The Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder—to overturn the “pre-clearance” requirement in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act—continues to have major ramifications for voting rights in America. Just before the decision came down in 2013, The Brennan Center for Democracy looked into its crystal ball and envisioned what would happen if the Court decided against pre-clearance. The predictions were ominous, and, unfortunately, they began to materialize, just days after the Supreme Court’s opinion went live. Here are the general categories into which new voting rights abuses were likely to fall, according to the Brennan Center’s prescient predictions. Check them against what has actually happened. I’m republishing this post because of its continuing relevance in the Trump era of diminishing American democracy.

Jurisdictions could try to revise discriminatory changes blocked by Section 5.

To give you a sense of the scope of this category, consider that 31 such proposed changes have been blocked by the Justice Department or the federal courts since the Voting Rights Act was last reauthorized just eight years ago. In just the past six months, after the 2012 election, many such challenges have been rejected.

Jurisdictions could put in place broad discriminatory practices they were previously “chilled” from implementing by Section 5’s pre-clearance requirement.

In South Carolina v. Holder, a Section 5 challenge that preceded the 2012 election, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, an appointee of George W. Bush, highlighted the deterrent effect of the statute — how it prevented state lawmakers from moving forward with the most obviously discriminatory practices, and how these officials narrowed the scope of their proposed voting change to track the requirements of the Section. That deterrent effect will be gone.

Jurisdictions might implement those discriminatory practices they tried but failed to get past the Justice Department under Section 5.

The Brennan Center reports that 153 such voting measures have been submitted and then withdrawn in recent years after federal officials questioned the discriminatory nature of these proposed laws. Even if just half of these policies were to be reconsidered and adopted in the absence of Section 5 they would significantly change the voting rights landscape in several Southern states.

Finally, the most obvious impact — jurisdictions might try to adopt restrictive new voting measures they neither contemplated nor dared submit for preclearance under Section 5.

For best effect, those lawmakers could do so on the eve of an election, forcing voting rights advocates to scramble and practically daring the federal judiciary to enjoin the measures. We wouldn’t likely go back to the age, as John Lewis recounted, where black voters would have to guess the number of bubbles in a bar of soap. But we wouldn’t be too far off, either. Just last election cycle, in Texas, lawmakers sought to impose what amounted to a poll tax on indigent — or carless — registered voters.

If you think these predictions sound hysterical, Orwellian and unlikely to occur in this country, think again. In the past seven years, states and local jurisdictions enacted legislation on many of the fronts outlined by the Brennan Center. We need to stay on full alert.

The post Life after the Voting Rights Act appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Depending on what state you live in and who you are, your voting rights may be either expanding or contracting this year. At the same time that some jurisdictions are making it easier to register and vote, others are continuing their efforts to make it harder to vote and to essentially disenfranchise voters whose views they don’t like. Here’s a brief rundown on the push-me-pull-you situation.

 One step forward

On August 9, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker [R] signed into law a bill that makes voter registration automatic throughout the state. The bill had passed the state legislature with an overwhelming majority—in the State Senate, it was unanimous. Under the new law, people will be automatically registered when they have transactions with the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, or when they interact with the state’s Medicaid system, known as MassCare.

The new law [AVR] is set to be fully implemented in time for the 2020 presidential election. It could reach estimated 680,000 eligible voters who are not yet on the rolls. According to Masslive.com, “An analysis by the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress estimated that AVR could enroll 437,000 new Massachusetts voters, of whom 156,000 could be expected to show up at the polls.”

Massachusetts now joins more than a dozen other states that have enacted similar AVR systems. More than a dozen other states including New Jersey and Washington have enacted similar automatic voter registration systems. Massachusetts’s law also raises the penalty for voter fraud to a fine of up to $10,000 or a five-year prison sentence.

And there may be more to come. According to the Brennan Center, “This year alone, 20 states have introduced legislation to implement or expand automatic registration, and an additional eight states had bills carry over from the 2017 legislative session.”

AVR: Opting out, rather than opting in

How does automatic voter registration work? Here’s the Brennan Center’s explanation and rationale:

AVR makes two simple, yet transformative, changes to the way our country has traditionally registered voters.  First, AVR makes voter registration “opt-out” instead of “opt-in”—eligible citizens who interact with government agencies are registered to vote or have their existing registration information updated, unless they affirmatively decline. Again, the voter can opt-out; it is not compulsory registration. Second, those agencies transfer voter registration information electronically to election officials instead of using paper registration forms. These common-sense reforms increase registration rates, clean up the voter rolls, and save states money.

States that have already implemented AVR have seen positive results, says the Brennan Center:

Since Oregon became the first state in the nation to implement AVR in 2016, the Beaver State has seen registration rates quadruple at DMV offices. In the first six months after AVR was implemented in Vermont on New Year’s Day 2017, registration rates jumped 62 percent when compared to the first half of 2016.

By Election Day 2018, reports NPR, almost of quarter of Americans will live in states where filling out voter registration postcards will be a thing of the past as more and more states are moving to automatic voter registration.

That’s the good news. Now for the flip side.

Two steps back

Unfortunately, some people view AVR not as positive steps toward democratic engagement, but rather as threats to their entrenched power. Over the years, we have witnessed many attempts, in many states, to restrict voting rights, disenfranchise certain groups, and generally make voting more inconvenient for people whose voting patterns threaten the Republican status quo.

This year, however, has marked a turning point in voter suppression efforts, as the Department of Justice itself–which was once an ally for voting-rights advocates—has switched sides. In August, Trump-appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave the green light to states’ efforts to drastically purge their voter-registration rolls—a major reversal of previous administrations’ efforts to protect the vote.

According to Slate:

The DOJ has withdrawn its opposition to Texas’ draconian voter ID law and to mandatory arbitration agreements designed to thwart class actions. Now the agency has made another about-face: ..It dropped its objections to Ohio’s voter purge procedures, which kick voters off the rolls for skipping elections. The DOJ is now arguing that such maneuvers are perfectly legal.

In addition, the New York Times reports that, under Sessions, the DOJ is not going to oppose the following voter-suppression efforts:

• A new voter ID law that could shut out many Native Americans from the polls in North Dakota.

• A strict rule on the collection of absentee ballots in Arizona that is being challenged by votig-rights advocates as a form of voter suppression.

• Officials in Georgia who are scrubbing voters from registration rolls if their details do not exactly match other records, a practice that voting rights groups say unfairly targets minority voters.

The Sessions department’s most prominent voting-rights lawsuit so far forced Kentucky state officials last month to step up the culling from registration rolls of voters who have moved.

Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the department has filed legal briefs in support of states that are resisting court orders to rein in voter ID requirements, stop aggressive purges of voter rolls and redraw political boundaries that have unfairly diluted minority voting power — all practices that were opposed under President Obama’s attorneys general.

If my understanding of America history is correct, since the beginning of this country—with some notable exceptions—we have been on a path of expanding rights, becoming more inclusive, and encouraging engagement. So, it’s heartening to see states building on that tradition and finding ways to enable more people to participate in the fundamental activity of a democracy—voting. Unfortunately, the Trump administration and its spineless Republican enablers [or should I say co-conspirators] clearly have a different trajectory in mind. We can only hope that enlightened thinking will prevail, and that our democracy—warts and all—will survive this dark period in American politics.

The post Voting rights 2018: One step forward, two steps back appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It has been very disconcerting to watch voting rights erode in America over the past 30 years or so. For those of us naïve enough to think that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 19th Amendment, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act settled the thorniest issues around voting rights—we have been forced to rethink our assumptions.

The term “erosion” is not really accurate, though. Eroding seems too passive a verb for what has been happening: the deliberate attempt, by politically motivated legislatures, to shrink voting rights for people whose votes they’d rather not count.

I seem to remember from my 8th grade Civics class that the history of voting rights in America has, traditionally, been one of expansion. The reversal of that trend, via radical, anti-democracy, anti-voting policies initiated primarily by right-wing Republicans, is a shameful blot on a country that claims to be a democracy [“the greatest democracy in the world!”]

So, I feel encouraged by some recent developments that may indicate the beginning of a pendulum swing back in the appropriate direction. Here are a few, in no particular order:

Automatic voter registration
On the campaign trail, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have both called for automatic voter registration for everyone at age 18. Voting rights advocates [wait, why is voting-rights advocacy even necessary?] note that these declarations represent a breakthrough, as voting reform has been absent as a front-and-center issue in presidential campaigns for at least 50 years.

Further along this spectrum is Oregon, whose state legislature passed a bill in March 2015 putting that idea into practice.

According to the Brennan Center,

…the new law automatically registers eligible citizens who have driver’s licenses (and do not ask to remain unregistered). While there had been strong and bipartisan efforts across a majority of states to modernize voter registration, Oregon’s law went a step further, giving government the primary responsibility for ensuring that every eligible citizen is registered.

Soon after Oregon’s bill was signed into law, legislators in 17 states plus the District of Columbia and the United States Congress introduced similar bills that would automatically register citizens who interact with motor vehicle offices and ensure that voter information is electronically and securely sent to the voter rolls.

The Brennan Center estimates that the new procedure in Oregon will immediately add 300,000 citizens to the voting rolls.

Making Election Day a national holiday

It has been clear for many years that the first-Tuesday-in-November Election Day schedule is out of sync with contemporary life. Many states have found ways to adapt, mostly by offering early voting days and extended voting hours [both of which have been under attack in the 21st century]. But, because most voting still takes place on a single day, during slightly extended business hours, it’s hard for people to get to the polls, let alone wait in long lines for their turn. It’s also hard to get people to work for election authorities—and the most qualified, such as government workers, people accustomed to checking numbers, workers comfortable with electronic equipment, etc., are otherwise occupied with their day jobs.

Recognizing this disconnect in the most essential activity of a democracy, Bernie Sanders recently introduced a bill into the U.S. Senate to declare presidential Election Day a national, public holiday, making it more convenient for more people to vote, as well as to do the vital work of ensuring fairness and accountability at the polls.

Sanders is realistic in his expectations: Making Election Day a national holiday won’t cure Americans of their embarrassing indifference to voting, but it would make an important statement about a fundamental element of the American democratic system.

In introducing the bill, Sanders said:

We should be doing everything possible to make it easier for people to participate in the political process. Election Day should be a national holiday so that everyone has the time and opportunity to vote. While this would not be a cure-all, it would indicate a national commitment to create a vibrant democracy.

Reversing punitive voter ID requirements

In a decision that gives hope to those of us who see voting as a right, rather than a privilege, the 5th Circuit Court recently struck down Texas’ highly restrictive voter ID law. According to the Brennan Center for Democracy, the Texas law discriminated against blacks and Hispanics and violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Texas ID law is one of the strictest of its kind in the country. It requires voters to bring a government-issued photo ID to the polls. Accepted forms of identification include a driver’s license, a United States passport, a concealed-handgun license and an election identification certificate issued by the State Department of Public Safety.

[Note that, under Texas law, you could use, as proof of identity, your concealed-carry handgun license, but not your state-issued student ID, your voter registration card, or your utility bill.]

According to Think Progress:

The plaintiffs, including individual voters, civil rights groups and the Department of Justice, said it was discriminatory because a far greater share of poor people and minorities do not have these forms of identification and lack easy access to birth certificates or other documents needed to obtain them.

In its ruling, the noted that “the lack of evidence that voter fraud was a threat and cited expert testimony that about 600,000 Texans, mainly poor, black and Hispanic, lacked the newly required IDs and often faced obstacles in obtaining them.”

Previously, a lower court had ruled that the law “creates an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote” and blocked its enforcement.

It’s also worth noting that the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which issued the ruling striking down the Texas voter ID requirements, is considered one of the most conservative appeals courts in the country. Apparently, Texas’s rules went too far even for a conservative court. That’s significant.

Gerrymandering

There’s also some good news on the gerrymandering front. The Florida Supreme Court [recently] ruled that the state legislature’s redistricting plans ahead of next year’s U.S. presidential election are tainted by “unconstitutional intent to favor the Republican Party and its incumbents” and ordered new congressional districts to be redrawn within 100 days.

In a 5-2 decision the court found the GOP’s redistricting process in 2012 violated the the state’s Fair District amendment, enacted two years earlier to safeguard against legislatures redrawing congressional boundaries to give favor to a political party—a process known as gerrymandering.

The judges affirmed a previous ruling by a trial court, which found that Republican “operatives” and political consultants “did in fact conspire to manipulate and influence the redistricting process.”

Eight out of Florida’s 27 congressional districts will be redrawn.

It’s a victory for voting rights, and a precedent-setting decision that could influence future gerrymandering fights.

Susan Goodman, who heads up the Florida League of Women Voters said:

This was the fox guarding the henhouse. In gerrymandered states, lawmakers end up choosing their voters, rather than voters choosing their legislators,” Goodman said, adding that the ruling “sets a precedent for many states across the country who are dealing with gerrymandered districts.”

The state court decision follows a similar anti-gerrymandering ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court last month, in which the justices voted 5-4 to uphold an Arizona ballot initiative that took redistricting power away from elected politicians and gave it to a nonpartisan commission.

We’re not there yet

All of these developments are encouraging. But they are only baby steps toward returning our country to the democratic system it could and should be. And they will undoubtedly be staunchly opposed by the cheaters and vote-riggers who think it’s just fine to win elections by denying the vote to their perceived opponents and people whose interests they don’t share or bother to represent.

And it’s cold comfort to know that, even though women there have recently gained the right to vote, at least we’re more advanced than Saudi Arabia.

The post Voting rights watch: Is the pendulum swinging back toward democracy? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

A classic country/western song says: “If you want to play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band.”  Well, if you want to vote in Texas on November 5, 2013, you gotta have a photo ID in your hand—a photo ID with your “up-to-date legal name” on it. That’s the new specification for Texas photo IDs, and it’s designed to disenfranchise the class of people who are most likely not to meet that standard: women.

As many as 34 percent of women voters in Texas lack a photo ID with their current name on it. The reason, of course, is that so many women change their names when they get married or divorced, but don’t get around to changing their drivers’ licenses until the next expiration date. Ninety-nine percent of men have their up-to-date legal names on their documents, because they never change their names.

And just to make the hurdle for women even higher, according to The New Civil Rights Movement:

Texas law now requires women to show original documents of the name change: a marriage certificate, a divorce certificate, or a court-ordered name-change certificate—and no photocopies are allowed. This leaves women in Texas either scrambling to gather the proper paperwork and get their ID in order before the registration cut-off, or leaves them unable to vote.

Think Progress adds:

Getting approved copies of these documents is often expensive or difficult for many, especially low-income women, to obtain.

…In the absence of original documents, voters must pay a minimum of $20 to receive new copies. Due to inflexible work schedules and travel expenses, voters often opt to have their documents mailed, incurring additional costs.

Similar to how poor, minority, and elderly voters in Pennsylvania had trouble getting to the DMV to obtain a state ID or driver’s license before the election, women in Texas are having trouble getting an acceptable photo ID that matches their most current name.

Just to put all of this into the real world, let me ask you this question: If you’re married or divorced, how quickly could you put your hands on your original marriage certificate, or your original divorce papers?

Why now?

The timing of this discriminatory voter ID law is not an accident. It comes as a direct response to the rising popularity of Texas State Senator Wendy Davis—a Democrat in the Republican-dominated legislature—whose 11-hour filibuster of anti-choice legislation catapulted her into the limelight. She is now running for Governor against Republican Greg Abbott, and she is galvanizing women voters in the state. The Texas Republican party is running scared, so, rather than try to win an election fair and square, they’re doing what Republican legislatures are doing all over America–rigging the election system to disenfranchise “undesirable” voters. It’s a sickening trend. First it was African-Americans, then it was Hispanics, then it was poor people, then it was anyone whose name sounded “foreign.” And now it’s women. After they exclude all of these groups, who will be left to vote? Oh, wait, that’s their point, isn’t it?

The post Voting rights watch: Texas makes voting harder for women appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The assault on voting rights is moving upstream. A recently released report by Project Vote [September 2013] lists legislation introduced—and in some cases, passed—in state legislators and in Congress—that would add hurdles to voter registration.

Voter registration is the first step most eligible citizens take to participate in our democracy, making it a prime target for those seeking to limit access to the ballot. Partisans stoke fears of noncitizen voting and voter impersonation in order to impose excessively restrictive voter registration laws in the states.

In 2013, lawmakers proposed to restrict community-based voter registration drives; to require voter applicants to provide citizenship documents with voter registration forms; and to rollback voter-favored policies, such as same-day registration.

How many ways can you make voter registration more difficult? State legislators are working on that. Here are some of the lowlights of this effort, excerpted from the Project Vote report:

[1] Making access to voter registration more difficult

In 2013, Indiana and North Carolina passed restrictive bills that repeal same-day registration, and repeal pre-registration of 16- and 17-year-old citizens.

[2] Making voter registration drives more difficult

Remember volunteering to register people to vote? It’s not going to quite that easy anymore—at least in Virginia. Project Vote says:

A law passed in 2013 in Virginia requires individuals and groups who  obtain 25 or more voter registration applications to: register with the State Board of Elections or local offices; and execute a sworn affidavit that they will abide by all Virginia voter registration laws and rules. The required paperwork and training provisions are unspecified, and give excessive discretion to the State Board of Elections. Finally, the bill reduces the time limit for mailing or delivering such completed applications from 15 to 10 days.

Also, as a result of a bill passed in 2013 in Montana, in November 2014, Montana voters will have a referendum on whether to stop allowing people to register and vote on Election Day, and whether to close voter registration on the Friday before elections. [Let’s see, will people voting on this one be allowed to register and vote on election day?]

[3] Adding complexity to the act of registering to vote

Two bills pending in Congress would amend the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to permit a state to require documentary evidence of citizenship from an applicant for voter registration who uses the federal voter registration application as a condition of the state’s acceptance of the form.  [States’ rights rears its head again.]

Currently, all you have to do to register on the federal form is sign your name under a statement in which you swear that you are a U.S. citizen. That statement has sufficed for many years, and non-citizen voting has yet to be proven to be a widespread problem.

Also, a bill pending in the Massachusetts legislature requires an applicant for voter registration to prove, to the satisfaction of the clerk or registrar, that he or she is a citizen of the United States. Birth certificate or naturalization papers would be accepted.

That provision would essentially end voter registration drives at fairs and festivals and on street corners, unless we all start carrying our passports and naturalization papers around with us wherever we go.

Each of these changes might seem trivial, at first glance. But they’re not. Each is a move to restrict voting–a significant reversal of philosophy from the path of expanding voting rights that has been such a positive trend as America has evolved. And make no mistake about it, these small changes are designed to add up to a cumulative erosion of voting rights–particularly for people [meaning minority voters, and people who tend to vote for Democratic candidates] deemed “undesirable” by Rebublican-dominated state legislatures and politicians aiming for a permanent Republican majority in America.

Stay vigilant.

The post Voting rights watch: Suppressing the vote by targeting voter registration appeared first on Occasional Planet.

For many years, the federal voter-registration form used in virtually all states has required that the person filling it out swear that he/she is a citizen, under penalty of perjury. But apparently, that’s not enough for Kansas and Arizona. Those two states have filed a suit in federal court to allow them to require proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate, to register to vote.

Is that a big deal? Yes, it is. It’s a lot like requiring proof of identity at the polling place—via a birth certificate, passport or other government-issued ID: a deliberate obstacle to voting, especially for minorities, poor people and the elderly. It may even be worse than the voter ID ploy, because it takes the disenfranchisement gambit further back in the process—making it even harder even to register to vote. Apparently, the cynical quest to prevent politically “undesirable” people from voting against you has been moved upstream—under the fraudulent guise of preventing voter fraud by non-citizens.

The lawsuit comes as a response to a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that knocked down a proof-of-citizenship law passed in Arizona in 2004. Kansas’ more recent proof-of-citizenship requirement for new voters took effect on Jan. 1, 2013.

Here’s the background, according to Daily Kos:

The suit stems from a 7-2 Supreme Court decision in the case of Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Inc. The ruling affirmed that a provision of the National Voting Rights Act of 1993 requires states to “accept and use” a specific federal form for voter registration. That form requires individuals to state they are a citizen and at least 18 years old. But it does not require proof of citizenship. In 2004, Arizona voters approved a law that does require that proof before anyone can register.

The law was challenged on the grounds that federal law overrides state law because of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. The Supreme Court affirmed that judgment, noting that not only the Supremacy Clause but the Elections Clause trumps state law. In other words, federal elections law will always supersede state elections laws.

Unfortunately, the majority opinion in the Supreme Court—written by arch-conservative Antonin Scalia—left a window slightly open:

The Court also ruled that states could ask the federal Election Assistance Commission to add a proof of citizenship requirement to the form. And that if the EAC refused, they could bring suit against it.

So, Arizona and Kansas jumped right in.

The American Civil Liberties Union opposes the proof-of-citizenship requirement. The ACLU says that the citizenship declaration that new voters sign at the bottom of the federal registration form  “has been acceptable for scores of years, and there is no problem of voter-citizenship fraud.” According to the ACLU, there is no evidence that non-citizens are falsely signing those citizenship declarations.

Another problem: The federal Election Assistance Commission currently doesn’t have any commissioners, and there’s a bill working its way through the Republican-dominated House of Representatives to eliminate the commission entirely.

In the meantime, about 12,000 registrations in Kansas are in limbo, because the proof-of-citizenship process hasn’t been completed.

Until the litigation is resolved, Kansas’ Secretary of State Kris Kobach said there will be two groups of voters in Kansas who have registered to vote since Jan. 1 — those who have documented proof of citizenship will be able to vote in all elections, and those who haven’t will be allowed to vote only in federal elections.

Since when does a state official get to make that decision?

We need state officials to concentrate more on actually governing and addressing the needs of the people they’re supposed to be serving, rather than focusing on bogus issues meant to demonstrate their conservative bona fides, fire up the base, suppress opposition voters, and keep themselves in office.

The post Voting rights watch: KS and AZ want to move voter suppression upstream appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The fallout continues. States that previously wouldn’t have dared to impose voting restrictions that disenfranchised minorities–and, of course, Democrats–are back in business. Florida is one of them. The state’s Republican Governor, Rick Scott has now revived his plan to purge Florida’s voter rolls of people suspected of not being American citizens. He tried the same tactic in 2012,  but according to Talking Points Memo, that effort was:

 … filled with errors, found few ineligible voters and prompted lawsuits by advocacy groups that argued the purge disproportionately targeted minority groups, according to the Miami Herald. Florida’s list of registered voters suspected of not being U.S. citizens shrank from 182,000 to 2,600 to 198 before the 2012 election.

“It was sloppy, it was slapdash and it was inaccurate,” Polk County Supervisor of Elections Lori Edwards told the Herald. “They were sending us names of people to remove because they were born in Puerto Rico. It was disgusting.”

In the 2012 purge, eighty-seven percent of the people on the list were minorities, according to a Miami Herald analysis; 58 percent were Hispanic. According to the Miami Herald, election officials in most counties simply stopped moving to enforce the purge, saying they didn’t trust the state government’s list. (Two counties in southwest Florida have continued with the effort.) Over 500 of the 2,700 had been identified as citizens; 40 had been identified as non-citizens.  Forty.

The DOJ ordered the state to stop the purge in May [2012]. A civil rights lawyer for the DOJ argued that the effort appeared to violate both the National Voter Registration Act, a 1993 law that requires a 90-day period between any voter purge and and a federal election, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, under which Florida cannot make changes that affect voting in five of the state’s counties without DOJ approval.

But that was last year, before the Supreme Court shredded the Voting Rights Act, giving states a free pass to make voting more difficult in any way they chose, even if it impacted minorities [who just happen to vote mostly for Democratic candidates]. Regarding Florida specifically, the Supreme Court decision nullified a federal lawsuit in Tampa that sought to stop new searches for noncitizen voters. On the very day that the Supreme Court handed down its decision, Scott jumped right in, vowing to renew his voter-purge efforts.

Florida, as we all remember, has a dismal record on voting rights. The 2000 election was a significant low point. The state also attempted a voter purge that year. And, in 2012. Governor, Scott joined the Republican Party in a fundraising appeal that accused Democrats of defending the right of noncitizens to vote.

Did I mention that Governor Scott is up for re-election in 2014? That fact makes this a dandy time to start disqualifying voters who might cast their ballots for someone else.

According to the Miami Herald, Scott’s top elections official, Secretary of State Ken Detzner, is now creating a new list of suspected noncitizen voters by cross-checking state voter data with a federal database managed by the Department of Homeland Security.

The whole effort is rather inane: The number of illegally registered, non-citizens is clearly small, and not enough to swing an election. One Florida commentator–Chan Lowe, of the Sun-Sentinel— questions why, in today’s anti-immigrant atmosphere, a non-citizen would take the risk of registering illegally to vote:

..if you’re living here and are not a citizen, the last thing you want to do is tick off the authorities. And that’s if you’re a legal resident. If you’re an undocumented alien, you’d have to be insane to risk getting picked up because you registered to vote, of all things. It’s hard enough to get American citizens to vote in their own elections, because you can’t convince them that their single vote matters. Why would an alien think any differently

You have to wonder: Rick Scott surely knows that his voter-purge effort is going to yield very meager results. To me, it’s beginning to look more like a right-wing, dog-whistle campaign that signals to the base that Governor Scott is tough on immigration. You’d think that would be an awkward place to be in Florida, but perhaps not with Scott’s base.

Whatever his reasons, Scott’s eagerness to disenfranchise voters bears watching. And let’s not mistake it for an UNnintended consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder. This is apparently what the conservative majority on the Roberts court had in mind, and this is what we’re getting.

[Editorial cartoon: Jeff Parker, 2012]

The post Voting rights watch: Florida restarts its [previously squelched] voter purge appeared first on Occasional Planet.

North Carolina Republicans are not hiding the fact that newly proposed [2013] voting restrictions are aimed at making it harder for Democrats to vote. As North Carolina’s House Majority Leader Edgar Starnes put it, “The Republicans won the election. We are in control. We intend to elect Republicans and appoint Republicans, and we make no apology for it.” [North Carolina elected a Republican-dominated state legislature in 2010—the first time that has happened since McKinley was president—and a Republican governor in 2012. Clearly, they are savoring the victory, with a vengeance—literally.]

OK, that’s about as blatant as it gets. So, exactly how do they intend to accomplish their goal? Here’s the plan—a seven-point program, proposed earlier this year, and scheduled for further pursuit following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act, under which many of these restrictions would most likely have been struck down.

Here’s a pared-down version of North Carolina’s 7-step solutions, as published in The Nation. We should be looking at each of these proposals as “models” for the tidal wave of voting rights wrongs that is about to hit all over the country:

Requiring state-issued photo ID to cast ballot

A government-issued photo ID, a state employee photo ID or a student ID from a public university would be required to vote. Other states with strict voter ID laws provide a free state ID (even though the underlying documents needed to obtain the ID, like a birth certificate, cost money), but in North Carolina the voter ID would cost $10, which is eerily reminiscent of a poll tax. A free ID can only be obtained by signing an affidavit, under the penalty of perjury, citing financial hardship.

Over 7 percent of registered voters in North Carolina, 481,109 to be exact, don’t have a driver’s license or a state-issued photo ID, according to the state’s own data. Fifty-five percent of registered voters without photo ID are Democrats. African-Americans make up 22 percent of registered voters in the state, but a third of all registered voters without ID.

Cutting early voting

New legislation would reduce the early voting period in North Carolina from two-and-a-half weeks to just one week and would eliminate voting on the last Sunday of early voting, when African-American churches hold “Souls to the Polls” get-out-the-vote drives. The legislation would also limit early voting locations to one site per county, which is a recipe for much longer line.

Ending same day registration during early voting

Over 155,000 voters registered to vote and voted on the same day during the early voting period in 2012. Ending same-day registration will almost certainly decrease voter turnout in North Carolina and make voting more inconvenient.

Penalizing parents of students who register to vote where they go to college

The most extreme proposal of all the new voting restrictions would eliminate the $2,500 child dependency tax deduction for parents of college students who vote where they attend school.

Disenfranchising ex-felons

New legislation would prevent ex-felons from receiving their voting rights after serving their time and would instead force them to wait five years, apply to the board of elections and receive unanimous approval in order to re-enter the political process. Five times as many blacks as whites have a criminal record in North Carolina and could be disenfranchised for years under this new proposal.

Banning “incompetent” voters from the polls

Anyone given such a designation from the state will be unable to cast a ballot, “even if the person’s mental health issues have nothing to do with their abilities to understand voting.”

Ending straight-ticket voting

In 2012, 1.4 million Democrats and 1.1 million Republicans in North Carolina voted a straight-party ticket. Eliminating this convenient form of voting will likely hurt Democrats in down-ballot races.

The post Voting rights watch: NC Repubs push harsh new voting restrictions appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The Supreme Court has opened the floodgates: Less than a year since state legislatures, governors and secretaries of state in both the north and south tried to suppress minority voting via a bagful of dirty tricks, the Supreme Court has gutted the long-standing Voting Rights Act–which has long been lauded as one of the most successful pieces of civil-rights legislation ever enacted in the U.S. Ignoring what happened during the 2012 presidential campaign–remember Florida? Ohio? Pennsylvania?–the Supreme Court thinks that “our country has changed,” we’re post-racial [They’re joking, right?], and that we don’t need to make sure, in advance, that states don’t enact discriminatory voting laws. But the 5-4 Supreme Court majority essentially gives a free pass to any state that wants to do precisely that.. The laws might not stand forever, says the Court’s decision, but what the heck: States can enact them and worry about court challenges later. Great plan. Remember how well that worked for us before the Voting Rights Act?

That’s my take on it. Here’s how political cartoonists portray the Great Supreme Court Voting Rights Debacle of 2013.

[cincopa AELArOLhBx_z]

The post Supreme Court shreds Voting Rights Act: Political cartoonists respond appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The backlash against voter suppression may have begun. Following highly publicized efforts by Republican-led legislatures to make voting harder for citizens during the 2012 Presidential election, voting rights advocates are fighting back. And, according to Progressive States Network, more and more states are now looking at enacting significant reforms to modernize voter registration and protect and expand voting rights.

Some of the developments are smart applications of technologies that our current, 19^th-Century based voter registration and voting system could not have anticipated. And some are baby steps that, nevertheless, move us in the direction of expansion, rather than restriction, of voting rights in what politicians regularly tout as the “world’s greatest democracy.” None, however, are slam-dunks. For every rights-expanding proposal, there’s an equal and opposite reaction pushing back, mostly from Republican legislators who are either stuck in the past and uncomfortable with new technologies, or scared to political death of enfranchising groups that could defeat them. We can feel good that progress is happening, but if the shenanigans of the 2012 election tell us anything, there is no end to what some politicians will do to suppress the vote.  Here’s a roundup [April 2013] of recent developments:

Connecticut

The Connecticut state House passed a joint resolution calling for a constitutional amendment to allow early voting and no-excuse absentee ballots. The resolution passed by a 90-49 vote, with 12 members absent. It goes next to the Senate and then to a public vote in the 2014 election. If Connecticut passes the amendment, it would join twenty-seven states and Washington, D.C., in allowing voters to vote by absentee ballot without requiring a reason; 32 states and Washington, D.C., have early voting; and two states use automatic mail voting instead of traditional polling sites, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Colorado

Colorado has taken a first step toward a sweeping change in voting. Under consideration in the Colorado legislature is the Voter Access and Modernized Elections Act, which would send mail ballots to every voter, allow election-day registration, and put all counties on a real-time, statewide database that supporters say would weed out cheaters who try to vote twice. It’s a long-shot at this point, but it’s a worthy effort to drag voting into the 21^st century in Colorado, and perhaps become a role model for other states.

Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania progressive lawmakers want their state to become the 36th to have some form of early voting. [Did you say Pennsylvania? Home of voter ID designed to ensure that Mitt Romney would win the state? Wow.] In addition, a bill with bipartisan support that would allow online voter registration could pass the state Senate later this month [April 2013] and then head to the House.

In an article published in the Post-Gazette, the executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania said that states with early voting consistently have higher voter turnout. In addition, said a Democratic state legislator, the issue should not be a partisan one, as Republican candidate Mitt Romney carried 20 of the 32 states that allowed early voting in November.

West Virginia

According to the West Virginia Gazette, a bill passed on April 16 by the West Virginia legislature will make it easier for voters to register and vote. Under the new law, citizens will be able to register online to vote if they already have a digital signature on file with a state agency, like the Division of Motor Vehicles. The bill allows county clerks to transfer a potential voter’s signature from a driver’s license application to the voter registration form.  West Virginia’s Secretary of State also says that, eventually, the state will be able to use other identifiers, such as a Social Security number, to allow online registration for people without a signature on file.

Delaware

Ex-felons will have their voting rights restored immediately thanks to legislation passed in Delaware. Non-violent felons will now be able to vote immediately after discharging their criminal sentences according to an amendment passed by the Senate removing a constitutional provision barring felons from voting for five years after the fulfillment of their punishments.

Hawaii

A bill passed the Senate and now goes back to the House for a vote on Senate amendments that would allow voters to register at early voting locations.

Maryland

A bill that had previously passed the state House has now passed the state Senate. It will allow same-day registration, expand early voting and allow voters to obtain absentee ballots online.

The post Positive signs for voting-rights laws—even in Pennsylvania appeared first on Occasional Planet.