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Voting rights

March 23, 2012
Remembering John Payton
by Nicole Flatow

The country lost a civil rights giant, with the passing of president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, John A. Payton. He died suddenly on Thursday at Johns Hopkins University Hospital after a brief illness, The Root reports.

Payton led LDF in several major Supreme Court victories, including Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District v. Holder, which rejected a challenge to the constitutionality of a core provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Lewis v. City of Chicago, a major employment discrimination victory, according to a statement from LDF.

The statement adds:

Widely considered one of the country's most skilled members of the Supreme Court bar, John Payton's enduring legacy will be his commitment to a principle articulated by LDF's founder, Charles Hamilton Houston. "What I am more concerned about," Houston said, "is that the Negro shall not be content simply with demanding an equal share in the existing system. It seems to me that his historical challenge is to make sure that the system [that] shall survive in the United States of America shall be a system which guarantees justice and freedom for everyone."

LDF's work will go on, in just the way that John would have wanted.

President Obama said today in a statement:

Michelle and I were saddened to hear about the passing of our dear friend John Payton. As president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, John led the organization's involvement in five Supreme Court cases.

A true champion of equality, he helped protect civil rights in the classroom and at the ballot box. The legal community has lost a legend, and while we mourn John's passing, we will never forget his courage and fierce opposition to discrimination in all its forms.

Payton was a voice for the civil rights community, and a leading constitutional thinker. During a 2009 American Constitution Society event at the National Press Club on “The Road from Lincoln to Obama,” Payton discussed the importance of shedding our racist history as we move forward with our constitutional jurisprudence.

“I would say Reconstruction didn’t fail. It was destroyed,” he said.

He continued:

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Civil rights, Fidelity to the Constitution, Supreme Court, Voting rights, Racial justice, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, Democracy and Voting, Equality and Liberty, Fifteenth Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment, John Payton, Lewis v. City of Chicago, NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder, Reconstruction Amendments, Thirteenth Amendment
March 12, 2012
DOJ Rejects Texas’ Support of Rigid Voter ID Law
by Jeremy Leaming

Confronting Texas’ stringent voter ID law, DOJ Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez said today in slowing implementation of the law that it would disproportionately hinder Latino voters.

Reporting for TPM, Ryan J. Reilly cites Perez’s letter to state officials, saying the assistant AG had concluded, in part, that Texas officials failed to provide any “explanation” for the voter ID’s disparate impact on Latino voters.

Texas is one of several states, pursuant to the Voting Rights Act, that must obtain “preclearance” from the DOJ before implementing new voter election laws. Originally section 5 of the VRA covered African Americans in Southern. Later, that VRA provision was expanded to also cover states with histories of making it difficult, if not impossible, for Latinos and other minorities to vote.

The DOJ has also taken action against other restrictive state voter identification laws, such as the one in South Carolina. Last fall during a Senate Judiciary Committee on the numerous state laws to hamper voting Attorney General Eric Holder said “techniques to discourage people from coming to the polls – that’s inconsistent with what we say we are as a nation.”

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick and Virginia law school professor Risa L. Goluboff blasted the slew of restrictive voter ID laws, writing that they represented "ugly parallels between Jim Crow and modern vote-suppression laws."

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Election law, Voting rights, Democracy and Voting, Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez, Attorney General Eric Holder, Latino voters, minority voters, Texas voter ID law, TPM
February 15, 2012
Let’s Get Voter Registration Right – and Make it Universal
Guest Post

By Rob Richie and Elise Helgesen. Richie is executive director and Helgesen is a democracy fellow at FairVote, a nonprofit organization promoting voting rights and electoral reform.

This November’s presidential election will present a stark choice between President Barack Obama and a Republican challenger, and voter turnout analysts predict a decline in voter turnout from our 62 percent turnout of eligible voters in 2008.

Voter motivation is one reason why American turnout lags behind that of many nations. Most Americans experience limited choice and a relatively low chance of electing strongly favored candidates. For example, in 2010 only one in four eligible voters elected a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives (what we call “the Representation Index”). In contrast, in Denmark’s last elections, nearly five in six eligible voters elected representatives to its national legislature from an array of choices, voter turnout was more than 85 percent, and its system of proportional representation led to more than 95 percent of voters electing their preferred choice.

Our broken voter registration system is a more direct barrier to participation. In fact, if every single registered voter participated this November, we still would trail many nations in turnout. According to a new study by the Pew Center on the States Election Initiatives, of some 220 million eligible American votes, more than 50 million aren’t registered to vote. Another 24 million voter registrations have serious data problems that could block or interfere with voting.

It won’t take rocket science to ensure that every eligible voter is registered to vote and that all ineligible voters are not. What we need is a national commitment to take on the challenge, some start-up resources and smart use of existing databases. Other countries continue to modernize their systems, with international norms for voter registration rates typically well above 90 percent of eligible voters.

Two nations provide recent examples of how it can be done. Chile last month adopted a law designed to register all eligible voters automatically. In its last presidential election in 2010, nearly a third of Chile’s 12 million voting-age citizens weren’t registered. With the new law, more than 4.5 million voters, mostly young adults, will be added to the voter rolls.

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Election law, Voting rights, Democracy and Voting, Guest Post, universal voter registration, Voter Registration
January 24, 2012
Perry v. Perez: Not That Big a Deal . . . But Wait
Guest Post

By Daniel P. Tokaji, a law professor at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and senior fellow for Election Law @ Moritz.

Whenever the U.S. Supreme Court decides a case, especially one involving elections, commentators have a tendency to wax eloquently about its importance. But let’s face it, not all Supreme Court decisions are really that important. A case in point Friday’s opinion in Perry v. Perez, regarding Texas’ redistricting plans.

To be sure, the decision is important to Texans wondering what their congressional and state legislative districts will look like. It also helps clarify a procedural question involving preclearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (“VRA”). But the broader significance of Friday’s per curiam decision is limited. What’s most significant is an issue the Court doesn’t address: whether Section 5 is constitutional. That’s the 800 pound gorilla which the justices (with the noteworthy exception of Justice Thomas) avoid mentioning – but will probably come before them in the not-too-distant future.

A bit of context is useful. Every state must redraw its congressional and state legislative maps at the start of each decade to account for population shifts. Section 5 of the VRA requires some jurisdictions to obtain “preclearance” of voting changes – including redistricting plans – before they take effect. As originally enacted, Section 5 covered Southern states that excluded African Americans from voting. Coverage was later expanded to include states with a history of excluding Latinos and other groups from fully participating in the electoral process. Texas is among the states now covered by Section 5, which was reauthorized and extended for another 25 years in 2006. To obtain preclearance, covered jurisdictions must show that their proposed changes don’t have a discriminatory purpose or retrogressive effect on minority voters.

At issue in Perry v. Perez is what should happen when a state legislature has drawn new districts, but no preclearance decision has yet been made. After the 2010 Census, the Texas legislature redrew its congressional and state legislative lines. As required by Section 5, the state then requested preclearance of the legislature’s plan, filing suit in the federal district court in Washington, D.C. That court denied Texas’ motion for summary judgment, but hasn’t yet ruled on whether preclearance should be granted. Meanwhile, separate lawsuits were filed in another federal court, alleging that the redistricting plans violate the U.S. Constitution and another section of the VRA. (You can find court filings from the cases here and here.)

Here’s the problem: Under Section 5, the 2011 Texas redistricting plans can’t take effect until they’ve been precleared. But the old districting plan, the one in effect through 2010, can’t be used either – that would violate the one person, one vote rule due to population shifts of the last decade. The lower court was therefore left with no choice but to draw its own map. That map departed from the legislatively-drawn map in significant respects, even though the court didn’t find a likelihood that plaintiffs would prevail in their legal challenges to it. Texas argued that the court didn’t show enough deference to the un-precleared plans drawn by the state legislature.

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Redistricting, Voting rights, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, Democracy and Voting, Guest Post, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder, Perry v. Perez, Section 5, Texas, Voting Rights Act
January 10, 2012
High Court Struggles with Texas Lawmakers’ Redistricting Debacle
by Jeremy Leaming

During yesterday’s oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court over legal challenges to recently redrawn electoral maps, the justices, according to Adam Liptak, appeared “frustrated” as they grappled with how to resolve the matter, which could have a major impact on which party controls the House of Representatives.

“The justices,” Liptak, The New York Times Supreme Court correspondent, wrote, “in essence must choose between two sets of electoral maps, or at least tell lower courts how to do so. The maps concern the two houses of the Texas Legislature and the House of Representatives.”

Prompted by the 2010 census – which reported that Texas gained more than 4 million new residents, most of them Latinos – the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature created new electoral maps that public interest groups criticized as failing to reflect minority population growth. Texas, because of its history of discrimination against minority voters, is one of the states that must get “preclearance,” pursuant to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, from the Department of Justice or a federal court before any electoral changes can take effect. While Texas officials sought preclearance from a federal court in Washington, a federal court in San Antonio created its own electoral maps as a substitute, which state officials challenged. That three-judge court in San Antonio found that the Legislature’s redistricting sharply reduced the number of minority voting opportunities.

During oral argument, Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested the Texas Legislature’s maps could not be used in the state’s primaries, because the maps had not been approved pursuant to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

“I don’t see how we can give deference to an enacted new map,” she said, “if Section 5 says don’t give it effect until it’s been precleared.”

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Redistricting, Supreme Court, Voting rights, Democracy and Voting, Adam Liptak, Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Pamela S. Karlan, preclearance, Richard L. Hasen, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, Texas Legislature, Texas redistricting

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