From ThinkProgress:

Though Republican election officials in battleground states sought to dampen voter turn out of traditionally Democratic voters through by instituting identification requirements and limiting early voting hours, a new analysis of census data by the Associated Press shows that African Americans “voted at a higher rate than other minority groups in 2012 and by most measures surpassed the white turnout for the first time.”

…

More significantly, the battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida and Colorado would have tipped in favor of Romney, handing him the presidency if the outcome of other states remained the same.

African Americans outperformed their voter share, representing 13 percent of total votes cast in 2012
while making up 12 percent of the population — despite facing great obstacles to exercising the franchise.
A poll conducted by Hart Research poll immediately after the election reported that 22 percent of African-Americans waited 30 minutes or more to vote, compared to just 9 percent of white voters. A more thorough analysis from Massachusetts Institute of Technology confirmed that black and hispanic voters waited nearly twice as long to vote as whites. In Florida, home to the longest lines, at least 201,000 people may have been deterred from voting by the long waits.

Black youth was also far more likely to be asked to show ID, a study by professors at the University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis found, and many did not even try to vote because they lacked the required identification.

Obama forms commission on long lines to vote

(CNN) – Taking steps to make good on a pledge from his State of the Union Address, President Obama signed an executive order Thursday that establishes a bipartisan panel to address long lines at polling stations and other voter irregularities…
The panel only has the power to make recommendations. State and local authorities are tasked with administering elections and ultimately have the final say on resource allocations. Moreover, only Congress has the power to create national standards around early voting, voter ID laws and means of registration.

New Voter Suppression Efforts Prove the Voting Rights Act Is Still Needed

(The Nation) By my count, 235 new voting restrictions have been introduced in forty-four states over the past three years.

Here’s the breakdown of where such laws have been introduced in 2013.

• Mandating a government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot: Arkansas, Connecticut, Iowa, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Washington, Wyoming

• Restricting voter registration drives: Illinois, Indiana, Montana, New Mexico, Virginia

• Banning election-day voter registration: California, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska

• Requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote: Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia

• Purging the voter rolls: Colorado, Indiana, New Mexico, Texas, Virginia

• Reducing early voting: Arizona, Indiana, South Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin

• Disenfranchising ex-felons: Virginia.

(On the plus side, thirty states have also introduced measures to make voting easier by adopting online voter registration, election-day registration, expanded early voting and the restoration of voting rights for ex-felons.)….

The continued push to restrict the right to vote reveals the extent to which conservative power remains deeply embedded in the states, thanks to the 2010 election and subsequent aggressive gerrymandering by GOP state legislatures to protect their majorities. To combat this imbalance, Howard Dean’s group Democracy For America is launching a new effort to flip state legislatures from red to blue. The group will start, fittingly, in Virginia this year, and then expand to Iowa, Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2014. DFA plans to spend $750,000 targeting five seats in the Virginia House of Delegates in 2013.

From The Oyez Project:

The Fourteenth Amendment protects every person’s right to due process of law. The Fifteenth Amendment protects citizens from having their right to vote abridged or denied due to “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The Tenth Amendment reserves all rights not expressly granted to the federal government to the individual states. Article Four of the Constitution guarantees the right of self-government for each state.

The Civil Rights Act of 1965 was enacted as a response to the nearly century-long history of voting discrimination. Section 5 prohibits eligible districts from enacting changes to their election laws and procedures without gaining official authorization. Section 4(b) defines the eligible districts as ones that had a voting test in place as of November 1, 1964 and less than 50% turnout for the 1964 presidential election. Such districts must prove to the Attorney General or a three-judge panel of a Washington, D.C. district court that the change “neither has the purpose nor will have the effect” of negatively impacting any individual’s right to vote based on race or minority status. Section 5 was originally enacted for five years, but has been continually renewed since that time.

Shelby County, Alabama, filed suit in district court and sought both a declaratory judgment that Section 5 and Section 4(b) are unconstitutional and a permanent injunction against their enforcement. The district court upheld the constitutionality of the Sections and granted summary judgment for the Attorney General. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that Congress did not exceed its powers by reauthorizing Section 5 and that Section 4(b) is still relevant to the issue of voting discrimination.

Question
Does the renewal of Section 5 of the Voter Rights Act under the constraints of Section 4(b) exceed Congress’ authority under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and therefore violate the Tenth Amendment and Article Four of the Constitution?

ORAL ARGUMENT OF BERT W. REIN ON BEHALF OF THE PETITIONER

Chief Justice John G. Roberts: We’ll hear argument first this morning in Case 12-96, Shelby County v. Holder.

Mr. Rein?

Bert W Rein: Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court:

Almost 4 years ago, eight Justices of the Court agreed the 2005 25-year extension of Voting Rights Act Section 5′s preclearance obligation, uniquely applicable to jurisdictions reached by Section 4(b)’s antiquated coverage formula, raised a serious constitutional question.

Those Justices recognized that the record before the Congress in 2005 made it unmistakable that the South had changed.

They questioned whether current remedial needs justified the extraordinary federalism and cost burdens of preclearance.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor: May I ask you a question?

Assuming I accept your premise, and there’s some question about that, that some portions of the South have changed, your county pretty much hasn’t.

Bert W Rein: Well, I–

Justice Sonia Sotomayor: In — in the period we’re talking about, it has many more discriminating — 240 discriminatory voting laws that were blocked by Section 5 objections.

There were numerous remedied by Section 2 litigation.

You may be the wrong party bringing this.

(more…)

The Neo-Confederate Supreme Court Gearing Up to Restore White Rule Over America, Alternet:

 If white rule in the United States is to be restored and sustained, then an important first step will be the decision of the five Neo-Confederate justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act, a move that many court analysts now consider likely.

The Court’s striking down Section Five of the Voting Rights Act will mean that jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting – mostly in the Old Confederacy – will be free to impose new obstacles to voting by African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities without first having to submit the changes to a federal court…..

The Supreme Court’s apparent intention to gut the Voting Rights Act also could be viewed in the continuum of its five-to-four ruling in the Citizens United case of 2010 in which the right-wing justices freed up rich Americans to spend unlimited amounts to influence political campaigns. In other words, the Court’s majority seems intent on tilting the political playing field in favor of white plutocrats.

But the Court’s Neo-Confederate rationale was underscored mostly openly by Justice Scalia and his sneering remark about minority voting rights being a “racial entitlement” and by Justice Kennedy’s insistence that Alabama has the “independent sovereign” right to set its own voting rules without federal oversight.

From NYT

Jerome Gray, a 74-year-old black man, has voted in every election since 1974 in this verdant little outpost of some 4,000 people halfway between Mobile and Montgomery. Casting a ballot, he said, is a way to honor the legacy of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a civil rights landmark born from a bloody confrontation 70 miles north of here, in Selma.

The franchise remains fragile in Evergreen, Mr. Gray said. Last summer, he was kicked off the voting rolls by a clerk who had improperly culled the list based on utility records.

A three-judge federal court in Mobile barred the city from using the new voting list, invoking Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires many state and local governments, mostly in the South, to obtain permission from the Justice Department or from a federal court in Washington before making changes that affect voting.

That provision is also at the heart of one of the marquee cases of the Supreme Court’s term, Shelby County v. Holder, No. 12-96, which will be argued on Feb. 27. It was brought by Shelby County, near Birmingham, and it contends that the provision has outlived its purpose of protecting minority voters in an era when a black man has been re-elected to the presidency.

…

The court in Mobile this month said the case before it, concerning Evergreen, was simple: because the city had not obtained preclearance from federal authorities, it could not revise its voting list using utility records. Nor could it use a municipal redistricting plan enacted by the City Council that had concentrated black voters, who are in the majority, into just two of the five districts, limiting black voting power.

It is not clear when the municipal election, originally scheduled for last August, will be held.

From ThinkProgress:

Virginia Republicans took the first step to move a GOP plan to rig the Electoral College forward in that state. Similar plans are under consideration in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

The Republican election rigging plan targets blue states that President Obama won in 2008 and 2012, and changes the way they allocate electoral votes to give many of these votes away for free to the Republican candidate for president. Under the Republican Plan, most electoral votes will be allocated to the winner of individual Congressional districts, rather than to the winner of the state as a whole. Because the Republican Plan would be implemented in states that are heavily gerrymandered to favor Republicans, the resulting maps would all but guarantee that the Republican would win a majority of each state’s electoral votes, even if the Democratic candidate wins the state as a whole.

The Center for American Progress Action Fund released a white paper detailing how this Republican election-rigging plan works — including this rather striking visual demonstration of just how effectively Republicans gerrymandered six states that are likely targets of their plan:

Miami Herald: Why Obama Wins Florida:

Though votes are still being tallied, President Obama is all but assured a victory in Florida because the lion’s share of the outstanding ballots come from Democratic-heavy counties.

Obama leads Republican Mitt Romney by 55,825 votes — or 49.9 percent to 49.24 — but there just aren’t enough votes from Republican areas to allow the challenger to catch up.

Romney’s Florida campaign has acknowledged he lost in Florida as well. Romney already conceded the national race after he lost the other battleground states….

Even if the above-listed estimates from South Florida were reversed and Obama’s extra projected votes were handed to Romney, the Republican would still lose by about 32,000 votes.

A wild card: Provisional ballots. These are cast by voters whose status is in doubt. Often, they’re rejected, in part because people vote in the wrong precinct. Most studies show, however, that provisional ballots are more likely to be cast by Democrats than Republicans.

† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm.

Editors note: Next week we will be back on task -discussing the always on-going work of dismantling the PIC, made more possible now, by yesterday’s result. Today , we will celebrate the larger Victory!

We asked here for breathing room and yes we received it — many thanks to the millions who braved long lines, resisted efforts at voter suppression, defied the billions in dark money.

Yes You Did!

Thank you to OFA for creating the most relentlessly people-powered machine in the history of politics — you made it possible for us to get it done. Thanks also to President Bill Clinton and 538 Nate for #Arithmetic,  for keeping it real. And of course much love and so many thanks to Give “Em Hell Harry Reid – he told the truth and shamed the devil while his  Nevada operation put the state out of reach before the polls even opened on Tuesday.

More breathing room.

A special thank you too to Seeta Persaud for this inspiring space and to Kay Whitlock for her steady call to the bolder vision. I am indebted.

Thanks to all of you who regularly read CI and to those whose tireless work for justice is sometimes featured here. You know who you are..

There is always so much work to do and yes we will do it. Today, just a reminder of what we have achieved, in the form a piece i wrote last September, willing it all to be so. And it was.. Of course. much more happened between then and now — forces of nature, more enemy obfuscation, but the central theme holds nonetheless.

We were Called and We Delivered..

More Power to Us.

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