Voting Rights Update

Why Would North Carolina Not Want People to Vote?

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has blocked two provisions passed by the Republican controlled state legislature: one would have ended same-day voter registration during early voting period and another would have prevented ballots cast outside of a voter's precinct from being counted. The state has said it will appeal this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The NAACP, League of Women Voters and other groups challenged the extreme voting laws adopted by the state legislature last year, pointing out that the changes were intended to restrict voting among people of color, the elderly and students.

During oral arguments, one of the judges asked, "Why does the state of North Carolina not want people to vote?" A good question.

However, the panel let stand other attacks by the state legislature on the right to vote, including cutting the number of days of early voting to just 10, allowing county boards of elections to determine whether poll hours could be expanded to make sure all voters had the opportunity to cast their ballots and allowing outside challenges to voters.

Separately, the Koch Brothers' Americans for Prosperity is being investigated by the state Board of Elections for mailing incorrect voting information to hundreds of thousands of North Carolina residents. The mailing included the wrong address for voters to return their registration information, the wrong deadline for registering and other errors.

It's not the first time that the Koch's have made "mistakes" in the instructions it mails to voters. Read more here.

Ohio: Early voting restricted just hours before polls were to open

By a 5-4 decision, supported by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Samuel A. Alito,, Jr., Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas (no surprise there), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld restrictions on early voting in Ohio that were sought by the Republican controlled state legislature and Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted.

Early voting would have begun just hours after the Court issued its ruling. Now there will be no early voting in "Golden Week," the period during which citizens can register and vote on the same day.

Husted and the Ohio legislature were determined to make early voting as tough as possible for ordinary people, and the Supreme Court shamefully approved this attack on the right to vote. There will be just three weeks of early voting, restricted mainly to weekdays. Early evening – that means after 5 p.m. – and most weekend voting is blocked, especially Sunday voting in advance of Election Day when many African-American churches organize "Souls to the Polls" events so that worshippers go as a group to vote after religious services.

Read more here.

Challenging Husted for Secretary of State is Nina Turner, a Democratic state senator who is a strong advocate of the right to vote and has made restoring voting rights for Ohioans a key platform of her campaign. "The ballot box is the greatest equalizer that we have because it is the only place that, regardless of our socio-economic status, our ethnicity, our gender, where we are totally equal," she said. As a state senator, Turner also worked to defeat SB 5, the attack on public workers' bargaining rights.

Wisconsin: Appeals court upholds restrictive voter ID law, 300,000 will have difficulty voting

A three member panel of the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, including a judge that Republican Governor Scott Walker has called "one of our favorite jurists," has ordered that Wisconsin's restrictive ID law be implemented, now just one month out from election. An appeal to the entire court to reconsider the ruling failed by a 5-5 vote; next stop is the U.S. Supreme Court. The Republican legislature passed voting restrictions in 2011. Walker is in a close race for governor with Mary Burke, the former head of the state Department of Commerce.

In order to vote next month, 300,000 citizens, mainly people of color and students, will need to obtain a new state ID from Department of Motor Vehicle offices. The ACLU and other challengers to this voter suppression have calculated that DMV offices would need to issue 6,000 IDs per day to protect the right to vote. Of course two-thirds of the state's Department of Motor Vehicles offices are only open part-time, and just one is open on Saturday.