The McKinney election contest
A few days ago I received an email with the complaint filed by several of Rep. Cynthia McKinney's supporters claiming that a massive number of Republicans had voted in the Democratic primary and that their votes had defeated McKinney. I passed the complaint along to a listserv of election law practitioners and academics and Eugene Volokh mentioned it on his blog and posted the complaint. The Atlanta Journal Constitution has now done an analysis of the voting and finds that the number of Republicans voting in the Demo primary was much smaller than the number by which McKinney lost (ajc.com | ELECTION 2002 | GOP not key in McKinney loss). This is all pretty interesting to me because I was involved in an election contest in 1986 in which we proved that Republicans had illegally crossed over to vote in the Democratic runoff. In our case, there was a party rule defining who could vote and backed up by a state law allowing such party rules. In the McKinney case, the theory is based on the constitution and the Voting Rights Act.