Welcome to the latest edition in our war on voting series, a joint project of Joan McCarter and Meteor Blades. |
If the governor signs bill, Vermont will become the fourth state with automatic voter registration: The three-party Vermont legislation approved the bill Wednesday with nearly unanimous support. Eligible citizens will be registered to vote when they visit the DMV unless they specifically choose to opt out of the process.
West Virginia passed a similar law in the past few weeks. California and Oregon passed their laws in the matter in 2015, and the latter has already proved it to be a success, having quadrupled registration rates since starting the automatic registration in January.
“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 Vermont Secretary of State James Condos. “As Secretary of State, I believe voting is a sacred right – one we must protect and encourage by removing unnecessary barriers. Democracy works best when more people participate. I once again applaud the Legislature for their hard work and thank them for their nonpartisan support.”
Adam Gitlin, counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said, "This reform is a common-sense, no-brainer idea for any state looking to make voting more convenient and accessible for everyone.” Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia have considered by not yet passed bills to automatically register voters.
You can read the Brennan Center for Justice’s The Case for Automatic, Permanent Voter Registration for more details on the rationale for this approach.
• Democratic Party, Clinton and Sanders campaigns sue Arizona over access to the polls: The suit was prompted because residents in the state’s March primary left thousands of citizens standing in line for five hours to vote. The focus is on Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county and home to the capital of Phoenix, where voters were confronted with the longest line after the number of polling places were cut from 400 in 2008 to 60 this year. That works out to one polling place for every 21,000 voters. So long were the delays that even Republican Gov. Doug Ducey called that situation “unacceptable.” The mayor of Phoenix called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the situation.
The cutback was “particularly burdensome” on for the black, Latino and American Indian communities, all of which had fewer polling stations than white communities. The lawsuit says that some areas had no place to vote at all, creating a “dramatic and disparate impact” on people of color.
According to the lawsuit, Arizona’s “alarmingly inadequate number of voting centers resulted in severe, inexcusable burdens on voters county-wide, as well as the ultimate disenfranchisement of untold numbers of voters who were unable or unwilling to wait in intolerably long lines.” This is the fifth lawsuit filed by the Clinton campaign against a state over voting issues. The other states sued are Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin, and North Carolina.
• A three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a district court judge must determine whether Wisconsin’s strict law requiring citizens to produce a photo-ID in order to cast a ballot applies to people who face special obstacles in obtaining such an ID.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Law Center for Homelessness and Poverty lost their suit against the state’s photo-ID law in 2014 argued before circuit court that citizens with special problems include people who have had trouble obtaining the proper IDs because their names on documents needed to get them don’t precisely match their birth certificates, they are caught in a Catch-22 because they need a credential from another agency that they can't obtain without a state photo ID, or they need a document that no longer exists because or war, natural disaster or other events beyond their control.
Wisconsin authorities say there isn’t a problem with obtaining the right photo-ID.
Tell that to Eddie Lee Holloway, Jr. His birth certificate says Eddie Junior Holloway. Because of that error made nearly six decades ago coupled with the new photo-ID law, he cannot vote anymore in Wisconsin. DMV employees told him his birth certificate is an unacceptable as a form of ID. It doesn't matter to them that his father's name—"Eddie Lee Holloway"—is printed on his birth certificate, and that he has a Social Security Card and an expired Illinois photo ID that both carry the name "Eddie L Holloway Jr." He voted ever since he was 18, he says. But now, after years of heavy work, he is severely disabled, unemployed, and homeless and was never able to obtain a Wisconsin photo ID. DMV bureaucrats who used their brains would be able to resolve this using common sense, but they obviously don’t have any to use, something those who got the law passed in the first place no doubt were counting on.
• ThinkProgress has put together an interactive map showing state-by-state what voter suppression looks like in the first presidential election in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. As Kira Lirner writes, ever since the Supreme Court gutted one of the VRA’s key provisions in 2013, states and jurisdictions no longer have had to “preclear” potentially discriminatory laws with the Department of Justice. And that’s the way things will likely remain “as long as a Congress controlled by radical, right-wing factions continues to sit on the rewrite of the VRA.”
Since 2012, 17 states have added voting restrictions to their statutes. Several times now, one of the extremist Republicans—the motive force behind this Jim-Crow-on-the-sly approach to voter suppression—has let slip that the laws being passed will be helpful to the GOP.
As Joan McCarter noted in “The deadlocked Supreme Court could make the 2016 election even more chaotic,” the court’s current 4-4 split could mean that conflicting decisions and voting restrictions as ruled in the circuit courts could make things messy at the polls.
Clicking on one of those states on the map will take you to a story about that state’s voter suppression situation.
• The progressive civic engagement group Mi Familia Vota and California-based Liberman Broadcasting, which calls itself the largest privately held, minority-owned Spanish-language broadcaster in the United States, have partnered to promote civic participation among Latino voters for the 2016 General Election. MFV operates in six states with extensive Latino populations—Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, and Texas.
The partnership, according to a press release from the two organizations, will put together a joint program of public service announcements, editorial and online content as well as the co-production of educational segments and events to spur Latino citizens to exercise their right to vote. This partnership will integrate the broadcasting company’s existing “Yo Soy el Voto” voting engagement platform with campaigns that MFV and its allies develop.
“We are delighted to partner with Liberman Broadcasting in building political power for the Latino community,” said Ben Monterroso, executive director of Mi Familia Vota. “Jointly we will be able to reach millions of Latino households across the country to inform and empower our community to register to vote and participate in the November election.” Monterroso, a Guatemalan immigrant who began his time in the United States as a dishwasher, has been a strong voice in the immigrants rights community and long worked as an organizer and later a supervisor of organizers for the Service Employees International Union.
• Outrageously early deadline to declare party affiliation likely will hurt Sanders in New York: Although Bernie Sanders has been drawing large crowds to his New York campaign rallies in the run-up to the state’s Democratic primary next Tuesday, many of the people attending won’t be able to cast ballots because they missed the deadline to change their party affiliation. A significant portion of Sanders supporters are independents. To be eligible to vote in New York’s closed primaries, they must register as either Republicans or Democrats. But the deadline was more than six months ago, something many Democrats have complained about for years, to no avail.
One New Yorker, Elisabeth Garber-Paul, registered to vote as a member of the Working Families Party years ago. She told Guardian reporter Megan Carpenter that she had learned in New York City’s 2013 mayoral election that she couldn’t vote in the Democratic primary. Determined not to let that happen again in 2016, she affiliated with the Democrats in October when she renewed her driver’s license “specifically so I could vote for Bernie Sanders. Last month, when she checked her status just to be sure, she found she had missed the October 9 affiliation deadline.
“The most frustrating part to me was that neither the state website nor the Democratic party [notified] me that the registration was invalid,” she said.
“This feels like a bullshit way to disenfranchise people in the primary,” she added. “Given that our presidential elections are two-party affairs, it seems pretty disingenuous to make it so hard for voters to participate.”
• Voting Rights Institute seeks DOJ investigation of cutback in polling stations in Daphne, Alabama: The city council of the 24,000-population city 13 miles from Mobile decided to reduce the number of polling places from five to two. The institute sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice complaining that the decision means that the residents of one of the only heavily black districts will have to travel from their existing polling place more than two-and-a-half miles to the new one while the polling place closest to heavily white districts will remain in place.
“This is exactly the type of voting change that would have had to have been pre-cleared by the Department of Justice before the Supreme Court’s disastrous ruling in Shelby County v. Holder,” said Harry Baumgarten, legal fellow with the VRI. “In gutting a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court has opened the door for these potentially discriminatory measures to be passed and implemented throughout the country,” he said.