October 2012

by Jeremy Leaming

In a number of states, Republican lawmakers have gone to great lengths to make voting a major pain. The Department of Justice, civil liberties groups and others have successfully fought to blunt many of those efforts. Now, in addition to Republican eagerness to limit voting, Hurricane Sandy has wrought large swaths devastation on the East Coast. Not only did Sandy knock out some early voting times in several states, it has left many of them with more work to ensure they will be prepared for Election Day.

Michael Cooper, in a piece for The New York Times, says the “obstacles are formidable. More than 8.2 million households were without power by midday Tuesday, with more than a fifth of them in swing states – a potential problem in an age when the voting process, which once consisted of stuffing paper ballots into boxes, has been electrified.”

Cooper’s piece notes that federal law gives states the ability to choose electors on a “subsequent day,” if they fail to do so on Election Day. But “prominent election lawyer Jerry H. Goldfeder says that while it may be legally “simple,” for states to choose how they might provide more voting opportunities after Election Day, “historically, politically and logistically, it would be highly extraordinary and unique event in American history.” Goldfeder said it likely makes more sense for Congress to clarify federal law to provide for a unified response to elections impacted by terrorist attacks or natural disasters.

Some states as Cooper notes have restored some early voting periods. (For example, Maryland Gov. Martin O’ Malley ordered early voting centers to reopen on Oct. 31 and extended early voting until 9 p.m. on Nov. 2 at those centers.)

By J. Amy Dillard, Associate Professor of Law, University of Baltimore School of Law

This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear two cases that address whether the sniff of a dog constitutes a search of a home under the Fourth Amendment and whether a trained drug-sniffing dog’s “alert” gives probable cause for a warrantless search of a vehicle. 

Where citizens have very low expectations of privacy like the exterior of luggage in an airport terminal, the Court has held that the warrantless sniff of a dog does not violate the Fourth Amendment. But in Florida v. Jardines, a trained police dog, without a warrant, sniffed the front porch and door of a home, where the occupant’s Fourth Amendment privacy interests were at her strongest; he alerted that drugs were within the home by sitting down at the front door. Based on the dog’s alert, police obtained a warrant to search the home and found marijuana plants. At issue in Jardines is whether the defendant had a Fourth Amendment interest in protecting the exterior of her home from a sniffing dog. In Florida v. Harris, the Court must address the reliability of a trained drug-sniffing dog and determine what evidence the government must offer of that reliability when the dog provides the fundamental piece of evidence supporting probable cause to justify a warrantless search of a vehicle. In Harris,a police officer responded to an alert by a trained police dog on the exterior handle of a vehicle and, relying on that dog’s alert, entered the vehicle without a warrant and seized drug contraband.