This week in the war on voting is a joint project of Joan McCarter and Meteor Blades.
Thousands of lawyers and partisan poll watchers are prepared to deal with problems on Election Day:
“The parties are well lawyered up,” said Richard Hasen, a University of California, Irvine, law and political science professor and the author of “The Voting Wars: From 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown.” “It’s a tactic and a tool. It’s like an arms race.”
Call it the legacy of Bush v. Gore. The 2000 presidential contest between Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore came down to a 537-vote margin in Florida, weeks of court fights, and ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Since 2000, when the parties felt, especially Democrats, they were caught flatfooted, they send lawyers to places where they expect close races,” Hasen said. “Campaigns now have boiler rooms where they sit and watch the polls. The most important thing is to have a (legal) infrastructure in place.”
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Greg Palast: Jim Crow Republicans seek to scrub millions from voter rolls: If you haven't read the long-time investigative journalist's piece in Al Jazeera on how Republicans in 27 states could remove millions of black, Latino and Asian American voters from the rolls, put in your mouthguard beforehand to avoid grinding your molars to dust. Interstate Crosscheck, the program Republicans have already used to purge tens of thousands of voters in one state, is supposed to ferret out people who have fraudulently voted in more than one state at the same time. But the list of names, 6,951,484 of them, is brimful of mismatches and probable mismatches. In short, a lot of the individuals that officials involved in the program say have double-voted are actually two people with similar or identical names.
• U. of Florida students call out Scott administration's voter suppression: In February, Florida’s secretary of state turned down the city of Gainesville’s request to use the University of Florida’s student union as an early voting site. That brought loud objections from students, other citizens in Gainesville and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist, who called the decision an “outrage.” The student union is used for voting on Election Day itself. But in the past, the queues to vote on that day can be immense, and it's been estimated that, statewide, more than 200,000 people didn't vote as a consequence of those lines. Early voting is meant to relieve that crunch and also make it easy for people whose schedules make voting on election day difficult.
Students are still unhappy. Katie Valentine at ThinkProgress writes that Amir Avin, president of the university’s College Democrats, said the rejection of the student union building for early voting was “definitely disenfranchising voters":
“And not just students—all the faculty and anyone that works and lives near the University of Florida. There are so many people who commute here every day,” he said. “All of these voters who live within Alachua county that come commuter here, all the students who go to school here, they aren’t able to vote early in a location that’s most convenient to them.”
• Grimes takes legal action over McConnell flyer implying voters involved in election violation: The complaint concerns a flyer that Hunter has dissected:
The mailer looks official. It has big letters marked WARNING and "ELECTION VIOLATION NOTICE," seemingly designed to make you think you're the one violating something, and warns of a "possible fraud being perpetrated." But when you open it, it turns out to be a mailer from the Kentucky Republican Party and Mitch McConnell's committee warning you of "fraudulent information" being spread by the campaign of his opponent, Alison Grimes.
Luke Brinker at Salon, who first caught wind of the partisan flyer in the official-looking envelope, opined:
it’s hard to see the mailers as anything but a shameless effort to suppress voter turnout. Indicting Grimes for fraud and even suggesting “election violation[s],” the mailers make no affirmative case for re-electing the senator and instead seek to taint Grimes with accusations of sordid and (hint, hint) potentially criminal political tactics. A vote for Grimes, the mailers convey, is an illegitimate vote.
The rash of voter identification measures passed by GOP-led legislatures in recent years leave little doubt that the Republican Party sees suppressing the vote as its path to victory. But rarely have GOP campaigns been so transparent in their attempts to keep voters at home.
Ben Jacobs at the Daily Beast reported Friday that the Grimes campaign is seeking an injunction “to prevent McConnell from engaging in these unprecedented and shameful campaign tactics.” It also is asking for a federal and state investigation.
• FiveThirtyEight: 17 states now have voter ID laws that didn't have them in 2000. Haley Munguia writes on the numbers:
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 24 states considered for Tuesday’s election legislation to implement stricter voter ID standards. Of those, 12 states’ proposals garnered enough support to make it on the ballot. On the flip-side, 11 states considered proposals to loosen restrictions or repeal them altogether — five made it on the ballot. The NCSL has detailed data since 2012. [...]
The number of states with proposals to loosen voter ID requirements seems to be experiencing a slight upward tick, while the percentage of those that made it on the ballot is growing — 22 percent in 2012, up to 46 percent this year.
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Ohio's Secretary of State Jon Husted sued again over voter suppression Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Today, the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, Columbus Coalition for the Homeless, and Ohio Democratic Party—successful plaintiffs in previous complaints to protect Ohioans’ voting rights—filed a proposed Second Supplemental Complaint against Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted and Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine asking U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley of the Southern District of Ohio to declare portions of Ohio Substitute Senate Bills 205 (S.B. 205) and 216 (S.B. 216) invalid for violating the federal Voting Rights Act and the Constitution, risking the disenfranchisement of thousands of Ohio voters who may cast absentee or provisional ballots, and intentionally making it more difficult for many African-American, Latino, and Democractic-Party-member Ohioans to vote.
“Ohio Republicans are implementing a two-tiered voting system in Ohio,” said Subodh Chandra, counsel for the two homeless coalitions. “These new laws create two sets of rules that make it much more likely that absentee and provisional ballots cast by legitimate Ohio voters will be invalidated. We are asking the federal court to prevent this unconstitutional disenfranchisement of thousands of Ohioans.”
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Ari Berman does his usual excellent job in a recap analysis of the voting restrictions that could swing the 2014 elections.:
The new restrictions could hamper turnout among African-Americans and younger voters in North Carolina, harming [Democratic Sen. Kay] Hagan’s campaign. During the May primary, more than 450 voters were disenfranchised by provisions of the new law—a disturbing preview of what’s to come.
North Carolina is one of eight states where black voters could decide who controls the Senate, according to a new report by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. (The others are Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana and Michigan.) “Many of these races are challenging for Democrats,” notes the report, “and low black turnout will guarantee Democratic losses.”
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Election law expert Rick Hasen: Texas voting law changes could be put back under federal supervision:
Readers of the entire 147-page opinion issued earlier this month by a federal district court striking down Texas’s strict voter identification law as unconstitutional and a violation of the Voting Rights Act might have been too exhausted to realize that the opinion’s very last sentence may be its most important. The court ended its opinion with a dry statement promising a future hearing on “plaintiffs’ request for relief under Section 3(c) of the Voting Rights Act.” That hearing, however, has the potential to require Texas to get federal approval for any future voting changes for up to the next decade, and to make it much more difficult for the state to pass more restrictive voting rules. It may be much more important than the ruling on the voter ID law itself.