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With his signature on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, outlawed discriminatory election practices that had been adopted in many southern states including Texas. Now, almost half a century later, another Texan, Attorney General Greg Abbott, could find himself in a position to dismantle a key section of the historic act that he thinks is unfair. For the past several weeks, a panel of federal judges in Washington, D.C., has been pondering what to do with Texas' 2011 voter identification law — one of the nation's strictest laws requiring voters to show one...

Every ten years, after the U.S. Census releases its latest population reports, most of the 50 states begin the complicated process of drawing new election districts. As you might expect, partisan bickering and maneuvering inevitably distort things. So a decade ago, Arizona voters decided to end the partisanship by removing the redistricting process from the state legislature and placing it in the hands of an independent commission. Last year, the new commission, consisting of two Democrats, two Republicans, and a nonpartisan chair, got to work on its first set of maps after the 2010 census. Unfortunately, the results were...

I heard this morning that the Obama lawyers are trying to suppress the videos of the NJ Obama Ballot Access Challenge public hearing. I just spoke with Attorney Mario Apuzzo and he confirmed that Obama’s lawyers have called him and told him they are planning to take legal action to get the videos of the NJ Ballot Access Challenge Public Hearing pulled and suppressed. What is the Obama side ashamed of and doesn’t want the world to see. Could it be that their Obama “emperor has no clothing on”, i.e., has no known conclusively proven true legal identity clothing/papers to...

Madison - A Dane County judge permanently enjoined the state's new voter ID law on Monday - the second judge in a week to block the requirement that voters show photo identification at the polls. "A government that undermines the very foundation of its existence - the people's inherent, pre-constitutional right to vote - imperils its legitimacy as a government by the people, for the people, and especially of the people," said the eight-page opinion by Dane County Judge Richard Niess. "It sows the seeds for its own demise as a democratic institution. This is precisely what 2011 Wisconsin Act...

<p>March 12 (Bloomberg) -- The Obama administration blocked Texas’s new law requiring voters to show government-issued photo identification at the polls, escalating a partisan dispute over voting restrictions.</p> <p>The U.S. Justice Department is using its power under the Voting Rights Act to halt the Texas law, saying in a letter to the state today that the measure may disproportionately harm Hispanics. The department in December blocked a similar law in South Carolina.</p>

The Justice Department is objecting to a new photo ID law in Texas for voters, saying the state has failed to demonstrate that the the law is not discriminatory by design against Hispanic voters. The department's head of the civil rights division, Tom Perez, wrote a a six-page letter to Texas' director of elections saying that Texas has not "sustained its burden" under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to show that the new law will not have a discriminatory effect on minority voters. About 11 percent of Hispanic voters reportedly lack state-issued identification. Perez wrote that while the...

Jacksonville,FL- After last night’s Republican Presidential debate, the candidates’ respective spinmeisters made their cases to the media as to why their guy won the debate. One of Governor Mitt Romney’s spokesmen was Florida Representative Will Weatherford, and during the course of his remarks in the “Spin Room”, he shed a very dim light on the ongoing redistricting process in the Florida Legislature. Over the past several weeks, many Republicans have voiced their disappointment towards the Republican legislature after the release of the preliminary redistricting maps. Much of the ire concerns the proposed boundaries of Congressman Allen West’s 22nd Congressional District...

When the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, it was considered a cornerstone bill for civil rights. After all, what wasn’t to like? Minorities would now be equally represented in government, they could vote without having to pay a ridiculous poll tax or take a literacy test, and institutional racism was essentially ended. At least that was what I originally thought, until I saw how the Department of Justice has interpreted the VRA in a recent case, in which the election procedures of Kingston, North Carolina were declared unconstitutional. Since Kingston is a community covered under Section...

Suffrage: Fresh from using his race as a defense in the Fast and Furious scandal, the attorney general blocks South Carolina's voter photo ID law as discriminatory. Tell that to the Department of Motor Vehicles. The Palmetto State can't seem to catch a break from this administration. First, the right-to-work state gets harassed by the National Labor Relations Board over Boeing's expansion into a new plant. Now the Justice Department has blocked a voter ID law passed in May and signed by Gov. Nikki Haley. Both federal actions, along with a Justice Department investigation into Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, have...

ANNAPOLIS — Black voters and lawmakers said Thursday that a proposed state-level redistricting map provides too few majority-black districts and would lead to continued underrepresentation of minorities in the General Assembly. The testimony was given during a public hearing held by Gov. Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, and his appointed redistricting panel, which remapped Maryland’s 47 state Senate districts to account for population changes in the past decade. The panel submitted the map last week and touted the strides it would make toward improving minority representation by increasing the number of majority-black districts from 10 to 12 and increasing the number...

Supreme Court to settle election district scuffle in Texas as a map signed by Rick Perry is accused of diluting minority voting power Texas’ March primary will likely be delayed after the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday blocked the use of state legislative and congressional district maps that were drawn by federal judges. The court issued a brief order late Friday that applies to electoral maps drawn by federal judges in San Antonio for the Texas Legislature and Congress that would have ensured minorities made up the majority in three additional Texas congressional districts. The justices said they will hear...

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Do you live in a "gayborhood"? Are you part of an Armenian sub-community or do you reside among black farmers and agriculturists? These and myriad other questions that most of us have never thought to ask will be answered Aug. 15, the day the Citizen's Redistricting Commission is scheduled to release its final maps. .. Among the criteria that the commission must consider when drawing its boundaries is "community of interest," a concept so vague as to remind one of Justice Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography - "I know it when I see it." Knowing a community when one...

WASHINGTON -- I won't procrastinate; I'll get the most difficult part of this column over right now: I was wrong. I was shortsighted, naive and narrow-minded to endorse the concept of drawing congressional districts to take racial demographics into account. In 1982, the Voting Rights Act, with its emphasis on Southern states, was amended to encourage the creation of awkwardly named "majority-minority" districts in order to give black voters the strength of a bloc. I believed that drawing such districts was a progressive political tactic, a benign form of affirmative action that would usher more black members into a Congress...

In a racially mixed corner of Shreveport, La., a small group of white voters protested loudly this year that they did not want to be part of a majority black district when the legislature redrew the state’s political boundaries. The Republican-led statehouse complied, drawing a line around the community to accommodate them. That line is at the heart of a case before the Justice Department that is seen as a critical test of how the Obama administration will interpret the controversial Voting Rights Act as it rules on a new wave of redistricting plans. The law, passed in 1965, was...

The Georgia Legislative Black Caucus filed a lawsuit Monday against the state of Georgia seeking to dissolve the city charters of Dunwoody, Sandy Springs, Johns Creek, Milton and Chattahoochee Hills. Further, the lawmakers, joined by civil rights leader the Rev. Joseph Lowery, aim to dash any hopes of a Milton County. The lawsuit, filed in a North Georgia U.S. District Court Monday, claims that the state circumvented the normal legislative process and set aside its own criteria when creating the “super-majority white ” cities within Fulton and DeKalb counties. The result, it argues, is to dilute minority votes in those...

Abusing the Voting Rights ActThanks to the Obama Justice Department, redistricting may touch off contentious court battles over the rule of law. The redistricting process for congressional and state-legislative seats will soon begin in earnest. All redistricting plans must meet the “one person, one vote” equal-protection standard established by the Supreme Court, which means that districts are supposed to be as even in population as possible. But redistricting also must comply with the Voting Rights Act, and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division just released its new “Guidance Concerning Redistricting Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.” This guidance,...

Last week, a federal district court heard arguments in a case brought by Shelby County, Ala., challenging the constitutionality of significant parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The case may reshape American politics. At issue is the law requiring the attorney general to approve every single change touching on elections in some but not all states. Little-noticed behavior of the Justice Department makes it more likely the U.S. Supreme Court could invalidate the 45-year-old law, assuming the high court is aware of the offending behavior. Section 5 forces nine states and parts of seven others to submit every...

Like any administration snared in a Beltway scandal, the Obama team has two problems in the New Black Panther Party scandal: the wrongdoing and the cover-up. The wrongdoing is not merely that the Obama administration dismissed a blatant case of voter intimidation. It is not merely that an NAACP attorney pressured the Obama team to dump the case. It is not merely that the Obama Justice Department explicitly told attorneys not to enforce Section 8 of the Voting Rights Act, which helps prevent voter fraud. It is that the Obama team believes that the civil rights laws run only one...

Click here or on the image below to read Mr. Coates’ testimony: