The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky along with Eric Eversole release this report on military voting rights.  “The MOVE Act, like previous voting rights laws, was supposed to help military members exercise their right to vote. The MOVE Act, however, cannot succeed in delivering on its promise until it is fully implemented and enforced. President Obama has a clear opportunity to help deliver the promise of the MOVE Act, but his Administration must be willing to make the issue a priority. It must address the shortcomings from the 2010 election and ensure a top-down commitment from the President’s agencies to promote and protect U.S. service members’ voting rights. At a time when members of America’s military are in harm’s way in remote parts of the world, this nation should spare no expense or effort in making sure that the MOVE Act’s promise is realized.”

More:

To make matters worse, the Voting Section once again appeared to be unwilling or unprepared to enforce the MOVE Act aggressively. From day one, the Voting Section appeared to drag its feet when implementing the new law and lacked a clear strategy to enforce it.[17] For nearly a year, the Voting Section and DOD promised to provide states with detailed implementation guidance on the MOVE Act, but that guidance never came, and the states were forced to guess how the Voting Section would enforce the new law. This failure left several states with no choice but to file last-minute waiver applications and, when DOD denied half of those applications, caused a rash of last-minute litigation on the eve of the election.[18]

More problematic was the Voting Section’s attempt to dispose of waiver cases by advising jurisdictions that it was permissible to send federal-only ballots to military voters—that is, a ballot that contains federal races, but not state or local races.[19] This federal-only ballot presumably would allow the state to meet the strict requirements of UOCAVA (which applies only to federal elections) but would affect the military voter’s right to vote in state and local races and could lead to other violations of the law.[20] In Maryland, for example, a federal judge found a violation of a military member’s fundamental right to vote in state and local elections when Maryland sent federal-only ballots, based on ill-advised guidance from the Voting Section, during the 2010 election.

Texas joins Virginia and Louisiana in going to district court for a more favorable venue on redistricting compared with the Eric Holder Justice Department.  By now, it’s rather obvious that DOJ can count on court oversight of any redistricting review of a covered Section 5 state with GOP leadership.  Texas won’t be the last state to go to court.  Other states will certainly avoid putting the fate of their redistricting plans solely in Eric Holder’s hands. 

The link below takes you to a PJ Tatler piece about today’s military voting forum at the Heritage Foundation in which I participated.  Senator John Cornyn spoke before my panel and had things to say about DOJ and DOD’s enforcement of military voting rights which the link below will provide more details. 

He also sent a letter to Eric Holder today about the Voting Section’s enforcement prowess (“grossly inadequate”) in 2010.  The full letter is here.

Latest at PJ Tatler:  “Sen. John Cornyn hits AG Eric Holder over military voting bungles”

Florida Republicans have resurrected Jim Crow, so states Karl Sheppard, an adjunct professor of history at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida

“The real issue however is the suppression of black votes. The limits on voter registration (the signatures collected by those registering to vote in Florida must now be turned in within 48 hours) greatly impacts the ability to sign up new voters and is aimed directly at poor minorities and college students.”

The law in Florida which Sheppard opposes is currently before the Justice Department for approval.  It limits the amount of time groups like ACORN can sit on voter registration forms before they must be turned in to election officials so that the voter can be registered.  It is designed to protect the voter. In the past many of these forms were never turned in and the voters, or people who thought they were eligible to vote, turned up on election day and could not vote.  Limiting the amount of time groups can sit on them could make it more likely that the voter will be registered, or can check well in advance of the election if they are.  To Professor Sheppard, this is Jim Crow resurrected. 

Issac Bailey, writer for the Sun News in Myrtle Beach (SC), has this erroneous statement about voter fraud and the Bush Justice Department in this article:

“An aggressive five-year probe by the Justice Department during President George W. Bush’s administration to identify, prove and root out voter fraud turned up very little.”

This is an innacurate statement.  Bailey’s willingness to so state is emblematic of the general tendancy of voter fraud deniers to say things that diminish the problem of voter fraud in hopes the accuracy of the statement will never be checked.  Not surprisingly, Bailey then cites another notorious voter fraud denier.  The full article is here.

Caroline May at the Daily Caller has this piece on the Kinston case challenging the Justice Department’s objection to moving Kinston (NC) to non-partisan city council elections:

An op-ed in Louisiana’s largest newspaper about the Justice Department lawsuit under Section 7 of  Motor Voter:  “If the state has indeed failed to drag the poor and disabled onto the electoral register, that is hardly the same as barring access. The requisite forms are available everywhere, and that should be enough. It is plainly absurd for a federal government on the brink of default to spend our money in an attempt to force the state to treat adult citizens like backward children.  Registering to vote is so easy that anyone who can’t figure it out — especially in a government assistance office — would be all at sea on election day anyway. If ever such a sap did find the way to a polling station, he’d be baffled once he got inside the booth.”  This is the same Justice Department that refuses to enforce Section 8 of Motor Voter, the provision which requires states to remove dead and ineligible voters.

CNSnews.com.  “I think that we need to make it easy to vote, hard to cheat, and I think that that’s a mantra that we ought to shout from the rooftops all over the country as a Party,” Priebus told conservative bloggers on a conference call on Thursday.

A hearing was held Friday regarding military and overseas voters on Friday.  The video of the hearing is here.  The report by the Military Voting Protection Project is discussed by Chairman Joe Wilson at minute 53.  A conference on military voting will take place on Tuesday July 19th at the Heritage Foundation.  More information is here.