive mail necessarily are able to cast their belt and have information to vote. In addition to the election process itself and voting, we also have a lot of really problematic elections system. So like even if you can vote, is your vote actually being counted in the same way that everyone else's vote is being counted or not even in the same that everyone else's but that is your vote being counted equally. That's a huge problem nationally and in Washington state and I think a lot of times people toss out gerrymandering and that's super important to be aware of but here in Washington, we also have the majority of elections for like city council or for counties are at large election systems which means in a county for example, like Yakima County or the city of Yakima where it's majority Latinx citizens or like almost majority that are not or sorry, almost majority voting population, there's still because of racism and voting and racial voting patterns, never able to elect candidates with their choice to the council. So the white majority voting population is still electing all seven candidates or all however many candidates there are. So I think there's still a lot of work to do with that both nationally and locally in addition to protecting our electoral process. Wonderful, we've got all sorts of questions coming in. I wanted to come back to Professor Nicholas to weigh in on what the post election landscape looks like and see if you could weigh in on that and we need. Thank you, yes. So I mean, for me thinking about the post election area there is the how do we resolve this vote but I'd also like us to move forward to thinking about what do we do next? Because one of the things we've seen in this election is in my mind an unprecedented effort to really deny people the right to vote. And I'm not talking about, we can agree or disagree on felon disenfranchisement it either is or is not the law but now I'm just talking about people who are legally qualified to vote. We are seeing all sorts of tricks popping up to try to prevent that whether it's things like in Texas where suddenly there's one drop box per county and I have to be honest with you we have those drop boxes in King County and I thought that they're too far away from me and I looked and there's like 70 or 80 of them so I can't imagine what it would be like if there was just one of them in the county. So that's one problem is that and why is this happening? Why is the wire States doing that? Well, guess what the Supreme Court did a few years ago they gutted the Voting Rights Act by striking down the coverage formula. Now, I'm blaming the Supreme Court in part but I'm also going to put a little bit of blame on prior democratic majorities in Congress. What do I mean by that? They had an opportunity to do a clean job of reenacting the Voting Rights Act with updated data and they didn't because they didn't feel they needed to. And if there is a democratic majority in Congress and a Democrat in the White House the first thing they should do is reenact the Voting Rights Act coverage formula with new data and there is plenty of data from this particular election. So that's one thing. The other thing though that I think is concerning and that I think is truly unprecedented because we've seen states do this before that's why the Voting Rights Act came into being. I don't trust the US post office anymore to deliver my ballot and that is never a feeling that I have had in any election with any president in the White House. And so that is very concerning the lack of independence in agencies like that that are partly responsible for protecting the right to vote. So in terms of other reforms it's not just about looking at the states but looking at the independence of other branches of the federal government and hopefully a new Congress can look to that as well. Wonderful. I have a question I think is aimed for the all of the panelists Peter Professor Nichols after you mentioned the Supreme Court here is the Supreme Court likely to decide this election? Question many of us are wondering and watching with bated breath. So I'm happy to jump in on that one. So I'm a lawyer I'm not, I don't think I can predict future events. So I don't know, it's possible. But in my view and in my view it would be extremely problematic for that to happen for a number of different reasons including as Professor Nichols suggested we are not at a time right now when the, we're not in 2000 right now the country is much more politically polarized and the idea that the Supreme Court would sort of step in at a certain point and appear to the public to be deciding the election is highly problematic just in terms of the legitimacy that's likely to accord both the Supreme Court as well as to the election results. And so while I share the concern that the Supreme Court may at some point weigh in I think that's a relatively low probability event at this point. The Supreme Court has been kind of pulled into a lot of these disputes thus far because in the pre-election phase like we talked about at the beginning the courts can often have a lot to say here. There's various claims that people can try to bring based on federal law, based on state law based on US constitutional law based on state constitutional law arguing that a jurisdiction must change its procedures in some way. But once election day hits the sorts of legal arguments shift into something new. And for the most part, definitely not entirely but for the most part those disputes are based in state law, not in federal law. And what that means is that you're certainly gonna have various state actors being involved in the recount process if the dispute continues after that it goes into an election contest you're certainly gonna have state actors involved and state courts possibly involved but you don't have a lot of direct involvement of federal actors or of federal courts. Now the big exception here that in a sense kind of proves the rule but also calls into question what's gonna happen going forward is the Bush versus Gore case. And Professor Nicholas talked about that a little bit and what I would say with respect to that case actually a surface back to what one of the audience members asked, which is what kind of presidential value does that case have going forward? And essentially it has the same presidential value as any other case. We know that the Supreme Court in the decision suggested that it's holding was narrow but that doesn't mean it can't be used as precedent going forward, number one. And number two, just to remind everybody prior to the Bush versus Gore decision Bush versus Gore was not itself a president at all. So the court can also take a step further and create its own precedents. In terms of what legally speaking that's likely to look like essentially there are I would say three broad federal claims that may be relevant to a post-election dispute. The first is a Bush versus Gore claim which is essentially that the way the jurisdiction is counting the ballots is so sort of inconsistent that it violates equal protection of law that's Bush versus Gore. The second is a due process claim and that claim essentially states that jurisdictions are not allowed to change the rules of an election after the votes have been cast. Okay, so we haven't seen that at the US Supreme Court level but that potentially could arise. And then third is a sort of claim that has gotten a lot of press recently which is the idea that when it comes to figuring out a state's elections rules the state legislature controls and maybe it controls even when it's in conflict with the state constitution. That third legal theory was in a concurrence in Bush versus Gore and now in various sort of concurrences and dissents justices of the US the currents of US Supreme Court have been bringing up that theory a little bit. So this gives rise to essentially concern that based on one or more of these theories the United States Supreme Court may be the one that ultimately decides the election which then I would say brings me back to my initial point which is yes, it's possible that that would present itself but that's a pretty low probability event. A lot of things would have to fall into place for the US Supreme Court to have any sort of federal question to answer in the 2020 election. Thank you. As I'm listening, I'm thinking about the majority of our audience is our lawyers or law students and can probably follow a good amount of what you've just been saying. And also there may be some folks in the audience who for whom that doesn't track and or the sort of issues are larger than the kind of narrow presidential potentially narrow presidential questions. And I wanted to turn to Ms. Ishisaka to ask how you think about your role in the democracy as a bearer of information and an advocate because you clearly are an advocate for voting rights and for sort of sharing accurate information. And I just wondered if you would weigh in on how as you're seeing these facts and cases unfold what your role is in this or what you're learning about how to translate and how to kind of share information. Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I think my role at the paper as both the an assistant managing editor and as a columnist is to really try to make sure that the voices of those who have been excluded are included, going forward and so in terms of my column what I really try to do is translate the things that folks like you and have a lot of expertise on to the lay person and try to get them to understand how it impacts them on their day-to-day life. And so I think my role is to really kind of filter out that information and make it as accessible for people as possible and if we're gonna get back to the question about what can be done but I definitely have thoughts about that if you want me to just say something about that. I think that'd be great. And then we can turn to Ms. Huster to hear about her efforts on the ground and locally and that might be a nice transition, so thank you. Yeah, so one of the things that I wrote about my first column on this topic in July was that even though we might've gotten used to the way things are in Washington I think it's important that we remind ourselves that it's not like this everywhere. And so I wrote in my column in July about this idea of the four pillars of fair absentee voting and you could call it four pillars of fair mail-in voting since absentee and mail-in seem to have some loadedness attached to it now. But those four pillars are things that we do in Washington but I think it bears repeating which is that one of them is allowing ballots to be postmarked on or before election day and then not having that be the barrier to whether or not the ballot is accepted. And you can see that the impacts of that playing out across the country right now. Allowing or giving voters prepaid postage so they don't have to scrounge around for a stamp or figure out how to pay for the postage and eliminating that barrier. Allowing community organizations to help return sealed ballots and I know that that's a controversial one but I think having that conversation there's a lot of uproar that people have had around seeing people return other people's ballots and it's a strange thing people are really fixated on but I think having some conversations around that as a community as to the pros and cons of doing it different ways I think is really important. And then having standards for signature matching that's another really controversial one that people are talking about across the country and it's almost like going back in time to hear folks and the consternation around a lot of these issues happening in other states because we've dealt with this for so long but I think it is important for folks that are from other states or folks that are thinking about how we could change things going forward that we keep those principles in mind. Thank you. Ms. Schuster, over to you. Yeah, thank you for that. So our office is, or our affiliate is focused largely on voter protection and election reform in Washington state specifically. And so there's, I just say that upfront there's lots of things that ACLU and other affiliates in the national office are doing in other places but here because we do have mail-in voting have for a while, it's pretty secure. And as was mentioned earlier don't have quite as many issues with voter suppression as other places again, still have issues. So we're working on that. We're working on making sure that the Washington Voting Rights Act is enforced and that allows cities and other jurisdictions to change their election systems to make sure that communities of color having an equal say in who their candidates of choice are. But I think, and also enforcing the Native American Voting Rights Act which allows folks on tribal reservations to use non-traditional addresses to name like a building and also request ballot boxes for their communities. So that was just recently passed and we're still trying to make sure that, it's worth more than the piece of paper it's written on. In terms of what I'm also really excited about I think we will see legislation this year to expand voting to folks that have a felony conviction that are no longer incarcerated. And so while we still have, building blocks from there to go to really further and make sure we're not disenfranchising anyone that I think that's a good step in the next direction or yes, a good step in the right direction. We've been working a lot with officials with respect to this election for folks that are in jail a lot of people don't know that can still vote. So making sure that they know they have a right to vote and have access to the ballot. So we've gotten some ballot boxes in jails which is really exciting. So people can drop their ballots off there and not have to worry about mailing them. I think, but I think the biggest thing and this was alluded to is really working with communities and being driven by what community needs are and making sure that folks know what their rights are. I am a lawyer, but the law is sometimes good and sometimes bad and so we need to work together to change it and it's certainly not just gonna come for me. And so I am excited to be collaborating with folks to see where we can go from here. Thank you. That seems like a great segue to head over to Professor Nicholas or Professor Mannheim for their thoughts on reform and what should come next. Who wants to go first? There you go, Peter Nicholas. As I started to say, I think that really the first step has to be to reinvigorate the Voting Rights Act. Professor Mannheim talked about changes, right? And some changes have been positive. Some changes have been designed to try to make it easier for people to vote. I think that sadly, a long history in this country has shown us that, especially in certain areas of the country, they are absolutely willing to disenfranchise people, to trick people to make it harder to vote. And one thing I do wanna pause and say is it is actually quite heartening to see that this election, people are not letting it happen. Now, it's hard, right? And I have, my hats off to these people I see standing in lines during a pandemic. People are saying, I want my vote to be counted and hearing about all of these organizations that are out there trying to help people vote. I mean, that's really what's gotta happen at this point because one of the things is, we as lawyers are used to kind of falling back on law. And a lot of the population thinks the law will help us. And sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. And I mean, one of the realities that we've started to see elections matter, right? You know, I remember four years ago, people saying, well, there's not much of a difference between the candidates. Well, I'll just say, imagine if Hillary Clinton had appointed the last three Supreme Court justices. If you told me four years ago that Donald Trump was gonna be appointing one third of the US Supreme Court in a single term, I would have not believed you. So that's one thing, but I think in general, efforts have to be made to make it easier to vote. You know, I was just looking, and it looked like they finally changed things. But even in what we might call progressive states like New York, where my parents live, I tried to fill out an absentee ballot form or try to help them with doing that a couple months ago. And there was nothing in place for generally, if you're a senior citizen, you know, COVID, nothing. I think they've just now made a change there. But, you know, we are all used to in this state voting by mail. It works. And so I really think we need to see more of that, but I wanna hear from Professor Mannheim, who thinks about this stuff all the time. Yeah, so, I mean, there's lots to say about this question of sort of reform going forward. One of the questions from the audience asked, what sorts of reform can be effectuated through constitutional amendment and what sorts of reforms can be effectuated through a statute? So I have an answer to that in case it's helpful. And that's gonna actually circle us right on back to the Supreme Court. So with respect to what sorts of reforms that might go to some of these issues of voting, what sorts of reforms could be done through statute? One is, as Professor Nicholas says, is the amendment to the Voting Rights Act. So in Shelby County, they struck that down the coverage formula as unconstitutional. That could be re-implemented. The whole act could be sort of looked back over and amended. The democratic members of the House have now repeatedly and pointedly offered bills that seek to make these sorts of sweeping changes to the preexisting Voting Rights laws that we have. So that's one place where folks could look. And I'm kind of stalling here a little bit because basically I'm about to go into things that they may not seem voting related, but I think they're voting related. So let me tell you what they are. So what else? How about a new state? New states, Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C. Maybe there's other states out there too. I don't know, but those, my understanding is that new states can be introduced into the country through legislation. And to me, that's relevant to voting and to elections because right now with when we have the system we have with the Senate and we have the Electoral College. What that means, among other things is that we have a real disconnect between on the one hand what a majority of the voters across the country want and then on the other hand what we actually see in Washington, D.C. It is also the case of course that the people who live in Washington, D.C. or at least most of the people live in Washington, D.C. And same thing, most of the people live in Puerto Rico are American citizens, all of them, but they are not able to vote in some or all of these elections. So that would respond to voting rights issues right there quite a bit. Another thing that could happen is expansion of the U.S. Supreme Court could happen through statute. And again, this may not seem to directly relate to voting rights but we'll get back to that in a second. As related matter, and this also goes to a question in the chat. Through legislation, Congress could also change the jurisdiction of the various federal courts. So Congress could take jurisdiction away from the federal courts with respect to certain types of issues. It could move it around to different courts. These are things that Congress can generally deal without a constitutional amendment. What sorts of things would require a constitutional amendment? Well, here's one. The U.S. Constitution does not include in its text a generally applicable right to vote. So it includes, it refers to the right to vote in various amendments and in other places. But when it refers to the right to vote in a sense what it says is, this is again the text of the constitution. It says to the extent there, I'm paraphrasing, to the extent there is a right to vote, you can't, the estate is not allowed to implement that right to vote in a way that discriminates against people on the basis of race or on the basis of gender or on the basis of age, if you're over 18. So in a sense, the constitution again at least based on its text does not set a baseline. It just says once there is a baseline, you can't discriminate on these factors. Now I think that there actually is a generally applicable right to vote in the U.S. Constitution. Half a century of case law from the Supreme Court really clearly confirms that understanding. But my sense is that that's not necessarily shared that understanding the U.S. Constitution shared by everybody in the federal judiciary. And so if one wanted to have a generally, textually bound right to vote in the U.S. Constitution, that would require an amendment to the Constitution. And there has been now some push toward getting a right to vote in a text of the Constitution added through amendment. Finally, there's been, I know some talk of turn limits associated with Supreme Court justices. And it's hard to know whether for sure that would require a constitutional amendment, but by my assessment, that probably would require a constitutional amendment, even if you tried to kind of be clever about it and just move the justices around, that likely would require a constitutional amendment. Now, some other things, if you want to change the electoral college, that's going to require a constitutional amendment. If you want to change the way the Senate and the House is constituted, other than just by adding states, that's going to take a constitutional amendment as well. And so to quickly kind of circle back to why I keep talking about the Supreme Court when it comes to voting reform, the reason is because at the end of the day, the US Supreme Court plays a pretty significant role in election law in our country. And what it has done recently in the last 10 plus years is essentially, it's been very hands-off. It's basically said, look, states, you do what you feel like you need to do. Unfortunately, what we see in not all states, but in some states is we see the people in charge not focusing, I'm trying to sort of be sort of neutral about this, they don't seem to be committed to facilitating the right to vote in a way that makes it easy and accessible for all voters. And the US Supreme Court doesn't have to take this hands-off approach, but that's what it's doing. It is also the case that in part, due to the legal theory I was suggesting before about this idea that you have to defer to state legislatures, the Supreme Court is now giving signals that maybe it's actually gonna start interfering with what state courts are doing to try to, in a sense, promote the right to vote. Okay, so this is just a long way of saying that when it comes, if it goes back to that sort of the three things again, what are the legal disputes when it comes to the 2020 elections that are going on right now, those are pretty sort of turning to resolve themselves and the election will go forward. What are the disputes gonna be after election? Well, we're gonna have to see. When it comes to a longer term, however, I think that's when at least in my view, you start talking about these really big picture issues. What about the Supreme Court? How many states should we have? Things like that. Thank you. We've got five minutes left. And I wondered if I could ask the panelists, if you are a law student or a citizen concerned about this election, what would you do on election day and thereafter? So kind of advice for the concerned citizen or a law student who'd like to be helpful in the democracy at this moment. Oh, I have plenty of thoughts. I would love to hear from you all. I mean, obviously vote, vote, number one vote, right? Number two, if you've got the extra time, you can obviously volunteer with any of the advocacy organizations that are trying to help other people get their votes in. And three, really just getting yourself informed on the issues. Some of the things, especially that Professor Mannheim has talked about are complex specialized areas of law. So taking the time to take courses like that so that you can become informed and then later on advocate for those particular areas that you're interested in. And I would just say to piggyback on that in a plug for local journalism, I think there's definitely the law, but I think we only know what's happening in our own communities and our own regions because of the work of journalists on the ground who are making sure to observe and report back any irregularities or things that come up. We have a whole team of folks that are working on that as do other newsrooms. And that says not anything to be taken for granted. I think there's a lot of states and localities that don't have any local journalism anymore and that's a very real threat. And as we think about kind of this whole ecosystem, an informed public requires that we have journalists on the ground doing that work. Yeah, I would all of that. And in addition, vote for the president and vote for everyone else on the ballot. I think that's something that often gets lost every presidential year. And there's a lot we can do to protect Washingtonians that with our state legislatures and legislators and judges. So vote and see council and mayor and all those things. And then I think the other thing echoing what's already been said too, but is regardless of who wins that we don't become complacent, right? Like we, there's some really unprecedented things, horrendous things that this president has done, but there are terrible things that democratic presidents do too and we need to be holding all of our elected officials accountable and not become complacent. So if there are issues that you care about, there's lots of ways to get involved politically, but there's also ways to get involved non-politically to be pushing people to be doing the right thing. So everything that people are saying makes a ton of sense to me. To circle back to the point about journalism, I can't emphasize enough how important that is. And I'll circle back to this theme in just a second, but I think that there is a lot of work to be done all the way down. And when I say all the way down, I mean civics education for my kids all the way down. And again, I'll come back to that in a second. So if I were lost in right now trying to figure out what to do with respect to concerns with the election, I think I might consider the following. So first I have to pay attention on election day, what's going on, that's my job, but if you don't have to pay attention to what's going on election day, consider taking the day and going off on a hike and just enjoying yourself. The news will wait, it will be there when you get back. And speaking of when it comes to the news, if you hear things breaking quickly and they seem very dramatic, very certain, coming out really quick, those are probably not correct facts. As somebody who is often called on and trying to do her best to explain what's going on, to reporters and to others, I can tell you it takes me time. I can't look at a court's opinion in 10 seconds and start commenting on it. It takes me a while to get to it and to process it and to explain it. This is certainly that's gonna be true generally on election day and the days thereafter. And speaking of when it comes to the days after election day, folks, there's a lot going on right now, but we have laws and this is an election and we have a process to follow and we have to follow it to the extent that anybody right now from the top on down thinks that we can just bypass these procedures, bypass these laws, that is not correct in my view. So we have rule of law, rule of laws in place and we have a procedure for resolving this election. And then what I'd say when it comes going forward, you know, there's a lot going on right now and it's really, really hard to sort of grapple with it all, but there are a number of signs for hope, I think. And one is that I said before, I talked before about the need for civics education. And in 2016, I think it was the Adenberg Public Policy Center or I don't quite remember the name. They have a study that they put out regularly testing citizens knowledge, civics knowledge and the results are appalling. I mean, it was something like over a quarter, only a quarter of the population could name all three branches of government or something like that. And so this is in the 2016, this survey went out and we got those results. In 2020, they did it again just recently and you know what, all those numbers skyrocketed. People are paying attention. You guys are not the only people who care about this. We're not the only people who care about this. There's lots of people who care about this. And frankly, and I know I'm talking too much but I'll end with this. A recent study by some political scientists looked at what they called the costs of voting and they found that when they compared all these different things, these impositions to voting, Texas was the most expensive state. If you think about it like that to vote, it's really, really hard to vote in Texas. And when I see that and then I see that there are nine million people who have already voted in Texas that warms my heart and it confirms that again, we have a lot of energy out there. I'm a lot of people who care about this. Thank you so much. I wanna thank all the panelists for joining us today. It was really a pleasure to hear your perspectives and your expertise and I wanna thank Professor Mannheim in particular for all the work she did in organizing this. So thank you and if we were in person, we would be clapping and be well. Thanks everybody. Thanks for attending.