elections
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Must We Vote?
There’s exactly one month to go until election day. It’s as good a moment as any to announce a series of blog posts that I will publish over the next few weeks, to argue that, contrary to what is often said, there is no moral duty to vote or, in other words, that it is Continue reading
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Show ‘Em
Earlier this week, an American court issued a decision on a topic that is all but certain to come up for discussion in the weeks after October 19: the ballot selfie, and the attempts ban it. Judge Barbadoro of the U.S. District Court in New Hampshire declared unconstitutional that state’s law that made it an offence to Continue reading
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Persuasion and Voting from Abroad
When Norman Spector and I debated the disenfranchisement of Canadians abroad on the CBC’s The 180 a couple of weeks ago, he pointed to the fact that some expatriates ― such as Americans he met in Israel while he was Canada’s ambassador there ― vote on the sole basis of the candidates’ policies towards their current Continue reading
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Shut Up!
Yesterday, the Court of Appeal for Ontario ruled that Parliament can disenfranchise Canadians who live abroad. The judgment, Frank v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 ONCA 536, reverses that of the Superior Court, which had ruled that the provisions of the Canada Elections Act that prevent Canadians who have resided abroad for more than five years are Continue reading
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The Party’s Over
This is the second post in the series about my most recent article, “‘Third Parties’ and Democracy 2.0”, (2015) 60:2 McGill LJ 253. I introduced the paper, which deals with the repercussions of political and technological changes on our framework for regulating the participation of persons other than parties and candidates in pre-electoral debate, yesterday. Today, Continue reading
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“Third Parties” and Democracy 2.0
The McGill Law Journal recently published a paper of mine, “‘Third Parties’ and Democracy 2.0”, (2015) 60:2 McGill LJ 253, about which I haven’t yet had the chance to brag here. Unfortunately, I won’t be able (pursuant to the Journal’s policy) to upload the full text of the paper to SSRN for a while. But Continue reading
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Keeping Secrets
I wrote, a while ago now, about the electoral practices of Georgian England, including the brazen, and fantastically expensive, corruption which elections involved. This weekend, the BBC published a fascinating story by Alasdair Gill, looking at a change in the electoral rules that happened during the Victorian age ― in 1872, to be precise ― Continue reading
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There Is Method In’t
To students of the Supreme Court’s “law of democracy” jurisprudence, there usually seems to be something distressingly inconsistent in the ways in which the Court approached the issue of discrimination against smaller political parties in Figueroa v. Canada (Attorney General), 2003 SCC 37,[2003] 1 S.C.R. 912, and that of the silencing of “third parties” in Harper v. Canada Continue reading
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Vote On
The CBC reports that Justice Robert Sharpe of the Ontario Court of Appeal denied the federal government’s application for a stay of the Superior Court’s decision in Frank v. Canada (Attorney-General), 2014 ONSC 907, invalidating the restrictions on expatriate voting in the Canada Elections Act, which the government is appealing. I blogged about the Superior Court’s Continue reading
Double Aspect 