- National: Voting Rights
for Blacks in ’65 Law Face Court Challenge | Bloomberg
- Colorado: Noncitizen
voters ID’d fraction of those first alleged by Secretary of State Gessler
| The Denver Post
- Colorado: Lack of
evidence doesn’t stop Colorado from going after voter fraud | Examiner.com
- Florida: Groups race
against time to get Florida voters registered | NBC News
- Florida: Early voting:
Why Justice dropped its challenge of Florida plan | CSMonitor.com
- Iowa: Judge refuses to
throw out voting rules lawsuit against Secretary of State Matt Schultz |
Des Moines Register
- Kansas: Ballot Challenge
Over Obama’s Birth Is Ended | NYTimes.com
- Mississippi:
U.S. Justice Department approves Mississippi’s legislative redistricting
plan | The
Commercial Appeal
- Pennsylvania: Voter ID
law sends non-drivers on a bureaucratic journey | The Washington Post
- Editorials: Can South
Carolina justify its voter ID law? | Rock Hill Herald
- Texas: Many Texans
Bereaved Over ‘Dead’ Voter Purge | NPR
- Texas: Voter ID, district
maps battles continue | Amarillo Globe-News
After running a story about voter access laws last Sunday, the New York Times got some complaints from readers about its he-said-she-said treatment of whether voter fraud is a serious problem. Margaret Sullivan, the Times' public editor, asked the reporter and editor of the piece for their views: The national editor, Sam Sifton, rejected the argument. “There’s a lot of reasonable disagreement on both sides,” he said. One side says there’s not significant voter fraud; the other side says there’s not significant voter suppression. “It’s not our job to litigate it in the paper,” Mr. Sifton said. “We need to state what each side says.” Mr. Bronner agreed. “Both sides have become very angry and very suspicious about the other,” he said. “The purpose of this story was to step back and look at both sides, to lay it out.” While he agreed that there was “no known evidence of in-person voter fraud,” and that could have been included in this story, “I don’t think that’s the core issue here.” This is a pretty remarkable response. Read More
In 2008 the majority-black town of Kinston, North Carolina, voted almost 2-to-1 to make its local elections nonpartisan. Nine months later, as the measure was set to kick in, the U.S. Justice Department blocked it. The department’s reason: The plan would reduce the power of black voters. The dispute in the town of 22,000 spawned a lawsuit that is now before the U.S. Supreme Court as a potential test case for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The landmark law was enacted to combat the discrimination that had kept blacks away from Southern polling booths for generations and has been used in this year’s elections to challenge Republican-backed voter- identification laws. The suit takes aim at one of the 1965 law’s core provisions: the power it gives the federal government to block changes in local election rules, like the one in Kinston, in 16 states. Read More
Colorado: Noncitizen voters
ID’d fraction of those first alleged by Secretary of State Gessler | The Denver
Post
More than a year ago, Colorado
Secretary of State Scott Gessler said there could be in excess of 11,000
noncitizens registered to vote in Colorado and more than 4,000 of those who had
cast ballots, and he has called noncitizen voter registration a "gaping
hole" in the system. But earlier this month, Gessler, a Republican, announced
that his office had found only 141 people who were noncitizens registered to
vote out of 1,416 names run through a federal database, and of those 141, only
35 who had cast ballots. That number represents 0.001 percent of Colorado's 3.5
million registered voters. Read MoreColorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler has been investigating voter fraud for over a year even though concern over ballots being cast by thousands of voters who aren't U.S. citizens has been founded on myth, not math. "It's created an atmosphere where voters, even ones who are entitled to vote, fear their registration may not be valid or that they'll be challenged at the polls," said Elena Nunez, executive director of Common Cause, a liberal group that has tangled with Gessler over election issues. More than a year ago Gessler said there could be in excess of 11,000 noncitizens registered to vote in Colorado. Earlier this month, the Republican Secretary of State announced that his office had found only 141 people who were noncitizens registered to vote out of 1,416 names run through a federal database, and of those 141, only 35 who had cast ballots. That number represents 0.001 percent of Colorado's 3.5 million registered voters. Read More
Voting-rights groups that virtually stopped registering voters in Florida for a year as they challenged the state's new restrictions on elections now are scrambling to get people there registered for the November 6 election. The effort in Florida - a large, politically divided state that is crucial in the nationwide race between Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney - comes two weeks after a federal judge rejected strict limits on voter-registration drives that have led to a big drop in Floridians signing up to vote. The Florida law was so limiting that groups such as Rock the Vote and the League of Women Voters, which have helped to register millions of voters in the last two presidential elections, essentially halted their registration drives in the state. Now, with the restrictions lifted and Florida's October 9 deadline for registering to vote in the November election looming, such groups are fanning out across the state to find new voters. Read More
Florida has received a green light to implement its new early voting schedule for the November presidential election, including a Republican-backed plan that eliminates early voting on the Sunday before Election Day. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division agreed to end its challenge to the new early voting scheme in Florida, considered a critical battleground in the upcoming election. The department notified state officials late Wednesday that it would approve the state’s plan for early voting, provided election supervisors in five designated counties agree to offer 96 hours of early voting over an 8-day period. “The Attorney General does not interpose any objections to the specified changes,” the letter says in part. Read More
Iowa: Judge refuses to throw
out voting rules lawsuit against Secretary of State Matt Schultz | Des Moines
Register
Polk County judge has refused
to throw out a lawsuit against Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz, rejecting
Schultz’s argument that a Latino advocacy group and the ACLU have no legal
standing to try to block his imposition of new voting rules. District
Judge Mary Pat Gunderson said the controversy, which stems from new rules that
Schultz instituted in July under emergency rule-making procedures, falls within
a special exception to legal limits on who has the ability to bring court cases
in certain issues. Iowa Supreme Court justices in 2008 refused to overturn
actions by the 2004 Iowa legislature, finding that the Sioux City taxpayer who
sued hadn’t satisfied requirements that she 1) be personally involved in the
controversy and 2) be seriously injured by the questioned
action. According to a ruling filed by Gunderson late Tuesday, “The court
in (that case) saw the absence of any allegations implicating ‘fraud, surprise,
personal and private gain or other such evils inconsistent with the democratic
process’ as diminishing the need to intervene in the activities of another
branch of government. Read MoreCiting a wave of angry backlash, a Kansas man on Friday withdrew a petition in which he argued that President Obama should be removed from the state’s election ballot because he did not meet citizenship requirements. The challenge filed this week by Joe Montgomery of Manhattan, Kan., prompted state election authorities to seek a certified copy of Mr. Obama’s birth certificate and reignited long-running conspiracy theories that the president was not born in the United States. The state will continue to try to obtain the birth certificate, and officials will meet on Monday as scheduled to close the case officially. But without the petition, Mr. Obama will remain on the ballot, Secretary of State Kris W. Kobach told The Associated Press. Mr. Montgomery, the communications director for the Kansas State University College of Veterinary Medicine, explained his decision in an e-mail to Mr. Kobach. intimidation directed not only at me, but at people around me, who are both personal and professional associations,” he wrote. He added that he did not “wish to burden anyone with more of this negative reaction.” Read More
Mississippi: U.S. Justice
Department approves Mississippi’s legislative redistricting plan | The
Commercial Appeal
The U.S. Justice Department has
approved legislative redistricting plans that give DeSoto County two new House
seats and a third state Senate district, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves said
Friday. Legislators last spring approved changes to House and Senate
boundaries that are required after each 10-year Census is taken to reflect
population shifts. But Justice Department approval, called pre-clearance,
is required before the state may implement changes affecting voting in
Mississippi, given the state's history of discrimination. Read MoreCheryl Ann Moore stepped into the state’s busiest driver’s licensing center, got a ticket with the number C809 on it and a clipboard with a pen attached by rubber band, and began her long wait Thursday to become a properly documented voter. Six blocks away, inside an ornate and crowded City Hall courtroom, a lawyer was arguing before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that the state’s controversial new voter ID law would strip citizens of their rights and should be enjoined. Just outside, on Thomas Paine Plaza, the NAACP president was inveighing against a modern-day poll tax at a boisterous rally of a few hundred opponents. Moore bent over a folding table and carefully filled out the form a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation worker had given her, in the first line she would stand in that day. Her ticket was time-stamped 11:38 a.m. and gave an estimated wait time of 63 minutes, which, said Moore, didn’t seem so bad. She had been registered to vote since she was 19, and now she was 54. Read More
I doubt that S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson has the authority to enforce his generous new interpretation of South Carolina's new voter ID law – he can merely advise election officials, who may or may not follow his legal advice – but his out-of-courtroom explanation for testimony that enraged critics and seemed to startle a panel of federal judges represented the first hint of a rational approach to this issue that I've heard from an elected official. After testifying last month that people without cars, birth certificates or enough time to get a state-approved photo ID would “absolutely” be able vote by signing an affidavit saying they had a “reasonable impediment,” Mr. Wilson told The Associated Press that “We have balanced the interest of ensuring the integrity of the electoral system with the fundamental right of the individual to vote.” That seems so obvious. The question isn't whether those two fundamental values have to be balanced in a voting system; the question is how to balance them. Or at least that ought to be the question. What's so maddening about this whole issue is that neither side has been willing to recognize any shades of gray. Read More
Quite a few Texas voters are seeing dead people in the mirror these days when they go to brush their teeth in the morning. In Houston, high school nurse Terry Collins got a letter informing her that after 34 years of voting she was off the Harris County rolls. Sorry. "Friday of last week, I got a letter saying that my voting registration would be revoked because I'm deceased, I'm dead. I was like, 'Oh, no I'm not!' " Collins says. In order to stay on the rolls, the 52-year-old nurse had to call and inform the registrar of her status among the living. She tried, but it didn't go so well. "When I tried to call I was on hold for an hour, never got anyone," she says. "I called three days in a row and was on hold for an hour or more." Collins, who is black, says she noticed that in Houston, quite a few of those who got the letters seemed to be older and black. "There's one lady here. She's 52. She's African-American. Her dad is 80. They both got a letter saying they're dead," she says. Read More
Despite two recent setbacks for the state of Texas in separate federal court rulings, the hard-fought voting battles continue. But, at least for now, those prolonged fights have nothing to do with Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s decision to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse both lower court rulings. For some of you who missed it, in late August two judicial panels in Washington ruled the state’s redistricting maps and the voter ID law — both approved by the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature last year — are unconstitutional because they violate the federal Voting Rights Act. The 1965 landmark legislation protects the voting rights of racial minorities. Read More
