"Bush Picks May Tip Court Against McCain-Feingold"

The Wall Street Journal offers this report on yesterday's orders by the Supreme Court agreeing to hear two election law cases. Thanks to Steven Sholk for the pointer (See here for links to my earlier commentary on these cases).

You can also find coverage in the New York Times; the Washington Post; the Los Angeles Times; Roll Call (paid subscription required); USA Today; AP; and Bloomberg News. Bob Bauer offers some commentary.

"For Shame: To Get Election Reform, Rank the States"

Heather Gerken offers this commentary at The New Republic Online (free, but registration required). It begins:

Yesterday, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) released the results of a national study of election practices. Created in the wake of the 2000 presidential election, the commission is charged with improving how elections are run. Unfortunately, Congress gave the new agency a modest mandate, little money, and less clout. The EAC has been so embattled that the National Association of Secretaries of State demanded that Congress dismantle it before all of its members had even been appointed (a request that, fortunately, was not granted).

Still, even without the authority accorded to most federal agencies, the EAC can get something done. In politics, information is power, and the EAC is uniquely suited to use that power to catalyze reform. The study released yesterday, which documents election practices in different states and localities, is an important first step. But it also presents much of its information in disaggregated and difficult-to-navigate form, and it does not provide a full set of comparative rankings on every issue that matters to voters.

Now the EAC should use its data to create explicit, comprehensive rankings of states and localities, shaming those local governments that are doing a poor job of running elections and rewarding those that are excelling. It's a strategy taken directly from the playbook of some human rights and environmental organizations, which have long used rankings to prod nations into improving their practices. The strategy works for a simple reason: No one wants to be at the bottom of a list.

"The Carter-Baker ID Card Proposal: Worse Than Georgia"

Spencer Overton has written this Roll Call commentary (paid subscription required). It begins:

In unveiling the Carter-Baker Election Reform Commission’s proposal on voter identification, former President Jimmy Carter condemned Georgia’s recently enacted voter ID law. He labeled the Georgia law — which makes government-issued photo ID an absolute requirement to vote — a discriminatory poll tax that should be “overthrown by the courts.” He tried to distinguish the Carter-Baker ID proposal by asserting that it had adequate safeguards to ensure that legitimate voters would not be excluded.

But the Carter-Baker proposal is more exclusionary than any state ID law — including Georgia’s.

Just under half the states require ID to vote, and most of these states accept a long list of non-photo ID such as a utility bill, bank statement, government check or paycheck. About a dozen of these ID states allow voters without ID to prove their identity by signing an affidavit or reciting information such as birth date and home address.

The Carter-Baker ID proposal would phase out the affidavit safety net and limit the forms of permissible identification to a “Real ID” card. If Georgia adopted the Carter-Baker ID proposal, voters would no longer be able to vote using a U.S. passport, military ID card, student ID card from a Georgia state university, government employee ID card or tribal ID card.

More commentary from Overton on the report is available here.

USC Policy Institute Report on Prop. 77

You can find it here. Meanwhile, there were some news reports yesterday about the Rose Institute report on Prop. 77. See the articles Google has aggregated here.

Taylor on Judge Roberts and the Voting Rights Act

See this National Journal column. Thanks to Chuck Bell for the pointer

-- 
Rick Hasen 
William H. Hannon Distinguished Professor of Law
Loyola Law School 
919 Albany Street 
Los Angeles, CA  90015-1211 
(213)736-1466 - voice 
(213)380-3769 - fax 
rick.hasen@lls.edu 
http://www.lls.edu/academics/faculty/hasen.html 
http://electionlawblog.org