You can find the 83 pages of opinions at this link. … Continue reading
Category Archives: The Voting Wars
Dallas Morning News: Betsy Schonhoff, whom newly disclosed emails depict as the secretary of state’s office’s honcho of a nearly yearlong effort to match voter lists with databases at the Department of Public Safety, quit recently with no explanation, a spokesman … Continue reading
WaPo: Six months after a grand jury demanded millions of North Carolina voting records, state officials have announced they will release fewer than 800 voter files — a potentially significant setback for a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who has targeted noncitizen … Continue reading
Union Leader: The American Civil Liberties Union has sued the state on behalf of two college students who claim a new law that requires a New Hampshire driver’s license to vote violates their constitutional rights and represents a 21st-century “poll … Continue reading
Texas Tribune: Facing an uncertain path to confirmation after ordering a deeply flawed voter citizenship review that seemingly focused on naturalized citizens, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley is now apologizing to state lawmakers for the way his office bungled its roll … Continue reading
Tweet thread starts here: .@senatemajldr has doubled down on his falsehoods and inaccuracies about H.R. 1, the "For the People Act" (which he derisively calls the Democrat Politician Protection Act), this time in response to a @heraldleader Op-Ed. Senator, you … Continue reading
Ross Douhat NYT column. … Continue reading
From the opening brief: … Continue reading
AP: Texas’ election chief on Thursday defended giving prosecutors a list of 95,000 potential noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls before vetting the information, which turned out to wrongly include scores of people who were naturalized before casting legal ballots.Secretary … Continue reading
Amy Gardner reports for WaPo. … Continue reading
Laura Brill blogs. … Continue reading
KCUR: Former Republican Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach rewrote the rules for voting in Kansas. Laws he pushed for required voters to show citizenship papers to register and ID at the polls. He secured prosecutorial powers for his office. Kobach’s … Continue reading
Very clear Democrats will make voter suppression arguments a key theme of 2020. From Stacey Abrams response to the SOTU: Let’s be clear. Voter suppression is real. From making it harder to register and stay on the rolls to moving … Continue reading
Karen Tumulty WaPo column. … Continue reading
Michigan withdrew its support of amicus brief in Fish v. Schwab (formerly, Fish v. Kobach) supporting Kansas’s position that the risk of noncitizen voting justifies a documentary proof of citizenship requirement for voter registration. The withdrawal cites the change in … Continue reading
Motion here. See also this declaration of Bruce J. Elfant, the elections administrator of Travis County. Elfant says that Travis County is in the midst of a review of voter registration records on Friday and determined that approximately 29% of the people … Continue reading
AP: Two Pennsylvania state lawmakers are making a disputed claim in a long-running, and possibly futile, effort by elections officials to determine how many non-U.S. citizens had registered to vote over the years.On Tuesday, the lawmakers, Republican state Reps. Daryl … Continue reading
You can watch this great conversation here. Voting Rights and Wrongs: Hammer Museum, Jan. 31, 2019 … Continue reading
Dallas Morning News: A civil rights group has sued the state of Texas for advising counties to review the citizenship of tens of thousands of eligible voters in the state with flawed data, claiming it violates the voting rights of … Continue reading
Ari Berman reports for Mother Jones. … Continue reading
Michael Wines for the NYT. … Continue reading
Texas should have (and likely did) know better. Great reporting from Alexa Ura of the Texas Tribune. … Continue reading
NYT reports. … Continue reading
Josh Douglas for CNN Opinion: As a professor of election law and voting rights at the University of Kentucky College of Law — your state’s flagship institution and your alma mater — I invite you to come sit in on … Continue reading
AP reports. Stacey Abrams is taking her voting rights campaign to the airwaves in her home state during the Super Bowl. … Continue reading
You can find the complaint here. Here is an earlier Texas Tribune story, suggesting there may be more lawsuits coming. … Continue reading
NYT reports. It says something about the Republicans’ views of election administration reform and improvement that they put up von Spakovsky and Adams as witnesses rather than credible Republican voices who have been working hard for sensible election reform. These … Continue reading
Watch this: WATCH: @Sifill_LDF calls out misleading testimony and how "shading the reality of what it takes for lawyers and communities to challenge discriminatory voting practices…is the reason that we need #HR1." #ForThePeople #WomenLead pic.twitter.com/Vr4vLAsNjX— Legal Defense Fund (@NAACP_LDF) January … Continue reading
So begins this tweet thread from the indispensable Texas Tribune, based upon this article. 1/ You might be seeing headlines or tweets tonight that claim Texas says 58,000 non-citizens have voted in Texas. That is not true. That is not … Continue reading
Des Moines Register: An Iowa judge struck down part of a 2017 voter ID law dealing with absentee ballots — a decision opponents of the law say will make it easier for voters to get ballots and Secretary of State Paul Pate said … Continue reading
Charlotte Observer: North Carolina’s new bipartisan elections board won’t be named for a week, but it’s already sparked more partisan sniping in the midst of what could be the state’s biggest election scandal in years.The attacks began after former board … Continue reading
News & Observer: The state’s investigation into alleged election fraud by the Mark Harris campaign will continue, a judge ruled Tuesday morning. Harris is the Republican candidate who appeared to narrowly win an election for North Carolina’s 9th District seat … Continue reading
Phoenix New Times: A battle is underway for the future of voting rights in Arizona, featuring liberal lawmakers who want to expand voting opportunities fighting with conservatives who seek to add new restrictions. Democratic legislators unveiled a House resolution on … Continue reading
New WaPo oped. Here were my more positive thoughts about the bill. … Continue reading
Matt Weil in Roll Call: House Democrats have waited eight years to regain the speakership, and now that they hold the gavel, they will clearly seek to move on pent-up priorities. For their first act out of the gate, they … Continue reading
I’ve written this piece for Slate. It begins: The Democrats’ first order of business as they took control of the 116th Congress was introducing H.R. 1, the colossal “For the People Act.” This 571-page behemoth of a bill covering voting rights, campaign finance … Continue reading
Jonathan Salant for NJ.com: A federal appeals court has refused to bring back restrictions on Republican National Committee voter activities set in motion 36 years ago by a New Jersey gubernatorial race, a decision that an election law expert warned could usher in “a new wave … Continue reading
I have written this piece for Slate. It begins: In a short unpublished opinion so far garnering only slight media attention, the United States Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit decided on Monday what may be one of the most consequential cases poised … Continue reading
Josh Gerstein for Politico: A consent decree that limited Republican Party’s use of controversial poll-watching and ballot security efforts for more than three decades appears consigned to the scrap heap of history after a federal appeals court rebuffed a move … Continue reading
Really looking forward to this, which will later have an archived webcast: HAMMER FORUM Voting Rights and Wrongs THURSDAY JAN 31, 2019 7:30PM The 2018 midterm elections revealed egregious voter suppression tactics and mismanagement of polling places but also slate … Continue reading
Miles Rapoport & Cecily Hines for TAP. … Continue reading
TPM: The United States’ byzantine election system is governed by overlapping rules on the county, state, and federal levels. Elections in different states and even different cities are held on different days, with polling places in varying locations and voting hours that change from one … Continue reading
Listen. … Continue reading
AP: The fight over restricting early voting in Wisconsin returned to federal court Monday, three days after Gov. Scott Walker signed into law a new limit passed during a lame-duck legislative session. A coalition of liberal groups, with the support … Continue reading
Politico: Two liberal groups announced that they will take legal action in response to Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s decision to sign legislation limiting the powers of Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers. The One Wisconsin Institute, supported by the National Redistricting … Continue reading
Release: According to Election Protection’s report, voters in 2018 faced widespread attempts at voter suppression and disenfranchisement across the country – obstacles that made voting more difficult or impossible. Election Protection kept track of the top barriers to the vote … Continue reading
NYT reports. … Continue reading
Indiana Lawyer: Indianapolis attorney Robbin Stewart was raised to value the right to vote. In his home state of Delaware, Stewart watched his mother work as a citizen lobbyist to protect the environment, and he got his first taste of … Continue reading
Steve at Moritz: But the North Carolina story makes clear that it behooves states to do more to promote the security of absentee voting by mail. For starters, reform advocates must recognize that the convenience of absentee voting comes with … Continue reading
I have written this piece for Slate. It begins: It is easy for Democrats to feel some glee about revelations that a Republican operative may have committed absentee ballot fraud in connection with last month’s election for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District. Not only does this … Continue reading