Editorials: Does Obama’s Re-election Doom the Voting Rights Act? | NYTimes.com

Does the re-election of the first black president mean the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is unnecessary and perhaps unconstitutional? The Supreme Court’s decision last week to consider a constitutional challenge to a key section of the act suggests that a perverse outcome of the 2012 campaign may be that President Obama’s victory spells doom for the civil rights law most responsible for African-American enfranchisement. The central question in the constitutional debate is whether times have changed enough in the nearly five decades since the act’s passage to suggest that the law has outlived its usefulness. The unprecedented flexing of racial minorities’ political muscle on Nov. 6 does make it clear how much times have changed. But a campaign marred by charges of voter suppression and Election Day mishaps also makes the need for federal protection of voting rights clearer than ever.

Voting Blogs: Redistricting does not explain why House Democrats got a majority of the vote and a minority of the seats | The Monkey Cage

In the wake of the 2012 House elections, it looks like Democrats won a slight majority of the major-party votes (roughly 50.5%) but only about 46% of the seats.  A story has gradually developed that pins this gap on redistricting (for example, see here, here, and here), since Republicans controlled the line-drawing process more often than not this time around.  Matthew Green pushes back a little on this narrative, arguing that, if anything, House seat share and vote share correspond more closely today than they once did.  But he doesn’t necessarily deny that redistricting is to blame for the gap this year.

Editorials: GOP’s gerrymandered advantages | Harold Meyerson/The Washington Post

When Republicans claim that this was a status quo election, they point to their continued hold on the House. The 2012 congressional vote, some have said, didn’t undo the party’s 2010 successes. True enough, but that’s not because Americans didn’t vote to undo them. It’s because Republicans have so gerrymandered congressional districts in states where they controlled redistricting the past two years that they were able to elude a popular vote that went the Democrats’ way last week. As The Post’s Aaron Blake reported, Democrats narrowly outpolled Republicans in the total number of votes cast for congressional candidates. The margin varies depending on whether you count the races in which candidates ran unopposed and those in which members of the same party faced off (as happened in several California districts). But any way you count it, the Democrats came out ahead — in everything but the number of House seats they won.

Editorials: Minority voters in Texas still need to be protected | Star Telegram

Some experts say the U.S. Supreme Court’s announcement Friday that it will hear a case challenging the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act’s Section 5 means this pivotal part of the 47-year-old law is dead and the court is finally ready to bury it. Some members of the court have complained about Section 5 in more than one case since Congress last renewed the VRA in 2006. Section 5 requires some states — the key is some, not all — to get permission, or “pre-clearance,” from the Justice Department or a federal court before changing their election laws. The affected states, including Texas, are those determined under the act to have a history of discriminating against minority voters. Most are in the South.

National: Votes in six House races still being counted, seventh will see runoff | CNN.com

When seven-term Republican Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack conceded to her Democratic challenger Raul Ruiz on Friday, she left two other members of California’s GOP House delegation still trailing in tight, unsettled races.
As of Saturday, six of seven unresolved House races remain too close to call. In the seventh, two Louisiana Republicans will face off in a December 8 runoff for the 3rd District seat after none of the five candidates got the required 50%. Democrats hold narrow leads in all six of the too-close-to-call races. Should all win, they will have picked up a net gain of eight seats in the House after losing the majority in the chamber and suffering the largest loss of seats since 1948 in the 2010 midterm elections.

Editorials: Queens Voters Forced to Trek a Mile After Polling-Place Swap | DNAinfo.com

On Tuesday, 59-year-old Ditmars resident Wendy Rodriguez crossed the street with the help of a crossing guard outside of P.S. 2 on 21st Avenue. The two began chatting, and the guard asked Rodriguez, a school administrator, if she had received a letter earlier this year from the Board of Elections, explaining that the polling site at the school would be closed for November’s election. The crossing guard explained that voting would now be done about a mile away, at P.S. 84, on 41st Street near 23rd Avenue. “That’s ridiculous,” said Rodriguez, who lives in the neighborhood. “You know what’s going to happen? People aren’t going to vote.” Rodriguez’s situation has become a familiar one. With redistricting after the 2010 census, concerns have risen across the city that new districts formed earlier this year would cause mass confusion on Election Day in November.

Tennessee: Audit Report Details Shelby County TN Election Commission Faults | Memphis Daily News

The Tennessee Comptroller’s audit division has concluded the Shelby County Election Commission has “demonstrated an inability to conduct elections without significant inaccuracies, including those identified in the 2012 elections.” But the audit review requested by Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett also concludes there was “no discernable evidence of intentional misconduct or other actions intended to affect or influence the election process or election outcomes in Shelby County.” The report – which goes to Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, Hargett and state legislators, who will recommend election commissioners for counties across the state to the Tennessee Election Commission in April – examined election problems in Shelby County prior to 2012.

California: ‘Top-Two’ Election Change in California Upends Races | NYTimes.com

Running against the Vietnam War, Representative Pete Stark entered Congress the year Richard M. Nixon was re-elected president. Since then, ensconced in Democratic strongholds here in the Bay Area, Mr. Stark was easily re-elected 19 times. Ricky Gill, a Republican, is trying to unseat Representative Jerry McNerney, a Democrat running in a redrawn district in the Central Valley. But Mr. Stark, 80, the dean of California’s Congressional delegation, is facing a serious challenge for the first time. That is because Eric Swalwell, a fellow Democrat who became a city councilman less than two years ago in Dublin, his hometown near here, came just a few points behind Mr. Stark in the primary Now Mr. Swalwell gets to carry the fight into November — thanks to a new primary system in California under which the top two vote getters advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation. “I wouldn’t have had a chance before,” Mr. Swalwell, 31, said before a recent afternoon and evening of campaigning.

Mississippi: U.S. Justice Department approves Mississippi’s legislative redistricting plan | The Commercial Appeal

The U.S. Justice Department has approved legislative redistricting plans that give DeSoto County two new House seats and a third state Senate district, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves said Friday. Legislators last spring approved changes to House and Senate boundaries that are required after each 10-year Census is taken to reflect population shifts. But Justice Department approval, called pre-clearance, is required before the state may implement changes affecting voting in Mississippi, given the state’s history of discrimination.

Texas: Voter ID, district maps battles continue | Amarillo Globe-News

Despite two recent setbacks for the state of Texas in separate federal court rulings, the hard-fought voting battles continue. But, at least for now, those prolonged fights have nothing to do with Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s decision to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse both lower court rulings. For some of you who missed it, in late August two judicial panels in Washington ruled the state’s redistricting maps and the voter ID law — both approved by the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature last year — are unconstitutional because they violate the federal Voting Rights Act. The 1965 landmark legislation protects the voting rights of racial minorities.

National: Prelude to a Supreme Court Showdown: Voting Rights Rulings in Texas and Florida Offer New Evidence of Racial Discrimination in Voting | Constitutional Accountability Center

The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits racial discrimination in voting and expressly empowers Congress to enforce this guarantee, which it has done primarily through the passage and repeated reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.  Recent events only bolster Congress’ repeated invocation of its express constitutional power to protect the right to vote free from racial discrimination.  In Shelby County v. Holder, an Alabama county, joined by a host of conservative states, including Alabama, Georgia, Texas and South Carolina, and right-leaning legal groups as amici curiae, are urging the Supreme Court to review the case and strike down a key part of the Voting Rights Act as beyond the scope of Congress’ power to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition on racial discrimination in voting.  The core of the conservative attack on the “preclearance” requirement of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (which requires jurisdictions that have a history of engaging in racial discrimination in voting to obtain federal permission before altering their voting laws and regulations) is that this strong medicine is now outdated and unnecessary.   In reauthorizing the Act in 2006, Congress disagreed, amassing a 15,000-page legislative record demonstrating that racial discrimination in voting continues to exist and remains concentrated in jurisdictions covered by the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirement.

Missouri: Ballot snafu puts one-vote-margin Missouri state House race in question | Stltoday

The St. Louis County Election Board has declined to certify the results of the Democratic primary for the 87th State Representative District—which was apparently won by one vote on Aug. 7—because 102 voters were given incorrect ballots, the board announced today. The contest was between two incumbents thrown into the same district by redistricting, state reps. Stacey Newman and Susan Carlson. According to the unofficial results from election night, Newman beat Carlson 1,823 votes to 1,822. However, that outcome now will have to be determined by a circuit court, since the county election board won’t certify the results.

Tennessee: Shelby County election official responds to state’s questions about voting problems | The Commercial Appeal

The County Commission’s failure to develop its redistricting plan, the loss of critical local precinct-change data by the state, the massive complexities of redistricting overall, and a new staff without redistricting experience contributed to unprecedented local problems in the Aug. 2 elections, Shelby County’s chief election official reported Wednesday night. The County Commission’s redistricting plan was legally due last Dec. 31, but was never finalized. The Shelby Election Commission decided on June 14 that it “must proceed at a rapid pace to implement the redistricting at all levels” based on no county commission plan, but the next day a court ruling approved a plan — and that ruling was promptly appealed. That was only a month before the start of early voting. “I believed we could not act until the county commission enacted a redistricting plan,” Shelby Elections Administrator Richard Holden wrote. “Had they acted in compliance with state law, we would have implemented the plan we developed after the March election certification and the results would have been dramatically different.”

Connecticut: Software glitch confuses New Haven voters | The New Haven Register

A software glitch caused about 2,400 postcards mailed to Republican voters to read “Democratic Primary,” and polling place confusion erupted when voters realized that new ward lines that resulted from redistricting had taken effect. Sharon Ferrucci, Democratic registrar of voters, said the glitch happened when the postcards were printed at Allegra Design of Grand Avenue, and the owner was very apologetic. “There were two lists given to me by the registrar of voters — one Republican and one Democratic list — and we do a merge of those. During the merge process, we combine the lists into a big file and code it so it would change one word,” said Allegra owner Bob Fraulo. “We thought we coded everything, but whatever happened in the software didn’t work.” The company was unaware of the issue until a city resident called the registrar of voters asking about the Republican primary that will be held Tuesday.

Texas: Voter registration the target of latest round of voting related litigation | kvue.com

From redistricting to voter ID, the Texas government and the federal government haven’t exactly seen eye-to-eye lately. There are more than 13 million registered voters in Texas, roughly 71 percent of the voting age population, however, there’s a fight brewing over exactly who can register the rest. At issue are a handful of components of current Texas law, from a pair of items passed during the last session to legislation dating to the mid-1980s. One element keeps third-party voter registration groups from working in more than one county. Another specifies only Texas residents can register voters. Other elements include legislation to keep registrars from being paid in relation to the number they sign up, from photocopying registration certificates and from mailing completed forms. Last week, a federal judge put those laws on hold with an injunction against the State of Texas. In his 94-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Gregg Costa of Galveston called the rules “more burdensome… than the vast majority, if not all, other states.”

National: Florida, Texas and Alabama Challenge 1965 Voting Rights Act | WUSF News

A landmark federal law used to block the adoption of state voter identification cards and other election rules now faces unprecedented legal challenges. A record five federal lawsuits filed this year challenge the constitutionality of a key provision in the Voting Rights Act. The 1965 statute prevents many state and local governments from enacting new voter ID requirements, redistricting plans and similar proposals on grounds that the changes would disenfranchise minorities. The plaintiffs, which include Alabama, Florida and Texas, are aiming for the Supreme Court because some justices in a previous ruling openly questioned the continued need for parts of the Voting Rights Act. The high court recently received two of the cases on appeal and could take them up in the fall term. The three states, and two smaller communities in Alabama and North Carolina, want to regain autonomy over their elections, which are under strict federal supervision imposed by the Voting Rights Act to remedy past discrimination. The complaints ask the courts to strike down the central provision in the law, known as “pre-clearance,” which requires governments with a history of discrimination to get federal permission to change election procedures. Pre-clearance is enforced throughout nine states and in portions of seven others. Most of the jurisdictions are in the South.

Texas: Court enjoins enforcement of new Texas voter registration laws | Texas Redistricting

This afternoon, U.S. District Judge Gregg Costa enjoined enforcement of Texas laws passed in the 2011 legislative session which require that deputy voter registrars be Texas residents and prohibited performance-based compensation for voter registration staff. The restrictions had been challenged by the non-profit group Voting for America and various other plaintiffs in a suit filed early this year in federal district court in Galveston. The court rejected claims of Texas that the new restrictions were required to prevent fraud, holding that “[i]f these practices did contribute to fraud, concrete examples of such fraud would likely exist from decades of experience … But no such evidence was introduced for the Court to weigh against the harm to Plaintiffs.”

Tennessee: Shelby County Election Commission will slow process to prevent ballot problems | The Commercial Appeal

In an effort to make sure all voters receive the proper ballot, the Shelby County Election Commission has added an extra step that chairman Robert Meyers said could slow the voting process for everyone in Thursday’s elections. The ballots will feature state and federal primaries, Shelby County general elections and suburban referendums related to the creation of municipal school districts. Ballot problems following redistricting of state House and Senate and U.S. House voting boundaries led to more than 3,000 voters appearing to cast ballots in incorrect races during the early voting period. The majority of the incorrect ballots involved state House party primaries, although some of those are uncontested. Problems related to the referendums on municipal school districts in six suburban towns were corrected in the first week of early voting, but problems continued in state and federal primaries. Those voters most likely affected by the problems will be on a list at every precinct, and when someone shows up to vote who has been identified as a potential victim of the computer glitch, poll workers will attempt to ensure the proper ballot is issued and voted upon.

Tennessee: Shelby County Election Commission hopes for smoother vote on Thursday | The Commercial Appeal

With a troubled early-voting period now behind it, the Shelby County Election Commission is working to insure voters receive correct ballots on Thursday’s Election Day. But the commission and its staff continue to ask voters to be sure when they go to the polls that they know which state and federal districts they should be voting in, and to ask poll workers for clarification if there is any question of whether they are voting in the correct districts. “We continue to work to try to make sure we will be as successful as possible on Election Day,” said commission chairman Robert Meyers. “We’re doing all we can to make it through this election, and then post election we’ll be taking some serious looks at what happened and why it happened.” The state said last week it will conduct a performance audit after the election, and Meyers said Monday he hopes that will help identify core problems that have affected previous elections as well.

Alabama: State challenges Voting Rights Act over district review | al.com

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: State asks federal court to rule its redistricting plan doesn’t violate Voting Rights Act | The Washington Post

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.

Tennessee: 1,000 ballots incorrect, but still count, Shelby County election official says | The Commercial Appeal

The chairman of the Shelby County Election Commission conceded Tuesday that nearly 1,000 voters received the wrong ballots during early voting for state and federal primary races in the Aug. 2 elections. But voters who received the wrong ballots won’t get to vote again with the right ballots, said commission chairman Robert Meyers. Meyers, a Republican, publicly thanked the Democratic nominee for a Shelby County Commission seat, Steve Ross, for identifying the glitch that caused the problem. Saying that the information Ross released on his popular progressive blog Monday was “a correct report,” Meyers at a late afternoon news conference Tuesday tried to assure voters that proper “corrective action” had been taken. The mistakes appear to be related to a late rush by the Election Commission to update voter files based on redistricting in state and federal races. The votes that were cast for the wrong race will still count, and those voters will not get a chance to cast ballots in the correct race, Meyers said, citing the one-man, one-vote principle. The wrong ballots appear to be dispersed across several races, with the vast majority in state House contests.

North Carolina: Wake County Elections board reconsiders nixing early voting sites | WRAL.com

A lack of county funding has Wake County elections officials mulling over how to stretch their budget to keep early-voting sites open for this fall’s presidential election. The Board of Elections was considering cutting the number of one-stop polling places for November’s election by 25 percent. But members voted Friday to reconsider after a public hearing at which 27 people spoke against the move. Fifty-seven percent of all registered voters in the county – 235,000 – used early voting in 2008, and officials expect that number to rise to an estimated 272,000 this fall. The board had asked county commissioners for $3 million for early voting, but received only $1.7 million – enough, says election board staff, to keep only 11 of the 15 sites from 2008 open this year. They would also be open fewer days and fewer hours. Overall, the number of hours available for early voting would be cut by half – from 1,456 hours in 2008 to just 725 hours this fall.

Editorials: Beginning of the end for ‘prison-based gerrymandering’ | The Washington Post

Sandwiched between its controversial immigration, campaign finance and health-care rulings last month, the Supreme Court issued a little-noticed decision in a Maryland case that gave the green light to states to eliminate the repugnant practice of “prison-based gerrymandering.” States are now unquestionably free to correct for an ancient flaw in the U.S. Census that counts incarcerated people as residents not of their homes but of the places where their prisons are located. When the prison population was small, the problem was little more than statistical trivia. Today, however, the census counts more than 2 million people as though they were residents of places where they have no community ties.

Ohio: Voters First Initiative Faces Opposition From Secretary of State | Ohio News Network

Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted, a longtime advocate of reforming the redistricting process in Ohio, said that he opposes the Voters First initiative. “Of course we should go to a more bipartisan approach on redistricting, but the one pending before us is not the solution,” Husted said. “We can’t have each party end-running the other one to try to get their way to do this.”. Each decade, Ohio redraws legislative and congressional lines after the census. If one political party has a clear majority, those lines are often drawn to that party’s advantage. Dan Tokaji, an election law professor from the Ohio State University, advocates an overhaul of the reapportionment process. “It’s not surprising that partisan politicians and party bosses are trying to hold onto their power,” Tokaji said. “What the Voters First Initiative would install is a non-partisan independent citizens commission.”

North Carolina: State Supreme Court hears redistricting issue Tuesday | BlueRidgeNow.com

legal battle over North Carolina’s redistricting maps will reach the state Supreme Court on Tuesday but the case is far from finished, as justices must first decide how much of the correspondence between mapmaking lawmakers and their lawyers should be disclosed. The state’s highest court will hear oral arguments about whether the public should learn about legal advice outside attorneys gave to Republican legislative leaders on drawing General Assembly and congressional seat boundaries, getting them enacted and preparing for potential lawsuits. Civil rights and election reform groups as well as Democratic voters who sued in November to overturn the maps on constitutional and discrimination grounds have asked for records to attempt to buttress their case. They’ve already received hundreds of thousands of pages. Taxpayer-paid contract attorneys representing GOP lawmakers say some of their documents should remain confidential due to attorney-client privilege and other restrictions.

National: Texas to test 1965 voting rights law in U.S. court | Reuters

The Voting Rights Act – a cherished safeguard for minority voters since 1965 – has been under siege for two years and this week faces one of its toughest test on an apparent path to the U.S. Supreme Court. Twenty-five hours of argument, starting on Monday and spread over five days, will help the judges of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia decide whether Texas can require voters to present a photo identification at the polls. Formulated at a time of racial turmoil, the Voting Rights Act passed 77-19 in the U.S. Senate and 333-85 in the House of Representatives. The votes transcended party lines to protect black voters of all political ideals. Ever since, it has served as the U.S. government’s chief check on the fairness of election rules imposed by local governments. While it passed with bipartisan support more than 45 years ago, a shift in political preferences along racial lines has turned the landmark piece of civil rights era legislation into a highly charged political issue. In the 1960s, Democrats held a monopoly of voters in the Southern states. But since then, most white Southern voters have shifted allegiances to the Republican Party, while black and Hispanic voters moved further toward the left.

New York: Rangel opponent files for re-vote in increasingly tight primary | The Washington Post

What at one point looked like a big primary night victory for Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) has gradually become a close race — enough so that Rangel’s opponent is now filing for a possible do-over election. State Sen. Adriano Espaillat this week filed with the state Supreme Court seeking either a recount or a highly unusual redo of his June 26 primary with Rangel. Espaillat has lodged accusations of voter suppression and has pointed to faulty administration and vote-counting by New York City elections officials. Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., salutes surviving members of the Montford Point Marines, during a Congressional Gold Medal ceremony at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, June 27, 2012. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais — Associated Press) The race appeared over and done last Tuesday night, with Rangel holding a double-digit lead in early returns. He delivered a victory speech, and Espaillat conceded. As the night wore on, though, Espaillat closed the gap significantly, and a continuing manual counting of the ballots now has Rangel up just 802 votes out of nearly 40,000 cast. A couple thousand absentee ballots still have yet to be counted.

Voting Blogs: So what’s going on in the Texas redistricting cases? | Texas Redistricting

After an extended period when the courts and parties were generating redistricting news it seemed almost hourly, things have gotten much quieter. In fact, in the  preclearance case in Washington, no pleadings, orders, notices, or advisories have been filed or entered since April 2.  Nada. And most parties seem to have more or less given up trying to predict when a ruling on the maps can be expected.