What could be better under the tree than a copy of the New York Times bestseller Injustice? Unlike some books about elections published by those fuddy duddy academic publishers, you can get Injustice on Audiobook CD, and Audible Download.  Naturally it is available on Kindle or the good old hardcover.  Amazon is discounting them all. 

I will be signing hardcovers of Injustice as a guest of the GOP in Palm Beach County Florida this coming Thursday night.  You can get a signed copy of the book, a great dinner, a speech and a soaring rendition of the Star Spangled Banner by Lou Galterio.  Info here. 

More at PJ Tatler about von Spakovsky’s NRO piece, Merced’s quibbles and a bailout blitz that may become a bailout boomerang.

The lawyers at Merced just don’t know all the negative things being said about their bailout application – both inside and outside the Justice Department. These comments were documented in the internal DOJ memos obtained by PJ Media – documents that Merced does not possess. Merced’s other complaints have no merit either. For example:

“All of those submissions, except for the two mentioned above, concerned independent subjurisdictions within the borders of the County over which the County has no control.”

So what? Tell that to Shelby County that had no control over Calera, a town that made unprecleared changes thus rendering Shelby’s bailout impossible according to the District Court.

Then Merced claims that the non-compliance across the county was trivial and promptly corrected, thus justifying bailout. The documents obtained by PJ Media, however, demonstrate that minority contacts disagreed with bailout and so did law professor Joaquin Avila, the lawyer who brought the lawsuit against these “trivial” violations of Section 5.  . . .

Some of the sound and fury over Merced is small compared to the bombshell von Spakovsky dropped today aboout New Hampshire. I can’t wait until Justice Roberts and Kennedy learn that multiple New Hampshire election officials never even heard of Section 5, a law in effect for 44 years! That’s right, Section 5 is so “congruent and proportional” that towns subject to it didn’t even know about it, and never complied with it – a situation approved by DOJ officials in Washington for decades.

Yesterday I reported on the problems with the Merced California bailout and how the flurry of bailouts (some granted improperly) is being used to help save Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.  Today, Hans von Spakovsky delivers over at National Review “Crooked Justice.”  Some highlights:

“But there’s one big problem for New Hampshire: For almost all of the 44 years that it has been covered under Section 5, New Hampshire has failed to comply with the law. The two townships and eight towns failed to submit for preclearance many voting changes they have made over that period. In fact, a November 18 internal DOJ memorandum sent by Chris Herren, chief of the voting section, to Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights, confirms that “town officials uniformly indicated that they were not aware of their obligations under Section 5.” Clearly, then, they don’t meet the ten-year “clean record” criterion needed to qualify for bailout.”

[Ponder this.  National Review says that the jurisdictions DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THEY WERE COVERED BY THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT.  That’s what I’ve called the Granite State Free Ride.  Why does the Granite State Free Ride matter?  It matters because it speaks to whether the Section 4 triggers are congruent and proportional, if they make sense.  If a jurisdiction covered by the triggers didn’t even know they were covered for the last 44 year and the DOJ gave them a free ride, it speaks directly to whether the triggers make any sense.  More from Hans:]

An internal Civil Rights Division report compiled on September 10, 2012, listed 90 unsubmitted voting changes made by New Hampshire jurisdictions subject to Section 5. This was, apparently, too many for the Civil Rights Division to be able to gloss over. So the department generated a “revised” list on September 27 that identified “only” 20 uncleared changes. Whether they’re 90 or 20, however, they render New Hampshire ineligible for bailout. . . .

“Contrast this DOJ fast-tracking of New Hampshire’s patently unqualified bailout request with its conduct in the Shelby County case. In Shelby, the district court noted that DOJ had objected in 2008 to an annexation of the city of Calera, a “governmental unit” within Shelby County, and that Shelby County held several special elections under one county ordinance that had not been submitted to DOJ for preclearance. That’s right — there was only one prior objection and only one voting change (not 20 or 90) that had not been submitted. Yet DOJ asked the court for six months of discovery to investigate Shelby County’s eligibility for bailout. The court denied the request and permitted no discovery into the eligibility question.”

[The Yankees get a smooth ride while the Southerners get the third degree.]

“Most minority contacts in New Hampshire opposed bailout because of perceived racial discrimination. Combined with the fact that the voter-registration rate in more than half of the covered jurisdictions is lower than the state average, such findings of noncompliance would have been the death knell for a bailout application when I worked in the Civil Rights Division. . . . “

So why the big hurry with New Hampshire and the refusal of the Justice Department to comply with the bailout requirements of Section 5? Sources tell me it’s because Justice wants to be able to get up before the Supreme Court in the Shelby County case and show that an entire state was able to bail out of Section 5. They want to argue that there is a viable way out for covered jurisdictions, including states, and that therefore the Supreme Court should not decide the constitutional issue. Justice officials are afraid that otherwise the Court will overturn Section 5. According to former Voting Section lawyer Christian Adams, DOJ has worked a similar deception in another bailout case involving Merced County, California.”

[It will be interesting to see what happened in other internal DOJ memos involving bailout.  But even more interesting will be whether DOJ abandons this bailout life raft because the costs of this information getting before the Supreme Court may be greater than the benefit of the flurry of bailouts.  It may be best to abandon the bailout blizzard argument and start arguing the Congressional records supports the triggers. Otherwise, the Justice Department may look like a shady dealer to Justice Roberts and Kennedy.]

The lawyers for Merced sent a 900 word “comment” to PJ Media which I suggested they edit down to actual comment length and resend.  Naturally they were unwilling to do so and the democrat activist posing as a law professor Rick Hasen was more than happy to oblige them by posting their entire 900 word “comment” as a “guest post.”

At least the “guest post” was labeled correctly this time, but that’s where the accuracy ends.  The lawyers for Merced did not have access to the internal DOJ documents describing the weaknesses of their bailout application.  I do.  So they can be forgiven for not fully appreciating how weak their bailout application was and the things that Joaquin Avila and the other community contacts said about the weakness of their bailout application.  They are advocates for bailout and will naturally make the best case they can regardless of the weakness of their position – a weakness readily apparent from on the face of the internal DOJ documents regarding the Merced bailout. 

I’ll have more on this at PJ Tatler shortly.

The Democrat activist posing as a law professor Rick Hasen has a habit of overstating facts. (Particularly involving John Fund or Hans von Spakovsky, when he isn’t busy demanding Hans act as his research assistant.)   He did it again today.  He called me an “opponent of Section 5.”  I’m not.  I’m probably an opponent of Section 4 triggers as constituted but (to my knowledge) have never said that Section 5 should never exist.  In fact, I spoke last week at Roger Williams Law School suggesting that a better trigger would be a capture trigger that captures states or government adjudicated to have violated another portion of the Voting Rights Act.  I listed Euclid(OH) and Oscela (FL) as but two examples of places found to have violated the law that would be ripe for coverage under Section 5.  I also noted this would never happen because certain congressional delegations – ok with screwing the South – would not vote for the change.

My latest at PJ Media about the DOJ failing to inform the court of unprecleared changes in bailout cases.

Linda Kerns has this op-ed.

David Martosko has more at the Daily Caller about who pays for Brentin Mock’s Corn Flakes:

“While True the Vote and other right-leaning campaigns were promoting ID requirements for voters and monitoring the implementation of ID laws at the state level, the Applied Research Center (ARC) was pushing back with claims that photo ID requirements at polling places were thinly veiled expressions of racism.

The Las Vegas Review Journal opines: Secretary of State Ross Miller, Nevada’s top elections officer, has accomplished the rarest of political feats: finding previously unknown middle ground on a hyperpartisan issue.