Young v. Fordice’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

15 federal appellate · 23 district · 1 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 87 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “requires States to provide simplified systems for registering to vote in federal elections, i.e., elections for federal officials, such as tbe President, congressional Representatives, and United States Senators. The States must provide a system for voter registration by mail, § 1973gg-4, a system for voter registration at various state offices (including those that provide “public assistance” and those that provide services to people with disabilities), § 1973gg-5, and, particularly important, a system for voter registration on a driver’s license application, § 1973gg-3. The NVRA specifies various details about how these systems must work_It also imposes requirements about just when, and how, States may remove people from the federal voter [registration] rolls. §§ 1973gg-6(a)(3), (4).”

   4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. League of Women Voters of the United States v. Newby · 100 F. Supp. 2d 1012 - Dobrovolny v. Nebraska

2. “In saying this, we recognize that the NVRA imposes certain mandates on States, describing those mandates in detail. The NVRA says, for example, that the state driver’s license applications must also serve as voter registration applications and that a decision not to register will remain confidential. It says that States cannot force driver’s license applications to submit the same information twice (on license applications and again on registration forms). Nonetheless, implementation of the NVRA is not purely ministerial. The NVRA still leaves room for policy choice. The NVRA does not list, for example, all the other information the State may—or may not—provide or request. And a decision about that other information—say, whether or not to tell the applicant that registration counts only for federal elections—makes Mississippi’s' changes to the New System the kind of discretionary, nonministerial changes that call for federal VRA review. Hence, Mississippi must preclear those changes.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Fish v. Kobach

3. “In this case, those seeking to administer the Provisional Plan .... abandoned the Plan as soon as its unlawfulness became apparent, ie., as soon as it became clear that the legislature would not pass the laws needed to make it lawful. Moreover, all these events took place within the space of a few weeks. The plan was used to register voters for only 41 days, and only about a third of the State’s voter registration officials had begun to use it. Further, the State held no elections prior to its abandonment of the Provisional Plan, nor were any elections imminent. These circumstances taken together lead us to conclude that the Provisional Plan was not “in force or effect”; hence it did not become part of the baseline against which we are to judge whether future change occurred.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 12 F. Supp. 2d 325 - Warden v. Pataki