Forum Post: RepubliCons (after WI, MI mayhem) Wage War on Democracy in NC!
Posted 10 years ago on Aug. 14, 2013, 6:45 a.m. EST by WSmith
(2698)
from Cornelius, OR
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Coming clean with full blown Fascism! mayhem
http://www.randirhodes.com/articles/homework-364336/randis-homework-tue-aug-13-2013-11568873/
N.C. sued soon after voter ID bill signed into law
Updated 4:30 a.m. ET Aug. 13, 2013
NEW YORK North Carolina Gov. Patrick McCrory has signed a sweeping voting reform bill that imposes strict photo identification requirements on the state's 4.5 million voters, rolls back the early voting period and repeals one-stop registration during early voting.
Almost immediately following the signing, civil rights groups filed lawsuits in federal court challenging the law.
McCrory, a Republican elected last November, called the bill - passed by the legislature along party lines on July 25 - "a common sense law" that is supported by 70 percent of North Carolinians polled.
"Common practices like boarding an airplane and purchasing Sudafed require photo ID, and we should expect nothing less for the protection of our right to vote," McCrory said in a written statement. Defending the law in an on camera statement posted to YouTube, he criticized opponents' "from the extreme left" for using "scare tactics."
While McCrory referred to the law as a "safeguard" against voter fraud, there is scarce evidence of it in North Carolina. The state's Board of Elections has referred only two cases of alleged voter impersonation fraud since 2004 to prosecutors.
The governor, like the state legislature sponsors before him, noted that 34 states now require some form of ID to vote. North Carolina would be the 20th state to require a photo ID, while 14 states require or request voters to present some other form of identification.
North Carolina is one of 13 states to adopt photo voter ID since the 2010 elections, and all but one of them was controlled by a Republican governor and Republican legislature or a Republican legislature that overrode a Democratic governor's veto of the law.
Democrats have opposed the laws, which they describe as an attempt to suppress the votes of groups that lean Democratic and are the most likely not to possess adequate ID: Young voters, blacks and Hispanics.
North Carolina is the first state to make changes to its voting laws after June's Supreme Court ruling found the Voting Rights Act of 1965 outdated. The ruling limited the Justice Department's power to block those changes in states that had a history of discrimination.
Two other Southern states, Virginia and Arkansas, were the most recent to adopt photo voter ID laws, earlier this year. Four other southern states that were caught up in Justice Department review or litigation -- Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and South Carolina -- announced immediately following the Supreme Court decision that their voter photo ID laws would take effect immediately.
Voter ID bill raises controversy in North Carolina
In Pennsylvania, voter ID law faces last crucial challenge before Election Day
Voting Rights Act faces Supreme Court challenge
The North Carolina law, to take effect in 2016, would allow only an in-state state driver's license, a U.S. passport or military ID as acceptable identification. Residents who don't drive could obtain a state-issued ID from the Department of Motor Vehicles for free. Some residents say obtaining the documents required to get an ID, such as a birth certificate, is neither free nor easy.
Rosanell Eaton, a 92-year-old black woman from Louisburg, N.C., and registered to vote since the 1940s, is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed Monday in the Middle District of North Carolina by the NAACP and the Advancement Project.
"Mrs. Eaton, who was born at home, has a current North Carolina driver's license, but the name on her certified birth certificate does not match the name on her driver's license or the name on her voter registration card," the lawsuit said. "Mrs. Eaton will incur substantial time and expense to correct her identification documents to match her voter registration record in order to meet the new requirements."
The lawsuit seeks relief under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bans voting procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, and under the 14th and 15th amendments of the Constitution. The recent Supreme Court ruling limited reviews under formulas in Sections 4 and 5 of the VRA.
Beyond the ID requirements, the new North Carolina law reduces the number of days for early voting from 17 to 10, even though 61 percent of state voters cast ballots early in 2012. McCrory said the law calls for the total early voting hours to remain the same by asking county board of elections to increase the number of early voting sites and hours open each day.
In 2012 in North Carolina, Democrats cast 47 percent of the early votes and Republicans cast 32 percent, according to a CBS News analysis.
Calling the reforms discriminatory, the Advancement Project said 70 percent of black North Carolinians who voted did so during early voting in 2012.
While blacks comprise one fourth of the state population, a third of the state's voters who currently lack a state-issued ID are black, according to an analysis of voter rolls and the DMV database by the North Carolina Board of Elections.
About 100,000 North Carolinians registered to vote and voted during the early voting period in both 2008 and 2012. The new law would repeal that "same day registration" option, which is proven to increase voter turnout in the handful of states that have it, such as Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Penda Hair, co-director of the Advancement Project, said, "Governor McCrory has transformed North Carolina from a state with one of the nation's most progressive voting systems, where we saw some of the highest voter turnout rates of the last two presidential elections, into a state with the most draconian policies we've seen in decades, policies that harken back to the days of Jim Crow."
In a second lawsuit, also filed Monday in North Carolina federal court, in Greensboro, the ACLU and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, with the League of Women Voters, the A. Philip Randolph Institute, Common Cause North Carolina, and the Unifour Onestop Collaborative, sued Governor McCrory and state officials over the reduction in early voting days and elimination of same day registration as having a disproportionate adverse impact on black voters.
The complaint, on behalf of three black voters and two white voters, also opposed the law's provision to void provisional ballots cast by voters in the incorrect precinct, even a voter's picks for governor and president. Around 7,500 North Carolina voters cast such "out of precinct" provisional ballots in 2012, which would not be counted under the new law.
"Eliminating a huge part of early voting will cut off voting opportunities for hundreds of thousands of citizens. It will turn Election Day into a mess, shoving more voters into even longer lines," said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project. "Florida similarly eliminated a week of early voting before the 2012 election, and we all know how that turned out - voters standing in line for hours, some having to wait until after the President's acceptance speech to finally vote, and hundreds of thousands giving up in frustration. Those burdens fell disproportionately on African-American voters, and the same thing will happen in North Carolina. We should be making it easier for people to vote, not harder."
© 2013 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get the truth here: http://www.randirhodes.com/articles/homework-364336/randis-homework-tue-aug-13-2013-11568873/
GOP Obliterates Voting Rights in North Carolina
*The Progress Report Banner | Immoral GOP Monday
By Josh Dorner on August 13, 2013 at 5:16 pm
We’ve previously discussed the extremist takeover of North Carolina and the Moral Monday protests that have arisen in response. The extreme right-wing of the GOP that now apparently controls the state has rolled back decades of progress on nearly every issue in an apparent attempt to create some sort of you’re-on-your-own utopia for the rich, powerful and well-connected. By contrast, the state’s middle class and the poor will be, well, on their own.
Last month, Gov. Pat McCrory (R) broke an unambiguous campaign promise to sign no further restrictions on abortion and signed an anti-abortion bill so sweeping it will close all but one of the state’s approximately three-dozen abortion clinics. The state then promptly shut down the one clinic that was believed to be able to meet the restrictions under the new law.
It gets worse.
Yesterday McCory announced that he had signed what has been described as the biggest attack on voting rights anywhere in the United States in recent memory. Here’s how election law expert Rick Hasen described the measure:
North Carolina’s governor signed one of the most restrictive voting laws in the Nation. I have been trying to think of another state law passed since the 1965 Voting Rights Act to rival this law but I cannot. It is a combination of cutbacks in early voting, restrictions on voter registration, imposition of new requirements on voters such as photo identification in voting, limitations on poll worker activity to help voters, and other actions which as a whole cannot be interpreted as anything other than an effort to make it harder for some people—and likely poor people, people of color, old people and others likely to “skew Democratic”—to vote.
As Hasen says, the law is shocking in terms of both the shear breadth and depth of its attack on voting rights. Here are just some of the law’s provisions:
The GOP’s attack on voting rights in North Carolina comes as part of what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described yesterday as an “unseemly rush” by states formerly covered under the Voting Rights Act’s pre-clearance system to enact restrictions “that will make it harder to vote for millions of Americans.” While Clinton pointed specifically to new restrictions in Texas, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina, “home to what she called the ‘greatest hits of voter suppression,’” she observed that they were part of “a sweeping effort across our country to construct new obstacles to voting.”
In a not-so-subtle jab at the Supreme Court majority, including Chief Justice John Roberts, that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act in June, Clinton added, “Anyone that says that racial discrimination is no longer a problem in American elections must not be paying attention.” She also dismissed the “phantom epidemic of election fraud” cited by McCrory and other Republicans as the justification for enacting restrictions on voting.
BOTTOM LINE: The Department of Justice has vowed to use all tools at its disposal to protect the rights of voters, but it’s time for Congress to right the Supreme Court’s wrong and restore the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. These protections served Americans for nearly five decades and are clearly still needed in order to prevent the right wing from enacting immoral and anti-democratic attacks on voting rights that could disenfranchise millions of voters.
92-Year-Old Who Once Faced Literacy Tests Sues North Carolina Over New Wave Of Voter Suppression by GOP
By Nicole Flatow on August 13, 2013 at 5:19 pm
When Rosanell Eaton was 21 years old and living in segregated North Carolina, she became one of the first African Americans in her county registered to vote, after successfully completing a literacy test that required her to recite the preamble to the Constitution. But now, at 92 years old, she faces new obstacles under the voter suppression law signed by Gov. Pat McCrory (R) Monday. For one thing, she may not qualify for the voter ID card required under the new law, because the name on her birth certificate is different from the name on her driver’s license and voter registration card. Reconciling this difference will be a costly and time-consuming administrative endeavor. For another, she has participated in early voting since it was instituted in the state. Now, it’s been cut back a week.
She is one of several individuals who, along with civil rights groups, are already suing the state for what may be the most restrictive voting law in the nation. Other restrictive new provisions in the law include the elimination of same-day registration and early registration for high schoolers in advance of their 18th birthday, and prohibiting certain kinds of voter registration drives that tend to register low-income and minority voters.
Eaton participated in Moral Monday protests in North Carolina before the law passed, expressing opposition with fellow North Carolinians to a raft of new state conservative policies that would hurt the poor, women, minorities, and the environment. During one Moral Monday event, her daughter Armenta told ThinkProgress on her behalf, “She thought things were smooth sailing. She’s seen the good, bad, and the ugly. Now she’s seeing the ugly again. She fought for civil rights, she was a civil rights worker, and now she sees that it’s going backward.”
Tuesday morning, she was back out again protesting the passage of the bill, this time delivering an impassioned address to an energized crowd. “Here I am at 92 years old doing the same battling,” she told the crowd. “I have registered over 4,000 citizens in the state, and at it again, alongside Republicans’ efforts to eliminate and cut early voting. … We need more, not less, public access to the ballot.” She concluded, “At the age of 92, I am fed up and fired up.”
Watch video of Eaton’s fiery address:
The North Carolina law is one of several restrictive voting measures to come immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. In Texas, Attorney General Eric Holder intervened to challenge voting changes under another provision of the VRA. And North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan (D) has already asked Holder to do the same in her state.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/08/13/2461481/92-year-old-who-once-faced-literacy-tests-sues-north-carolina-over-new-wave-of-voter-suppression/
(D) President John F. Kennedy's Civil Rights Address
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BEhKgoA86U
On Today's Show - RR - Wed, Aug 14, 2013
A 92-year old black woman who had once faced literacy tests to vote now has to sue North Carolina over their new voter suppression law. We’ve come full-circle, and unfortunately, it’s a very vicious circle. Back in the 1940’s, a 21-year old Rosanell Eaton had to recite the preamble to the Constitution as a test before she could vote. That’s literally easier to do than the new roadblocks that (R) North Carolina governor Pat McCrory has set up for her now. This woman managed to vote under Jim Crow, but she may not be able to vote under Pat McCrory. What does that tell you? Is Pat McCrory ('13) worse than Jim Crow (1876)?
If what’s happening in states like North Carolina is taking us backwards, then we need to take inspiration from the things that good people were doing back in the bad old days. When things were bad, good people managed to make them better. Now that things aren’t that bad, good people have to fight to prevent bad people from making them worse. Back in 1963, people were struggling to make something good happen in a bad situation. Today we’re struggling to prevent things from getting that bad again. In a sad way, that’s progress of a sort.
Unlike in 1963, today we have the law on our side. The rightwingers and the racists are the ones who are fighting to change the law. Unfortunately, they have the Supreme Court on their side. Today, the forces that want to take us backwards have to lie about what they’re doing, like saying voter suppression is really about preventing voter fraud. That’s a long way from George Wallace outright saying “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
Read more: http://www.randirhodes.com/articles/daily-blog-380723/on-todays-show-wed-aug-14-11572711/#ixzz2c0BzCnFK