“The use of the immigration databases are inaccurate, discriminatory and inappropriate for voter list maintenance. We know that it results in inaccurate purging of eligible voters,” said Katherine Culliton-González, a lawyer at think tank Demos who represented plaintiffs challenging Florida’s method of striking people from the rolls.
"Countless Ohioans have been denied their right to vote as a result of these purges," said Stuart Naifeh, an attorney for Demos, which is among the organizations challenging Ohio's law. [...]
But national voting rights and civil rights activists said the commission and Trump's call for new laws is just a pretext to suppress voter participation particularly among the poor, the elderly and people of color.
“I’m thrilled that the commission has been disbanded, but also will definitely keep an eye on what it is that these players will do in the next steps,” said Katherine Culliton-González, senior counsel for Demos, a public policy group.
Demos and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) will host a media call to discuss the upcoming Supreme Court oral argument in the case of Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute.
“Ohio is the only state that does it based on not voting in a two-year period,” says Dale E. Ho, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, which along with the public policy group Demos, is representing Harmon and two Ohio nonprofit organizations. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to assume that most registered voters move every two years.”
“Compared to any other democracy in the world, we have some of the lowest numbers in terms of participation and turnout,” Katherine Culliton-Gonzalez, a senior counsel for the think tank Demos, told WhoWhatWhy. [...]
The ACLU and public policy organization Demos, have filed a lawsuit against Ohio’s Secretary of State Jon Husted (R), for violating the NVRA “when he purged voters based on their failure to vote,” a ACLU press release read in part.
Washington, D.C.-- Today’s 5-0 vote by the Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety to advance the Fair Elections Act of 2017 (B22-0192) to the full Council for consideration is a major step forward for the campaign, supporters said today. They called on the Council to immediately schedule a vote to pass the legislation.
Councilmembers Charles Allen, David Grosso, Anita Bonds, Mary M. Cheh, and Vincent C. Gray voted unanimously in favor of the legislation, which passed without amendment.
Washington, DC – Today, over 80 community leaders signed a letter urging Mayor Bowser and the members of the DC Council to support the Fair Elections Act of 2017, important legislation under consideration to create a voluntary, small-donor matching program for local elections.
Katherine Culliton-González is senior counsel at Demos(the people), a New York-based nonpartisan, nonprofit voter-rights group active in litigating voting issues, including Pennsylvania’s voter ID law, ruled unconstitutional in 2014.
“Pennsylvania has a history. And it continues to create barriers to the ballot,” she says, “from lack of language access to a lack of poll worker training, no early voting. It not only complicates voting but it sets up real barriers to voters.”
According to a 2012 policy paper from the nonprofit public policy research organization Demos, Maryland and New York implemented their laws after the 2010 census, and both have withstood federal court challenges; Delaware and California's laws will take effect with the next census.
Conservative groups and Republican election officials in some states say the poorly maintained rolls invite fraud and meddling by hackers, sap public confidence in elections and make election workers’ jobs harder. Voting rights advocates and most Democratic election officials, in turn, say that the benefits are mostly imaginary, and that the purges are intended to reduce the number of minority, poor and young voters, who are disproportionately Democrats.
More than a quarter of Ohio’s registered voters didn’t cast ballots last year, and for some of them, that could have been one inactive election too many. Ohio has been removing voters who haven’t cast ballots over a period of six years – unless they contact their Board of Elections during that time.
Larry Harmon is one of them, and now his lawsuit against Ohio is the center of a U.S. Supreme Court case expected to be argued early next year. [...]
The Lawyers’ Committee, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School and Demos—all legal advocates that have defended the right to vote for years and fought voter suppression tactics in court—said Wednesday that they would be sending letters to the local offices targeted by PILF. Their letters will urge local election officials to not be intimidated by PILF’s threat of suits unless they proved, to PILF’s satisfaction, that they had purged sufficient numbers of legally registered voters. [...]
While Public Interest Legal Foundation Undertakes National Campaign to Institute Massive Purge Voter Programs, Civil Rights Groups Offer Needed Guidance to Election Officials on Prohibitions within the National Voter Registration Act
WASHINGTON – U.S. Supreme Court arguments in the Ohio voting purge case, Husted v.A. Philip Randolph Institute, have been rescheduled for Jan. 10, 2018. Paul M. Smith, vice president of litigation and strategy at the Campaign Legal Center, will argue the case on behalf of the plaintiffs.
This report presents findings on the use of public transit by people of color and on the potential jobs benefits that people of color can gain from investments in public transit.
A 2013 survey by Demos, a public policy organization that combats inequality, showed that 10 percent of respondents who were unemployed had been informed that they would not be hired because of some facet of their credit history. The same survey indicated that 1 out of every 7 job applicants with “blemished credit histories” had been told they were not hired because of their credit history. [...]
PHOENIX – An investigation by voting rights groups revealed Arizona agencies are persistently violating the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which Congress enacted to increase opportunities to register to vote and simplify the registration process. The groups detailed their findings and demanded action in a formal notice letter sent today to Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan.