Federal Judge Strikes Down Lame-Duck Changes To Wisconsin Voting Laws

Peterson issued a favorable ruling for the groups on Thursday afternoon.

“This is not a close question,” Peterson wrote in his decision.

The judge also struck down a law passed during the lame duck session that requires a 2-year expiration date on student IDs used for identification at the polls, as well as a law that limits the use of receipts as valid voter identification for individuals who are involved in a sometimes lengthy process of getting a valid ID without a birth certificate.

Analiese Eicher, program director at One Wisconsin Now, lauded Peterson’s decision as a victory for Wisconsin voters.

.. In an emailed statement, Holder said the ruling should serve as a rebuke to former Gov. Walker and “his cronies in the state legislature.”

“Every voter in the state should be asking one question: Why are Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature so afraid of the people they claim they want to represent?” Holder said. “Though we are heartened by this decision, we will continue to fight any further efforts designed to undermine democracy in Wisconsin or any other part of our nation.”

Republican Efforts to End Democracy

This group will not willingly cede its power.

“After hours of mysterious closed-door meetings that went past midnight, the Wisconsin Senate convened at 4:30 on Wednesday morning and passed by one vote a package of bills devised to curb the powers of the incoming Democratic leaders.”

.. “In Michigan, where Democrats last month won the governor’s mansion as well as the races for attorney general and secretary of state, Republican lawmakers last week introduced measures that would water down the authority of those positions on campaign finance oversight and other legal matters.”

.. Altering the structure of power in a state to limit the influence of an incoming executive of an opposing party wasn’t something I thought I’d ever see in America, but unfortunately this isn’t even the first time we’ve seen it. This is not the first time Republicans have done it.

.. In 2016, Republicans in the North Carolina legislature also pushed through legislation designed to limit the power of an incoming Democratic governor. Kevin Drum wrote a fascinating column about this in Mother Jones titled “Republicans Are No Longer Committed to That Whole Peaceful Transfer of Power Thing.”

.. Republican anti-democratic tendencies aren’t limited to the transfer of power. They extend to areas like the widespread efforts to enact voter suppression, from voter ID laws to voter roll purges to shortening early-voting windows to gerrymandering.

..  a report this year by the Brennan Center for Justice found that voter purging was on the rise:

We found that between 2014 and 2016, states removed almost 16 million voters from the rolls, and every state in the country can and should do more to protect voters from improper purges. Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008. This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent — far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).

In some cases it is clear that minority voters are disproportionately affected by the purges. One reason is the method used. The report found that 28 states now submit data to the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, the purpose of which “is to identify possible ‘double voters’ — an imprecise term that could be used to refer to people who have registrations in two states or who actually voted in an election in multiple states.”

.. But many people have the same name, which poses a problem for the database. That problem is heightened for minority voters because, as the report says, “African-American, Asian-American, and Latino voters are much more likely than Caucasians to have one of the most common 100 last names in the United States.”

As for gerrymandering, it is “the biggest obstacle to genuine democracy in the United States,” according to Brian Klaasa political scientist at University College London.

.. eight of the ten most gerrymandered districts in the United States were drawn by Republicans.”

..Even our current immigration debate is far more about future voters than about safety or criminals or the other canards Republicans typically use to oppose it.

.. “among all Latino immigrants who are eligible to vote (i.e. are U.S. citizens) many more identify as Democrats than as Republicans — 54 percent versus 11 percent.”

That is why immigration is such a burning issue on the right and why Donald Trump is able to exploit it: Immigration, both legal and illegal, represents a loss of political power for Republicans.

.. Republican power is increasingly synonymous with white power. The party’s nationalist tendencies are increasingly synonymous with white nationalism.

.. This group will not willingly cede its power just because demographics predict its downfall and current circumstances demonstrate its weaknesses.

If the Republican Party can’t maintain power in the democracy we have, it will destroy that democracy so that its power can be entrenched by limiting the impact of the vote.

The Voter Purges Are Coming

The Trump administration’s election-integrity commission will have its first meeting on Wednesday to map out how the president will strip the right to vote from millions of Americans.

.. the Justice Department’s civil rights division. It forced 44 states to provide extensive information on how they keep their voter rolls up-to-date. It cited the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, known as the Motor-Voter law, which mandates that states help voters register through motor vehicle departments.

The letter doesn’t ask whether states are complying with the parts of the law that expand opportunities to register. Instead it focuses on the sections related to maintaining the lists. That’s a prelude to voter purging.

.. Here’s how the government will use voters’ data. It will create a national database to try to find things like double-voters. But the commission won’t be able to tell two people with the same name and birthday apart. Such errors will hit communities of color the hardest. Census data shows that minorities are overrepresented in 85 of the 100 most common last names.

.. Purging voters is part of a larger malicious pattern that states have employed across the country. Georgia and Ohio are being sued for carrying out early versions of what we can expect from the Trump administration.

.. Mr. Kobach has been at the vanguard of a crusade against Motor-Voter and has been sued at least three times for making it harder for Kansans to vote. Before the 2016 election, he illegally blocked tens of thousands of voters from registering. Mr. Blackwell rejected registration forms because they were printed on paper he thought was too thin. Mr. von Spakovsky has led numerous unsuccessful legal efforts to diminish voter participation and to fight voting rights. Mr. Adams published personal information about people whom he wrongly accused of committing multiple felonies in a flawed hunt for fraud.
.. my biggest fear is that the government will issue a report with “findings” of unsupported claims of illegal voting, focused on communities of color.
.. These wild claims won’t be just hot air. Members of Congress will seize on them to turn back protections in federal law. States will enact new barriers to the ballot box. Courts will point to the commission’s work to justify their decisions.
.. The irony is that there are serious threats to our voting systems,
  1. from cyberattacks to aging machines to
  2. Russian interference to
  3. discriminatory voter ID laws at the state level.
Those are the real problems, but that’s not what the commission was created to address.

Trump’s call for election-fraud probe fraught with peril

Former Justice Department lawyers and prominent Democrats are warning the president against a blatantly political exercise.

.. Such an effort would also conjure up memories of an anti-voter-fraud drive launched under President George W. Bush a decade ago. That initiative — and the firing of some U.S. attorneys who were reluctant to go along with it — led to a major political imbroglio that prompted the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

.. Perhaps due to those sensitivities, White House press secretary Sean Spicer suggested Wednesday that Trump is more likely to pursue a commission that would examine the sources and scope of potential fraud rather than trying to find cases to prosecute. Spicer described the planned inquiry not as an investigation, but a more genteel-sounding “study.”

.. “Part of the reason we need to do a study is … there’s a lot of people that are dead that are on rolls, that are voting in two places or that are on the rolls in two different states, sometimes in three different states,” Spicer said

.. Even a high-profile commission would be something of a high-wire act, since Democrats will insist that controversial voter ID laws also be part of any such review if they take part.

.. “The thing I want him to do, I want him to investigate, are all of the people who don’t get the chance to vote, who have been denied the right to vote,” Cummings said.

.. “The Obama administration had the tools to fight voter fraud but let them gather dust. Because of that neglect of their duties, aliens got on the rolls, people voted multiple times and lawlessness took hold of our elections.”