High court won’t hear appeal on straight-ticket voting

Melissa Nann Burke, Detroit News Washington Bureau

Washington — The U.S. Supreme Court has denied a request to hear an emergency appeal over Michigan’s new law that bans straight-ticket voting, allowing the straight-ticket option to appear on ballots in the Nov. 8 election.

Democratic opponents of the new law asked the justices to reject Attorney General Bill Schuette’semergency appeal, predicting “massive” confusion and long lines at polling places that would disproportionately affect black voters if the law were enforced. Schuette’s office said the change was not discriminatory, applying to all voters regardless of race.

“It is my duty to defend Michigan’s laws, in this case a law that stands in 40 other states,” Schuette said in a Friday statement. “Now, the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken, and I will respect that decision.”

The attorneys challenging the straight-ticket ban include Mark Brewer, a Southfield attorney who is a former Michigan Democratic Party chairman. Brewer argued in part that the state made no effort to educate voters that straight-party voting would not be available this fall.

“This is a victory for Michigan voters. It would have been chaos eight weeks from now at the polls if straight-party voting was eliminated,” Brewer said Friday.

The straight-ticket option lets voters make one mark to select all Democratic or all Republican candidates on a ballot, rather than selecting individual candidates for each office.

Without comment, the High Court issued an order Friday denying the state’s application for a stay. Two of the court’s conservatives, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, would have granted Schuette’s application, but four justices must agree to grant a hearing.

The nation’s highest court has one vacancy since Justice Antonin Scalia died in February. Controversial issues have resulted in tied 4-4 decisions on the court that now consists of four Democratic appointees and four Republican appointees.

After the court’s order, Michigan’s Secretary of State Office spokesman Fred Woodhams confirmed the straight-ticket option would be available on Election Day. The Election Bureau department may now certify the ballot, and local clerks may finalize and print ballots.

U.S. District Judge Gershwin A. Drain, a Democratic appointee of President Barack Obama, rejected the state’s straight-ticket ban in July, finding that the change could create longer lines on Election Day that would disproportionately affect black voters and limit their ability to participate in the political process.

The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a request by Schuette and Secretary of State Ruth Johnson for an “en banc” hearing on a stay request of Drain’s preliminary injunctions against the straight ticket-voting ban, approved by the Republican-led Legislature in December.

Schuette wanted the Supreme Court to stay Drain’s preliminary injunction pending a federal appeals court decision on the full merits of the case.

Brewer said long lines at the polls would violate the rights of disabled voters, as well as African-American voters, who historically have a higher rate of using the straight-ticket option.

“For whatever reason, and there may be historic reasons, African-Americans use the option more,” Brewer said. “And the case law is very clear — if you take away the voting rights of a minority, the Voting Rights Act is violated.”

The case will continue in the lower courts, with a trial before Drain expected next year.

Ottawa County Clerk Justin Roebuck, a Republican, shared the some of the same concerns as Democrats. Schuette’s appeals forced his office to wait on finalizing ballots, which was “frustrating” so close to the deadline, he said.

From a purely “administrative standpoint,” optional straight-ticket voting made sense for the Nov. 8 election, Roebuck said.

“At the end of the day I’m more concerned with a fair and free elections process than I am the partisanship,” he said.

Brandon Dillon, chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, said the justices made the right decision to avoid “mass voter confusion” and longer lines on Election Day.

The order “shows that now judges — both Republican and Democratic appointees — have disagreed with Attorney General Bill Schuette, and the voters were handed a big victory for this November,” Dillon said.

“Bill Schuette should actually ask for an apology from the taxpayers for continuing to waste their money when he knew that he had virtually no chance of prevailing in this case.”

IA GOP Kingmaker Mickelson Wants To Bring Back Jim Crow-Era Voting Laws

By SALVATORE COLLELUORI/Media Matters

Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson, the state's self-appointed vetter of GOP presidential candidates, recently told members of the League of Women Voters that it should be harder for people to vote, suggesting it be limited to state property owners or people who pass a civics test -- both of which were used to disenfranchise black voters and others in colonial America and the Jim Crow era.

On the June 4 broadcast of Mickelson in the Morning, Mickelson hosted two representatives of the League of Women Voters. During the discussion, Mickelson declared that unlike his guests, whose group works to register more Americans to vote, he is in "the voter repression business" and doesn't want people to vote "unless they agree" with him. He also suggested that in order to vote, Americans should have to pass a "civics test" to prove they're smart enough.

Later in the show, in response to a caller's comment about who should be eligible to vote on property tax ballot issues, Mickelson suggested that only people who pay property taxes -- i.e., property owners -- should be allowed to do so, which would effectively exclude local citizens who are students or renters.

Mickelson's suggestions are a stunning endorsement of disfavored economic restrictions on the right to vote that are now presumptively unconstitutional. Owning property was a prerequisite for white males to vote in colonial America, but eventually gave way to a law requiring voters to be taxpayers. However, by the 1850's, even the tax-paying requirement was phased out in most states. Despite passage of the 15th Amendment, which sought to eliminate that litmus test, some groups, including women and African-Americans, were still denied the vote.

The Jim Crow-era literacy test, which Mickelson has renamed a "civics test" requirement, was even more pernicious. As a PBS special on Jim Crow noted, literacy tests were often "used to keep people of color -- and, sometimes, poor whites -- from voting" and whether someone passed was up to "the discretion of the officials in charge of voter registration," meaning those whom officials wanted to pass did, while others were set up to fail.

Mickelson, who has a national reputation as a GOP kingmaker in Iowa, has a history of pushing presidential candidates to embrace his extreme views. Already this year, he has hosted every major GOP presidential candidate -- except Jeb Bush, who has yet to declare but is expected to, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina -- at least once, and Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee several times.

Full Segment:

White House fighting for voting rights

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Justice Ginsburg Reacts To Epidemic Of Voter Suppression Laws: Told Ya So

By Ian Millhiser/Think Progress

“I didn’t want to be right,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says about her prediction that striking a key prong of the Voting Rights Act will lead to a wave of minority voter suppression, “but sadly I am.” In an interview with the Associated Press’ Mark Sherman, Ginsburg reiterated one of the core points of her dissent from the five Republican justices’ voting rights decision — “The notion that because the Voting Rights Act had been so tremendously effective we had to stop it didn’t make any sense to me,” Ginsburg said. “And one really could have predicted what was going to happen” once the law was struck down.

What has happened is a rush of voter suppression laws in states once subject to federal supervision under the provision gutted by Ginsburg’s Republican colleagues. Just two hours after the decision was announced, Texas’ attorney general announced that a common voter suppression law would take effect in Texas — and several other states are right behind Texas. In Arizona, Republicans want to redraw district lines to make them less “competitive,” now that federal supervision of the state’s redistricting has lifted. North Carolina Republicans are on the verge of enacting the worst voter suppression law in the country.

In her dissent, Ginsburg warned that “the evolution of voting discrimination into more subtle second-generation barriers is powerful evidence that a remedy as effective as preclearanceremains vital to protect minority voting rights and prevent backsliding.” One month later, it’s already clear that Ginsburg was right.

Sharpton: We cannot give up this basic right

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Florida a Central battleground in fight for voting rights

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Holder: Minority rights under threat from voter ID laws

By Chris McGreal, The Guardian via Raw Story

The US attorney general, Eric Holder, has warned that gains of the civil rights struggle hang in the balance in the face of a determined effort by many states to roll back laws ensuring the right to vote.

Holder told a Washington conference on Wednesday that there is a “growing need to protect the voting rights of every eligible citizen” amid a flurry of legislation and executive orders in US states ostensibly to prevent election fraud with measures such as requiring proof of identity in order to vote.

The meeting was told the laws are intended to prevent African Americans in particular from voting because because nearly one in four black people lack photo identification.

A Congressman from North Carolina, GK Butterfield, said that if new requirements for voter identification and proof of citizenship in many states, and restrictions on groups mobilising people to vote, had been in place four years ago they would have been likely to cost Barack Obama the presidency.

Holder said that in the past two years the justice department has challenged “two dozen state laws and executive orders from more than a dozen states that could make it significantly harder for many eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012″.

“Despite our nation’s long history of extending voting rights to non-property owners and to women, to people of colour, to Native Americans, and to younger Americans, today a growing number of our fellow citizens are worried about the same disparities, divisions and problems that nearly five decades ago so many fought to address,” Holder told a meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus and black church leaders.

“In my travels across this country I’ve heard a consistent drumbeat of concern from citizens who for the first time in their lives now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up to one of our nation’s most noble ideals and some of the achievements that defined the civil rights movement now hang, again, in the balance.”

Nicole Austin-Hillery, legal counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, said that up to 5 million voters could be affected by laws already in place or on hold in the face of legal challenges.

“The efforts underway to change [voting] laws are fast and furious,” she said. “This is not just about voter ID, there are a panoply of changes that have taken place.”

The supreme court has upheld voter ID legislatation and seven states have introduced strict requirements. But 16 southern states require justice department approval for changes to election laws under the 1965 Voting Rights Act because of a history of discrimination. The justice department has used that power to block voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina as likely to discriminate against racial minorities as well as other people.

Holder also pointed up the example of redistricting in Texas for elections to the state legislature and US Congress. He said that electoral maps “were manipulated to give the appearance of minority while minimising minority electoral strength”.

“In December, we objected to South Carolina’s voter ID law after finding, based on the state’s own data, that the proposed change would place an unfair burden on non-white voters. In March we objected to a photo ID requirement in Texas because it would have a disproportionate impact on Hispanic voters,” he said.

Twenty-three other states now require some form of proof of identity in order to be able to vote.

Austin-Hillery said other measures are also likely to have an impact on voting including proof of citizenship in some states and the curbing of early or Sunday voting which many poorer people rely on because they cannot afford to take hours off work on election day.

She said these measures have a disproportionate impact on minorities, old people and students. One in four African Americans and one in five people over 65 lack photo identification. “A lot of Americans say: who doesn’t have ID? But 11% of us don’t have it,” she said.

Republicans in some states claim that the new measures are necessary because voter fraud is so widespread that it is costing the party elections. But a federal investigation and academic studies have not backed up the claim.

Critics, such as Butterfield, say that the real intent is to reduce the black and Hispanic vote which mostly goes to the Democratic party. He compared the new voting requirements to laws passed at the turn of the 20th century that effectively stripped African Americans of the right to vote in southern states and saw black representatives from the south driven from Congress.

“All of this progress that we have made is under assault. There is a right wing conspiracy that is alive and well in this country that is trying to take us back to 1900 and even before,” he said. “What they want to do is not take away the right to vote but if black voter participation can be diminished, even by 10%, it will make that critical difference all across the country.

“President Obama won my state in the last election by 14,000 votes. Had we had a voter ID law in North Carolina he would not have won the state of North Carolina and probably could not have won the presidency.”

Holder said that some of these laws fall foul of two key parts of the Voting Rights Act – section two, which forbids racially discriminatory practices that deny or dilute the vote, and section five, which requires the justice department to approve changes to voting regulations in the 16 states with a history of institutionalised racial discrimination.

Section five was reauthorised by Congress in 2006 by an overwhelming vote. Since then it has come under concerted attack. Between the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and 2010 there were just eight legal challenges to section five. In the past two years there have been nine, of which four are still being fought out in the courts.

Holder sald: “Each of these challenges to section five claims that we attained a new era of electoral equality. That America in 2012 has moved beyond the challenges of 1965 and that section five is no longer necessary. I wish this were the case but the reality is that in jurisdictions across the country both overt and subtle forms of discrimination remain all too common and have not yet been relegated to the pages of history.”

Bill Clinton: GOP War On Voting Is Most Determined Disenfranchisement Effort Since Jim Crow

By Ian Millhiser

Speaking yesterday at the annual Campus Progress convention, former President Bill Clinton called out the GOP’s state by state efforts to make it harder to vote — a war on voting designed almost entirely to reduce the number of Democrats who cast ballots:

I can’t help thinking, since we just celebrated the Fourth of July and we’re supposed to be a country dedicated to liberty, that one of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time. There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.

Getting rid of same-day registration. Some states getting rid of all advanced voting. Governor of Florida proposed to reverse his Republican predecessor’s signing of a bill that gave people the right to vote when they got out of prison and they’d finished they’re probation period, even if they didn’t have a pardon—that’s one of the most important things we can do. Why should we disenfranchise people forever once they pay their price? Cause most of them in Florida were African Americans and Hispanics and would tend to vote for Democrats, that’s why.

Why do we want to get rid of same day registration? Why has New Hampshire made it almost impossible for college students who come from other states but live in New Hampshire most of the year to vote there? Why is all this going on? This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate.

Watch it:

Clinton is exactly right to question why anyone who professes a love of liberty could work so passionately to prevent Americans from exercising their most sacred right to vote, and the examples he cites are just a small taste of the GOP’s pervasive effort to keep people from going to the polls. Numerous GOP state legislatures rammed through “voter ID” laws, which disenfranchise thousands of elderly, disabled, and low-income voters. Republicans typically justify these voter disenfranchisement laws by claiming that they are necessary to combat voter fraud at the polls, but in-person voter fraud is only slightly more common than unicorns. A recent Supreme Court decision upholding a voter ID law was only able to cite one example of in-person voter fraud in the last 143 years.

Similarly, Republicans declared war on campaign finance regulations intended to allow candidates without massive corporate or other wealthy donor support to still compete fairly in an election. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) gutted his state’s public financing system for candidates to pay for a voter disenfranchisement law. And a 5-4 Supreme Court decision just declared laws enabling publicly financed candidates to defend themselves against unlimited corporate attack ads unconstitutional.

It’s much easier for the GOP to win the game, after all, if they can make it impossible for the other team’s players to even take the field.