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☆ Appeals Court Further Narrows Voting Rights Act’s Scope
▼ + stars: | 2024-08-02 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A federal appeals court further narrowed the scope of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, ruling that members of separate minority groups cannot join together to claim that a political map has been drawn to dilute their voting power. The 12-to-6 ruling on Thursday by the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned almost four decades of legal precedent, as well as an earlier ruling by a three-judge panel of the same appeals court. It applies only in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, the three states where the court has jurisdiction, but the decision has national implications and may be appealed to the Supreme Court. The redrawn boundaries reduced their combined share of the district’s electorate to 38 percent, and a lawsuit claimed that doing so violated Section Two of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits drawing maps that dilute minority voting power. A lower court and the three-judge appellate panel both ruled that the new map was a clear violation of the law.

Persons: ” Organizations: Fifth, Supreme, Circuit Locations: Louisiana , Mississippi, Texas, Galveston County , Texas, Black

☆ How Some States Are Making It Harder to Register Voters
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-26 | by ( Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In an average year, she said, the nonprofit Faith in Florida, where she serves as democracy director, used to add 12,000 new voters to the state’s rolls. These days, Faith in Florida canvassers no longer help would-be voters fill out registration forms. Instead, they hand out slips of paper with a QR code that links to the state’s online registration website. And it’s not just small-time civic groups that are affected: The Florida chapter of the League of Women Voters has scaled back its trademark voter registration drives, too. “These draconian laws and rules are like taking a sledgehammer to hit a flea,” said Cecile Scoon, a lawyer and the president of the Florida league.

Persons: LaVon Bracy, Lyndon Johnson, Ron DeSantis, ”, Cecile Scoon Organizations: Gov, League of Women Voters, Florida Locations: Florida

☆ The Ballot Measures Aim to Reduce Partisanship. Can They Fix American Politics?
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-25 | by ( Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Americans of both parties routinely express deep concern about the state of the country’s democracy. This fall, many voters may have a chance to do something about it, by voting on state ballot measures related to the nuts and bolts of elections and governance. Eight states, including Ohio and seven others largely in the West, appear all but certain to field ballot measures that would either overhaul redistricting or rewrite election rules to discourage hyper-partisanship and give voters a greater voice in choosing candidates. Redistricting ballot measures are not uncommon, but since the advent of citizen-backed ballot initiatives in the early 1900s no other year has had more than three election-system initiatives, according to the online elections database Ballotpedia. It creates the perception that we’re living in a democracy, when maybe we’re not.”

Persons: “, Kathy Cunningham, ” Locations: Ohio, Cincinnati

☆ Can Republicans Embrace Voting by Mail? Pennsylvania Offers a Test.
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-21 | by ( Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

When voters turned out in February to fill a vacant seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, the stakes were nothing less than control of the chamber, which Democrats held by a single seat. But as Election Day dawned, a nor’easter dumped several inches of snow, stranding would-be voters at home. Bad luck dogged others: One woman backing Ms. Cabanas skipped the polls after she fell ill and was rushed to the hospital. Ms. Cabanas’s Democratic opponent faced similar hurdles but had one advantage: More than 3,300 of his voters had mailed in their ballots early. Ms. Cabanas could count only 532.

Persons: Candace Cabanas, Cabanas, Cabanas’s Organizations: Republican, Cabanas’s Democratic Locations: Pennsylvania

New hires from across the country and abroad are snapping up just-built Spanish-tiled houses nearby, and schools are already adding semiconductor trainings. But on the other side of the fence, roadside vendors are doing brisk business opposing President Biden. Each morning, they hoist Confederate flags and lay out tables of Trump hats and crude banners deriding Mr. Biden. Arizona feels like a place where nearly all of 2024’s pivotal political clashes are converging. It is a border state bristling with active fault lines on abortion, inflation, immigration and election conspiracies, where vast demographic changes have shifted Arizona from reliably Republican and seldom contested in national politics to a desert hothouse.

Persons: Biden, Trump, Mr, “, ”, Mike Conley, ’ Locations: Phoenix, Arizona, California

☆ Former Ohio House Speaker Hit With 10 Additional Felony Charges
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-25 | by ( Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A former speaker of the Ohio State House of Representatives, now serving a 20-year federal prison sentence, was indicted on 10 more state felony charges on Monday in connection with a sprawling bribery scheme that handed a $1.3 billion bailout to a major regional energy utility. The charges against the former speaker, Larry Householder, followed an inquiry by the Ohio Organized Crime Commission that also produced indictments last month of two former executives of the Akron-based utility, FirstEnergy Corporation. The two men — Chuck Jones, a former FirstEnergy chief executive officer, and Michael Dowling, a senior vice president — were charged with funneling $4.3 million in bribes to the former chairman of the Ohio Public Utility Commission, Sam Randazzo. They and Mr. Randazzo, who was also indicted, have pleaded not guilty to a total of 27 charges. The FirstEnergy case has been called the largest political scandal in Ohio history.

Persons: Larry, Chuck Jones, Michael Dowling, —, Sam Randazzo, Randazzo Organizations: Ohio State House of Representatives, Ohio, Commission, FirstEnergy Corporation Locations: Akron, Ohio

☆ Some on the Right Flirt With a Voting Method the Left Loves
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-08 | by ( Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Long viewed as an intriguing, if somewhat wonky, approach to conducting elections, ranked-choice voting — allowing voters to list candidates in order of preference instead of selecting just one — appears to be having a moment. Across the country, voters have adopted the system for municipal and county elections in each of the last 27 times the issue has been put to them. Nevada and Oregon — and perhaps Colorado and Idaho as well — will hold referendums on adopting the system this fall. Critics call the system confusing and even undemocratic, since candidates who initially get the most first-place votes don’t always win in the end. But just how popular ranked-choice voting is may depend on the group that has most often waged tooth-and-claw battles against it: conservatives, and in particular Republican political figures, who have ideological and practical reasons to oppose the system.

Persons: Long, don’t Organizations: Republican Locations: Nevada, Oregon, Colorado, Idaho, Maine, Alaska

☆ Arizona G.O.P. Picks New Leader After Scandal Creates a Vacancy
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-27 | by ( Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Arizona Republicans chose a new party chair on Saturday, a move that tightened the grip on the state party hierarchy by far-right supporters of former President Donald J. Trump and that came days after a scandal that forced the last chairman to resign. Ms. Swoboda, whom Mr. Trump endorsed on Friday, won an overwhelming majority of votes in an election of state party officials held at the party’s required annual meeting in Phoenix. The vote was delayed by a lengthy debate over a motion to ban the use of electronic tabulators — mistrusted by many election deniers in the party — to count the ballots. Kari Lake, a far-right candidate for U.S. Senate and close ally of Mr. Trump who had a central role in Mr. DeWit’s fall, took to the stage on Saturday to nominate Ms. Swoboda. But she was met with a din of boos and heckling from the crowd, an apparent rebuff to her involvement in the scandal.

Persons: Donald J, Gina Swoboda, Trump, Jeff DeWit, Swoboda, Kari Lake, DeWit’s Organizations: Arizona Republicans, Trump, Mr, U.S . Senate Locations: Arizona, Phoenix

☆ For Election Workers, Fentanyl-Laced Letters Signal a Challenging Year
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-22 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For the people who run elections at thousands of local offices nationwide, 2024 was never going to be an easy year. But the recent anonymous mailing of powder-filled envelopes to election offices in five states offers new hints of how hard it could be. The letters, sent to offices in Washington State, Oregon, Nevada, California and Georgia this month, are under investigation by the U.S. And they presage the pressure-cooker environment that election officials will face next year in a contest for the White House that could chart the future course of American democracy. “Every way in which our elections are administered is going to be tested somewhere, at some time, during 2024.”

Persons: ”, Tammy Patrick Organizations: U.S . Postal Inspection Service, National Association of Election Locations: Washington State , Oregon , Nevada , California, Georgia

☆ Letters With Suspicious Substances Sent to Election Offices Spur Alarm
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-09 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Suspicious letters were sent to local elections officials in at least four states, the authorities said on Thursday, including to two locations in Washington State that were said to include white powders containing the toxic drug fentanyl. Preliminary tests indicated that letters sent to at least two of four Washington election offices — in Spokane County and King County, which includes Seattle — contained fentanyl, law enforcement officials said. Georgia authorities said that a letter bound for the election office in Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta, had been flagged as potentially including fentanyl but had not yet been delivered. And California authorities said that they were uncertain what was in letters sent to election offices in Sacramento and Los Angeles. None of the affected election offices reported that any employees were injured.

Locations: Washington State, Washington, —, Spokane County, King County, Seattle, Georgia, Fulton County, Atlanta, California, Sacramento, Los Angeles

☆ After Antifraud Crusade, a Trial Asks: Were Illegal Voters or Legal Ones the Target?
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-26 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

As Republican candidates and their supporters increasingly focus on specious claims of rampant voter fraud, a federal trial starting in Georgia on Thursday will examine whether a key campaign to unmask illegal voters in 2020 actually aimed to intimidate legal ones. The outcome could have implications for conservative election integrity organizations that are widely expected to ramp up antifraud efforts during next year’s general election. That question is serious enough that the Department of Justice has filed a brief in the case and will defend the government’s view of the act’s scope at the trial. The campaign, mounted in December 2020 by a right-wing group called True the Vote, filed challenges with local election officials to the eligibility of some 250,000 registered Georgia voters. The group also offered bounties from a $1 million reward fund for evidence of “election malfeasance” and sought to recruit citizen monitors to patrol polls and ballot drop-off locations.

Persons: ” Organizations: Republican, Department of Justice, Georgia voters Locations: Georgia

Amanda McDaniel, a member of the preservation alliance, is rooting for Jordan’s speaker bid — seeing in him the same principles she holds. It is not an approach that builds consensus — a previous Republican speaker to brand him a “legislative terrorist” — even as he has steadily parlayed it into political success. Mr. Jordan embraced right-wing populism long before the Tea Party or Donald Trump made into a national force. Eric Forson, 50, said that when he wrote to his elected representatives during the 2013 government shutdown, Mr. Jordan was the only one who responded. Ms. Esch and her husband, Mike, 57 were both hopeful that Mr. Jordan would drum up the votes needed to take the speaker role on Wednesday.

Persons: Jim Jordan, Amanda McDaniel, ”, McDaniel, Jordan, “, Katie Porter, Porter, Mr, Jordan’s, Donald Trump, grimaces, Jim wasn’t, Brian Seaver, Eric Forson, Forson, he’s, Missy Esch, . Esch, Mike, Mike Esch Organizations: Champaign County Preservation Alliance, Ohio, Ohio General, Caucus, Tea Party, Lima Correctional, State Senate, Urbana Brewing Company Locations: Champaign, Urbana, Ohio, Washington, Lima, Jordan’s

Six members of the Champaign County Preservation Alliance were touring the picturesque downtown in Urbana, the central Ohio town where Representative Jim Jordan has made his mark as a state champion wrestler, an aspiring politician and now a member of Congress. As they watched his attempt to end the tortured efforts to choose a new House speaker, the uncompromising figure he casts nationally is much the same as seen back home in the heavily gerrymandered, largely Republican, Fourth Congressional District that snakes and loops through hundreds of miles of mainly small towns and farmland. The district is much whiter and slightly poorer, less educated and older than the state at large. It went for Donald Trump in 2020 by nearly a 36 percentage point margin. Amanda McDaniel, a member of the preservation alliance, is rooting for Jordan’s speaker bid — seeing in him the same principles she holds.

Persons: Jim Jordan, Donald Trump, Amanda McDaniel Organizations: Champaign County Preservation Alliance, Republican, Fourth Congressional Locations: Champaign, Urbana, Ohio

☆ In North Carolina, Republicans Seek More Control Over Elections
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-24 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Roy Cooper, a North Carolina Democrat, began his first term in 2017, his rivals in the Republican-controlled legislature voted to strip the position of key powers, including the governor’s longstanding authority to appoint majorities to the state election board and local election boards in all 100 counties. After the state Supreme Court ruled that move illegal, the lawmakers put the idea on the ballot, but the state’s voters shot that down, too. Now, seven years after their first try, the legislators appear on the verge of getting what they have long sought. On Wednesday, the State House of Representatives followed the State Senate in passing legislation that would put the legislature in charge of all election board appointments. Under the newly passed bill, ties in local election boards would be addressed by the State Board of Elections — which, under the bill, would also have an equal number of members from each party.

Persons: Roy Cooper, — Organizations: Gov, North, North Carolina Democrat, Republican, State, Senate, Democratic, State Board Locations: North Carolina

☆ In Three Southern States, a Legal Battle Over Political Maps
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-21 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Last year, the same judges said that, even before full trials were held, the same maps were so likely illegal that replacements should be used for the 2022 elections. That did not happen: Thanks to a once-obscure Supreme Court rule that outlaws election-law changes close to campaign season, the disputed maps were used anyway. With an electorate so deeply split along partisan lines that few House races are competitive, the significance last November was glaring. Republicans took control of the House of Representatives by a bare five seats, three of them from districts they were poised to lose had new maps been used in the three states. Now the revived litigation is again churning through the courts — at least six of them, at last count — with the same political stakes and a sharply divided view of the likely outcomes.

Persons: WASHINGTON Organizations: Republican, Black Locations: Georgia , Louisiana, Alabama

☆ Ohio Voters Reject Constitutional Change Intended to Thwart Abortion Amendment
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-08 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Ohio voters rejected a bid on Tuesday to make it harder to amend the State Constitution, according to The Associated Press, a significant victory for abortion-rights supporters trying to stop the Republican-controlled State Legislature from severely restricting the procedure. The abortion question turned what would normally be a sleepy summer election in an off year into a highly visible dogfight that took on national importance and drew an uncharacteristically high number of Ohio voters for an August election. Initial results showed the measure losing by a roughly 3 to 2 margin. The contest was seen as a test of Republicans’ efforts nationwide to curb the use of ballot initiatives, and a potential barometer of the political climate going into the 2024 elections.

Organizations: Associated Press, Republican, Legislature, Ohio

☆ Abortion Drives Ohio Election on Amending the State Constitution
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-07 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

John Kasich of Ohio, a Republican, wrote on Twitter in April that he had watched voters reject policies that he and his legislative majority had backed. “It wouldn’t have been right then, and it isn’t right now.”Once, Ohio was the quintessential swing state. The 2022 election brought single-party control of the governor’s office and legislature to 39 states, the most in at least three decades. And 29 states, 20 of them Republican, have veto-proof supermajorities that control both houses of the state legislatures. “We can kind of do what we want,” Matt Huffman, the powerful Ohio State Senate president, told the Columbus Dispatch in a 2022 profile.

Persons: John Kasich of, ”, Matt Huffman, — Organizations: Gov, Republican, Twitter, Ohio State, Columbus Dispatch, Alabama Legislature, U.S, Supreme Locations: John Kasich of Ohio, Ohio

☆ Appeals Court Overturns Mississippi’s Lifetime Ban on Voting for Former Felons
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-04 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Mississippi’s lifetime ban on voting for people convicted of a range of felonies is cruel and unusual punishment that violates the Eighth Amendment and “is at odds with society’s evolving standards of decency,” a federal appeals court ruled on Friday. In an emphatic 2-to-1 opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upbraided Mississippi officials for what it called a pointless “denial of the democratic core of American citizenship." They added: “It is an especially cruel penalty as applied to those whom the justice system has already deemed to have completed all terms of their sentences. These individuals, despite having satisfied their debt to society, are precluded from ever fully participating in civic life. Indeed, they are excluded from the most essential feature and expression of citizenship in a democracy — voting.”

Persons: ” Organizations: U.S ., Appeals, Fifth Circuit upbraided

☆ Voting by Formerly Imprisoned in Tennessee, Already Hard, Gets Harder
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-25 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Tennessee has sharply restricted the conditions under which it will restore voting rights to people who have completed prison sentences for felonies, joining a growing list of Republican-controlled states that have rolled back access to the ballot by former felons. The state has for years permitted most people with completed felony sentences to restore their voting rights through an administrative process established in 2006 that is ostensibly automatic, but in practice almost unnavigable. Only 3,400 people, or less than 1 percent of all disenfranchised Tennesseans, have had their voting rights restored under the program, said Blair Bowie, the director of the Restore Your Vote initiative at the Campaign Legal Center, a voting-rights advocacy group in Washington. But in a letter sent to local election officials on Friday, the elections coordinator for Tennessee’s secretary of state said the state would now require that formerly incarcerated people also be granted clemency by the governor’s office or have their citizenship rights restored by a circuit court judge.

Persons: Blair Bowie Organizations: Republican Locations: Tennessee, Washington

Under orders from the Supreme Court to produce a voting map that no longer illegally dilutes the power of Black voters in Alabama, the state’s lawmakers are now facing a high-stakes scramble to come up with an acceptable replacement by the end of this week. A little over a month after the court’s surprise ruling, the Alabama legislature will convene for a special five-day session on Monday, with the Republican supermajority having given little public indication of how it plans to fulfill a mandate to craft a second district that allows Black voters to elect a representative of their choice — one who could well be a Democrat. The effects of the revised map, which must be passed by Friday and approved by a federal court, could reverberate across the country, with other states in the South confronting similar voting rights challenges and Republicans looking to hold onto a razor-thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives next year. The session also comes at a pivotal moment in the debate over the constitutionality of factoring race into government decisions, as conservatives have increasingly chipped away at the 1965 Voting Rights Act and other longstanding judicial protections centered on equality and race.

Organizations: Democrat, U.S . House Locations: Alabama, U.S

☆ Utah G.O.P.’s Map Carved Up Salt Lake Democrats. Is It a Legal Matter?
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-11 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The 550,000 voters in Salt Lake County, Utah’s most populous, handed Joseph R. Biden Jr. an 11-percentage point victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 contest for president. On Tuesday, the Utah Supreme Court will consider whether to wade into the increasingly pitched nationwide battle over partisan gerrymanders. The justices will decide whether the state’s courts can hear a lawsuit challenging the House map, or whether partisan maps are a political issue beyond their jurisdiction. But voting rights advocates say Utah’s Constitution offers a stronger case than the federal one for reining in political maps. He said other relevant provisions in the State Constitution, but absent from the federal Constitution, include guarantees of free elections and the right to vote.

Persons: Joseph R, Biden, Donald Trump, ”, Mark Gaber Organizations: Republican, Utah Supreme, U.S, Supreme Locations: Salt Lake County, Utah’s, Utah, State, Washington

☆ The Supreme Court Rejects a Once-Fringe Elections Theory
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-27 | by ( Matthew Cullen | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Justices on the country’s highest court rejected a legal theory that would have radically reshaped how elections are conducted by giving state legislatures largely unchecked power to set rules for federal elections and to draw congressional maps warped by partisan gerrymandering. The 6-to-3 decision was cheered by voting rights advocates who feared an undemocratic fallout if the Supreme Court had ruled the other way. “If the theory had been upheld, it would have been chaotic,” my colleague Michael Wines said. “In states like Wisconsin and Ohio, it basically would have allowed legislators to enshrine themselves in power all but permanently. A recent ruling by that state’s Supreme Court authorized the legislature, which is controlled by Republicans, to draw maps as it sees fit, ensuring that the resulting districts will be warped by politics.

Persons: Michael Wines, “, John Roberts Organizations: North, Republicans Locations: Wisconsin, Ohio

☆ Supreme Court Gives the Voting Rights Act a Tenuous New Lease on Life
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-08 | by ( Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The Supreme Court’s surprising decision on Thursday to effectively reaffirm the remaining powers of the 1965 Voting Rights Act has halted, at least for the foreseeable future, the slide toward irrelevance of a landmark civil rights law that reshaped American politics. In 2013, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote an opinion that effectively gutted the heart of the act, a provision that gave the Justice Department a veto over changes in election procedures in states with histories of racial bias in elections. Two years ago, an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito greatly weakened the law’s authority over polling rules that reduced the clout of minority voters. Supporters of the act expected the court to take an ax to the law’s chief remaining authority, over political maps, in the latest case, Allen v. Milligan — a suit charging that Alabama had drawn its seven congressional districts to illegally limit Black voters’ influence to a single House seat. Instead, Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 ruling, reaffirmed the law’s authority over racially biased maps and the arcane structure of legal precedents and court tests that underpin it.

Persons: John G, Roberts, Samuel Alito, Allen, Milligan —, Justice Roberts Organizations: Justice Department, Alabama

☆ How to Police Gerrymanders? Some Judges Say the Courts Can’t.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

WASHINGTON — Courts decide vexing legal matters and interpret opaque Constitutional language all the time, from defining pornography and judging whether a search or seizure is unreasonable to determining how speedy a speedy trial must be. And then there is the issue that some judges increasingly say is beyond their abilities to adjudicate. It was on display again last week, in North Carolina. The North Carolina Supreme Court said on Friday that it could find no way to determine when even egregious gerrymanders — in this case, lopsided partisan maps of the state’s General Assembly and its 14 congressional districts — cross the line between skewed but legal and unconstitutionally rigged. political dominance, even though the state’s electorate is split almost evenly between the two major parties.

☆ North Carolina Court, With New Partisan Mix, Reverses Itself on a Key Voting Case
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-28 | by ( Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Barely a year after Democratic justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court said new maps of the state’s legislative and congressional districts were partisan gerrymanders that violated the State Constitution, a newly elected Republican majority on the court reversed course on Friday and said the court had no authority to overturn those maps. The practical effect is to enable the Republican-controlled State Legislature to scrap the court-ordered State Senate and congressional district. boundaries that were used in elections last November, and draw new maps skewed in their favor for elections in 2024. In an opinion divided 5 to 2 along party lines, the new Republican majority of justices said the court had no authority to strike down partisan maps that the state General Assembly had drawn. “Were this Court to create such a limitation, there is no judicially discoverable or manageable standard for adjudicating such claims.”

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