Editorials: Citizens United v. FEC decision proves justice is blind | Jeffrey Rosen/Politico.com

Last week, the Occupy movement came to the Supreme Court. To protest the second anniversary of the Citizens United decision, the group called Move to Amend organized demonstrations at courthouses around the country — including the steps of the high court itself. (The protests began peacefully but ended with 11 arrests.) Say what you will about the strategy of organizing political protests against controversial judicial decisions, which can be overturned only by constitutional amendment, but one thing is clear: The Supreme Court was spectacularly wrong in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission when it confidently predicted that the ruling would have no significant impact on Americans’ confidence in their political system. In this sense, the Citizens United decision has much in common with the ruling in Paula Corbin Jones v. William Jefferson Clinton, which allowed President Bill Clinton to be sued for sexual harassment while in office.

Editorials: FEC Chair Hunter: Sizing up the superPACs | Washington Times

Jan. 21 marked the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in CitizensUnitedv. FederalElectionCommission. Already controversial at the time it was issued, the ruling has taken center stage in the debate over superPACs’ role in the race for the White House. Contrary to some suggestions that superPACs are acting under the radar and outside of any regulation, they are, in fact, subject to the same long-standing disclosure requirements and objective rules applicable to everyone else. To place superPACs in context, it is important to understand their origin. In CitizensUnited, the government was put in the unenviable position of defending a statute dictating who could speak, when they could speak and how they could speak. Specifically, the law prohibited corporations and labor unions from sponsoring broadcast advertisements that expressly advocate the election or defeat of candidates for federal office. Not only that, the law purported to impose a blackout period on certain ads that even mentioned candidates.

Editorials: Return voting rights to ex-felons | Kentucky.com

The Kentucky House of Representatives is once again acting favorably on a proposal (HB 70) by Rep. Jesse Crenshaw, D-Lexington, to amend the state constitution to automatically restore voting rights to non-violent felons who have paid their assigned debt to society. Remarkably, each time in recent years this measure has passed out of the House it has stopped dead in the Senate. This is a good year to change that pattern. We are, after all, witnessing one of the great political processes as the presidential campaign unfolds before our very eyes. There is a lot of debate these days about the role of government in our lives, but does anyone really think it should be government’s task to prevent people from voting?

Editorials: Kazakhstan’s Elections: Aspirations for Democracy amidst Expectations of Paternalism | Registan.net

The background to the January 15 Kazakhstan’s parliamentary elections has been most unfavorable. The image of stability that Kazakhstan’s government had carefully cultivated over the years has been tarnished with the outbreak of violence in an oil town of Zhanaozen. In neighboring Russia, on which Kazakhstan depends both culturally and politically, dozens of thousands of people protested in December against falsifications in the Russian Duma elections held on December 4. These combined events generated warning signs that the Kazakh authorities should brace themselves for a stormy political season. However, the elections went as planned with a high turn-out (lower than in the 2011 Presidential elections but still solid 75 %) and very few instances of protest or boycott; the expected rendering of the elections as undemocratic by the OSCE and the usual accusations by the losing parties managed to gather only about a couple of hundred protesters in the center of Almaty on January 17. The charges leveled by the OSCE were that the elections “though well administered, did not meet key democratic principles.” As the OSCE statement said, “the authorities did not provide the necessary conditions for the conduct of genuinely pluralistic elections.” The accusations of not facilitating a “genuine pluralism” and not allowing all aspiring candidates and parties to enter free competition for the parliament seats comes as no surprise. After all, in a widely-held view, the authoritarian regime in Kazakhstan has been faking democratic processes for quite a while. So, now, on top of the previous simulations, it began to fake a multi-party parliament with 83 seats in the lower chamber given to the ruling Nur Otan party, 8 seats to the “Ak Zhol” (translated as “bright path”), 7 seats to the KNPK (communist) party, and 9 seats reserved for the representatives of ethnic minorities through the Assembly of the People.

Editorials: Citizens United: How Did it Happen? | John Wellington Ennis/Huffington Post

Though the manifold problems of money pouring into our campaigns have become a source of daily news and mounting public backlash, the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission is an opportunity to review how this transformative decision was reached — the perfect storm of politicized jurisprudence, corporate entitlement, and a narrowly tilted bench. As Chief Justice John Roberts has expressed such concern over corporate rights, one might think he was found as a boy abandoned, taken in, and raised by some corporations. It was Roberts who directed the narrow issue of FEC penalties over ads for Hillary: The Movie to be rewritten and re-argued as a much broader debate over the right for corporations to spend money freely on third party advertisements.

Editorials: Science of elections: The problem with turnout | BBC

For veteran election-watcher Curtis Gans, who runs the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, this disenfranchisement is a major problem. “There are 50 million American citizens who aren’t registered to vote,” he says. “And there are 20 million names on registration lists that ought not to be there.” Alaska, Illinois, and South Dakota have more voters on their lists than there are citizens eligible to vote living there, Mr Gans has told Congress. And of 172 recognised democracies, the US is ranked 139th in voter participation, he says.

Editorials: Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown deserve major props for campaign finance truce | The Washington Post

This morning, Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown announced that they had hammered out an agreement to put up a dam against the flood of outside cash that’s expected to gush into their Senate race. Even if the dam ends up springing a few leaks, they deserve credit for trying. Good for them. The deal wasn’t easy to hammer out, because campaigns don’t have any power to restrict third-party-group spending. But the arrangement deals with this problem in an artful way:

Under the terms of the deal, each campaign would agree to donate half the cost of any third-party ad to charity if that ad either supports their candidacy or attacks their opponent by name.

Editorials: The electoral train wreck scenario | Martin Frost/Politico.com

Train wrecks don’t happen often in American politics. But there could be one in this presidential election. And if it occurs, it will be big. Consider. The Constitution has a specific provision regarding an Electoral College deadlock. The bottom line is that if no candidate receives a majority — 270 — of the 538 electoral votes, then the next president will be chosen by the House of Representatives, with each state having one vote. It has happened twice in our history — the election of 1800 and then 1824. But given Congress’s current low repute — 9 percent approval rating in one poll — all hell would break loose if the House wound up selecting the next president. This scenario can happen only if there is a viable third-party candidate who wins at least some electoral votes. Most states still decide their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, so the third-party candidate would need to win a state or two, and the election would otherwise need to be close.

Editorials: South Carolina’s gift to the Voting Rights Act | William Yeomans/Politico.com

When the Justice Department recently blocked implementation of South Carolina’s photo ID law, analysts were quick to suggest that the action was risky and could be the death of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. They were wrong to sound the alarm. Recent discriminatory actions by South Carolina and other covered states give Attorney General Eric Holder no choice but to block their implementation. In fact, the very actions that forced Holder’s hand may ultimately save the act from the daggers of Chief Justice John Roberts and his band of conservative justices, who seem ready to strike it down as unconstitutional.

Editorials: The War on Political Free Speech | Bradley Smith/WSJ.com

Two years ago the Supreme Court upheld the right of an incorporated nonprofit organization to distribute, air and advertise a turgid documentary about Hillary Clinton called, appropriately enough, “Hillary: The Movie.” From this seemingly innocuous and obvious First Amendment decision has sprung a campaign of disinformation and alarmism rarely seen in American politics. From the start, reaction to Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has bordered on the hysterical. Rep. Alan Grayson (D., Fla.) called it the “worst decision since Dred Scott”—the 1857 decision holding that slaves could never become citizens. In his State of the Union message, within days of the ruling, President Obama lectured Supreme Court justices in attendance that they had “reversed a century of law” to allow “foreign companies to spend without limit in our elections.” Neither statement was true.

Editorials: The Uphill Battle Against Citizens United: Tricky Legal Terrain and No Easy Fixes | AlterNet

The movement to overturn the Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United ruling and confront the doctrine of corporate personhood stands at a perilous crossroads.  Across the country, two distinct strategies are converging on Congress. More than a million people have signed online petitions. State legislators, city and township governments, Democratic Party groups and unions have sponsored and passed measures in 23 states demanding that Congress pass a constitutional amendment to reassert and elevate the political speech of ordinary citizens and roll back the growing political speech and legal privileges of corporations.

Editorials: Despite Supreme Court ruling, Texas congressional map still very uncertain | The Washington Post

The drama over Texas’s new congressional map will drag on after the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday blocked an interim court-drawn map. The Court on Friday ruled that an interim 2012 election map drawn by a federal court in San Antonio must give greater deference to the original map drawn by the GOP-controlled Texas state legislature. The ruling is at least a temporary victory for Republicans, in that it blocks an interim map to be used for the 2012 election that is preferred by Democrats. But it’s still not clear that the end result will be any better for Republicans. In fact, it’s not clear what the end result will be at all.

Editorials: Voter ID legislation, not fraud, is the real problem | Michael Paul Williams/Richmond Times-Dispatch

The legislative drive against voter fraud is a solution in search of a problem. Proposed General Assembly legislation would scratch the current provision that allows voters to sign a sworn statement that they are who they claim to be if they’re unable to produce a required form of identification. Instead, they would cast a provisional ballot. For lack of an ID, a potentially eligible vote would not be counted on election night, and possibly not at all, if the would-be voter doesn’t provide the information. At the least, this measure would leave registrars sitting on more uncounted ballots after Election Day, potentially causing confusion for voters and candidates.

Editorials: Do Arab Women Need Electoral Quotas? | Foreign Policy

Women are at a crossroads in the Middle East and North Africa. This is widely reflected in the current battles over the adoption of quotas aimed at improving women’s chances of being elected into parliaments. Although women’s quotas were introduced as early as 1979 in Egypt, there are new efforts underway in the Middle East to implement them. Last year, Tunisia adopted a law requiring that party lists alternate between men and women. In a more restrained manner, Libya recently drafted an election law that gives women only 10 percent of the seats. However, the struggle for quotas has also met with resistance as in Egypt, which abandoned a 2010 quota law altogether that would have ensured the presence of 64 women in the parliament.

Editorials: Actual Winner Unclear in Supreme Court’s Ruling on Texas Redistricting | ProPublica

The Supreme Court ruled this morning that federal judges in Texas overstepped their bounds in drawing a minority-friendly set of interim maps for the state to use in the 2012 elections. The Court ruled unanimously that the judges should have given more deference to the new district maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Texas legislature even though parts of these maps may discriminate against Latinos. The Department of Justice has argued that the state legislature’s plans would harm minorities and violate the Voting Rights Act.  A panel of federal judges in Washington, D.C., is in the process of determining whether those plans did, in fact, break the law. Because that decision may not be made in time for the next elections, federal judges in San Antonio were tasked with drawing interim maps for the state to use. The maps used in Texas’ next elections could impact the balance of power in Congress. They will likely determine whether the four new congressional seats awarded Texas via the census will be held by Democrats or Republicans.  The Supreme Court’s decision leaves the fate of those seats in limbo.

Editorials: Super PACs wreak havoc | Fred Wertheimer/Politico.com

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, issued two years ago this week, is wreaking havoc on the 2012 elections. When the Roberts Court decided to strike down the ban on corporate expenditures in campaigns, the five justices who issued the opinion surely had no idea their misguided decision would cause such enormous damage to our political system. Meanwhile, the rest of us are living with the destructive consequences of their ruling.

Editorials: ‘Super PACs’ dominate the political landscape | latimes.com

Trevor Potter is an unlikely repeat guest for a late-night comedy show. As the former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, the courtly Washington lawyer is a leading expert on campaign finance law — not the kind of material that generates a lot of laughs. So the fact that he’s appeared seven times on “The Colbert Report” in the last year, helping host Stephen Colbert set up his own “super PAC” as part of a mischievous political parody, underscores an unexpected development in the 2012 presidential race: Super PACs have seized the zeitgeist.

Editorials: Election e-voting has its advantages and disadvantages | Star Phoenix

Like a lot of terrible ideas, voting over the Internet in federal elections is not without superficial appeal. That would explain why Elections Canada reportedly is moving us towards electronic or e-voting. E-voting certainly would make it easier to participate in the democratic process. Instead of schlepping to the polls, we could vote from the comfort of our homes simply by clicking a computer mouse or swiping a smart phone. We could vote while travelling anywhere outside the country with Internet access. Canadian astronauts could even vote from space if they happened to be in orbit on election day. … So what’s not to like about e-voting? Security, for starters.

Canada: Halifax: Not ready for electronic voting | Truro Daily News

Municipal elections are just nine months away and, perhaps not surprisingly, electronic voting has been a recent subject of discussion for local councils.
Truro Town Council received a pitch from a Halifax-based company lauding the virtues of electronic voting and tabled it for further discussion. Colchester County Council, meanwhile, rejected the idea outright. At the risk of sounding ridiculously old-fashioned, we concur with the go-slow or no-go approach to electronic voting. At least for the time being.

Editorials: Counting Voters Fairly | NYTimes.com

A Federal District Court late last month wisely upheld a 2010 Maryland law that counts prison inmates as residents in their home communities for purposes of redistricting, rather than at the prisons where they are incarcerated. The practice of counting inmates as local “residents” — even though they lack the right to vote — has been used to inflate the power of mainly rural areas where prisons tend to placed. It undercuts the power of the urban districts where the inmates actually live and where they generally return when they are released.

Editorials: Mitt Romney’s flawed plan to ‘fix’ campaign financing | The Washington Post

Mitt Romney has a prescription for the super PAC problem: Allow political candidates to collect unlimited donations, instead of having the funds funneled to supposedly independent groups. “Let campaigns then take responsibility for their own words,” Mr. Romney said at Monday’s debate. He raises an intriguing question: Given the Supreme Court’s flawed interpretation of the First Amendment — that campaign spending equals speech; that independent expenditures on behalf of candidates, even by corporations, therefore cannot be limited — would the campaign finance system be better off with a regime of no limits plus full and timely disclosure of donations? In other words, a world where the $5 million check can go directly to the candidate? As Mr. Romney put it, “Wouldn’t it nice to have people give what they would like to to campaigns, and campaigns could run their own ads and take responsibility for them?”

Editorials: The Problem With Citizens United Is Not Corporate Personhood | Truthout

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Florida Rep. Ted Deutch introduced aconstitutional amendmentin December to overturnCitizens United, one of five decisions since 2006 by which a closely divided Supreme Court vastly increased the amount of corrupting corporate money in elections. In an opinion piece critical of the decision in Citizens United, Senator Sanders wrote:

When the Supreme Court says that for purposes of the First Amendment, corporations are people, that writing checks from the company’s bank account is constitutionally-protected speech and that attempts by the federal government and states to impose reasonable restrictions on campaign ads are unconstitutional, when that occurs, our democracy is in grave danger.

The joint Sanders-Deutch Resolution proposes an amendment to the constitution “to expressly exclude for-profit corporations from the rights given to natural persons.”

Editorials: Two Years Later: Showdown with Citizens United | The Nation

On December 30, the Montana Supreme Court delivered a New Year’s gift to the nation, upholding a century-old ban on corporate political expenditures in state elections.  The decision has gone underreported amidst the hoopla of the Republican primaries—even as super PAC spending skyrockets and there is an emerging understanding of its corrosive impact—but the Montana case sets up the first direct challenge to the disastrous Citizens United decision as we approach its second anniversary. Free Speech For People—a national non-partisan campaign challenging the fabrication of corporate rights under the US Constitution—filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Montana case. It led a coalition that included the American Sustainable Business Council, a network of more than 70,000 businesses across the country; the American Independent Business Alliance; and a local supermarket business and non-profit corporation.

Editorials: China eyes Taiwan’s election freedoms | BBC News

Gazing out of my window trying to make out the skyscrapers of central Beijing today is a bit like trying to divine the thoughts of China’s leaders. Not easy. A thick smog has settled on China’s capital (yet again), and through the murk it is hard to see much beyond the few buildings just across the way. The atmospheric conditions are grim. The US embassy pollution reading on Twitter is well over 300, indicating highly hazardous air quality. Beijing is choking on pollution. As we begin a year when major leadership changes will happen in China, the thoughts of its rising leaders are pretty opaque. It’s hard to know what Xi Jinping, the man expected to become China’s next president, one of the most powerful positions in the world, thinks about many subjects.

Editorials: Back to the Robber Barons | NYTimes.com

With federal campaigns already knee-deep in a new era of laissez-faire money, the Republican National Committee has brazenly proposed the ultimate step — that the 105-year-old ban on direct corporation contributions to candidates and parties be scrapped as unconstitutional. The Supreme Court’s misguided Citizens United decision did damage enough to fair elections by freeing corporations to make unlimited donations to supposedly independent campaign expenditure groups. But the court said nothing about the basic 1907 reform law — enacted after the robber baron scandals — that bans corporate donors from wooing candidates directly with largess.

Editorials: Montana Spurns U.S. Supreme Court Ruling, Upholds Ban on Corporate Electioneering | AMIBA

On December 30, the Montana Supreme Court issued a stunning ruling, rejecting arguments that the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Citizens United vs. FEC applied to Montana’s century-old ban on direct corporate election spending. The 5-2 ruling overturned a lower court and reinstated Montana’s Corrupt Practices Act, a citizen initiative passed to confront some of the most overt corporate corruption in American history. While the Montana ruling detailed several ways in which the Corrupt Practices Act differed from the federal statute struck down in Citizens United, the justices clearly rejected much of the U.S. Supreme Court’s rationale. Citizens United struck down a federal law that prohibited corporations from directly spending company funds to advocate for or against political candidates.

Editorials: Voting in Plain Sight | Linda Greenhouse/NYTimes.com

Of all the domestic policy differences between the Bush and Obama administrations, just about the sharpest and most telling may be their opposite responses to the drive by Republican-dominated states to require voters to present photo identification at the polls. The Bush administration thought photo ID was a dandy idea. The Obama administration recognizes it for what it is: a cynical effort to insure that fewer young people and members of minority groups (read, likely Democratic voters) are able to cast a ballot.

Editorials: Voter ID cases could test Voting Rights Act | Facing South

Since 1965, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Acthas been a key tool used by civil rights and election reform advocates to protect the franchise in the South. By requiring states and counties to “pre-clear” major election changes with the Department of Justice, the measure has allowed groups to challenge a variety of state laws that threatened to disproportionately hurt African-American and other historically disadvantaged voters. But Section 5 has come under increasing scrutiny from conservative lawmakers and the Supreme Court itself. Three years ago, in alawsuit brought by a Texas sewer district, the court came close to striking down Section 5 on the grounds that it represented an unconstitutional over-reach by Congress over states’ rights.

Editorials: Reject voter ID – Seniors, minorities, young people and the poor could lose their right to vote | Pittsburgh Post Gazette

State senators in Harrisburg will soon consider House Bill 934, which would require citizens to provide one of a very short list of government-issued photo IDs in order to vote. It sounds simple, but it is not. If it became law, this bill would create one of the most extreme restrictions on voting in the country — and would threaten to needlessly disenfranchise a massive number of Pennsylvania citizens. Many Americans don’t have driver’s licenses or the other photo IDs that would meet H.B. 934’s narrow standards. Survey research indicates that 11 percent of voting-age citizens don’t have the limited forms of government-issued photo ID that would be accepted under H.B. 934 — even though these taxpayers and voters could prove their identity with other types of documents.

Editorials: Where Did They Get the Money For That? | NYTimes.com

Over the past few weeks, voters in early primary and caucus states have been deluged by political advertising. Some of the ads are pure hagiography, while others are slashing. Disclaimers tell viewers which candidate or group with a soothing name is responsible in each case. But even as they choose from among the Republican presidential candidates, voters haven’t been able to find out who is really behind the spots – who has been putting up the big money it takes to make and air these messages.