Welcome to the latest edition in our war on voting series. This is a joint project of Joan McCarter and Meteor Blades
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Here are a few numbers you might like to have with you when you're voting: the FBI Voter Intimidation Hotline at 202-514-1888; and Election Protection at 866-OUR-VOTE. This is going to be a thing this year, so best be prepared.
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.
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A good place to start this weekend’s war on voting feature is with Joan’s McCarter’s post Friday about ongoing litigation related to the election:
[In Ohio], 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.
Two cases were filed Friday by Democrats in Wisconsin and Michigan regarding the recruitment of Trump “poll watchers” who are proposing to use threatening techniques like “amateur exit polls” to intimidate voters. In Michigan, the Democrats pointed out in their lawsuit that the watchers are concentrating on urban areas heavily populated by people of color.
Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee has provided a recording of a conference call during which Virginia Republican Party General Counsel almost spills the beans regarding the party’s involvement with vigilante “ballot security” initiatives being pushed by the Trump campaign. That’s a violation of a consent decree the GOP agreed to in 1982. If it’s shown the decree was violated, which is more and more obviously the case, it could be extended until 2025.
The RNC has argued in its defense in the matter that its members are accountable to the consent decree when they are acting in their capacity as state chairs. The only problem with that is the RNC’s own general counsel sent out an email last week saying the opposite. Ooops.
U.S. District Court John Michael Vazquez will issue his ruling on the matter today.
• A federal judge on Wednesday reamed North Carolina election officials:
U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs slammed an ongoing North Carolinian voter purge during a dramatic Wednesday hearing, telling county attorneys that she was “horrified” by the “insane” process by which voters could be removed from the rolls without their knowledge. “It almost looks like a cattle call, the way people are being purged,” Biggs said. “This sounds like something that was put together in 1901,” when the state used Jim Crow laws to prevent black citizens from casting a ballot.
On Friday, Judge Biggs issued an injunction blocking the purge on the grounds they likely violate federal voter registration laws.
• The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, reversed a decision by a three-judge panel regarding "ballot harvesting" in Arizona. A bill passed by Republican legislature had made it a felony for anyone to take someone else’s ballot to a polling place. Since this is more likely to done more often by people of color, the court ruled that the harvesting ban discriminates.
• A federal district court in Arizona chose not to issue an injunction against intimidation regarding Trump’s call for poll watchers. Here’s a piece of the opinion snipped out by Rick Hasen:
Second, whether true or false, and whether appealing or repugnant to the listener, Mr. Trump’s and his agents’ statements that the election is rigged, that voter fraud is being perpetrated en masse by “illegal aliens,” and that his supporters should go to polls and watch to ensure a fair election, without more, simply do not prove actual or likely intimidation. One can seriously question the wisdom of stirring up supporters about a controversial issue, encouraging them to go to a precinct that is not their own, and telling them to look for “voter fraud” without defining what it is, leaving individuals to their own devices to figure out how to go about that task.9 If the objective of observing is to detect persons voting more than once, the fact that the observer is in a precinct not their own, whether in the next town or the next state, only adds to the difficulty of recognizing a voter coming through the line more than once. And if the objective of observing, as strongly suggested by the candidate’s statements, is to detect persons attempting to vote who are ineligible because they are not citizens, it is beyond question that no one can tell a person’s citizenship based on what that person looks like or sounds like. But whatever the shortcomings of the Trump Campaign’s statements on this issue might be, simply arguing there is voter fraud and urging people to watch out for it is not, without more, sufficient to justify the extraordinary relief that an injunction constitutes.
• A Kansas state court punctured Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s balloon when it permanently ended his attempt to force more than 18,000 voters to prove their citizenship before allowing them to vote in state and local elections. Kobach sought to keep these thousands who had registered through the Division of Vehicles or by using the standard federal national mail registration form from voting for local offices. The federal form does not ask a person to prove their citizenship.
• The Brennan Center for Justice has posted an analysis of long queues at the polls and what to be done about them.
• Ari Berman points out that there are 868 fewer places to vote this year. That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court splattered key elements of the Voting Rights Act, and states are taking full advantage of the hole left in voter protection, just as critics of the court ruling said would happen:
The Leadership Conference for Civil Rights surveyed 381 of the 800 counties previously covered by Section 5 where polling place information was available in 2012 or 2014 and found there are 868 fewer places to cast a ballot in 2016 in these areas. “Out of the 381 counties in our study, 165 of them—43 percent—have reduced voting locations,” says the important new report. [...]
Many of these counties have been hot spots for voting discrimination. Cochise County, on the Mexico border, which is 30 percent Latino, was sued by the Justice Department in 2006 failing to print election materials in Spanish or have Spanish-speaking poll workers, in violation of the VRA. Today, the county “is the nation’s biggest closer by percentage,” having shuttered 63 percent of its voting locations since Shelby. There will be only 18 polling places for 130,000 residents in 2016, down from 49 polling places in 2012.
• Rick Perlstein details how Republican voter fraud squads are nothing new: There’s some good history here.