Author Archives: J Christian Adams

Top Election Integrity Panel at Heritage Thursday

The Heritage Foundation is hosting an event in conjunction with True the Vote on Thursday July 26 bringing together some of the nation’s top advocates for election integrity.  Speakers:


Catherine Engelbrecht
Founder, True the Vote


The Honorable Artur Davis
Former Congressman, 7th District of Alabama


The Honorable Alan Wilson
Attorney General, State of South Carolina


The Honorable Scott Gessler
Secretary of State, State of Colorado


The Honorable Kris Kobach
Secretary of State, State of Kansas

Registration is here.

DOJ and PA Voter ID

 CNN on DOJ demanding information from Pennsylvania in a 1974 letter.  It goes without saying that the demand letter goes well beyond what DOJ is entitled to have under the law.  The engineer of the letter is Daniel Freeman.   It is hard to imagine what a J-Memo would look like if Pennsylvania simply did not provide anything to DOJ, particularly the requests not covered by 1974.

Norm Ornstein Calls for “New Voting Rights Act” in Error-Filled Article

Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute calls for a “new” Voting Rights Act in a Roll Call column infested with errors.  A sample:

Ornstein flat-out lies when he writes: “Florida’s first efforts here resulted in widespread embarrassment, with longtime voters — and native-born citizens — notified they were being barred from the rolls.”

Poppycock.  Florida did no such thing.  Florida took no such action.  No letter from Florida to a potential non-citizen said the voter was being “barred from the rolls.”  Norm Ornstein is not being truthful, period.

Then Ornstein gets his facts wrong about Texas. “The Texas law has been challenged by the Justice Department as discriminatory, and a federal court heard the case earlier this month.” 

Wrong again.  The DOJ did not challenge the law in federal court.  DOJ played defense.  Texas brought the challenge in federal court as a plaintiff to get the law approved.  Ornstein’s error ascribes an offensive attack by DOJ that never occurred.

Then this AEI “scholar” gazes clumsily into his crystal ball:

“Do not be surprised if the court, on a 5-4 vote, demolishes preclearance once and for all, in the heat of the presidential campaign.”

Actually, be surprised, be very surprised if that happens.  The Supreme Court hasn’t even granted cert yet in any Section 5 challenge.  That would be quite an accelerated schedule, to grant cert, brief the case, conduct oral arguments and decide the case all in the next 100 days. 


Finally, without a lick of evidence, Ornstein says Voter ID laws represent “a wave of new laws in states designed to curb and suppress voting.”  Really?  I’ve participated in multiple discussions involving Voter ID legislation in multiple states and the design of the laws is simply to ensure that the person voting is who they say they are.  There is never any discussion on this nonsensical conspiracy theory unbecoming of someone working at the American Enterprise Institute. 

What does Ornstein suggest as a cure?  Of course a big federal power grab – creating a national ballot and changing election day to the weekend.

Naturally, none of these errors in this Roll Call piece will prevent it from being called thoughtful and interesting in some circles.  Roll Call’s editor John Bicknell was negligent in publishing this slop.  It also demonstrates the deception endemic to opposition to voter ID laws.

Two challenges to “outdated” preclearance sections of Voting Rights Act


 


Will SCOTUS hear Kinston, NC and Shelby County, AL cases, or will Constitutional issues “continue to fester”?

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court received two petitions to hear cases challenging the Constitutionality of certain sections of the Voting Rights Act and is expected to add at least one to its docket for next term. 


 


The Shelby County case challenges Section 5 as it existed before the 2006 reauthorization, as well as Section 4(b), which lays out the formula for coverage under Section 5.   The Kinston case challenges Section 5 as it now reads.  Both petitioners note that Congress has taken no action in the three years since Northwest Austin v. Holder in response to the Constitutional concerns expressed by the Court in that 2009 opinion.  Thus, Shelby County argues, a new assessment is necessary to judge “whether Section 5′s current needs justify its current burdens.” 


 


SCOTUSBlog summarizes:


 


When Congress in 2006 renewed Section 5 for an additional 25 years, it imposed added requirements on state and local governments covered by that section.  The challengers in the Kinston litigation argued that those new burdens prove even more convincingly that Section 5 is now unconstitutionally broad as it applies to the state and local governments that remain the only ones targeted by Section 5. 


. . .


“This Court should grant review of both cases,” the North Carolina petition argued, in order “to facilitate a timely and definitive resolution of the exceptionally important question whether the 2006 version of Section 5 is facially valid.” 


 


In its petition, Shelby County said that Section 5 interferes directly in “the basic operation of state and local government,” which has the practical effect of barring “the implementation of more than 100,000 electoral changes unless and until they are pre-cleared by federal officials in Washington, D.C.”


. . .


Shelby County did not file its lawsuit after having a voting change vetoed by the Justice Department or by a federal court.  Instead, it filed a lawsuit seeking to strike down the 2006 renewal as written, so that, if this challenge succeeded, the law could not be validly applied in any factual situation.


 


 


Edward Blum, director of the Project on Fair Representation, tells AL.com,  “This case presents the Supreme Court with an opportunity to strike down an outdated and unnecessary portion of the Voting Rights Act that punishes some states for voting transgressions that are long gone.”

“Unregistered Latino Voters Large Enough To Transform Red States Into Swing States”

Huffingtonpost article on potential Hispanic electoral clout. 

Right now in 10 battleground states — places where both the Obama and Romney campaigns say victory is feasible — there are 12.1 million unregistered, but potentially eligible, Latino adults, according to new data released late Thursday by the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C., think tank. In uber-important Florida, the state’s 1.4 million unregistered, potentially eligible Latino adults represent a group of voters five times larger than Obama’s margin of victory in 2008.


“If just a portion of these potential voters do come out and vote they could swing the election,” said Philip Wolgin, an immigration policy analyst at the center. “And while I don’t think that Texas is going to become a swing state tomorrow, I also don’t think that four years ago anyone thought that Arizona would be either. Look at it now.”


In Arizona, 405,300 Latino U.S. citizens do not have voting credentials. And another 575,300 Latino permanent legal residents could become naturalized citizens, register and vote.

“US Supreme Court may get Shelby voting rights law challenge”


The latest on the Shelby County challenge to mend not end the Voting Rights Act.

Shelby County took its challenge of the Voting Rights Act to the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, asking the justices to declare part of the 1965 law an unfair burden on states such as Alabama where the federal government still keeps a close watch on elections for evidence of racial discrimination.


Shelby County is appealing two recent lower court decisions that upheld the constitutionality of the landmark civil rights-era law. If the justices agree to accept the case, they’ll schedule it for oral arguments sometime after they return in October, and it would be one of the highest-profile cases of the court’s 2012-13 term.

A bit from the petition.

…”It is this court’s duty to ensure that Congress appropriately remedies Fifteenth Amendment violations without usurping the states’ sovereign powers,” according to Shelby County’s petition. “Shelby County asks the court to protect this important federalism interest.”

…”Congress needed to find that Section 5 was justified under actual conditions uniquely present in the covered jurisdictions; it could not proceed from an unsubstantiated and unbounded assumption that the covered jurisdictions have a latent desire to discriminate that does not exist elsewhere in the country,” the petition states.

“Lawsuit seeks to force Indiana to remove deceased, those who have moved”

Several Southwestern Indiana counties are among those that have caught the attention of election watchers for failing to purge their voter rolls of people who have died or left town.
 


A national group called Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit in an effort to force Indiana to clean up its voter rolls, and the U.S. Department of Justice has told the state in a letter that it, too, sees a problem. The Justice Department says Indiana has at least 10 counties with more registered voters than possibly eligible voters, and Judicial Watch says there are 12 — and even more that are close to having more registered voters than eligible voters.


..”Indiana’s election officials are shirking their responsibility to maintain clean voter registration lists. The citizens of Indiana should be outraged by the indifferent attitude their election officials have taken with respect to the National Voter Registration Act and to clean elections,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

full story at the Courier Press.