Welcome to the latest edition in our war on voting series. This is a joint project of Joan McCarter and Meteor Blades.
• Appeals court gives Kansas Secretary of State poke in the eye on citizenship issue. In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Friday ruled that officials must remove a proof-of-citizenship requirement from federal voter registration forms in Kansas, Georgia and Alabama. The ruling is a defeat for Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach who has been pushing the citizenship requirement based on the claim that it would reduce voter fraud at the polls. Such fraud has been found by a number of studies to be exceedingly rare. But that hasn’t stopped Kobach from clamping down.
But the court chose only to grant a preliminary injunction. It could still review the case on its merits.
Plaintiffs had argued Thursday that the citizenship requirement could disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters. Kobach, a leading vote suppressor and clearly proud of it, had established a system in which people who tried to register without citizenship proof would have just 90 days to return and complete their registration or their applications would be thrown out. At one point earlier this year, there were more than 30,000 applications awaiting completion.
Brian Newby, a Kobach protege, who had been appointed to run elections in Johnson County, managed to turn that low-level post into an appointment as executive director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. It was Newby who granted the three states’ request to add the proof-of-citizenship requirement to federal forms they used on registration applications.
The judges sent the case back to the lower court whose decision to allow the change on federal forms was what the appeals court panel overturned.
“Hopefully this will put an end to shenanigans in the much-needed federal agency charged with helping to improve our elections,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, a co-plaintiff.
Kobach could appeal to the Supreme Court, and he might. But, as Rick Hasen of the Election Law Blog writes, “good luck trying to find a fifth vote.”
• The new Jim Crow is good deal sneakier than the old one. Officials at Kennesaw State University have warned students about a fake voter registration campaign on the Georgia campus. KSU has authorized two registration drives on campus for September 21 and September 27. These will focus on on-line registration. Deadline for registering to vote in the November 8 election is October 11.
KSU Dean of Students Michael Sanseviro sent a memo alert to students Tuesday saying “unauthorized individuals are walking around with clipboards claiming they are registering students to vote” in recent weeks. “Some of these unauthorized individuals,” the dean added, “are targeting particular student populations.” Specifically black students. The individuals pretend to register students who would then discover at the polls that they could not vote:
“We have had students in the past not be able to vote on Election Day because they completed a form with an unauthorized person and were never properly registered,” Sanseviro said in the alert. “We are committed to ensuring all eligible KSU students have the proper access and opportunity to participate in the democratic process.”
When nothing else can be done to keep blacks from voting, try trickery, eh?
• And there’s more trickery in Texas. Last month, U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos ordered that Texas spend $2.5 million on educating citizens about less restrictive requirements since the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in July shot down the state’s voter ID as a violation of the Voting Rights Act. She said the state must provide "the opportunity for voters who do not possess SB 14 ID and cannot reasonably obtain it to cast a regular ballot.”
The Texas Tribune reported that the Justice Department had accused officials of having circulated material to poll workers about voter ID that was “misleading”:
“Limited funds are being spent on inaccurate materials,” the U.S. Department of Justice wrote in a legal filing Tuesday.
The filing asked [...] Gonzales Ramos to “issue corrections to past press releases and other public statements” by Texas officials and “update and redistribute all electronic resources to reflect that all voters” without one of seven types of photo identification required by a 2011 Texas law may cast a ballot in November.
• NC board of elections adds extra early voting in several counties. In a marathon meeting Thursday, the state board of elections overruled several North Carolina county boards that had slashed hours for early voting and reducing the sites where it was available. But they did not force those counties to offer Sunday voting, a popular provision for many blacks who traditionally vote en masse on Sundays.
Because the governor is a Republican, the three-member election boards of the state’s 100 counties have two Republicans and one Democrat. The state board also has a Republican majority. Seventy of North Carolina boards voted unanimously for their early voting schedules and the number of sites available for casting votes before November 8. But the state board scrutinized the county boards that established their hours and locations on a split vote. In many instances, they added considerably more hours.
Democracy North Carolina, a voting-rights organization, called the meeting an overall victory an “overall victory” and lauded the actions of the State Board, its staff, and the local leaders who fought for strong Early Voting plans.
Having counties running the machinery of elections makes sense. But the state—and not just North Carolina—should be setting early voting hours, not the counties, in order to provide the state’s citizens with an opportunity to vote early.
• SCOTUS squashes effort by Michigan Republicans to end straight-party voting. The court chose not to review the ruling of a lower court that overturned a law that banned straight-party. Straight-ticket voting has been on the books in Michigan since 1891:
The Supreme Court rejected the Michigan case without comment, but Federal District Court Judge Judge Gershwin Drain said in July that the law placed “a disproportionate burden on African-Americans’ right to vote.”
The data showed that “there are ‘extremely high’ correlations between the size of the African-American voting population within a district and the use of straight-party voting in that district,” he added.