The People’s World, the magazine associated with the Communist Party USA, opines about Voter ID here in “Unions say “voter ID” is Jim Crow revisited.”

“Robert H. Allen died nearly four years ago at the age of 81.  But the deceased Sun Prairie man appears to be living on — at least on Wisconsin’s statewide voting list. Allen is among nearly 1,000 other probable deceased individuals who remain on the Statewide Voter Registration System, or SVRS, according to a Wisconsin Reporter investigation.”  More at Watchdog.org.

excerpts from article: 

He said forming new legislative maps for Pinal
County as it expands from three supervisors to five will be cumbersome.
County staff and a consulting firm have been going over the new
districts to meet the U.S. Department of Justice requirements, which
Martyn said would create Democratic majorities.

“They all meet DOJ
criteria, but not common-sense criteria,” said Martyn, whose district
includes Florence, Queen Creek and Apache Junction.

The other supervisors, Pete Rios and David Snider, who represents Maricopa, are both Democrats.

Martyn
said trying to get past the “33,000 lawyers” at the Justice Department
is difficult and he is concerned the city of Casa Grande would still be
split across two districts.

The Plain Dealer reports on the start of the redistricting season in Ohio. 

“Once a decade, all eyes in Ohio’s political world turn to a pair of maps.

Not just any old pair of maps, but rather the process of drawing a
fresh pair outlining the road to electoral power — the new state
legislative and congressional district maps showing the terrain where
Ohio’s political campaigns are fought over the next decade.” 

Steven Greenhut at the OCRegister.com, excerpts below:

After looking at the current redistricting process, and the new maps
offered by a supposedly nonpartisan and fair-minded commission that is
doing the bidding for left-wing and ethnic interest groups, I do have
some happy news: The new maps – which almost certainly will ensure a
two-thirds legislative voting majority for Democrats, who will be sure
to raise taxes early and often – are likely to be challenged and, either
way, won’t go into effect until at least 2012.

Facetiousness aside, the redistricting debacle spotlights the
far-reaching tentacles of the political Left, the impotence of the
Republican Party and the outlandish double-standards at work in the
high-stakes game of Sacramento politics.

As former California
Republican Party Chairman Shawn Steel put it, “The Democrats knew what
they were doing, and Republicans were asleep at the switch.” He said the
commission, comprised of Republicans and Democrats (and members of
third parties), features ineffective and liberal Republican members and
hyperpartisan Democrats, with the results strongly tilting the new seats
in one direction.”  Furthermore, Steel notes that the commission was designed, though the
language of the initiative that created it, to devise new
ethnic-oriented gerrymanders beyond what’s required by the federal
Voting Rights Act. The one commissioner who voted “no” on the new
maps, Michael Ward of Fullerton, complained publicly. “In my opinion,
the commission failed to fulfill its mandate to strictly apply
constitutional criteria and consistently applied race and ‘community of
interest’ criteria and sought to diminish dissenting viewpoints.”

Link: When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law
in 1965, it was an antidote to Jim Crow-era efforts to suppress the
black vote in Southern states still fighting bloody battles over racial
equality.

Forty-six years later, the law has become a partisan arguing point in
several Dixie statehouses between Democrats and Republicans bent on
justifying opposing strategies to increase their respective advantages
in this year’s redistricting debates.

The Tampa Tribune complains about Secretary of State Kurt Browning’s move to a neutral forum with established rules of evidence for voting law changes.

Buried in the redistricting complaint filed by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbot is some interesting language:

“This complaint is filed under the assumption that Section 5 complies with the United States Constitution.”

One can almost imagine the Motions to Amend Complaint just waiting for lawyer signatures down in Austin to add constitutional challenges to Section 5 to the complaint.

The Fort Worth Star Telegram calls it Abbot’s “Kings-X”.

“That’s not just typical lawyer mumbo-jumbo. Abbott said the state “reserves all applicable legal claims” in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in an Austin case that skirted the edge of declaring the pre-clearance requirement unconstitutional. Two other cases on the same question are pending before the D.C. court.”

The Bigs.

Ben Smith at Politio has this piece about the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee asking Justice to object to Florida’s new voting laws covered extensively at ELC.  There’s only one problem, Secretary of State Kurt Browning yanked the submission from DOJ the week before.  Smith doesn’t mention that in the piece.