Author Archives: ELECTIONLAWCENTER.COM

“North Dakota lawmakers target petition fraud”

The Bismark Tribune: North Dakota lawmakers decided Monday to clamp down on the type of
petition fraud that invalidated two initiated measures last fall.  Signing someone else’s name to a petition could be a felony under a bill approved by the Senate.  “The
intent is to relay the importance of our election process and that we
are serious about voter and election fraud,” said Sen. Donald Schaible,
R-Mott.  Last fall, two initiated measures failed to make the
ballot after it was revealed many of the signatures on the petitions
were fraudulent.

“Justice Dept. letter means BISD incumbents who didn’t file may get to keep seats”

“The Justice Department has sent a letter to the Beaumont ISD indicating the government won’t pre-clear the May 11 elections, in which the 9th Court of Appeals ruling all seven seats are up for a vote and three incumbents who didn’t file could not be on the ballot, according to information provided by Michael Getz.

Getz says the Justice Department believes the election would dilute minority voting strength.


The board is scheduled to hold a special meeting Tuesday. It could amend the election order and place seats held by incumbents Janice Brassard, Tom Neild and Gwen Ambres on the ballot.


Getz and several other attorneys represent three challengers who filed for seats on the board, as well as incumbent Mike Neil. The 9th Court ruled the challengers would run unopposed because three incumbents, board president Woodrow Reece, and trustees Terry Williams and Zenobia Bush, hadn’t filed for the election. The incumbents said they were under the impression their terms wouldn’t expire in May.”

Link.

Virginia investigating “several possible cases of duplicate voting”



The Virginia attorney general’s office is investigating “several possible cases of duplicate voting” after comparing the commonwealth’s registration rolls against voter rolls in 21 other states via the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which Virginia joined in 2012.


 


The State Board of Elections requested the investigation after finding more than 308,000 voters registered in Virginia and another state; more than 97,000 were listed as having voted in recent Virginia elections.


Voter ID and the Wisconsin Judicial Elections

Big night for conservatives in Wisconsin elections.  John Fund at National Review:

“In a third judicial election, Milwaukee County circuit judge Rebecca Bradley won an election with 54 percent of the vote over Janet Protasiewicz, a veteran prosecutor backed by Democrats. Bradley had been appointed to the bench by Governor Walker last year. Protasiewicz’s TV ads attacked Bradley as Governor Walker’s “handpicked” judge and accused her of being a member of the Republican National Lawyer’s Association, calling it an “extreme” group because of its support for voter-ID laws. Voters obviously didn’t buy that pitch, and reelected Bradley in a county that gave Barack Obama 67 percent of its vote in 2012.”

DOJ Amicus in Montana Voting Case

DOJ files an amicus in the 9th Circuit: “Civil rights attorneys from the U.S. Justice Department say a federal judge wrongly denied a request to establish satellite election offices for American Indians on three Montana reservations.


Plaintiffs from the Crow, Northern Cheyenne and Fort Belknap Reservations say in a lawsuit before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals they must drive long distances to county courthouses for early voting and late registration.

They say that leaves them disadvantaged compared to white voters.

But in the run-up to last fall’s election, U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull ruled there was no evidence Indians couldn’t vote for the candidate of their choice.

Justice Department attorneys say in a friend-of-the-court brief filed this week that Cebull overlooked discrimination suffered by Indians who lack the resources to travel far.”

The Justice Department filed an amicus brief in the 9th Circuit.  If the DOJ believes not having satellite election offices is discriminatory, it certainly could have filed a lawsuit last fall when the private plaintiffs filed the case. Or, it might have filed a motion to intervene and undertaken genuine Section 2 litigation.  Instead, the Department seems to prefer to pontificate through amicus briefs.  Fine, but recognize that the claim that the Bush administration didn’t vigorously enforce federal voting laws looks more absurd with each passed opportunity for the Obama administration to actually litigate a case.  It also makes Pam Karlan’s false scholarship about the Bush Section 2 enforcement record look even more dishonest.

George Will: “For substantial GOP candidates, deregulate campaign finance”

Because of the grotesquely swollen place the presidency now occupies
in the nation’s governance and consciousness, we are never not
preoccupied with presidential campaigning. The Constitution’s Framers
would be appalled. The nation reveres the Framers, but long ago
abandoned the presidential selection process they considered so
important that they made it one of the four national institutions
created by the Constitution. Hence the significance of the Republican
National Committee’s suggested reforms for the 2016 process.

University
of Virginia professor James Ceaser says the four national institutions
the Framers created were Congress, the Supreme Court, the presidency and
the presidential selection system based on the Electoral College. The
fourth, wherein the selection of candidates and election of a president
by each state’s electors occurred simultaneously — they were the same
deliberation — soon disappeared. 

Responding to the fact that the
2012 nomination process was ruinously protracted, the RNC suggests
reforms that might, like many improvements, make matters worse. This is
because of a prior “improvement” — campaign finance reform.   For more and the conclusion: Here.