“Selling Americans a ‘lie’: How election integrity attorneys battled left-wing efforts to upend voting laws”

The Voting Wars

Fox News presents a view of pre-election litigation as “rife with repeated legal battles to protect the voting processes from left-wing attorneys leveraging the courts to strip election safeguards.” 

I have to say, I’m still waiting for an explanation of the substantive rationale for a “safeguard” that disenfranchises a voter who’s otherwise eligible to vote but messed up a ballot envelope date that election officials don’t use for any administrative purpose.

Share this:

“‘Bunch of bull.’  NC voters furious to learn candidates want to disqualify them.”

The Voting Wars, voter registration

There’s a challenge to the eligibility of 60,000 voters in the NC Supreme Court race decided by just a few hundred votes.  Among the challenged voters: the incumbent justice’s parents. 

Any mass challenge to voter registration is going to involve some mistakes.  (That’s why real safeguards for mass list maintenance are so important at any point in the calendar, and why hurried and high-stakes post-election procedures are significantly more problematic than procedures before the 90-day NVRA cutoff, with time to address the errors.)

This Carolina Public Press piece interviews some of the people on the challenge list in the NC Supreme Court race, with a welcome reminder that there are real people behind the big numbers.

More real people here from the Asheville Watchdog and here from Popular Information.

Share this:

“How N.C. Republicans Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Loving Early Voting”

election administration, political parties

The subhead of this story in The Assembly: “GOP lawmakers predicted 25 years ago that Democrats would use early voting to steal elections in North Carolina.  This year, they rallied voters to embrace it to secure victory for Donald Trump.”

As voting populations shift partisan preferences, I suspect we’re in for more stories about partisan shifts of opinion on the merits of particular election procedures.  (And also: a gentle reminder that it’s possible to have views on election procedures that don’t depend on their partisan impact.)

Share this:

4th Circuit on felony disenfranchisement claims under Virginia Readmission Act

election law and constitutional law, felon voting

An interesting opinion from the 4th Circuit today, rejecting claims of state immunity in claims under the Virginia Readmission Act of 1870.  The plaintiffs’ suit asserts that the federal statute prevents the Commonwealth from disenfranchising citizens for convictions other than the specific crimes that were felonies at common law at the time. 

The decision didn’t address the merits, but this suit is one to watch.

Share this: