Author Archives: ELECTIONLAWCENTER.COM

Voting Rights Act in California: A legal fee windfall?

California Capitol Weekly: 

Upon resolution of the case, the Lawyers Committee requested legal fees of $1.1 million, which, as the successful plaintiff in a case brought under the California Voting Rights Act, means the defendants pay the costs.

“You never want to see a waste of anything, but public school funds of this size being spent on this kind of litigation – against the backdrop of financial hardship we’re all facing – is very difficult,” said Geri Kendall Cox, chief business and administrative services officer for the Madera County Office of Education.

A superior court judge released the county office and the registrar of voters from being responsible for the legal fees, which he said, were excessive.

New York has yet to comply with MOVE Act


YNN New York reports “New York State has yet to comply with a new federal law requiring states to send its residents, overseas and in the military, voting ballots at least 45 days before an election, something that’s difficult if not impossible with the state’s short general election calendar.

“It really insists that we give every single military voter and overseas voter an opportunity to get their ballot in a timely fashion and return it in a timely fashion,” said Joan Millman, Assembly Election Committee Chair.”

Despite multiple failures in past New York elections in sending timely ballots to overseas military voters, there may finally be fundamental reforms enacted by the New York legislature to ensure that adequate time is provided to prepare and send ballots to these voters. 

House Administration Committee closely working with election officials on language to end the EAC

While the White House has instinctively nominated “voter fraud denier” Myrna Perez with absolutely no election administration experience to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the House Administration Committee has been working closely with state and local election officials in crafting substitute language that quietly ends the tenure of the EAC.  It is apparent that the House believes that they must end the current dysfunctionality, regulatory growth, and overhead cost of the EAC and begin again with a different slimmed down model. 

In anticipation of a legislative markup, the committee primarily responsible for election administration oversight is now actively floating a new proposal to the election community, including the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS), that address the important issues and functions that election administrators wish to continue in any post-EAC environment.

The proposed amendment by Representative Harper would terminate the EAC and transfer some of its key functions going forward.  The substitute then transfers the EAC’s Office of Voting System Testing and Certification to the Federal Election Commission (FEC).  In the original bill, NIST would have been responsible for these duties.  The second change creates formal committees for development of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG).  The legislation would maintain the current Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) but the current Standards and Advisory Boards would be replaced by a new 56 member Guidelines Review Board that would be composed of state and local election officials and other interested parties. 

$25,000 cash award for Wisc. voter fraud info

You don’t see this very often.  A “nonpartisan advocacy group” (the mis-appropriated “Velvet Revolution”) put up a $25,000 cash reward for information on any voter fraud that leads to the reversal of the victory of David Prosser in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race.  Prosser leads JoAnne Kloppenburg by at least 7,000 votes.  Twenty five large for a voter fraud reward?!  Why might this contest spark a record reward for information on voter fraud? 

You can see the wanted poster, styled after something from Dodge City, here.

The press release states:

“Advocates of election integrity have become experienced in seeing early warning signs that indicate possible election tampering, and we saw some of those indicators in this race,” said project director Emily Levy. “For that reason, we strongly recommended that the votes be counted by hand statewide, since the computerized election systems are known to produce incorrect results and can easily be manipulated.”

By all means abandon those machine counts.  After all, those hand counts, with dozens of humans fingering documents and tabulating numbers in their heads are sure to be more reliable than computers.  Obviously this Luddite approach to election adminstration will invite human error, some accidental, and some certainly not.

For more information on the real Velvet Revolution, click here. 

NC Democrats think the Voting Rights Act protects their partisan needs


Politico notes that “the redistricting wars are about to hit North Carolina, and Republicans in the Tar Heel State are considering a controversial but well-worn strategy that has worked elsewhere in the South: Create a new majority-minority district while destroying other districts occupied by white Democrats.”  “The state’s Republicans — who are in control of the General Assembly for the first time since Reconstruction — are basically planning to blow up the current congressional map and give North Carolina a third district that has a large enough minority population to elect another African-American member of Congress. But in doing so, they’ll be drawing new lines that would secure the political safety and expand the ranks of the state’s congressional Republicans.”

The Obama DOJ needs to remember that the Voting Rights Act was designed to protect minority communities and not the partisan electoral needs of white Democrats who wish to retain power despite being badly beaten at the polls.  The addition of new majority minority seats in the North Carolina state legislature and U.S. Congress may have the Democrats complaining loudly but such a move is certainly not retrogressive toward minority voters.  As DOJ will likely interpret the law on retrogression with partisan effect, North Carolina should simply go straight to court.  Regardless, these plans end up being litigated in court for some reason. 

For decades, North Carolina Democrats unnaturally retained their political power by redistricting on race and actually minimizing the number of majority minority seats, not reflecting the large black population.  Now North Carolina Republicans finally have the opportunity to reshape the lines of North Carolina to reflect the electoral realities of the state and empower both newly resurgent Republicans and signficiant minority populations. 

Missouri House endorses constitutional amendment on Voter ID

In Missouri, media reports indicate ..

The Missouri House endorsed a proposed constitutional amendment
yesterday that is designed to help resurrect a requirement that voters
show government-issued photo identification to cast ballots.

Rep. Stanley Cox, who is sponsoring the constitutional amendment in
the House, said requiring a photo ID to vote would help to protect
Missouri elections by combatting voter fraud. He said while lawmakers
should be looking for ways to make it easier to vote, it also is
important to make it harder for people to cheat at the polls.

“If you cheat, you water down our votes,” said Cox, R-Sedalia. “You deny us the right to vote.”

The proposed constitutional amendment would
appear on a 2012 ballot.

Will the DOJ sue to force Florida to seek federal approval for felon rules?

From the press release:

“The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), NAACP, Florida State Conference of the NAACP, and the Advancement Project, called upon the United States Department of Justice to require the State of Florida to submit for review its recent changes to rules governing the restoration of voting rights to persons with felony convictions.


The Florida Executive Clemency Board recently sought to adopt changes that would require a person convicted of a non-violent felony to wait five years after completing a sentence before that citizen can even apply for a restoration of her voting rights.  Moreover, under the proposed new rule, the clock automatically resets if an individual is arrested during this period, even if no charges are ultimately filed.”

The groups are seeking Florida to submit the rules under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.  If Florida resists, this could make for an interesting case about the constitutional scope of the Voting Rights Act.