Welcome to the latest edition in our war on voting series. This is a joint project of Joan McCarter and Meteor Blades. |
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted has appealed a second ruling tossing out Ohio voting laws. Although he has a long record of pushing laws and procedures that have the effect of suppressing the vote, particularly the vote in areas where there are large communities of color, Husted said the ruling was generating “chaos and voter confusion,” according to Darrel Rowland at The Columbus Dispatch.
Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper had a different view of the matter. “[The Republicans’] handiwork continues to violate the Constitution, that's where the chaos and confusion comes from. They're just playing games at this point.”
Husted argued that the two cases heard by two different federal district judges came to conflicting conclusions. But both rulings called Ohio’s changes in the voting law unconstitutional and a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Election law expert Rick Hasen pointed out that changes made to meet the objections contained in each judge’s ruling would not have to be in conflict.
Judge Michael H. Watson, appointed by George W. Bush, made his 120-page ruling May 24. He stated that the GOP-run Ohio legislature in 2014 had violated the U.S. Constitution and Voting Rights Act by cutting the period of early voting from 35 to 28 days. Lawmakers also got rid of “Golden Week,” a period when citizens could register to vote and cast an absentee ballot simultaneously. These moves disproportionately affected blacks, according to Watson, who pointed out in his ruling that African Americans took advantage of Golden week three-and-a-half times as much as did white voters in 2008 and five times as much as in 2012.
Watson ruled on Thursday evening that Golden Week must be reinstated in spite of the appeal because Husted is not likely to succeed at the 6th Circuit Court.
In his 115-page ruling, Judge Algenon L. Marbley, appointed by Bill Clinton, found that rule changes regarding the casting and counting of absentee ballots are racially discriminatory. “Voter suppression tactics have not disappeared but are now merely cloaked in ostensibly race-neutral language,” he wrote.
At issue in the case were changes made in the voting law requiring that absentee ballots be tossed if they had technical errors in their name, address or date of birth. Another prohibited poll workers from helping a voter unless they could show they were illiterate or disabled. A third shortened the period during which voters could fix errors in their ballots. In knocking down these changes that Husted is appealing, Marbley noted that he found them to be part of a climate of “racial appeals” by state political leaders:
“From an email from a top Republican Party official denigrating the ‘urban—read African-American—voter turnout machine’ to racist appeals like the ‘Obama phone lady’ ad, Ohio has seen both overt and subtle racial appeals in campaigns over the last several years. Moreover, the targeting of minority communities for anti-voter fraud efforts, including with billboards, is an indication that voter suppression tactics have not disappeared but are now merely cloaked in ostensibly race-neutral language. Old dogs, it seems, can learn new tricks.”
• Matt Pearce at the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that throughout California, but especially in Los Angeles, the state’s largest county, voters ran into a host of problems, including broken voting machines, polls closed that should have been open and incomplete voter rolls leading to many long-time voters having to cast a provisional ballots. The problems were attributed by officials to old machines, new voters and complicated voting laws that not even all poll volunteers fully understand. A few critics have made claims that a fraud was committed that benefited Hillary Clinton but presented nothing more than speculation and suspicions as evidence.
Meanwhile, on Friday evening, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla posted notice that some 2.4 million ballots had not yet been counted. Most of these—1.6 million—were mail-in votes, many of which were not sent until the deadline on Tuesday. The largest number of unprocessed ballots were the 556,319 in Los Angeles County.
If you were one of the people given a provisional ballot, you can find out its status by going to this website.
It’s doubtful we’ll see any winner-switching in the major contests when the tally is completed, but some close down-ballot races may see such changes in the results. Counties must provide those results by July 8. The official tally must be announced by July 15.
• There were reports on Election Day that the California Attorney General’s offices visited Siskiyou County because of what Hmong residents in the area were claiming was voter intimidation by the local sheriff’s office. AG spokeswoman Rachel Huennekens said: “We are specifically monitoring reports of alleged voter intimidation among vulnerable minority populations, such as the Hmong community. Anyone who witnesses or is subject to voter intimidation should report it to the Secretary of State’s office.”
The matter to the AG’s attention after Lori Shellenberger, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s California Voting Rights Project, informed the office that she had been told by a representative of the Hmong community had complained about intimidation by deputies who set up a checkpoint outside a subdivision and stopped cars to ask Hmong residents whether they were registered to vote. Advocates for the community said law enforcement officers also went to the homes of some Hmong and told them they could not vote.
“The story is particularly disturbing because the people being targeted are refugees who came here to escape oppression. Many of them fought alongside the United States to promote democratic freedoms,” the ACLU said in its press release.
Janelle Vang, a spokeswoman for the Hmong community, said county and state officials showed up at homes carrying assault rifles “in hand.”
She added that they were threatened with arrest if they did vote. Not surprisingly, out of fear many of the residents did not vote, Vang said.
A representative of the community said the sheriff’s action may be related to problems with residency, with some of Hmong not having a physical address for property they own and using an assessor’s parcel number instead. County election officials won’t accept that, but either parcel number or location description can be used to prove residency, he said.
• Groups sue New York over online voter registration accessibility for people with disabilities: The American Civil Liberties Union and the Disability Rights Advocates sued on behalf of the National Federation of the Blind, the Center for the Independence of the Disabled, and individual plaintiffs who are blind. New York, the complaint states, is failing to comply with federal requirements for accessibility and confidentiality standards for services such as online voter registration.
“Online voter registration is key to ensuring access to the ballot for people with disabilities. Yet in New York, it's not just difficult for hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities to register online, it's virtually impossible,” said ACLU attorney Susan Mizner. “We’ve told the state where the worst barriers are. It can easily fix the problems, but has refused to do so. ”
Among the problems: DMV web pages and downloadable forms that can't be read aloud by the screen-reader software blind and low-vision people use to hear and navigate computer screen content. That software also cannot read the fillable form’s section on party affiliation on the Board of Elections website so blind and low-vision voters must disclose this private information by getting someone else to help them sign it, which destroys their privacy and independence.
• William & Mary Law School posts Election Law E-Benchbooks for state judges: The eBenchbooks are designed to remedy a problem pointed out by the Conference of Chief Justices. It noted that: “The number of election law disputes being brought before the state courts has increased dramatically in recent years, often requiring immediate resolution by judges who may be unfamiliar with the basics of election law.” Professor Rebecca Green, co-director of the Election Law Program at William & Mary Law School, said “the rate of election litigation has risen greatly in this country." Before 2000, she said, there was an annual average of 94 election cases. That annual number has doubled, with 2,849 decisions since then. The E-Benchbooks is meant to deal with that plethora and the fact that “each state’s election laws are a creature of state law, so we have 50 different sets of rules,” Green said, adding, “That means there can be no generalizing on election issues from other states’ experiences.