About Us
What We Are Doing:
Voting – in our country people have tried to rock it, stuff it, defraud it, gerrymander it, disenfranchise it, expand it, turn it out, recount it, and stop it. How we vote–the whole crazy process from months before the polls open to months after they have closed–has increasingly come under the microscope of lawyers, judges, campaigns, and average citizens in the past decade. We’re interested, too.
We dedicate this blog to how Americans vote. We will focus our microscope closer than the four year presidential pageantry and the buzz of national campaign finance law coverage on the evening news. It’s voting at the local level, determined by state and local level election laws and practices, that make the difference in our perennial exercise of democracy.
Our goal is to cover every state in the union–to examine the particulars of how they’re voting, redistricting, and recounting. We recognize the ambition inherent in such a goal and know we can’t do it on Day One or without help. So, we invite you to help us get there.
While you will find facts and opinions in our posts, the purpose of this blog is not to advance any political agenda, candidate, or party. We want to inform our readers and ourselves about interesting aspects of election law in our United States.
Comments? If you would like to make a comment to our posts, please email wmstateofelections@gmail.com. We won’t put every comment up because wise people have advised against doing so. But we will post responsive and considered comments that advance the discussion.
Who We Are:
This blog is a run by the students in the Election Law Program at William & Mary Law School. But it wouldn’t last long without help from lots of institutions and great people like our guest bloggers, the Election Law Society and the Election Law Program Advisory Committee, the Institute of Bill of Rights Law, and our neighbors, the National Center for State Courts.
Join Us
If we’re not covering your state, you can help us. We are in the process of developing as broad of coverage as possible with the contributions of students from many different parts of the country. If you are interested in adding to the discussion for your state, SOE invites you to become a contributor to our site. Also, you can send us an individual submission on a state election law issue that you want to address. Please contact us for more information at wmstateofelections@gmail.com.
Thanks for your interest and support!
Our Editorial Board:
Editors:
Tehya Gerbino ’27
Gianna Smurro ’27 is a first-year law student from Manalapan, New Jersey, and a 2024 graduate of Elon University. While at Elon, she earned a B.A., summa cum laude, in Journalism and Cinema with a minor in Political Science. While an undergraduate, Gianna spent three years as a leader of a multi-institutional, international research seminar on Work-Integrated Learning and worked on the communications team of the higher education non-profit Bringing Theory to Practice. She also completed her research capstone assessing the influence of deepfake technology on identifying political misinformation on social media. At William & Mary, in addition to serving as a State of Elections Blog Editor, Gianna serves on the Student Intellectual Property Society board. She is also involved in Public Service Fund and Women’s Law Society.