Chiraag Bains, a former prosecutor and civil rights attorney at the U.S. Justice Department, said that because criminal codes are so complicated, prosecutors have an incredible amount of flexibility in deciding whether and how to bring a case. Prosecutors normally consider the culpability of the individual, the severity of the offense and what kind of penalty is necessary to deter future misconduct.
Last week, ballot initiatives to improve the functioning of democracy fared very well. In Florida — a state divided nearly equally between right and left — more than 64 percent of voters approved restoring the franchise to 1.4 million people with felony convictions. In Colorado, Michigan and Missouri, measures to reduce gerrymandering passed. In Maryland, Michigan and Nevada, measures to simplify voter registration passed.
We just filed this emergency lawsuit to protect the rights of eligible Ohio voters who were recently arrested and are being held in jail, unable to get to the polls.
Under the current system, eligible voters who are detained pretrial by the state are being unconstitutionally denied their fundamental right to vote. Ohio’s disenfranchisement of these qualified voters violates the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Voter suppression is alive and well in Florida where our election protection volunteers reported multiple voting rights violations as well as coercion during early voting and we secured an emergency order in response to the violation of a federal injunction
We secured another win for voters in our Ohio voter purge case, A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI) v. Husted. Voters who were removed from the voter rolls in Ohio without adequate notice will now be able to participate in Tuesday’s midterms.
Such lawsuits from the right have yielded mixed results, in part because voting rights advocates like the ACLU, Common Cause, Demos, the Lawyers’ Committee, the League of Women Voters and the NAACP have successfully fought back in court. Private groups defending voters have filed more suits to protect voters than the Justice Department itself in recent years. [...]
Similar interim rules were in place for the 2016 elections and more than 7,500 residents used them to vote, said lawyers for Demos and the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, two groups that sued the state.
“In a state where elections have been won or lost by only one vote, protecting the right of eligible voters to have their voices heard will uphold the fundamental principles on which our democracy is supposed to operate.”
In a blow for voting rights today, an Ohio federal court ruled that the state does not have to provide relief to allow purged voters to participate in this November’s mid-term elections.
In Ohio, registered voters who do not vote in a two-year period are sent a mailing asking them to confirm their address. If they do not respond to the mailing or vote in the subsequent four years, they are purged from the rolls. Represented by Demos and the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, the Ohio chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute -- an organization of black trade unionists and community activists -- has been fighting these purges in court since 2016.
“It’s political stubbornness,” said Stuart C. Naifeh, senior counsel for Demos, a national voting rights law group that is working with the League of Women Voters of Arizona, Mi Familia Vota Education Fund, Promise Arizona, the American Civil Liberties Union and others on this lawsuit and related NVRA issues.
Chiraag Bains of the advocacy group Demos that has monitored the activity of Pilf and its allied groups for several years, said: “Their aim is not to ensure the security of our elections, but to intimidate people from going to the polls. They are promoting purges that prevent eligible voters from participating in our democracy.”
JEFFERSON CITY, MO – A federal judge in the Western District of Missouri issued an order today requiring the State of Missouri to take immediate steps to prevent Missourians from being denied their right to vote in this November’s election as a result of the state’s failure to comply with the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).
Stuart Naifeh, one of the attorneys pressing the lawsuit against Reagan, said the ruling was deeply flawed, but the groups haven’t yet decided whether to file an appeal.
“Voters should go out there and check their registration to make sure they are update to date, since the secretary of state is not going to do anything about it,” Naifeh said.
Naila Awan, a counsel at Demos — one of the legal firms representing the groups in the lawsuit — said Friday's ruling "sides with democracy and promotes a more robust and inclusive democracy. The state of Missouri has been failing to provide address update services required by the NVRA.
"This disproportionately impacts people of color and low-income individuals, who tend to move at higher rates."