Courts & Law

Update on Special Action challenge to the consolidated elections bill

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Last year, Rep. Michelle Ugenti (R-Scottsdale) sponsored HB 2826 (consolidated election dates; political subdivisions), a bill providing for the consolidation of elections in the fall of even numbered years only. The law will apply to elections in 2014 and thereafter.

The City of Tucson filed its special action for declaratory and
injunctive relief on October 10, 2013 in the Pima County Superior Court,
City of Tucson v. State of Arizona et al. (Case No.
C20126272). The City of Phoenix Intervened as a
plaintiff. The case is assigned to Judge James E. Marner.

The case goes to trial today at 9:00 a.m. in the Pima County Superior Court, Room 808. The matter is scheduled for one day.

I am glad to see that the Arizona Daily Star has finally assigned a reporter to this case, Darren DaRonco. Who controls local elections at issue in suit against state :

Tucson will be in court today for the first round in its most recent
legal battle with the state over who controls local elections.

Tucson
and Phoenix will jointly ask Pima County Superior Court Judge James
Marner to overturn a state law mandating all elections occur in
even-numbered years.

The Legislature passed the bill in 2012 over the vehement opposition of most incorporated cities and towns across the state.

GOP voter suppression in North Carolina

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Hey, Chief Justice Roberts. Yeah I'm talking to you. Does this look like race-based GOP voter suppression — the Southern strategy — is a thing of the past to you? Ed Kilgore writes at the Political Animal blog, Supreme Court Decisions Have Consequences:

So do you think the Supreme Court decision
largely invalidating the preclearance requirement imposed by Section 5
of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was no big deal, since southern
discrimination is largely a thing of the past and other
anti-discrimination measures are available?

Check out what the North Carolina legislature is about to do, per this depressing report from The Nation’s Ari Berman:

This week, the North Carolina legislature will almost
certainly pass a strict new voter ID law that could disenfranchise
318,000 registered voters who don’t have the narrow forms of accepted
state-issued ID. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the bill has since been
amended by Republicans to include a slew of appalling voter suppression
measures. They include cutting a week of early voting, ending same-day
registration during the early voting period and making it easier for
vigilante poll-watchers to challenge eligible voters. The bill is being
debated this afternoon in the Senate Rules Committee.

Sen. John McCain calls for review of Arizona’s ‘stand your ground’ law

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Careful, Johnny. Arizona's "Ms. NRA," Governor Jan Brewer, will be sticking her boney finger in your face next like she did to President Obama. Brewer:
Fla. case doesn't change her mind on 'stand your ground'.

Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Sen. John McCain joined President Barack Obama's call to review so-called "Stand Your
Ground" laws in the aftermath of the acquittal of George Zimmerman in
the 2012 shooting of black teen Trayvon Martin. NBC reports, McCain joins Obama in calling for review of 'Stand Your Ground' laws:

Sen. John McCain, Ariz., a prominent Republican who's been known to
break ranks with fellow members of the GOP at times, urged state
legislatures to review Stand Your Ground laws in the wake of the
Zimmerman trial, which became a national flashpoint for race relations
in America.

"I can also see that Stand Your Ground laws may be
something that needs to be reviewed by the Florida legislature or any
other legislature that has passed such legislation," McCain said on
CNN.

Asked whether his home state legislature should consider revising its own similar law, McCain said yes. 

"I
think that, yes, I do, and I'm confident that the members of the
Arizona legislature will because it is a very controversial
legislation," he said.

(Update) Voter ID on trial in Pennsylvania

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The AP wraps up the first week of trial. Pennsylvania voter ID law trial wraps up first week:

A professor who specializes in political communication gave low
grades Friday to the 2012 multimedia campaign to educate Pennsylvania
voters about the state’s new voter-identification law as part of a court
trial on its constitutionality.

Diana Mutz, a faculty member at
the University of Pennsylvania and its Annenberg School for
Communication, said the centerpiece of the campaign — TV ads in which
people holding up photo ID cards urged voters to “show it” — seemed
confusing.

“It wasn’t always clear what ‘it’ was,” said Mutz, the
author of several books, who testified as an expert witness on behalf of
plaintiffs who sued the state in an attempt to overturn the
yet-to-be-enforced March 2012 law.

The “show it” slogan, which was
also incorporated in radio and print ads, also provided little guidance
to voters who lacked a Pennsylvania drivers’ license or other
acceptable IDs.

“To say ‘show it’ presumes you have it,” she said.

Her testimony wrapped up the first week of the trial in Commonwealth Court.

New study confirms the Supreme Court is wrong in Shelby County v. Holder

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I previously posted about the richly detailed data analysis by Morgan Kousser at Reuters, Gutting the landmark civil rights legislation, which blows away the disingenuous sophistry of Chief Justice John Roberts in Shelby County v. Holder. Research data proves the Supreme Court is wrong.

Key takaeway: updating the data, as the court suggests in Shelby County, would produce nearly the identical coverage as the current formula that the court found "outdated" and thus "unconstitutional" under a previously heretofor unknown constitutional standard of review ("we don't like it"):

Congress did not update the formula because it knows it still works. The comprehensive database that I assembled proves this.
Consider, from 1957 through 2006, almost 94 percent of all voting
rights minority lawsuits, legal objections and out-of-court settlements
occurred in jurisdictions now subject to federal oversight under the
Section 4 formula.

* * *

My database, however, shows that Congress acted wisely because it knew
that the formula works. Of 3,874 voting rights actions from 1957 through
2006, 3,636 — or 93.9 percent — came from jurisdictions covered under
the Section 4 formula. Many depended on the coverage formula because
they were based on Justice Department objections, or drew “more
information requests” or lawsuits to enforce Section 5.

Suppose we look instead at cases and consent decrees filed under Section
2 — which can be filed anywhere in the country, in areas not subject to
federal jurisdiction as well as in covered jurisdictions. I have
identified 1,244 Section 2 actions from 1957 through 2006 — and fully
83.7 percent occurred in the jurisdictions subject to federal oversight.