” The so-called “youth vote amendment” would lower the minimum voting age in Brattleboro, a town of about 12,000 people, to 16 from its current 18, the age minimum for state and federal elections.
The amendment is part of slate of proposals being considered on Tuesday as part of Brattleboro’s annual town meeting.
The idea was put forward by Kurt Daims, a longtime activist in the town, who said lowering the voting age would boost voter turnout and extend rights to a “disenfranchised group.”
Daily Signal: “The Obama administration filed an amicus brief in the case on the side of the redistricting commission and was given time this morning to present its arguments to the Court. However, some of the justices seemed to find the administration’s arguments a bit hard to swallow. For example, Assistant Solicitor General Eric Feigin claimed that the state legislature didn’t have standing to sue because nothing prevented the legislature from “passing a bill that would redistrict the state,” even though he acknowledged that such a law would not be enforceable. As Chief Justice Roberts said, “So you want the legislature to pass a law that’s not enforceable and suggest they don’t have standing to challenge what the referendum has done in this case until they go through that process?”
In fact, Feigin went even further, claiming the legislature doesn’t have “an interest in the enforcement of the laws that they pass,” thus taking the astonishing position that the legislature would have no ability to ever appear in court to contest this referendum. Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed surprised by Feigin’s answer, saying that didn’t the legislature “have an interest in the constitutional powers they have?” Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony Kennedy also were clearly concerned over the arguments being asserted by the Justice Department over standing.
Seth Waxman asserted that Arizona defines its legislature to include “the People,” and thus the referendum process, and that the term “Legislature” in the Elections Clause cannot “ignore a State’s definition of its own legislature.” Justice Scalia interrupted Waxman and challenged him to give Scalia “one provision of the Constitution that uses the term ‘legislature’ that clearly was not meant to apply to the body of representatives of the people that makes the laws.” Waxman was unable to answer that question and Scalia admonished him that Scalia had looked through the Constitution and there wasn’t a single provision that “clearly” had the meaning Waxman was trying to subscribe to it.
Justice Kennedy added that “history works very much against” Waxman’s argument on the definition of legislature, citing the Seventeenth Amendment, which changed the Constitution’s original provision that senators were chosen by the legislature. As Kennedy pointed out, “there was no suggestion that this could be displaced” by a state prior to the Seventeenth Amendment.”
Fayetteville Observer:
“Plaintiffs wanted Superior Court Judge Michael Morgan to strike down the state’s voter ID law as unconstitutional last week. That didn’t happen. The state wanted him to toss out the lawsuit. That didn’t happen either.
But Morgan dismissed two of three grounds for the suit. One asserted that requiring a photo ID to vote is the same as requiring property ownership. Another said it violated the guarantee of free elections. Both of these were a stretch.
What Morgan left intact to be argued at trial this summer was a claim that even providing free IDs creates an undue burden for those who cannot afford the time or expense to obtain them. If true, it would mean the state’s election law violates the principle of equal protection.”
When Voter ID lawsuits are left to argue that some people just can’t manage to find the time to get free ID, those lawsuits have edged toward farce and are likely to be losers.
“Peterson said in a news release that she had received a report that a group of parents who had just voted at one polling place said they were going to vote again at a second polling place.
The unofficial vote total released Tuesday was 6,395 for a tax increase, 5,515 against.
Unlike general elections, voters are not assigned a specific polling place for school referendums so there’s no way for poll workers to know if someone voted multiple times, the release said.”
Link here.
Here is the ACRU brief that argues that the Justice Department only uses citizenship data in Section 2 redistricting cases and states should not be allowed to count illegal aliens when drawing district lines in Texas, and throughout the country. It also argues that using illegal aliens in population data violates the Constitutional command of one person, one vote.
One of the defendants has been identified as Jose Angel Garza. He was formally charged on a five count indictment on the charge of tampering with a marked ballot. Rafael Angel Elizondo has been charged with one count of the same charge for an offense that allegedly took place in July 2012, the information provided to Breitbart Texas revealed.
Here’s a paper (in an academic site) about the effort to constitutionalize the right to vote. Creating a constitutional right to vote would wipe out rules against felon voting in prison, wipe about voter ID, potentially wipe out precincts, advance voter registration, and create meddlesome tinkering with district lines. That, of course, means that the people in favor of voting in prison, opposed to voter ID, against voter registration and forever looking to tinker with district lines are naturally the forces behind the federal constitutional right to vote.
Voting free from race and gender discrimination is already a federal constitutional right. The general right to vote is not in the text of the constitution. That’s what allows states to place reasonable voting regulations in place like advance voter registration, precincts, and other residency and citizenship requirements. It would give rise to potential lawsuits that would allow the slightest barrier to voting to be struck down – such as being in prison for felony voter fraud.
It seems only academics and activists (but I repeat myself) seem to care about campaign finance issues and “money in politics.” The inordinate focus on campaign finance and “dark money” has been a topic of conversation at the meetings at the Democratic National Committee meetings this week. It turns out voters don’t care, the dark money fear mongering message doesn’t penetrate, and the Democrats are moving on. The Washington Times:
And Ken Martin, chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said campaign finances issues were “inside baseball.” “Americans are focused on bread and butter issues and could care less about who is funding the campaigns,” he said. Mr. Martin, who leads the campaign finance reform committee for the Association of State Democratic Chairs, said that the effect of money in politics was an important issue but “people don’t care.”