Posts Tagged ‘voting rights’
Feds send civil rights monitors to 5 states for elections
Federal civil rights officials announced…they have sent election observers to locations in five states to keep an eye out for potential trouble at the polls Tuesday.
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division dispatched 11 staff attorneys along with 85 trained election observers from the Office of Personnel Management to watch activities at the polls and report any irregularities…
In Mississippi, monitors are being dispatched to four counties, as voters go to the polls in a gubernatorial election to replace Haley Barbour, who is term-limited from running again. The campaign features the white Republican Lieutenant Gov. Phil Bryant and African-American Hattiesburg Mayor Johnny DuPree, a Democrat. Mississippi political observers say Bryant is a strong favorite to win the election…
The Justice Department has also assigned monitors to Lorain County, Ohio, to protect the rights of Spanish-speaking voters. Last month, the federal government signed an agreement with Lorain County to resolve concerns that limited-English Hispanic voters were being denied their full voting rights because the county failed to provide language assistance as required by law.
In Alameda County, California, the U.S. will monitor voting following an agreement between federal officials and the county in July. The agreement requires Alameda County to provide election materials and information in Spanish and Chinese. Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez said the agreement “ensures that Alameda County’s Spanish- and Chinese-speaking citizens will be able to cast an effective ballot and successfully participate in the electoral process.”
In Jasper, Texas, racial tensions have run high over the recall election for three African-American city council members responsible for the hiring of the city’s first black police chief.
In Springfield, Massachusetts, activists claim minorities were turned away at the polls in the September primary, and said there was no Spanish-language assistance for voters. Hispanic leaders, the NAACP and ACLU had all urged the Justice Department to travel to Springfield to protect voting rights of all minorities.
Republicans around the country continue to mobilize to deny the franchise to citizens on the basis of ethnicity and language. Nothing new about the practice. Nothing less than bigotry is expected – after all – since the so-called Southern Strategy has never been limited to the South. Or to Black folks alone.
EU pressures UK over voting rights for prisoners
Of course, we keep whole cities from having the right to vote
The government faces being hauled before the European court of human rights unless it gives prisoners the right to vote as a matter of urgency.
The revelation comes as several law firms seek to launch claims on behalf of thousands of UK prisoners who are demanding compensation – estimated to be as much as £750 each – on the grounds they were illegally denied the right to vote at the last general election…
In March 2004, the ECHR ruled in Hirst v UK that the government’s blanket ban barring sentenced prisoners from voting was unlawful. But despite the ruling, the previous government continued to consult on the issue and failed to make it law.
The committee of ministers, the body that oversees European member states’ compliance with ECHR judgments, is to meet this week to discuss the UK’s failure to enfranchise prisoners following the ruling.
The committee will then issue a stark public reminder to the government that it must comply with the ruling immediately. If it refuses, the committee has the power to refer the question of whether the government has failed in its obligations to the ECHR, a move that would put Westminster on a collision course with the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe.
The clash would represent the culmination of months of mounting frustration on the part of the committee. In March it warned the UK must “rapidly adopt measures, of even an interim nature, to ensure the execution of the court’s judgment before the forthcoming general election”, otherwise the nationwide vote would be illegal…
Penal reformers say giving prisoners the vote is about restoring a fundamental human right that will confer a sense of responsibility and aid their rehabilitation.
They point out that the UK is out of step with many other countries. Eighteen European countries have no restrictions on prisoners voting while in France and Germany a decision to disenfranchise a prisoner is left to the courts.
One of those moments of clarity that makes me pleased the United States needn’t follow the rulings of European politicians. And the ECHR is after all more of a political court than one concerned with constitutional and historic law.
Here in the States, serving a year-and-a-day is sufficient for disfranchising someone. Whether that needs to be varied or not would be a task for the sort of review that Euros seem to approach from the opposite direction. It is suggested that it would be beneficial in reducing recidivism – therefore it must be done. I’d rather see a bit of study on the subject, a stretch of practice and evaluation.
Though, the Brits dithering around under the leadership of Blair and Brown is no surprise. Democracy might have accidentally entered into the political equation.
Christians sue for the right to be bigots
The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear an appeal from a Christian student group that had been denied recognition by a public law school in California for excluding homosexuals and nonbelievers. The case pits anti-discrimination principles against religious freedom.
The group, the Christian Legal Society, says it welcomes all students to participate in its activities. But it does not allow students to become voting members or to assume leadership positions unless they affirm what the group calls orthodox Christian beliefs and disavow “unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle.” Such a lifestyle, the group says, includes “sexual conduct outside of marriage between a man and a woman.”
The law school, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, part of the University of California, allows some 60 recognized student groups to use meeting space, bulletin boards and the like so long as they agree to a policy that forbids discrimination on various grounds, including religion and sexual orientation. The school withdrew recognition from the Christian group after it refused to comply with the policy.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled in favor of Hastings in March.
“Hastings imposes an open membership rule on all student groups — all groups must accept all comers as voting members even if those individuals disagree with the mission of the group,” a three-judge panel of the court said in a brief unsigned decision. “The conditions on recognition are therefore viewpoint neutral and reasonable.”
None of which guarantees that a Supreme Court stacked to support reactionary politics will issue a ruling anymore advanced than some of the crap they produced in the 19th Century.
