Voting Rights Act & Redistricting Issues
News & Commentary | Archive

Legislative developments and continued judicial engagement with Voting Rights Act issues will be covered here. Also addressed will be other issues in redistricting, such as the unsettled state of questions about the Supreme Court's direction on partisan gerrymandering.

The Question of Election Day Equity

   Ned Foley has written an interesting series of commetaries, the last Part appearing today, raising questions about a March 4 federal court Order in Cuyahoga County that extended polling hours in selected precincts to address a shortfall in ballot supplies.  He does not believe that the Order should have been issued; he sees in any poll extension a serious Equal Protection defect harmful to voters elsewhere denied similarly extended hours.  Foley has fashioned an equitable test for consideration in a small number of cases where such relief would be appropriate.  He means for this relief to be hard to get.

California Redistricting Reform: Replacing Retired Judges With…. Well, It’s All Very Complicated

     To wish the political process to function as in their dreams is no dishonor to the dreamers.  There is trouble only in confusing the dreaming and waking states, and when the waking state is found short on the desired and dreamy qualities, proposing to legislate fantasy into reality. This is the sure road to laws that, establishing goals both unwise and impossible to achieve, betray, by a stunning complexity, the hopelessness and confusion of their mission.

 

Hebert Contra von Spakovsky

      In a review of the nomination of Hans von Spakovsky, for a confirmed term to the Federal Election Commission, his prior tenure at DOJ cannot be not irrelevant.  Nothing, personal or professional, is necessarily irrelevant.  The question is how the relevant points would be identified and then weighed.  Gerry Hebert, whose distinguished career in election law, in and outside of government, entitles him to be heard seriously on the subject, argues in a letter to the Senate Rules Committee that von Spakovsky should not serve on the FEC because he served so poorly, displaying a lack of judgment, integrity and impartiality, at DOJ.  The Committee members who read Gerry’s letter will have to separate the intimation of misconduct from the passionate disagreement over policy and administration.  It is hazardous to confuse the two but very much the risk in confirmation processes.

Voter Politics: the High Drama of Bad Intentions

    A taste for conspiracy and high intrigue will be well satisfied by a tour through the "vote fraud" controversy.  By comparison, campaign finance is strictly second-drawer dinner theater, having nothing much to put up against its competition on the Fraud Channel.  Money-In-Politics has nothing like Fraud’s fly-by-night but shuttered-by-morning organizations (American Center for Voting Rights), no charges of personal (personnel) conflicts like those apparently routine in the Justice Department, no reports furtively changed and its authors silenced as we have seen at the EAC where the "Free Tova Wang" movement was born.  Campaign finance is all gassy moral rhetoric and low political dealing.  Voter fraud can fill the House and keep them in their seats.

 

Voting Fraud and the Offense of Littering in the Jurisprudence of Richard Posner

    Rick Hasen yesterday pounded away at Judge Posner’s opinion in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, a decision upholding the State of Indiana’s voter ID law.  Posner turned in a striking performance, questioning the instrumental value (to the voter) of voting and offering the thinnest of rationalizations for the dearth of evidence of voter impersonation.   Posner both discounts the importance of voting while inflating the case for fraud, and he gets both propositions wrong.  Hasen asks how Posner, well known for attending to data and for valuing the empirically grounded policy analysis, could disregard those commitments here, in this case.

 

Also...

A Hard Shot at von Spakovsky  2/21/07

One Surprising Voice for (One Kind of) Reform  11/21/06

Lessons about and for the Voters, Learned from 2006  11/15/06

Voter Injury  11/2/06

Voter ID: The Missouri Supreme Court Evaluates Legislative "Foresight"  10/17/06

Voter ID and Citizen “Capacity”  9/20/06

Injury to the Vote; Injury to the Voters  9/13/06

"Voter Identification” and Its Functions  9/12/06

At Weekend: Scholars at Odds with Politicians, Interest Groups at Odds with the Government  7/21/06

How Congressional Elections May Have Become Competitive: Reflections From Tom Mann  7/17/06