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The Democratic Party sues Arizona for voter suppression

April 15, 2016 by AZ BlueMeanie

A group of Maricopa County voters, the Democratic National Committee, the Arizona Democratic Party, the president of the Navajo Nation, the campaign of Ann Kirkpatrick, and the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will sue the state of Arizona over voter access to the polls after the state’s presidential primary last month. Democratic Party, Clinton and Sanders campaigns to sue Arizona over voting rights:

The lawsuit, which will be filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for Arizona in Phoenix, focuses on Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county, where voters faced the longest lines on March 22 during the Democratic and Republican primaries after the county cut the number of polling places by 85 percent since 2008.

Arizona’s “alarmingly inadequate number of voting centers resulted in severe, inexcusable burdens on voters county-wide, as well as the ultimate disenfranchisement of untold numbers of voters who were unable or unwilling to wait in intolerably long lines,” the lawsuit says.

The lack of voting places was “particularly burdensome” on Maricopa County’s black, Hispanic and Native American communities, which had fewer polling locations than white communities and in some cases no places to vote at all, the lawsuit alleges.

West Virginia is third state to enact universal (automatic) voter registration

April 10, 2016 by AZ BlueMeanie

In news that does not get reported in Arizona — I’ll leave it to you to speculate as to the reasons why — the West Virginia legislature has passed a bipartisan bill to become the third state to enact universal (automatic) voter registration.

This is a significant development because (1) the bill was bipartisan, and (2) West Virginia does not have the reputation of being a progressive state. There is hope for Arizona yet.

The Observer-Reporter editorializes, West Virginia becomes a pioneer in voter registration:

West Virginia doesn’t have a whole lot in common with Oregon or California.

The Mountain State is nestled in Appalachia, while the Beaver and the Golden states are on the Pacific coast, and would take about 35 hours to reach if you drove nonstop from Charleston, W.Va. They have different industries, vastly different heritages and wildly different demographic makeups – California is one of the most diverse states in the country, while West Virginia is one of the least. They also diverge politically: President Obama only took 35 percent of the vote in West Virginia during his successful 2012 re-election bid, while comfortably winning California and Oregon by 60 percent and 54 percent, respectively. West Virginia will almost certainly remain red in this year’s presidential contest, while it would take a seismic shift of epic proportions for either Oregon or California to take on a reddish hue.

And yet, last week, West Virginia found some common ground with Oregon and California – it followed in the footsteps of those two states by approving a measure that would automatically register its citizens to vote once they interact with the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles.

SCOTUS unanimously rejects challenge to ‘one person, one vote,’ but fails to adopt a standard

April 4, 2016 by AZ BlueMeanie

This morning the Court released a unanimous opinion in Evenwel v. Abbott, holding that a state or locality may draw its legislative districts based on total population — the method used by the states and the vast majority of local jurisdictions — rejecting the efforts by Edward Blum, who directs the Project on Fair Representation, who spearheaded the challenge to the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, and is also behind the affirmative action case from Texas pending before the Court.

As a practical matter, if the plaintiffs had won this appeal, power would shift markedly from urban voters to rural voters and to white and Republican districts over minority and Democratic ones.

Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog has the Opinion analysis: Leaving a constitutional ideal still undefined:

For more than a half-century, the Supreme Court has spoken often of its commitment to the constitutional ideal that every citizen’s vote should count as much as every other’s, but it only now has tried to say just how that equality should be measured. On Monday, it announced the result of that initial effort to define “one person, one vote”: the states mostly get to choose, but they don’t have to switch to a system that few of them have ever tried.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the main opinion in the much-anticipated case of Evenwel v. Abbott, and a hasty reading of it might suggest that the states must use one formula in drawing election maps: take the total number of people in a state, and then divide up that total by the number of seats in the legislature or local governing bodies, with the answer dictating how many people (give or take a few) should be in each district. But that is not where the Court wound up.

While virtually every argument used by the Ginsburg opinion in favor of basing representation on total population (because elected officials supposedly represent everybody and not just the voters) points toward a constitutional mandate, it turns out that the states actually are not bound by the Constitution to craft new election districts by starting with total population. The only thing settled constitutionally now is that the states also are not required to divide up districts by using the voting population to be assigned to each, making them equal. Should a state do it that way, the opinion seems to say, the Court will then face that issue.

The Arizona Republic is indifferent to the constitutional freedom of association

March 28, 2016 by AZ BlueMeanie

The media villagers are a forceful defender of their own freedoms under the First Amendment, i.e., freedom of the press and free speech. Infringe on their freedoms, and they will howl like a scalded dog.

But when it comes to the First Amendment freedom of association of political parties, the media villagers are all “Meh, who cares? We hate political parties.”

Thus after Arizona’s election debacle last Tuesday, the usual suspects at The Arizona Republic used the fiasco to argue in favor of open primaries, and even Paul Johnson’s damn fool idea of the Top Two Primary (entirely unrelated to the Presidential Preference Election). Exemplary of this was E.J. Montini. Arizona – Where registered voters..CAN’T VOTE!

Arizona law already effectively disenfranchises 36 percent of registered voters.

These would be voters who are unaffiliated with any political party.

Independent. The only way those individuals can vote in a presidential primary is to re-register with a political party. And they have to do so 29 days before the election.

It’s ridiculous to think that 36 percent of Arizona voters — can’t vote.

They represent a constituency that is larger than the state’s Democrats.

They represent a constituency that is larger than the state’s Republicans.

How is such exclusion possible?

What went wrong in Arizona’s election

March 28, 2016 by AZ BlueMeanie

Arizona — OK, the state of Maricopa — was a national disgrace last week with an epic failure on election day for the Presidential Preference Election. Some voters stood in line for over five hours to vote (which reminds me of the determined souls who stood in the cold for over ten hours in Ohio in 2004, No One Should Have to Stand in Line for 10 Hours to Vote, and the voters who stood in line for over seven hours in Florida in 2012. No One in America Should Have to Wait 7 Hours to Vote; Florida Voting Lines Discouraged 201,000 Voters Statewide).

A special Arizona House Elections Committee hearing today will take testimony from Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell, and Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan will announce the results of her preliminary review before the hearing. Arizona House panel to review election foul-ups. You can bet that the Secretary of State will not name everyone responsible for this epic failure.

John Roberts and the Conservative Activist Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court

Chief Justice John Roberts spent his entire legal career seeking to undermine the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He achieved his life’s goal in 2013 with Shelby County v. Holder. The Election in Arizona Was a Mess:

Arizona has a long history of problems at the ballot box. Until 2013, the Grand Canyon State was one of 16 states required to clear all changes to voting law and procedures with the U.S. Department of Justice, under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, because of its history of discriminatory and racist election practices.