“Obviously we are disappointed by the ruling. Mr. Davis had argued that a citizen is injured when they are denied the right to fully participate in any political process. Even GovGuam did not find the ripeness argument to have enough merit to bring it in the first place. Mr. Davis will be appealing the ripeness ruling to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals where we are hopeful existing Supreme Court precedent will lead to a reversal and remand. Regardless, no plebiscite election will ever take place on Guam without the discriminatory problems being fully litigated.”
Author Archives: ELECTIONLAWCENTER.COM
Voter ID: DOJ to Monitor Election in Branchville, SC
Branchville, South Carolina. Population 1,083. Voting age population, 806.
The Justice Department will send lawyers to monitor a special election. The reason is that this is the first election conducted with the new Voter ID requirement in the state. The Justice Department opposed voter ID and forced the state to spend $3,500,000 to obtain federal court approval. Justice Department career attorneys had recommended that the South Carolina voter ID law be precleared, but they were overruled by political appointees Tom Perez and Matt Colangelo. Convinced that voter ID is a “poll tax” (Holder’s words) or is a plot to disenfranchise voters, DOJ lawyers from Washington D.C. will be collecting evidence in Branchville for the election of a town council member.
Rep. Gilda Cobb Hunter has been a vocal opponent of voter ID and recently was called to testify to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Branchville is in Cobb-Hunter’s legislative district.
Alabama Stands With Shelby County
Audacity: Pam Karlan Complains About Distortions
Takes one to know one. Pam Karlan, the scholar, has published outright demonstrable falsehoods about the Bush administration’s enforcement of voting rights laws. She should be embarrassed and ashamed for publishing false statements in the Duke University Law review. (Pamela S. Karlan, “Lessons Learned: Voting Rights and the Bush Administration,” 4 Duke J. Const. L. & Pub. Pol’y 17 (2009)). She has no room to criticize George Will for imprecise language. From my book Injustice (page 162):
“These arguments—that the Brown case was the first Section 2 case brought by the Bush DOJ, and that for five years no case was brought to protect minority voters—are common untruths told by critics of the Bush administration. Stanford Law professor Pam Karlan peddled this nonsense in a published law review article that falsely states ‘for five of the eight years of the Bush Administration, [they] brought no Voting Rights Act cases of its own except for one case protecting white voters.’ In a footnote, Karlan says she relied on Obama Voting Section chief Chris Herren for information for her article.”
The Brown case was not the first case to protect voters under Section 2 brought by the Bush DOJ. Nor was there ever a gap of five years where no case was brought to protect minority voters. Karlan is outright making things up. She entirely ignores multiple Section 2 cases. As far as I know, Karlan has never corrected her errors, and her “scholarship” is still taken seriously by some.
“South Carolina Beats DOJ (Again) Over Voter ID Law”
The Foundry:
“The civil rights organizations tried to persuade the court to not award costs against them because “their participation should be encouraged and because they cannot afford to pay.” But such costs are “routinely” awarded against losing parties in civil rights litigation, and the court questioned the credibility of the organizations’ claims, saying that they had “failed to establish an inability to pay costs given their hefty expenditures throughout the litigation.”
In fact, the NAACP independent auditors’ report for 2011 shows almost $14 million in total assets, so the organization’s claim made to a federal court that it cannot pay such costs was highly questionable.”
If Section 5 survives, civil rights groups better be more careful in deciding to intervene in cases.
In Alaska, Redistricting destined for do over
The Artic-Sounder reports:
“All the disruptions of redistricting that are necessarily endured
every 10 years will be repeated in the next two,” states the final
supreme court opinion. “The cause of this drastic remedy, according to
the majority opinion, is the Board’s use of unchallenged districts in
devising a Hickel plan.”
The Hickel process requires the board to draw up voting districts
with first Alaska’s constitutional requirements in mind, and then
determine if the plan meets federal voting laws. Those requirements are
often incredibly difficult to meet simultaneously.
Deviation from Alaska constitutional requirements are then allowed only if it is the sole way to comply with federal mandate.
Did Massachusetts Ex-Rep. Smith Act Alone in Election Fixing Case?
In exchange for his plea, prosecutors will recommend that Stat spend six months in some Club Fed, instead of the maximum two years he faces for engaging in what the US criminal code calls the Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law and what the rest of us call fixing elections. Reading the charges and the plea agreement leads to only two possible conclusions: Either Stat rolled and pointed the finger at others, or a two-year investigation by the FBI in which a staggering number of Everett residents were hauled before a grand jury has ended with a resounding thud. “No comment” from the office of US Attorney Carmen Ortiz. Smith’s plea hearing is scheduled for Friday, and his lawyers say Smith will not be implicating anyone else in the ballot fraud scheme.
More on the absentee ballot fraud case against Stephen “Stat” Smith, the now former state representative from Everett, Massachusetts forced to resign as part of a plea deal with federal prosecutors:
WV Voter ID Gains Support
Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
“Miami-Dade grand jury spells out voting fixes”
The Miami Herald reports on grand jury recommendations on absentee ballot protections against fraud.
There may no longer be hanging chads to compromise the integrity of a
Florida election, as happened in 2000, but lax state laws still allow
all sorts of shenanigans — from ballot brokers who get paid by
candidates’ campaigns to hunt for absentee ballots at assisted living
facilities and other senior centers to opening up absentee ballot
request lists only to candidates and certain political campaign
committees.“Many of our legislative recommendations are easy to
implement as we are only asking that they reinstate laws that were
previously on the books,” the grand jury report notes. One of those old
laws required people who vote absentee to have a witness (with an
address and signature) on the envelope returning the ballot. That would
be one way to put so-called boleteros on notice.Another way to
help combat fraud: Expand the county’s supervised voting program which
encourages senior centers to work with the elections office so that
absentee ballots are delivered and collected by trained elections
workers. “With the supervised voting program, the voting of an absentee
ballot mirrors that of live, in-person voting . . . and the marking of
the ballot is done without any solicitations or outside influences,” the
report states.
Footnote to Supreme Court on Burden of Section 5: “Justice can cost millions”
According to media reports, the Section 5 litigation over one piece of legislation, the infamous photo ID bill, cost South Carolina $3.5 million dollars. That cost was to simply put the law into effect. That’s $3.5 million dollars and all-out assault by DOJ lawyers over a law that is not as strict as the Indiana photo ID law and which the Supreme Court found non-objectionable and non-discriminatory.
Of course, none of this would have happened if an overly politicized DOJ would have simply accepted the recommendations of career attorneys to provide preclearance. In the end, the political appointees improperly overruled that recommendation twice and South Carolina had to go the court to preclear the photo ID law when it should have been simply precleared administratively. Instead of administrative preclearance, we had Attorney General Holder make the bill a political issue, calling it a “poll tax.”
There is simply no way around it. The federal government (DOJ) wrongfully interfered with state election law, in part on non-substantive reasons: politics and overzealousness. This is not how a healthy political system works, much less the noble notion of “federalism.” After multiple administrative objections where South Carolina tried to work with DOJ to no avail, the state exercised its legal right to go to the DC District Court for preclearance. And they won. However, if South Carolina had not stood on principle, the will of their elected legislature would have never gone into effect. It is shameful that the courts once again had to reign in DOJ.
The damage caused by the federal government’s intrusion: A $3.5 million dollar Section 5 burden and the South Carolina photo ID law being delayed for over a year through multiple elections including the Presidential General Election. This may be what the Supreme Court meant by a law not being proportional and congruent to justify such an invasion of the normal balance between state and federal voting laws. Giving such authority to a politicized federal agency in the executive branch to preempt state law is no small matter. The Holder DOJ has proven why.