Ari Berman

7 Ways North Carolina Republicans are Trying to Make it Harder to Vote

Ari Berman on April 5, 2013 - 12:13 PM ET

The voter suppression efforts that spread nationwide during the last election have continued in 2013. Seventy-five new voting restrictions have been introduced in thirty states so far in 2013, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Among all the states, North Carolina, which elected a Republican legislature in 2010 for the first time since the McKinley administration and a Republican governor in 2012, is currently taking voter suppression to brazen new extreme.

New Voter Suppression Efforts Prove the Voting Rights Act Is Still Needed

Ari Berman on March 28, 2013 - 11:57 AM ET

So far this year, fifty-five new voting restrictions have been proposed, including bills requiring government-issued photo ID in many states. (AP Photo/Keith Sracocic.)

In 2011 and 2012, 180 new voting restrictions were introduced in forty-one states. Ultimately, twenty-five laws and two executive actions were passed in nineteen states following the 2010 election to make it harder to vote. In many cases, these laws backfired on their Republican sponsors. The courts blocked ten of them, and young and minority voters—the prime target of the restrictions—formed a larger share of the electorate in 2012 than in 2008.

Voting Rights Are Once Again Challenged at the Supreme Court

Ari Berman on March 18, 2013 - 10:10 AM ET

The Supreme Court will decide the constitutionality of a stringent Arizona voter registration law. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais.)

Three weeks after hearing a challenge to the heart of the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court will decide another important voting rights case following oral arguments today in Arizona v. The Inter Tribal Council of Arizona.

Ad Policy

Congress Honors Rosa Parks While the Supreme Court Targets the Voting Rights Act

Ari Berman on February 27, 2013 - 4:45 PM ET

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act at US Capitol alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Photo: Yoichi R. Okamoto, courtesy Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum

At 11 am, as Congress unveiled a statue honoring Rosa Parks, the civil rights leaders of today (Including Rep. John Lewis, who nearly died in Selma during "Bloody Sunday") were gathered inside the Supreme Court, listening to a challenge to the centerpiece of the Voting Rights Act. The stark contrast illustrated the profound contradictions of American democracy when it comes to race and political power—the progress we’ve made has always been met by equally intense efforts to roll back that progress. And that remains true today, especially on February 27, 2013.

Obama Appoints a Controversial GOP Lawyer to His Voting Commission

Ari Berman on February 12, 2013 - 11:52 PM ET

President Obama embraced the cause of voting rights in his State of the Union speech, which he called “our most fundamental right as citizens,” and spotlighted 102-year-old Desiline Victor, a naturalized Haitian immigrant from Miami who waited three hours—and had to make two trips—to cast a ballot. He also proposed a new voting commission headed by lawyers from the Obama and Romney campaigns.

Here’s what Obama said:

We must all do our part to make sure our God-given rights are protected here at home. That includes our most fundamental right as citizens: the right to vote. When any American—no matter where they live or what their party—are denied that right because they can’t afford to wait for five, six, seven hours just to cast their ballot, we are betraying our ideals. So, tonight, I’m announcing a non-partisan commission to improve the voting experience in America, and it definitely needs improvement. I’m asking two longtime experts in the field, who, by the way, served as the top attorneys for my campaign and for Governor Romney’s campaign, to lead it. We can fix this, and we will. The American people demand it. And so does our democracy.

Election Reform Should Be a Top Priority for the New Congress

Ari Berman on January 23, 2013 - 3:47 PM ET

(Reuters/Lucy Nicholson.)

On two major occasions—during his election-night speech and second inaugural address—President Obama has highlighted the need for election reform. “By the way, we have to fix that,” he said on November 6 about the long lines at the polls in states like Florida. Shortly thereafter, the cause of election reform seemed to fall by the wayside, with more pressing events, such as the Sandy Hook shooting and the fiscal cliff, dominating the news. But Obama returned to the issue on January 21, saying “our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.”

The GOP’s New Voter Suppression Strategy: Gerrymander the Electoral College

Ari Berman on December 10, 2012 - 3:46 PM ET

For a brief time in the fall of 2011, Pennsylvania GOP Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi unveiled a plan to deliver the bulk of his state’s electoral votes to Mitt Romney. Pileggi wanted Pennsylvania to award its electoral votes not via the winner-take-all system in place in forty-eight states but instead based on the winner of each Congressional district. Republicans, by virtue of controlling the redistricting process, held thirteen of eighteen congressional seats in Pennsylvania following the 2012 election. If Pileggi’s plan would have been in place on November 6, 2012, Romney would’ve captured thirteen of Pennsylvania’s twenty Electoral College votes, even though Obama carried the state with 52 percent of the vote.

In the wake of Romney’s defeat and the backfiring of GOP voter suppression efforts, Pileggi is resurrecting his plan (albeit in a slightly different form) and the idea of gerrymandering the Electoral College to boost the 2016 GOP presidential candidate is spreading to other GOP-controlled battleground states that Obama carried, like Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin. Thanks to big gains at the state legislative level in 2010, Republicans controlled the redistricting process in twenty states compared to seven for Democrats, drawing legislative and Congressional maps that will benefit their party for the next decade. (The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that Republicans picked up six additional House seats in 2012 due to redistricting.) Republicans now want to extend their redistricting advantage to the presidential realm.

Pileggi’s plan, if implemented in all of the battleground states where Republicans held a majority of House seats, would’ve handed the White House to Romney. According to Think Progress:

Why We Still Need Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act

Ari Berman on November 12, 2012 - 1:21 PM ET

In 2006, Congress voted overwhelmingly to reauthorize Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act for another twenty-five years. The vote was 390-33 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate. Every top Republican supported the bill. “The Voting Rights Act must continue to exist,” said House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner, “and exist in its current form.” Civil rights leaders, including Julian Bond and Jesse Jackson, flanked George W. Bush at the signing ceremony.

Yet three days after the 2012 election, in which voter suppression played a starring role, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a conservative challenge to the constitutionality of Section 5, which compels parts or all of sixteen states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to clear election-related changes with the federal government. The challenge originates in Shelby County, Alabama, and is being supported by Republican attorneys general in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas. Ed Blum, director of the Project on Fair Representation, which is funding the lawsuit, told The New York Times that Section 5 “is stuck in a Jim Crow-era time warp.”

But past remains present to a disturbing degree in the South. It turns out that states and counties with a history of voting discrimination in 1964 are still trying to suppress the growing minority vote today. Consider, for example, that eight of eleven states in the former Confederacy passed new voting restrictions since the 2010 election. These included laws requiring government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot (Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas), proof of citizenship to register to vote (Alabama and Tennessee), cutbacks to early voting (Florida, Georgia and Tennessee) and disenfranchising of ex-felons (Florida). All of these changes make it harder for minority voters to participate in the political process.

How the GOP’s War on Voting Backfired

Ari Berman on November 8, 2012 - 2:24 PM ET

Since the 2010 election, Republicans passed new voting restrictions in more than a dozen states aimed at reducing the turnout of Barack Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant”—young voters, African-Americans and Hispanics.

“This is not rocket science,” Bill Clinton said last year. “They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate.” By pushing voter suppression laws, Republicans wanted the 2012 electorate to be older, whiter and more conservative than the young and diverse 2008 electorate.

But the GOP’s suppression strategy failed. Ten major restrictive voting laws were blocked in court and turnout among young, black and Hispanic voters increased as a share of the electorate relative to 2008.

Voter Suppression on Election Day in Key Swing States

Ari Berman on November 6, 2012 - 7:04 PM ET

This afternoon the 1-866-Our-Vote Election Protection Coalition did another press briefing about voting problems nationwide on Election Day. The major issues are in the key swing states of Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, in addition to New Jersey, which is struggling to cope with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and has extended voting until Friday at 5 pm. See the links for more information on voting reports in each state.

Let’s start with Pennsylvania. As I reported earlier, poll workers in the state are telling a number of voters they wrongly need ID to cast a ballot, and voters in Bucks and Montgomery County in the Philadelphia suburbs have been wrongly turned away from the polls. Signs in Bucks, Butler and Erie counties also wrongly told voters they needed photo ID to vote.

In addition, scores of longtime voters in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh have been told they are not on the voter rolls and must cast a provisional ballot. Such ballots will not be counted until up to seven days after the election. Philadelphia City Commissioner Stephanie Singer said the city had received as many provisional ballot requests as of 3 pm today as they had for all of 2008. Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, said voters were not on the rolls due to administrative errors or an unannounced voter purge. First-time student voters have also been facing major problems in the state. “At least several hundred first-time voters going to polls near or on college campuses in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are reporting apparently being left off the rolls at the locations on their voting cards and having to vote by provisional ballot,” according to US PIRG. “Additionally, the confusion is creating particularly long lines, further endangering turn out for voters in those precincts.”