You can listen to the oral argument here. With the caveat that one never knows how to read oral argument, and judges can change their minds before issuing an opinion, here are some thoughts: The judges seemed to believe that … Continue reading
Category Archives: NVRA (motor voter)
Wash. Times: Los Angeles County has agreed to conduct a purge of its voting rolls, in a move that could strip perhaps 1.5 million inactive voters from the lists of those eligible to cast ballots. The county made the deal … Continue reading
Release via email: Today, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and its partners filed a major lawsuit against Secretary of State Brian Kemp over the state of Georgia’s discriminatory and unlawful “exact match” voter suppression scheme. The suit alleges … Continue reading
Press release via email: The League of Women Voters of Arizona joined voting rights organizations in a lawsuit filed against Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan Monday, nine months after notifying her office of significant federal voting rights violations. The … Continue reading
Neil Makhija on Husted at the Regulatory Review. … Continue reading
AP: A federal judge invalidated part of North Carolina elections law that allows one voter to challenge another’s residency, a provision that activist groups used to scrub thousands of names from rolls ahead of the 2016 elections. U.S. District Judge … Continue reading
Celia Llopis-Jepsen reports for Kansas News Service. … Continue reading
Listen at Slate’s Amicus. … Continue reading
Patt Morrison talks to Dan Tokaji about the Husted voter purge case. … Continue reading
Eliza Newlin Carney for TAP. … Continue reading
Chiraag Bains oped for WaPo. … Continue reading
Imani Gandy for Rewire. … Continue reading
Dale Ho NYT oped: States should also be encouraged to adopt Election Day registration programs allowing eligible voters — including those who have been knocked off the rolls — to register at the polls. Fifteen states and the District of … Continue reading
Dan Smith and Michael Herron NYDN oped: More fundamentally, do we have a right not to vote? Should infrequent voters be removed from the rolls merely for not exercising their franchise? Is the right to vote only protected when it is used? … Continue reading
Justin Levitt for ACS on the Husted decision. … Continue reading
Dahlia Lithwick for Slate. … Continue reading
Smart Garrett Epps in the Atlantic. … Continue reading
You can find it here. And see my earlier Slate piece, “Sonia Sotomayor’s Dissent in the Big Voter Purge Case Points to How the Law Might Still Be Struck Down” … Continue reading
Daniel Nichanian for NBC Think. … Continue reading
Nina Totenberg reports for NPR. … Continue reading
Josh Douglas for CNN Opinion. … Continue reading
I have written this piece for Slate. It begins: The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a controversial Ohio voter purge law which allows the state to begin the process of removing voters from the rolls based upon their failure to vote in … Continue reading
You can find the 5-4 decision, breaking down along party/ideological lines, here. [Update: My thoughts on this case are over at Slate.] … Continue reading
From the court’s decision preliminarily enjoining Indiana’s purge system as violating the NVRA: Regarding the likelihood of success on the merits, the Court determines that Common Cause has a high likelihood of success on the merits of its claim that … Continue reading
Texas Tribune: Told it was breaking the law and asked to propose a fix, Texas seems to have mostly declined in a new filing the state’s legal adversaries have called “bad faith foot-dragging.” Following a ruling last month that Texas was violating … Continue reading
Press release. … Continue reading
Texas Tribune: Handing the state another voting rights loss, a federal judge has sided with a civil rights groups that claimed the state violated federal law by failing to register Texans to vote when they updated their drivers’ license information … Continue reading
The district court had dismissed Common Cause’s claim that Georgia’s voter purge law violated the NVRA and the First Amendment. Today, the Eleventh Circuit, in a brief, unpublished opinion, sent the case back and told the trial court to reconsider … Continue reading
Sam Levine for HuffPo. … Continue reading
Release: In a change of course, effective February 21, 2018, the Texas Workforce Commission (“TWC”) will begin the process of implementing voter registration services to those served by its Vocational Rehabilitation program. The change comes after the agency received a notice from … Continue reading
David Becker: So again, Justice Breyer’s question reflects what states have been going through with regard to list maintenance. Despite the false choice often presented by partisans, states don’t want a list maintenance procedure that’s overbroad, leading to false positives … Continue reading
Howard’s got it. … Continue reading
Nina Totenberg’s report on yesterday’s oral argument begins with this: JON HUSTED: We believe our state is one where we make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. We make every effort possible to try to reach out to … Continue reading
Today the voting wars reached the Supreme Court, which heard oral argument in Husted v. A Philip Randolph Institute, a case which concerns an Ohio law which makes it relatively easy to remove voters from the rolls. While there might … Continue reading
It is posted here. … Continue reading
Nina Totenberg curtain raiser on Husted. … Continue reading
Tierney Sneed for TPM: Now that President Trump has dissolved his shady voter fraud commission, a Supreme Court case being heard Wednesday represents fraud alarmists’ next best chance to boost their voter purge campaigns. The case, Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, is … Continue reading
Slate Amicus: Sometimes the technical stuff is how you get to the crucial stuff. Next week, the Supreme Court will hear a case about Ohio’s voter purge, and the case rests on some sticky statutory interpretation questions. Up to 1.2 … Continue reading
Karen Hobert Flynn WaPo oped: Nearly 63 million Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and nearly 66 million cast ballots for Hillary Clinton. But the votes for Trump and Clinton fell well short of the number cast for no … Continue reading
Greg Stohr for Bloomberg. … Continue reading
Steven Mazie for the Economist on the upcoming Husted case, and the Sam Bagenstos brief I flagged here. … Continue reading
Opinion (via Jessica Huseman): The scope of this Court’s summary judgment Order is narrower than the parties sought in their briefing. The Tenth Circuit provided the framework within which Plaintiffs’ Count 1 preemption claim under § 5 of the NVRA … Continue reading
AP: The case has taken on added importance because the parties have squared off over ballot access across the country. Democrats have accused Republicans of trying to suppress votes from minorities and poorer people who tend to vote for Democrats. … Continue reading
Slate: Theoretically, voters who received the first postcard and did nothing (as instructed) remained active and received no further correspondence. Stuart Naifeh, a voting rights attorney at Demos, told me that, under the federal National Voter Registration Act, states cannot begin … Continue reading
NYT: Conservative groups and Republican election officials in some states say the poorly maintained rolls invite fraud and meddling by hackers, sap public confidence in elections and make election workers’ jobs harder. Voting rights advocates and most Democratic election officials, … Continue reading
Release: Today, leading national civil rights organizations are urging state and county election officials in jurisdictions across the country to reject the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s (PILF) coordinated attempt to launch a wide-scale voter purge effort across the country. Using … Continue reading
Details. … Continue reading
Release: An investigation by voting rights groups revealed Arizona agencies are persistently violating the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which Congress enacted to increase opportunities to register to vote and simplify the registration process. The groups detailed their findings and … Continue reading
Release: Today, Campaign Legal Center (CLC), the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and private co-counsel filed a federal lawsuit challenging Arizona’s overly burdensome and confusing voter registration process that has disenfranchised 26,000 voters in Maricopa County alone. Maricopa is the … Continue reading
AP: A government watchdog group is suing Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson, accusing her office of allowing voters to be illegally purged from the state’s voting roles. Common Cause Indiana is asking a federal judge to put a stop … Continue reading