Kerry Picket at the Daily Caller has the story.

Local state government officials are registering non-U.S. citizens as valid voters — even when the non-citizens say they are not Americans on their voter registration forms, a former Justice Department attorney tells The Daily Caller.

J. Christian Adams, a former United States Department of Justice official in the Civil Rights Division will show the Supreme Court in a brief later this month that non-citizens are registering to vote through the government’s motor voter program. The motor voter act became law during the Clinton administration as an easier way to register voters through their local Department of Motor Vehicles offices, but Adams says the program is failing to weed out those who are not American citizens.

“The bigger problem is that when they get those drivers licenses, there’s a government social services agency that is compelled under motor voter to offer voter registration,” Adams says. “For example, I’m representing a client — the American Civil Rights Union. We’re about to file a brief to the Supreme Court that shows actual voter registrations of people who on their voter registration forms that they’re not citizens, but they’re still getting registered to vote.”

Just a short note that I’ll be speaking at the University of Missouri School of Law, Wednesday, April 1, at noon.

The topic is Voting, Elections and Race Polarization in America.

I’ll be talking about many of the issues covered here at PJ Media, namely how elections have become the latest contentious area involving race and civil rights issues. I’ll also discuss how various interests benefit from a racially divided and polarized electorate. Voter ID, the events in Ferguson and other election laws are part of an overarching fight involving color, politics and process.

The event is free and sponsored by the Federalist Society.

Opinion is here.

Here is the most important part:

“The District Court’s final alternative holding—that “the [challenged] Districts would satisfy strict scrutiny”—rests upon a misperception of the law. Section 5 does not require a covered jurisdiction to maintain a particular numerical minority percentage. It requires the jurisdiction to maintain a minority’s ability to elect a preferred can
didate of choice.”

Hence, nobody can claim now that the Voting Rights Act – either Section 5 or Section 2 – requires the packing of black voters into districts forever and ever at the same levels. Legislatures are free to use other alternative means to maintain the ability of minorities to elect candidates of choice. This undermines the argument, frequently used by those seeking to pack, that the Voting Rights Act requires proportionality of representation or black majority enclaves.

This part of the opinion makes it seem the days are gone where redistricting efforts must aim to preserve black faces in legislative bodies at all costs. Preserving a specific minority population percentage is NOT required by the Voting Rights Act, despite years of hearing from some people that it is. From the Court syllabus:

“Here, however, the District Court and the legislature both asked the wrong question with respect to narrow tailoring. They asked how to maintain the present minority percentages in majority-minority districts, instead of asking the extent to which they must preserve existing minority percentages in order to maintain the minority’s pr
esent ability to elect the candidate of its choice. Because asking the wrong question may well have led to
the wrong answer, the Court cannot accept the District Court’s conclusion.”

I have a bit more at PJ Media.

A federal judge has found that a county redistricting plan violates the Voting Rights Act.  The court ruled in favor of plaintiffs who brought an action to challenge the plan in Albany County, Georgia. The Justice Department did not bring the case.   What’s worse about the DOJ inaction, this is a plan that would have crossed the desks of DOJ lawyers under a Section 5 review.  From the link:

“On Tuesday, a federal judge stopped Albany County’s legislative elections with a ruling on the County’s 2011 redistricting. Judge Lawrence Kahn ruled the county is in violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He says the county’s most recent redistricting plan dilutes the voting strength of black voters in Albany County.”

“Progressives genuinely believe that they don’t hold total power only because large groups of disaffected economically downtrodden Americans don’t vote. Progressives believe if they just tinker with the process rules — mandatory voting, automatic voter registration, elimination of Election Day, elimination of precincts — they will elect enough progressives to transform the nation.

Once they dictate the process, they believe they will own the policy.”  Link.

Robert Knight on Obama’s mandatory voting longings.

America’s Founders abhorred the idea of universal democracy, which is why they fashioned a constitutional republic with separation of powers between the states and the central government and within the national government. Plus, national borders and meaningful citizenship.

In Federalist 10, James Madison warned of the dangers of a pure democracy without republican safeguards: “[S]uch democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.”

Going nowhere it seems. Here’s an interesting quote from an x-staffer of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies:

For example, Ferguson is two-thirds black, yet a majority of voters in their local elections are white. “Otherwise Ferguson would have a black government and a black police force, and if there was any justice in the world, they’d be suppressing white people,” Bositis says with a wry laugh.