Free Republic

Military voting rights still aren't protected. That's the message from former Justice Department official M. Eric Eversole, who argues in a column at the front of this section that his former employer is undermining the new law requiring states to mail ballots to military voters at least 45 days before the November elections. If anything, the situation might be even worse than Mr. Eversole suggests. The Obama administration refuses to release the waiver requests filed by a dozen states and territories claiming an inability to meet the legal deadline. Mr. Eversole and 17 members of Congress led by Rep. Robert...

The Department of Justice denied accusations by former voting section attorneys who say states are being encouraged to use waivers to bypass the new federal Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act. The accusations prompted Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) to write a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, dated July 26, demanding answers and requesting specific information about how the agency was going to enforce the MOVE Act provision that requires states to send military and overseas voters absentee ballots 45 days prior to elections. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich responded with a letter dated July 30. "The Department of...

Obama Justice Department outrages never cease. The politically charged gang led by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is more interested in helping felons vote than in helping the military to vote. Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, has put a legislative hold on the already troubled nomination of James M. Cole to be deputy attorney general until the attorney general ensures full protection for voting rights of our military (and associated civilian personnel) stationed abroad. The senator is right to raise a ruckus. Mr. Cornyn co-authored a 2009 law mandating that states mail absentee ballots to military voters at least...

The Department of Justice is ignoring a new law aimed at protecting the right of American soldiers to vote, according to two former DOJ attorneys who say states are being encouraged to use waivers to bypass the new federal Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act. The MOVE Act, enacted last October, ensures that servicemen and women serving overseas have ample time to get in their absentee ballots. The result of the DOJ's alleged inaction in enforcing the act, say Eric Eversole and J. Christian Adams — both former litigation attorneys for the DOJ’s Voting Section — could be that...

About four brigades' worth of American military personnel lost the right to have their votes count in the 2008 elections. It now appears that the Justice Department is willing to allow many of the same 17,000 Americans fighting for us overseas to be disenfranchised once again in November. Congress and the Defense Department need to step in to ensure this doesn't happen. Military Voter Protection Project Director M. Eric Eversole accused his former employer, the Justice Department's Voting Section, of encouraging states to use waivers to get around a law Congress passed last year to address the problems with overseas...

A black civil rights leader recently told an assembly at Michigan State University that American democracy was only decades old rather than centuries – that not until the 1965 Voting Rights Act when blacks could vote did democracy truly begin. [1]Such a declaration does not accurately portray the history of black voting in America nor does it honor the thousands of blacks who sacrificed their lives obtaining the right to vote and who exercised that right as long as two centuries ago. In fact, most today are completely unaware that it was not Democrats but was actually Republicans – like...

Whistleblower J. Christian Adams says the DOJ has a mandate not to enforce the law that ineligible voters must be taken off registration rolls. VIDEO

Civil Rights: The Justice Department explains that it dropped a Black Panther voter-intimidation case because of lack of evidence. Pay no attention to the thugs outside the polling place. Yet another reason Eric Holder must go. On Election Day 2008, New Black Panther Party members King Samir Shabazz, Malik Zulu Sha-bazz and Jerry Jackson were charged in a civil complaint with civil violations by "allegedly" violating the Voting Rights Act through intimidation, threats and coercion as they stood outside a Philadelphia polling place. It was what Bartle Bull, a former civil rights lawyer and publisher of the left-wing Village Voice,...

On Monday April 19th, DC residents seeking a vote in Congress were on the verge of achieving what they had worked for over 50 years to accomplish. Both houses of Congress were willing to grant DC a voting seat in Congress. The catch? In order to get the voting seat, they had to accept an easing of DC’s draconian gun laws.

According to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., research organization, nearly half of U.S. households will pay no federal income taxes for 2009. That's up from the Tax Foundation's 2006 estimate that 41% of the American population, or 121 million Americans, were completely outside the federal income tax system. These Americans pay no federal income tax either because their incomes are too low or they have higher income but credits, deductions and exemptions that relieve them of tax liability. This lack of income tax liability stands in stark contrast to the top 10% of earners, those households earning an...

Obama pushes D.C. voting rights bill ASSOCIATED PRESSWASHINGTON | President Barack Obama urged lawmakers Friday to give the District of Columbia a voting member of Congress. A bill to give the city just that is expected to be brought for a vote in the House next week. Many advocates for D.C. voting rights believe this year could be their last opportunity in a long time if Democrats lose their majority in Congress in the fall. Obama made the push in a statement in honor of Emancipation Day, a D.C. holiday commemorating President Abraham Lincoln's freeing of the slaves in Washington,...

The more the Obama administration fights the subpoenas from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and denies congressmen’s requests for answers concerning the inexplicable dismissal of the voter-intimidation case in Philadelphia against the New Black Panther Party (NBPP), the more reasonable people wonder what the administration has to hide. And so it is appropriate now to ask: What did the White House know and when did it know it? Perhaps the single most important question that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the White House are refusing to answer in the growing scandal (for the stonewalling and subpoena violations make...

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — A federal judge imposed an unusual election system on a suburban village Friday, nearly two years after finding that the existing system was unfair to Hispanics. The village, Port Chester, is run by a mayor and six trustees. Under the new system, called cumulative voting, residents will be allowed to cast as many as six votes for one trustee candidate. No Hispanic had ever been elected trustee or mayor in the village 25 miles northeast of New York City, although the population of 28,000 is about half Hispanic. The ruling is likely to mean that the...

The "straw-dog" that comes out of the liberal circles is that asking people if they are in the US Legally during the census is a horrible act of racism. In actuality it is simply an attempt to guarantee all US Citizens the right to equal representation in congress and equal access to congressional funds and programs. As set up by the constitution, the purpose of the US Census is to determine the amount of congressional representatives each state receives Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their...

Despite the fact that there have not been any complaints, the Justice Department (DOJ) will be monitoring today’s municipal elections in – are you ready for this - Springfield, Mass., and Newburgh, N.Y., to ensure compliance with the Voting Rights Act. Forget about reams of evidence of voting rights violations in Philadelphia, no Eric Holder's Justice Department would rather spend the taxpayers' money investigating a place where there is no problem. According to the DOJ press statement, federal observers will be assigned to monitor polling place activities in Springfield and Newburgh. The observers will ....

In a past national election, a uniformed hate group stood outside a polling place with a two-foot-long police nightstick in hand, screaming racial epithets and threats in a successful effort to prevent citizens from voting and poll watchers from doing their jobs. The Department of Justice investigated, the career counsel approved the institution of a civil complaint, and one was brought.

When Eric Holder became U.S. attorney general, he promised to administer the law in an objective, nonpolitical manner. So it's disappointing that the Justice Department had spent the last several months misinterpreting key voting rights laws for nakedly political reasons. Exhibit A: Justice's inexplicable dismissal of a civil lawsuit for voter intimidation against the New Black Panther Party. The Black Panthers weren't content to endorse Barack Obama. They sent their members to the polls last November to "patrol election sites." Fox News aired a video of two Black Panthers in military-style uniforms in a Philadelphia precinct. One of them was...

Courtesy of National Geographic Channel King Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson, pictured last year for the National Geographic Channel's show "Inside," were accused of voter intimidation by the Justice Department. Justice Department political appointees overruled career lawyers and ended a civil complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense of wielding a nightstick and intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place last Election Day, according to documents and interviews. The incident - which gained national attention when it was captured on videotape and distributed on YouTube - had prompted the government to sue the men,...

A central provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, designed to protect minorities in states with a history of discrimination, is at substantial risk of being struck down as unconstitutional, judging from the questioning on Wednesday at the Supreme Court. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, whose vote is likely to be crucial, was a vigorous participant in the argument, asking 17 questions that were almost consistently hostile to the approach Congress had taken to renewing the act in 2006. “Congress has made a finding that the sovereignty of Georgia is less than the sovereign dignity of Ohio,” Justice Kennedy said....

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court's conservative justices led a sustained attack Wednesday on a key element of the Voting Rights Act, questioning whether one-time bastions of segregation still should be held to account for past discrimination. The justices who were skeptical of that part of the voting rights law included Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose views are likely to prevail on the closely divided court. He tends to side with his more conservative colleagues on matters of race. -snip- The law requires all or parts of 16 states, mainly in the South, with a history of discrimination in voting to...