Leading Off
● Washington: On Monday, the state of Washington took great strides toward making voting easier, more accessible, and more equitable when Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee signed several bills into law to expand voting rights. These measures will take effect in 2019 and include automatic voter registration; allowing voters to register and cast a ballot on the same day, including on Election Day; letting 16- and 17-year-olds "pre-register" so that they’ll be automatically added to the voter rolls once they turn 18; and a bill known as the Washington Voting Rights Act, which is aimed at increasing Latino representation in local elections.
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Importantly, the automatic registration measure isn't just limited to those who obtain a driver's license or state ID card at the state Department of Licensing. Instead, it will also direct other state agencies to assess their ability to automatically register voters, and provide the state with a justification if they can’t. Assuming other agencies do start to provide automatic registration, that will greatly enhance the program’s reach.
Meanwhile, the Washington Voting Rights Act has long been a goal of civil rights activists. Following in the footsteps of California, this measure empowers county and municipal governments to switch from electing all of their officials at-large to electing them using individual districts. The law will also make it easier for cities to avoid costly federal voting rights lawsuits, while also allowing citizens to formally notify local governments about potential discriminatory election systems without having to resort to the courts.
Switching to districts-based elections will empower Latino voters especially, since many localities in agriculture-heavy eastern Washington in particular have large Latino minorities who can't elect their preferred candidates in at-large races where the white majority opposes them. A federal lawsuit forced the city Yakima to adopt districts a few years ago, leading to the election of its first-ever Latina city council member in 2015, and this sort of change could soon become widespread. Indeed, in the 10 counties in the state with the highest Latino populations, there are no Latino county commissioners at all.
Finally, the pre-registration law goes beyond offering it as an option for eligible teenagers. It requires high school social studies classes to establish voter registration events, and the state's chief education official will be required to disseminate registration materials for eligible students. These provisions are important because actively encouraging students to pre-register instead of just passively giving them the choice to do so will likely lead to increased participation.
These new laws were only possible because Democrats retook the majority in the state Senate in a pivotal 2017 special election, giving the party unified control over state government for the first time since Inslee became governor in 2013. Voting rights shouldn't be a partisan issue, but Republicans had blocked these measures from even getting a vote. Consequently, Washington's expansion of voting rights should serve as an example for what Democrats should pursue, both in the state governments they currently control and in any states where they gain power this November, since there's so much more that could be done to protect and expand the right to vote.
Redistricting
● Pennsylvania: On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously denied a stay request from Republicans seeking to block Pennsylvania's new court-drawn congressional map, while a district court panel also dismissed a separate GOP lawsuit on the matter. The Supreme Court ruled that plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the issue before the court, and with Republicans saying they won't appeal the district court's decision, legal challenges to the map are now officially over. Consequently, Pennsylvanians will finally vote in fairer districts this fall after three elections under an unconstitutional map.
But disturbingly, Republican legislators have not backed down from their threat to impeach four of the five Democratic state Supreme Court justices who threw out their gerrymander. To the contrary: After a dozen state House Republicans introduced measures to do so on Tuesday, GOP leaders said they’d consider this extreme assault on the rule of law, and the effort’s main sponsor in the House said he has received assurances from party leaders that they will allow the Republican-run chamber to vote on the measures.
Impeachment is still unlikely to happen. Thanks to their gerrymanders of the legislature, Republicans hold the bare minimum two-thirds majority in the state Senate to remove the justices. That means it would take only a single GOP senator to block an impeachment drive. But a simple majority in the House is all that’s needed to refer impeachment to the upper chamber for a trial, so the effort might yet move forward—and in any event, democracy shouldn’t have to rely on whether a Republican legislator is willing to buck his or her own party.
But even if this effort doesn’t succeed, it’s still an ominous sign that Republican leaders are even contemplating such an attack on the rule of law instead of immediately denouncing it. The justices did nothing but lawfully interpret the state constitution’s guarantee of “free and equal” elections in striking down one of the most extreme partisan gerrymanders in the modern era and replacing it with a much fairer map—an outcome that can only boost civic participation and strengthen democracy in the Keystone State.
Judges in a democracy should never be impeached for their jurisprudence. Doing so sends a chilling message that undermines the very principle of judicial independence. Indeed, even the court’s Republican chief justice denounced the impeachment effort for this very reason—despite having dissented in the ruling on the map itself.
While Republicans may not ultimately carry out this dangerous threat, it only serves to normalize the concept of removing judges who issue rulings that Republicans dislike—and it’s yet another escalation of widespread Republican attacks on state-level judicial independence over the past decade.
Voter Suppression
● Georgia: Georgia Republicans appear intent on following the same blatantly discriminatory path of their brethren in North Carolina after they recently passed a bill out of a state House committee to curb Sunday early voting statewide and shorten voting hours in the city of Atlanta, where about half the population is black. The bill would limit early voting to only one Saturday or Sunday prior to Election Day, but not on both as some jurisdictions currently do. The real goal is to pressure localities into holding early voting from 9 AM to 4 PM Saturdays, which is the minimum required under current state law.
Georgia Republicans have previously let slip their real motivation for opposing Sunday early voting: African American churches use it as an opportunity to conduct community-wide "souls to the polls" voter drives after Sunday services. The GOP’s effort to cut voting hours in Atlanta is also just barely veiled in its discriminatory intent: The move comes after Republicans lost a key state Senate special election in December where Atlanta polls stayed open an hour later than those in the whiter and more Republican suburbs of Cobb County because Atlanta had a concurrent municipal election.
Republicans have claimed the move to cut Atlanta's poll hours is about fairness, but if that were true, the easiest remedy would be to simply extend Election Day voting by one hour in the rest of the state. Instead, they’ve already tipped their hand that these measures are about deterring black voters from turning out. If this bill becomes law, it will almost certainly face a lawsuit just like the one that struck down the North Carolina GOP's similarly discriminatory law.
● Kansas: A trial recently concluded in an ACLU lawsuit against infamous vote-suppressor Kris Kobach over his work as Kansas' Republican secretary of state, and the proceedings amounted to an unmitigated trainwreck for the man who led Trump's now-defunct bogus voter fraud commission. The ACLU’s suit is challenging a proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration passed by the Kansas GOP that led to the suspension of tens of thousands of registration applications and badly undermined the ability of civic groups to conduct voter registration drives. A federal court had suspended the law ahead of the 2016 elections while litigation was ongoing.
During the trial, Kobach presented supposed expert witnesses whose testimony collapsed under the slightest scrutiny from the plaintiffs' experts. Kobach in particular relied heavily on a discredited study from political science professor Jesse Richman that argued as many as 18,000 non-citizens were registered to vote in Kansas. But once he was on the stand, Richman conceded there was no evidence to support Trump and Kobach's claims that millions of illegal votes cost Trump the national popular vote.
In one telling exchange, Richman revealed the barely veiled discrimination at the heart of Kobach's crusade. When asked how he determined which voters might be non-citizens, Richman admitted he simply flagged voters with "foreign"-sounding names, which the plaintiffs demonstrated was done in a highly inconsistent manner even for people with the same last names. ACLU voting rights project director Dale Ho then asked Richman how he would classify the name “Carlos Murguia,” and when Richman said he would likely deem it foreign, Ho delivered the coup de grace and pointed out that Murguia was a federal judge in the very same Kansas City courthouse where the trial was taking place.
Richman's testimony wasn't the only excruciating embarrassment Kobach suffered. Hans von Spakovsky was another voter-suppression crusader who had served on Trump's election commission, and he had also pushed for voting restrictions while working in the George W. Bush administration's Justice Department Civil Rights Division. But Van Spakovsky conceded on the stand that he couldn’t name a single election where non-citizens had decided the outcome.
As the saying goes, a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client, and Kobach did his best to prove the adage right by leading his own defense. District court Judge Julie Robinson oversaw the case and was even a George W. Bush appointee, but she had to repeatedly reprimand Kobach and his team for failing to follow the most basic trial procedures. She excoriated Kobach for trying conduct a "trial by ambush" by attempting to introduce new evidence at the last minute, and for arguing with her directives.
Kobach's incompetent handling of the proceedings doesn't just undermine his defense of this law. The ACLU is also pushing for Robinson to hold him in contempt of court over his continued refusal to adequately inform suspended voters who hadn't provided proof-of-citizenship documents that they were once again eligible to vote following the 2016 court order suspending the law.
It may be weeks or months before the court reaches its decision, but this trial has already had broader consequences for Kobach and the GOP's use of bogus research to whip up fears of illegal voting as a pretext to pass new voting restrictions, since it has already demonstrated for all to see that the real fraud is their baseless claims of voter fraud.
● North Carolina: Democratic Gov. Cooper Roy Cooper has finally made appointments to the new state Board of Elections after more than a year of ongoing litigation against multiple GOP-backed efforts to remove the Democratic majority that Cooper would have been entitled to appoint under the preceding law, which we have previously covered in depth. Cooper had to choose four Democrats and four Republicans upon the advice of their respective party committees. Those eight members then agreed to submit the names of two unaffiliated members, from whom Cooper picked nonprofit director Damon Circosta to serve as the tiebreaking ninth member.
If this new board, which arose out of the GOP’s third attempt to upend the old system, survives legal scrutiny, it's unclear what the impact on this year's elections will be with Circosta breaking ties. Democrats had planned on rolling back restrictions on early voting and polling place availability that Republicans had imposed when they held the majority under former GOP Gov. Pat McCrory. The new state board will also appoint members of all 100 county elections boards, and a Republican-backed law that forces counties to revert to just one countywide early voting site if the county boards deadlock is still in effect.
Voter Registration
● Massachusetts: One of two committees needed to pass an automatic voter registration bill has advanced the measure in Massachusetts' Democratic-dominated state House. The bill would cover eligible voters who do business with the Registry of Motor Vehicles or MassHealth, meaning its impact won't just be limited to those who drive.
Democratic Secretary of State William Galvin also finally endorsed the measure. Galvin had long opposed the idea, but faces a primary challenge from Boston City Councilor Josh Zakim, who has advocated for automatic registration and similar policies to expand access to voting. With a majority of House members co-sponsoring the measure, its chance of passage appears strong.
Election Security
● Congress: On Friday, congressional Republicans and Donald Trump approved a major spending bill that includes includes $380 million to help states protect their voting systems from cyber attacks like those the Russian government attempted during the 2016 elections. This funding would give states grants to pay for new voting equipment, post-election audits and updated cybersecurity training.
Unfortunately, as election expert Michael McDonald points out, this money most likely won't come soon enough to safeguard the 2018 elections. Actually putting it to use will take some time to coordinate, since states will have to determine their needs, come up with solutions, and program software updates. Nevertheless, this is a welcome move from a Republican-run Congress that has done almost nothing to counter the well-documented threat of Russian hacking and has even actively enabled it.
Ballot Measures
● South Dakota: Activists in South Dakota had been trying to put an initiative on the November ballot to let counties choose to hold elections almost entirely by mail, but election officials determined that supporters failed to submit enough valid signatures. Reports last year had indicated organizers submitted around 20,000 signatures, but it turns out the actual number was just under 16,000. With only about 11,000 of those being valid, organizers fell short of the 13,871 needed to get on the ballot.
Elections
● Wisconsin: On Thursday, a state court judge ordered Republican Gov. Scott Walker to promptly call special elections for two legislative seats that he'd let lie vacant since December, which would've deprived those voters of representation for nearly a year. But those special elections still might not take place: Even though the judge in question, Dane County Circuit Judge Josann Reynolds, was a Walker appointee, Republicans in the legislature reacted to her decision with terrifying anti-democratic furor. State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos swiftly called a special session to advance legislation to overturn Reynolds’s ruling, which Walker indicated he would sign.
Fitzgerald did not stop there. He demanded that the chief justice of the state Supreme Court discipline Reynolds for “politicizing” her ruling and called Reynolds’s judicial district, which is anchored by the state capital of Madison, a “laughingstock.” In a final Orwellian twist, Fitzgerald declared, “Nobody’s trying to slow down or halt anything related to an election,” which is exactly what he’s trying to do.
That’s because Wisconsin Republicans are fearful of more special election losses, after an upset Democratic victory in January for a heavily Republican state Senate seat. Walker had refused to call special elections for these two vacant seats (one in the Senate and one in the Assembly) for no other reason. That reduced Walker to making patently ridiculous arguments in court, and Reynolds took him to task for blatantly ignoring the law.
But, it seems, if Republicans don't like the law, they’ll simply change it. Absurdly, Fitzgerald is arguing that Reynolds’s ruling would lead to “chaos,” even though officials had no trouble at all administering that January special election. Instead, Fitzgerald would prefer to leave these two districts without representatives—in the very same legislature he presides over—until November. And this is part of a broader GOP pattern. After last year’s special election for the U.S. Senate didn’t go their way, Alabama Republicans decided the best idea was to stop holding special elections altogether. Now Wisconsin Republicans want to do the same thing.
