[EL] ELB News and Commentary 7/11/13

Wed Jul 10 21:03:10 PDT 2013

    Linda Greenhouse on Why Liberal Justices Compromised in NAMUDNO and
    Why Justice Ginsburg Dissented in Fisher
    <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52831>

Posted on July 10, 2013 8:29 pm <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52831> by 
Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Linda in NYT 
<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/the-cost-of-compromise/>:

    Why did the liberal justices sign on to the Northwest Austin opinion
    in 2009? Clearly, it was the price of the compromise to buy the
    Voting Rights Act a little more time. They must have expected --- or
    desperately hoped --- that Congress would take the hint and update
    the formula that determines which states and localities are covered
    by the Section 5 preclearance requirement. A near-unanimous opinion,
    they may have thought, would make a Congressional response more
    likely; that the court was speaking with close to one voice
    seemingly put the issue beyond partisanship. Only in hindsight is it
    clear that this expectation was doomed by Congressional dysfunction,
    leaving the liberal justices on a limb they had knowingly, if
    reluctantly, climbed.

    Was the price of compromise too high back in 2009? In retrospect,
    the answer is yes. The liberal justices' acquiescence to
    near-unanimity placed a fig leaf on a truly radical project to curb
    the civil-rights enforcement authority that the framers of the 14th
    and 15th amendments explicitly gave to Congress. It's admittedly a
    long shot even in hindsight, but a powerful dissent four years ago
    might have been the clarion call that just might have shaken
    Congress out of its torpor and persuaded it to immunize the Voting
    Rights Act from the charge that the application of Section 5 was, in
    the chief justice's words, "based on decades-old data and eradicated
    practices."

I offer a somewhat different take on the liberal Justices inthis Slate 
piece 
<http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/07/are_the_liberals_on_the_supreme_court_savvy_or_suckers.html> 
and my draft APSA paper 
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2291612>.

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Posted in Uncategorized <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1> | Comments Off

    "The Decline of Black Power in the South"
    <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52828>

Posted on July 10, 2013 8:24 pm <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52828> by 
Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Tom Edsall 
<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/the-decline-of-black-power-in-the-south/?ref=politics>(NYT) 
with a very interesting perspective post-Shelby County.

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Posted in Voting Rights Act <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=15> | 
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    "Miami-Dade should take steps to thwart absentee-ballot fraudsters,
    advisory group says" <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52825>

Posted on July 10, 2013 2:59 pm <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52825> by 
Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

The Miami Herald reports. 
<http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/07/10/3494208/miami-dade-should-take-steps-to.html>

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Posted in absentee ballots <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=53>, 
chicanery <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>, election administration 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>, The Voting Wars 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60> | Comments Off

    "More voter-fraud allegations evaporate into nothing"
    <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52822>

Posted on July 10, 2013 2:03 pm <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52822> by 
Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Steve Benen blogs 
<http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/07/10/19396665-more-voter-fraud-allegations-evaporate-into-nothing?lite>.

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Posted in fraudulent fraud squad <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8>, 
The Voting Wars <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60> | Comments Off

    "Obama tells black lawmakers he'll help rebuild Voting Rights Act"
    <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52819>

Posted on July 10, 2013 1:39 pm <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52819> by 
Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

The /Dallas Morning News/ reports. 
<http://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/headlines/20130709-obama-tells-black-lawmakers-hell-help-rebuild-voting-rights-act.ece>

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Posted in Supreme Court <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>, Voting 
Rights Act <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=15> | Comments Off

    "Looking to Tech for Help With Life After the Voting Rights Act"
    <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52816>

Posted on July 10, 2013 1:29 pm <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52816> by 
Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Interesting post 
<http://techpresident.com/news/24114/technology-key-weapon-voting-rights-advocacy> 
at TechPresident.

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Posted in Uncategorized <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1> | Comments Off

    The Effects of Racial Redistricting on Southern Politics: A View
     From the Republican Side <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52780>

Posted on July 10, 2013 1:20 pm <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52780> by 
Richard Pildes <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=7>

For the past several decades, E. Mark Braden (here 
<http://www.bakerlaw.com/emarkbraden/>) has been one of the leading 
redistricting lawyers in the country working on the Republican side.  He 
has successfully argued in the redistricting area before the U.S. 
Supreme Court and has been involved in redistricting litigation 
throughout the country.  For 10 years, he was Chief Counsel to the 
Republican National Committee.

In the wake of the Supreme Court's //VRA decision, I was fortunate to be 
part of a first-rate conference at the Brookings Institution to assess 
the decision and the future of voting rights law and policy.  The 
conference (for a webcast, seehere 
<http://www.brookings.edu/events/2013/07/01-voting-rights-shelby-holder>), 
hosted by Tom Mann and Nate Persily, was so good precisely because it 
included such a productively diverse array of experts and participants 
in the voting-rights field --- including lawyers who were on opposite 
sides of the /Shelby County /case, academics, journalists, voting rights 
activists, and others.

Many fascinating insights and comments were offered at this conference.  
For now, I wanted to quote this observation from Mark Braden about how 
the system of racial redistricting that began in full in the 1990s (in 
the wake of the 1982 Amendments to the VRA and the Supreme Court's 1986 
interpretation of those amendments in the /Gingles /case) contributed to 
the rise of the Republican Party at the state and local level in the South:

    /Mark Braden:/

    . . . of course, redistricting based upon race has been vital to the
    creation of the Republican Party itself.  I mean, there's no
    question about that throughout the '80s, '90s.  People that were
    working with me was the minority community in the South, and*that's
    what permitted the Republican party to become the majority party in
    those states at the local and legislative level. */(emphasis added)
    /

There has been much discussion over recent years about whether, and how 
much, the required creation of majority-minority districts, as a result 
of the VRA, also had the additional consequence of creating more 
conservative districts as well.  But I am not sure I have ever seen 
anyone so directly involved in the redistricting process acknowledge 
these consequences as directly and dramatically as Mark Braden does in 
this statement.

In the mid-1990s, when VRA-required racial redistricting began, I recall 
how difficult it was even to discuss whether one of the effects this 
redistricting was to enable the election of more Republicans and to make 
political bodies more conservative overall.  Indeed, in an article 
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/1341860> in the Harvard Law Review in 1995, 
I quoted a prominent civil rights activist who called it "pure racism" 
to raise such issues.  By the decade of the 2000s, political figures on 
the ground in some parts of the South recognized that this tradeoff was 
indeed taking place; that's why Congressman John Lewis testified in 
favor of Georgia's post-2000 redistricting plan, put together by a 
coalition of black and white Democratic state legislators, that the 
Supreme Court ultimately upheld in the 5-4 /Georgia v. Ashcroft 
/decision. By now, I think it's widely accepted factually, at least by 
politically knowledgeable players, that there is what might be called a 
tragic tension between creating more African-American majority districts 
in the South and creating more Democratic districts (a pending lawsuit 
<http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/07/08/3016723/nc-three-judge-panel-lets-gop.html> 
in North Carolina argues that a strategy of this sort was behind the 
most recent, Republican-controlled redistricting of that state).  Mark 
Braden's recent comments are a public confirmation of that from the 
Republican point of view.

For my own views on how the VRA affected the rise of the Republican 
Party in the South, see /Why the Center Does Not Hold:  The Causes of 
Hyperpolarized Democracy in America/ 
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1646989>.  As noted 
above, the webcast of the Brookings conference is now available.  I will 
update with a link to the full transcript when it is available.

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Posted in redistricting <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=6>, Voting 
Rights Act <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=15> | Comments Off

    "Claim Citizens United Attorney Broke Charity Tax Law Doesn't Hold
    Up" <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52807>

Posted on July 10, 2013 12:00 pm <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52807> 
by Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Interesting perspective 
<http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterjreilly/2013/07/10/crew-embarrasses-itself-with-bopp-whistleblower-claim/> 
on Bopp-CREW from Peter Reilly.

MORE 
<http://www.theindianalawyer.com/attorney-says-washington-nonprofits-complaints-are-part-of-smear-campaign/PARAMS/article/31887>from 
/Indiana Lawyer./

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Posted in Uncategorized <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1> | Comments Off

    "NC redistricting decision a setback for voting rights"
    <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52804>

Posted on July 10, 2013 11:57 am <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52804> 
by Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Brentin Mock 
<http://www.southernstudies.org/2013/07/nc-redistricting-decision-a-setback-for-voting-rig.html> 
writes for Facing South.

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Posted in redistricting <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=6> | Comments Off

    "Voting Rights: Was Chief Justice Roberts Wrong About Voting in
    Mississippi?" <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52802>

Posted on July 10, 2013 11:55 am <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52802> 
by Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

This item 
<http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2013/jul/10/voting-rights-was-chief-justice-roberts-wrong-abou/>appears 
in the /Jackson Free Press./

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Posted in Supreme Court <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>, Voting 
Rights Act <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=15> | Comments Off

    "Herdt: Nothing special about these elections"
    <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52799>

Posted on July 10, 2013 11:33 am <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52799> 
by Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

VC Star: 
<http://www.vcstar.com/news/2013/jul/09/timm-herdt-nothing-special-about-these-elections/?opinion=1#ixzz2Yf7M9L00>

    Combined, these 2013 special elections will come with a price tag of
    roughly $10.4 million.

    Among the six that have been conducted thus far, the average voter
    turnout has been 16.4 percent. The low was 9.1 percent.

    Looking at the numbers, here's an observation: These elections are
    an absurd waste of money and, because of the paltry voter turnout,
    make a mockery of democracy.

    It doesn't have to be this way --- and in 23 states, it's not.

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Posted in voting <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=31> | Comments Off

    Ninth Circuit Dismisses Nevada "None of the Above" Lawsuit
    <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52796>

Posted on July 10, 2013 11:31 am <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52796> 
by Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

You can find the opinion here 
<http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2013/07/10/12-16881.pdf>.

When this case earlier reached the Ninth Circuit, it featured a very 
interesting smackdown <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=39602> of the 
disctrict court judge, followed by an attack by the district court judge 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=39724> on the Ninth Circuit.

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Posted in voting <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=31> | Comments Off

    IRV 101 in New Haven <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52792>

Posted on July 10, 2013 10:47 am <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52792> 
by Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

See here 
<http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/democracy_wins/>.

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Posted in alternative voting systems 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=63> | Comments Off

    "Why Voter ID Won't Save the GOP" <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52789>

Posted on July 10, 2013 10:45 am <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52789> 
by Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Zach Roth writes 
<http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/07/10/why-voter-id-wont-save-the-gop/>for MSNBC.

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Posted in election administration <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>, 
The Voting Wars <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>, voter id 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=9> | Comments Off

    "From Selma to Shelby County: Working Together to Restore the
    Protections of the Voting Rights Act"
    <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52781>

Posted on July 10, 2013 10:16 am <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52781> 
by Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

The Senate Judiciary Committee is havinga post-/Shelby/ hearing 
<http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/hearing.cfm?id=6ae289b2466e2489f90d6b42c9d8d78f> 
on July 17.  The witnesses are Representatives John Lewis and Jim 
Sensenbrenner.

This should be very interesting.  I will be listening very carefully to 
what Senator Sessions and other Republican Senators have to say.

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Posted in Supreme Court <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>, Voting 
Rights Act <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=15> | Comments Off

    "To salvage Obamacare, White House hires lobbyist for drugmakers,
    hospitals" <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52776>

Posted on July 10, 2013 9:36 am <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=52776> by 
Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Important Tim Carney column 
<http://washingtonexaminer.com/to-salvage-obamacare-white-house-hires-lobbyist-for-drugmakers-hospitals/article/2532881>.

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Posted in lobbying <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=28> | Comments Off

-- 
Rick Hasen
Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science
UC Irvine School of Law
401 E. Peltason Dr., Suite 1000
Irvine, CA 92697-8000
949.824.3072 - office
949.824.0495 - fax
rhasen at law.uci.edu
http://law.uci.edu/faculty/page1_r_hasen.html
http://electionlawblog.org

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