Voting Rights ruling was 'legislating from the bench'

I don't often comment on Supreme Court decisions because they are so blatantly political to me, albeit dressed up in pomp and black robes as something serious, deliberative and solomonic.  As my Uncle T., a lawyer and dyed-in-the-wool conservative, once told me, he can't see much that's legal or constitutional in the way the Supreme Court operates.  I tend to agree with him.  

It's because they are all utterly political appointees, justices whom the appointing President thinks he can rely on to interpret the Constitution with a particular ideological bent, the facts be damned.  Most of the time the Supreme Court's majority can't wait for certain controversial cases to hit their docket so that they can affect the political direction of our country.

That said, I think the SCOTUS went way too far on Tuesday by striking down Section 4 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  This time they clearly usurped the powers of Congress.

The power of Congress vested in them by the Constitution is not the power to be right, it's the power to be wrong. One can argue that Congress was wrong to overwhelmingly uphold the Voting Rights Act "coverage formula" in 2006, but then it was wrong with serious bipartisan conviction: 390-33 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate.  Congress provided 15,000 pages of documentation in 2006 to show that voter discrimination was still happening in the jurisdictions that the coverage formula designated for pre-clearance.

This week the U.S. Supreme Court said to hell with that.  The high court majority went beyond the Constitution to examine what it felt were facts on the ground that made the law unnecessary.  I'm sorry, but that's not the high court's job.  We have lots of unnecessary and stupid laws.  That's Congress's prerogative to make them; it's our job every 2 years to vote out the bums to replace or repeal them.  What the "anti-activist judges" majority did on Tuesday was to "legislate from the bench," pure and simple.  In doing so they are were not only hyper-partisan, they werehypocrites against their own judicial philosophy!

Even so, those facts on the ground are debatable, even without study, therefore the SCOTUS should not have so cavalierly struck down a law passed by Congress. What do I mean, without study?  Well, the majority said that the Voting Rights Act has clearly achieved its goal, therefore it was no longer needed. Yet one could argue that without it, racial discrimination against minority voters could easily spring up again.  This possibility is certainly imaginable, and certainly not possible to exclude, logically, yet the Supreme Court majority did just that and excluded it.  "We know everything's going to be fine from now on," they basically said.  

Also, Chief Justice Roberts said the SCOTUS "warned" Congress in 2009 to update the formula by which it determines a history of voter discrimination, and that with case of Shelby County [Alabama] v. Holder hitting the court's docket in 2013 without any action by Congress, the high court had no choice but to strike down the law.  But think about that for a second.  We have an historically gridlocked Congress and Republican majority that wants the Voting Rights Act to remain struck down... but wasn't dumb enough, politically, to offer up a bill to do so.  

Now surely the Republican House will not offer up a new bill now to update the pre-clearance formula that would require the DOJ's approval for any changes in state's voting laws.  (If you think they will, the Supreme Court needs to ban that medical marijuana you're smoking).  And the GOP majority's inevitable inaction in the coming weeks/months -- I would love it if they proved me wrong -- will prove just how absurd was Justice Roberts' utterly political premise for usurping the will of Congress in 2006 that was the law of the land.  

Furthermore, the majority cited states' rights (federalism) as its main justification for striking down the will of Congress.  However, Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act allows individual counties in affected states to "bail out" of the law if they can prove there is no recent history of racial discrimination against voters, as dozens of counties have since 1967.    

All that constitutional stuff aside, I agree with Dr. Martin Luther King that the arc of history bends toward justice... and obviously I agree with the U.S. Census that the arc of demography bends towards a non-white U.S. majority.  Politically, in the long run, this conservative SCOTUS decision -- and the inevitable inaction from a GOP-majority House that will follow it -- will be good for Democrats.  

I predict that this SCOTUS decision and Congress's almost certain failure to respond, combined with Republicans' likely continued inaction on immigration reform, will spur minority turnout rates in 2014 that will exceed 2012.  Republicans are showing once again they just can't get out of their rut... as they shoot themselves in the foot that's stuck in that rut.  

Democracy denied: 4th phase in U.S. voting rights history

History will not look kindly on what we're doing to restrict and suppress voting in America today.  

The argument on its face that we are justified in spending so much effort to make voting harder and more inconvenient in order to prevent fraud is absurd, considering it's a crime that doesn't exist.  It's a hyper-partisan attack aimed at the heart of our democracy: one man, one vote.

Incidentally, today I'm in another country with its own national elections.  It's a Sunday and polling stations are open from early morning till late evening.  Administrative judges are required to work all day to resolve, immediately, any questions about voters' registration.  Meanwhile, the United States routinely criticizes other countries' elections for not being free and fair.  Matthew 7:3-5 comes to mind.

Democracy denied: Millions of Americans blocked from voting

Voter suppression efforts today echo 19th century efforts to block urban immigrant working class from casting vote.

By Paul Rosenberg

October 28, 2012 | Al Jazeera

URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/20121022125746737657.html

Voting should be preceded by an obstacle course

Hey, Democrat-district voters: your polling station is on the other side. 

"By and large, election officials, it's our job to make it easier for people to vote, not harder," said a Greene County election official in Dayton, OH.

Au contraire!  The ordeal of voting is a test of one's economic station and democratic mettle.  You should be willing to risk losing your minimum-wage job, and even swim across a moat full of man-eating alligators if you really want to get to your local polling station.  (Ideally, they'd have to pass through the Game like Kurt Thomas in Gymkata, but that would be too expensive to organize, unfortunately....)

Naturally, if you're fortunate enough to have a salaried position and your home county has excess funds to pay for early and extended voting, well... that's just one of the benefits that accrue to upstanding Americans who work hard, live right, and live in the right place.

To make sure that only the right people vote (wink-wink), we should make voting downright inconvenient and during work hours, when wage-earning commoners are least likely to go to the polls.  Because if they do vote, they'll just choose the candidates promising more government benefits that we property-owning lords of the manor must pay for.  And I say, harumph-harumph and tut-tut to that!  

Republican Voter Suppression Campaign Rolls Back Early Voting

By Dan Froomkin

August 18, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/QbM3q3

An oldie but a baddie: Restricting the franchise

Ay-ay-ay.  In uncertain economic times even 18th century junk ideas get dusted off and put up for re-sale to credulous political consumers.  

I'm ashamed but not surprised that this Bill Flax person is from Cincinnati, one of the most reactionary cities on Earth.  Correction: the mostly white area surrounding the City of Cincinnati.  

If On The Dole Why Do You Still Get To Go To The Poll?

By Bill Flax

August 4, 2012 | Forbes

URL:  http://www.forbes.com/sites/billflax/2011/08/04/if-on-the-dole-why-do-you-still-get-to-go-to-the-poll/

More voters 'purged' mistakenly, in violation of fed law

Jeez, why can't we manage to run normal elections, without disenfranchisement, in the world's oldest democracy!?  Right-to-lifers say we should err on the side of life.  Well, when it comes to elections, we need to err on the side of letting citizens vote.  The right to vote is the most important right we've got in a democracy, without it our other rights and civil liberties don't mean squat.  The right to vote shouldn't be yanked away without warning, weeks before a national election, due to some bureaucrat's typo. 

These state attorney generals should be prosecuted for violating federal elections laws!

 

Some voters 'purged' from voter rolls

By Abbie Boudreau and Scott Bronstein

October 26, 2008  | CNN.com

 

College senior Kyla Berry was looking forward to voting in her first presidential election, even carrying her voter registration card in her wallet.

 

But about two weeks ago, Berry got disturbing news from local election officials.

 

"This office has received notification from the state of Georgia indicating that you are not a citizen of the United States and therefore, not eligible to vote," a letter from the Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections said.

 

But Berry is a U.S. citizen, born in Boston, Massachusetts. She has a passport and a birth certificate to prove it.

 

The letter, which was dated October 2, gave her a week from the time it was dated to prove her citizenship. There was a problem, though -- the letter was postmarked October 9.

 

"It was the most bizarre thing. I immediately called my mother and asked her to send me my birth certificate, and then I was like, 'It's too late, apparently,' " Berry said.

 

Berry is one of more than 50,000 registered Georgia voters who have been "flagged" because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification information.  At least 4,500 of those people are having their citizenship questioned and the burden is on them to prove eligibility to vote.

 

Experts say lists of people with mismatches are often systematically cut, or "purged," from voter rolls.

 

It's a scenario that's being repeated all across the country, with cases like Berry's raising fears of potential vote suppression in crucial swing states.

 

"What most people don't know is that every year, elections officials strike millions of names from the voter rolls using processes that are secret, prone to error and vulnerable to manipulation," said Wendy Weiser, an elections expert with New York University's Brennan Center for Justice.

 

"That means that lots and lots of eligible voters could get knocked off the voter rolls without any notice and, in many cases, without any opportunity to correct it before Election Day."

 

Weiser acknowledged that "purging done well and with proper accountability" is necessary to remove people who have died or moved out of state.

 

"But the problem is it's not necessary to do inaccurate purges that catch up thousands of eligible voters without any notice or any opportunity to fix it before Election Day and really without any public scrutiny at all," she said.

 

Such allegations have flared up across the United States during this election cycle, most notably in Ohio, where a recent lawsuit has already gone to the U.S. Supreme Court.

 

There, the state Republican Party sued Ohio's Democratic secretary of state in an effort to make her generate a list of people who had mismatched information. But Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said generating such a list would create numerous problems too close to the election and possibly disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters.

 

The Supreme Court last week ruled against the GOP on appeal of a lower court order directing Brunner to prepare the list.

 

In Florida, election officials found that 75 percent of about 20,000 voter registration applications from a three-week period in September were mismatched due to typographical and administrative errors. Florida's Republican secretary of state ordered the computer match system implemented in early September.

 

In Wisconsin, Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen sued the state's election board after it voted against a proposal to implement a "no-match" policy. The board conducted an audit of its voter rolls and found a 22 percent match failure rate -- including for four of the six members of the board.

 

The Brennan Center has also documented cases across the country of possible illegal purging, impediments to college student voting and difficulties accessing voter registration.

 

A lawsuit has been filed over Georgia's mismatch system, and the state is also under fire for requesting Social Security records for verification checks on about 2 million voters -- more requests than any other state.

 

One of the lawyers involved in the lawsuit says Georgia is violating a federal law that prohibits widespread voter purges within 90 days of the election, arguing that the letters were sent out too close to the election date.

 

"They are systematically using these lists and matching them and using those matches to send these letters out to voters," said McDonald, director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project in Georgia.

 

"It's not, you know, an individualized notion of people maybe not being citizens or not being residents. They're using a systematic purging procedure that's expressly prohibited by federal laws."

 

Asked if he believed that eligible voters were purged in Georgia, McDonald said, "If people who are properly eligible, are getting improperly challenged and purged, the answer would be 'Yes,' " he said.

 

Elise Shore, regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said letters like those sent to Berry appear to violate two federal laws against voter purging within 90 days of the election.

 

"People are being targeted, and people are being told they are non-citizens, including both naturalized citizens and U.S.-born citizens," said Shore, another plaintiff in the Georgia lawsuit. "They're being told they're not eligible to vote, based on information in a database that hasn't been checked and approved by the Department of Justice, and that we know has flaws in it."

 

Georgia's Secretary of State Karen Handel, a Republican who began working on purging voter rolls since she was elected in 2006, said that won't happen. If there are errors, she said, there is still plenty of time to resolve the problems.

 

Handel says she is not worried the verification process will prevent eligible voters from casting a ballot.

 

"In this state and all states, there's a process to ensure that a voter who comes in -- even if there's a question about their status -- that they will vote either provisional or challenge ballot, which is a paper ballot," she said.

 

"So then the voter has ample opportunity to clarify any issues or address them," Handel added. "And I think that's a really important process."

 

Handel denied the efforts to verify the vote are suppression.

 

"This is about ensuring the integrity of our elections," she said. "It is imperative to have checks and balances on the front end, during the processes and on the back end. That's what the verification process is about."

 

So someone like Kyla Berry will be allowed to cast a provisional ballot when she votes, but it's up to county election officials whether those ballots would actually count.

 

Berry says she will try to vote, but she's not confident it will count.

 

"I know this happens, but I cannot believe it's happening to me," she said. "If I weren't allowed to vote, I would just feel like that would be ... like the worst thing ever -- a travesty."