Courts & Law

Posted by AzBlueMeanie: The California Supreme Court ordered written arguments submitted this weekend on the state Fair Political Practices Commission's request to examine records of the nonprofit Americans for Responsible Leadership, and determine whether its contributors can be publicly named before Tuesday's election. Arizona group won't say who gave $11 million: State officials' frantic efforts … Read more

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Washington Post reports today that the probe into GOP voter suppression specialist Nathan Sproul has expanded into voter registration fraud. Va. probe of dumped voter registration forms broadens:

The investigation into the arrest of a man on charges of dumping
voter registration forms last month in Harrisonburg, Va., has widened,
with state officials probing whether a company tied to top Republican
leaders had engaged in voter registration fraud in the key battleground
state, according to two persons close to the case.

A former employee of Strategic Allied Consulting, a contractor
for the Republican Party of Virginia, had been scheduled to appear last
Tuesday before a grand jury after he was charged
with tossing completed registration forms into a recycling bin. But
state prosecutors canceled Colin Small’s grand jury testimony to gather
more information, with their focus expanding to the firm that had
employed Small, which is led by longtime GOP operative Nathan Sproul.

State authorities are seeking to learn whether any of Small’s
supervisors instructed him or any of his 40 co-workers in Virginia to
ask potential voters about their political leanings during registration
drives, the two sources said. Asking such questions could be a violation
of state election law.

* * *

Sproul’s firms and political consulting operations have faced
questions over the past eight years, including investigations and formal
charges of suppressing Democratic votes, destroying voter registrations
and other election violations. The charges against Small came a month
after voter registration work by a Sproul company prompted a fraud investigation in Florida.

Nine
Florida counties reported in September that hundreds of voter
registration forms submitted by Sproul’s firm contained irregularities
such as suspicious, conflicting signatures and missing information.

* * *

After the Florida investigation became public, the Republican National Committee said it was severing ties
with Strategic Allied Consulting. At that time, Strategic stopped
overseeing registration workers in Virginia and Pinpoint, Strategic’s
staffing contractor, began overseeing the work.

Investigators
have gathered information showing that Small asserted that he worked for
Strategic to voters, according to two persons close to the probe.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Howard Fischer reports on Wednesday's hearing before a three judge panel of federal judges. GOP attorney to judicial panel: Redistricting maps are illegal:

David Cantelme told the three-judge panel the
Independent Redistricting Commission broke the law when it created
districts with varying populations despite state and federal laws
generally requiring all voting districts to have approximately the same
number of people. The commission's maps have a difference of more than 8
percent between the most and least-populated districts.

This is a losing argument. Apparently neither Howard Fischer nor David Cantelme are aware that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on September 25, 2012 in a West Virginia Redistricting case — by an apparent unanimous vote — that lower-court judges not 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 wrote at SCOTUSblog.com, Opinion recap: Hedging on “one person, one vote”:

“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. The new ruling came in the case of Tennant v. Jefferson County Commission (docket 11-1184).

* * *

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.”

* * *

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court said once again that state legislatures
can have some inequality in the population of districts, if that is
done, within reason, to serve the other goals that redistricting can be
arranged to meet. The Court said explicitly that the Constitution does
not guarantee absolute equality in population of districts, even if
that could be achieved by high-tech computers.  It also cautioned judges
around the country not to go too far to second-guess how legislatures
work out the various and competing interests that they confront in
redistricting.

What else have you got, Howard?