Courts & Law

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

While we are awaiting a decision from the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court on voter ID in Pennsylvania (certain to be appealed to the state supreme court), let's take a look at other election law cases in court today.

The U.S. Supreme Court has denied petitions for certiorari this morning in:

Washington State Democratic Central Committee v. Washington State Grange, Docket: 11-1263

– and –

Libertarian Party of Washington State v. Washington State Grange, Docket: 11-1266

These are cases challenging Washington state's top-two primary system on a theory of trademark infringement to protect the use of the trademark of "Democratic Party" and "Libertarian Party" by candidates who are not the official candidate of the party, under a primary system that allows candidates to self identify party affiliation through voter registration. High court rejects Wash. top-2 primary appeal – AP. This is relevant to Prop. 121 in Arizona on the ballot in November.

In Ohio, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit will hear two appeals today on early voting and Ohio's so-called "right church, wrong pew" rule for rejecting provisional ballots due to poll worker errors. Edward Foley, an election law expert writes at Election Law @ Moritz – Commentary: Two Big Cases Ready for Major Appellate Rulings: 

In the next week or two, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit will decide two Ohio election cases with both practical and jurisprudential importance. One concerns the rollback of early voting during the last three days before Election Day (November 6 this year). The other involves the invalidation of a ballot cast by a valid voter in the correct polling location, but to whom the poll worker erroneously gives the incorrect ballot for the voter's specific precinct.

Both cases present claims based on the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and both expose the current uncertainty of how the Fourteenth Amendment applies to voting rules, particularly in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore. The Ohio government lost both cases in the federal district court, but is seeking to reverse those two rulings on appeal. The Secretary of State, Jon Husted, declined to appeal the main portion of the provisional voting case, but the Attorney General, Mike DeWine, appealed on behalf of the State of Ohio as an independent litigating entity. 

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The U.S. Supreme Court opens its new term on the first Monday in October. Last week the Court held its pre-term conference. One decision was reached at conference. The Court — by an apparent unanimous vote — told lower-court judges not to insist on close-to-zero differences in the population of each of a state’s districts for choosing members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Lyle Denniston reports, Opinion recap: Hedging on “one person, one vote” : SCOTUSblog:

Zero variance” in population is not the new constitutional norm for redistricting, the Court made clear.  Just because computers can produce almost exactly equal-sized districts, the Constitution does not require it, the decision said.

After sitting on the case from West Virginia all summer long, the Court produced an eight-page, unsigned ruling that largely deferred to the wishes of that state’s legislature on how to craft the three districts for choosing its House delegation.  The opinion can be found here.  

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Tuesday’s ruling gave state legislators constitutional permission to have some variation in size between congressional districts, if the lawmakers do so to protect incumbents from having to run against each other, to avoid splitting up counties, and to avoid moving many people into a new district from the one where they had previously cast their votes.   In what appeared to be a novel new declaration, the Court stressed that lower courts should not demand that a state prove specifically how each of those goals would be satisfied by moving away from equally populated districts.    And, in another legal innovation, the Court said that a variation that is not really very big does not become a constitutionally suspect one just because a sophisticated computer program could be used to avoid nearly all such variations.

If the difference between a state’s largest House district and its smallest one is small — such as the 0.79% deviation in the West Virginia plan — that does not become unconstitutionally large just because it could be avoided by “technological advances in redistricting and mapping software.”