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Voter caging involves challenging the registration status of voters and calling into question the legality of allowing them to vote. Usually it involves sending mail directly to registered voters and compiling a list from mail returned undelivered. Undeliverable mail is seen as proof that the person no longer resides at the address on their voter registration. The resultant list is then used by election officials to purge names from the voter registration rolls or to challenge voters' eligibility to vote on the grounds that the voters no longer reside at their registered addresses.
Merrick Brian Garland is an American lawyer and jurist serving as the 86th United States attorney general since March 2021. He served as a circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1997 to 2021.
The National Ballot Security Task Force (BSTF) was a controversial group founded in 1981 in New Jersey, United States by the Republican National Committee (RNC) as a means of intimidating voters and discouraging voter turnout among likely Democratic voters in the gubernatorial election. The group's activities prompted the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to bring a federal lawsuit, alleging a violation of the Voting Rights Act, illegal harassment, and voter intimidation. The RNC and New Jersey Republican State Committee entered into a consent decree in 1982, barring them from engaging in further such conduct. The RNC unsuccessfully tried to lift the consent decree several times over the next 25 years; these attempts were rejected by the federal courts each time. However, in 2009, the US District Court of New Jersey agreed to several modifications of the consent decree, including the addition of an expiration date. That date was set for December 1, 2017. Democrats sought an extension of the consent decree based on allegations of new conduct, but the request was denied in January 2018 and the decree expired.
Hans Anatol von Spakovsky is an American attorney and a former member of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). He is the manager of the Heritage Foundation's Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow in Heritage's Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. He is an advocate for more restrictive voting laws. He has been described as playing an influential role in making unfounded concern about voter fraud mainstream in the Republican Party. His work, which claims voting fraud is rampant, is controversial as it has been found to be fraught with misleading statistics.
The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law is a nonprofit law and public policy institute. The organization is named after Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. Generally considered liberal, the Brennan Center advocates for a number of progressive public policy positions, including raising the minimum wage, opposing voter ID laws, and calling for public funding of elections. The organization opposed the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, which held that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent political expenditures by nonprofits.
Bradley Joseph Schlozman is an American attorney who served as acting head of the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. A member of the Republican Party, Schlozman was appointed by Gonzales as the interim U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, replacing Todd Graves, and he assumed that office on March 23, 2006. In April 2007, Schlozman left the U.S. Attorney position to work at the Executive Office for United States Attorneys.
John Christian Adams is an American attorney and conservative activist formerly employed by the United States Department of Justice under the George W. Bush administration. Since leaving the DOJ, Adams has become notable for making alarmist and false claims about the extent of voter fraud in the United States. He has falsely accused a number of legitimate voters of being fraudulent, and has published information about them online, including Social Security numbers.
Voter ID laws in the United States are laws that require a person to provide some form of official identification before they are permitted to register to vote, receive a ballot for an election, or to actually vote in elections in the United States.
Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States regarding the constitutionality of two provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965: Section 5, which requires certain states and local governments to obtain federal preclearance before implementing any changes to their voting laws or practices; and Section 4(b), which contains the coverage formula that determines which jurisdictions are subject to preclearance based on their histories of discrimination in voting.
Voter suppression in the United States is various legal and illegal efforts to prevent eligible voters from exercising their right to vote. Where found, such voter suppression efforts vary by state, local government, precinct, and election. Voter suppression has historically been used for racial, gender, age and disability discrimination. Before and during the American Civil War, African-Americans had not been able to vote. After the Civil War, all African-Americans were granted voting rights, causing some Southern Democrats and former Confederate states to institute actions such as poll taxes or language tests that were ostensibly not in contradiction to the U.S. Constitution at the time, but were used to limit and suppress voting access. African Americans' access to registration and voting was often difficult until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and continues to be a subject of debate. American women did not have a constitutionally protected right to vote until the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, while Native Americans' right to vote was not enacted fully until 1924 with the Indian Citizenship Act. Until 1971, with the passage of the Twenty-sixth Amendment, the minimum voting age in the United states was 21, not 18. A constitutional amendment improving voting accessibility for the elderly and handicapped was passed in 1984. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as of March 24, 2021, more than 361 bills that would restrict voting access have been introduced in 47 states.
John Harold Merrill is an American politician serving as the 53rd secretary of state of Alabama since 2015. He served in the Alabama House of Representatives from 2010 through 2014. Merrill is a member of the Republican Party.
Voter impersonation, also sometimes called in-person voter fraud, is a form of electoral fraud in which a person who is eligible to vote in an election votes more than once, or a person who is not eligible to vote does so by voting under the name of an eligible voter. In the United States, voter ID laws have been enacted in a number of states by Republican legislatures and governors since 2010 with the purported aim of preventing voter impersonation. Existing research and evidence shows that voter impersonation is extremely rare. Between 2000 and 2014, there were only 31 documented instances of voter impersonation. There is no evidence that it has changed the result of any election. In April 2020, a voter fraud study covering 20 years by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found the level of mail-in ballot fraud "exceedingly rare" since it occurs only in "0.00006 percent" of instances nationally, and, in one state, "0.000004 percent — about five times less likely than getting hit by lightning in the United States."
The 2020 United States redistricting cycle is in progress following the completion of the 2020 United States census. In all fifty states, various bodies will re-draw state legislative districts. States that are apportioned more than one seat in the United States House of Representatives will also draw new districts for that legislative body.
Albert Turner was an American civil rights activist and an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. He was Alabama field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and helped lead the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery; he was beaten on Bloody Sunday.
The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, also called the Voter Fraud Commission, was a Presidential Commission established by Donald Trump that ran from May 11, 2017 to January 3, 2018. The Trump administration said the commission would review claims of voter fraud, improper registration, and voter suppression. The establishment of the commission followed Trump's false claim that millions of illegal immigrants had voted in the 2016 presidential election, costing him the popular vote. Vice President Mike Pence was chosen as chair of the commission and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach was its vice chair and day-to-day administrator.
The For the People Act, introduced as H.R. 1, is a bill in the United States Congress intended to expand voting rights, change campaign finance laws to reduce the influence of money in politics, ban partisan gerrymandering, and create new ethics rules for federal officeholders.
After the 2020 United States presidential election, the campaign for incumbent President Donald Trump and others filed and lost at least 63 lawsuits contesting election processes, vote counting, and the vote certification process in multiple states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Among the judges who dismissed the lawsuits were some appointed by Trump himself.
Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, 594 U.S. ___ (2021), was a United States Supreme Court case related to voting rights established by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), and specifically the applicability of Section 2's general provision barring discrimination against minorities in state and local election laws in the wake of the 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder, which removed the preclearance requirements for election laws for certain states that had been set by Sections 4(b) and 5. The case deals with two of Arizona's election policies: one outlawing ballot collection and another banning out-of-precinct voting. The Supreme Court ruled in a 6–3 decision in July 2021 that neither of Arizona's election policies violated the VRA or had a racially discriminatory purpose.
Following the 2020 United States presidential election and the unsuccessful attempts by Donald Trump and various other Republican officials to overturn it, Republican lawmakers initiated a sweeping effort to make voting laws more restrictive within several states across the country. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as of October 4, 2021, more than 425 bills that would restrict voting access have been introduced in 49 states—with 33 of these bills enacted across 19 states so far. The bills are largely centered around limiting mail-in voting, strengthening voter ID laws, shortening early voting, eliminating automatic and same-day voter registration, curbing the use of ballot drop boxes, and allowing for increased purging of voter rolls. Republicans in at least eight states have also introduced bills that would give lawmakers greater power over election administration after they were unsuccessful in their attempts to overturn election results in swing states won by Democratic candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Law Forward is an American non-profit legal advocacy organization based in Madison, Wisconsin. Jeff Mandell and Doug Poland founded Law Forward in October 2020. Poland was notable for his role as a lead trial attorney in Gill v. Whitford, a major 2018 U.S. Supreme Court case involving the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering.
References
- 1 2 3 "Justin Levitt". Loyola Law School. Retrieved 16 February 2016.
- 1 2 3 "Professor Justin Levitt Named to U.S. Department of Justice Post Overseeing Voting". Loyola Law School. 10 September 2015. Retrieved 16 February 2016.
- ↑ Sewell, Abby (22 October 2014). "L.A. County OKs contract to design new touch-screen voting system". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 16 February 2016.
- ↑ Horwitz, Sari (13 January 2016). "For government's top lawyer on voting rights, presidential election has begun". Washington Post. Retrieved 16 February 2016.
- ↑ Levitt, Justin (6 August 2014). "A comprehensive investigation of voter impersonation finds 31 credible incidents out of one billion ballots cast". Washington Post. Retrieved 16 February 2016.
- ↑ Portnoy, Jenna (4 August 2015). "Gov. McAuliffe leads Democratic effort to redraw House districts". Washington Post. Retrieved 16 February 2016.
- ↑ "The voter-fraud commission relies on some really dodgy studies". The Economist. Retrieved 2017-08-01.
- ↑ "In-Person Voter Fraud Myth, Justin Levitt Before Senate Committee | Brennan Center for Justice". www.brennancenter.org. Retrieved 2017-08-01.
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