NC Judge Allows Voter ID Law Case Go to Trial

Superior Court Judge Mike Morgan will not dismiss challenge to state’s 2013 election law.  Currie v North Carolina, 13cv-1419, Orange County.

A Wake County judge, Mike Morgan, has refused to dismiss a challenge to North Carolina's Voter ID law, saying in a ruling issued Friday that most of the claims in the lawsuit are strong enough to take to trial.

Judge Morgan dismissed two of six claims made by the League of Women Voters of North Carolina, the A. Philip Randolph Institute and five female voters who contend that requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls violates the North Carolina State Constitution.  He dismissed arguments that the voter ID requirement represented an unconstitutional property ownership requirement and that it trespassed against a guarantee of free elections.

Attorneys for the legislators behind the 2013 elections-law overhaul argued three weeks ago to Morgan that the case should be dismissed outright and that no one would be prohibited from voting if they did not have one of the acceptable forms of ID.

But Morgan ruled that he could not make a final decision until he heard evidence in the case.

“On behalf of our clients, we look forward to trying this case in July and demonstrating the disenfranchising effect of the photo ID requirement,” said George Eppsteiner, a Southern Coalition for Social Justice staff attorney for some of the challengers.

Melvin Montford, executive director of the A. Phillip Randolph Institute of North Carolina, added, “We’re going to show how this law has a negative impact on voters of color and voters that do not have the resources to obtain an ID.”

Press Millen, an attorney with Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice in Raleigh, along with lawyers from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, contended that the first article of the state constitution governs voter qualifications.  That article was adopted in 1868, when North Carolina was under military rule in the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.

The qualifications set out there are minimal, Millen has said. They are that a person be at least 18, a North Carolina resident and not a felon, unless rights of citizenship have been restored.  The North Carolina Constitution, Millen argued, explicitly allows the General Assembly to “enact general laws governing the registration of voters,” and over the past 147 years, pages and pages of laws related to that topic have been added to the General Statutes.  In contrast, he said, lawmakers cannot change voter qualifications without North Carolina voters, themselves, weighing in on the matter.

At issue in the Wake County courtroom Friday was whether requiring IDs at the poll should be considered a “qualification” for voting or an extension of the registration process, which lawmakers have the authority to tweak.

Millen argued that if North Carolina is going to have a requirement that distinguishes which IDs are acceptable, then such a change to election law must be approved by voters as an amendment to the state constitution.

Alec Peters, a special deputy attorney general in the N.C. Attorney General’s office, and Thomas A. Farr, an attorney with Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart in Raleigh, argued that an ID requirement is no different from what voters do now, attest to poll workers that they are who they say they are by stating their name and address, then signing a form before being handed a ballot.

Republican lawmakers pushed for the requirement, contending that it would prevent voter fraud and build confidence in election results.  But few cases of voter fraud have been prosecuted.

The case in Wake County Superior Court is not the only legal challenge to the elections law overhaul in 2013.

The NAACP and others who have filed lawsuits in federal court contend that the 2013 overhaul discriminates against African-Americans, Latinos and voters younger than 25.  They’re seeking to block provisions that end same-day registration, curb the number of days on which people can vote early, do away with a popular teen preregistration program and prohibit people from casting ballots out of their assigned precinct.  They also listed the voter ID requirement as a provision that would hit African-Americans, Latinos and college-age voters the hardest.  They have argued in federal and state court that many voters, often poor and minorities, don’t have the necessary documents or money to get photo IDs.

Advocates of the changes have argued that voting rules had the same effect on all voters.

North Carolina’s voter ID requirement is not set to take full effect until 2016.  The trials in state and federal court are expected to be resolved before then.











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What America Voters Will Look Like in 2060

The changing face of the typical American voter stands to make a transformative impact on future U.S. politics as the electorate shifts to “majority-minority.”  A new report from the Center for American Progress, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Brookings Institution predicts the makeup of states over the next 45 years, and what that means for the democratic process.

The report, entitled States of Change: The Demographic Evolution of the American Electorate, 1974-2060, examined population data to pinpoint the “tipping year” for states where the current minority population will become the majority.  The U.S. as a whole is expected to reach that tipping point in 2052.  Many states already have Caucasian minorities, including California, Texas, and Arizona.

10 Big Trends that are Transforming America

1: The rise of majority-minority and near-majority-minority states.

2: The diversification of eligible voters.

3: The lagged diversification of actual voters.

4: The rise of post-Baby Boom generations.

5: The super-diversification of America’s children.

6: The graying of America.

7: The diversification of the gray.

8: The decline of the white working class.

9: The rise of white college graduates.

10: The rise of the unmarried electorate.

CLICK HERE to read the entire report.











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Revised New York Voter Registration Form

New York revised their voter registration form to handle the new parties and the question of are your independence.

There is now two questions:

Political party - You must make 1 selection

Political party enrollment is optional but that, in order to vote in a primary election of a political party, a voter must enroll in that political party, unless state party rules allow otherwise.

I wish to enroll in a political party

☐ Democratic party
☐ Republican party
☐ Conservative party
☐ Green party
☐ Working Families party
☐ Independence party
☐ Women’s Equality party
☐ Reform party
☐ Other_________________

I do not wish to enroll in a political party

☐ No party

The other change that is waiting for the New York Board of Elections (BOE) to finalize, is requiring the maintenance of the write-in party names for the Other box by the Counties and the State.  This is needed when a party asks for its registration totals, which are not keep by all entities, currently.  The BOE has previously changed their system to accommodate this change, but did not make it mandatory.

I would like to see a mass mailing so voters could be notified about this change, so they could update their party preference or become an independent voter.

CLICK HERE to view the form.











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Secession Talk in New York State

New York lawmakers in income strapped fifteen towns across four counties in upstate New York are pondering the possibility of seceding from the Empire State and being adopted by Pennsylvania.  The fifteen towns have expressed interest in secession after the state banned fracking, according to an interest group researching the economic benefits of such a move.

The Upstate New York Towns Association declined to name specific towns involved in the effort, but the towns are located in Broome, Delaware, Tioga and Sullivan counties.  These counties are located in or near New York’s natural gas-rich Southern Tier, which borders Pennsylvania.

The Association will review the results from a survey and review the Association’s study comparing taxes and the cost of doing business in New York and Pennsylvania.  With all this information, the Association will decide what action should be taken.  Options such as seceding to Pennsylvania, partitioning the state, as well as other options that may come up will be looked at.

The gas resources available here are locked off from development, and many landowners have lived through years of frustration as they watched their neighbors just over the border to the south enjoy a resurgence in their economy and job prospects.  Jobs have bled off from the area with no new development to replace them, largely due to the state’s tax policies.

The problem with all of this is that it looks pretty much impossible.  The rules for changing state borders are clear, and the powers that be in Albany and Manhattan would never be on board with it.

Boundary changes between states require the approval of each state’s legislature and the approval of Congress.  The U.S. Supreme Court settles boundary disputes between states.

While Pennsylvania would no doubt love to expand their territory and gain access to the mineral resources, I can’t imagine the state government in Albany ever agreeing to let this happen.











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Staten Island Democrats Pick Vincent Gentile to Run in Special Election

In New York City last night, the Staten Island Democratic Party officially nominated Brooklyn Councilman Vincent Gentile to take on Staten Island Republican's selection, District Attorney Daniel Donovan, in the race to replace former Congressman Michael Grimm.

Just over two months away from the May 5 special election, Mr. Gentile accepted his party’s nod to run for the seat, which consists mostly of Staten Island with some smaller slices of Brooklyn.

The councilman–widely seen as the party’s third choice a Staten Island Assemblyman and a former Congressman opted not to run,, emphasizing his determination to defeat the heavily favored Mr. Donovan.

Some elected official present at the event, argued that Mr. Gentile has a strong chance of winning the election despite the abysmal history of Brooklyn candidates who have sought the seat.











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England's Two-Party Political System Under Unprecedented Pressure

The distance between the front benches in Britain's House of Commons, the PIT, is said to be the distance of two drawn swords.

The pit is the product not just of Parliament's adversarial architecture, but of the electoral system that supports it.  The Members of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons, the elected and more powerful of Parliament's two chambers, are the individuals who won the largest share of the vote in each of 650 constituencies.  This winner-takes-all system, is know as "First Past The Post" (FPTP), took its current form in 1885.  By its nature, FPTP squashes small political parties; the dynamics of what political scientists call "Duverger's Law" doom them to irrelevance or merger, a process that will reliably lead to duopolies on power.

Defenders of FPTP argue that by giving voters two broad parties to choice between, instead of a plethora of more focused ones, it delivers durable single-party governments rather than flimsy coalitions.  This allows governments to do more and lets voters hold parties to account for either doing or not doing in office what they promise to do at elections.

The system's detractors say that disenfranchising people who vote for small parties is a price that outweighs these purported benefits.  And this problem has recently been getting worse.  The general election to be held on May 7th will see some widely popular parties winning very few seats, but it is quite unlikely to produce a strong single-party government.  If increasing costs in fairness offer fewer compensating benefits, both Britain's people and its politicians may decide it is time for a change.

The most two-party election held since FPTP took its modern form was in 1951.  Labour received 49% and Conservatives received 48%.  it was a time when class loyalty trumped almost all other concerns.  A study of Labour supporters found only a third held political views vaguely resembling the party's; the rest voted for it because their families, neighbors and work related friends did.  At the other end of the scale the Conservatives was the only game in town.

Now voters do not feel so constrained.  There is the UK Independence Party (UKIP), left-nationalist Scottish National Party (SNP), and the left-some-what-libertarian Greens.  All told, UKIP, the SNP, and the Greens, got one in 18 voters in the 2010 election.  Some polls put the figure today at 1 in 3 voters.

Party activist are redesigning their canvassing sheets to accommodate newly nuanced voting intentions.  A number of previously safe seats are up for grabs, not because they will be lost to the new parties, but because the new parties will eat into past margins of victories.  Some predict a "lottery election" in which small shifts in the vote will make big differences in the Commons.  The complexity is in part a reaction to Britain's first coalition government in 70 years, which has left its members with, weakened flanks.

The Conservatives have lost right-wing voters to UKIP.  The Lib Dems have lost some more left-wing voters to the Greens and Labour.  Labour, for its part, has seen its support in Scotland plummet after campaigning against independence in last September's referendum.  Stagnant living standards, blamed by each of the major parties on the other, have fueled a "stuff the pair of them" attitude which benefits the minor parties.

A related trend is that voters expect more from politics.  They are more used to "shopping around" in their everyday lives.  But where supermarkets offer wider choices and better value, politics does not.  The differences between parties seem to many be harder to see.  FPTP means that many politicians hardly even need to try and sell themselves.  In 69% of seats the incumbent has a majority of 10 percentage points or more; in those seats only half the voters had any contact with a politician in 2010.  Voters paid no heed and the big parties returned the favor.

The most significant trend is a change in the shape of politics.  A two-party system works best when debates can be collapsed on to a single axis, say from command-and-control economics to free markets.  Such a one-dimensional scheme does ever less justice to how people think.  But class has lost salience, cultural issues have increasingly taken its place as a way to defining people's politics.  This has been helped along by the unusually large gulf in the experiences of younger voters and older ones that has come with the huge expansion of higher education over the past decades.

James Tilley, an Oxford academic, has argued for a while that Britain's political maps are increasingly in need of a libertarian-authoritarian axis to supplement the old left-right economics axis.

Will the three parties make that change possible on May 7, 2015, to elect the 56th Parliament of the United Kingdom?











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Chicago Voters Endorse Campaign Finance Reform

Chicago voters endorsed by a wide margin Tuesday a plan to institute public campaign financing and limit outside contributions.

The ballot measure, though non-binding, begins a process that will now move to city and state government, where legislation would be drafted.

The Ballot Referendum asked whether the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois should “reduce the influence of special interest money in elections by financing campaigns using small contributions from individuals and a limited amount of public money,” and voters signaled yes by a 58-point margin, 79 percent to 21 percent.

The “small donor matching” system proposes to provide public money to match small contributions by individual donors — a plan proponents say will weaken the power of special interest money, open the pool of candidates to average citizens and restore faith in an election process seen by voters as controlled by a wealthy few.











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A New Reason for Alternatives to Runoff Elections

One of the most disruptive features of the 2014 election cycle was a result of a court ruling that in order to allow overseas soldiers enough time to vote in congressional and presidential primaries, and if needed runoff elections, absentee ballots would need to be provided 45 days prior to these elections (UOCAVA).

Following the judge’s ruling, legislature passed bills to move primary elections and if needed runoff elections.  But it turns out some runoff elections are so late, that overseas voters miss out.

On Tuesday, a district court in Georgia ruled that the 45-day transmittal requirement applies to runoff elections for federal office, and that the runoff election schemes violated UOCAVA.  After the district court had issued its ruling and after the briefs in this appeal were filed, the Georgia Legislature passed H.B. 310, which in relevant part amends Georgia’s election calendar and voting procedures to comply with the 45-day transmittal requirement.

We will have to see how other states handle this problem.

What I find interesting, is states that follow the congressional law to the letter, and will not change their state election dates to accommodate the UOCAVA law.

Rank-Choice voting will eliminate the need for run-offs as well as reduce a states cost to run elections.











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Another View of Top-Two Primaries

Markos Moulitsas, the founder and publisher of Daily Kos, has an article in The Hill, he calls "No One Wins with ‘Top Two’.

He writes:

Empirical results show that the top-two system is a failure.  What it means is that today, parties must limit the number of candidates who run in primaries.  So rather than having an honest intra-party debate on who can best represent a district, the parties have to arm-twist candidates out of the race, lest they risk the opposition capturing the top two slots.

In other words, the top-two system limits political participation; it doesn’t expand it.

Most importantly, the top-two system kills voter participation.  When arguing for top-two, advocates said that California’s 30 percent turnout in primaries was a sign that the existing system was broken.  Well, after implementing it, turnout last year was at 18 percent.  If 30 percent was bad, 18 percent is objectively far worse.

CLICK HERE to read the entire article.











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Money in Politics Panel Discussion

Last night, I attended a panel discussion on 'Money in Politics' at New York University's Institute for Public Knowledge.

The three person panel included:

Mansur Gidfar is the Communications Director of Represent.Us, a non-partisan national campaign to combat the undue influence of special interests in American government.  Mansur has previously worked as deputy editor and contributor for viral media site Upworthy, one of the fastest-growing media companies of all time.  he invited me to the event.

Thomas Frank is a political analyst, historian, and columnist for Salon.com.  He is the author of a number of books, including What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004), The Wrecking Crew (2010), and Pity the Billionaire (2011),  He also wrote a review of Zephyr Teachout's book.



Zephyr Teachout is an organizer, educator, and scholar with years of experience as a leader in the fights for economic and political equality and against concentration of wealth and control in the hands of the few.  Currently an associate professor of law at Fordham Law School, was previously a visiting professor of law at Duke University and a lecturer at the University of Vermont.  She has worked as an antitrust and media expert and served as the Director of Internet Organizing for the 2004 Howard Dean presidential campaign.  In 2008 she co-founded a New Way Forward, an organization built to break up the power of big banks, and was involved with Occupy Wall Street.  She ran for the Democratic Party nomination for Governor of New York in 2014, getting 33.47% of the vote, and remains actively involved with local politics.  She is the author of CORRUPTION IN AMERICA.

Zephyr started her talk with these excerpts from her book:

When Louis XVI presented Benjamin Franklin with a snuff box encrusted with diamonds and insert with the King's portrait, the gift troubled Americans: it threatened to "corrupt" Franklin by clouding his judgement or altering his attitude toward the French in subtle psychological ways.  This broad understating of political corruption--rooted in ideals of civic virtue--was a driving force at the Constitutional Convention.

For two centuries the framers' ideas about corruption flourished in the courts, even in the absence of clear rules governing voters, civil officers, and elected officials.  Should a law that was passed by a state legislature be overturned because half of its members were bribed?  What kinds of lobbying activity were corrupt, and what kinds were legal?  When does an implicit promise count as bribery?  In the 1970s the U.S. Supreme Court began to narrow the definition of corruption, and the meaning has since changed dramatically.  No case makes that clearer than 'Citizen United'.

In 2010, one of the most consequential Court decisions in American political history gave wealth corporations the right to spend unlimited money to influence elections.  Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion treated corruption as nothing more than explicit bribery, a narrow conception later echoed by Chief Justice Roberts in deciding 'McCutcheon v. FEC' in 2014.

With unlimited spending transforming American politics for the worse, warns Teachout, Citizens United and McCutcheon were not just bad laws but bad history.

"If the American experiment in self-government is to have a future, then we must revive the traditional meaning of corruption and embrace an old ideal, she said.

Mansur Gidfar spoke about the use of Initiative & Referendum (I&R) at the state level to change state laws about money in politics, using a non-partisan effort across political and social ideals.  Using congressional efforts or constitutional amendment attempts to correct the money in politics problem was not viable at this time.

Thomas Franks gave us antidotes about political corruption and money in politics.

CLICK HERE to read Thomas Frank's review of Zephyr's book in the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

At a Harvard Law Reform Forum called The Varieties of Corruption and the Problem of Appearance, Robert F. Bauer, a partner of Perkins Cole, writes:

Neither the same as actual corruption nor well defined in its own right, the "appearance of corruption" as a basis for campaign finance regulation is suspect on two counts, depending on the observer: appearances are either useless appendages to demonstrated instances of quid pro quo corruption, or they are rhetorical compensation for their absence.  If there is corruption, effectively sale of office, then the appearance of it may be self-evident, but beside the point.  Absent corruption, placing the full weight of the state regulatory interest on "appearance" guarantees contention, since regulatory regime's advocates will often perceive what its critics do not see.

It has been argued that money in high volume through the political process distracts candidates from engagement with the voters and incumbents from their official duties, as they pursue an ever larger campaign budget, underwrites negative political advertising at odds with ideals of deliberative democracy, allows independent organizations to dominate the political debate to the detriment of candidates and political parties, and enables candidates to escape accountability for the tone and message of the campaign.  All of these criticisms may be fairly taken to be threats to what has been referred to as the "integrity of the political process:.

The Court has so far rejected a conception of "electoral integrity" that is grounded in the failings of the electoral process itself.

The campaign finance debate increased with super PAC's: about the quality of campaign negative speech, the fairness of competition, the absence of accountability of candidates and parties, or just the outsized impact that a single wealthy individual can have on electoral outcomes.

So the appearance of corruption may rest on the various effects of money in politics in the aggregate, and on perceived corruption defined as the threat to "electoral integrity", that arises from frenzied fundraising and unlimited spending.  The corruption in question attacks the electoral process; it does not consist exclusively of debts incurred to campaign donors and spenders who expect post-election repayment.  One might even consider whether the reference to the "appearance" of corruption have become the means, not explicitly recognized by which these other concerns with money in electoral politics have come to be expressed.

It is useful to consider the gap between the appearance problem the Court will weigh in the constitutional balance and those questions of appearance that animate much of the campaign finance debate and controversy.  This gap is among other reasons that the appeal to appearance in the limited form available will remain vulnerable to attack and unpersuasive in application.











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