The Voting News Weekly: TVN Weekly December 26 2011 – January 1 2012

Happy New Year! Looking forward to the year ahead, Fareed Zakaria notes the many significant elections scheduled across the world in 2012. The Iowa GOP has made some procedural changes in response to threats of hackers to disrupt this week’s Iowa Caucuses. Rick Perry files a lawsuit after he failed to submit sufficient signatures to meet ballot access requirements for the Virginia primary. The Montana Supreme Court upheld the State’s ban on corporation spending on political campaigns, while the Indiana Supreme Court upheld a ban on robo-calls. The New York Times surveyed laws passed in 2011 that could make it difficult for students to vote. Jeffrey Toobin considered Attorney General Eric Holder’s legacy after the Department of Justice blocked South Carolina’s Voter ID law and Joshua Spivak considered the roles of voter anger and technology in the many recall elections over the past year.

Editorials: 2012 – the year of elections | Fareed Zakaria/CNN.com
Iowa: Suspected hackers could target Iowa caucuses | WQAD
Virginia: Rick Perry to ‘Activist Judges’: Save Me | Garrett Epps/The Atlantic
Montana: Supreme Court upholds state ban on corporation spending | Billings Gazette
Indiana: Court Upholds Robocall Ban | WRTV Indianapolis
Editorials: Keeping College Students From the Polls | NYTimes.com
Editorials: Holder’s Legacy | Jeffrey Toobin/The New Yorker
Editorials: 2011, the year of the recall — Why has the recall vote suddenly become so popular? You may think it’s anger, but it’s really technology | Joshua Spivak/latimes.com

Dec 31, 2011
Editorials: 2012 – the year of elections | Fareed Zakaria/CNN.com

2011 will likely be recorded as a year of historic change. Mass uprisings have upended governments across the Arab world. Economic mismanagement in Europe led to changes at the top in Italy, Greece and Spain. 365 days ago you couldn’t have predicted these events. You couldn’t have imagined so many leaders would lose their jobs. So what if I told you that you can predict that in 2012, a lot of leaders will say goodbye? No, I’m not gazing into a magic crystal ball. You see, 2012 is the year of elections.

59 countries will be tallying up votes — local, state or national. There are 193 countries in the world so that’s about a third of the world’s nations. 26 of these may see a change in national leadership. Together, these changes could affect 53% of the world’s population, representing half of the world’s GDP. And a lot of the change is concentrated in the world’s most powerful countries. Four out of the five U.N. Security Council members could see changes at the top. That’s Russia, China, France, and, of course, the U.S. These four countries alone represent 40% of the world’s GDP.

Of all of them, China will not have democratic elections, of course, but it will see the biggest, wholesale change at the top. 70% of the country’s leadership will be new. But we’re not expecting any surprises — it’s widely believed that Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao will be replaced by Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang. So, get used to those names, you’ll be hearing a lot of them.

Russia’s election will be the most predictable. We already know that Prime Minister Putin is going to become President Putin once again. But even that change isn’t as clear-cut as you’d imagine. For the first time in years, it seems like it’s becoming acceptable in Russia to criticize the Kremlin. Putin was recently openly booed at a boxing match, and his party had a stunningly weak showing in the recent parliamentary elections.

Full Article: Zakaria: 2012 – the year of elections – Global Public Square — CNN.com… Blogs.

A Christmas scrooge stole credit card information from a Texas-based company Saturday, by hacking into its website. We’ve told you about a cyber threat that could impact the Iowa caucuses on January 3rd. Turns out, this latest internet breach could be affiliated with the same group of hackers, which released credit card information from Stratfor, a think-tank that concentrates on security issues, totaling losses of $1 million.

The group thought to be behind it is called Anonymous. That’s the same one responsible for threats made against the upcoming Iowa caucuses. How the group could hamper the process is unknown. University of Iowa professor, Douglas Jones, has two theories. He says the hackers could leave a calling card by hacking into the caucus reporting system. “The example I’ve used before is, if they make Spongebob Squarepants win the caucuses,” said Jones.

There’s another more sinister option. “If they decided they were just going to boost Michelle Bachmann by 20 points, how would we know until a week or two later when it’s too late?” he said. Either way, republican leaders plan to step-up security at the caucuses by using paper ballots as a backup and Jones says, while it’s worrisome, the hacking threat could serve a larger purpose.

Full Article: Suspected hackers could target caucuses — WQAD.

Rick Perry appears to be riding into the sunset, but he is not leaving the stage without exercising a true politician’s prerogative of cheerfully sacrificing any principle, no matter how strongly stated, when it becomes inconvenient. If there’s one thing we know about Perry — one dry-gulch bedrock to his cowboy constitutional philosophy — it’s that he just hates them activist judges and all the perverted things they have done to the Fourteenth Amendment. “[T]he Fourteenth Amendment is abused by the Court to carry out whatever policy choices it wants to make in the form of judicial activism,” he lamented in his book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington. In particular, courts “should be particularly protective of our founding structure — a unique structure of dual sovereigns that placed power as close to the people as was practical so that the people could govern themselves.”

Surely that would mean that the people of Virginia should have a right to determine what level of support a candidate needs to be a serious presidential candidate, deserving of a place on its primary ballot? Or should that decision be made by “unelected judges”? Well, actually, unelected judges are suddenly looking right good to Gov. Perry. Perry last week failed to qualify for the Virginia Republican Primary ballot, both a humiliating blow to his dignity and a concrete setback to his hope of remaining in the presidential race after his expected low showing in Iowa.

Perry’s suit is a request—a desperate plea—for a court to invent a rule
Well, that don’t sit right with Perry, and now he is shopping for a judge who will agree. In a lawsuit filed Monday, Perry asks the federal courts to step in on his behalf. Nothing too startling about that — if Perry feels the Virginia authorities had cheated him in some way that violates federal law or the Constitution, he has every right to invoke these sources of law in a court. But what’s remarkable is the second count of his suit, in which he asks the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to invent a new constitutional norm about how many signatures a state can require for its ballots. (Newt Gingrich so far has not filed a suit, and his campaign contented itself with a characteristically nuanced statement comparing the long-announced ballot-access rule to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.)

To qualify for the ballot, a presidential candidate has to collect the signatures of 10,000 registered Virginia voters who would attest that they intend to vote in the GOP primary. It’s steep — the 2008 Republican primary attracted just shy of 500,000 voters, making this a requirement of 2 percent of the votes cast — but hardly a staggering burden in a commonwealth of more than 5 million registered voters.

Perry didn’t fall a little short of his goal. He fell real short. By his own admission, he filed more than 6,000 valid signatures — 40 percent less than the required total.

In his suit, Perry makes two claims. One has some support in the caselaw — he says that by requiring the signature gatherers to be eligible Virginia voters, the state violates a line of cases that say that the First Amendment protects the right to use out-of-state personnel to gather signatures on some ballot petitions.

But the second claim comes screaming out of the clear blue Texas sky. “Virginia’s requirement that a presidential primary candidate collect signatures from 10,000 qualified voters, including 400 qualified voters from each Congressional district in the Commonwealth… violates freedom of speech and association protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution,” Perry’s complaint alleges.

Full Article: Rick Perry to ‘Activist Judges’: Save Me — Garrett Epps — Politics — The Atlantic.

The Montana Supreme Court on Friday overturned a lower court’s ruling and reinstated the state’s century-old ban on direct spending by corporations for or against political candidates. The justices ruled 5–2 in favor of the state attorney general’s office and commissioner of political practices to uphold the initiative passed by Montana voters in 1912.

Western Tradition Partnership, a conservative political group now known as American Tradition Partnership, joined by Champion Painting Inc., and the Montana Shooting Sports Association Inc., had challenged the Montana ban after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The U.S. Supreme Court decision granted political speech rights to corporations.

District Judge Jeffrey Sherlock of Helena ruled that the U.S. Supreme Court decision rendered the Montana ban unconstitutional. But the Montana Supreme Court’s majority saw it differently and overturned Sherlock.

“Citizens United does not compel a conclusion that Montana’s law prohibiting independent political expenditures by a corporation related to a candidate is unconstitutional,” Chief Justice Mike McGrath wrote for the majority. “Rather, applying the principles enunciated in Citizens United, it is clear that Montana has a compelling interest to impose the challenged rationally tailored statutory restriction.”

The court held that corporations are not deprived of political speech by the Montana law. They can form political committees, as many other groups have done, but must file reports disclosing where they raised their money and how they spent it. They also can hire legislative lobbyists.

Full Article: Supreme Court upholds state ban on corporation spending.

The Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a state law that requires a live operator on the phone before any recorded message is delivered does not violate the right to free speech or the right to participate in political speech.

Read the Court Opinion (h/t Election Law Blog)

The 4–1 decision involves a case that began in 2006 in which FreeEats.com…, an automated phone messaging operator, sought to overturn an Indiana law that forbade so-called robocalls, or unsolicited calls with automated messages. The case stemmed from automated calls the company made on behalf of a group called the Economic Freedom Fund during the 2006 congressional campaign. “Robocalls generate a harm that directly impacts the interest of residential privacy,” the court said in its ruling.

The Supreme Court said a trial court “incorrectly found that FreeEats had a reasonable likelihood of success on its claim that the live-operator provision of the Autodialer Law violates … the Indiana Constitution.”

Full Article: Court Shoots Down Indiana Robocalls — Indiana News Story — WRTV Indianapolis.

Next fall, thousands of students on college campuses will attempt to register to vote and be turned away. Sorry, they will hear, you have an out-of-state driver’s license. Sorry, your college ID is not valid here. Sorry, we found out that you paid out-of-state tuition, so even though you do have a state driver’s license, you still can’t vote. Political leaders should be encouraging young adults to participate in civic life, but many Republican state lawmakers are doing everything they can instead to prevent students from voting in the 2012 presidential election. Some have openly acknowledged doing so because students tend to be liberal.

Seven states have already passed strict laws requiring a government-issued ID (like a driver’s license or a passport) to vote, which many students don’t have, and 27 others are considering such measures. Many of those laws have been interpreted as prohibiting out-of-state driver’s licenses from being used for voting.

It’s all part of a widespread Republican effort to restrict the voting rights of demographic groups that tend to vote Democratic. Blacks, Hispanics, the poor and the young, who are more likely to support President Obama, are disproportionately represented in the 21 million people without government IDs. On Friday, the Justice Department, finally taking action against these abuses, blocked the new voter ID law in South Carolina.

Republicans usually don’t want to acknowledge that their purpose is to turn away voters, especially when race is involved, so they invented an explanation, claiming that stricter ID laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud. In fact, there is almost no voter fraud in America to prevent.

William O’Brien, the speaker of the New Hampshire State House, told a Tea Party group earlier this year that students are “foolish” and tend to “vote their feelings” because they lack life experience. “Voting as a liberal,” he said, “that’s what kids do.” And that’s why, he said, he supported measures to prohibit students from voting from their college addresses and to end same-day registration. New Hampshire Republicans even tried to pass a bill that would have kept students who previously lived elsewhere from voting in the state; fortunately, the measure failed, as did the others Mr. O’Brien favored.

Full Article: Keeping College Students From the Polls — NYTimes.com….

Two years ago, the Supreme Court decided a case that may, it now appears, save Barack Obama’s chances at reëlection—and, more importantly, preserve a precious corner of American democracy. For many years now, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been under assault. The law requires that any changes in voting rules in certain states, mostly in the South, be “pre-cleared” by the Justice Department, to make sure that they do not impinge on the voting rights of minorities. Many people in these states and elsewhere have argued that the law is now obsolete and that its pre-clearance provisions stigmatize and demean places that have long ago reformed from their racist pasts. In the 2009 case of Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, the Court had a chance to invalidate the law—and ducked. Instead, by a vote of 8–1, the Justices disposed of the case on procedural grounds and left the larger fight for another day. (Clarence Thomas dissented, arguing that the Voting Rights Act is indeed obsolete and unconstitutional.) The Voting Rights Act, and its pre-clearance provisions, remained intact.

The importance of the Northwest Austin case was apparent last week when the Justice Department rejected South Carolina’s new law to impose a photo-identification requirement for voters in 2012. “According to the state’s statistics, there are 81,938 minority citizens who are already registered to vote and who lack D.M.V.-issued identification,” Thomas E. Perez, the chief of the department’s civil-rights division, said in a letter to South Carolina officials. The only reason the Justice Department had the chance to rule on the South Carolina changes is because of the pre-clearance rules. (South Carolina may challenge the Justice Department decision in court, thus possibly setting up another test of the Voting Rights Act in the Supreme Court.)

The Justice Department action in South Carolina underlines the continuing necessity for the Voting Rights Act, nearly four decades after it was first passed. The South Carolina law is part of a wave of new rules, passed in the wake of the 2010 Republican landslide purportedly to stop vote fraud, that limit the right to the franchise. As many independent studies have found, “voter fraud” is a cure in search of a disease. There is no significant voter-fraud problem in the United States. Rather, these laws are transparent attempts by Republican majorities to stifle and suppress the number of minorities and poor people (mostly Democrats) who go to the polls. Thanks to the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department has the tools to stop this travesty—at least in states like South Carolina, which are still subject to “pre-clearance.”

But a recent speech by Eric Holder, the Attorney General, suggests that the Justice Department may be looking to attack these “voter fraud” laws in other states as well. Earlier this month in Austin, Holder delivered a ringing defense of the right to vote and quoted Congressman John Lewis, who said that voting rights are “under attack … [by] a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, [and] minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.”

Full Article: Comment: Holder’s Legacy : The New Yorker.

This year an enraged electorate has made its presence felt, through Occupying events and a roller-coaster Republican presidential primary process. But the most obvious sign of political activism has been the unprecedented use of recall elections. The numbers tell the tale: In 2011, at least 150 elected officials in 17 states faced recall votes.

Recalls stretched from the Arizona state Senate to the Miami-Dade mayor’s office to the school board in Grenora, N.D. Eleven state legislators faced recall — including nine in Wisconsin. Thirty mayors were subject to recall votes in 2011. At least three municipalities adopted the recall. Nineteen U.S. states allow recalls, with more — South Carolina among them — seriously considering adopting the process. It’s even grown internationally, with governments in India, Britain and Australia all considering adopting the recall in some form.

Next year may be an even bigger one for recalls. Nationally, there are more than 100 active recall petitions seeking signatures, and 22 have already been scheduled in 2012. Most notably, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is likely to be only the third governor in U.S. history to face a recall vote. Voter anger, especially over the downturn in the economy, unquestionably fuels the recall mania. But voters have been angry plenty of times in the past; why has the recall suddenly become so popular?

The reality is that the 2011 recalls are the culmination of a 30-year trend. Since states first adopted the recall — Oregon and Michigan, in 1908 — a total of 32 state legislators have faced recall elections. From 1908 to 1980, there were just seven state recall attempts. From 1981 through 2009, there were 14. The 11 state recall votes this year nearly doubled the total for any other decade.

The recall’s increasing popularity and effectiveness is directly connected to technology. Campaigning, fundraising and, critically for the recall, signature gathering have become easier thanks to the digital revolution. It may seem like a paradox: At the same time that we are witnessing billion-dollar campaigns for president, the most basic political action launched by non-professionals is becoming cheaper and more effective.

Full Article: Joshua Spivak: 2011, the year of the recall — latimes.com….

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The Voting News Weekly: TVN Weekly December 26 2011 – January 1 2012

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