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By Thaddeus Kromelis – 11/02/08
As the 2008 Election draws to a close, the stars are coming out to protetct voting rights. Last Friday, along with the Advancement Project, the Brennan Center produced several PSAs featuring Sean "P. Diddy" Combs and Russell Simmons. I've posted them below. Here's some of the release announcing the campaign
Sean "P. Diddy" Combs and Russell Simmons have teamed up with the Advancement Project and the Brennan Center for Justice on a voter education campaign in the key states of Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. The campaign kicked-off Saturday, with the release of Public Service Announcements, released to radio, which gave voters important information to bring ID and to contact 1-866-OUR-VOTE with any problems.
When voters show up at the polls and have their eligibility questioned, they may be asked to vote with "provisional ballots." Known as a fail-safe for voters who are being challenged or who are not on the rolls, provisional ballots should be treated skeptically.
Rules vary from state to state, but these ballots are often counted only if the voter appears in a voter registration database or if the voter can provide evidence of his eligibility in the days after the election. For this reason, many provisional ballots go uncounted. In the 2008 primaries, 40% of provisional ballots were ultimately rejected.
Listen to the recordings after the fold...
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Election Day Issues, Other Voter List Issues, Provisional Ballots, Voter ID, Voter Registration Drives
By Adam Skaggs – 10/07/08
The voter registration deadlines of most states have either just passed or will come in the next two weeks, and there has been an unprecedented surge in registrations across the country. For most observers, this is evidence of a renewed public interest in participating in our democracy. Others, unfortunately, see the prospect of higher voter turnout as a threat—and are working to keep voters from registering and voting.
The efforts to suppress voting range from challenging the eligibility of voters whose homes have been foreclosed to scaring college students out of registering where they go to school. And, as we've written previously, efforts are under way in a number of states to use trivial imperfections in paperwork to keep voters off the registration rolls or kick them off when they are successfully registered. One way citizens are blocked from casting ballots that count is through so-called "no match, no vote" policies.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Allegations of Voter Fraud, No Match, No Vote, Other Voter List Issues, Purges, Voter Registration Drives
By Wendy R. Weiser – 08/25/08
*Cross-posted from The Hill
Yesterday the League of Women Voters of Florida, the Florida AFL-CIO, and other non-partisan voter registration groups announced their intent to continue signing up eligible Florida voters for the fall election despite the state’s law restricting voter registration drives. For groups that registered over half a million citizens in Florida in the last presidential race, this is big news.
Just earlier this year, the League and others had declared a moratorium on registering voters as soon as Florida’s new voter registration law went into effect because the law’s strict deadlines, backed by excessive fines, made the risk of conducting drives too prohibitive. States like New Mexico and Texas similarly impose onerous restrictions on voter registration drives, and there too, the laws have shut down or dramatically curtailed voter registration activity.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Registration Drives
By Thaddeus Kromelis – 07/29/08
We don't need more reasons to worry about foreclosure rates.
Digby, nonetheless, citing this AP/CBSnews.com
story, provides one: the high rate of foreclosures in Ohio and the affect election officials
believe it could have on their voting rolls.
(Digby cited the voting issue in the context of a 7/26 longer posting on Hans von
Spakovsky, "legal disenfranchisement" and "voter fraud.") There's concern that a
wave of voters, still registered to their former—foreclosed—address, will
show up to the polls on election day. This could lead to a number of
pre-election challenges or a whole lot of voters casting provisional ballots in
Ohio.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Allegations of Voter Fraud, Election Day Issues, Other Voter List Issues, Purges, Voter Registration Drives
By Kahlil Williams – 06/20/08
Yesterday, Governor Charlie Crist (R) reported that Florida
has restored voting rights to 115,232 people with felony convictions since the
state revised its clemency procedure. The new clemency rules that Crist pushed
through in 2007 ease the restoration process for some who have committed lesser
offenses, like low-level drug dealing. The impact of the change is notable, and
Governor Crist should be acknowledged
for taking an important first step. But there is still much work to be done.
First, the total number of people stripped of their voting
rights because of a criminal conviction is about 950,000, meaning that only
about 12% of those who are disenfranchised have regained the right to vote
since the 2007 change. According to the Florida Department of Corrections,
nearly 300,000 of these people are "Level I" offenders convicted of crimes that
permit them to regain their voting rights under the new rules. But because of
backlogs created by the still cumbersome process, the majority of those
potential voters remains unable to cast a ballot in November.
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Tags: Democracy, Voting After Criminal Conviction, Post-Incarceration Restoration of Voting Rights, State-Based Advocacy, Voting Rights & Elections
By Michael Waldman – 05/23/08
I just sat through a nail-biting, emotionally exhausting
two hour TV movie. The opening ten minutes were especially
nerve-wracking. The film begins with elderly Floridians squinting at
their butterfly ballots, then stabbing at the ballots, scary music playing,
over and over, voting by accident for Pat Buchanan. Think of the shower
scene in "Psycho" with your grandmother instead of Janet Leigh. Even more
exciting: would the panting, lurching advance man catch up with Al Gore before
he walked onstage to concede?
Maybe not everybody would find this as thrilling. But
Recount,which airs on HBO this Sunday, is one of the
better political movies I've ever seen. It "gets" the motives and methods
of political players better than anything in years. More relevant to the
work of the Brennan
Center, it brings to life
the ways our elections can go wrong, and the rickety and often corrupt
machinery by which we still cast and count votes.
(Full disclosure: I am an old colleague and friend of Ron
Klain, the protagonist; I see GOP lawyer Ben Ginsberg at the beach many summers;
and I go duck hunting with James Baker every year. Well, that part isn't
true. But like anyone involved in politics, back then I had a rooting interest
in the outcome of the recount.)
The narrative crackles and does a good job portraying the
legal machinations that led to the Supreme Court's 5–4 intervention to stop the
counting, thus making George W. Bush President. It's all here, from the
"Brooks Brothers riot" in which Republican congressional staffers shut down the
counting in Miami,
to the frenzied efforts to read and understand the Supreme Court opinion that
announced its reasoning only applied to this case. The acting is
terrific, and the dialogue is sharp and as profane as real life politics (and
HBO).
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Tags: Democracy, Voting After Criminal Conviction, Voting Rights & Elections, Allegations of Voter Fraud, Other Voter List Issues, Purges, Voting Technology
By Maggie Barron – 03/10/08
The media was atwitter over the weekend
with possible solutions to the Florida/Michigan primary problem. Can the Democratic
Party disenfranchise all those voters merely to prove a point? Did the states
miscalculate so wildy that there's a real chance they won't be able to seat any
delegates in one of the most important conventions in years? And who is going
to pay for another round of elections? As someone who works on voting rights,
it's hard to argue that those Florida and Michigan voters (who had
nothing to do with scheduling their rogue primaries) should be shut out of the
process. But the kid in me, reared on playgrounds and games like handball and
freeze tag, knows you can't change the rules in the middle of the game.
One solution bandied about by the Florida
Democratic Party, according to the Los Angeles Times, is a vote-by-mail
election, which would cost significantly less than another traditional primary.
"Under this scenario," the article says, "ballots would be mailed out to all of
Florida's
approximately 4.7 million registered Democrats in May or June," costing between
$4-$6 million (much less than the estimated $25 million for another traditional
primary).
But trying to implement a vote-by-mail
scheme so quickly is not the solution to get the Florida Democratic Party out
of this mess. Vote-by-mail might seem easier, and it certainly is cheaper, but sending
ballots out to 4.7 million voters is complicated and subject to errors that
could easily compound Florida's
primary woes.
Consider California, where officials were still processing
and counting vote-by-mail ballots weeks after its primary. According to the New
York Times, about 4.1 million Californians voted by mail. The practice
can be easier for voters, but it is labor-intensive for registrars and staff,
who must open all the mail, authenticate it, and sort it by precinct. In California, voting
officials literally ironed thousands of ballots that had been crumpled or
creased in the mail, in order to feed them into the vote-counting machines (the
appropriate setting to iron out a ballot, just so you know, is apparently
"silk.") This is part of the reason why,
two weeks after Super Tuesday, California
still had some 800,000 ballots to count.
And that's only considering the
vote-by-mail ballots that actually reach
eligible voters. In California
on Super Tuesday, the Election Protection Hotline reported numerous calls from confused voters who had requested vote-by-mail ballots
but had never received them. Project
Vote reminds us that vote-by-mail can only be as dependable as the mail
service itself, which is inconsistent in low-income and densely populated urban
areas, areas with non-traditional addresses, and when people move. So for people who live in housing
developments or remote urban areas, and who get there mail less reliably than
others, this is not a great solution.
Linking your ability to vote with the post
office's ability to reach you is a dangerous proposition. Voter
caging, the practice of sending out mass mailings and using the returned
mail to challenge voters' registrations, is notoriously inaccurate, which is
why there are currently bills pending in Congress to ban the practice. Voter
registration lists can be rife with simple errors in addresses that can make
mail undeliverable, and mail
often goes undelivered even when the voter at the address may be registered
and perfectly eligible.
While vote-by-mail shows promise as a means
of conducting elections in the future, it can't be implemented as quickly as
many election officials want it to be. As voting technology expert Larry Norden
explained in testimony in Ohio (which has been considering a vote-by-mail plan
for the November elections), delivering high-volume mailings in a secure,
accessible way is no easy feat, and it should not be adopted without good
planning and public education, especially right before a critical election (and
certainly not for a slap-dash do-over election like we may have in Florida.)
The cost of a vote-by-mail election is even
more attractive to the Florida Democratic Party, since it is getting no love, or
money, from DNC chair Howard Dean or Governor Charlie Crist. But the truth
is there will be no easy, or cheap, solution here. Unfortunately it will be
voters who will in some way pay for the party's mistake.
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Other Voter List Issues
By Renée Paradis – 01/24/08
The Department of Justice was originally created during
Reconstruction with the intent of protecting the rights of newly freed
slaves. Then in the 1960s, when Congress
reawoke to its responsibility to protect the rights of African-Americans, it
placed the charge of enforcing this country's marquee civil rights statute, the
Voting Rights Act, into the hands of the Department of Justice. Given this history, the Bush-era DOJ's complete
capitulation of its obligation to enforce the Voting Rights Act is particularly
appalling.
The latest injustice is the approval (or preclearance) of
three changes in Florida law, including restrictions on third-party voter
registration drives that help minority voters register, a limitation on what
kind of identification voters can use at the polls, and a shortening of the
time voters have to verify provisional ballots.
The Voting Rights Act is actually a collection of provisions,
but its key provision requires all changes in voting procedure to be precleared
by the DOJ. States and local
governments—mostly in the old South—have to submit any changes they make to the
Department, to make sure they won't make minority voters any worse off (that
the change isn't "retrogressive").
Congress did this because they had tried for ten years
through less intrusive means to make sure black citizens in the South were able
to vote. They had outlawed certain
practices, created certain procedures, gave federal agents more power—and none
of it worked. As Congress said when it enacted
the Voting Rights Act, "Indeed, even after apparent defeat registers seek new
ways and means of discriminating.
Barring one contrivance too often has caused no change in result, only
in methods."
The amazing thing is, the VRA basically worked: by the end of 1967, black voter registration in Mississippi, which was
at 6.7% in 1963, increased to 60%. In Alabama, registration
rose from 24 to 57 percent. These numbers were echoed all over the South. The DOJ, even under subsequent Republican
administrations, dutifully enforced the law.
And then, the current
administration came into power. There's
been a lot of detailed press coverage about the
problems in the Voting Section in the Civil Rights Division of the
Department, and how Bush political appointees have essentially dismantled the
Section, which I won't rehash here. But
there's every reason to suspect preclearance decisions coming out of the Section.
One of the changes the DOJ
precleared this week—the changes to the rules governing third-party voter
registration drives—comes out of a case I've helped litigate with the Brennan
Center, along with the Advancement Project and the law firm Kramer Levin. Florida
placed heavy restrictions on third-party registration drives in 2005 that
forced the League of Women Voters to stop registering voters for the first time
in their 70 year history in the state. When
a federal court struck down the law as unconstitutional, the state
legislature went back and instead of getting rid of an unconstitutional law,
they reenacted the law with a few changes.
That new law is what the DOJ approved on Thursday.
Under the VRA, the state is required to prove that the
change it's making won't hurt minority voters.
Here's how Florida
tried to prove its law wouldn't hurt minority voters: they submitted a copy of the new law, the old
law, a description of the law, and a statement that the new law
"will apply equally to all voters, regardless of racial or language minority
status." Even the DOJ recognized further
investigation might be necessary and asked for more information—particularly,
any statistics Florida had showing how
minority voters in the five Florida
counties covered by the VRA registered to vote, whether through drives or other
means.
They asked
that question in response to a letter the
Brennan Center and the Advancement Project sent in September, showing that
in Florida
statewide black and Hispanic voters and voters from Spanish-speaking households
were twice as likely to register to vote through drives as white voters or
voters from English-speaking households, based on Census data. So how did Florida respond? By submitting statistics that don't even
track how people register to vote by race—in other words, evidence that didn't
even come close to rebutting the Census data we submitted, much less prove on
their own that shutting down voter registration drives, which traditionally
target minority voters, wouldn't violate the letter as well as the spirit of
the Voting Rights Act.
On its face, Florida's submission
didn't even come close to bearing its burden of proving that its law change
wouldn't hurt minority voters. Except,
it appears, in the looking-glass world of the Bush Justice Department.
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Registration Drives
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