Montgomery was the final stop Wednesday on a bus tour of Alabama and Mississippi aimed at keeping the 1965 Voting Rights intact. The “Never Forget, Never Again” pilgrimage for voting rights came to the Alabama State House on Wednesday to raise awareness of a pending case before the U.S. Supreme Court that could allow some states to change voting laws.
The House of Representatives passed a bill Tuesday pushing back the voter registration period from 10 days prior to an election to 17. It now goes to the Senate. But even if the bill passes the Senate and is signed into law, opponents say they will file a complaint with the Justice Department in an attempt to block it. The measure was pushed by voter registrars around the state who said they need the additional time to finalize voter lists, but it drew strong criticism from Democrats saying it was an attempt to block minority voting. “We are not helping Alabamians when we start closing doors and put obstacles in their way to vote,” said Rep. James Buskey, D-Mobile.
Lawmaking proved slow-going in the Alabama House of Representatives Tuesday, as a bill that would move up the deadline to register to vote drew filibusters from black lawmakers. The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Wes Long, R-Guntersville, would move the deadline to register to vote from 10 days prior to an election to 17 days prior. Registrars have supported adoption of the measure, saying they need the additional time to prepare a proper list of voters for elections and correct any mistakes that may emerge on voter registration forms. The bill passed the House in 2011 — with a window of 14 days — but did not move out of the Senate.
Black lawmakers in the House of Representatives today vowed to fight a bill that would move the deadline to register to vote in Alabama from 10 days before an election to 17 days. County registrars are seeking the change for more time to process voter rolls before elections. But African-American legislators called the bill an effort to disenfranchise and discourage voters. “This is a bill made just for suppressing the vote,” Rep. John Rogers, D-Birmingham, said.
The Selma City Council became one of the first municipalities to publicly show their support for the continued installation of Section 5 in the Voting Rights Act when the council approved a resolution in support of the voting preclearance Tuesday. Though the resolution has no legal weight as to whether or not the city of Selma has to gain preclearance through officials in Washington D.C. when changing voting lines, polling locations or other electoral matters, the resolution shows Selma’s support of Section 5 in an official manner. “The city of Selma recognizes the fight for change and equality and understands the significance of the Voting Rights Movement and the need and support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” the resolution reads.
If the Supreme Court strikes down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act this year, it will largely come as the result of events that began in Shelby County, Alabama, where a disputed city council election has thrown into doubt the future of a landmark law that stops state and local governments from making it hard for minorities to vote. Long-time Shelby County resident Frank Ellis is the attorney who brought the suit, which the Supreme Court will hear Wednesday. In his argument:
“The South has changed, it is not the same as it was in 1964…The whole country has changed, we are a dynamic society, not just in Alabama, but everywhere.” Indeed, one need look no further than the results of the most recent national elections for evidence of just how “dynamic” a society this is. For some reason, Chief Justice Roberts decided only a few days after the president’s re-election to revisit an issue he had ducked just three years earlier in a case which bears the imposing title, “Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No.1 vs. Holder.”
History will repeat itself in the chambers of the Supreme Court this week. The very state where the fight for voting rights reached its critical peak nearly 50 years ago is once again at the center of the dispute over democracy in America. But oddly, the political and legal odds may now be tilting away from civil rights and back toward an era in which the federal government had limited power to protect voters of color in the South from the machinations of local leaders. The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Wednesday from an Alabama county that is challenging the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. That section protects voters of color in sixteen states (some fully covered, some partially), many of which have long brutal histories of denying black Americans their voting rights. It does this by making covered jurisdictions “preclear” election law changes with the federal government before implementation.
A north Alabama lawmaker is kicking an idea around Montgomery that could dramatically change the state’s election process. Rep. Mike Ball, R-Madison, said he’s researching and gathering opinions about discontinuing most party primary runoffs. He said he wants to file a bill to do so by the end of March. “We go to the polls an awful lot in Alabama,” Ball said last week. Ball said because of runoffs, which are six weeks after the primaries, almost an entire legislative session can go by without a district seat being filled. Case in point: Former Rep. Jeremy Oden’s seat representing a portion of Morgan, Cullman and Blount counties. Oden resigned late last year when he was appointed to the state Public Service Commission. If no primary runoff is required in the special election to replace Oden, a new representative will be elected March 26. But if a primary runoff were required, the special general election won’t occur until May 7. The legislative session will end somewhere around May 20.
Alabama’s practice of discriminating against minorities at the ballot box is a relic from a bygone era and the state no longer deserves to be punished for it, according to papers Alabama’s attorney general has filed with the Supreme Court. “Alabama has a new generation of leaders with no connection to the tragic events of 1965,” Attorney General Luther Strange wrote in a brief filed last week. “The effects of those events on voting and political representation have now, thankfully, faded away.”
A volunteer network started by Tea Party members in Texas has taken steps to verify the addresses of college students in Huntsville, prompting local Democrats to cry foul. True the Vote last month sent a fax to Oakwood University, a historically black Seventh-day Adventist college in Huntsville, to verify the addresses of more than 120 students who are registered voters. The list included names alongside dates of birth. “I’m outraged about this,” said Clete Wetli, chairman of the Madison County Democratic party. Wetli on Friday said True the Vote is “aligned with the far right and Tea Party activists” and is using “fear and suppression” to attempt to influence elections.
Members of the local Democratic Party are upset that an unknown number of ballots in the March primary election may not have been counted because the voters’ mailing addresses did not match their addresses on file at their precincts. One of the party members, Milton Morrow, who has run for political office in the past, has filed a formal complaint with Secretary of State Beth Chapman’s office asking for a cease and desist order against Mobile County Probate Judge Don Davis. Davis had flagged 4,000 such voters who moved from one part of Mobile County to another and ordered that their ballots be cast as “provisional ballots,” which, by law, count only if the Board of Registrars can demonstrate that the voter is eligible. Napoleon Bracy, a state representative from Prichard who heads the Mobile County Democratic Executive Committee, said he’s concerned about the practice as municipal elections in most all local cities are on Aug. 28.
Rep. Terri Sewell is angry that Alabama wants registered voters such as her wheelchair-bound father to show a photo ID before casting a ballot. The Birmingham Democrat, Alabama’s only black member of Congress, said her 77-year-old father doesn’t have photo ID since he let his driver’s license expire years ago. If the state’s law takes effect as scheduled in 2014, thousands of elderly, disabled and minority Alabama voters will either stay home each election day or will have to make “extraordinary efforts” to get a driver’s license, passport or other form of identification, Sewell said.
The Alabama Attorney General’s Office has opened yet another front in the legal battle to scale back the 1965 Voting Rights Act. With a lawsuit filed this week in Washington, D.C., add Alabama to the growing list of governments complaining to judges that they’re chafing under the burdens of the 47-year-old law that doesn’t let them run their elections without strict supervision. All or part of 16 states — those with a blatant history of discrimination against minority voters — have to get permission from the federal government before they change any election-related procedures. Alabama is one of those states. “The fact that so many covered states are now willing to come out against the Voting Rights Act is a sea change since the act’s amendments passed 98-0 in the Senate in 2006,” said Rick Hasen, professor at the University of California Irvine School of Law and election law expert. Congress approved a 25-year extension of the law in 2006 and, as with previous renewals, sparked a new round of legal action. Shelby County has a case pending at the U.S. Supreme Court, as does a jurisdiction in North Carolina. And other states from around the South have challenges at various stages in the legal process.
Alabama’s attorney general filed a lawsuit Thursday asking a federal court to approve a redistricting plan for his Legislature without requiring the plan to go through the U.S. Justice Department for approval to make sure it doesn’t discriminate against minority voters. The lawsuit seeks a declaratory judgment from a three-judge panel of U.S. District Court in Washington finding that the plan approved by the Alabama Legislature during a special session in May does not deny or abridge the right to vote based on race or color. Joy Patterson, a spokeswoman for the Alabama Attorney General’s office, said the state has the option of seeking pre-clearance from the Justice Department or asking for a three-judge panel to do it. She said the attorney general’s office filed a similar suit last year for its new Congressional and state school board districts. But the Justice Department ended up preclearing those districts anyway.
Shelby County took its challenge of the Voting Rights Act to the U.S. Supreme Court today, asking the justices to declare part of the 1965 law an unfair burden on states such as Alabama where the federal government still oversees elections for evidence of racial discrimination. Shelby County is appealing two lower court decisions that upheld the constitutionality of the landmark civil rights-era law. If the Supreme Court justices agree to accept the case, they’ll schedule it for oral arguments sometime after they return in October, and it would be one of the highest-profile cases of the court’s 2012-13 term.
Faye Cochran is convinced voter fraud is rampant in Alabama, and she has her reasons. Cochran is the chairwoman of the Board of Registrars in Hale County, where two years ago, a trio of Hale County residents pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges in a voter fraud investigation. Cochran believes similar cases of fraud are happening across Alabama. And she thinks Alabama’s new voter ID law, which would require a photo ID at the polls beginning in 2014, will help bring that fraud to an end. “You have to prove who you are to get a Social Security check,” she said. “You have to prove who you are to check a book out of the library. You should have to prove who you are to vote.” Voter ID is fast becoming a hot topic in this presidential election year. Just last week, in a speech at the NAACP’s national convention in Houston, Attorney General Eric Holder compared photo ID requirements to the poll taxes Southern states once imposed to keep black voters away from the polls. At the same time, Texas officials were in a federal courtroom arguing that the Lone Star State’s photo ID requirement was needed to prevent fraud at the ballot box. But it’s not at all clear, some experts say, that there’s really that much fraud to prevent — or that photo ID is the best way to do it.
Some 20,000 registered voters in Mobile County do not live where they signed up to vote, and Probate Judge Don Davis’ efforts to deal with that in the primary election this year has drawn complaints from critics. Davis points to three different state statutes indicating that it is illegal for voters to cast ballots in a precinct where they do not live. The Mobile County Board of Registrars, backed by an administrative rule issued by the state Secretary of State’s Office in 1994, contends that people should be allowed to vote in whichever precinct they are registered. Davis said that he is waiting for a response to a request he made in April for an attorney general’s opinion, which carries the force of law absent a court order. He said he wants to make sure to get it right. “We pride ourselves on having proper, correct elections in Mobile County,” he said.
The Alabama Legislature passed plans early Thursday morning to redraw the 140 districts of state lawmakers, but did so in the Senate over angry and loud objections of Democratic senators. Democratic Sens. Rodger Smitherman and Bobby Singleton yelled for the proposed map of the 105 House districts to be read in its entirety, which some estimated would take 36 hours or longer. They said it violated the constitutional right of a senator to ignore their request to have it read. Smitherman, a Birmingham Democrat who had already had an angry confrontation with a senator in the chamber earlier, walked the Senate floor yelling about racism and prejudice, referring to the Ku Klux Klan and saying Alabama has gone backward. He continued shouting those words and phrases during the vote, and after the Senate recessed and members began to leave the floor.
Jefferson County Presiding Court Judge Scott Vowell on Tuesday ordered Jefferson County to retabulate the votes from the March 13 Republican presidential primary in precincts that are split between two congressional districts, a review that could change how the state GOP awards one of its delegates. Vowell also ordered the Alabama Republican Party to pay for the review if the state does not reimburse Jefferson County. The order came after a lawsuit was filed Friday by the Alabama Republican Party arguing that votes in 48 split precincts in Jefferson and six other counties failed to identify which congressional district the presidential vote came from. The issue is significant because some of the party’s presidential delegates are awarded based on how each candidate fared within the congressional districts. Alabama Republican Party Executive Director T.J. Maloney, testifying Tuesday, said 16 of the split precincts are in Jefferson County.
With the Alabama Senate considering a recall law for all officials throughout the state, voters could look north to the recall fights in Wisconsin and express some concern whether the state would become a brutal, political, three-ring circus. However, because of the way the potential Alabama law is structured, the likelihood of misuse is small. Alabama would be the 19th state to allow for recalls for state-level officials (an additional state, Illinois, allows it just for the governor). Alabama is already one of the 36 states that allow some municipalities to provide for a recall of local officials. Among those 18 states with the recall for state-level officials, there is a deep and very meaningful divide. Eleven of them have what is called a “political recall” — meaning they can recall an official for any reason whatsoever. The famous recalls in U.S. history, such as the ones in Wisconsin and the recall of California Gov. Gray Davis in 2003, were not for any charges of incompetence or ethical violations reason. They were solely for political reasons.
A printing mistake on some Mobile County ballots in Tuesday’s election caused electronic voting machines to reject them — forcing poll workers to count roughly 3,000 ballots by hand into the early morning hours, Probate Court officials said today. “This little white dot,” said Probate Judge Don Davis, pointing to a white, donut-shaped mark barely one-tenth of an inch wide. The tiny error, though, ended up in an important spot, on the security markings that let the electronic machines know whether to count it. The markings look like a bar code stretching along the side of the ballot.
The faulty marks appeared only on Republican primary ballots for precincts within the contested Mobile County Commission District 3. Not all of the District 3 ballots were affected, officials said. Poll workers at 12 precincts on Tuesday noticed that machines were rejecting some ballots as they were scanned in.
Eleven voting centers in Mobile County reported issues with electronic ballot scanners during Tuesday’s primary election. Most of those voting centers were in the south or west parts of the county, according to Roxann Dyess, county election coordinator. Generally, the precincts reported issues with some of the ballots fed into the scanners, although 1 — the Odd Fellows Lodge in Irvington — was unable to scan any of the ballots cast, she said late Tuesday. The ballots that weren’t electronically scanned were placed into secure emergency bins, to be collected by deputies and Probate Court staff, Dyess said. She described the issue as being one where the machines accepted the ballots as they were physically fed into them by poll workers, but then displayed error messages that prohibited the ballots from being counted.
If primary elections are close enough today in 29 counties, including Montgomery and Elmore, the results might not be known until near the end of the month. More than 1,000 military and overseas absentee ballots won’t be counted until later in the month, which could make some races too close to call today. That includes the GOP presidential contest, where the winner may not become known today if the non-absentee vote totals show the race is too close to call. There are also absentee ballots, the secretary of state’s office did not know how many, sent to Alabamians living elsewhere in the United States.
Television advertisements in Alabama and Mississippi promoting rival Republican presidential contenders have been paid for almost entirely by independent political action committees instead of the candidates’ campaigns. So-called Super-PACs supplied 91 percent of the 5,592 campaign ads that aired on broadcast television stations in the two states in the past month, according to data from New York- based Kantar Media’s CMAG, which tracks advertising. Alabama and Mississippi hold primary elections today, and polls indicate a close race in each among former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
It won’t just be about history when crowds cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge this weekend and recreate the famous civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery — it will be about targeting Alabama’s toughest-in-the-nation immigration laws and its new voter ID requirements. Organizers expect thousands to participate in the crossing of the Selma bridge for the 47th anniversary of the 1965 incident when peaceful demonstrators were attacked by police in what became known as “Bloody Sunday.” The violence helped spark passage of the Voting Rights Act. They say hundreds plan to make the 50-mile march between Selma and Montgomery over the next week.
The state of Alabama filed a response Wednesday to a temporary restraining order issued over absentee ballots that were sent late to military and overseas voters. The response filed Wednesday lists some of the precautions the secretary of state’s office took and the special circumstances that led to the delays. County and state election officials, meanwhile, sparred over where to place the blame for the delays. The U.S. Justice Department filed a suit late Friday against Alabama and Secretary of State Beth Chapman alleging that the state failed to send absentee ballots to military and overseas voters by the required deadline for the March 13 primaries. U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson issued a temporary restraining order against Chapman and the state Tuesday that requires them to work with the Justice Department to decide on a remedy for the late ballots.
All elected officials, and those who help finance elections in the expectation that certain promises will be kept — and everyone who cares about the rule of law — should hope the Supreme Court agrees to hear Don Siegelman’s appeal of his conviction. Until the court clarifies what constitutes quid pro quo political corruption, Americans engage in politics at their peril because prosecutors have dangerous discretion to criminalize politics. Siegelman, a Democrat, was elected Alabama’s governor in 1998 and was defeated in 2002. In 2006, he and a prominent Alabama businessman — Richard Scrushy, former chief executive of HealthSouth — were convicted of bribery.
The chances that Shelby County’s challenge to the Voting Rights Act will make it to the U.S. Supreme Court have improved since the Justice Department announced it is rethinking its position in a similar North Carolina case. In a Jan. 30 letter to a lawyer for a group of voters in Kinston, NC., the assistant attorney general for civil rights said the agency has new information and will reconsider its 2009 objection to the city’s switch to nonpartisan elections. Assuming the Justice Department formally withdraws that objection, Kinston’s related lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act goes away.
Former Gov. Don Siegelman today asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review his 2006 conviction in a government corruption case arguing that there was insufficient evidence to convict him of bribery. The petition was filed with the high court today, according to Siegelman lawyer Sam Heldman. “By granting review, this court would have the opportunity to right an injustice, to exonerate a man who has committed no crime, and to clarify the law in a manner that will be important to all candidates, elected officials, and politically engaged citizens,” Siegelman’s lawyers wrote in the petition.
Shelby County’s name is on the case, but a one-man Washington, D.C., legal defense fund with private donors is the driving force behind one of the most important constitutional challenges to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Project on Fair Representation is the nonprofit run by Edward Blum, a one-time congressional candidate in Texas with two decades of experience in litigation over affirmative action, redistricting and voting rights. After the U.S. Supreme Court in 2009 expressed some reservations about the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act but no official ruling, Blum found in Shelby County a potential litigant to try again: a local government that had grown weary of the burdens of the Voting Rights Act and a willingness to take that complaint all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. So the Shelby County Commission agreed to let Blum’s Project on Fair Representation hire the lawyers and file the case that alleges two key parts of the landmark civil rights law are outdated and no longer necessary.