"Shareholders Seek Political Spending Receipt"

CFO.com offers this report, with the subhead: "As the fall election season draws near, shareholders are increasing their demands for corporate disclosure of political spending."

"Ruling shows Alabama still under feds' thumb"

The Mobile Register offers this editorial on a recent Voting Rights Act ruling by a three-judge court. The editorial concludes: "On most election-related issues in the states covered by the Voting Rights Act, the federal government still insists on having the final word. Thanks to Congress, Alabama will remain trapped in this nightmare of history for at least the next 25 years."

"DOJ files motion to halt election in Springfield"

A.P. offers this report.

"Mayor Drops Bid to Replace DeLay"

AP offers this report. Now that Republicans have unified behind a single write-in candidate, they can focus on the practical hurdles of having voters cast write-in votes using electronic voting machines.

Jeffrey Rosen on LULAC

Jeff Rosen is doing an interview on SCOTUSBlog in connection with his new book (see my earlier blurb about what it says about election law here). One of the questions he was asked was how his theories applied to some of this term's cases, including LULAC. Here is what he answered:

The Texas redistricting decision is part statutory and part constitutional. I don't have a dog in the statutory fight about whether or not the challenged districts violate section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. But I agree with the decision of the majority of the Court not to strike down the Texas districting plan as an unconstitutional political gerrymander. In the book, I acknowledge that there is a strong temptation, for those who care about democratic constitutionalism, to urge courts to strike down political gerrymanders that make it harder for legislatures to reflect the wishes of a majority of their constituents. Nevertheless, I agree with Justice Scalia that it's difficult to articulate a principle for striking down political gerrymanders that a majority of the American people unequivocally accept -- neither Congress nor the White House nor the states nor the Fourteenth Amendment as originally understood have converged around a definition of unconstitutional political gerrymandering in the past. Until they do, I think the Court would be ill-advised unilaterally to invent its own definition of political gerrymandering -- as Justice Kennedy, in his Hamlet-like way, seems to be contemplating. And with great reluctance, I fear that political gerrymandering, at least for the foreseeable future, may be a problem without an obvious judicial or political solution.

-- 
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