Tag: preclearance

US Supreme Court: North Carolina Democrats may not have their election fraud, after all.

Oh, yeah, like anybody else is going to couch this anything except favorable partisan terms, either.

The Supreme Court, with two Justices noting dissents, on Wednesday afternoon allowed North Carolina to bar voters from registering and casting their ballots on the same day, and to refuse to count votes that were cast in the wrong polling places.  Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.  The majority did not explain its action.

The order gives the state time to file an appeal from lower-court rulings striking down those two provisions, which were part of a larger, sweeping change in voting rights in the state.  If the Court grants review of the state’s appeal, the postponement will remain in effect until there is a decision.

Continue reading US Supreme Court: North Carolina Democrats may not have their election fraud, after all.

I doubt that there’ll be a significant update to preclearance.

Short version: preclearance was set up by the Voting Rights Act to require various locales to submit their redistricting maps to the Justice Department prior to implementation, on the then-reasonable principle that certain states weren’t exactly thrilled about this entire ‘integration’ thing. So far, so good; only, we never updated the locales that needed watching, and it’s been almost a half century, and the Supreme Court warned Congress that they needed to do something, and Congress decided that they didn’t want to have that discussion, and so they just renewed the old rules one too many times, and the Supreme Court staked the old preclearance rules once and for all last week.

Now there’s mutterings about setting up new preclearance rules – only, here’s the thing. Just picking the old jurisdictions to be targeted will merely result in the courts throwing the whole thing out again; the Supreme Court Hath Spoken. And picking new jurisdictions will be… politically risky; and contra that Hill article a lot of the people who will be at risk will be Democrats, too. You see, voters don’t like being told that their state is so racist that it needs the Justice Department to keep an eye on it – and, of course, there’s an election coming up.

Mind you, there always is.  So: I expect a sound and a fury, signifying nothing – or at most, a list of a couple of the most problematical locations.  Then again, I am quite often wrong.

Moe Lane