| Subject: news of the day 4/8/05 |
| From: Rick Hasen |
| Date: 4/8/2005, 8:14 AM |
| To: election-law |
Spencer Overton has written this oped for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It begins: "In Congress and about a dozen states, recent debates over proposals to require photo identification at the polls have fallen along partisan lines. Republicans generally support ID requirements and Democrats oppose them. Both parties need to move beyond political posturing and empty rhetoric. Voter fraud is wrong. At the same time, however, advocates have yet to show that ID laws solve more problems than they create." The article requires free registration, but should be available without registration here later today.
I agree with much of what Overton writes in this oped. My own proposal for registration reform would couple universal voter registration with government issued photo identification. Because the identification would contain biometric information like a fingerprint, a voter would not need the physical i.d. itself to cast a vote.
The San Francisco Chronicle offers this
report.
The Washington Post offers this
report, which begins:
Lobbying expenditures in Washington have at least doubled in the past six years, the center reported. Last year, corporations, labor unions and interest groups spent more than $3 billion trying to influence the federal government, up from $1.6 billion in 1998.
At the same time, the center said, enforcement of lobbying regulations has been lax. The center estimated that at least 14,000 disclosure documents required under a 10-year-old lobbying law were not filed over the period, including documents that should have come from 49 of the nation's 50 largest lobbying firms.
-- Rick Hasen William H. Hannon Distinguished Professor of Law Loyola Law School 919 Albany Street Los Angeles, CA 90015-1211 (213)736-1466 (213)380-3769 - fax rick.hasen@lls.edu http://www.lls.edu/academics/faculty/hasen.html http://electionlawblog.org