Election Law at Ohio State (ELOSU)

As of 2025, ELOSU was listed as an official affiliate of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab (MEDSL), an election and polling statistics center that tends to favor a left-leaning narrative of election policies in its research and reports. ^{2 3}

Background

Election Law at Ohio State is an election law and administration research and education program housed at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Its researchers investigate challenges facing election administrators, and the institution then shares this research with policymakers to influence legislation pertaining to elections and voting. ELOSU was founded in 2004 and claims to have distributed its findings to lawyers, academics, teachers, journalists, lawmakers, and various civic leaders. ¹

Activities

Since its founding, Election Law at Ohio State has run a project called Major Pending Election Cases, which keeps track of election law cases, as well as commentaries and summaries, from around the United States. In 2020, it partnered with SCOTUSblog to create the 2020 Election Litigation Tracker to monitor all litigation pertaining to U.S. elections, particularly those that had the potential to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. ⁴

In 2024, ELOSU held a conference on Convergence Voting, an alternative to Instant Runoff Voting, where political parties would receive votes from third parties that are ideologically affiliated. For example, during the tabulation process, Democrats would receive votes that were cast for the Green Party, and if the total amount of votes they garnered put them over the percentage received by Republicans, they would win the election even if the Republicans received more direct votes. ELOSU’s director Edward B. Foley was joined by director of research at FairVote Deb Otis and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Kevin R. Kosar. ⁵

Affiliations

As of 2025, Election Law at Ohio State was listed as an official affiliate of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab (MEDSL), an election and polling statistics center housed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). MEDSL purports to apply “scientific principles” to the study of how elections are administered in the United States and aims to “improve the democratic experience” for American voters. MEDSL’s research areas tend to favor a left-leaning narrative of election policies, focusing on subjects such as “mail-in balloting,” “same-day registration,” and “redistricting.”  ^{2 3}

Leadership

As of 2025, Edward B. Foley was serving as the director of Election Law at Ohio State. At that time, Foley held the Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law at OSU. He has been invited to speak as an “Election Law Analyst” by NBC and MSNBC during the 2020 and 2024 elections. A former contributing columnist for the Washington Post, his writings have been published in The Atlantic, Politico, and other publications. He runs a Substack called “Common Ground Democracy” through which he argues that America’s election laws need to be changed to “combat polarization.” ^{1 6 7}