Voter Suppression and Reapportionment
Free and fair elections are the fundamental bedrocks of our democracy.
During Super Tuesday, both Texas and Los Angeles County had horrendously long lines to vote, discouraging many potential voters.
In LA, the state has done everything possible to encourage voting from early voting, to mail voting, to modernized vote systems in LA, etc. So they closed a number of polling places believing that the reforms would reduce turnout on Election Day. That assumption proved false so the closure of many polling places backfired, and we had huge long lines. https://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-voter-suppression-california-texas-voting-lines-2020-3 LA will fix it, but imagine if this had been the general election in November. You can see some of the background to LA’s recent voting snafus in this article. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/20/calif_begins_removing_5_million_inactive_voters_on_its_rolls__140602.html
In Texas, they also closed a lot of voting places, primarily in minority neighborhoods. The waiting lines to vote were horrendous, discouraging potential voters. https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/diversity-inclusion/485906-long-voting-lines-in-texas-renew-accusations-of
In Florida since the Jim Crow era, felons were permanently disenfranchised from voting. By a 2/3rds vote, Floridians passed an initiative restoring felon voting rights after their release from prison – about 1.4 million are now eligible to vote. The Florida legislators then passed legislation prohibiting released felons from voting if they had unpaid court fines and fees. Critics point to this as a new poll tax. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/florida-felon-voting-rights-amendment-4-counties-poll-tax.html
In North Dakota, state officials were denying Native American citizens the right to vote because they lacked street addresses for their homes on reservations. The state has just settled the lawsuit after four years of litigation so Native Americans using PO Boxes as their mailing address will be able to vote. https://publicintegrity.org/politics/voting-settlement/
In Wisconsin, there has been a huge battle over efforts to purge about 200,000 registered voters based on the state’s “reliable information” law. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/wisconsin-voter-suppression-lawsuit-purge-938043/ For the moment, voting rights have been preserved.
In Rucho v. Common Cause, the United State Supreme Court has said that extreme partisan political gerrymandering is a political issue, not one for the federal courts, but one for Congress, state legislatures, state voters and state courts. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-422_9ol1.pdf The Pennsylvania Supreme Court invalidated the Pennsylvania legislature’s extreme partisan gerrymander. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/pennsylvanias-partisan-gerrymandering-saga-ends-victory-voters Similarly, the North Carolina state courts have held that the extreme partisan gerrymander in that state violated the state constitution. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/north-carolina-court-kills-republican-gerrymander.html
California voters used the initiative to put an end to the state’s habitual gerrymandering to politically protect incumbents from both parties. https://calmatters.org/politics/2019/10/california-trouble-filling-citizen-redistricting-commission-gerrymandering/ That has made our elections far less predictable as evidenced by Democratic sweep of the 2018 mid terms in Orange County and the Central Valley. Many of those districts could now just as easily swing back to Republican control in the next close election contest. Arizona voters did likewise. Six other states have followed suit from Michigan to Colorado. https://www.ocregister.com/2019/08/13/on-gerrymandering-california-once-again-takes-the-lead/ Michigan Republican party leaders are now seeking to invalidate their state’s citizen’s commission as denying their First Amendment rights. https://www.vox.com/2019/9/9/20850936/gerrymandering-michigan-commission-republican-legal-argument
Lucien Wulsin