GOP Cries Against Voter Fraud Go Silent in Face Of GOP Fraud

Mark Harris, the disgraced Republican candidate.

For years now Republicans have whined about almost non-existent "voter fraud" as a justification for voter ID laws and other restrictions on voting that are aimed at disenfranchising voters not-inclined for voting for Republican candidates. Instances of individuals illegally voting are rare, but as North Carolina's 9th congressional distract race has revealed, organized GOP efforts to commit voter fraud is not equally rare.  Indeed, the 2018 election results are being thrown out and a new election has been ordered.   And those GOP shrieks about voter fraud?  They are almost non-existent.  The GOP hypocrisy is stunning and seemingly parallels that of the GOP's evangelical base.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the deafening GOP silence.    Here are highlights:

Republican politicians across the country have for years railed against the threat of voter fraud. Some have made unproven claims about how rampant it has become in order to pass voter ID laws and open sweeping investigations. The sanctity of the vote, they have said, must be protected at all costs.

But when a hard-fought congressional election in North Carolina — in which a Republican candidate appeared to narrowly beat his Democratic opponent — was overturned this week because of election fraud by a Republican political operative, the party was measured, and largely muted, in its response.

The state party chairman, Robin Hayes, issued a statement after officials ordered a new election calling the affair “a tremendously difficult situation for all involved.” National Republicans have been mostly mum.

Mark Harris, the Republican nominee, had eked out a 905-vote lead over Dan McCready. But the North Carolina Board of Elections refused to certify Mr. Harris as the winner and opened an investigation into irregularities. This week, the five-member board, made up of Republicans and Democrats, convened an evidentiary hearing in Raleigh at which witnesses described a voter-turnout effort that relied on the rogue collection of absentee ballots.

Witnesses detailed how people working for a Harris campaign operative, L. McCrae Dowless Jr., had filled out parts of some absentee ballots and improperly collected others. On Friday, Lorrin Freeman, the district attorney in Wake County, said she could seek charges within weeks against Mr. Dowless and some of the people he hired.

State Republicans, who over the past few years have tightened voting laws and had fought to preserve Mr. Harris’s victory, were far less vociferous in denouncing voter fraud than they have been in the past.

That stands in marked contrast to 2016, when the state’s Republicans filed many complaints and claimed for a month that Roy Cooper, the Democrat who was elected governor that year, should not be seated because rampant fraud had enabled his victory. The charge proved baseless.

Among Mr. Harris’s supporters, Tami Fitzgerald, the executive director of the North Carolina Values Coalition, a group that works with pastors throughout the state and has close ties to Mr. Harris, would not say whether fraud had taken place in the Ninth District. Instead, she called the board’s unanimous decision a “stolen victory.”
 Prosecutors in the Trump administration have been conducting a high-profile investigation in North Carolina for months to find noncitizens who cast illegal ballots, many of them in apparent ignorance of the law. But although the state elections board sent Justice Department officials evidence of absentee-ballot fraud by Mr. Dowless as early as January 2017, they took no action before last November’s House election, and it is unclear whether they are investigating the matter.
 The party has given scant attention to the more frequent kind of election fraud — the inside-job schemes in which campaigns or election officials manufacture fake votes and destroy their opponents’ real ones — that appears to have taken place in the Ninth District race. Absentee ballots are especially susceptible to manipulation.

On Friday, Mr. Berger, the Republican state senator, resisted suggestions that his party had ignored the fraud potential and noted that state law already banned the misconduct outlined at the hearing this week. But he said, “I think it’s clear that something needs to be done if there’s a reasonable thing that can be done.”

Racist Jeff Sessions to Target Marijuana Users

As previous posts have indicated, in my opinion Attorney General Jeff Sessions is an avowed racist despite his protests to the contrary.  Having known the man since the days we were both in Mobile, Alabama (I lived there when Sessions refused to prosecute KKK members who lynched a young black man), Sessions will do anything he can to keep blacks - and gays for that matter - second class citizens.  Moreover, he supports any policy that will help to disproportionately disenfranchise black Americans.  Hence the news that Sessions plans to enforce antiquated federal marijuana laws even in states that have legalized and regulate the sale and possession of small amounts for personal use.  The move comes just as Der Trumpenführer has disbanded his committee to investigate non-existent voter fraud which many believed was a thinly veiled effort to disenfranchise minorities and the poor.  Apparently what could not be accomplished by Trump's farcical committee will now be accomplished through marijuana prosecutions. Politico looks at Sessions' disingenuous move.  Here are excerpts:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is rescinding the Obama-era policy that had paved the way for legalized marijuana to flourish in states across the country, two people with knowledge of the decision told The Associated Press. Sessions will instead let federal prosecutors where pot is legal decide how aggressively to enforce federal marijuana law, the people said.

The move by President Donald Trump's attorney general likely will add to confusion about whether it's OK to grow, buy or use marijuana in states where pot is legal, since long-standing federal law prohibits it. It comes days after pot shops opened in California, launching what is expected to become the world's largest market for legal recreational marijuana and as polls show a solid majority of Americans believe the drug should be legal.

Sessions, who has assailed marijuana as comparable to heroin and has blamed it for spikes in violence, had been expected to ramp up enforcement. Pot advocates argue that legalizing the drug eliminates the need for a black market and would likely reduce violence, since criminals would no longer control the marijuana trade.

The Obama administration in 2013 announced it would not stand in the way of states that legalize marijuana, so long as officials acted to keep it from migrating to places where it remained outlawed and out of the hands of criminal gangs and children.

The pot business has since become a sophisticated, multimillion-dollar industry that helps fund schools, educational programs and law enforcement. Eight states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana for recreational use, and California's sales alone are projected to bring in $1 billion annually in tax revenue within several years.

Sessions' policy will let U.S. attorneys across the country decide what kinds of federal resources to devote to marijuana enforcement based on what they see as priorities in their districts, the people familiar with the decision said.

The change also reflects yet another way in which Sessions, who served as a federal prosecutor at the height of the drug war in Mobile, Alabama, has reversed Obama-era criminal justice policies that aimed to ease overcrowding in federal prisons and contributed to a rethinking of how drug criminals were prosecuted and sentenced. While his Democratic predecessor Eric Holder told federal prosecutors to avoid seeking long mandatory minimum sentences when charging certain lower level drug offenders, for example, Sessions issued an order demanding the opposite, telling them to pursue the most serious charges possible against most suspects.

Sit in criminal court any morning and you will witness white defendants with money getting off or light sentences for marijuana possession while poor blacks without resources to hire a private attorney get slammed and receive sentences that put them in prison and deprive them of the right to vote.  Sessions knows what he is doing and it is disgusting.  He might as well wear KKK robes while on the job.  

Jill Vogel Embraces Lies and the Trump Agenda in the LT. Governor Race

Jill Vogel with E.W. Jackson at a ultra-far right "Christian" gathering

It seems that almost all Republicans lie nowadays and GOP candidate Jill Vogel may be one of the more devious liars in the Republican field as she runs against Democrat Justin Fairfax for Lt. Governor.  Although some of her campaign ads strive to show her as a moderate, she is no moderate. One can only hope that voters are not fooled by her deliberately disingenuous campaign.  Vogel indeed stands for all of the worst of the Trump and GOP reverse Robin Hood agenda.  Nor is she any friend of the LGBT community even though she has pretended otherwise at a few LGBT pride events where she distributed rainbow stickers at LGBT.  Her true view of the LGBT community is not much different that the hysterically anti-gay E. W. Jackson who ran for Lt. Governor four years ago (Jackson has endorsed her and lauds her in a video on his Facebook page).  If elected, Vogel will be all in on the Trump/Pence war against the LGBT community and likewise all on board with the effort to disenfranchise those who do not vote Republican.  Vogel is a liar, although a very, very smooth one - something that makes her very dangerous.  And yes, she is in bed with the Koch brothers and Karl Rove.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Vogel's wolf in sheep's clothing campaign of deceit.  Here are excerpts:

Jill Vogel was just getting her legal career off the ground — still a “baby lawyer,” as a friend tells it — when she went to work for the Republican National Committee.

Before long, she was chief counsel. Then a top lawyer for President George W. Bush’s Energy Department. From there, she built one of the nation’s most prominent GOP elections law firms and won a seat in the state Senate.

Now Vogel, 47, is running for lieutenant governor of Virginia — in the drain-the-swamp style of President Trump.

“We are going to take back Virginia the way this president is going to take back this country!” Vogel declared at an August rally in tiny Marion, in southwest Virginia.

If it takes a certain chutzpah for a longtime GOP insider to adopt the president’s anti-establishment mantra, Vogel has it.  . . . Vogel is all in.

Hers could be a risky strategy in the only Southern state that Trump lost, a place where the president is deeply unpopular. Her Democratic rival, former federal prosecutor Justin Fairfax, played up her ties to Trump as a negative during their debate last week. Democrats speak less admiringly of her balancing act, which in the course of the campaign has included distributing rainbow stickers at LGBT pride events while also teaming up with E.W. Jackson, a lawyer, Christian minister and critic of gay rights who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in 2013. Vogel gained notoriety — and the ire of abortion rights activists — in 2012 for a bill that, as originally proposed, would have required most women seeking abortions to first undergo a vaginal ultrasound and be offered a view of the fetus.

“She is intentionally different things to different people,” said Anna Scholl, executive director of Progress Virginia. “When she is with moderate swing voters, she is trying to sell herself as a mom who’s just working hard for families. But you get her into a room with the base and she’s right there with E.W. Jackson. . . . I think it’s a little bit of, don’t look at the woman behind the curtain.”

Specializing in elections and campaign finance law, [Vogel's law firm] it represents some of the nation’s largest super PACs and their related “social welfare” nonprofit organizations, which are allowed to shield their donors. Among them are Americans for Prosperity, part of the “dark money” political network established by the billionaire Koch brothers, and American Crossroads, the super PAC co-founded by Gillespie and GOP strategist Karl Rove. 

Vogel narrowly won the nomination for lieutenant governor after a mudslinging battle with Sen. Bryce Reeves (R-Spotsylvania). During the primary, Reeves turned up digital records linking Vogel to a pseudonymous email that falsely accused him of having an extramarital affair. Vogel denied any involvement and suggested her family’s electronics had been hacked.  

Her campaign website boasts that she has introduced “more pro-gun bills than any other state senator.” .. . . There was no wavering after the Las Vegas mass shooting, even after the National Rifle Association on Thursday unexpectedly supported a review of regulations on “bump stocks,” devices that allow a semiautomatic rifle to mimic the rapid discharge of an automatic weapon. 

“She comes across as very moderate, very nice — a soccer mom,” Sen. Barbara Favola (D-Arlington) said. “Because of that persona, voters are really tricked because they can’t imagine she’s as strident as she is.” 

[A]head of her primary, Vogel raised all-caps alarms with a mailing about the Obama administration’s order to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms of their choice: “DO YOU WANT BARACK OBAMA TO SET TRANSGENDER BATHROOM POLICIES AT YOUR CHILDREN’S SCHOOL?”

Like most of the Virginia Republican Party, Vogel wants to take Virginia backward in time and to put "those people" back in their place.  Vote for Justin Fairfax on November 7, 2017. 

Jeff Sessions' Crackdown on Marijuana - Is It Really All About Disenfranchising Minorities?

As previous posts have indicated, in my opinion, U.S. Attorney General Sessions is a foul individual. My view dates all the way back to the late 1970's when he and I were both members of the Mobile, Alabama legal community. Sessions has a long history of racism and, as noted previously, failed to prosecute KKK members who lynched a 19 year old young black man, Michael Donald, while I still lived in Mobile (a photo of Donald's body is here). Now, it seems that Sessions has come up with a new means to assault minority communities: crackdown on marijuana - even legal marijuana - to increase convictions that will often lead to felony convictions that will deprive individuals of their voting rights and make it difficult to ever have successful employment opportunities.  Similarly, Sessions cares nothing about youths ensnared by the often draconian marijuana laws (Virginia's laws are horrific thanks to the GOP control of the Virginia House of Delegates).  Sessions likewise ignores the research that negate his  or the fact that research hows that marijuana is not a serious health threat.  A piece in Salon looks at Sessions ugly agenda.  Here are excerpts:

Soon after his election, Donald Trump announced he would appoint Jeff Sessions as attorney general, sending a wave of panic through the world of activism around legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana. Sessions is an old-line drug warrior who opposes all state-level efforts to liberalize marijuana laws, and it was widely feared he would reverse Obama-era Department of Justice policies recommending that federal authorities not interfere with states that legalize marijuana.
In July, Sessions made his first tentative move toward cracking down on states that legalize pot, sending a letter to Washington state officials in which he expressed skepticism about marijuana legalization, repeatedly singling out the fear that such laws would lead to more pot smoking among minors.
If Sessions is legitimately concerned about high school kids and that’s not just a front for promoting laws that are disproportionately enforced on black people, then he probably shouldn’t worry so much. A new study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that the effects of liberalizing marijuana laws on the behavioral outcomes of minors are . . . well, nothing. At least nothing of significance. “Notably, many of the outcomes predicted by critics of liberalizations, such as increases in youth drug use and youth criminal behavior, have failed to materialize in the wake of marijuana liberalizations,” the report reads.
In fact, the researchers found the opposite: Marijuana liberalization was associated with “reduced marijuana, alcohol, and other drug use; reduced desirability of consuming these substances; and reduced access to these substances on school property.”
Marijuana legalization or decriminalization apparently doesn’t do much to change young people’s behavior. Getting arrested for possessing or selling marijuana, however, can have a massive impact on a person’s life.
“Arrests prohibit individuals from fully participating in society, inhibiting their ability to get a job, get a loan, go to college, or even have a place to live,” Kassandra Frederique, the New York State Director at the Drug Policy Alliance, argued in a recent study of New York City’s marijuana arrest rates.
This life disruption, in turn, helps reinforce serious racial disparities in our society. Black and white people smoke marijuana at the same rate, but black people are almost four times as likely to be arrested for it. Even after New York Mayor Bill de Blasio enacted policies that reduced marijuana arrest rates in the city, black and Latino people made up 85 percent of marijuana arrests, despite being only about half the population.
Criminalizing marijuana does little or nothing to reduce crime or improve youth outcomes, but it is highly effective at increasing racial disparities, criminalizing young people of color and derailing career opportunities for young Latinos and African-Americans. Sessions is widely perceived as hostile to civil rights and full equality for people of color, so it’s entirely possible that his interest in escalating marijuana crackdowns is not as innocent as he claims.
If Jeff Sessions does begin to roll back decades of progress on marijuana reform, he’s fighting against the political tide: A survey conducted earlier this year found that 57 percent of Americans believed pot should be legal (although only 40 percent of Republicans held that view). Furthermore, Sessions is pursuing this crusade for no good reason. There is simply no evidence that marijuana liberalization leads to bad outcomes for younger people, while the evidence that being arrested for marijuana causes bad outcomes is overwhelming. Of course, if Jeff Sessions is actively trying to send more people of color to prison on minor drug offenses and damage their future prospects, maybe he knows exactly what he’s doing.

White House: Expect "Greater Enforcement" of Recreational Marijuana Laws

As I have noted on this blog and in my VEER Magazine column, rigid enforcement of marijuana laws against recreational users costs Virginia (and other states) millions and millions of dollars each year.  Worse yet, a marijuana conviction leaves young offenders with permanent criminal records that make securing good paying jobs in the future difficult, if not impossible. And as a crowning glory, such laws are disproportionately enforced against minorities who not only are arrested more frequently but who often cannot afford legal counsel who can facilitate a lesser sentence.  In short, enforcement of such laws creates an underclass and permanently stigmatizes countless young individuals.  So what is Der Trumpenführer proposing?  A crack down and stepped enforcement of federal marijuana laws.  Funny how the issue of transgender rights should be left to the states, but not marijuana laws.  Oh, and meanwhile, Trump wants to revert back to the use of private, for profit prisons.  One cannot help but wonder if he owns stock in such operations.  Here are highlights from Time on this wrongheaded effort:

The Trump Administration will step up enforcement of federal laws on recreational marijuana in states where its use is legalized, the White House said Thursday.

Asked about the conflict between federal laws barring recreational marijuana and the handful of states that allow it, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said the Administration would change direction from the more permissive approach under President Obama.

"I do believe you'll see greater enforcement of it," Spicer told reporters Thursday during the White House briefing.

It would represent the latest policy shift from the Obama Administration, which declined to enforce federal laws in states that legalized weed, such as Colorado and Washington, as long as the states regulated the marketplace. As he prepared to leave office, former President Obama came out in favor of legalizing marijuana.

Spicer repeatedly linked the use of marijuana to the nationwide opioid abuse epidemic, suggesting without offering proof that marijuana is a gateway drug to more serious substances.

Earlier in the briefing, Spicer touted the president and the GOP's commitment to deferring to the states over the federal government on controversial issues.

“We are a states’ rights party," he said while discussing a reversal of Obama-era guidance on transgender student bathroom use.

Let's be clear, Spicer and his boss are a**holes.  Oh, and did I mention that marijuana convictions often disenfranchise the disproportionately number of blacks who are prosecuted?  It all fits nicely with Trump's white supremacist agenda. .

States Are Losing Billions of Dollars by Keeping Marijuana Illegal

When it comes to marijuana laws, Virginia is among the more regressive states.  Locally, Norfolk leads Virginia in marijuana arrests, with blacks disproportionately subject to such arrests.  Since possessing small amounts of marijuana can lead to a felony conviction, one net effect is to disenfranchise more blacks - something that is a top priority for Virginia Republicans who increasingly try to use voter disenfranchisement to counter demographics that trend in favor of Democrats.  But there is another consequence of this draconian approach - which is popular, of course, with the white Christofascists that comprise the core of the Virginia GOP base: lost revenues and increased costs for prisons.   Virginia is not alone in this wrongheaded policy and a piece in the Washington Post looks at how states are throwing away billions of dollars in potential revenue.  Here are excerpts:

The federal government and most states are throwing away $28 billion in yearly tax revenue by not legalizing marijuana, according to a new analysis from the Tax Foundation, an independent think tank.

The bulk of that revenue -- $20.5 billion of it -- would accrue to states through the collection of excise taxes on marijuana sales, general sales taxes, and income and payroll taxes levied on workers and businesses in a mature legal marijuana industry.

The federal government would take in another $7.5 billion, primarily from income and payroll taxes, and $500 million in excise taxes if marijuana were to be taxed the same way tobacco is.

These are estimates relying on a certain number of assumptions about the size of the marijuana market ($45 billion in sales annually) and the ways that governments decide to tax the sale of the drug. For instance, if the federal government decided to slap a 10 percent surtax on marijuana sales rather than a tobacco-style per-pound tax, that $500 million excise tax figure would grow to $5.3 billion.

$28 billion is nothing to scoff at. The Tax Foundation analysis points out that marijuana tax revenues in Colorado and Washington are exceeding projections by a considerable margins. Colorado initially projected it would receive $70 million in annual taxes on marijuana sales and excise taxes, but it is on track to pull in $140 million this year. The money goes to fund things like school construction and drug abuse-prevention campaigns.

[A]s the Tax Foundation analysis points out, people are already using and abusing marijuana -- regardless of legality. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, over 13 percent of Americans age 12 and older, 0r 35 million people, used marijuana in 2014. And 4.2 million of them met criteria for substance abuse or dependence.

We're already paying the social cost of marijuana abuse, in other words. Increased tax revenues could help offset those costs.

And marijuana prohibition carries a whole host of costs of its own -- roughly a half- billion dollars a year to arrest people for simple marijuana possession. Billions more to arrest and prosecute people who sell and traffic the drug. And the difficult-to-quantify cost of restricting the ability of millions of people who would prefer to use a drug that, by any reasonable metric, is considerably less harmful than alcohol. 

Bobby Scott Calls Out Republicans Attacking McAuliffe's Restoration of Voting Rights

As Virginia's population becomes more urban - with urban areas being much more liberal than the hinterland regions - the Republican Party of Virginia has done all it can to block the restoration of voting rights for felons who have done their time and paid their fines.  In the vast majority of states the restoration of voting rights happens automatically.  Not so in Virginia.  Why?  Because convicted felons in Virginia are disproportionately members of racial minorities - minorities that tend to vote liberal/Democrat.  Indeed, Virginia Republicans even opposed former Governor Bob McDonnell's effort to restore voting rights - one of McDonnell's few progressive acts - because even a small increase in minority voters might tip some districts from the GOP column to that of Democrats.  This GOP concern is heighten by the reality that the population of the urban cities and counties of Northern Virginia, greater Richmond, and Hampton Roads now exceeds that of the rest of Virginia combined.  It was no surprise, therefore, that the Virginia GOP went ballistic over Governor McAuliffe's executive order that restore voting rights to thousands and thousands of former felons, many of who are now productive members of society and good citizens.  As the Virginian Pilot reports, Congressman Bobby Scott - who is my representative and who the husband and I know - blasted the bigotry of Virginia Republicans.  Here are story excerpts:

U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott struck hard Wednesday at Republicans who accused Gov. Terry McAuliffe of trying to help the Democrats win the presidency when he issued an executive order last week restoring voting and other civil rights to 206,000 felons.

State Republican leaders have said McAuliffe’s executive order last week that allows felons who have served their sentences and probation to vote, run for office or serve on juries was a way to register more voters for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the November presidential election. They also objected to his restoring rights to those who committed violent crimes.

Scott, an attorney and civil liberties expert, argues the governor is correcting a suppression effort that goes back 115 years.

“The right to vote is a right. It’s not a privilege. You have Republicans who at every opportunity are trying to deny people the right to vote,” he said in a conference call with reporters.

He noted Virginia’s ban on felons voting originated in the early 1900s as part of a package of new state laws designed to suppress blacks. Those restrictions, including the now-banned literacy tests and poll taxes, at the time had forced the removal of 85 percent of black voters from the rolls.

McAuliffe’s order could return to the voting rolls as much as 20 percent of the state’s black population that have felony convictions, Scott said.

“If there is such an advantage to Democrats, it means the Republicans were enjoying a huge advantage all these years because they could deny 20 percent of the African American population the right to vote,” the Newport News Democrat said.

Virginia remains one of four states that strip voting rights from felons for life after their convictions. Before McAuliffe’s action, felons could get the right restored only by individually applying to the governor. Governors, both Republicans and Democrats, have restored rights to thousands in recent decades.

The mindset behind Massive Resistance in the 1960's is a live and well in some factions in Virginia, especially the Republican Party of Virginia which has become increasingly racists and homophobic since I resigned from the party many years ago.  I should note, however, that the growing racism and religious extremism directly corresponds with the rise of the Christofascists in the Virginia GOP. 

At 50 The Voting Rights Act is Under GOP Assault

When I arrived in Virginia to begin college at the University of Virginia I was shocked to see the remnants of segregation all around me with the vestiges of separate rest rooms and water fountains for blacks still plainly visible - the blacks always got to use the inferior facilities.  Things have improved markedly in the intervening years in large party because of desegregation laws and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.   In recent years, however, the protections of the Voting Rights Act are under constant attack by Republicans who seek to disenfranchise as many potential Democrat voters - read minorities in particular - through voter ID laws that claim to be aimed at voter fraud even though little or no evidence of any such fraud exists.  Controlling women's bodies and keeping blacks from voting are twin pillars of the Virginia GOP.  The New York Times looks at the accomplishments and threats to the Voting Rights Act on its 50th anniversary.  Here are highlights:

For the first 48 years of its existence, the Voting Rights Act — signed by President Lyndon Johnson 50 years ago this week — was one of the most popular and effective civil rights laws in American history. Centuries of slavery, segregation and officially sanctioned discrimination had kept African-Americans from having any real voice in the nation’s politics. Under the aggressive new law, black voter registration and turnout soared, as did the number of black elected officials.

Recognizing its success, Congress repeatedly reaffirmed the act and expanded its protections. The last time, in 2006, overwhelming majorities in both houses extended the law for another 25 years. But only seven years later, in 2013, five Supreme Court justices elbowed in and concluded, on scant evidence, that there was no longer a need for the law’s most powerful tool; the Voting Rights Act, they claimed, had done its job.

In truth, the battle for voting rights has had to be unrelenting, and the act itself has been under constant assault from the start. As Ari Berman writes in his new history of the law, “Give Us the Ballot,” the act’s revolutionary success “spawned an equally committed group of counterrevolutionaries” who have aimed to dismantle the central achievements of the civil rights movement.

Today there are no poll taxes or literacy tests. Instead there are strict and unnecessary voter-identification requirements, or cutbacks to early voting and same-day registration — all of which are known to disproportionately burden black voters.

The relative subtlety of the newer measures does not make them any less insidious. But it does make them more resistant to charges of illegality.

H.B. 589, that North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature passed in a duplicitous maneuver only weeks after the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling. The law rolled back 15 years of voting rights measures, including same-day registration, which 90,000 North Carolinians used in 2012; a week of early voting used by 900,000; out-of-precinct registration; and preregistration for 16- and 17-year-olds.

If North Carolina were under federal supervision, as much of the state had been before the Supreme Court’s ruling, H.B. 589 would almost surely have been blocked for its disproportionate impact on black voters, who tend to vote Democratic. But because of the ruling, the state’s legislators were free to impose a raft of restrictions based on bogus claims of electoral integrity and efficiency. The legislators refused to testify at trial.

This demonstrates the need for the Voting Rights Act’s supervision scheme, which the Supreme Court eliminated. If there was any question that the court had misjudged the reality on the ground, it was answered by the speed with which North Carolina, Texas and other states moved to impose discriminatory new voting laws.

In North Carolina, as in many places around the country that are determined to undermine the right to vote, the past is far from over.

Mark Herring Hires Outside Counsel on Challenge to GOP Voter ID Law

As the Virginia GOP has become increasingly out of step with a majority of Virginians and changing demographics have made winning state wide elections nearly impossible, rather than change its agenda and enter the 21st century, the Virginia GOP has opted instead to work to disenfranchise voters hostile to the party's extremist and racist policies.   One example id the voter ID law rammed through the GOP dominated Virginia General Assembly where Republicans hold sway thanks to gerrymandered districts.  Now, Attorney General Mark Herring has brought in outside counsel to avoid a conflict of interest as Democrats challenge the Virginia GOP's anti-democratic handiwork.  Here are highlights from the Daily Press:

Attorney General Mark Herring will outsource the legal defense of the state's voter ID laws and other election practices, Herring's office announced Friday afternoon.

The move allows Herring, a Democrat who voted against voter ID when he was in the state Senate, to avoid arguing directly in the law's defense. His office said Mark F. "Thor" Hearne II, a partner in the D.C. offices of Arent Fox, will handle the case, which Democratic groups filed against the state earlier this month.

Democrats challenging the law argue that Virginia's photo ID law is unconstitutional, but their case is much broader than that. It challenges long waits times on election day and says the Republican-controlled legislature deliberately targeted minority voters, young people and other likely Democratic voters when it rewrote voting rules.

The case was brought by Mark Elias of Perkins Coie, an attorney and firm with deep Democratic ties. The suit is part of a multi-state effort to challenge voting rules ahead of the 2016 elections. The firm is also challenging Virginia's election districts in a pair of ongoing suits.

Herring said in a statement Friday that outside counsel for the voter ID case was needed to avoid "any concern that my previous advocacy would result in anything less than a vigorous defense."

"Nothing is more fundamental than the right to vote and my position on these issues is clear," Herring said in the statement. "I have consistently opposed these measures and worked hard in the legislature to combat them."

The speaker's office declined to comment Friday on Hearne's selection. Howell and other Republican legislative leaders may hire their own attorney in this case, as they did in the cases challenging Virginia's election districts.

The Virginia GOP needs to grasp the simple concept that if your platform cannot win a majority of voters, it's the platform that needs to change rather than changing rules so as to keep people from voting. 

Why the Fate of Virginia’s Congressional Map Matters

Here in Virginia despite changing demographics and urban growth that are hostile to the policies of the Virginia GOP, Republicans remain in a stranglehold over the House of Delegates and a disproportionate number of Congressional seats remain in Republican hands. How has this happened?  One word describes the problem: gerrymandering.  State and congressional districts were carefully draw to give Republicans an advantage so that minorities and "liberal" areas were packed into a small number of districts.  Now, Virginia's congressional district map is facing revision after court rulings struck down the horrifically drawn 3rd District that is pictured above (I live in the 3rd district, but used to be in the 2nd until it was redrawn to protect Republican Scott Rigell).  A piece in MSNBC looks at why the outcome of this redistricting matters.  Here are excerpts:

When voters in Virginia went to the polls in 2012, a narrow majority backed President Obama’s re-election bid, just as they’d done four years earlier. In a closely watched U.S. Senate race, the commonwealth’s voters also elected Sen. Tim Kaine (D) over former Sen. George Allen (R) by about six points.

 

But just a little further down on the ballot is where things get tricky. If you add up all the votes case in each of Virginia’s U.S. House races, roughly 49% of Virginians voted for Democratic candidates, while about 51% supported Republican candidates. The state has 11 congressional districts, so if there was some kind of parallel between voter preferences and partisan results, we might expect to see five Democrats head to Congress from the state, along with six Republicans.

 

Except that’s not what happened. Of Virginia’s 11 U.S. House seats, Democrats ended up with three victories to the GOP’s eight. Dems may have won nearly 49% of the vote, but they also won about 27% of the representation.

After the 2010 Census, Virginia’s Republican-dominated state government carefully crafted a district map intended to maximize GOP victories. How? Step one, of course, was drawing lines in such a way as to keep as many African-American voters together as possible, effectively creating noncompetitive districts.

 

Late last week, this map ran into some trouble. The Washington Post reported:

A panel of federal judges issued a ruling Friday that Virginia lawmakers illegally concentrated African American voters into one congressional district to reduce their influence elsewhere, bringing the state a step closer to being forced to redraw its election map.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia affirmed its earlier decision and ordered the Virginia House of Delegates to redraw the state’s 11-district congressional map by Sept. 1.

 It’s not yet resolved – an appeal is inevitable – but this has the potential to be a pretty big deal.

If you’re thinking this might be a contentious process, you’re not alone. As the Post’s report added, “Democrats and advocates for reducing the influence of politics on redistricting applauded Friday’s decision. And they could benefit politically: Diluting the African American makeup of the state’s black-majority district would make adjacent districts less Republican and potentially vulnerable to Democratic challenge.”

 

If appeals fail, Virginia lawmakers would have to return for a special session this summer.

The approach of today's Virginia GOP is that if you cannot win because of your policies and agenda, you win by disenfranchising minorities and gerrymandering the districts.

Will the Black Vote Save the Democrats?

In the lead up to the 2104 midterm elections, the Republican candidates have campaigned as much against Barack Obama as they have against their actual opponents.  Why?  I and other suspect because they believe it will motivate the increasingly visible white supremacists in the GOP to get out to the polls tomorrow.  Here in Virginia, racism is a live and well in the Republican Party and with some regularity GOP officials find themselves forced to resign after disseminating racist jokes and statements.   One would think that the GOP racism would not be lost on black voters who, if they were like me, would make a point of voting just to flip the bird to the GOP.   A column in the New York Times speculates whether or not blacks will show their support for Obama by getting to the polls tomorrow.  Here are excerpts:

As Gallup pointed out last week: “We find very little change in the support given to Obama among his strongest demographic subgroup: black Americans.” The report continued, “In fact, if anything, the trend is for relatively higher support among blacks” when measuring the gap between black support for Obama and the national average.

The president is now playing to those black folks in a last-ditch effort to help Democrats maintain Senate control, even as much of the betting money is on the real possibility that Republicans will wrest control away.

According to a New York Times analysis of voter data earlier this month: “African-Americans could help swing elections in Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and possibly Arkansas,” but, the article says, “only if they turn out at higher-than-forecast rates.”

So, the president has been making direct appeals to this group on black radio stations across the country. Obama’s appeals appear to be working, at least as measured by the composition of early-voting tallies. As The New York Times’s Nate Cohn pointed out last week in The Upshot:

“The turnout among black voters is particularly encouraging for Democrats, who need strong black turnout to compete in racially polarized states like Georgia and North Carolina. In those two states, black voters so far represent 30 percent of the voters who did not participate in 2010. By comparison, 24 percent of all those who voted in those states in 2010 were black.”

It’s not clear whether President Obama can energize enough black voters to save Democratic control of the Senate, but he seems ever more reliant on this group to give him “the benefit of the doubt” and ride to his rescue.  

Personally, I do not understand those who do not vote in midterms, especially black voters.  The GOP has made it clear that it is their enemy and seeks to disenfranchise them whenever possible.  Getting out and voting against one's enemies would seem to me to be the only logical thing to do.

Unanimous Arkansas Supreme Court Rules GOP Voter ID Law Unconstitutional

With the 2014 midterm elections just weeks away, a unanimous Arkansas Supreme Court struck down that state's GOP backed voter ID law aimed at disenfranchising blacks and those thought likely to vote Democrat.  Brace yourself for shrieks of "judicial tyranny" from the Tea Party/Christofascists and their GOP operatives.  It is telling that the GOP's thinly veiled efforts to win by cheating, if you will, are not doing well when analyzed by the courts.  Think Progress has details on this latest GOP defeat.  Here are excerpts:

Late Wednesday afternoon, the Arkansas Supreme Court released a unanimous decision holding the voter ID law passed earlier this year in violation of the state’s constitution. The judges wrote: “The legislature can not, under color of regulating the manner of holding elections…impose such restrictions as will have the effect to take away the right to vote as secured by the constitution.”

“We are extremely pleased,” lead attorney Jeff Priebe told ThinkProgress. “This decision really shows the importance of voting. The Arkansas Constitution holds that the right to vote is a fundamental right, the gateway to all others. It’s so important that we can’t erect additional qualifications that would keep people from voting.”

The ruling affirms a lower court ruling back in April, saying the law is “unconstitutional on its face.”

[T]he Arkansas case turned on a purely technical question: can the legislature add any more requirements to vote than those already listed in the state’s constitution? The court said today they cannot. 

The judges went on to quote Democratic Governor Mike Beebe calling the law “an expensive solution in search of a problem” and “an unnecessary measure that would negatively impact one of our most precious rights as citizens.”

In the case, Priebe and the Arkansas American Civil Liberties Union represented four registered voters in Pulaski County who lacked a valid ID and would thus be disenfranchised in the upcoming midterm election.

“These voters will now be able to cast a ballot in the November general election that will be counted,” he told ThinkProgress. “And countless others will be able to cast a ballot and they won’t have to jump through any hoops to get an ID.”

Panel of Federal Judges Declares Gerrymandered 3rd District Unconstitutional

The GOP approach to winning elections is to (i) disenfranchise as many voters as possible who might vote for Democrats and (ii) shamelessly gerrymander districts to protect Republicans.  The Virginia GOP has carefully implemented these nefarious methods.  The husband and I used to live in Virginia's 2nd congressional district until the GOP controlled House of Delegates redrew the lines of the district to protect GOP incumbent Scott Rigell.  Then suddenly, we found ourselves in the 3rd congressional district which had been carefully drawn to pack blacks into a single district and thereby improve the chances of GOP candidates in surrounding districts.  The map above shows the ridiculous boundaries of the 3rd district as redrawn.   Now, a panel of federal judges has declared the district as redrawn to be unconstitutional and ordered the General Assembly to revise it by next spring.  Sadly, that will not benefit voters in elections next month.  Both the Virginian Pilot and the Washington Post have details.  Here are highlights from the Pilot:

In a decision with potential implications for Virginia's congressional delegation, three federal judges ruled Tuesday that the lines of the state's 3rd Congressional District were drawn in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

The panel of judges allowed next month's election to proceed under the existing district lines, but ordered the General Assembly to redraw them by April 1, in time for the next congressional election in 2016.

The 3rd District is the only one of Virginia's 11 congressional districts with an African American majority. It has been represented since 1992 by Rep. Bobby Scott, a Newport News Democrat who is unopposed in the Nov. 4 election.

In a 2-1 decision, the judges agreed with the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed a year ago that the congressional redistricting plan adopted by the Republican-controlled Assembly in 2012 amounted to racial gerrymandering, packing African American voters into Scott's district and leaving adjoining districts safer for their Republican incumbents.

Moreover, the judges said, the 3rd District is marked by "an odd shape and a composition of a disparate chain of communities, predominantly African American, loosely connected by the James River."

The district, which stretches from Norfolk to Richmond, is the least-compact district in Virginia and splits more city and county boundaries than any other district, the judges said.

In order to comply with the panel's ruling, the legislature might have to pull some Democratic-leaning voters out of Scott's district and redistribute them to surrounding districts, possibly creating less-hospitable electoral terrain for Republican Reps. Randy Forbes of Chesapeake and Scott Rigell of Virginia Beach.

The Washington Post notes in part as follows:

Michael Kelly, a spokesman for Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D), said state lawyers were “reviewing the decision and assessing its impact and how best to move forward.” The attorney general’s office, in consultation with the Department of Elections, will decide whether to appeal, he said.

But there was broad agreement Tuesday that, if the decision is not appealed, its impact could ripple across several districts in the state. Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report tweeted this on Tuesday: “Depending on how VA’s map is redrawn for 2016, the big loser here could be #VA04 Rep. Randy Forbes (R).”

Republican reaction to the ruling was muted; a spokesman for Virginia House Speaker William J. Howell (Stafford) declined to comment. But privately, some members of the GOP conceded that the redrawn map would probably make at least one and possibly several heavily GOP districts competitive for Democrats. If the state doesn’t appeal, the General Assembly would address the process when it reconvenes in January.

Republicans and Democrats would be taking a big risk if they did not find a way to come to an agreement. If the GOP-controlled legislature did not pass a plan that McAuliffe would be willing to sign, more uncertainty could ensue: A veto from McAuliffe would send the map to the courts for the judges to redraw.

 Sadly, the Virginia GOP has become a coven of religious extremists and open racists that opposes rights for minorities of all stripes and which seeks to infuse Christofascist religious beliefs into the laws of the Commonwealth.  To truly move forward, Virginia needs to see the Virginia GOP as it currently exists wither and die.

Republican Councilman: Explains Racist Facebook Posts: 'I Was A Very Active Republican'

GOP Facebook post - he was simply being a "very active Republican"

When not condemning gays, Republicans and their hate disseminating Christofascist/Tea Party party base seem obsessed with stirring up racism and encouraging white supremacists to work to disenfranchise minority voters and anyone else deemed :other."  Of course, when confronted, these people usually deny their agenda, but once in a while one finds a Republican who is honest about the racism that is now a pillar of the GOP.  A case in point?  Poplar Bluff, Missouri, councilman Peter Tinsley who explained his racist Facebook post by saying that he was just being "a very active Republican." No doubt Tinsley also sees himself as a  "godly Christian" since no one hates others more than the godly folk be they members of ISIS or a local Southern Baptist congregation.  Talking Points Memo looks at the mysognmy:

A Republican city councilman in Missouri apologized this week for posting racist messages about President Obama on Facebook, citing his own strong engagement with the Republican Party as the reason behind his actions.

According to television station KFVS, Poplar Bluff, Mo., councilman Peter Tinsley's offensive posts were brought up during a city council meeting on Monday night. Tinsley apologized for his behavior, saying he didn't intend to offend anyone when he made those posts last year, reported KFVS.

"I apologize from the bottom of my heart," Tinsley said. "At one time, I was a very active republican, very opposed to Obama."

KFVS reported that Tinsley's justification for posting the photos upset fellow Republicans and prompted another apology.

"I want people to know that I am very remorseful for it," Tinsley told KFVS. "That it was inappropriate. I believe I got caught up in an emotional moment of sharing jokes and at the time it seemed funny but today it's, it's, it's very serious and it's not funny at all. … That anything that I have said, that I referred to the activity because I was a Republican, that is not true. It's not an excuse, " Tinsley said.

Tinsley's efforts to shield the GOP are disingenuous.  Locally, a GOP chairman had to resign after disseminating racist "jokes" and just recently the Treasurer f the Republican Party of Virginia resigned after making anti-Muslim statements.  This behavior is the norm, not the exception.

The GOP’s War on Voters Continues in Virginia

With demographic changes in Virginia continuing to trend strongly against the Virginia GOP's long term status as a major political party outside of rural backwaters and select white neighborhoods, rather than shift its extremist agenda to remain competitive, the Virginia GOP continues its war to disenfranchise as many voters it deems hostile to its extreme policies.   The main targets are minority voters, of course since nowadays most good Virginia Republicans might just as well be card carrying members of the KKK, and young voters and the elderly.  All of these efforts are being taken under the guise of preventing voter fraud even though there is zero evidence that voter fraud exists.  The truth is that it is all about keeping those who don't subscribe to the GOP's steal from the poor to give to the rich and religiously extreme agenda from voting if at all possible.  A main editorial in the Washington Post looks at the continuing GOP effort to disenfranchise voters.  Here are highlights:

IN 2012, Republican lawmakers in Virginia changed a decade-old state law that allowed registered voters without identification to cast ballots if they signed a sworn statement attesting to their identity. Mindful that there was no compelling reason for the change — there was zero evidence of in-person voting fraud — they cushioned its impact by allowing voters to present any one of an array of IDs, including bank statements and utility bills. They also authorized a $2.2 million public relations campaign to make sure voters got the word. 

Then GOP lawmakers went for broke. In what amounts to an unadvertised blitzkrieg aimed at young and minority voters, they enacted another law, effective this year, requiring voters to present photo IDs at the polls — and not just any photo IDs. Even if they have registered without a hitch, Virginians may now be blocked from casting regular ballots if their photo ID expired more than a year ago, if they moved to the state recently and have only an out-of-state driver’s license, if all they have is a photo ID from a private high school, if they attend college out of state and present a photo ID from that institution, or . . . .
 
The point is clear. At least 200,000 active voters in Virginia lack driver’s licenses, and many of them may also lack other photo IDs that the state now may consider valid for the purpose of voting. If the Republicans’ goal was to disenfranchise those voters, they have done a fine job.

Putting aside their partisan agenda — to impede voting by certain groups that lean Democrat — the illogic of their project is breathtaking. Bank and utility statements, paychecks and other non-photo forms of ID remain sufficient to register to vote and to receive voter registration cards in Virginia. But those same forms of identification no longer will suffice at polling stations; nor will voter registration cards (which have no photo).

Republican lawmakers note that registrars’ offices will issue voters a free photo ID. But many voters who work full-time would have trouble finding the time or means to get to these offices, which are closed weekends and evenings.

The campaign to tighten voter ID rules has accelerated for several years under GOP auspices, mainly in Southern states. It calls attention to the party’s increasing identification with and reliance on older and whiter portions of the nation’s electorate, which are shrinking. By trying to negate the electoral effects of demographic change, Republicans are digging themselves deeper into a hole of their own making.

Federal Court Strikes Down Wisconsin Voter ID Law

As noted before here, as it panders to dwindling numbers of angry white conservatives, one of the GOP's top agenda items has been to pass voter ID laws and other restrictions that have the effect of disenfranchising the poor and others which the GOP deems likely to vote for Democrats.  Virginia has passed such legislation under the guise of "preventing voter fraud" even though no problem of voter fraud has been documented to exist outside the minds of the GOP base which views only white, conservative Christians as "real Americans."  Yesterday, a federal court saw Wisconsin's voter ID law for what it really was and ruled that it was unconstitutional and in violation of the Voting Rights Act.  Hopefully, the ruling will be the first of many that strike down GOP efforts to disenfranchise citizens. Here are excerpts from the New York Times on the ruling:

A federal judge on Tuesday struck down Wisconsin’s law requiring voters to produce state-approved photo identification cards at polling places, advancing a new legal basis — the Voting Rights Act — for similar challenges playing out around the nation.

Judge Lynn Adelman, of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, found that the state’s 2011 law violated the 14th Amendment of the Constitution as well as the Voting Rights Act, which bars states from imposing rules that abridge a citizen’s right to vote based on race or color.

“I find that the plaintiffs have shown that the disproportionate impact of the photo ID requirement results from the interaction of the requirement with the effects of past or present discrimination,” Judge Adelman wrote in the decision. “Blacks and Latinos in Wisconsin are disproportionately likely to live in poverty. Individuals who live in poverty are less likely to drive or participate in other activities for which a photo ID may be required (such as banking, air travel, and international travel) and so they obtain fewer benefits from possession of a photo ID than do individuals who can afford to participate in these activities.”

In Wisconsin, the photo identification requirement approved by Gov. Scott Walker and his fellow Republicans who control the State Legislature was already delayed following rulings in state court. But Judge Adelman’s finding citing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, more often a factor in cases related to redistricting, is certain to draw note from those involved in other voter identification challenges, including cases brought by the Department of Justice in North .Carolina and Texas . . . . 

[O]pponents, who say the laws are really aimed at suppressing the turnout of Democrats, have been buoyed by a series of recent court rulings, including a state court finding in January striking down Pennsylvania’s law and another last week in Arkansas, which found the law there in violation of the state’s Constitution.

[T]he order posed an immediate challenge for state Republican leaders who had earlier indicated they might soon call a special session to approve a revised law — one that could presumably pass court muster and go into effect before this year’s elections, which include the governor’s race.

Judge Adelman enjoined the state from requiring voters to provide identification cards, and required officials to seek legal approval of any revised law. The judge pledged to expedite hearings on any rewritten law, but wrote that “it is difficult to see how an amendment to the photo ID requirement could remove its disproportionate racial impact and discriminatory result.”