This week in the war on voting is a joint project of Joan McCarter and Meteor Blades
Ohio House Speaker open to having legislature set early voting hours
Republican Speaker Bill Batchelder told reporters this week that he could see having the legislature establish early voting hours rather than having the secretary of state's office or a court make that decision. "We're thinking about it, very definitely," he said.
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, also a Republican, has been at the forefront of a long-running battle with Democrats and the federal courts over setting the number and timing of early voting hours. The fight wound up in the courts in 2012 and again this year.
Husted had set mostly weekday early voting hours for the November elections, but a federal judge stepped in and ordered the addition of voting hours on two extra days, the Saturday and Sunday right before the election. Husted then added those days. That's still not good enough for the NAACP, which has asked a judge to order more early voting hours and restoration of a so-called "golden week" right before Election Day during which citizens could register and vote on the same day.
Batchelder said having early voting hours on the weekend before the election makes matters difficult for county election officials:
"This is a burden for them to get all this stuff done and then be ready for the election shortly after the cutoff."
Rep. Kathleen Clyde, D-Kent, a frequent critic of recent Republican election law changes, said she does not oppose setting early voting hours in state law, so long as evenings and weekends are included.
"Any legislative attempts to limit early voting hours will be met with staunch opposition from me and my Democratic colleagues," Clyde said in a released statement. "I think we all would like to move on from these bitter partisan battles over voting rights, so I hope the Speaker treads carefully here."
There is more about the war on voting below the fold.
• President Obama nominates two for Election Assistance Commission: The 12-year-old commission came about as part of the Help America Vote Act. The idea was to have the EAC come up with best practices for elections after the 2000 fiasco in Florida that led to the Supreme Court decision which installed George W. Bush as president. The four-member commission is supposed to have two Democrats and two Republicans.
But what was supposed to be a bipartisan operation became embroiled in the photo voter ID controversy and commissioners started splitting 2-2 along party lines. Nothing got done. The House of Representatives voted to defund the EAC. Soon, both Republican and Democratic commissioners resigned.
While having just two commissioners on board won't allow any measures to be approved, it will give Democrats an official platform from which to speak on election matters. That means Republicans may suggest their own representatives to sit on the commission to avoid having no voice of their own there.
• L.A. Times headline writer gets it wrong in "six Californias" complaint: Foes of of splitting California into six states have alleged that circulators of a petition to place such a measure on the ballot claimed Thursday that there had been "several instances" of tricking people into backing the initiative with their signatures.
In a letter to Secretary of State Debra Bowen, One California, a bipartisan group that opposes the measure to divide California into six states, asked for an investigation of blatant misrepresentations of the initiative by signature gatherers. Among the allegations are that one circulator of the petition had said the initiative is in opposition to the effort to partition the state.
While the reporter got it right, the headline writer called the One California complaint a matter of "voter fraud." In fact, as election law expert Rick Hasen notes, the allegations are not about fraud by voters but rather attempts to defraud voters. Such errors are one factor in persuading people that voter fraud is widespread when the opposite is the case.
• NCSL reports that all-mail voting is doing well: The Canvass, which reports on news relevant to the National Congress of State Legislatures, points out that all-mail elections are "quietly flourishing." At least 22 states allow all-mail voting in at least some elections.
Rep. Dickey Lee Hullinghorst (D-Colo.) [the state's House majority leader] thought an all-mail election sounded like a bad idea when she heard Oregon was mailing out ballots to every voter during the 2000 election.
“It was a traditional thing for me—I liked to go to my polling place on Election Day,” she said.
A little more than a decade later, Hullinghorst was one of four legislators who sponsored HB 1303, a 2013 bill that made Colorado the third state to have all-mail elections or vote-by-mail elections.
Colorado already allowed jurisdictions to hold all-mail elections except in the case of general elections. But, even so, in the general election in 2012, according to the Colorado County Clerks Association, 74 percent of Coloradans who cast a ballot did so by mail under the no-excuse-needed absentee voting law. Colorado, Oregon and Washington now mail ballots to every registered voter and do not operate traditional in-person voting at precincts.
The benefits to voters is obvious. They can take their time at home to fill out their ballots. They lose any excuse, such as bad weather, for not voting. But there is also the benefit of lower costs to government. Although postage expenditures are, of course, added to the costs of running an election, there's no more need to pay polling place workers, a big portion of what state election officials must spend. A study in Colorado, “Changing the Way Colorado Votes: A Study of Selected Reforms,” surveyed 12 Colorado counties to see what they would have saved in 2010 if that year's election had been an all-mail vote. The report found that those counties would have saved an average of $1.05 per voter.
• Arlington County, Virginia, wants expired IDs approved by the State Board of Elections for voting purposes: But not everyone agrees. One person who offered advice to the board, Maureen Williams-Wolfe, argued that people often move out of state and keep their old licenses. She said: "Too many people move out of state and keep their previous state licenses. Crossing back and voting in Virginia from West Virginia, North Carolina, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Tennessee or Kentucky is not unheard of while also voting in their new state." She did not offer any examples of this actually happening.
• Judge okays two-track voting system for Kansas: In a victory for right-wing Secretary of State Kris Kobach and a defeat for the American Civil Liberties Union, county election officials will set aside the ballots of voters who registered using a federal form that does not include a proof-of-citizenship provision. Under the dual system, only ballots for congressional races will be counted in such cases.
• Robert Biersack: FEC data delayed is democracy denied: Bad enough that the Supreme Court has struck down limits on corporate campaign spending and individual contributions to federal candidates, but this is made worse by slow reporting on campaign expenditures by the Federal Election Commission. What this means in practice that citizens don't know in a timely fashion who is funding campaigns and how the money is being spent.
• Ana Marie Cox: Call voter ID laws what they are—racist on purpose: This summer, three lawsuits are testing the voter photo ID law in North Carolina and an ID law and gerrymandering Texas. "[T]he DoJ will make the jump from accusations that laws have a racial impact to straight-up calling voter ID laws racist.