“Judge Slams Voter Suppression Law”: ‘Why Does The State Of North Carolina Not Want People To Vote?’
Voting rights advocates in North Carolina caught a lucky break on Thursday, where it was revealed that the panel of three judges who would consider that state’s comprehensive voter suppression law included one Clinton appointee, Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, and two Obama appointees, Judges James Wynn and Henry Floyd. Last month, a George W. Bush appointee to a federal trial bench in North Carolina allowed the law to go into effect during the 2014 election, the panel of three judges from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit are now considering whether to affirm or reverse that decision. They heard oral arguments in the case on Thursday.
Several provisions are at issue in this case that all make it more difficult for residents of North Carolina to cast a vote. One provision cuts a week of early voting days. Another restricts voter registration drives. A third implements a strict voter ID law, although that provision does not take effect until 2016, so it would be reasonable for the court to decide not to suspend it during the 2014 election.
One provision that received a great deal of attention from the judges during Thursday’s oral arguments in this case is a change to the state law that causes ballots to be tossed out if a voter shows up in the wrong precinct. For the last decade, voters who showed up at the wrong precinct would still have their votes counted in races that were not specific to that precinct, so long as they voted in the correct county. The new law prohibits these ballots from being counted at all. According to the Associated Press, that means thousands of ballots will be thrown out each election year.
Judge Wynn, the only member of the panel who lives in North Carolina, appeared baffled by this provision. Explaining that he lives very close to a precinct that is not his assigned polling place, he asked the state to justify why his vote should be thrown out if he did not travel to a precinct that is further away from his home. At one point, his questions grew quite pointed — “Why does the state of North Carolina not want people to vote?” Wynn asked. At another point, he described a hypothetical grandmother who has always voted at the same place. Why not “let her just vote in that precinct?” he wondered?
An attorney defending the North Carolina law spent a great deal of his time at the podium arguing that it would be too disruptive for a court to suspend parts of North Carolina’s election law this close to the November elections. As a legal matter, this is a strong argument. In a 2006 case called Purcell v. Gonzalez, the justices reinstated a voter ID law that had been halted by a lower court. They explained that “[c]ourt orders affecting elections, especially conflicting orders, can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls. As an election draws closer, that risk will increase.”
Yet the judges seemed skeptical of this argument as well, questioning what evidence the state could show that voters would actually be confused. When an attorney argued that restoring lost voting rights could be logistically challenging for the state, Judge Floyd asked whether “an administrative burden [can] trump a constitutional right?”
The argument that judges should heed Purcell‘s warning and be cautious about changing voting law close to an election also did not convince a much more conservative panel considering another voter suppression law in Wisconsin. Earlier this month, a panel of three Republican judges reinstated a voter ID in a single page order issued the same day that they heard oral arguments in the case. At the time, election law expert Rick Hasen criticized this order as a “very bad idea,” in part because of the reasons stated in Purcell. There are already early signs that Hasen was correct.
The Wisconsin case is already making its way to the Supreme Court, and the North Carolina case is likely to wind up there as well, especially if the Fourth Circuit rules against the state’s law. Should both cases come before the justices, that means that they will be confronted with one case where a court changed a state’s election law in a way that Democrats generally approve of, and another case where a court changed the state’s election law in a way that Republicans generally approve of. Both of these changes, moreover, would be made close to an election.
If the conservative Roberts Court really meant what it said in Purcell, then it is likely to allow the North Carolina law to go into effect while suspending the Wisconsin law. Should it allow both laws to take effect, however, that would raise serious concerns about whether the justices are willing to apply the same rule to every case, regardless of whether the rule benefits Democrats or Republicans.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, September 29, 2014
“No Idea Of Whats At Risk”: What People Don’t Know Can Hurt Them
For those who remain engaged in public affairs, the basics on contemporary politics are usually too obvious to even mention. We know who President Obama is and what party he belongs to; we know who Speaker of the House John Boehner is and his party affiliation; etc.
But like it or not, we’re in the minority. Most Americans don’t keep up with current events enough to know which party, for example, is in the majority in the House and the Senate.
It’s easy to lament the scope of our uninformed electorate, but in the short term, it’s also worth appreciating the practical consequence. As Greg Sargent noted yesterday, there’s new focus-group research that shows many Democratic voters are likely to skip the 2014 midterms in large part because they have no idea what’s at risk.
What if a key part of the problem is that many of these voters simply don’t know that Democratic control of the Senate is at stake in this fall’s elections?
That’s one of the conclusions veteran Dem pollster Celinda Lake reached after conducting new focus groups and polling for the liberal group MoveOn. Lake conducted two focus groups of people from Detroit and its suburbs. One was made up of single white women under 55 and married white women under 35 (millenials). The second was all African American women. These are the same voters who are expected to drop off in many red state Senate contests, too.
Lake added that the drop-off voters “had no idea that control of the Senate was even up for grabs and were even very confused about who controlled it. These voters are very representative of drop-off voters in a lot of states.”
Told that their state’s election may very well dictate control of the Senate in 2015 and 2016, these voters’ motivation went up. Reminded of specific issues at stake in the event of a Republican takeover, and their interest, not surprisingly, grew further.
The point isn’t lost on Democratic officials, who’ve seen the recent polls showing Dems faring well among registered voters, but losing among likely voters. Greg noted the DSCC’s Bannock Street Project which is “investing $60 million in organizing that is premised on contacting voters again, and again, and again,” as well as “unprecedented levels of organizing to states that aren’t contested in presidential years, such as Arkansas.”
Ed Kilgore added that it’s not a simple message, “at least for low-information voters who cannot be expected to be focused on issues of Senate control and where it’s determined, much less immediately grasp what a GOP Senate could mean next year and down the road. So it requires multiple mutually reinforcing and highly targeted messages, and a lot of repetition. And that means money and scale.”
Election Day is 53 days away. Early voting in much of the country starts even sooner.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 12, 2014
“Just The Tip Of The Iceberg”: Hundreds Of Voters Are Disenfranchised By North Carolina’s New Voting Restrictions
Craig Thomas of Granville County, North Carolina, registered to vote before he deployed to Afghanistan with the US Army. After serving abroad for eighteen months, he went to vote early in the state’s primary on April 30. He returned from Afghanistan to the same house, in the same precinct, but was told at the polls that there was “no record of registration” for him.
In the past, Thomas could’ve re-registered during the early voting period and cast a regular ballot under the state’s same-day registration system. But same-day registration was one of the key electoral reforms eliminated by the North Carolina legislature last year when it passed the nation’s most onerous package of voting restrictions. In 2014, Thomas had to cast a provisional ballot, which was not counted. After fighting abroad, he was disenfranchised at home.
Thomas was one of 454 North Carolina voters who would have had their ballots counted in 2012 but did not have them counted in the 2014 primary because of North Carolina’s elimination of same-day registration and prohibition on counting a provisional ballot cast in the wrong precinct, according to a new review by Democracy NC. (North Carolina also cut early voting by a week and mandated a strict voter ID law for 2016, among other things.)
From the report:
Voters denied a chance to have their voices heard include a veteran returning from Afghanistan whose registration was incorrectly terminated while he was away; a first-time voter who registered at the DMV, but that registration didn’t reach the local board of elections; a precinct judge assigned to a precinct other than her own who couldn’t leave to vote in her home precinct; a disabled senior who was driven to a friend’s polling place on Election Day; a nurse who temporarily registered her car in a nearby county while working at its hospital for nine months; a college student who registered during a voter drive but her application was not recorded; and a new couple in town who mailed in their registration but it did not reach the county board of elections before the registration deadline.
These new restrictions disproportionately impacted black and Democratic voters. “While Black voters make up 22% of all registered voters, they were 39% of those who lost their votes because of the two rule changes,” according to Democracy NC. “Democrats are 42% of the state’s registered voters, but 57% of those disenfranchised by the new rules.”
The problems in the primary are a disturbing preview of what’s to come. “These 454 voters are obviously just the tip of the iceberg of the thousands who faced the same problems when they went to vote in the primary and who simply left the polling place without taking the time to fill out the paperwork and file a provisional ballot,” Democracy NC notes.
Voter turnout will be much higher in the general election than in the primary, so many more voters will be burdened by the new rules. North Carolina has one of the closest Senate races in the country between Democrat Kay Hagan and Republican Thom Tillis, which could very well decide control of the Senate.
Last month, US District Court Judge Thomas Schroeder declined to grant a preliminary injunction against the state’s new voting restrictions because he said that the plaintiffs “have not demonstrated they are likely to suffer irreparable harm.”
Craig Thomas and the hundreds of voters whose ballots were not counted would likely disagree with Schroeder’s definition of irreparable harm.
An expedited appeal to block the new restrictions before the midterms will be heard by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Charlotte on September 25.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, September 10, 2014
“An Important Voting Rights Victory”: Ohio Early Voting Cuts Violate The Voting Rights Act
Ohio keeps trying to cut early voting and the federal courts keep striking the cuts down.
Last year, Ohio’s Republican-controlled legislature cut a week of early voting and eliminated the “Golden Week” when voters can register and vote on the same day during the early voting period. GOP Secretary of State Jon Husted also issued a directive prohibiting early voting on the two days before the election, and on weekends and nights in the preceding weeks—the times when it’s most convenient to vote.
Today a federal court in Ohio issued a preliminary injunction against the early voting cuts, which it said violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, ordering Ohio to restore early voting opportunities before the midterms. “African Americans in Ohio are more likely than other groups to utilize [early] voting in general and to rely on evening and Sunday voting hours,” wrote District Court Judge Peter Economus, a Clinton appointee. As a consequence, the early voting cuts “result in fewer voting opportunities for African Americans.”
The lawsuit was brought by the ACLU and the Ohio NAACP. In 2012, 157,000 Ohioans cast ballots during early voting hours eliminated by the Ohio GOP. Overall, 600,000 Ohioans, 10 percent of the electorate, voted early in 2012.
Blacks in Ohio were far more likely than whites to vote early in 2008 and 2012. “In the November 2008 election in [Cleveland’s] Cuyahoga County, African-Americans voted early in person at a rate over twenty times greater than white voters,” according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. In cities like Cincinnati, Columbus and Dayton blacks voted early in numbers far exceeding their percentage of the population.
There’s an important backstory here. Early voting became a critical reform in Ohio after the disastrous 2004 election. Once Democrats and minority groups began using it in large numbers, Republicans repeatedly tried to curb early voting. As I’ve previously reported:
In 2004, Ohio had the longest lines in the country on Election Day, with some voters—particularly in large urban areas—waiting as long as seven hours to vote. A DNC survey estimated that 174,000 Ohioans—3 percent of the state’s electorate—left without voting. George W. Bush won the state by just 118,000 votes.
In response to the long lines, Ohio adopted thirty-five days of early voting in 2008, including on nights and weekends. But following the large Democratic turnout in 2008, Ohio Republicans drastically curtailed early voting in 2012 from thirty-five to eleven days, with no voting on the Sunday before the election, when African-American churches historically rally their congregants to go to the polls. Voting rights activists subsequently gathered enough signatures to block the new voting restrictions and force a referendum on Election Day. In reaction, Ohio Republicans repealed their own bill in the state legislature, but kept a ban on early voting three days before Election Day (when 98,000 Ohioans voted in 2008), adding an exception for active duty members of the military, who tend to lean Republican.
These cuts disproportionately impacted black voters, who made up a majority of early voters in large urban areas like Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County and Dayton’s Montgomery County in 2008. Ohio Republicans brazenly tried to cut early voting hours in Democratic counties while expanding them in Republican ones. GOP leaders admitted the cuts in Democratic counties were motivated by racial politics. “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African-American—voter-turnout machine,” said Doug Preisse, the GOP chair in Columbus’s Franklin County.
These voter suppression efforts backfired in 2012. The Obama campaign successfully sued to reinstate early voting on the three days before Election Day (although Secretary of State Jon Husted limited the hours) and the overall share of the black electorate increased from 11 percent in 2008 to 15 percent in 2012.
Despite the public and legal backlash, Ohio Republicans pressed ahead with early voting cuts in 2013. Now they’ve lost in court, again. (Some Ohio Republicans are also trying to pass a new voter ID law. Nine hundred thousand Ohioans, including one in four African-Americans, don’t have a government-issued ID).
Judge Economus’s ruling could have broad significance. Ohio is once again a critical swing state in 2014, with competitive races for governor and secretary of state.
More broadly, the courts are split over how to interpret the remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act in the wake of the Supreme Court’s gutting a key part of the law last June. This is the first time a court has struck down limits on early voting under Section 2 of the VRA. A Bush-appointed judge recently denied a preliminary injunction to block North Carolina’s cuts to early voting and the elimination of same-day registration, a lawsuit similar to the one in Ohio. A Wisconsin judged blocked the state’s voter ID law under Section 2, while a similar trial is currently underway in Texas.
As Rick Hasen points out, we still don’t know if the courts will consistently stop new vote denial efforts like voter ID and cuts to early voting. And the Roberts Court could very well overturn any good precedents in the lower courts.
The Ohio ruling is an important voting rights victory. But it won’t be the last word.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, September 4, 2014
“Three Feet Away”: Scott Walker’s Intimidation And Voter Harassment Program
There’s been a fair amount of attention lately on Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) newly imposed voting restrictions in Wisconsin, and for good reason. The governor’s latest measures appear to have only one purpose: making it more difficult for his constituents to participate in their democracy.
But last week’s new restrictions weren’t the end of Walker’s efforts. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:
Election observers could stand a few feet from voters and poll workers, under one of a series of election bills Gov. Scott Walker signed in private Wednesday.
The law would allow observers to stand 3 to 8 feet from the table where voters announce their names and addresses and are issued voter numbers, or from the table where people register to vote.
Consider a hypothetical scenario. A college student in Madison stops by a table to register to vote, and as she goes through the process, an elections “observer” stands 36 inches away, just to ensure the rules are being followed to his satisfaction. Months later, when she goes to her local voting precinct, another “observer” – again standing just 36 inches away – will oversee the process as she picks up her ballot.
This scenario will now be legal in Wisconsin.
Why in the world would GOP policymakers in Wisconsin consider this a good idea? According to the article, “Walker’s office said that the law will safeguard the fairness of elections by ensuring observers can see how they are being conducted.”
Just think, Wisconsin not only held generations of fair elections without “observers” hovering around voters, but has enjoyed one of the highest voter-participation rates in the country. Little did state residents know how flawed their system was.
Democratic opponents of the proposal warned of intimidation, voter harassment, and according to one state senator, observers “breathing down the necks of poll workers.”
They did not, however, have the votes to stop the measure.
All of this is the latest in a series of election-related policies approved by Wisconsin Republicans. In 2011, for example, they curtailed early voting statewide.
Last week, Walker went further, curtailing early voting even further, eliminating weekend voting and ending evening voting after 7 p.m.
There was no reason to impose these new voter-suppression policies and the rationales proponents came up with were easily discredited.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 3, 2014
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