Editorials: All American citizens should have the same voting rights | Pacific Daily News

We applaud U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren for adding her voice of support to voting rights for Americans living in Guam and other U.S. territories. She said citizens in the territories are treated like “second-class citizens” because they can’t vote in presidential elections, aren’t represented in the Senate and only have a nonvoting delegate in Congress. “I just have to say this is absurd,” Warren said at a hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in Washington, D.C., earlier this week. “Four million Americans live on American soil and can only participate in our democracy, but only if they leave home. At their homes — on U.S. soil — all of their representation rights disappear.”

Montana: Fort Belknap Challenging Montana for Voting Rights | ICTMN

The Fort Belknap Indian Community in Montana is considering taking legal action against Blaine County and the Secretary of State of Montana for failing to provide equal access to the right to vote for tribal members, according to the tribe’s president. Fort Belknap Indian Community President Mark Azure said the tribe has retained the services of Timothy Purdon and Brendan Johnson of Robins Kaplan – the former attorneys general of North Dakota and South Dakota, respectively – and Bryan Sells, who was previously working in civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice before starting his own law practice. “We have made multiple requests of Blaine County officials for equal access to in-person late registration and absentee balloting on the Fort Belknap Reservation going back to August 2014,” Azure said.

Washington: Yakima City Council abandons appeal of ACLU voting rights suit | Yakima Herald

The Yakima City Council unanimously ended a four-year fight Tuesday over how the city elects its representatives by ending its appeal of a voting rights lawsuit with the American Civil Liberties Union. In a 6-0 vote, with Councilwoman Maureen Adkison absent, the council withdrew its appeal to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, ending a case it had spent more than $1.1 million defending and will now pay the ACLU $1.8 million as part of a federal court order. “This is a $3 million reminder” that all residents should have a say in who represents them,” Mayor Avina Gutierrez said.

Arizona: Voting Rights Act rulings’ negative effects manifested in Arizona | Washington Times

Ever since the Supreme Court poked a hole in the Voting Rights Act, activists have been warning of devastating effects on average voters showing up at the polls. Last month they got their case in Arizona, where some voters said they waited in lines longer than five hours to vote in the primary elections after Maricopa County, one of the most sprawling in the country, cut its number of polling places from more than 400 in 2008 down to 60 this year. Other voters said they had their registration secretly changed without their knowledge, locking them out of the “closed” primary, in which voters had to have declared their affiliation in advance to be able to vote in either party’s contest. Supporters of Sen. Bernard Sanders alleged dirty tricks, saying the vast majority of secret switches were those who were changed from Democrat to independent. “We made some horrendous mistakes, and I apologize for that. I can’t go back and undo it. I wish that I could, but I cannot,” Helen Purcell, the Maricopa County recorder, told a state legislative investigation last week. “I can only say we felt we were using the best information that we had available to us.”

National: New ID laws, long lines raise allegations of U.S. voting discrimination | Toronto Star

Steve Pacewicz of Madison, Wis., is such a political junkie that he can speak intelligently about Canadian pipeline proposals. His Facebook page is plastered with images of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Until recently, though, he didn’t think he was going be voting in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. He didn’t think he could afford it. Pacewicz, 56, is a homeless man who sleeps in his truck. Wisconsin has a new “voter ID” law that requires every voter to show specific kinds of photo identification to cast a ballot. If a voter wants to obtain that identification while keeping his driver’s licence, it costs money. Pacewicz, who works odd jobs, doesn’t have any. He only managed to get the card he needed — a duplicate of the licence he said he never received in the mail — when a non-profit group called VoteRiders paid the $14 fee for him. If it hadn’t, his only other option was surrendering his driving privileges in exchange for a free non-driver ID. He is still indignant. “I don’t have much in this world, but I know I’ve got rights,” he said. “I have to trade my driving privileges for my right to vote? That doesn’t make any sense. Isn’t that kind of like Jim Crow laws? The new version?”

National: The Legal Battles Over the Status of Puerto Rico and Other Unites States Territories | The Atlantic

Why does America have territories, and why aren’t they governed the same way as states? Despite boasting a total population of around 4 million people, the legal fate of the five inhabited territories of the United States and the constitutional status of their residents have always occupied surprisingly little of the American legal imagination. However, that might be changing as the Supreme Court considers two cases directly involving Puerto Rico’s self-governing authority and as a number of legal challenges involving the other territories wind up in federal courts. Rulings in these cases may go a long way toward unwinding the complicated, confusing, and often contradictory relationship between the territories and the United States. In the process, they might also unravel some of the imperialist justifications for maintaining the status quo. Puerto Rico, the largest of the territories by far, is the subject of the bulk of the legal debate. It is also the territory that has most come up against the legal, governmental, and financial limits of its status. The island is in the midst of a decade-long economic contraction, which has led to hundreds of thousands fleeing to the mainland for jobs and opportunities.

Editorials: Arizona’s voting rights fire bell | E.J. Dionne/The Washington Post

It’s bad enough that an outrage was perpetrated last week against the voters of Maricopa County, Ariz. It would be far worse if we ignore the warning that the disenfranchisement of thousands of its citizens offers our nation. In November, one of the most contentious campaigns in our history could end in a catastrophe for our democracy. A major culprit would be the U.S. Supreme Court, and specifically the conservative majority that gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. The facts of what happened in Arizona’s presidential primary are gradually penetrating the nation’s consciousness. In a move rationalized as an attempt to save money, officials of Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, cut the number of polling places by 70 percent, from 200 in the last presidential election to 60 this time around. Maricopa includes Phoenix, the state’s largest city, which happens to have a non-white majority and is a Democratic island in an otherwise Republican county. What did the cutbacks mean? As the Arizona Republic reported, the county’s move left one polling place for every 21,000 voters — compared with one polling place for every 2,500 voters in the rest of the state.

Arizona: Native Americans Struggle To Overcome Barriers Ahead Of Arizona Elections | International Business Times

The Navajo Nation reservation, the largest concentrated population of American Indians in the United States, is tucked into Arizona’s northwest corner. Stretching across 27,000 square miles of mesas, shrubs and sand, the reservation is largely rural, often without internet access, paved roads or street signs. Employment and education rates are far below the national average, and very few people own vehicles. If residents on the reservation ever need to drive to their county seat — say, to register to vote or to cast an early-voting ballot — the journey could easily take them four hours. Ahead of Arizona’s primary on Tuesday, Democratic candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have sought to reach out to Native communities and mention Native issues on the campaign trail. This year marks the first presidential election since the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down the key provision of the Voting Rights Act that required states with a history of voting discrimination to get pre-approval for new voting laws. While much of the national conversation has been focused on Southern states and laws affecting African-American and Hispanic voters, Native Americans in places like Arizona also are affected by policies that discourage them from voting, which have resulted in some of the lowest voter participation rates of any demographic group in the country.

Washington: Yakima City Council moves toward abandoning appeal of ACLU lawsuit over election districts | Yakima Herald

The Yakima City Council has scheduled an April vote in which it is expected to rescind its appeal of the American Civil Liberties Union voting rights lawsuit that changed elections last year. The council voted 5-1 to put the issue on the April 5 agenda, with Councilwoman Kathy Coffey opposed and Councilman Bill Lover absent. After a brief executive session following the vote, Coffey announced that her concerns about the proposal were answered and that she too would support it.

National: Law expert examines battles over voting rights | Miami Herald

Taking a long view on the state of American democracy is hard amid the dung-flinging reality TV circus that has dominated the 2016 presidential primary season. The rise of Donald Trump and his disruptive effect on the mainstream Republican Party — and the nation at large — has overwhelmed comparatively mundane public-policy fights over such critical issues as voting rights. But as anyone who lived through the 2000 Florida presidential recount debacle will recall, the debate over who should be eligible to vote and how those votes are counted will become increasingly relevant come November. In his timely new book, constitutional law expert Michael Waldman argues that universal voting rights — the doctrine of “one person, one vote’’ — have been in steady retreat since that dangling-chad dead heat when “partisans realized anew that razor-thin margins can be turned by manipulation of voting rules.’’

Editorials: One person, one vote in America? The ideal is often not the practice | David Cole/The Washington Post

In 2008, 57 percent of Americans voted, and Barack Obama became the nation’s first black president. In the 2010 midterms, only 37 percent voted, and Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, as well as 18 state legislatures. They learned their lesson. The following year, Republican legislators introduced 180 bills in 41 states designed to make it harder to vote. Nineteen states passed 25 laws that limited voting. They included onerous voter-identification laws and registration requirements, restrictions on early voting and increased penalties for volunteers who make mistakes in registration drives. Not coincidentally, the laws all had a foreseeably disproportionate impact on the young, the poor and minority voters — groups that tend to vote Democratic. As conservative strategist Paul Weyrich told the Republican National Convention some 30 years earlier: “I don’t want everybody to vote. . . . Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Such a self-consciously partisan and highly coordinated strategy of vote suppression is, one might think, profoundly un-American. The nation was founded on the “consent of the governed.” “We the people” rejected monarchy for popular sovereignty. Yet as Michael Waldman deftly shows in “The Fight to Vote,” there have long been two competing strains in American politics.

Washington: State Voting Rights Act likely dead again this year | Yakima Herald

A state Voting Rights Act bill that has passed the House two years in a row will again not make it out of the Senate. Senate Republican leaders said earlier this week there were negotiations on the bill through last Friday, but they failed to reach a compromise. Senate Majority Leader Mark Schoesler, R-Ritzville, said the sole focus now is passing a supplemental budget to fund government through the 2015-17 biennium. “I think right now all of the bandwidth is focused on getting the three budgets out of here because that is the one thing we do really need to do that we all agree on,” Schoesler said at a news conference Tuesday in Olympia. Gov. Jay Inslee called the Legislature into an immediate special session Thursday night when no budget had emerged.

American Samoa: How Many Delegates Does American Samoa Get? The US Territory Gets A Say In The 2016 Primaries, Too | Bustle

Super Tuesday is the biggest voting day of primary season. A total of 14 states and territories will cast their votes on March 1st, and it’s a diverse roster: Texas, Vermont, Georgia, Colorado and Oklahoma are amongst the states that will head to the polls on Super Tuesday. And then there’s American Samoa, the tiny US territory 2,500 miles from Hawaii that will also hold a caucus on March 1st. How many delegates does American Samoa get? In the Democratic contest, American Samoa gets 10 delegates. Six of them are regular pledged delegates, while the other four are superdelegates who can vote for whomever they please at the national convention over the summer. Republicans in American Samoa will select a candidate on March 22nd, with nine delegates at play.

Washington: Voting rights bill gains support in state Senate | Yakima Herald

A proposed state Voting Rights Act that has languished for years in Olympia now appears to have bipartisan support in the Senate. For four years Rep. Luis Moscoso, D-Mountlake Terrace, has led the effort in the House to pass the law he says would make it easier to avoid costly court battles over local voting rights. Yakima’s expensive years-long case with the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is the prime example cited by supporters in the House, where the bill passed earlier this month on a 50-47 vote. No Central Washington lawmakers supported the measure.

National: Civil rights groups concerned restrictive laws will keep minorities from casting votes | Associated Press

With less than a week to go before “Super Tuesday,” a coalition of civil rights groups is working to make sure that everyone eligible can cast a vote. Election Protection, which represents more than 100 civil rights organizations across the U.S., is concerned with the recent surge of restrictive voting laws in some states following the 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted a Voting Rights Act provision. “We’ve come to see a lot of stress when it comes to accessing the ballot box,” Kristen Clarke, the executive director of Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in a conference call Wednesday. “This is the first election in 40 years without the Voting Rights Act.”

National: Post-Scalia supreme court could start to turn tide on voting rights restrictions | The Guardian

Just over a week after the death of Antonin Scalia, legal experts are seeing signs that a newly configured supreme court may lead to a modest expansion of voting rights after years of setbacks. Although a new justice is unlikely to be appointed before election day, a court deadlocked between four conservatives and four liberals could still have a significant effect during a presidential election year in which activists on both sides of the partisan divide will be banging on the door of the country’s highest court to settle disputes over restrictive voting rules and racial discrimination. “It’s starting pretty much immediately,” said Dan Tokaji, an election law specialist at Ohio State University’s Moritz School of Law. “You’re going to start seeing cases challenging voting rules like you do in every election … These cases tended to be decided on a 5-4 vote, so Justice Scalia’s absence could be very important.”

National: Scalia’s absence could shape election rules | Politico

Justice Antonin Scalia’s death is certain to have an impact on the political debate in this year’s elections, but it could also have a far more direct effect on the elections themselves. There are numerous challenges to Republican-led congressional redistricting plans and new voter ID laws likely to come under Supreme Court scrutiny. Scalia had been a reliable vote for allowing such redistricting plans and voting rules. A new justice nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate would almost certainly shift the court in the direction of stricter voting rights enforcement and a greater willingness to take account of race when considering redistricting and election law matters. But the more likely scenario in the near term — deadlock over Scalia’s replacement — could have a similar effect by leaving the court less likely to come up with the five votes required to set precedents on such matters and to issue emergency stays in challenges to last-minute voter ID and election-law changes coming up from lower courts.

Guam: Federal government asks judge to dismiss voting case | Pacific Daily News

The federal government is asking an Illinois federal judge to throw out a case challenging how voter rights are extended to the territories, saying the plaintiffs’ issue should be with the state, not the feds. Guam resident and National Guard Staff Sgt. Luis Segovia and five others — plus two veterans groups — filed a lawsuit in November 2015 saying they were unconstitutionally deprived of their rights to participate abroad in Illinois elections. All of the plaintiffs are former Illinois residents. They have targeted the federal Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act and the Illinois Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act. Those laws allow military members and overseas citizens to participate in Illinois elections even if they live outside the United States. However, the law defines the United States to include the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

American Samoa: US Territories citizenship case arrives at Supreme Court | Marianas Variety

The case for birthright citizenship for individuals born in U.S. territories, Tuaua v. United States, could be decided by the Supreme Court. Attorneys filed a petition for writ of certiorari Monday last week requesting that the Supreme Court review the decision of a lower court denying citizenship to people born in American Samoa. “Our goal is for the Supreme Court to recognize that citizenship is a constitutional right, not a mere congressional privilege, for the millions of Americans born in U.S. territories,” Neil Weare, president and founder of We the People Project, a nonprofit advocacy organization for Americans in U.S. territories, told NBC News. In June 2015, the District of Columbia Circuit Court ruled that the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment was “ambiguous” as to whether birthright citizenship was guaranteed in overseas U.S. territories.

North Carolina: As Primaries Loom, Voting Rights Are Challenged in North Carolina | Fortune

Just when the right to vote, so cherished and so disputed, seem entrenched around the country, a new chapter in the long-running battle to secure it has opened. That chapter is unfolding in North Carolina, which holds its presidential primaries on March 15. In a matter of weeks, a federal judge in the state will decide whether to uphold or repeal new state requirements for photo identification from citizens who want to vote. The requirements are controversial, as some see them as an effort to curb African-American and Hispanic voting participation just as these groups are becoming a larger portion of the overall voter population. No matter the outcome, the case is likely to be regarded as a harbinger of whether enfranchisement applies to every eligible citizen, or whether it can be circumscribed as it has often been in the country’s past. In recent years, more than a dozen states, including Kansas, Texas, and Wisconsin, have adopted new voter identification laws. And Florida and Ohio have curbed early voting.

National: Clinton Allies Forming Group to Protect, Register Voters | The New York Times

Allies of Hillary Clinton are forming a new $25 million political organization aimed at expanding voter protection efforts and driving turnout and registration among Latino and black voters essential to her Democratic presidential campaign. The new group, Every Citizen Counts, is beginning its work as Clinton faces a stronger-than-expected challenge from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose overwhelming victory in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary has set off new worries among Democrats that Sanders may soon cut into Clinton’s advantage with black and Hispanic voters. The non-partisan organization will focus on legislation, litigation, voter registration and turnout among black and Latino communities in the general election. It was formed in August and has recently begun developing partnerships with other organizations to expand voter education, registration, protection and turnout.

Virginia: Board of Elections Asks Court To Ignore Pre-1965 Discrimination In Voting Rights Case | TPM

Virginia’s State Board of Elections is asking the court weighing a voting rights case being brought in the state to exclude any evidence of the state’s history of racial discrimination. The board filed a motion Monday to “exclude expert testimony and other evidence of Virginia’s history of racial discrimination,” particularly anything that happened before 1965, when the federal Voting Rights Act was passed. “No one denies Virginia’s troubling history of racial discrimination nor that Virginia was once part of the Confederacy,” the motion said. “However, Virginia’s history as a former Confederate state is simply not relevant to the issue this Court is asked to decide.” The state’s motion focuses on the anticipated testimony of John Douglas Smith, the author of “Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia.” It argues that his testimony should not be admitted because much of his initial report covers Virginia’s pre-1965 history.

Editorials: Will you have the right to vote in 2016? | Ari Berman/Los Angeles Times

As Iowa voters headed to their caucus sites Monday, 94-year-old Rosanell Eaton sat in the first row of a federal courtroom in Winston-Salem, N.C., to witness the closing arguments of a trial challenging North Carolina’s new voter identification law. Eaton, who is African American and grew up in the Jim Crow South, had to recite the preamble to the Constitution from memory to register to vote. She had been participating in elections for 70 years when North Carolina passed its strict voter ID law in 2013. Lawyers for the North Carolina NAACP played a videotaped deposition during the trial of Eaton recounting how the names on her driver’s license and voter registration card did not match. To get her paperwork in order, Eaton had to make 11 trips to different state agencies in 2015, totaling more than 200 miles and 20 hours. “I’m disgusted,” Eaton told the Raleigh News & Observer as she left the courtroom. North Carolina is one of 16 states that have new voting restrictions in place since the last presidential contest, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, accounting for 178 electoral votes, including in crucial swing states such as Ohio, Wisconsin and Virginia.

Washington: State Voting Rights Act passes House: Will Senate ever vote on it? | Seattle Post Intelligencer

The Washington Voting Rights Act is designed to open up democracy in local government, but it has been shut down for three years in the Washington State Senate. On Thursday, the Democratic-controlled House of Representative passed the WVRA for the fourth consecutive year, on a party line 50-47 vote. It now goes to the Republican-run Senate, where in past years the Rules Committee has refused a floor vote. The legislation gives counties, cities and towns the authority to negotiate election changes, specifically to move from at-large voting to a system of districts. (Seattle moved to district voting last year for seven of its nine City Council seats.) The legislation is prompted by Eastern Washington counties in which the population is now 30-50 percent Hispanic, but where at-large voting has kept the growing minority from winning council and school board seats.

Montana: McCulloch announces satellite voting offices on reservations | Great Falls Tribune

Secretary of State Linda McCulloch on Monday announced the establishment of five satellite election offices with the potential of more on Indian reservations in Montana for the 2016 elections. This follows a directive issued by McCulloch in October, ordering counties to provide satellite offices to ensure compliance with the Federal Voting Rights Act. Satellite offices offer services that are otherwise only available to voters at the county headquarters, namely late registration and in-person absentee voting, which are available in the 29 days preceding the election, officials said.

New York: Voter-Registration Lawsuit Settled in Unusual Accord | Wall Street Journal

The Sullivan County Board of Elections will appoint a monitor to review challenges to voter registrations to settle a lawsuit filed by Hasidic Jewish residents in what legal experts call an unprecedented agreement in New York state. A group of 10 Hasidic registered voters from the Catskills village of Bloomingburg sued the Sullivan County Board of Elections in 2015, claiming the board violated the First Amendment, the 14th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act. The plaintiffs alleged the Board of Elections engaged in a “discriminatory campaign to deprive Hasidic Jewish residents of Bloomingburg…of the fundamental right to vote.” U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest approved the settlement Monday.

Voting Blogs: Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Vote in Kansas… | Project Vote

Project Vote was part of the landmark case in which Kobach got whacked down by the U.S. Court of Appeals, when he tried to force the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to add Kansas and Arizona’s state proof-of-citizenship requirements to the federal voter registration form. The Court of Appeals rightfully ruled in 2014 that the NVRA preempted those draconian state laws, and added that Kobach and company “have not provided substantial evidence of noncitizens registering to vote using the Federal Form.” … Today, in a bizarre turnaround, the EAC—without any public process of review—suddenly decided to do what Kobach and Co. have been asking all along. They just added proof-of-citizenship requirements to the instructions on the federal form for residents of Kansas, Georgia, and Alabama.

National: Voting Rights Act: After Supreme Court Ruling, 2016 Election Could Endanger Black, Latino Rights | International Business Times

Decades after many Americans fought, bled and died for the right to vote, millions of voters could be once again be turned away from the polls this year because of a regime of voting laws that disproportionately burden minorities, the elderly, immigrants and the poor. With both presidential and congressional elections in November, advocates warn that the stakes are high. “Basically, all hell is breaking loose,” said Katherine Culliton-González, director of the voter protection program at the Washington, D.C.-based Advancement Project, who spent five years working on voter issues at the U.S. Department of Justice. “Unless you are in the elite — and that doesn’t even mean in the middle class — voter restrictions are going to impact you, one way or another.” This year’s presidential election will be the first one held after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the historic Voting Rights Act in 2013, which required federal pre-clearance of voting law changes for states with a history of voter discrimination. Without those protections in place, pending legal battles over the fairness and constitutionality of recently enacted voting laws will get unprecedented scrutiny this year, advocates on both sides have said. If the courts uphold, for example, a voter ID requirement in North Carolina or allow Texas to redraw districts and reduce political power in heavily immigrant communities, they’d potentially be denying millions the right to vote and be equally represented by their state lawmakers. “Voting laws seem to be changing every day, and that in and of itself is disenfranchising to so many Americans,” González said.

National: Voting rights advocates observe somber King holiday | USA Today

While most of the country will spend the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday remembering the peaceful nature and civil rights successes lodged by the late leader, voting rights advocates say this is a dark time for them. Many might spend Monday reflecting on King’s 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march to push for voting equality for black Americans, but voting rights advocates note that there has been a major setback in their world. In 2013, a Supreme Court ruling struck down the part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that indicates which parts of the country must have changes to voting rights laws cleared by the federal government or by a federal court. Preclearance was a requirement for states and communities that had a history of discrimination against black voters. Advocates viewed it as a necessary safeguard against discrimination at the ballot. Also, 33 states now have Voter ID laws in place with increased identification requirements for people seeking to cast ballots. The issue has been a controversial one for civil rights advocates, who maintain that some groups of Americans, including older people and minorities, are less likely to have the sort of identification that would be required.

Japan: Lower House passes bill to preserve voting rights for new electors | The Japan Times

The Lower House on Thursday passed a bill to enable people aged 18 or 19 to vote in the upcoming Upper House election even if they change their address shortly before the ballot. While the country is set to lower its voting age to 18 from 20 on June 19, some 70,000 of the 2.4 million new voters were expected to become ineligible to vote as the current election system shuts out those who change their address less than three months before the election.