A federal appeals court has given same-day registration and
out-of-precinct voting a chance of resurrection in North Carolina.
This week in the war on voting is a joint project of Joan McCarter and Meteor Blades.
Two important federal court decisions were issued this week on voting in Ohio and North Carolina.
First, Ohio. The conservative Supreme Court majority ruled that, for now, the state can eliminate the "Golden Week" during which Ohioans can register and vote the same day. While that leaves 28 days of early voting in place, more than the majority of states, according to Secretary of State Jon Husted, it bars casting ballots past 5 PM before Election Day and limits early voting on weekends. The Court split 5-4.
The NAACP and ACLU, which sued over when Golden Week was dropped and won their case in the lower courts, said the change will have a disparate impact on minority and low-income voters. They argued that once a state implements early voting they are violating the 14th Amendment and Voting Rights Act to take it away. The case is still to be heard and the preliminary rulings by the district and appeals courts in the matter so far indicate that the civil rights organizations may win when the merits of their complaints are heard at trial. But that won't happen before this year's election.
Husted expressed pleasure over the Court's one-paragraph ruling, saying that he had always wanted all Ohio counties to have the same early voting schedules. That, in fact, is an outright lie. In 2012, Ohio county election boards—comprising two Democrats and two Republicans each—voted on how many early voting hours to have. In Republican-heavy counties, Democratic board members voted pretty much the way the GOP board members did. But in Democratic strongholds, the Republican board members voted against more early voting while Democrats voted for them. Husted broke the tie in the Republicans' favor, making for different early voting schedules in different counties.
In North Carolina, matters went somewhat the other direction in a 2-1, 69-page ruling from a panel for the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Plaintiffs had sought a preliminary injunction staying implementation of a new state law until a trial decided whether it passes constitutional and statutory muster. The district court gave them a no and state officials a thumbs-up to enforce the law. But the appeals panel temporarily has blocked implementation of two provisions: same-day registration and the elimination of voting outside one's precinct. Those are the items in the law that would have the most negative impact on voting. The panel affirmed the lower court's approval of the law's reduction in the number of early voting days, expansion of what can be done to challenge voters and ending county election boards' discretion when it comes to adding an extra hour on election day in extraordinary circumstances.
North Carolina officials have appealed the panel's ruling to the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts
Below the orange butterfly ballot are more war on voting items.
• Study: ID laws financially burden voters. A report from Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice found that getting the documentation needed to acquire an official photo ID can be costly, according to researchers:
They included everything from the cost of waiting to the cost of traveling and obtaining documentation. Their conclusion? The costs can range anywhere from $75 to $400 per person. The study is not a comprehensive, since it examines evidence from just three states— Texas, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, which had its law blocked by the U.S. Justice Department but upheld by a District Court. But as many as 11 percent of voters don’t have a photo ID, according to the Brennan Center, and the study illustrates the challenge these people—many of them very poor—would face trying to get new identification documents. “The more it can be shown that is a substantial financial cost, the clearer it is that these laws are unconstitutional,” said Richard Sobel, author of the study.
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Plaintiffs seek Supreme Court ruling on Wisconsin voter ID law: A 5-5 ruling by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals gave Wisconsin the go-ahead to implement one of the nation's strictest photo voter ID laws after a district court judge had ruled against it. Now plaintiffs in the case
are seeking a ruling by the Supreme Court that vacate the stay 7th Circuit put on district court judge's preliminary injunction blocking implementation of the law.
• Close contest spurs Republicans to seek purge of voters from Illinois rolls:
With their sights on unseating a Democratic governor and winning back several congressional seats, Republicans have allocated $1 million in Cook County alone — from fundraising and the Republican Governors Association — to examine voter rolls and recruit 5,000 GOP election judges to watch over polling places in Democrat-heavy Chicago.
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Arkansas Supreme Court hears arguments in voter ID case: In April and early May, a county judge twice found the state's voter ID law out of bounds but stayed an order mandating its implementation until the state supreme court could hear the case. It listened to oral arguments Thursday. The law was in effect for the May 20 Arkansas primary. The ACLU says that as a result of the law, as many as a thousand ballots went uncounted when a would-be voter could not supply adequate identification.
• Texas judge sues over voter ID law: He says the law is meant to prevent voter fraud, something he claims the authors of the state constitution never intended.
• 110 million of nation's 225 million eligible voters now have access to online registration:
The following states allow online voter registration: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia, and Washington. Additionally four states are in the process of building online systems: Hawaii, Massachusetts, Nebraska, and West Virginia.
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Commentary by Michael Mestitz and Chelsea Priest on the Supreme Court's Ohio ruling:
The decision to issue the stay brings the Court back into contentious political waters even at the very the start of its 2014 term, which has its first day of argument on October 6. Although the order is unsigned, all of the four justices traditionally considered to make up the “liberal” wing of the court—Justices Ginsberg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan—dissented from the order to stay the case, meaning that they would have let the ruling of the lower court stand. The “conservative” justices, including Anthony Kennedy, who is often the deciding vote on close legal questions, voted to in favor of the stay. The voting rights question and the 5-4 split along ideological lines recalls the very controversial 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, in which the Court overruled a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.
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Early voting increases in Florida despite cut in the number of days.