Leading Off
● North Carolina: Last month, Republican legislators passed new state legislative districts after their previous maps were struck down in state court for illegal gerrymandering, but their new districts are still highly problematic. To highlight these issues, Daily Kos Elections' Stephen Wolf submitted an amicus brief to the court that objects to the GOP's new maps and proposes nonpartisan alternatives.
Campaign Action
These alternate districts better fulfill the court's nonpartisan criteria of improving compactness, reducing the number of divided voting precincts, reducing the number of divided municipalities, and other requirements of state and federal law. Wolf's analysis indicates these districts would lead to fairer elections than the GOP's remedial maps if adopted.
Additionally, Daily Kos Elections has unveiled a huge trove of political and demographic data for the state of North Carolina, along with an explanation of how you can use it to create precinct-level maps or calculate the results for hypothetical districts you've drawn in the free Dave's Redistricting App. The data set includes statewide election results from 2004 through 2018 broken down by 2010 census voting district; 2010 racial demographics; and 2016 primary turnout by race and party. This data can be used to evaluate the fairness of whatever maps are ultimately adopted, or any hypothetical alternatives.
In a related case, Republicans filed to remove the new lawsuit over their gerrymandered congressional map from state court to federal court, prompting the plaintiffs to file an emergency motion to return the lawsuit in state court. Republicans unsuccessfully tried this same gambit in the earlier lawsuit over their legislative gerrymanders, but it failed because the plaintiffs were only making claims based on the state constitution, which strictly limits the ability of federal courts to get involved.
The GOP, however, says that federal law is implicated because, it argues, redrawing the congressional map could violate the Voting Rights Act. However, the Supreme Court itself rejected similar arguments when it struck down Republicans' original map for racial gerrymandering, finding that the conditions needed to invoke the protection of the VRA didn't apply. Furthermore, the GOP made no attempt to comply with the VRA when Republicans drew the current map in 2016, claiming that they didn't use racial data at all in constructing their districts.
While this attempted removal to federal court is likely to fail on legal grounds, Republicans are likely seeking to delay any adjudication of the case so that new districts can't be put in place in time for the 2020 elections. The state court had set a hearing on Oct. 24 on whether to grant a preliminary injunction that would block the map for 2020 while the case proceeds on the merits. The plaintiffs are asking the federal court to quickly send the matter back to the state level so as not to disrupt the state court's timeline.
Felony Disenfranchisement
● Florida: In a major victory for voting rights, a federal district court has issued a preliminary injunction blocking most of Florida Republicans' modern-day poll tax that they passed earlier this year. That measure sought to deny voting rights to citizens with felony convictions after voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2018 to end lifetime disenfranchisement. Even for citizens who had served out all prison, parole, or probation sentences, the GOP's poll tax denied them the right to vote if they still owed any court-related fines or fees, costs that are often used in a predatory fashion to fund the court system itself.
The court didn't block the entire law, and the case is still proceeding, but the judge hearing the case did order election officials not to take any action to prevent those affected from registering to vote "based only on failure to pay a financial obligation that the plaintiff asserts the plaintiff is genuinely unable to pay." Previous research estimated that the GOP's poll tax could disenfranchise up to 1.1 million of the up to 1.4 million citizens who were supposed to regain their voting rights after 2018. This ruling could thus restore the rights of many such citizens if it remains in effect.
Electoral Reform
● California: In a setback for election reformers, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill that Democrats had passed with a few Republicans in support to let all cities and counties choose whether to adopt instant-runoff voting. Currently, this option is only available for the minority of California cities such as San Francisco that have their own charters. The Democratic-run legislature passed the bill with veto-proof majorities, but California Democrats have typically deferred to the governor and chosen not to override vetoes in recent years.
Election Security
● Indiana: On Thursday, voters in Indiana filed a federal lawsuit to block the state from using voting machines that lack a paper trail that voters can verify. Plaintiffs are instead asking that the state implement voting machines with a voter-verifiable paper trail in every remaining county that still uses the unverifiable voting machines. Indiana's Republican-dominated legislature passed a bipartisan law earlier this year to phase out those remaining voting machines, but not until 2030, which the plaintiffs called an unacceptably long timeframe.
Electoral College
● Colorado: Democratic officials in Colorado are petitioning the Supreme Court to hear their appeal of a recent 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that struck down Colorado's faithless elector law. That decision invalidated Colorado's ban on Electoral College members who vote for a candidate other than the one who nominated them. Faithless 2016 electors from Washington also recently petitioned the Supreme Court to hear their appeal after the state Supreme Court upheld a similar law.
Voter Suppression
● Kentucky: A state judge has granted an injunction that the Kentucky Democratic Party recently requested to prevent the state Board of Elections from placing 175,000 voters on the "inactive" list. The decision requires the board to instead place those voters back on the "master" list of registrations.
Although the board maintained that inactive voters could still cast a ballot in this November's state elections, Democrats successfully argued there could have been a chilling effect that might have deterred would-be voters. To avoid this, the ruling will require election officials to put an asterisk by the names of these voters in the master list, and poll workers will confirm their addresses.
● New York: On Tuesday, a federal court held a trial to determine whether the New York state Board of Elections is illegally removing voters from the registration rolls. The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law and the good-government organization Common Cause New York had sued the state over its process for removing voters it suspects of having moved away or died.
The civil rights groups argue the state has wrongly included active voters who have participated in recent elections, leading them to discover only on Election Day that they weren't on the rolls and to find out that their provisional ballots weren't counted afterward. This trial comes after the New York City Board of Elections admitted in a 2017 court settlement that it wrongly removed more than 100,000 voters from the rolls ahead of the 2016 presidential primary. Both the city and state boards have had a long history of problems with ensuring voters have access to the ballot box.
● Ohio: Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose recently purged roughly 200,000 "inactive" voters whose registrations were allegedly outdated, but that number would have been much higher had voting rights advocates not determined ahead of time that the state's list included 41,000 active voters who had cast ballots in recent elections. In one revealing incident, the director of Ohio's League of Women Voters, a good government and voting rights organization, was included on the list despite having voted in recent years. Those 41,000 registrants disproportionately hailed from Democratic-leaning counties.
The Ohio GOP successfully convinced the Supreme Court's conservatives last year to allow it and Republicans in other states to purge eligible voters who hadn't voted in six years using the pretext that they failed to respond to a single mailing. This latest development indicates these voter purges are going much further and risk ensnaring active voters thanks to the state's faulty management of its own database. While activists were able to catch these 41,000 errors after LaRose made his list public before conducting the purge, Republicans in most other states have not been as forthcoming before removing voters.
