VA Dem Chair Moran misses the mark on Voting Rights Act

Virginia Democratic Party Chair Brian Moran misses the mark wildly and jumps all over Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli over the Voting Rights Act.  Of course Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires certain, but not all, states to get federal government approval of any change whatsoever involving elections.  For example, hours an election office is open, the location of the office, the people translating ballots into Spanish, the district lines, etc, must all be approved by the feds. 

States and jurisdictions are allowed to apply for bailouts, but almost nobody has.  Of the thousands of jurisdictions eligible to seek bailout, only a dozen or so have done so.  At the same time, two jurisdictions are challenging the constitutionality of Section 5.  Whether or not bailouts are effective and being used is an issue that will affect the constitutionality of Section 5.  Simply put, defenders of Section 5 want jurisdictions to bail out.  The more jurisdictions that bailout, the more constitutional Section 5 is.

Enter Brian Moran.  He obviously didn’t get the memo that the defenders of Section 5 are desperate to find places to bailout.  If Virginia bailed out as a state, and very few would be more appropriate for a bailout than the Commonwealth, it would significantly bolster the constitutionality of Section 5. 

Because of the high temperature rhetoric of Moran, states and jurisdictions are scared to seek bailouts because of the racially driven wrath people like Moran will unleash when they do.  If the Supreme Court strikes down Section 5, which most informed observers believe is increasingly possible, there will likely be a passage in the opinion about the low number of places which obtained bailouts, and those seeking to overturn the law will be able to thank people like Brian Moran.    Perhaps he will reassess his position.

Dispatches from the Kinston Hearing

An eyewitness account of the hearing in Laroque v. Holder last Friday.  ELC first reported on the email that went out to every employee inviting them to skip work and go watch the hearings. The National Review story notes:


” . . . One half of the courtroom was occupied by lawyers and staff from the Voting Section of the Justice Department on a taxpayer-paid field trip. Even Julie Fernandes, the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights under an ethical cloud for her role in the New Black Panther Party scandal, was there. She apparently didn’t see the irony of her having an announced, race-based policy for enforcing the Voting Rights Act, on one hand, and her presence as the DOJ argued for the continued constitutionality of Section 5 on the other.


If where you sit is a sign of where you stand, it was probably appropriate that the DOJ staff were all sitting on the left side of the courtroom. Of course, they may have been avoiding me, sitting on the right side.


The DOJ lawyer arguing the case, Richard Dellheim, had only uttered about two sentences when Judge Bates started peppering him with questions. Bates seemed somewhat taken aback by the government’s claim that nobody in Kinston had standing to contest the constitutionality of a federal statute like Section 5.”

 

Voter ID in Kansas

The Witchita Eagle reports that Voter ID will be on the agenda in Kansas but not without some opponents.  “Kobach, a Republican, made voter photo ID the centerpiece of his campaign, which ended with a decisive victory last month over Democrat incumbent Chris Biggs.”   With the new conservative resurgence and working majority in the Kansas Legislature, the likelihood of passage of a Voter ID requirement has dramatically increased.

Slate on Bush v Gore

Slate does a 10th anniversary article on Bush v. Gore.  It gets a little bit right, but most of it wrong.

The right part:

“Before 2000, candidates and the public were both quick to accept official election results even in close elections. Bush v. Gore taught political operatives and everyone else that there are significant problems in how we administer our elections.”

The wrong part quickly follows. The author suggests nationalizing voter registration and federalizing the process to fix poorly run elections.  As if turning anything over to the federal government tends to make things work better.  I wonder if Rick Hasen has ever gone to the U.S. Post Office to mail a 17 ounce parcel on December 22.  Thankfully only a few people in academia take seriously the idea of federalizing election adminstration, especially those who have read the Constitution.  It is a non-starter, except perhaps in the ivory tower:


“If we wanted to, we could put an end to all this fighting. We could start with a uniform national ballot and uniform rules for the casting and counting of votes in federal elections. We could nationalize voter registration or at least mandate modernization so that state voter-registration databases talk to each other.”

Maybe they can put the voter registration office in the Social Security office.  The ensuing bedlam would be a sight to see.

The wrong and preposterously hypocritical:

“We could remove partisan officials from making election decisions in which they have a vested interest (like Ken Blackwell, who served as co-chair of Bush’s 2004 Ohio re-election committee while making a series of election-law decisions as Ohio Secretary of State that seemed designed to favor Republicans).”

Really?  Ken Blackwell is the best example?  One wonders why a more recent Ohio Secretary of State’s decisions wouldn’t fall into the same category.  Current Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has a reputation of a partisan who uses the power of her office for partisan advantage.  But like so much in the world of elections, I suppose the author just doesn’t see her record the same way.  All those shady 2008 dealings, including her highly questionable list maintenance compliance, why nothing more than GOP spin, right?