Category Archives: elections

99 Years After Women’s Suffrage, the Fight for the Vote Continues

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From today’s Time Magazine:

The observance of Women’s Equality Day on Monday marks the 99th anniversary of the day the 19th Amendment, extending the vote to women, entered the Constitution in 1920. These days, as the centennial year gets underway, I keep a Votes For Women sash in my suitcase, ready to slip on if period attire is required.

That moment was the culmination of a long struggle, the themes of which are timely—voting rights, women’s rights, citizenship rights and, inevitably, racism. (For black women in the Jim Crow southern states, as for Asian and Native American women, the promise of the 19th Amendment could not be realized until much later.) Likewise, the lessons we can learn from the movement are especially valuable today.

Tennessee was the last state to ratify the 19th Amendment, on Aug. 18, 1920, and the state is gearing up to mark that moment. More than 40 organizations in the Nashville area are collaborating on projects, from museum exhibits to ballet performances, symposia to musical tributes. The Nashville Public Library is constructing a Votes for Women room within its majestic central building, and the library chose my recent book about that dramatic climax of the suffrage movement, The Woman’s Hour, for its city-wide summer book club; the theme was “Read.Remember.Vote”—with a voter registration button prominent on the book-club web page. So I traveled to the Nashville this month to take part in the centennial kick-off celebrations.

I love telling the story of the three generations of brave and clever grassroots activists who powered the woman suffrage movement through 900 campaigns over seven decades, and I try to present an honest exploration of the movement’s achievements, failings and contradictions. But I’m also disturbed by some bitter ironies I’ve noticed as I tour the country.

From the window of the Library building downtown where the Votes for Women room is being built, you can see the handsome limestone Tennessee statehouse, just two blocks away.

There, this summer, Gov. Bill Lee signed into law the latest Tennessee law that makes it harder to register citizens to vote. Even though Tennessee already has one of the worst voter participation rates in the nation, the new law imposes both civil and criminal penalties (steep fines and up to nearly a year in prison) for even minor mistakes or omissions in registration documents and processes; opponents say it will especially suppress the vote in minority communities. Groups that work to register eligible new voters—like the League of Women Voters, NAACP, and the local Equity Alliance—are among those suing in Federal court to stop the law from going into effect this fall, but it has already had a chilling effect upon voter-registration drives.

Read the complete article here.

Democrats Are Getting Very Serious About the Native American Vote

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From today’s New York Times:

What do the 573 federally recognized nations of American Indians and Alaska Natives all have in common? A never-ending need for lawyers. The Frank LaMere Native American Presidential Forumheld this week in Sioux City, Iowa, at which 11 presidential candidates fielded questions from indigenous elected officials and activists, was a rousing two-day argument for an informed, experienced, compassionate and rational president. Sponsored by Four Directions, the South Dakota-based advocates for native voting rights, it was also a sobering reminder that the road to equality in the United States is paved with outrage, elbow grease and paperwork.

No American citizen should have to drive 100 miles to vote, especially if the roads to a far-flung polling place are maintained by the chronically underfunded Bureau of Indian Affairs. (On the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, two people died in July because of a washed-out section of highway on BIA Road 3.) Janet Davis, of Nevada’s Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribal Council, quizzed Marianne Williamson and Bernie Sanders about voting access. She explained that in 2016, her tribe and the Walker River Paiutes won a lawsuit to establish satellite polling places on their reservations. (From Pyramid Lake, the county’s nearest voting site had been a 96-mile round trip.)

Ms. Davis happened to be seated on the stage next to Senator Sanders. She told him, “The county told us it was too late to recruit and train poll workers and we told them we could and we did.” Senator Sanders patted her arm and smiled, revealing an uncharacteristic split second of what appeared to be actual joy.

Ms. Davis asked him, “How will you ensure that all Native Americans on reservations have the same access without having to litigate as we did?” His answer echoed Ms. Williamson’s suggestion earlier that morning, that a president who cares will appoint an effective attorney general. (Which is true in that an attorney general can prosecute violations of election law, though states and counties generally control polling locations.) But the real answer, to paraphrase the “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” is that obtaining freedoms is almost always a hassle. All American Indians received full citizenship in 1924, and yet the indigenous people of New Mexico were still suing for suffrage in 1962.

In Minnesota, Four Directions and its native partners were able to negotiate with the state to open satellite polling places on the Red Lake, White Earth and Leech Lake Reservations without litigation. (Good old Minnesotans; unlike the rest of us they might actually deserve Amy Klobuchar.) But in South Dakota and here in Montana, successfully opening satellite polling places on reservations required legal action.

Read the complete article here.

Stacey Abrams’s Fight for a Fair Vote

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From today’s New Yorker Magazine:

mong the many issues currently polarizing American politics—abortion, climate change, health care, immigration, gun control—one of the most consequential tends to be one of the least discussed. The American electorate, across the country, is diversifying ethnically and racially at a rapid rate. Progressives, interpreting the shift to mean that, following traditional paths, the new voters will lean Democratic, see a political landscape that is turning blue. Conservatives apparently see the same thing, because in recent years many of them have supported policies, such as voter-I.D. laws and voter-roll purges, that have disproportionately affected people of color.

The issue has become more pressing with the approach of the 2020 Presidential election. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that federal judges do not have the power to address partisan gerrymandering, even when it creates results that “reasonably seem unjust.” Last month, President Donald Trump was finally forced to abandon his effort to add, in defiance of another Court ruling, a citizenship question to the census—an idea that Thomas B. Hofeller, the late Republican strategist who promoted it, believed would aid the G.O.P. in further redistricting. But, days later, the President was telling four American women of color, all elected members of the House of Representatives, to “go back” to where they came from.

The nation got a preview of the battle for the future of electoral politics last year, in Georgia’s gubernatorial race. The Republican candidate was declared the winner by a margin of less than two percentage points: fifty-five thousand votes out of nearly four million cast—a record-breaking total for a midterm election in the state. Many Georgians, though, still use the terms “won” and “lost” advisedly, not only because the Democrat never technically conceded but also because of the highly irregular nature of the contest. The Republican, Brian Kemp, was Georgia’s secretary of state, and in that role he presided over an election marred by charges of voter suppression; the Democrat, Stacey Abrams, has become the nation’s most prominent critic of that practice.

Although she has only recently come to wide attention, Abrams, a forty-five-year-old tax attorney, romance novelist, and former state representative, has been working on electoral reform—particularly on voter registration—in Georgia for some fifteen years. In that regard, some Georgians view her campaign as a success; she won more votes than any Democrat has ever won for statewide office. Georgia is representative of the nation’s demographic changes. The population is 10.5 million, and, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, it was 57.5 per cent white in 2008, fell to 54.2 per cent white in 2018, and will be 53.6 per cent white next year. It will be majority-minority by 2033. Democratic leaders from red states in the South and beyond with shifting populations—they include the Presidential candidates Mayor Pete Buttigieg, of South Bend, Indiana, and former Representative Beto O’Rourke, of El Paso, Texas, as well as the former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, who is considering a second run for the U.S. Senate, in Mississippi—have examined Abrams’s campaign to see how they might adopt its strategies. Espy described his discussion with her as “a graduate course in politics.”

Read the complete article here.

League Of Women Voters Mark Voting Rights Laws With Vigilance

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From today’s Charleston Chronicle:

The day of August 6 marked the 54th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. For many the monumental civil rights event went unacknowledged. Barbara Zia, Citizen Education coordinator for the Charleston Area League of Women Voters, called the event an important one prompting a Charleston vigil August 6 at the Circular Congregational Church.

Instead of just commemorating the landmark voting rights legislation, many advocates in Charleston and around the nation are fighting to curb the voter suppression unleashed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to gut it, Zia said.

The Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision paved a path for states to pass a wave of new restrictive voting laws that disproportionately impact people of color by removing the preclearance requirements in the Voting Rights Act that applied to many states, including South Carolina. Preclearance required certain states to get federal approval before making changes in voting laws. Since the Supreme Court decision, restrictive voting laws have been passed in 20 states. Extreme gerrymandering, voter ID laws, and voter purges all infringe on Americans’ ability to exercise their right to vote, the League purports.

Despite its history of voter suppression, South Carolina has avoided much of the egregious erosion of voting rights experienced in neighboring states, Zia said. Still South Carolina struggled to defend against attacks such as picture ID requirements that could have been more detrimental without vigilance. The two-year struggle against the legislation enacted in 2013 drew the line in the sand, Zia said. The August 6 vigil served notice the League still is standing on that line, she emphasized.

Read the complete article here.

Prior to 2020 debate, MT Gov. Bullock handed victory in dark money case

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From today’s ABC News Online:

Moments before Montana Gov. Steve Bullock joined other 2020 candidates on the Democratic debate on Tuesday, his team delivered news about a victory back home: the governor just won a year-long lawsuit against the Trump administration.

Bullock, whose campaign message centers on removing dark money from politics, sued the Internal Revenue Service a year ago over a rule requiring that politically-active nonprofit groups disclose to the IRS names of donors. The rule had been overturned by President Donald Trump’s administration.

A federal judge in Montana, Brian Morris, ruled on Tuesday evening that the rule would be reinstated.

According to the docket, which was provided to ABC News by the Bullock campaign, the court “holds unlawful” the rule as adopted by the IRS and said the agency “must follow the proper notice-and-comment procedures pursuant to the APA it if seeks to adopt a similar rule.”

Under the previous law, the names of donors who gave $5,000 or more in their tax returns would be disclosed to the IRS, although the IRS would redact those names when making those documents public. Such groups are commonly called “dark money” groups because they don’t disclose their donors publicly unlike other politically active groups that disclose their donors to the FEC such as super PACs.

Read the complete article here.

Trump won key union workers in 2016. Will Scalia as labor secretary change that for 2020?

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From PBS Newshour Online:

To critics, the nomination of a labor secretary who built his career fighting unions underscores a President Donald Trump’s attacks against organized labor.

But for Trump, it seems appointing Eugene Scalia is a way to continue taking on unions through deregulation and business-centric policies without alienating rank and file union members in key states he’ll need to win reelection in 2020.

The president’s pick, which he announced on Twitter but has not officially submitted to the Senate, also shows Trump’s willingness to push the boundaries on who makes a suitable labor nominee, compared to past Republican administrations.

In the past, “Republicans tended to choose businessmen” to lead the Department of Labor, said Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University. “Often they were businessmen who had dealings with unions. But [they] were not anti-union.”

Scalia, the son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, appears to be a departure from that norm.

Scalia is a partner at the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Gibson Dunn, where he focuses on labor and employment issues. As an attorney, he has worked on behalf of Walmart, Ford, UPS and a host of other companies in lawsuits fighting against workers’ rights claims. He also served a brief stint as the Labor Department’s solicitor in 2002.

Some union leaders argued Scalia is also more extreme than Trump’s past appointments for the cabinet position. Scalia is Trump’s third pick for labor secretary. Businessman Andrew Puzder withdrew from consideration after it was reported that he had hired an undocumented immigrant as a housekeeper. Former prosecutor Alex Acosta served as labor secretary for two years before resigning earlier this month after coming under scrutiny for his role in a 2008 plea deal for financier Jeffrey Epstein, who is facing charges of sex trafficking.

Read the complete article here.

Trump administration gives up fight over citizenship question on the census

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From today’s Los Angeles Times:

The Trump administration, abruptly switching course, has decided to give up its fight to add a question about citizenship to next year’s census. Word of the decision to give up the fight came initially in an email from a Justice Department attorney to the lawyers who had challenged the administration in court. The email announced the decision to begin printing census forms without the controversial question.

Administration officials did not dispute the authenticity of the email, but declined additional immediate comment. A Justice Department spokesperson confirmed the decision to print the census forms without the citizenship query.

The Supreme Court last week blocked the administration’s effort to add the question on citizenship to the census, saying Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose agency oversees the Census Bureau, had not provided an honest answer for why he wanted to make the move.

But the 5-4 ruling by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. gave the administration a chance to start over and try to come up with a new rationale for adding the question for the first time in decades.

As recently as Monday, President Trump had repeated his insistence that the census should include a question about citizenship. After the high court’s decision, he had publicly called for delaying the census.

Read the complete article here.

Supreme Court decides federal judges cannot block gerrymandering

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From today’s CNBC Online:

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that federal courts may not block gerrymandering in a 5-4 decision that fell along partisan lines.

The court also ruled, in a separate high-profile case decided Thursday, that the Trump administration’s reasoning for adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census was insufficient, effectively blocking the question for now.

On the final day of decisions before the court’s summer recess, Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the majority opinions of the court in both cases.

The closely watched case on a charged political matter comes in the midst of the 2020 presidential election. The decision was met with scorn by some Democrats running for president, including former vice president Joe Biden, and a sharp dissent from the liberal justices.

“We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,” Roberts wrote in the redistricting case. He said those asking the top court to block gerrymandered districts effectively sought “an unprecedented expansion of judicial power.”

“Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions,” he wrote.

The court’s decision prompted a fierce reply from its liberal wing. Justice Elena Kagan wrote a dissent joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.

“Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one,” Kagan wrote. “The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.”

Read the complete article here.

Battle over Georgia voting rights escalates in federal court

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From today’s Atlanta Journal Constitution:

A lawsuit alleging widespread voting problems in Georgia is pursuing an ambitious solution: restoration of the Voting Rights Act and federal oversight of elections.

After notching an initial court victory last month, allies of Stacey Abrams will now attempt to prove through their lawsuit that Georgia’s election was so flawed that it prevented thousands of voters from being counted, especially African Americans.

The lawsuit links civil rights and voting rights with the aim of showing that elections are unfair in Georgia because racial minorities suffered most from voter registration cancellations, precinct closures, long lines, malfunctioning voting equipment and disqualified ballots. More than 50,000 phone calls poured into a hotline set up by the Democratic Party of Georgia to report hurdles voters faced at the polls.

If successful, the case has the potential to regain voting protections that were lost because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in a case involving the Voting Rights Act, the landmark legislation approved in 1965. The court decided that several states with a history of discriminatory practices, including Georgia, no longer had to obtain federal clearance before making changes to elections.

Bringing Georgia back under the Voting Rights Act will be tough because the lawsuit would have to prove intentional discrimination in the state’s election laws and practices. But the plaintiffs see an opportunity to try to make that case.ADVERTISING

Free from federal supervision, voter suppression has been on the rise in Georgia, said Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, an attorney for the plaintiffs, which include Fair Fight Action, an advocacy group founded by Abrams, along with Ebenezer Baptist Church and other churches.

“This is modern-day Jim Crow,” Lawrence-Hardy said. “Minority voters simply have a harder time voting and having their vote counted in the state of Georgia than other voters. That’s just factual, and that’s part of the information we’ll be submitting to the court.”

Read the complete article here.

FACT CHECK: Foreign Interference And ‘Opposition Research’ Are Not The Same

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From today’s NPR News Online:

President Trump has conflated an infamous practice in and among political campaigns — “opposition research” — with foreign election interference like that launched by Russia against the United States in 2016.

Are they the same thing? Is foreign interference just a kind of “oppo research,” as Trump said in an interview with ABC?

The short answer: No. Oppo research is part of politics. But the law prohibits American political campaigns from taking “a contribution or donation of money or any other thing of value” from foreigners. The ban isn’t limited to money, as Justice Department investigators wrote.

The long answer: Trump told ABC News that essentially every political candidate is willing to accept information that could be of use against an opponent.

“You go and talk honestly to congressmen, they all do it. They always have. And that’s the way it is. It’s called ‘oppo research,’ ” he said.

What’s the difference?

Opposition research is what campaigns and political operatives use against each other. If one candidate running for office dug up a story about something embarrassing her opponent had done, the first candidate might bundle it together and see that it found its way into the newspaper.

Active measures

In 2016, however, the Russian government also launched a broad wave of “active measures” from outside the U.S. and used sophisticated tools found only in the arsenal of a major government. Its ultimate goal was to help elect Trump.

Trump’s campaign counted on the boost it got from WikiLeaks in 2016, according to the report by Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller. Donald Trump Jr. also accepted the offer of a meeting, via intermediaries, to get “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

Read the complete article here.