Editorials: North Carolina has the worst gerrymander in US history. What else is new? | Gene Nichol/News & Observer

In mid-January, yet again, a three-judge federal court ruled the redistricting work of the North Carolina General Assembly to be a knowing, intentional and hugely impactful violation of the U.S. Constitution. This time the court struck down the apportionment of our federal congressional districts as an impermissible, extreme, partisan political gerrymander – designed, admittedly and successfully, to entrench Republicans in power and handicap their adversaries. The state yawned. We’re used to it. Rick Hasen, a professor at California-Irvine, is often said to be the nation’s leading election law expert. Hasen wrote that the decision could hardly be seen as a surprise, given what our legislature did. “If there is any case that could be invalidated as a partisan gerrymander, it is this one,” he indicated. It is “the most brazen and egregious” political electoral distortion yet seen in the United States. North Carolina leaders “admitted the practice, but argued it should be seen as perfectly legal.”

Editorials: The state of voting rights in America | Debo P. Adegbile/News & Observer

The vote is the most powerful tool in a democracy. To harness its full power however, voting must be accessible, protected and broadly exercised. In his award-winning history of voting in America, Professor Alexander Keyssar explains that American democracy is contested. He traces the history of the vote from the revolutionary period to contemporary times and shows that our nation, conceived in democratic ideals, has expanded the franchise only gradually and with the concerted efforts of those demanding access to the vote, and through it, to meaningful inclusion within the nation’s political life.

Editorials: Justice Alito prepares an attack on state sovereignty over voting rights | Mark Stern/Slate

The Supreme Court’s conservative bloc may be preparing an attack on state sovereignty in order to maintain a Republican gerrymander through the 2018 midterms. Last week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court invalidated the state’s current congressional map, ruling that it favored the GOP in violation of the state constitution and ordering a new, nonpartisan map. Republican legislative leaders asked Justice Samuel Alito, who reviews emergency appeals out of Pennsylvania, to block the decision. Because the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision involved only state law, Alito should’ve denied the request outright. Instead, he has ordered voting rights advocates to respond, raising the real possibility that a majority of the justices will vote to halt the ruling. If they do, the intervention will mark an extraordinary expansion of the court’s power to prevent states from protecting their residents’ voting rights.

Editorials: No conspiracy in paper voting | The Covington News

As could be expected in an election year, a proposal to overhaul the state’s method of voting is getting bogged down in politics. But it shouldn’t, because this is too important. For background: Georgia uses 16-year-old touchscreen technology for its elections. The machines are powered by Windows 2000, which Microsoft doesn’t even support anymore. And there are always questions about the lack of a paper trail. Votes are recorded on data packs, which can be run through a machine again, but without seeing a voter’s actual ballot, there’s going to be a question of whether tampering might have happened.

Editorials: The Supreme Court’s Elections Clause dilemma in Pennsylvania | Lyle Denniston/Constitution Daily

The Constitution has had an Elections Clause since it first went into effect in 1789, but the Supreme Court has rarely given an interpretation of its meaning. But what the Supreme Court has said creates a dilemma for the Justices as they decide soon what to do about the claim that Pennsylvania’s state legislature engaged in partisan gerrymandering when it drew up election districts for choosing the state’s 18 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Republican legislative leaders in the state have asked the Justices to put on hold, and then review, a decision earlier this month by the state Supreme Court that the 2011 congressional map was a partisan-driven effort and that it violates the state constitution.   The voters and political organizations that won the case in the state’s highest court have been told to file by Friday a reply to the request for a postponement of the ruling at issue. The state GOP leaders’ first hurdle will be to persuade five of the nine Justices to grant a postponement.  But an even bigger hurdle is to persuade the Justices that the Supreme Court should get involved in second-guessing the state court’s interpretation of its own constitution. 

Editorials: The real purpose of Russia’s presidential election | Stephen Blank/The Interpreter

Vladimir Putin’s election to a fourth term as President of Russia on 18 March is a foregone conclusion. Nobody can remotely consider Russia’s presidential election to be democratic, whatever Putin and his defenders might say. Seeing as it is obviously a sham and a travesty, one might ask why bother to hold an election at all? This is because in Putin’s Russia, the outcome of an election is not nearly as important as the conditions under which it occurs. Russian elections are really ritualised forms of political participation directed towards creating the illusion of a sustaining and legitimating mass basis of support for the regime. Thus Putin is very intent on not only winning 70% of the votes cast – since directives to regional bosses to arrange this figure were sent out long ago – but also on obtaining a turnout of more than 70% of eligible voters. By achieving this 70–70 formula, Putin and the regime can pretend to fulfil the electoral ritual and furnish it with the illusion of legitimacy.

Editorials: The courts may address partisan gerrymandering. Virginia and Maryland, take note. | The Washington Post

Courts have historically shied away from striking down redistricting plans for fear of showing favor to one party in a process that is inherently political. But recent decisions by state and federal judges in North Carolina and Pennsylvania suggest that the judicial branch thinks partisan gerrymandering has gone too far and needs to stop. We hope lawmakers in Maryland and Virginia are paying attention and that those decisions serve as a trigger for them to overhaul how their states’ legislative and congressional districts are drawn.

Editorials: Floridians should scrap these retrograde, racist voting laws | The Washington Post

No state comes close to disenfranchising its citizens at the rate Florida does. By doing so, the state extends the iniquities of Jim Crow into the modern era to the detriment of minority and, for the most part, Democratic voters. Now, after years of serving as an anti-democratic model, Florida appears about to see its voters drag it into the 21st century. They should. Of 6.1 million former felons who remain barred from voting across the United States, more than a quarter of them — nearly 1.7 million — are Floridians. It is one of just three states that permanently bars all felons from voting unless their rights are individually restored following an arduous, years-long process. The result: More than 10 percent of voting-age adults, and more than 20 percent of African Americans, have no access to the ballot box in Florida. You read that correctly: 1 in 5 black adults in Florida cannot vote.

Editorials: Vote auditing can ensure integrity of Virginia’s elections | Audrey Malagon/Virginian-Pilot

It’s time for better quality control in our election processes. Virginia’s 94th District in the House of Delegates drew names after disputes over a single ballot’s validity. In the 28th District, many voters were told to vote in the wrong district. A single district can determine party control of the House, affecting health care, taxes and education. Yet how can we be sure the ballots we cast are even read and counted correctly? Mathematics makes checking the integrity of our elections simple and inexpensive, and Virginia should do this more often. My grandmother worked in a syringe factory in my hometown. Her supervisor used to pull a few syringes off the line and inspect them. He didn’t check every syringe, but if the ones he randomly checked looked OK, he was confident that the products going out were the right quality. This idea of random checking isn’t just for factories; we rely on it to make sure smoke detectors will save us in a fire and restaurants won’t make us sick.

Editorials: One Person, One Vote | David Leonhardt/The New York Times

Voting rights have been under attack recently. In several states, officials — almost all of them Republican, alas — have tried to reduce voting hours, close polling stations or erect barriers to voting, like strict ID rules. These measures have disproportionately affected minorities. In fact, that has sometimes been the stated goal. But now a counterattack is underway. Not only are civil-rights advocates fighting the various attempts to restrict voting, they’re also pushing for new laws to expand it. One of those efforts took a step forward this week. Organizers in Florida announced that they had gathered enough signatures to put an initiative on the ballot this November that would restore voting rights to nearly 1.5 million convicted felons. Today, felon disenfranchisement denies the right to vote to one in five black Floridians — and 10 percent of the state’s total voting population.

Editorials: Putting the Voters in Charge of Fair Voting | Tina Rosenberg/The New York Times

Katie Fahey is 28 and lives in a small village just outside Grand Rapids, Mich. She works as a program officer for the Michigan Recycling Coalition. In her spare time, she founded and leads a massive volunteer effort that could end partisan gerrymandering in Michigan. If you doubt that a private citizen can make a difference, meet Fahey. Like many others, Fahey anguished over America’s growing polarization. After the 2016 elections, she resolved to do something. “Nobody trusted the system — on the right, on the left, on the middle,” she said. “I was nervous to go to Thanksgiving dinner. I didn’t want another holiday to be ruined by divisiveness.”

Editorials: Are Czechs about to reelect the Trumpiest president in Europe? | Jakub Janda/The Washington Post

Voters in the Czech Republic are preparing for their most important election since 1989. On Jan. 26, they will begin heading to the polls to pick their next president. The winner of the first round of the two-stage election earlier this month was the incumbent Milos Zeman, who is facing a strong runoff challenge from Jiri Drahos, a pro-western centrist and the former head of the Academy of Sciences. As of now, the race is considered too close to call. For Czechs, Zeman needs little introduction. He has spent his first five-year term excoriating migrants and Muslims, whipping up fears of terrorism, and praising President Vladimir Putin of Russia. He is possibly the closest thing to President Trump that we have today in Central Europe – except Zeman took office long before Trump did.

Editorials: Redistricting reform in Indiana is long overdue | South Bend Tribune

Indiana lawmakers have the perfect opportunity before them to reform the redistricting process, to make for more open and fair elections. A recent federal court ruling should serve as a nudge to take that opportunity. Redistricting reform is long overdue in the Hoosier state, given that the current system — which gives the legislature responsibility for drawing its own legislative and congressional districts — has resulted in maps that make it easy for incumbents to get re-elected and nearly impossible for challengers to be competitive. Both Democrats and Republicans have taken advantage of this system over the years, with the voters, whose role in political process has been reduced, coming up the big losers. Small wonder that the nonpartisan nonprofit FairVote calls redistricting a “blood sport” that allows incumbent politicians to “choose their voters before the voters choose them.”

Editorials: On King’s birthday, voting rights remain under assault | The Buffalo News

Today is the day the nation celebrates the birth of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a man who is regarded as the leader of the Civil Rights movement. Yet, were he alive, he might be at a loss as to why some key initiatives for which he and his contemporaries had marched and even died are still being debated. Both black and white supporters fought for change, placing their lives in harm’s way. King, himself, ultimately paid the highest price for his advocacy. For example: Voting rights are still under attack. They were severely weakened in an infamous 2013 Supreme Court decision that allowed several states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without advance federal approval. The Supreme Court is currently torn over whether to allow Ohio to purge people from the voting rolls if they skip a few elections and fail to respond to a notice from state officials. Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a convincing argument about disenfranchising minorities and the homeless, not to mention being part of a broader effort to effectively suppress voting.

Editorials: Our elections are in danger. Congress must defend them. | Marco Rubio and Chris Van Hollen/The Washington Post

While the 2016 election may have left our country divided on many issues, it exposed one critical problem that should unite all Americans: Our democratic process is vulnerable to attacks by hostile foreign powers. As our intelligence community unanimously assessed, Russia used social media channels to influence and mislead voters. It also hacked political campaign committees and local elections boards in a brazen attempt to undermine and subvert our elections. There is no reason to think this meddling will be an isolated incident. In fact, we expect the threat will grow in future years. The United States must do everything possible to prevent these attacks in the future — and lay out the consequences well in advance of our next elections. Today, we are introducing bipartisan legislation to do just that.

Editorials: A few words on the difficulty of voting while black | Leonaard Pitts Jr./Miami Herald

A few words on the difficulty of voting while black. As we mark what would have been his 89th birthday, it seems fitting to recall that Martin Luther King spoke to that difficulty in a 1957 speech whose words ring relevant 61 years later. “All types of conniving methods are still being used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters,” lamented King. As he saw it, neither political party was blameless. He castigated Democrats for capitulating to the rabid racists of their Southern wing — the so-called “Dixiecrats” — and blasted Republicans for caving in to “rightwing reactionary Northerners.” “Both political parties,” he said, “have betrayed the cause of justice.”

Editorials: The constitutional case against partisan gerrymandering | Chicago Tribune

North Carolina is a purple state, narrowly electing a Democratic governor in 2016 while giving a slim presidential victory to Republican Donald Trump. But its congressional delegation is not split so evenly. Republicans hold 10 seats and Democratsonly three. Asked why, one GOP state legislator involved in designing district boundaries had a pithy explanation: “Because I don’t believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” North Carolina’s lawmakers made no bones about their intention to divvy up voters so that the GOP would retain a large majority of the state’s congressional delegation no matter which way the political winds blow. And they succeeded. But last week, a federal appeals court ruled the redistricting plan unconstitutional because of its discriminatory purpose and effect. It was the first time a federal court had ever struck down a map because of partisan gerrymandering. Parties in power have practiced this method to entrench themselves for as long as anyone can remember. But modern technology has made it possible for legislators to carry out their mission with nearly infallible results.

Editorials: President Trump is playing politics with the 2020 Census. It could backfire. | Judith Giesberg/The Washington Post

The 2020 Census is set to take place at a time of political turmoil, when Americans are experiencing a crisis in confidence in federal institutions. Unfortunately, the census is likely to exacerbate that crisis, because the Trump administration has enlisted it in the work of maintaining Republican political control. Signs of the administration’s strategy emerged in May, when John Thompson, director of the Census Bureau and a 27-year veteran of the agency, resigned over a congressional budget forecast he said was inadequate. The proposed cuts would undermine efforts to expand access — getting the word out to undercounted communities or experimenting with online responses. Those warning bells rang louder in December when news broke that President Trump would appoint as deputy director Thomas Brunell, a political scientist who has defended Republican gerrymandering tactics in court. Then, two weeks ago, ProPublica reported that administration officials have asked to include a new question about citizenship status — an addition clearly aimed at scaring immigrants away from participating and being counted. This should concern every American.

Editorials: Florida’s chance to make it easier to restore civil rights | Tampa Bay Times

As it has for decades, Florida stubbornly clings to an inhumane, inefficient and indefensible system of justice that permanently sentences more than 1.5 million residents to second-class citizenship. This state automatically revokes the right to vote for anyone convicted of a felony, and Gov. Rick Scott and the Cabinet are making it nearly impossible to persuade them to restore that right. Now the potential to modernize an archaic practice appears better than ever, and Florida cannot waste this opportunity. Over the next month, it will become clearer whether the most viable path to reform is through a yearslong voter petition drive for a constitutional amendment, the Constitution Revision Commission or the Florida Legislature. The most time-sensitive proposal is a ballot initiative that would ask voters to amend the Florida Constitution so voting rights would be automatically restored for nearly all felons who complete the terms of their sentences, including prison and probation. 

Editorials: North Carolina’s ‘partisan gerrymander’ could prompt supreme court action | Andrew Gumbel/The Guardian

The last time North Carolina Republicans redrew the state’s 13 congressional districts, they made absolutely no secret of their ambition to rig the system and lock in a 10-3 balance in their favour – regardless of whether they or the Democrats won a majority of the votes in future elections. “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” bragged the chair of the redistricting committee in the state general assembly, David Lewis. “So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.” Drastic improvements in mapping technologies and voter information databases meant specialist mapmakers had unprecedented power to manipulate political outcomes, even in a swing state like North Carolina where one would ordinarily expect to see US House and state legislative seats split more or less evenly between the two parties. The instruction from Lewis and his colleagues, according to court documents, was “to create as many districts as possible in which GOP candidates would be able to successfully compete for office”.

Editorials: Honduras’s president suspiciously reversed a loss. Then the U.S. congratulated him. | The Washington Post

As in much of the rest of the world, democracy is on the defensive in Latin America, in part because it has few principled defenders. A simple comparison of two ongoing political crises, in Venezuela and Honduras, illustrates the problem. After Venezuela’s populist anti-American government rigged state gubernatorial elections in October, the United States led a campaign of condemnation and stepped up sanctions. But when Honduras’s rightist pro-American president suspiciously reversed what looked like an upset loss in a presidential election a month later, the Trump administration congratulated him.

Editorials: Will the Court Kill the Gerrymander? | Zachary Roth/The New York Review of Books

On Tuesday, a panel of federal judges struck down North Carolina’s congressional map, ruling it an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. State Republicans had drawn district lines with such ruthlessness that they had won ten out of thirteen seats in the 2016 election—77 percent—even though they got only 53 percent of the vote. GOP lawmakers, wrote Judge James Wynn Jr., had been “motivated by invidious partisan intent.” Republicans had openly admitted as much. “Nothing wrong with political gerrymandering,” declared one of the lawmakers leading the process at a 2016 hearing. “It is not illegal.” The GOP is likely to appeal Tuesday’s ruling to the Supreme Court on those grounds. Whether courts are empowered to block partisan gerrymanders—as opposed to gerrymanders involving racial discrimination, which just about everyone agrees are unconstitutional—is a question the justices considered in October when they heard Gill v. Whitford, a challenge to Wisconsin’s state assembly map. The fate of North Carolina’s map likely hangs on how the court decides Gill. A ruling is expected before the end of June.

Editorials: Who Will Listen to Democrats’ Warning on Russia? | The New York Times

If there has been any benefit from Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, it’s that it has raised awareness about President Vladimir Putin’s broader threat to democracies in Europe and elsewhere. In the face of complacency from Republicans fearful of what attention to these intrigues might reveal about the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia, Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have issued a report that appears to be the most comprehensive public accounting of Russia’s war on the West. It drives home the point that the 2016 election, which every American intelligence agency has said involved Russian interference to help elect Donald Trump, is part of a pattern in which Mr. Putin has worked to erode Western institutions and undermine faith in democratic practices.

Editorials: Donald Trump’s Racist Voter Fraud Charade Isn’t Dead Yet | Sherrilyn Ifill/Newsweek

President Donald Trump’s slapdash commission on election integrity, which he disbanded earlier this week, exists now only in the dustbin of history. But we should not assume that his administration’s attacks on voters of color are over. Beginning during his campaign, Trump has consistently peddled the odious narrative that voters of color are cheaters. During a rally before a nearly all-white audience in rural Pennsylvania, the then-candidate encouraged his supporters to “go down to certain areas” in the state to ensure “other people don’t come in and vote five times.” Many took that to mean African-American voters in places like Philadelphia, a majority-minority city and county that voted overwhelmingly against Trump.

Editorials: I was on Trump’s fraud commission. Its demise was inevitable. | Matt Dunlap/The Washington Post

It didn’t surprise me when I got an email from the White House on Wednesday night that President Trump had moved to dissolve the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The move came without warning, but given how incredibly dysfunctional the process had been from the start, dissolution was inevitable. Twelve days earlier, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that as a member of the commission, I am entitled to share in the work of the commission and to know when and where we were meeting, what communications we were having and what the commission was working on. That shockingly obvious conclusion came only after I filed a lawsuit to get answers to those very basic questions. The demise of the commission was inevitable simply because the voter-fraud vampire hunters on the panel and in the White House prioritized a desired result of the commission’s work above any sense of process. It didn’t matter that evidence of actual voter misconduct is incredibly rare anywhere in the United States; we’ve all heard the ghost stories, and the Trump administration’s solution was to find those ghosts and exorcise them.

Editorials: Demise of Trump election commission teaches Kansas lessons about Kobach | The Kansas City Star

The demise of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity is great news for every American who values a free and fair ballot. President Donald Trump formed the commission last May. He falsely claimed millions of illegal votes cost him a popular vote victory in 2016, and he wanted an investigation to prove it. The commission, led by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, met just twice. It eventually crumpled under an avalanche of lawsuits, secrecy, poor management and discord. Few will regret the commission’s collapse. This saves the nation from a final report Kobach and others undoubtedly would have used to restrict voter rights in advance of the 2018 midterm elections.

Editorials: Long wait for federal help to secure the 2018 election | San Francisco Chronicle

One of the most pressing questions ahead of the 2018 elections is whether the states will be able to guard their voting infrastructure from computer hackers, foreign espionage and other security breaches. Unfortunately, many states may not have enough time to get the assistance they need. State officials and some congressional lawmakers are deeply concerned about long wait times for the Department of Homeland Security’s most thorough security screening. Some states are reporting estimated wait times of up to nine months. The service is an intensive, multiweek probe of the entire system required to run an election. If some of the states that have requested it won’t be able to get it until just weeks before this November’s elections, they won’t be able to fix flaws that could allow cybervandals to hijack everything from election offices’ computer systems to voter registration databases.

Editorials: Trump will still yell about voter fraud, but at least his clownish election commission can’t do any lasting damage | Richard Hasen/Los Angeles Times

President Trump’s precipitous decision Wednesday to shutter his “election integrity” commission — buried amid a slew of revelations from Michael Wolff’s new tell-all book about the Trump campaign and presidency — is good news for Americans who care about fair elections in the United States. Though Trump’s tweets Thursday about voter fraud and his announcement that he will shift the commission’s investigation to the Department of Homeland Security means he won’t let go of the issue, the greatest immediate danger to voting rights seems to have passed. Trump has long made irresponsible and wildly unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud. Before the election, he suggested that there was a great deal of voter impersonation fraud occurring in areas full of poor and minority voters, despite incontrovertible evidence that voter impersonation fraud almost never happens.

Editorials: Trump’s explanation for shutting down his voter fraud commission is just as untrue and partisan | Philip Bump/The Washington Post

President Trump’s efforts to root out voter fraud in the 2016 election were always a charade. Before Election Day, he offered dire warnings in his campaign speeches about voters near Philadelphia (winkwinkwinkwink) and in other places who were voting illegally. His campaign put together a halfhearted poll-watching system, encouraging supporters to blow the whistle on apparent fraudulent activity at the polls. Then, unexpectedly, Trump won Pennsylvania, and his claims of fraud in the Keystone State vanished from his portfolio faster than an Atlantic City casino. Instead, he found new targets: California — a state which, by itself, made up the vote margin by which Trump lost the popular vote — and New Hampshire, a state he narrowly lost. In Michigan, the closest state of the cycle, Trump wasn’t worried about fraud having been a factor; his lawyers declared in a court filing in that state opposing a recount that “All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake.”

Editorials: Two Ways of Looking at Gerrymandering | Linda Greenhouse/The New York Times

Even though Doug Jones won a famous statewide victory in last month’s Alabama Senate race, he actually lost — less famously — to Roy Moore in six of the state’s seven congressional districts. That’s right: He carried only the heavily black Seventh Congressional District, into which the Alabama Legislature has jammed almost a third of the state’s African-American population while making sure that the rest of the districts remain safely white and Republican. That’s gerrymandering in the raw. Something equally raw, although less overtly racial, happened in Maryland back in 2011, when the overwhelmingly Democratic State Legislature decided that two Republicans out of Maryland’s eight-member congressional delegation was at least one Republican too many. The 2010 census required the state to shrink the majority-Republican Sixth District by 10,000 people in order to restore one-person, one-vote equality among the districts. Seeing its opportunity for some major new line-drawing, the Legislature conducted a population transfer. It moved 66,417 Republican voters out of the district while moving into it 24,460 Democratic voters from safely Democratic adjoining districts, a swing of more than 90,000 votes. And guess what? The 20-year Republican incumbent, Roscoe Bartlett, lost the 2012 election to the Democratic candidate, John Delaney, who has won re-election ever since.