voting rights

Vermont is the fourth state to enact universal (automatic) voter registration

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Vermont is the fourth state to approve universal (automatic) voter registration, following Oregon, California, and most recently, West Virginia. Think Progress reports, BREAKING: Vermont Will Automatically Register Hundreds Of Thousands Of Voters:

Voting-RightsVermont Governor Peter Shumlin signed a bill Thursday to automatically register to vote any eligible Vermonter who visits a Department of Motor Vehicles. The bill passed with near-unanimous support through Vermont’s House and Senate, where power is split between the Republican, Democratic and Progressive Parties. The state estimates the new policy will add between 30,000 and 50,000 new voters to the rolls within the first four years.

Vermont Secretary of State James Condos, a longtime advocate of the measure, told ThinkProgress it will be a boon to the state’s democracy when it goes into effect next year.

“It saves time and money, increases accuracy, curbs the potential for voter fraud, and protects integrity of our elections,” he said. “I believe that voting is a sacred right that we must encourage and protect, and our democracy works best when people can actually participate in it.”

Beginning in the summer of 2017, anyone who visits a Vermont DMV to request or renew a license or ID will be automatically registered to vote, unless they opt-out.

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9th Circuit Court of Appeals to hear en banc appeal of Tucson elections case

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TucsonDylan Smith at the Tucson Sentinel reports that the full Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed to the City of Tucson’s request for an en banc review of the federal district court panels’ 2-1 split decision last November regarding the City of Tucson’s “hybrid” election system.

En banc hearings are not favored, Rule 35, Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure, “and ordinarily will not be ordered unless:

(1) en banc consideration is necessary to secure or maintain uniformity of the court’s decisions; or

(2) the proceeding involves a question of exceptional importance.”

It takes “a majority of the circuit judges who are in regular active service and who are not disqualified to order that an appeal or other proceeding be heard or reheard by the court of appeals en banc,” which seems to favor the City of Tucson’s appeal (all previous legal challenges to the City of Tucson’s “hybrid” election system resulted in the election system being upheld by the courts).

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The Democratic Party sues Arizona for voter suppression

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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:

Screenshot from 2016-03-28 13:33:22The 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.

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

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Voting-RightsIn 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.

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

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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.

notorious_rbg_tank_topJustice 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.

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