Welcome to the latest edition in our war on voting series, a joint project of Joan McCarter and Meteor Blades. |
U.S. District Court Judge Thomas D. Schroeder, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled in favor of North Carolina’s new voting law Monday, prompting plaintiffs in the case to say they would immediately appeal. The law is considered by opponents as one of the strictest in the country. But that wasn’t the viewpoint of the judge.
The law requires voters to have one of a number of state-specified, government-issued photo-IDs. It also barred people from registering and voting on the same day, cut the number of days allotted for early voting, blocked the counting of any ballots that are cast in the wrong precinct. Preregistering teenagers before they turn 18 is also no longer allowed under the law.
The Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP, one of the plaintiffs, wrote an op-ed on the impact of Judge Schroeder’s ruling that appeared in Thursday’s New York Times.
Under the Voting Rights Act, North Carolina would have had to submit a draft of the law to the Department of Justice for “pre-clearance” because 40 of its 100 counties had in the past discriminated against African-American voters. But since the Supreme Court wrecked a hunk of the VRA in 2013, no states have had to pre-clear any changes in their voting laws with the DOJ. It was up to advocacy groups and individual plaintiffs to sue over the changes.
Judge Schroeder’s 485-page opinion in the suit concluded:
In short, North Carolina has provided legitimate State interests for its voter-ID requirement and electoral system that provides registration all year long up to twenty-five days before an election, absentee voting for up to sixty days before an election, ten days of early voting at extended hours convenient for workers that includes one Sunday and two Saturdays, and Election Day voting. Plaintiffs oppose this system because they preferred one that they say was even more convenient—which they used disproportionately during certain elections—and point to some fraction of voters who did not vote or register. Plaintiffs’ contention that such voters did not do so because of vestiges of historical official discrimination is rebutted by the facts. There is strong evidence that some other reason is at play for the failure of these persons to register and/or vote. The unprecedented gains by African Americans in registration and turnout, both during and even in 2014 after SL 2013-381, bolster this conclusion. While the consideration is clearly local and practical in nature, based on North Carolina’s unique facts, it would no doubt bear relevance if North Carolina were seeking to return to an electoral system that was not in the mainstream of other States. It is not.
Representatives of the plaintiffs in the case, including the North Carolina state conference of the NAACP, three churches and several individuals, will appeal the decision to the 4th Circuit Court, which could reverse some or all of Schroeder’s ruling. Any decision by the circuit court is likely to be appealed to the Scalia-less U.S. Supreme Court, where a 4-4 split could mean whatever decision the 4th Circuit makes would stand.
The question is whether the case can work its way through the courts in time for the election. Rick Hasen, a law professor who runs the Election Law Blog, said speed is important because of the Supreme Court’s Purcell v. Gonzalez ruling.
The so-called Purcell Principle states that courts should be wary of approving any changes in voting laws the closer those changes are to an election because of the potential for voter confusion. The 4th Circuit issued an order Thursday that mandates that briefs and reply briefs in the appeal all be submitted to the court by June 14.
Among the problems posed by the North Carolina law as it now stands is what happened to a 94-year-old black citizen who has voted in every election since she first registered 70 years ago. Armenta Eaton told a Washington Post reporter that she rode in a mule-drawn wagon driven by her mother to sign up to vote the first time. Before she was allowed to do so, she had to take a “literacy test,” which consisted of reciting, without error, the Preamble to the Constitution. Not only has she voted in every election ever since, but she’s worked to help others register over the years. Under the new law, she said she and her daughter were forced to make 10 trips to the state’s Division of Motor Vehicles, and spend more than 20 hours to obtain one of the allowable voter IDs because the name on her her driver’s license did not exactly match that on her voter registration.
• Obama nominates former Nevada treasurer to vacancy on troubled Election Assistance Commission: Kate Marshall has previously worked in the antitrust division of the Department of Justice, was a senior deputy attorney general in Nevada from 1997 to 2000, served as state treasurer from 2007 to 2014, and has been a principal of her own firm, Marshall Legal Consulting, since 2015. The EAC was established in 2002 by the Help America Vote Act and is charged with developing guidelines for state to meet HAVA requirements, accrediting voting system test laboratories and certifying voting equipment.
For a while the EAC was short of members and hampered by partisan sniping and couldn’t do much of anything. Then all the vacancies were filled and the commission seemed headed in a good direction. But in November, Brian Newby came aboard as executive director, and the partisanship returned.
Newby, a pal of vote-suppression maven Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, was boosted into his job with Kobach’s assistance. Kobach had for years been involved in making it more difficult to vote in Kansas, and he tried to get the EAC to change its federal voter registration form to include a requirement for proof of citizenship, something the commission rejected. He tried to set up a two-tiered operation that would have barred people registered via the federal form from voting in state and local elections. In February, Newby decided that voters in Kansas, Georgia and Alabama would be required to show such proof.
• Speaking of Kansas, what a mess they made of voter registration: Under state law, Kansas is one of four states that require people who register to vote first provide some proof of their citizenship, such as a birth certificate, passport or naturalization papers. People can complete most of the registration form even if they don’t have the proof, but the law requires that a registration application be held in suspense until the person returns within 90 days or the incomplete form will be tossed out. As part of lawsuit filed on behalf of would-be voters, the American Civil Liberties Union discovered that only 7,444 of the 22,000 registration applications filled out the first two weeks of February have been approved:
The ACLU found that young voters were most likely to register without the ID required: The AP reports that people aged 18 to 29 “[make] up more than 58% of applicants who registered at motor vehicle offices and are on the suspense list.”
• Latino voter registration spikes: The executive director of the National Association of Elected and Appointed Officials, Arturo Vargas, has predicted that 13.1 million Latinos will vote in the United States in 2016. In 2012, 11.2 million Latinos voted, and in 2008, 9.7 million did. That’s bad news for Donald Trump. In a poll of registered Latino voters in Colorado and Nevada, 80 percent of respondents said Trump's views on immigration made them less likely to vote for Republicans in November. In Florida, 68 percent said that. While Trump has numerous obstacles to overcome—he’s not popular among blacks or women either—his unpopularity with Latinos could hurt other Republicans further down the ballot.
• Vermont’s Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin signs automatic voter registration law: The bill he signed passed with nearly unanimous support. It automatically registers eligible Vermonters to vote when they apply for a state driver’s license. Vermont is the fourth state with such a law. Shumlin credited Secretary of State Jim Condos for championing the law:
“As Vermont’s Secretary of State, I believe voting is a sacred right—one we must protect and encourage by removing unnecessary barriers. Automatic Voter Registration saves time and money, increases the accuracy of our statewide voter checklist, curbs the potential for fraud, and protects the integrity of our elections,” said Secretary Condos. “AVR saves time and money, increases the accuracy of our statewide voter checklist, curbs the potential for fraud, and protects the integrity of our elections.”
• More than 120,000 New Yorkers voted in the primary by affidavit:
Affidavit ballots are what poll workers are supposed to give voters when they can't be found on the relevant voter list. On the ballots, voters swear they are who they say they are and explain where they live and what party they believe they should be a member of, and cast a vote, which commissioners are supposed to consider the validity of after the polls close. In this year's primary, a BOE spokeswoman disclosed, 121,058 affidavit ballots were cast, including 37,214 in Brooklyn. For perspective, that's nearly five times the 26,242 cast in the last contested presidential primary in 2008, and more than a tenth as much as the 1,032,796 ballots counted already in the city.
• Missouri Democrats successfully filibuster voter ID bill, but it will return: Democratic state senators filibustered with speeches until 2 AM Thursday and managed to keep the strict bill, but it could be back in discussion as early as Monday. The latest Republican-initiated bill would mandate that all voters show up with a non-expired government ID. No student IDs, even from state-run universities would be accepted. The executive director of Progress Missouri, Laura Swinford, said if the bill passes, it could also disenfranchise the elderly. “When my grandmother was alive and I took her to vote, she didn’t have a current drivers license, because she didn’t drive,” Swinford told Alice Ollstein at ThinkProgress. “But under this bill you can’t use an expired ID, even a military one.”