Tag: Voting

Good News, Everyone!

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A proposal to create an independent redistricting commission will appear on the November ballot, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled late Tuesday in a closely watched case.

The 4-3 decision is rife with political implications in Michigan, where Republicans have maintained or grown congressional and legislative advantages since last drawing the state’s political boundaries in 2011.

Volunteers with the Voters Not Politicians committee gathered nearly 400,000 valid signatures to put the anti-gerrymandering plan before voters. The Board of State Canvassers certified the group’s petitions, but the proposal was challenged as being overly broad.

In a split decision, the state’s highest court ruled that voter-initiated proposals are permissible if they do not “significantly alter or abolish the form or structure of our government, making it tantamount to creating a new constitution.”

The redistricting proposal “surpasses these hurdles,” Justice David Viviano wrote in the majority opinion. He was joined by fellow Republican appointee Beth Clement and Democratic-nominated Justices Bridget McCormack and Richard Bernstein.

………

The proposal would create a 13-member redistricting commission that would be composed of four Democrats, four Republicans and five independent members who vow they are not affiliated with any major political party. The secretary of state would select the commission members.

More of this.

Supreme Court Rules 5-4: N*****s Shouldn’t Vote

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This morning the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Texas in a dispute alleging that the state’s lawmakers had drawn redistricting maps to discriminate against some of the state’s black and Hispanic residents. By a vote of 5-4, the justices threw out almost all of a ruling by a three-judge federal district court that would have invalidated the maps, agreeing with the lower court only that one state legislative district was a racial gerrymander. Today’s ruling means that elections this year will likely go forward using the existing maps.

 The decision came in the two cases known as Abbott v. Perez, which date back to 2011, when Texas’ Republican-controlled legislature began to redistrict after the 2010 census. The legislature’s federal congressional and state legislative maps never took effect, because a three-judge district court (which normally hears redistricting cases) barred the state from using the maps and created its own plans instead. But the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the court-created maps in 2012, telling the lower court to use the state legislature’s maps as a “starting point” for new maps. The district court did so, and in 2013 the state legislature adopted the maps for permanent use.

Then they kicked the North Carolina redistricting case to the curb:

The Supreme Court passed up an opportunity on Monday to take another look at whether the Constitution bars extreme partisan gerrymandering, returning a case from North Carolina to a trial court there for a further examination of whether the challengers had suffered the sort of direct injury that would give them standing to sue.

The move followed two decisions last week that sidestepped the main issues in partisan gerrymandering cases from Wisconsin and Maryland.

The new case was an appeal from a decision in January by a three-judge panel of a Federal District Court in North Carolina. The ruling found that Republican legislators there had violated the Constitution by drawing the districts to hurt the electoral chances of Democratic candidates.

The decision was the first from a federal court to strike down a congressional map as a partisan gerrymander.

 I’m with Sonya Sotomayor on this one:

It means that, after years of litigation and undeniable proof of intentional discrimination, minority voters in Texas—despite constituting a majority of the population within the State—will continue to be underrepresented in the political process. Those voters must return to the polls in 2018 and 2020 with the knowledge that their ability to exercise meaningfully their right to vote has been burdened by the manipulation of district lines specifically designed to target their communities and minimize their political will.

Let me translate Sotomayor into something more pithy:  The 5 justices who voted to ignore the racism in Texas are a bunch of corrupt ratf%$3s.

I Gotta Figure that Kennedy Called Bullsh%$ on this Appeal

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The other 4 conservatives on the court are political hacks, so the US Supreme Court’s refusal to review the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s redistricting decision was driven by Kennedy ensuring that they would lose, and they did not want to fight a losing battle.

The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a request from Republican legislative leaders in Pennsylvania to block a redrawn congressional map that creates more parity between the political parties in the state.

The practical impact is the 2018 elections are likely to be held under a map much more favorable to Democrats, who scored an apparent victory last week in a special election in a strongly Republican congressional district. The 2011 map that has been used this decade has resulted in Republicans consistently winning 13 of the state’s 18 congressional seats.

Monday’s action was the second time that the court declined to get involved in the partisan battle that has roiled Pennsylvania politics. The commonwealth’s highest court earlier this year ruled that a map drawn by Republican leaders in 2011 “clearly, plainly and palpably” violated the free-and-equal-elections clause of the Pennsylvania Constitution.

The PA court decision was rooted entirely on the Pennsylvania state constitution.

In fact, it could be argued that the Pennsylvania opinion was carefully drafted to avoid any possibility of a federal issue , and as such a Supreme Court review would be highly unusual.

Of course, that didn’t stop Kennedy in Bush v. Gore, but I think that the sh%$ that he got over that may have been a learning experience for him.

November in Pennsylvania should be rather interesting.

The New Pennsylvania Map is Out

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Following the complete inability of the legislature and the governor to agree on come up with something that meets the requirements of the Pennsylvania constitution, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has drawn the new Congressional map, and it appears to be a far fairer map:

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Monday imposed a new congressional district map that upends previous boundaries, renumbers districts across the state and gives a potential boost to Democrats in the 2018 House elections.

Under the court’s redrawn map, districts more closely align with county lines and only 13 counties are split among two or three districts. By contrast, under the last map, enacted by the state legislature in 2011, more than twice as many counties were split among multiple districts.

In striking down that map last month as unconstitutional, the justices said the new districts should be as compact and contiguous as possible. Their new map, they wrote in an order, is “superior or comparable” to proposals submitted by the participants and interested groups during in the legal challenge that led to the historic ruling.

The reconfigured map prompted a sharp rebuke from top Republican legislators, who said honoring it would create a “constitutional crisis.” Extending a political clash that has roiled the state for months, they said they might challenge the map — or the justices’ authority to impose it — in federal court as early as Tuesday.

The US Supreme Court has already declined to review this, since the ruling is under the aegis of the Pennsylvania constitution, so I see it as somewhat unlikely that a Federal court overruling this.

The only way that I see an injunction is if the Supreme Court reverses itself and agrees to take the case directly.

They gave the legislature and governor an opportunity (albeit a short time) to come together on this, and they failed, so the court had to draw their own map.

Good News Everyone!

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Good news everyone!


I invented a device that makes you read this in your head using my voice!

In a shocking outbreak of judicial integrity, Justice Samuel Alito, who covers appeals from Pennsylvania, has refused to issue an injunction against the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling which requires an immediate redistricting:

The Supreme Court on Monday denied a request from Pennsylvania Republicans to delay redrawing congressional lines, meaning the 2018 elections in the state will most likely be held in districts far more favorable to Democrats.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court last month ruled that the state’s Republican legislative leaders had violated the state Constitution by unfairly favoring the GOP. Although there are more registered Democrats than Republicans in the state, Republicans hold 13 of 18 congressional seats.

The GOP leaders asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, but Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. turned down their request for a stay without even referring the case to his colleagues. He gave no reason for the decision, but generally the Supreme Court stays out of the way when a state’s highest court is interpreting its own state constitution.

That sound you hear is political consultants frantically updating their spreadsheets and their voter roll databases.

Here Is Hoping the SCOTUS Will Leave This One to the States

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Of particular interest is the fact that they ruled solely on the state constitution, which means that, assuming that the US Supreme Court doesn’t pull some sort of bogus law out of its ass,* this ruling will stand.

In a decision that could tilt the congressional balance of power in a key swing state in favor of Democrats, Pennsylvania’s highest court decided Monday that the state’s GOP-drawn congressional districts violate its Constitution, and ordered all 18 districts redrawn in the next few weeks.

Less partisan congressional districts could give Democrats a chance this November to win back as many as half a dozen seats that had been lost to them over the past decade. It could also give the party a major boost in its quest to take back the House of Representatives, where Democrats need to net 24 seats to win control of the chamber.

………

In a 4-to-3 decision, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ordered the Republican-controlled state legislature to redraw the lines by Feb. 9, an extraordinarily quick timeline that will reset the districts in time for the state’s May congressional primaries. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf will have veto power over the maps.

………

How the court reached its decision is just as significant as what they decided. This is the second court case in recent weeks to throw out electoral lines because they were drawn to favor one party’s voters over another, decisions that have mostly benefited Democrats.

………

Monday’s case wasn’t the only one involving Pennsylvania’s maps. A three-judge panel on a federal court recently sided with Republicans, though Pildes and other legal experts think Monday’s state Supreme Court decision will be the final word.

Legal analysts also weren’t sure that appealing to the Supreme Court is a possibility, given that Pennsylvania’s state court ruled that the lines violated the state Constitution. The Supreme Court has never thrown out a state’s redistricting plan because of extreme partisan gerrymandering.

(emphasis mine)

The thing to watch for here is whether or not the US Supreme Court issues an injunction, which would indicate that a significant portion of the court is planning to do some seriously partisan bullsh%$.

*Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000)

Racist Voter Suppression Much?

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The now (thankfully) shuttered “voter fraud” commission wanted a list of Texas voters with Hispanic names flagged:

President Trump’s voting commission asked every state and the District for detailed voter registration data, but in Texas’s case it took an additional step: It asked to see Texas records that identify all voters with Hispanic surnames, newly released documents show.

 In buying nearly 50 million records from the state with the nation’s second-largest Hispanic population, a researcher for the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity checked a box on two Texas public voter data request forms explicitly asking for the “Hispanic surname flag notation,” to be included in information sent to the voting commission, according to copies of the signed and notarized state forms.

 White House and Texas officials said the state’s voter data was never delivered because a lawsuit brought by Texas voting rights advocates after the request last year temporarily stopped any data handoff.

 The voting commission was disbanded Jan. 3 after Trump cited a host of ongoing state and federal lawsuits and resistance from state officials over the sweeping pursuit, in the name of investigating alleged voter fraud, of information about more than 150 million voters across the country. The voting panel said it would destroy all voter data it had gathered, without detailing any data purchases.

 ………

 Texas since 1983 has identified voters with a Hispanic name to mail bilingual election notices in Spanish and English as required by state and federal laws, said Sam Taylor, spokesman for Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos (R). Names are selected from the U.S. Census Bureau’s list of most common surnames by race and Hispanic origin, Taylor said.

 ………

 On the forms sent to Texas by the voting panel, commission policy adviser Ronald Williams II checked a box to flag Hispanic names and signed a notarized form required as part of the overall process to get voter records released.

Kobach and his Evil Minions™ have denied any knowledge of this request.

If you believe them, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Good Riddance

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Kris Koback weeps, because Donald Trump’s bogus vote fraud commission is no more:

President Trump on Wednesday abruptly shut down a White House commission he had charged with investigating voter fraud, ending a brief quest for evidence of election theft that generated lawsuits, outrage and some scholarly testimony, but no real evidence that American elections are at all corrupt.

 Mr. Trump did not acknowledge the commission’s inability to find evidence of fraud, but cast the closing as a result of continuing legal challenges.

 “Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry,” Mr. Trump said in a White House statement.

 “Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action,” he said.

This is a good thing, but not a perfect thing.

A perfect thing would also involve having Kobach frog marched out of the White House in handcuffs.

You Cannot Blame the Deplorables or the Russians for This

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The Pew Research Center just did a study, and it showed that black voter’s turnout fell in 2016.

A record 137.5 million Americans voted in the 2016 presidential election, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Overall voter turnout – defined as the share of adult U.S. citizens who cast ballots – was 61.4% in 2016, a share similar to 2012 but below the 63.6% who say they voted in 2008.

This wasn’t Russian hacking. This wasn’t, as Lamberth Strether sarcastically noted, “Black voters are racist, sexist bros,” this was an incompetent, arrogant, and, uninspiring candidate with a history of winking and nodding to racism. (“They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.”)

This was a candidate who promulgated a Lord of the Flies management style in her campaign which created an incompetent, arrogant, and uninspiring campaign.

And the Democratic party establishment, the incompetent, arrogant, and, uninspiring Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the incompetent, arrogant, and, uninspiring DNC, and the legions of incompetent, arrogant, and, uninspiring consultants pulled out all the stops to fix the primary process for her.

Running against the most racist major Presidential candidate since Woodrow Wilson, somehow, she, and the entire Democratic Party establishment, could not get black voters to turn out.

These are not the people who should be running the Democratic Party. 

These are not consultants who candidates should pay to run their campaigns. 

These are not people who should hold elective office.

They need to go away.

A Mixed Day for Voter Suppression

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First, a Federal judge has ruled that Trump’s voter suppression commission is not required to do a privacy review, allowing them to request data and make no real effort to protect personal data from hackers or other nefarious entities.

It appears that the judge found it irrelevant that the commision had already doxxed people who had made comments.

A federal judge on Monday allowed President Trump’s voting commission to go forward with seeking voter data from 50 states and the District, ruling that the White House advisory panel is exempt from federal privacy review requirements, whatever additional risk it might pose to Americans’ information.

The ruling averted a public setback for a president who has claimed that widespread fraud cost him the popular vote in November. The commission’s request for the voting information of more than 150 million registered voters remains controversial, with many state leaders from both parties voicing objections about its potential to reveal personal information, suppress voter participation and encroach on states’ oversight of voting laws.

The panel’s June 28 letter to the states requested that they turn over “publicly-available voter roll data,” including names, addresses, dates of birth, party registrations, partial Social Security numbers and voting, military, felony and overseas histories, among other data.

In related news, another Federal Judge just just approved sanctions against commission co-chair Kris Kobach for lying to the court:

A federal judge on Tuesday denied Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s request to reconsider a magistrate judge’s sanctions, finding Kobach has shown a pattern of misleading the court in a voting-rights case.
In a ruling issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson refused Kobach’s request to reconsider a $1,000 fine issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge James O’Hara, as well as O’Hara’s order that Kobach submit to a deposition in an ongoing case between the secretary of state and the American Civil Liberties Union over Kansas’ requirement of proof of citizenship for registered voters.

 O’Hara sanctioned Kobach for misleading the court regarding the nature of voting-policy documents he was photographed with in a November meeting with President Donald Trump. The top sheet of the documents visibly showed suggested policy changes to the National Voter Registration Act which had been requested by the ACLU. After a review, O’Hara ordered Kobach to hand over the documents after finding them relevant to the case.

 Kobach fought the order, arguing they were protected by Trump’s executive privilege and attorney-client privilege since an attorney in Kobach’s office had seen them. When he did hand them over, he marked the documents as confidential, a classification the ACLU is currently trying to overturn in an effort to make them public.

 In her ruling, Robinson used three examples of Kobach’s previous behavior to chide him for habitually making misleading statements.

Heck of a commission there, huh.

This is a Grammatically Correct Use of the Term Irony

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Donald Trump has commissioned vote fraud commission to prove that he actually won the popular vote in 2016. (Yes, this is Narcissistic insanity)

He has appointed prominent figures in the voter suppression movement including Kansas Secretary of State Kris Korbach and Hans “Der novotenführer” von Spakovsky, whose primary goal has been to keep blacks and Hispanics from voting, primarily through purging them from voter rolls.

This commission is a clear attempt to go national with the voter purges in an attempt to gain partisan political advantage, and, in an attempt to go national programs to disenfranchise minorities.

Basically, the commission will manufacture data, and then manufacture outrage, and use this to jump start national legislation to suppress minority voting.

This is clear to anyone with two brain cells to rub together, so when the commission requested complete voter registration data from the states and the District of Columbia, over half of the states election officials have told the commission to go pound sand.

It turns out that, due to vagaries in state election law, one of the Secretaries of State that is telling Kris Korbach to go pound sand, is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Korbach:

Kris Kobach, the co-chair of Donald Trump’s glorious Find The Five Million Illegals Who Voted For Hillary Commission, has been running into a bit of pushback to his letter asking all 50 states to submit detailed voter information to be used in a great big study that would supposedly root out all the voter fraud. At least 25 states have said they won’t or can’t comply — or will not submit all the data Kobach requested, either because they’re restricted by state law, or they don’t trust the commission, which is expected to skew the data to support Republican claims of massive voter fraud, and to recommend restrictions on voting rights.

Among the states that won’t be giving the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity” all the data Kris Kobach wants is Kansas, where Secretary of State Kris Kobach explained that under state law, he can’t release the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers. The state will release all other information requested in the letter, like voters’ names, addresses, dates of birth, voting history, party affiliation, and felony criminal history. Kobach explained,

 “If the commission decides that they would like to receive Social Security numbers to a secure site in order to remove false positives, then we would have to double check and make sure Kansas law permits,” Kobach said.

“I know for a fact that this information would be secured and maintained confidentially,” he added in response to security concerns.

He happens to personally know the commission’s co-chair, after all, and he trusts Kris Kobach not to pull any funny stuff.

 Several other states, however, know exactly who Kris Kobach is, and have decided not to play along with Kobach, like Virginia, where Gov. Terry McAulliffe issued a statement saying

This entire commission is based on the specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last November […] At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.

Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, was a bit more blunt. His statement not only said Mississippi wouldn’t comply with the request for voter records, he also told Kobach that while he hadn’t yet received the letter, based on the copies he’d seen, his reply to the commission would be “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from.”

(emphasis mine)

I think there is a method to Republican madness here: They want to institute nationwide voter suppression, and they are using Trumps ego to push this whole effort along.

Unlike prior Republican Presidents, who had the hubris to believe that they could pick the lock of the minority vote, Trump is personally hurt by the 2.8+ million voter deficit, and really believes that this was from widespread voter fraud.

As such, Trump is the perfect patient zero for the plague of voter suppression.

Well, Here is Some Good News to Start the Month

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The Supreme Court just remanded the Virginia redistricting case back to a lower court with instructions to apply a more rigorous standard regarding racial bias.

It wasn’t a complete victory, but it was a definite win for the good guys:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday gave Virginia Democrats a fresh chance to challenge parts of the legislative map for the state’s House of Delegates.

………

“The upshot of all of this is that not much has changed with these cases,” Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in a blog post. “The fight will be over the details and application to particular cases.”

Marc E. Elias, a lawyer for the challengers in the case, disagreed, calling the decision a “major victory” that will help Democrats.

………

In 2015, a divided three-judge panel of Federal District Court in Richmond, Va., upheld 11 of the challenged districts because, it said, race had not been the primary factor in drawing them. Since the districts could be justified under traditional redistricting criteria like compactness, contiguity, incumbency protection and political considerations, the court said, race could not have been the predominant reason for drawing them.

That was the wrong approach, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority. “The racial predominance inquiry concerns the actual considerations that provided the essential basis for the lines drawn,” he wrote, “not post hoc justifications the legislature in theory could have used but in reality did not.”

………

In assessing those challenges, Justice Kennedy wrote, the trial court identified “no fewer than 11 race neutral redistricting factors.” He called that kind of analysis too malleable.

“By deploying those factors in various combinations and permutations, a state could construct a plethora of potential maps that look consistent with traditional, race-neutral principles,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “But if race for its own sake is the overriding reason for choosing one map over others, race still may predominate.”

Justice Kennedy did not say the challengers would win under his less rigid standard. “The district court,” he wrote, “is best positioned to determine in the first instance the extent to which, under the proper standard, race directed the shape of these 11 districts.”

The Supreme Court affirmed one part of the trial court’s ruling, concerning a single district, which the trial court had upheld even after finding that race played the dominant role in drawing it. The trial court said the district was justified by an attempt to comply with the Voting Rights Act, which forbade the reduction of minority voters’ ability to elect candidates of their choice.

Redistricting is still a mess, but it is a bit less of a mess, and it appears that racial Gerrymanders have become more difficult.

Canny Political Move

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Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein has filed for a recount for Wisconsin, and is raising money for similar challenges in Pennsylvania and Michigan.

She is looking to raise something north of $7 million in her efforts, and there is a good chance that she will hit that target.

Of course, Stein and the Green Party do not directly benefit from such a challenge, they will have lost in all three states at the end of any count, but this action grants her, and the Green Party, some much needed publicity, and at the end of the day, she will have a list of those people who donated to the cause.

Those donors are a well that she, and the Green Party, can return to at a later date.

It is a no lose situation for Stein and the Greens.

I Expect Trump’s Supreme Court to Overturn This on Appeal

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A federal court has just ruled that Wisconsin’s state house district are an unconstitutional Gerrymander:

A panel of federal judges on Monday ruled that Wisconsin’s 2011 legislative redistricting plan, created by Republican leaders virtually in secret, is an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

The map “was intended to burden the representational rights of Democratic voters … by impeding their ability to translate their votes into legislative seats,” wrote federal appeals court Judge Kenneth Ripple, the senior judge on the three-judge panel, adding that “the discriminatory effect is not explained by the political geography of Wisconsin nor is it justified by a legitimate state interest.

“Consequently, Act 43 constitutes an unconstitutional political gerrymander,” Ripple wrote.

The 116-page decision, with a 40-page dissent from U.S. District Judge William Griesbach, was issued several months after the panel heard testimony in federal court in Madison. U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb, the third judge on the panel, joined Ripple in the court’s 2-1 decision.

………

The Democrats contend they have found a way to measure unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders designed to give a “large and durable” advantage in elections to one party — a measure the U.S. Supreme Court said was lacking in previous redistricting cases. The measure, called the efficiency gap, shows how cracking (breaking up blocs of Democratic voters) and packing (concentrating Democrats within certain districts) results in wasted votes — excess votes for the winners in safe districts and perpetually inadequate votes for the losers.

Lawyers for the Democrats said the 2011 plan, which changed boundaries for all of the state’s Congressional and state Senate and Assembly districts, was drawn specifically to disenfranchise Democratic voters.

Republicans have countered that as the majority party, they can draw the maps any way they choose, short of creating districts that disenfranchise racial minorities.

I really hope that the ruling sticks, but I expect that whatever partisan hack that Trump appoints to be on the prevailing side of a 5-4 decision saying that the voters can go Cheney themselves.

Cold Feet and the End of the World

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On Tuesday, I did early voting, and I had cold feet.  ……… Literally.

It was a long line, about half an hour long , with the first 20 minutes being outside, and my feet got cold.

All things considered, the line actually went fairly quickly.

One interesting thing:  when I signed it, the volunteer asked how long it took, and I checked on my phone to get the elapsed time.

I then dropped my phone, which landed on the table with a loud bang, and Everyone in the room jumped.

Poll workers are on edge this year.

As an FYI, since I live in Maryland, so my vote doesn’t count, I wrote in Bernie Sanders for President.

As to the end of the world, I’m not talking about Donald Trump, but the fact that the Cubs have won the World Series for the first time in 107 years.

Congratulations to the new champs.

This is Some Quality Trolling

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In an apparent move to embarrass the United States over Donald Trump’s claims of a “rigged” presidential election, Russia sought to send monitors to U.S. polling stations for the Nov. 8 vote, Russian media revealed Thursday.

The bid was sharply rebuffed by the State Department, and one state election official threatened criminal action if Russian monitors showed up, according to state-controlled Izvestia daily and broadcaster RT.

State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner called the Russian effort a “PR stunt” and denied that the United States blocked Russian diplomats from observing the election.

A spokeswoman for Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler, who received a request to allow Russian monitors, called it a “propaganda ploy.”

“We’ve allowed observers from overseas in the past from other countries, never from Russia,” Meg Casper said. She added that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security also “told us not to do this.”

This is world class trolling, as evidenced by the stupid and self destructive response from the State Department.

The best trolls say something that seems eminently reasonable that triggers a conflict and makes the targets look like complete stooges.

Well played, Vladimir.

The Bull Durham Rule of Constitutional Law

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Do not call the judge a C%$# Sucker.

On the issue of voting rights, the state of Texas has left a Federal Court Judge profoundly unamused:

Texas violated a court order intended to preserve voting rights. And it got caught.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department informed a federal court that Texas is violating a recent court order that sought to keep the state from disenfranchising voters. After an appeals court struck down the state’s voter ID law, a common form of voter suppression favored by conservative lawmakers, the state agreed to be bound by an order that would permit voters to cast a ballot in the 2016 election if they “cannot reasonably obtain” photo ID.

Despite this order, Texas published press releases, voter education materials, and training manuals for poll workers that effectively stated that a voter without ID cannot vote unless it is literally impossible for that voter to obtain a photo ID. Thus, for example, a voter who had to make multiple day long trips to a government office and make burdensome document requests to obtain an ID would not be able to vote, under Texas’ standard, unless that voter was willing to jump through all of these considerable hoops.

On Tuesday, Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos, the judge overseeing this case, weighed in on Texas’ defiance of the court order. And, if the order she issued on Tuesday is any indication, she’s pissed.

………

Among other things, the Tuesday order requires Texas to “re-issue its press releases concerning voting to properly reflect the language in the Court’s Order,” to “edit the poster to be printed and placed at polling locations to accurately reflect the language in the Court’s Order,” and to “edit digital materials on its website page(s) that address voting rights and procedures, including titles or headlines and FAQs” to bring them into compliance with the original court order.

Significantly, the Tuesday order also provides that “the State of Texas shall provide to counsel for all Plaintiffs scripts and copy for documents and advertisements that have not yet been published for review and objection prior to publication.” As a practical matter, this gives the Justice Department (as well as the private plaintiffs in this case) the power to read over and object to new elections related materials before those materials are published.

You read that right:  The judge put the state of Texas back under a pre-clearance regime, at least this year.

Oh snap.

Once Again, Scalia Makes the World a Better Place by His Absence

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The Supreme Court will not allow North Carolina’s voter suppression law to be in force for election day. It was a 4-4 tie:

A deadlocked Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to revive parts of a restrictive North Carolina voting law that a federal appeals court had struck down as an unconstitutional effort to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

The court was divided 4 to 4, with the court’s more conservative members voting to revive parts of the law. The court’s brief order included no reasoning.

North Carolina’s law, which imposed an array of voting restrictions, including new voter identification requirements, was enacted by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2013. It was part of a wave of voting restrictions enacted after a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision that effectively struck down a central part of the federal Voting Rights Act, weakening federal oversight of voting rights.

Challenges to the laws have met with considerable success in recent months, and Wednesday’s development suggested that the current eight-member Supreme Court is not likely to undo those victories.

If Scalia were still on the court, it would be gleefully reinventing Jim Crow.