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Breaking News: “Texas Judge Guts Vote Registration Law”

Posted: August 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Breaking News | Tags: , |17 Comments

This is via the Houston Chronicle.

A federal judge in Galveston on Thursday partially blocked new Texas registration laws that critics say amount to vote suppression because they prevent large voter registration drives.

U.S. District Judge Gregg Costa blocked the state from enforcing five provisions of the laws that its defenders say are aimed at preventing voter fraud.

“Today’s ruling means that community groups and organizations like Voting for America and Project Vote will be able to run community voter registration drives in Texas,” plaintiff’s attorney Chad Dunn said. “These drives are important to reaching the millions of Texans, including three-quarters of a million African-Americans and 2 million Latinos, who are eligible but still not registered to vote.”

Dunn represents two Galveston County residents and the nonprofit voter registration group Voting for America, an affiliate of the nonpartisan Project Vote based in Washington, D.C.

“They don’t care how you vote as long as you get registered and participate,” Dunn said.

The plaintiffs sued Galveston County Tax Assessor-Collector Cheryl Johnson and Texas Secretary of State Hope Andrade

“It was a scholarly opinion, he obviously put a lot of thought into it, but I am very disappointed by the outcome,” Johnson said. State officials could not be reached for comment.

Costa granted a preliminary injunction on five sections of the law until a trial on whether the entire law violates the plaintiffs’ civil rights and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act.

Key points

Under the ruling, the state may no longer require that deputy voter registrars live in Texas, a law Voting for America said prevented it from organizing voter registration drives.

It also may not prevent deputy registrars from registering voters who live outside their county; prevent organizations from firing or promoting employees based on the number of voters registered; prevent organizations from making photocopies of completed voter registration forms for their records; or prevent deputy registrars from mailing completed applications.

Johnson said allowing groups to copy registration applications could violate privacy rights.

“I intend to start calling state representatives tomorrow to change the content of voter registration applications,” she said. Johnson wants social security numbers, dates of birth and driver’s license numbers removed.

“Is there going to be a huge increase in voter fraud? I hope not,” she said, adding that her office would redouble its scrutiny of completed registration forms.

The plaintiffs had asked Costa to block eight sections of the law enacted in 2011 so that they could register voters before the national election in November. Costa declined to block enforcement of laws that make it a criminal offense for a deputy registrar to submit a partially completed form, a restrictive training requirement, and a requirement that deputy registrars wear an identification badge. He left the legality of those laws to be decided at trial.

Some background and interesting tidbits are available at Think Progress.

Though Costa is a recent Obama appointee, he also served as a law clerk for two unapologetic conservatives: former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Appeals Court Judge A. Raymond Randolph.

Yesterday’s ruling is a major victory not only for voter groups, but also communities who are disproportionately helped by registration drives, including minorities and poorer citizens.

To learn more about the law’s impact, read ThinkProgress’ on-the-ground coverage from Texas last year

17 Comments on “Breaking News: “Texas Judge Guts Vote Registration Law””

  1. bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
    August 3, 2012 at 3:12 pm

    Excellent news!

  2. pdgrey's avatar pdgrey says:
    August 3, 2012 at 3:43 pm

    Great news.
    I wanted to share more “shave my eyeballs with a lemon zester” moments.
    http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/03/porn-star-jenna-jameson-backs-romney-when-youre-rich-you-want-a-republican/
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/03/john-clark-medical-bill_n_1737543.html?utm_hp_ref=business
    It’s hard to believe middle class people can’t understand this.

  3. dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
    August 3, 2012 at 4:45 pm

    Here’s Susie’s latest post at C&L: shocking but not surprising!

    Child sexual abuse in the world of Romney’s top LDS donors

    I’ve been doing some reading about the LDS culture, and the duties of a Mormon bishop (like Mitt Romney) in particular. There’s some pretty creepy stuff — and a whole damned boatload of repressed sexual energy. We’ll get to that later.

    But first, what I’m coming up with are numerous accounts of child abuse — and child sexual abuse, as spelled out in “Scout’s Honor,” an award-winning investigative series about how the LDS church and its Idaho Falls scouting program covered up for the sexual molestation of Scouts by a Mormon pedophile.

    Funny thing: Peter Zuckerman, the reporter who did the series, was outed as gay in a full-page newspaper ad paid for by billionaire Frank VanderSloot, Romney campaign finance co-chair and chairman of Melaleuca, Inc., an MLM company. VanderSloot is famous for threatening reporters, bloggers and publications with lawsuits. He’s also a major donor to the Restore Our Future superPAC.

    I also discovered a long chain of stories about “ranches” and “camps” owned and run by very politically connected Utah Mormons – especially the World Wide Association of Specialty Schools, founded by Robert Lichfield, who was Mitt Romney’s finance co-chair back in 2007.

  4. RalphB's avatar RalphB says:
    August 3, 2012 at 5:17 pm

    Paul Constant’s great headline.

    Mitt Romney Says He Has Paid Taxes, So Harry Reid Just Better Stop Picking on Him, or Romney Will Tell Mom

    It’s become a regular Romney campaign stunt to try to put out fires by scheduling press availabilities on Friday afternoon. But Friday afternoons are when most campaigns assume people aren’t paying attention to the news. I don’t know exactly why Romney’s people keep doing this. Maybe it’s because they don’t trust Romney to not fuck it up?

    Well, Romney fucked this one up. Hugely. He looks cagey, whiney, and powerless, here. I expect him to burst into tears at the end of this statement. “Bullied” is not high on the list of qualities people like in their presidential candidates. And his demand that Reid release his sources still sounds fishy, because the one human being who could conclusively settle this matter once and for all is Mitt Romney, by releasing his taxes. If Romney keeps this up, he’ll look like the saddest sack to run for president since Ed Muskie. And at least Muskie was sobbing about his wife; Romney keeps getting all huffy over his money.

  5. dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
    August 3, 2012 at 5:23 pm

    Biker’s broken jaw by cop nets her $225,000
    Jessica Williams hit when she called Officer Desmond Nichols a rookie in 2008

    The city has paid $225,000 to a young woman whose jaw was broken by an NYPD cop after she called him a “rookie” when he prepared to arrest her for riding her bike on the sidewalk, the Daily News has learned.

    The settlement came last week as a jury was about to be empaneled in Jessica Williams’ civil suit charging Officer Desmond Nichols for using excessive force in the 2008 incident.

    According to Williams, the then-17-year-old was stopped by Nichols for riding on a sidewalk in Bedford-Stuyvesant — but the routine stop quickly took a violent turn.

    The officer asked Williams for ID, but she said she didn’t have any. That’s when she complained that Nichols was only hassling her because he was “a rookie.”

    This guy is still on the force.

  6. RalphB's avatar RalphB says:
    August 3, 2012 at 5:31 pm

    Sweet. If this doesn’t cost an arm AND a leg, I’d love to have gigabit service.

    Google Fiber Is A Hit: 1 Week In, 46 Neighborhoods Signed Up

    Google Fiber appears to be connecting with residents of Kansas City. Just over a week after Google launched its ultra high-speed (1 gigabit) Internet service, at least 46 neighborhoods — or fiberhoods, as Google calls them — have signed-up to receive the service.

    To put that number in context: That’s 22 percent of the 202 “fiberhoods” that Google has drawn up to cover households in Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas, two distinct cities that form one major metropolitan region on the border between Kansas state and Missouri.

  7. ecocatwoman's avatar ecocatwoman says:
    August 3, 2012 at 5:40 pm

    Sharpton covered this tonight. Here’s the story & video of Rmoney defending Bush during the 2004 election – http://www.mediaite.com/online/video-2004-mitt-romney-says-its-poppycock-to-blame-president-for-job-market/ Good old Mr. Poppycock.

  8. pdgrey's avatar pdgrey says:
    August 3, 2012 at 5:48 pm

    Well if I need software.
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/03/carbonite-ceo-limbaugh-ad-regret_n_1738332.html

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