Voting rights bills and lawsuits megathread (Updated: April 27th 2020)

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Huzzah!

ITT: people happy their political opponents will be prevented from voting.

Constipated Conservative is a hack, you see.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Gerrymandering in Ohio is done!

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Wake me when it actually passes.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

I believe under the NY Constitution, new maps require a majority vote from both parties, so the Pub minority in the State Senate would have a veto power. So either one gets a non partisan map (voted by the legislature or imposed by the Court if there is a deadlock), or a bipartisan gerrymander such as exists now in the state legislature (with the Assembly seats being a Dem gerrymander, and the Senate seats a Pub gerrymander).

What about congressional maps?

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

SCOTUS added the Maryland CD map to its pile, apparently to rule on it along with the Wisconsin map.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, is MD-03 or PA-07 the ugliest CD district of them all? Your choose.

That’s not the MD map

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

It is now. Thanks!

PS:  MD-03 is just as ugly as the earlier map.

I think it’s uglier under the new one, tbh.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

PA-07 is pretty bad, but MD-03 is absolutely horrendous.

I think MD-3 is uglier, but PA-7 is a more gerrymandered district.  I’d argue Ohio has a worse gerrymander than MD or PA though (PA is still pretty bad o/c).  MD’s map is ugly, but the idea that it is among the worst partisan gerrymanders is pretty ridiculous.  PA, NC, TX, OH, MI, and arguably even WI are all far worse.  MD is about on par with the gerrymander in IN imo.  The Democrats didn’t even draw an 8-0 map (which they certainly could’ve done).

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

FantasySCOTUS, which has a pretty good track record on predicting SCOTUS cases, predicts that gerrymandering will be ruled unconstitutional by a 5 to 4 decision in Gil vs. Whitford

https://fantasyscotus.lexpredict.com/case/list/

My concern is that Roberts might vote with the majority so he can assign himself the opinion and can write as narrow/case-specific a ruling as possible.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

According to Rick Hansen....the majority opinion for Gil vs Witford has been assigned to either Chief Justice Roberts or Gorsuch

Not lookin too good

Roberts getting the opinion isn’t necessarily a disaster.  As Hansen noted, he could easily be a sixth vote to significantly rein in partisan gerrymandering.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

There is the possibility of a veto, but articles I've read about IA haven't suggested that. If one party wanted to force the issue and controlled the court, the IA constitution calls on the court to draw the map if no plan is enacted by Sep 15. That hasn't happened either since 1980, but did before the current process was created.

I suppose they could have tried. Not all state parties are as equally ruthless though. If the IAGOP was more like the NCGOP, I imagine they would have gotten rid of SDR almost immediately, along with trying to scrap the redistricting system in place.

IA as a whole shares a lot of the sense of fair play known in their neighbor as "Minnesota nice". My visits to UT give me the impression that they may also have enough of that to make this system work.

Ohio is a bit interesting in that regard because whether the emphasis on fair play and civility kicks in really depends on geography.  The Cleveland folks (especially on the Democratic side, but Republicans too) tend to be “anything goes” junkyard dogs of OH politics.  Even Voinovich (a politician who was pretty beloved by most Ohioans of all stripes, myself included) had to learn the hard way that most of OH outside of the Cleveland metro simply won’t put up with that crap and will vote against you for going Hard Negative (2016 was a fluke where Hillary - like Mittens - might as well have been tailor-made to lose OH and Democrats here have both a lower floor and lower ceiling than Republicans).  

Akron politics are really an extension of Cleveland politics.  There are a few other areas like the blood-red counties around HamCo (Warren, Butler, Clarmont and such), Youngstown (which has been desensitized to dirty pool due to all the relatively open political corruption there), etc that are also fine with folks going hard negative, but in much of the state, it tends to backfire.  Suburban Franklin County in particular seems to have limits to the types of negative campaigning it is willing to tolerate.

Some of the folks who have been badly damaged by going Hard Negative include Voinovich (the pedophile ad), Metzenbaum (claiming a veteran had never held a real job), Mandel (part of why he’s so hated is the smear campaign against Brown from 2012 Re: the false DV accusations), Jean Schmidt (calling a veteran a “coward” is simply incompatible with Ohio values and she was generally a nasty person), and Ben Cupp (lost a State Supreme Court race to William “I’m gonna post about my sex life on FB” O’Neill largely b/c Cupp ran an ad accussing O’Neill of being soft on pedophiles as a judge...that and O’Neill is a good Irish name )

This seems to be changing a bit on the Republican side, but I think there’s still a real distaste in much of OH for Hard Negative campaigning.  Folks are also starting to get pretty fed up with gerrymandering too, but both state parties want to keep it around as long as possible.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

^ Is that lawsuit halting the entire ID requirement, or just for absentee voting? I haven't followed it too much.


https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/indiana-marion-county-early-voting_us_5b6dd7cce4b0530743c9c2ef

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Republicans upset Indiana's most populous county is going to have more than one early voting site (they are fine with whiter, more Republican counties next to it having more than one though)

Isn't Curtis Hill being accused of sexual harassment and/or sexual assault by four different women including one member of the Indiana legislature?  I thought he'd already resigned.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

https://twitter.com/AriBerman/status/1049778552013541376

SCOTUS rules 6-2 to essentially disenfranchise Native Americans in North Dakota, and the fact that can't be said to be hyperbole says a lot.

Do those IDs include a picture and address?  I feel like there’s probably more to this than meets the eye (i.e. some sort of legitimate and important legal basis for this decision) since it was a 6-2 decision.  Some of these guys can be political hacks and I’d argue Roberts is, if not an outright racist, at least someone who is dangerously out-of-touch with and unempathetic about the challenges facing minorities in general and African-Americans in particular due to his own personal prejudices which were very clearly manifested during his time at the Justice Department during the Reagan administration.  That said, these folks are brilliant lawyers and even with the more activist Justices like Ginsberg, Kennedy (before his retirement), post-Bush v. Gore Scalia, etc, I’ll sometimes read decisions I hate for ideological reasons (ex: upholding Trump’s de facto Muslim ban) and find that there was actually a very strong constitutional basis for the court’s decision (as opposed to something like McCutcheon v. FEC or D.C. v. Heller which were simply shameless judicial activism).