Voting Rights Primer: North Carolina’s Latest, Sneaky Move To Curtail Voting Rights
A recently passed GOP measure in North Carolina, a hotbed of voter suppression efforts, claims to be aimed at expanding voting rights but appears that it would actually have the opposite effect. The bill, passed over the Democratic Governor’s veto, requires early voting polling places to remain open for 12 hours a day each weekday. The problem is that it was passed quickly, late in the legislative session, surprising many localities that had already set their annual budgets. The fear among voting rights advocates, as Slate reported, is that the requirement will actually suck up local resources, and counties will have to cut back on the number of sites where they offer early voting.
Former President Barack Obama took a rare step into the public spotlight last week by filming a video touting the work of a group led by his former Attorney General Eric Holder, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which focuses on electing lawmakers and bringing lawsuits that seek to curtail extreme gerrymandering.
Related to the fight over redistricting is the focus on the 2020 Census. In addition to the half-dozen or so lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s addition of a citizenship question to the census, which critics say will diminish immigrant representation in redistricting and apportionment, Alabama Republicans have brought a lawsuit seeking to exclude undocumented immigrants from the Census count used to apportion U.S. congressional districts. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed a motion Thursday to intervene in that case to defend the current system of counting undocumented immigrants in congressional apportionment.
Voting rights advocates were dealt both a victory and a defeat in state legislatures over the past week. On the pro-voting rights side, the Massachusetts legislature passed an automatic voter registration bill on Thursday; it now awaits Republican Gov. Charlie Baker’s signature.
In New Hampshire, however, Republican Gov. Chris Sununu signed a GOP bill on Friday that will greatly increase the obstacles for college students in the state to register to vote. The move came after a 3-2 state Supreme Court advisory opinion greenlighting the bill.
Voting rights activists in Michigan got closer to implementing measures to expand access to the franchise there. A group called Promote the Vote last week collected 430,000 signatures for a ballot initiative slated for November’s election which would bring to the state automatic voter registration, same-day registration, access to absentee ballots on request, and better access for military service members and overseas voters.
The Campaign Legal Center and Southern Poverty Law Center rolled out a new campaign in Alabama, called Alabama Voting Rights Project, to tout a new state law that restores eligibility to vote to people who committed certain felonies.
The federal grand jury indictment of 12 Russian hackers unveiled by special counsel Robert Mueller Friday provided new details about Russia’s attempts to infiltrate state and local elections systems. I broke down what was new in the indictment, and how it compares to what we previously knew, here.