Welcome to the latest edition in our war on voting series. This is a joint project of Meteor Blades and Joan McCarter.
On Tuesday, three-judge panel on the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard the legal challenge from the U.S. Justice Department, state NAACP, League of Women Voters and citizens of North Carolina who allege that laws passed by Republicans in that state illegally discriminate against minority voters. According to reports from various media, the state's lawyers faced a skeptical court.
Judge Henry F. Floyd questioned the timing of the changes — done after Republicans took control of state government for the first time in a century and after the U.S. Supreme Court undid key provisions of the Voting Rights Act — and whether they weren't done to suppress minority votes for political gain.
"It looks pretty bad to me," Floyd said. […]
Voters must now show one of six qualifying IDs, although those with "reasonable impediments" can fill out a form and cast a provisional ballot. The voter ID mandate began with this year's March primary. At Tuesday's hearing, Judge James A. Wynn Jr. asked pointed questions about why public assistance IDs, used disproportionally by minorities, were not acceptable in the final version of the law.
"Why did they take it out?" asked Wynn, a former North Carolina state appeals judge.
According to one reporter on the scene, the answer was simply "I don't know." That probably didn't win the state any points. This same judge, according to The Wall Street Journal "seemed bothered that state legislators consulted racial voting data while they were moving forward with the voting bill." That was a tad obvious of them, wasn't it.
The judges, says the WSJ "signaled they were aware that they would need to make a fairly quick ruling to give North Carolina time to prepare for Election Day, which is 20 weeks away." There's a lot on the line, including a U.S. Senate race and, of course, the presidential race. More than that, voter suppression in North Carolina is likely to be one of two voter suppression cases (Texas is the other) to reach the Supreme Court.
Below, you'll find some briefs what's happened this week in the war on voting.
- Want to help fight voter suppression? Election Protection, a coalition of advocacy organizations, is one place to start. Go to their website, 866ourvote.org, to find out what's happening in your state, to volunteer for election protection, or to donate to their efforts. You can also call your local Democratic party office and volunteer to help with voter registration and education drives.
- In Arizona a U.S. district court judge might rule on two voter suppression claims before November's election—"whether to stop the state's new so-called 'ballot harvesting' law from taking effect and whether to force elections officials to count out-of-precinct provisional ballots." The first is a challenge to a state law that prevents people collecting early and absentee ballots and turning them in to elections officials—for example, people who collect ballots from senior centers or nursing homes where the residents would have difficulty turning in their ballots. The second is intended to force Maricopa County to come up with a polling plan to ensure there isn't a repeat of what happened in the primary, where a contraction of polling places resulted in hours-long lines to vote. They also want elections officials to count out-of-precinct ballots. Arguments will be heard the last week of August for a possible decision before November.
- Georgia is the focus of a new report from the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
“We are now seeing the proliferation of voter suppression laws across the country in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2103 Shelby County decision,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “In Georgia, we have seen the purging of African-American voters from the registration rolls in Hancock County, an effort to move a polling site out of a majority Black neighborhood and into a local sheriff’s office in Macon-Bibb County, and an effort to move forward with burdensome documentary proof of citizenship requirements for people seeking to register to vote. The 2016 presidential election is the first in more than 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act and Georgia illustrates why powerful federal remedies remain necessary to safeguard minority voting rights today.”
From 1992 until 2012, the year before the Shelby decision, the the U.S. Department of Justice "issued 37 objections to discriminatory voting changes across the state of Georgia, effectively blocking efforts that would have made voting more difficult for African-Americans and other minority communities." Clearly, the problem of voter suppression in Georgia had not been solved.
- In yet another new study, the National Council of State Legislators describes the "crazy quilt" of election technology across the states. It's a mess. Only 18 states have uniform voting technology across all counties!
These states have the same vendor and the same equipment statewide, but variations still exist on the role of the state in assisting its jurisdictions with purchasing, maintaining and implementing the systems, as well as putting statewide procedures in place on how to use the voting equipment. Even the 18 states listed above fall somewhere on a spectrum of uniformity.
A modern, uniform voting system is pretty darned important when it comes to access to the ballot—every election year there are stories about how too few or broken-down machines in, usually, minority precincts delay and discourage people from voting. But a uniform, functioning balloting system is also critical to the integrity of the ballot.
- The platform committee for the Democratic National Convention had its second of four committee meetings hearing from rank-and-file members what needs to be included, and voting rights was at the top of the list. It was presented by no less than Rev. William Barber, president of the NAACP's North Carolina chapter. He told the committee that voting rights is integrally tied into all other issues: "You can't be concerned about, for instance, economic sustainability and living wages and then not say anything about voter suppression."