WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is delaying its early November argument over Ohio's effort to purge its voter rolls because one of the lawyers for the challengers is ill.
Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, a challenge to the procedure that Ohio uses to remove inactive voters from its voter-registration lists, had been scheduled for oral argument on Wednesday, November 8, but it will be postponed to a later, as-yet-undetermined date.
The ACLU of Indiana, national ACLU and voting rights group Demos are representing Common Cause in the suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.
Today, Demos and the ACLU issued the following statement in response to the new oral argument schedule in the case of Husted v.A. Philip Randolph Institute.
With only the wealthy funding and communicating with the campaigns of elected officials, politicians are incentivized to make policy decisions that align with their donors’ interests, not those of their broader constituency. But the elite donor class holds views that don’t align with the general public’s, as a 2016 Demos study detailed.
Many Americans believe that we have achieved black-white racial economic equality, but the data continue to show that we have a long way to go. For centuries, we have had policies to help white families build wealth at the expense of black families.
For those who believe Black people are already equal with white people, any policy that seeks to address anti-Black discrimination looks like an attempt to give Blacks an advantage.
NEW YORK — Demos and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court detailing how Ohio is violating the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) by targeting registered voters who fail to vote in a two-year period for eventual removal from the registration rolls — even if they have not moved and are still fully eligible to vote.
The Congressional Black Caucus budget should be implemented because it calls for racial equity in future infrastructure and investments; improving public transit infrastructure, noting that people of color are heavy users of it; and school infrastructure, saying that modernized buildings held reduce achievements gaps.
NEW YORK, NY – Ahead of the second Pence-Kobach Commission meeting today, Demos Vice President of External Affairs Tori O'Neal-McElrath released the following statement:
Illinois becomes 10th State to enact Automatic Voter Registration
New York – Demos applauds Governor Rauner and the Illinois Legislature on approving Senate Bill 1933, automatic voter registration (AVR) legislation. After a veto last year, the Illinois legislature unanimously approved SB 1933, which was signed into law by Governor Rauner. This bipartisan legislation will provide opt-in voter registration at DMV offices, as well as other government agencies.
[A] study by Demos, a progressive think tank which supports AVR, found that the population of voters who came onto the rolls automatically was less white than the population registered under the opt-in system.
Voting rights advocates fear that counties carrying out aggressive purges under legal duress will push officials to purge eligible voters.
"In a lot of these settlements, the push to remove people from the rolls may result in a lot of mistakes," Cameron Bell, an attorney for the liberal think tank Demos, said after fighting a lawsuit in Broward County, Florida. "That’s why Demos got involved, to make sure the parties weren’t reaching settlements that would lead to mistakes that would disenfranchise eligible voters."