Author Archives: ELECTIONLAWCENTER.COM

“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.

“Pennsylvania voter ID cause furthered by Philly voter fraud report”

HumanEvents reports on a report of voter fraud and irregularities in just one primary election in the wild west of voter fraud and voter intimidation (New Black Panthers) – Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love:

At a time when voter ID laws in 30 states are coming under intense
fire from the liberal media, the Obama administration and civil rights
leaders, one of the strongest cases anywhere was offered for voter
identification by the lone Republican on the three-member panel
overseeing elections in Philadelphia.

Wednesday, City Commissioner Al Schmidt unveiled a 27 page report
that his office had commissioned entitled “Voting Irregularities in
Philadelphia County, 2012 Primary Election.” The report, which focused
on cases in 15 of the city’s 1,687 election districts, found cases of
double voting, voter impersonation, voting by non-citizens, and 23 cases
of people who were unregistered to vote but nonetheless permitted to do
so.

 

“Dem takeover of House of Representatives is impossible”

Bold prediction.  ELC doesn’t normally discuss political seat arithmetic or subtraction but this opinion by political expert Stuart Rothenberg is important in the context of recently competed congressional redistricting across the country and where party resources may be focused in a close senate and presidential race.

@Roll Call: Right now, the outlook for the House is anywhere from a small GOP gain
to a modest Democratic gain in the single digits — not close to what
Democrats hoped for as the cycle began.
…Given the current outlook, a Democratic gain of 10 to 12 House seats
would have to be regarded as an extremely good outcome for the party,
and a net GOP gain is not impossible. What does seem impossible, at
least at this point, is a Democratic takeover of the House in November.

“Suppressing the military vote”

HumanEvents.com has the story: 

In the voter fraud versus voter suppression debate, the biggest
suppression of the vote, and the most scandalous, has gone virtually
unnoticed.  Deployed members of the American military have the most difficulty
getting absentee ballots and casting their vote on time than any other
group of Americans. According to the Military Voters Protection Project (MVPP), only 20
percent of the 2.5 million military voters were able to request and
return their absentee ballots on time in the 2008 election.

…According to testimony by Thomas Perez, assistant Attorney General for
civil rights at the Justice Department, one third of overseas troops who
wanted to vote in 2010 couldn’t.

And what is DOJ doing about it?  Re-fighting the voter ID wars the Supreme Court has already weighed in on and trying to prevent verification checks for non-citizen voters.

“Non-citizens voting in America”

The Obama Administration has gone to the mat to try to prevent states from verifying the citizenship of their registered voters.

…Why would the Obama Administration not want states finding out about
non-citizens who are illegally registered or have them removed from the
voter rolls?

There is little doubt that, based on prior prosecutions and other
evidence that has surfaced (such as the 430 non-citizens in Colorado who
recently asked the state to remove them from the voter rolls), states
are going to find hundreds if not thousands of non-citizens illegally
registered to vote when they start actually accessing DHS databases. And
the federal government’s resistance to such state requests should
concern all Americans who want clean, fair, and secure elections.

Full story at Heritage – The Foundry.