This week in the war on voting is a joint project of Joan McCarter and Meteor Blades
• A case of a Republican doing the right thing:
Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell said Wednesday that he is waiving the waiting period and automatically restoring the voting rights of non-violent felons who have completed their sentences and satisfied certain conditions.
The decision by McDonnell, a former prosecutor who has supported restoring voting rights, underscores a long-held position. McDonnell (R) has granted the right to vote to more ex-felons than any of his predecessors at a time when other Republican across the country have adopted more strict voting requirements, including photo IDs and shortened early voting periods.
“When someone commits a crime, they must be justly punished,” the governor said during remarks in Richmond. “However, once these individuals have served their time and fully paid for the offenses they committed, they should be afforded a clear and fair opportunity to resume their lives as productive members of our society.
Some reform-minded Virginians have unsuccessfully
sought to create a process to restore rights that don't require the governor's doing so on an individual basis.
Virginia is only one of two states that continues to impose a lifelong denial of voting rights to felons unless the governor restores them. While McDonnell's willingness to restore more felons to full citizenship than his predecessors is encouraging, this ought to be an automatic process. Florida is worse. Two years ago, Gov. Rick Scott reversed a reform that loosened the re-enfranchisement process. Now a released prisoner must wait seven years before receiving a clemency hearing in which the right to vote, sit on a jury or run for public office can be granted. And it's no sure thing.
Thirty-nine states automatically restore voting rights to felons when they are released. Two states, Maine and Vermont, allow prisoners to vote, something Canada has done since 2002. This approach deserves approval nationwide in the States because it separates voting from criminal activity and it is one aspect of maintaining a societal connection between those who are incarcerated and other citizens. But it will long time before that is widely adopted.
More war on voting news can be read below the fold.
• Ohio's Jon Husted ready for voter registration via the internet: Last year, Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted was the point man trying to suppress the vote for partisan advantage in urban areas by, among other things, supporting more early voting hours there than in less densely populated areas. Eventually, he "solved" that problem by approving the same lower number of early voting hours statewide. Husted also tried to cut off early voting in the three days before the election. He wound up in court over that and lost.
Now, however, partly as a consequence of seeing minuscule levels in Ohio of the supposedly widespread voter fraud that had Republicans across the country all riled up for no good reason, he's again pushing voter registration via the internet, something he has favored since 2011. The Columbus Dispatch Editorial Board notes:
Paper registrations submitted to boards of election under the current system must be entered into a database by someone. Errors inevitably occur, and when discrepancies are discovered on Election Day and voters are forced to vote by provisional ballot, public confidence in the election is diminished.
Information entered online personally by the voter is more likely to be accurate than anything transposed by someone else.
Online registration also allows a much quicker cross-check of new registrations against existing databases, such as those for driver’s licenses.
Good sense. Who woulda guessed?
• Project Vote issues report on internet registration. If Ohio does adopt internet voter registration, it will be joining a growing number of states. From the report:
Given the growth in Internet usage, it is encouraging that an increasing number of states have harnessed the Internet to expand voter registration options for their citizens. Over the past four or five years, online registration has made slow but steady progress in reforming voter registration in the states. In the 2008 election cycle, only two states, Washington and Arizona, allowed applicants to fill out and submit voter registration applications completely online. But as of this writing, eighteen states have passed legislation or made administrative changes (such as New York) to enable individuals to register to vote completely electronically. In at least thirteen of these states, many eligible citizens can already take advantage of online registration. (Online registration has been enacted or is in development in the remaining five states.) In addition, several states that do not currently have online registration allow or will soon allow voters to update their information online. A few other states have hybrid systems with significant online components.
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In other Ohio news, 39 voters under scrutiny: Thirty-nine voters in Hamilton County are being reviewed by the prosecutor's office for possible voter fraud. All of them filled out provisional ballots on election day even though they have voted early or absentee. Most of them said they had sent their absentee ballot in time or even put a stamp on the envelope:
Board of Elections Chairman Tim Burke, who is also the County Democratic Party Chairman, said the news “ruined my day.”
“I fear what this has come down to is an effort to scare the hell out of voters needlessly,” Burke said. “It’s a tragedy these people’s names are now going over to prosecutor for felony investigation when I am convinced they did nothing wrong and did not have two votes counted.”
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Wisconsin appellate judge upholds voter ID law:
A Wisconsin appellate court has overturned one decision by a lower court finding the state's voter ID law unconstitutional, but the legislation remains blocked, with a separate challenge to the law pending before a different appellate court. Despite upholding the voter ID law, the judge deciding today's case appeared to imply that there could be a different outcome for a challenge that provides more evidence of the law's burdens on the right to vote.
Writing for a three-judge panel, Judge Brian Blanchard of the 4th District rejected arguments by the League of Women Voters that the voter ID law imposed additional voter qualifications beyond those included in the Wisconsin Constitution or that, based on the evidence presented in the case, its requirements were so burdensome as to be unreasonable.
But in a lengthy footnote, Judge Blanchard distinguished the case from another challenge to the law, filed by the NAACP and the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera, that provides more extensive evidence that a voter ID requirement would "severely burden a significant number of qualified voters but is not reasonably necessitated or designed to deter fraud or otherwise effect an important government interest."
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New York City is back to the future on voting machines: It has cost New York City $95 million to upgrade its election process by replacing old voting machines with electronic scanners.
But now, less than three years after the new machines were deployed, election officials say the counting process with the machines is too cumbersome to use them for the mayoral primary this year, and then for the runoff that seems increasingly likely to follow as soon as two weeks later.
In a last-ditch effort to avoid an electoral embarrassment, the city is poised to go back in time: it is seeking to redeploy lever machines, a technology first developed in the 1890s, for use this September at polling places across the five boroughs. The city’s fleet of lever machines was acquired in the 1960s and has been preserved in two warehouses in Brooklyn, shielded from dust by plastic covers.