The courts are busy today, with voter suppression orders and suits moving at a fast clip. Let's start with Ohio where a federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order against Donald Trump and his buddy Roger Stone and their volunteers and recruits "to avoid 'harassing or intimidating conduct' at polling places on Nov. 8 Election Day." The judge indicated that he would not include the Ohio GOP in the restraining order, and that his order will have generic language that will ban harassment of voters by either party. Even though the Clinton campaign is not really harassing anyone and there’s no indication they intend to. The Ohio Democratic Party brought this case, one of a handful filed in the last week including state challenges in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada and the DNC's suit against the RNC for violating a consent decree that it agreed to back in the 1980s limiting its "ballot security" activities.
The North Carolina Democratic Party filed suit today against both the Trump campaign and the state GOP.
The Democrats are pointing to comments Trump has made on the stump encouraging vigilante poll watching. They also cite the initiative led by Stone to recruit so called "Vote Protectors," according to his website, to conduct amateur exit polls, which the North Carolina Dems said was a "phony" guise to "threaten lawful voters." The North Carolina GOP, meanwhile, is accused of "providing financial, personnel, and other organizational support" to Trump's and Stone's efforts. Additionally, the complaint referenced a news story reporting that a Trump supporter with a baseball bat marked "TRUMP" was at a North Carolina polling place video taping and photographing cars while wearing a badge that said he was a "poll observer."
And add Michigan to that list as well, "where the state Democratic party there filed a lawsuit Friday claiming that the Michigan Republican Party, the Trump campaign, former Trump adviser Roger Stone and his group Stop the Steal have engaged in voter intimidation tactics."
Pointing out that the Trump campaign appears to be reliant on the Michigan GOP for its get-out-the-vote effort, the Democrats allege that Republicans there have focused their poll watching efforts on urban areas, with the suggestion that Democrats and minority voters are more likely to commit election fraud.
We are on the brink of winning the White House, the Senate and the Supreme Court. But it is still close. Please, in the final hours of the campaign sign up with MoveOn to call voters in the states that will decide the White House and the Senate.
In Arizona, an en banc 9th Circuit reversed a decision by a three-judge panel and is allowing "ballot harvesting" for this election. The Republican legislature had passed legislation making it a felony for anyone to take someone else’s ballot to the polling place. The full court decided that because the practice is more heavily used by minorities, the ban is illegally discriminatory. Arizona has one last chance to keep its ban in place—an emergency request to Justice Kennedy. It would have to happen very soon.
Kris Kobach suffered a well-deserved major defeat in Kansas, where a state court has ordered a permanent halt to his effort to try to force more than 18,000 voters to prove their citizenship in order to vote in state and local elections. Kobach was trying to prevent these voters who registered through the Division of Vehicles or by using the federal national mail registration form from voting for local offices. "The right of citizen suffrage forms the foundation of a democratic society," Larry Hendricks, District Judge in Shawnee County wrote in striking down Kobach's dream.
And finally, in the grand-daddy of all the case, the federal judge reviewing whether the RNC is indeed violating the consent decree will rule by Saturday.