Monthly Archives: March 2013

On March 4th Kenyans went to the polls to elect the country’s 4th president, among other officials. Most polling stations opened on time at 6 AM. Some, however, opened late due to late arrival of voting materials or the failure of the biometric voter registration (BVR) kits that were used to identify voters before they cast their ballots. It was the first time that Kenya had implemented an electronic voter register, the previous manual register having had hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ghost voters. It was also the first election following the enactment of a new constitution in 2010, which doubled the number of elective contests in the general election. With the botched 2007 general election still fresh on everyone’s mind, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) was keen on guarding the credibility of the process. The actual voting went relatively well. Besides a night attack on the eve of the election by a separatist group in the former Coast Province, there were no major incidents. Most polling stations closed at 5 PM and those that opened late were allowed to extend voting until 10 PM.

Kenya: Chief justice pledges fair hearing for election challenge | The Star Online

Kenya’s Supreme Court will handle any challenge to the result of last week’s presidential election in a fair and speedy manner, the chief justice said on Monday, two days after defeated candidate Raila Odinga threatened legal action over the outcome. Uhuru Kenyatta, indicted for crimes against humanity, was declared the winner on Saturday. Odinga refused to concede, although he urged his supporters to avoid any repeat of the violence that erupted after the last election in 2007. Chief justice Willy Mutunga, appointed in 2011 to reform a legal system accused of serving the interests of the elite, said politicians and political parties had confidence in the judiciary to handle all electoral disputes. A swift and transparent resolution of the dispute is seen as critical to restoring Kenya’s reputation as a stable democracy, something that was helped by last week’s largely peaceful vote.

Indonesia: Election Commission Vows to Ensure Voting Rights for Disabled People in 2014 | The Jakarta Globe

The General Election Commission (KPU) said on Monday it would guarantee that disabled people in Indonesia would be able to exercise their right to vote in the upcoming election. “This is not about increasing the participatory rate in the election — we are hoping there will be no discrimination against the disabled community,” KPU head Husni Kamil Manik said on Monday. Husni said the KPU was drafting a special regulation for disabled people to ensure the opportunity to use their voting rights and have convenient access to voting centers. The commission also signed a memorandum of understanding with several nongovernmental organizations focusing on increasing the participation of disabled people in Indonesian elections. “We must have an honest and fair election, accessible and nondiscriminatory. We hope this cooperation between the KPU and civil societies will pave a better way for Indonesian disabled to use their voting rights,” said Ariani Soekanwo, the chairwoman of the Center for Election Access for Citizens with Disabilities (PPUA Penca).

Iran: VPN use blocked ahead of elections | Wired UK

The Iranian government has blocked the use of most VPNs in the country, three months ahead of the presidential election. “Within the last few days illegal VPN ports in the country have been blocked,” head of Iran’s information and communications technology committee Ramezanali Sobhani-Fard confirmed to Iran’s Mehr news agency on 10 March. “Only legal and registered VPNs can from now on be used.” Project Ainita, a non-profit championing internet freedom in places like Iran, flagged up the issue at the end of February when access to encrypted international sites using a SSL proxy appeared to be impossible. “Email, proxies and all the secure channels that start with ‘https’ are not available,” a Tehran-based technology expert told Reuters.

Vatican City: In Conclave, Ritual and Secrecy in Selection of Pope | NYTimes.com

It begins with prayers chanted in an ancient language and ends with a tiny figure on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica unveiled as the supreme pontiff of more than a billion Catholics. The conclave to elect a pope, which starts Tuesday, unfolds with elaborate ritual, deep secrecy and politicking that would warm the heart of a machine politician. While carried out in the trappings of past centuries, “in reality, the elections are a political fact,” said Paolo Francia, author of “The Conclave.” The voting is minutely scripted. Rectangular paper ballots are counted, collected, pierced with a needle and burned. Exactly four rounds of voting are permitted each day. The winner’s name is intoned in Latin. It is a process dating back centuries, with a rich history of chicanery — like the bought election of Julius II in 1503 and the undermining of a leading contender, Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, in 1978, thanks to the leaking of an embargoed interview he gave. There are no formal nominees, and technically, each cardinal enters the conclave as a possible pope. The next pope must garner two-thirds of the votes, or 77 of 115 in this case. In practice, a few names always emerge as favorites beforehand, although the principal truism is, “Go in a pope, come out a cardinal.”

Editorials: From Rosa Parks to the Voting Rights Act: making equal rights a reality for all | Barbara Boxer/theGrio

I will never forget watching President Obama unveil the statue of one of my personal heroes in Statuary Hall last month – allowing civil rights icon Rosa Parks to take her rightful place in our nation’s Capitol. At the same time, just across the street, the fundamental promise that Rosa Parks spent her whole life fighting for – equal treatment for all Americans under the law – was under attack at the U.S. Supreme Court. While Parks was being celebrated for helping to bring down “the entire edifice of segregation,” as the President eloquently put it, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was busy declaring that the basic protections provided to the American people by the Voting Rights Act were a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” His stunning remark shows clearly that our dream of justice and equality for all is still unfinished – even 57 years after Rosa Parks courageously refused to budge from her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

Editorials: In the defense of our voting rights | Clyde Hughes/Journal and Courier

It is hard to imagine in a country built on the idea of democracy and one person/one vote, that there would be such a debate today over voting rights. Yet, here we are in 2013, and there is a debate over the rules of the voting game that has the potential of curtailing those rights. It seemed too ironic that we celebrated the 100th anniversary of a historic Washington, D.C., march for women’s suffrage on March 3, when days before the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on stripping the 1965 Voting Rights Act of a key provision that protects minority representation in much of the South. The National Women Suffrage Parade was held in 1913, the day before the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson, in an effort to bring attention to the issue. It would take seven years before the 19th Amendment would pass, guaranteeing women the right to vote.

Editorials: We’ve Known How to Fix Voting Since 1975—We Don’t Need Another Panel | J. Ray Kennedy/The Atlantic

Many Americans learned a valuable lesson in 2000: The technologies that emerged over the previous century for casting and counting votes are not always as reliable as they need to be, especially in close elections. Those tools — mechanical lever machines, punch cards, optical-mark readers and, most recently, touch-screen and push-button electronic units — emerged as urban populations grew and as pressure intensified for rapid tallying of results, largely from candidates and broadcasters. For years, they were widely accepted as accurate. But as early as 1975, Roy Saltman, an engineer at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology), undertook a privately funded study of voting and vote-counting technology and recommended that punch-card systems be dropped as soon as possible due to problems like hanging chads. Alarm. Yawn. Hit the snooze button. A 1988 update had the same reaction. In 1990, after extensive public hearings, the Federal Election Commission’s Office of Election Administration issued voluntary guidelines regarding the testing and certification of voting and vote-counting technologies. America was beginning to wake up. Around the same time, the House Subcommittee on Elections of the Committee on Administration held hearings on emerging voting technologies. The report of those hearings was a cornucopia of information. Another sign of awakening. Yet in 1994, one of the first actions of the new Republican majority was to eliminate the Subcommittee on Elections. Big yawn. Hit the snooze button.

Editorials: Voting rights: Americans died for it, the free world admires it, the Supreme Court should preserve it | Brent Budowsky/The Hill

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy recently made an important and wise comment when he said that with gridlock plaguing our political system, “A democracy should not be dependent for its major decisions on what nine unelected people from a narrow legal background have to say.” Considering the controversial history of recent Supreme Court decisions regarding elections, and the pending case regarding the Voting Rights Act, the nine unelected justices should uphold the Voting Rights Act, which was not passed under gridlock but was passed by overwhelming majorities of both parties, in both the House and Senate, including those representing states covered by the act. In my view the act should be upheld, period. For conservative justices who might be inclined to overturn the act or Section 5 of the act, I would suggest they consider that this would violate the conservative principle against extreme judicial activism. It would violate the conservative principle of avoiding political decisions. It would violate the conservative principle against the unelected judicial branch negating overwhelming agreement of the elected executive and legislative branches, which have substantially more expertise regarding free elections than those of “narrow legal background.”

Iowa: Legislative panel doesn’t stop voter purge rule | Associated Press

A controversial voting rule targeting immigrants without U.S. citizenship will take effect this month after a state oversight committee failed to stop it Friday, but activists are threating an immediate court fight. The rule, proposed by Secretary of State Matt Schultz, establishes a way to remove from voter registration lists an individual whose citizenship is questioned. The Republican says the change is needed to reduce voter fraud, which he’s made his key issue, but opponents say the rule intimidates immigrants who are citizens. The Administrative Rules Review Committee voted 5-5 along party lines on a motion to object to the rule. But since the objection needed six votes to pass, the rule will automatically take effect March 27. The legislative panel oversees state government agency rules and is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Schultz first proposed the change just a few weeks before November’s general election, but a Polk County judge blocked it after a lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa. The ACLU said Friday it would do the same on the day the new rule takes effect.

Hawaii: Legislature Considering Allowing Election-Day Registration | Big Island Now

Residents who procrastinate and fail to register to vote by the deadline would still be able to cast ballots on election day under a bill approved by the state House of Representatives. House Bill 321, which has been referred to several Senate committees, would permit residents to register at the same time they went in to vote. Current state law requires that voters register 30 days before the election. The change to allow election-day registration has been proposed as a way of increasing voting participation, lawmakers say.

Maryland: Use of old voting machines angers state senators | Baltimore Post-Examiner

Sen. Richard Madaleno said Thursday on the floor of the Senate he was shocked by the news that Maryland will not be replacing old touchscreen voting machines with more advanced technology before the 2014 election. “I was under the impression that we were going to have new voting machines in place by then,” Madaleno said during debate on a bill to make voting easier. He added he was concerned that an amendment on that bill calling for the State Board of Elections to research voters’ wait times would distract the board from the urgent task of purchasing modern voting machines. “I’m worried that we’re inadvertently giving the State Board of Elections an excuse to say that they’re not able to get the new voting system,” said Madaleno, a Montgomery County Democrat. The amendment was later passed.

Michigan: Election official seeks more transparency | The Morning Sun

Michigan’s top elections official wants to require political campaigns to report financial contributions within 48 hours after they receive them, one of several proposals aimed at giving voters nearly real-time information about the money behind the candidates. As part of this week’s observance of National Sunshine Week, an initiative aimed at improving government transparency, Secretary of State Ruth Johnson said she is working with lawmakers to draft legislation and push through some long-elusive changes to the state’s campaign finance system. Under current law, voters often have to wait months before being able to access critical information about contributors to groups funding the candidates. “That’s a long time not to have that information, with lots of voting going on and lots of decision making,” she said.

Nebraska: Voter ID debate rages in Nebraska committee hearing | The Grand Island Independent

Opponents of a voter identification bill threatened a lawsuit Thursday if Nebraska lawmakers approve it, while supporters cast the measure as a preventive effort to protect against voter fraud. The issue triggered a heated debate during a legislative hearing, where opponents outnumbered supporters by a nearly 5-to-1 margin. Some compared the bill to poll taxes levied in the post-Civil War South to keep minorities from voting. The head of a Nebraska taxpayers’ group argued that any person who was “too lazy” to request a free state-issued ID probably wouldn’t vote on Election Day. Sen. Charlie Janssen of Fremont, a Republican candidate for governor, introduced the bill. He’s tried similar measures several times, with last year’s attempt making it to the floor after supporters failed to overcome an eight-hour filibuster. Voter ID, an issue throughout the nation’s statehouses, is trumpeted by Republicans as a way to prevent voter fraud, while Democrats call it a political ploy to suppress voters who may not have proper identification, particularly groups that typically vote Democratic. No cases of voter fraud have been reported in Nebraska. The bill would entitle voters without a driver’s license to a free, state-issued identification card. The Department of Motor Vehicles would give free cards to voters who are indigent, and voters without IDs would still be allowed to cast provisional ballots.

Editorials: Ohio election law needs an upgrade | The Columbus Dispatch

Four or five months ago, Secretary of State Jon Husted probably would have been grateful for people to forget about Ohio elections for a while. Now, however, he needs the attention of state and federal lawmakers. When in-state and out-of-state partisans are done besieging this swing state during presidential-election years — trumping up charges of widespread voter fraud or voter suppression to rally their troops across the country — it seems they forget all about the importance of smooth, valid elections in Ohio. But Husted’s job remains the same: ensuring that every election is well run. The General Assembly should do its part to help, by enacting the common-sense reforms for which Husted has asked, starting with allowing online voter registration and establishing uniform days and hours for voting.

Ohio: Redistricting reform stalling in Ohio House | Dayton Daily News

Despite calls for urgency from fellow Republicans, the Ohio House and its leader are pumping the breaks on the latest round of legislation that would overhaul how Ohio draws its election maps. Senate President Keith Faber, R-Celina, said passing a plan that would require both Republicans and Democrats to sign off on congressional and state legislative districts is a top priority. The Ohio Senate approved that plan 32-1 in December. Senators reintroduced a bipartisan new version in the new legislative session that began this year. “I’d expect the senate to act soon,” Faber said. But the Ohio House, led by Speaker William Batchelder, R-Medina, is taking a more deliberate approach. Rather than address the Senate plan directly in the legislature, Batchelder has decided that redistricting reform should be first taken up by the Constitutional Modernization Commission, a 32-member advisory body that meets four times a year. The commission has 10 years to recommend changes to Ohio’s constitution. Any changes would ultimately require the approval of the legislature.

Australia: Electoral Commission bids for change | Bunbury Mail

Many people who turned up to cast their vote on Saturday were surprised to find out they were one of 240,000 West Australians that were not listed on the electoral roll, prompting the WA Electoral Commission to look to other states for a solution. WA Electoral Commissioner Warwick Gately said while the commission often contacted people at what were believed to be their new addresses, the onus was for voters to respond and provide their details so they could be enrolled. Some people simply chose not to turn up, despite voting being compulsory. Mr Gately said a solution which had been picked up in New South Wales, was to enrol people automatically as a result of change of address information supplied to government departments. For this to happen, legislative change is required.

Kenya: Audit after ‘count errors’ | BBC News

Kenya’s electoral commission has said it is auditing election results so far tallied to iron out discrepancies that have been detected. With 87% of constituencies declared from Monday’s vote, Uhuru Kenyatta retains a significant lead over his rival Prime Minister Raila Odinga. He has 50% of the vote, against 43.3% for Mr Odinga. A candidate needs more than 50% to avoid a run-off. Officials had said the results would be finalised on Friday. “There may have been errors and discrepancies here and there. Some we have already detected and we are working on them,” Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper quotes James Oswago, chief executive of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), as saying. … Mr Oswago’s announcement came after Mr Odinga’s Cord alliance had complained that the votes from 11 constituencies were missing from the 254 officially tallied so far, the Daily Nation reports. This meant that Mr Odinga was missing 281,611 votes compared to 25,863 for Mr Kenyatta for those constituencies, Cord said.

Kenya: Kenyatta Leads in Kenyan Election as Opponent Urges Recount | Bloomberg

Uhuru Kenyatta, facing crimes against humanity charges, led Kenya’s presidential vote as the electoral commission rejected his opponent’s call to stop tallying because of flaws and alleged manipulation. The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission said it had found no cases where votes cast exceeded the number of registered voters, as Prime Minister Raila Odinga’sCoalition for Reform and Democracy, or CORD, alleged earlier in the day, Chairman Issack Hassan said. “With the rigorous verification in place, there is no room to doctor the results whatsoever by any election official,” he told reporters in Nairobi, the capital. “We cannot stop tallying. This is a legal process.” Kenyatta, a deputy prime minister, received 3.13 million votes and Odinga got 2.56 million of the ballots declared from 45 percent of constituencies, according to the commission. Accusations by Odinga that he was robbed of victory in the last presidential election in December 2007 sparked two months of clashes that left more than 1,100 people dead and another 350,000 homeless.

Venezuela: Date Set To Elect Chavez’s Successor | NPR

Venezuela’s elections commission announced Saturday that voters will go to the polls on April 14 to choose a successor to President Hugo Chavez, who died this week after a battle with cancer. The nation’s constitution mandated that an election be called within 30 days of Chavez’s death on March 5, but the scheduled date falls outside of that window. Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s vice president, was sworn in as interim leader on Friday. Opposition coalition leader and state governor Henrique Capriles, who ran against Chavez in the October election, has disputed Maduro’s right to be interim leader. Capriles is expected to be the opposition candidate against Maduro in the special election, though many in his party are concerned about the vote’s fairness.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for March 3-10 2013

March 10, 2013

The Election Assistance Commission and NIST held a conference on the future of voting technology that included a presentation of California’s proposed development of public voting equipment. Facing South surveyed the renewed efforts in State legislatures to pass voter ID requirements. The New Yorker reviewed the history of the Voting Rights Act after contentious oral arguments in the Supreme Court last week. The Florida House passed sweeping election law changes, many of which reverse changes made prior to the 2012 election. The Maryland Board of Elections has proposed new ways of delaying the implementation of the State’s 2010 deadline to abandon touchscreen voting equipment, while New Jersey’s even older direct recording electronic equipment was the subject of a continuing lawsuit. Italy remains without a government two weeks after an inconclusive election and Kenya’s elections were marred by tabulation software errors.

National: U.S. Election Assistance Commission and NIST trumpet innovation in voting technology | California Forward

Last week, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission hosted a Future of Voting Systems Symposium. The three-day meeting outside of Washington, DC was designed to look at the latest developments in the field of voting technology and assess how such developments mesh with the current federal structure for testing and certification. The takeaway from the meeting was sobering and exciting; while it is increasingly clear that existing testing and certification requirements aren’t working, there is a burst of creativity underway by election officials, technologists and other stakeholders in the effort to design a different and better approach.

National: New battle over voter ID in the South | Facing South

It’s like 2011 all over again. It was two years ago that, after Republicans claimed big gains in state legislatures across the South and country in the 2010 mid-terms, lawmakers made a national push for changes to voting laws, with one of the most controversial being restrictive bills requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls. Now, with the 2012 elections behind them, state GOP leaders have again pledged to make voter photo ID a priority this year. But has the debate — and public sentiment about voter restrictions — changed this time? States leading the push in 2013 include Arkansas, where Republicans won over the state legislature in 2012 and a House panel advanced a voter ID bill this week, and North Carolina, where a Democratic governor’s veto staved off an ID bill in 2012, but newly elected GOP Gov. Pat McCrory has signaled he’ll support a looming measure.

National: In Supreme Court Debate on Voting Rights Act, a Dubious Use of Statistics | Nate Silver/NYTimes.com

In oral arguments before the Supreme Court last week, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. introduced a statistical claim that he took to imply that an important provision of the Voting Rights Act has become outmoded. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which is being challenged by Shelby County, Ala., in the case before the court, requires that certain states, counties and townships with a history of racial discrimination get approval (or “pre-clearance”) from the Department of Justice before making changes to their voting laws. But Chief Justice Roberts said that Mississippi, which is covered by Section 5, has the best ratio of African-American to white turnout, while Massachusetts, which is not covered, has the worst, he said. Chief Justice Roberts’s statistics appear to come from data compiled in 2004 by the Census Bureau, which polls Americans about their voting behavior as part of its Current Population Survey. In 2004, according to the Census Bureau’s survey, the turnout rate among white voting-aged citizens was 60.2 percent in Mississippi, while the turnout rate among African-Americans was higher, 66.8 percent. In Massachusetts, conversely, the Census Bureau reported the white turnout rate at 72.0 percent but the black turnout rate at just 46.5 percent.

Editorials: Supreme Court: Uphold the Voting Rights Act! | Ari Berman/The Nation

On Sunday, March 3, Representative John Lewis locked arms with Luci Baines Johnson and Vice President Joe Biden and marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge here. Forty-eight years earlier, on “Bloody Sunday,” Lewis was badly beaten by Alabama state troopers at the foot of the bridge while attempting to march from Selma to Montgomery in support of voting rights. Eight days later, Luci’s father introduced the Voting Rights Act before a joint session of Congress. “When Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965,” Lewis said, “he helped free and liberate all of us.” At the time of Bloody Sunday, only 393 of the 15,000 black voting-age residents of Selma’s Dallas County were registered to vote. Today Selma has a black mayor, a black congresswoman and six black city council members. Since 2000, Lewis has led a congressional pilgrimage to Selma for every anniversary of Bloody Sunday, paying homage to how the VRA transformed American democracy. This year’s march had special significance.

Editorials: Scalia scorns vote protections | Verna Williams /Cincinnati.com

On my constitutional law exam this year, I invited students to comment on a quote from a scholar – Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. What he said is worth considering in light of his gasp-inducing comment during the argument in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 case, Shelby County v. Holder: “Originalism seems to me more compatible with the nature and purpose of a Constitution in a democratic system. A democratic society does not, by and large, need constitutional guarantees to insure that its laws will reflect ‘current values.’ Elections take care of that quite well. The purpose of constitutional guarantees (especially those guaranteeing individual rights) is precisely to prevent the law from reflecting certain changes in original values that the society adopting the Constitution thinks fundamentally undesirable. Or, more precisely, to require the society to devote to the subject the long and hard consideration required for a constitutional amendment before those particular values can be cast aside.” This is Justice Scalia in his element. Originalism as protector of constitutional values against the vagaries of electoral politics. Requiring us to think “long and hard” before casting aside those foundational notions. And yet.

Editorials: The Voting Rights Act Isn’t a Racial Entitlement | Politic365

“Come, listen, all you girls and boys, I’m just from Tuckahoe; I’m going to sing a little song, My name’s Jim Crow.” These are the two opening lines to a song entitled “Jump Jim Crow” made famous by a prominent minstrel actor named Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice in 1828. When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made his derogatory, insensitive comments last Wednesday about Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act from his bench, this was the first thing that popped up in my mind. What Justice Scalia and his fellow justices may need is a history lesson on why Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was put there in the first place and why it must remain there. Scalia is known for hurling verbal bombs from his seat in the chamber, but last Wednesday he crossed the line. Under Section 5, parts of the country with histories of discriminatory election practices have to ask for preclearance from the Justice Department before making any changes to their voting rules. Scalia declared, “I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It’s been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.”

Editorials: Voting Rights Act still needed | South Florida Sun-Sentinel

A case before the U.S. Supreme Court once again asks the justices to change the Voting Rights Act of 1965, arguably one of the nation’s most effective civil-rights laws. Since its inception, the number of blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans in the political process has grown almost to the point of parity with white voters. Such progress was cited last week when attorneys representing Shelby County, Ala., asked the justices to strike down a key provision in the law because they believe it has served its purpose. Granted, a lot has changed since blacks in the South were denied the right to vote due to rigid laws and societal norms that denied them basic rights because of the color of their skin. The days of Jim Crow have passed. But the need for strong federal oversight to protect against discriminatory voting practices has not. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is still needed, as is Section 5, the key component that requires a select group of states, counties and other jurisdictions with the worst history of racial discrimination to obtain approval from the U.S. Department of Justice before implementing any change to their voting procedures.

Editorials: Bloody Sunday, the Voting Rights Act, and the Movement of History | The New Yorker

Forty-eight years ago Thursday, five hundred or so activists gathered to march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks in the state. They didn’t make it. The march was attacked by state and local police, who were cheered on by crowds of white onlookers in an assault so brutal that it has come to be known as Bloody Sunday. Seventeen people, including future congressman John Lewis, were hospitalized. Last weekend, an array of activists and elected officials gathered in Selma, as they have for many years, to commemorate that march. But this year, the commemoration had a special significance: it came just days after the Supreme Court heard arguments in Shelby v. Holder, a case that threatens to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act, which might never have passed were it not for the aborted Bloody Sunday march and the chaotic, violent tableau playing out in Alabama. If we take nothing else from this anniversary, it’s a reminder that the history of race in this country resembles a pendulum, not an arrow.

Minnesota: Minnesota woman, 86, charged with voter fraud | TwinCities.com