AP wire story today on Supreme Court ruling

 Rep. Clyburn's March 5 commentary in Charleston Gazette

 State Jan. 9th editorial: "A better way of voting"

 LA Times article on litigation to see uniform administration

 Charlotte Observer op-ed by Kelly Alexander on proportional

           systems as way to maintain diversity in face of urban growth

 Miami Herald on sweeping electoral reform legislation in FL

 Newark Star-Ledger on New Jersey redistricting case 

    

A day after three federal judges rejected Utah's claim to the 435th seat in the U.S. House of Representatives that has been allocated to North Carolina, the Supreme Court in a major ruling today has upheld the most recent version of North Carolina's controversial 12th Congressional district. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was the key swing vote in a closely divided 5-4 ruling that ends a full decade of litigation for the district's representative, Congressman Mel Watt.

We also are seeing growing attention to the potential of proportional voting systems to provide for minority voting rights. Meanwhile, there have been major developments in California and Florida on improving election administration and voter education, while redistricting plans are moving toward completion in several states, including one in New Jersey that Republican lawyers claim reduces the number of black-majority districts. See excerpts from:

"Court Upholds N.C. District"

Laurie Asseo Associated Press Wire, April 18 10:55 am ET

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court upheld a much-litigated North Carolina congressional district Wednesday, saying those who challenged it did not show that race was the main factor in its creation.

The 5-4 ruling was the fourth time that the high court has looked at North Carolina's 12th district. The case is a follow-up to a landmark 1993 decision that racially drawn districts may violate the rights of white voters.

``The evidence ... does not show that racial considerations predominated in the drawing of District 12's boundaries,'' Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote for the court. ``That is because race in this case correlates closely with political behavior.''

Those who challenged the district have ``not successfully shown that race, rather than politics, predominantly accounts for the result,'' Breyer wrote.

A lower court ruling that said the district was unconstitutionally based on race was based on ``clearly erroneous'' findings, Breyer said.

His opinion was joined by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg....

The district is represented by Democrat Mel Watt, one of two blacks elected to Congress in 1992 from a state that had not sent a black to Washington since 1901.

North Carolina had argued that the district's latest boundaries were dictated by politics, not race. Lawyers for the state argued that the North Carolina Legislature wanted to ensure the district was safely Democratic, to maintain an even split between Republicans and Democrats in the state's congressional delegation....

...Breyer wrote that after a detailed review of the three-judge panel's findings, ``that review leaves us with the definite and firm conviction that the district court's key findings are mistaken.'' He said the lower court wrongly considered evidence of voting registration rather than voting behavior.

In cases in which race correlates with political affiliation, Breyer added, those who attack a voting district must show ``that the legislature could have achieved its legitimate political objectives in alternative ways that are comparably consistent with traditional districting principles.''

[Justice Clarence] Thomas wrote in dissent that the lower court found evidence ``demonstrating that race was foremost on the legislative agenda.''...

[The cases are Hunt v. Cromartie, 99-1864, and Smallwood v. Cromartie, 99-1865. See the case at http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-1864.ZS.html ]

"Suits Seek Uniformity in States' Vote-Counting Law: In the latest such action, the ACLU says machines' accuracy levels vary widely in California."

By HENRY WEINSTEIN, Los Angeles Times , March 18, 2001

In the months since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that awarded the presidential election to George W. Bush, lawsuits have started sprouting up around the nation demanding greater uniformity in statewide vote-counting.

Legal experts say the suits--a byproduct of the court's decision that a lack of uniformity in vote recount procedures violated equal protection rights--will determine whether the controversial ruling has ramifications for future elections.

"This squarely raises a question scholars have been discussing since Bush vs. Gore was handed down," said J. Clark Kelso, a professor at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento.

The suits are also providing a new forum for national debate over how to fix the nation's ailing voting machinery--a problem brought into sharp focus by November's election.

The latest such suit was filed in Los Angeles federal court Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union, alleging that the wide variety of voting machines used in California results in sharply disparate levels of accuracy. Calling the state's voting system flawed and discriminatory, the ACLU charges that "a disproportionate number of votes in some counties"--including Los Angeles--are not counted...

...The error rate for [pre-scored punchard] machines was more than double that of any other system used in the state and three times as high as in Riverside County, which used high-tech touch screen voting machines, according to the suit.

"Under our Constitution, every vote should be counted, regardless of where a person lives or the color of his or her skin," Dan Tokaji, ACLU staff attorney, said in a news conference at the organization's Los Angeles office. "Unfortunately, that is not true in California today, due to outdated equipment which is the voting equivalent of a horse and buggy."

Legal experts said the recent wave of lawsuits--others have been filed by the ACLU and additional attorneys in Florida, Georgia and Illinois--will mark the first important tests of whether December's Supreme Court decision will be applied broadly or limited to the specifics of the 2000 presidential election.... 

Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the ACLU of Southern California, said the logic of last year's Supreme Court decision, which held that Florida's manual vote recounts violated equal protection because of differing county standards, is beneficial to the plaintiffs in the Los Angeles case.

"I think that Bush vs. Gore dictates that you can't have voting machines of different levels of reliability," said Rosenbaum, who is representing Common Cause, the Southwest Voter Registration Project, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Chicano Federation of San Diego County in the suit. Another plaintiff, the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest labor organization, is separately represented by its own Washington attorneys. Munger, Tolles & Olson, a large Los Angeles law firm, is assisting the ACLU.... 

"Can We Keep Diverse Voices in Our Civic Dialog? Charlotte Faces the Question of How to Maintain Diversity in Our Local Government Bodies in the Face of Urban Growth"

Kelly Alexander, Jr., The Charlotte Observer, January 11, 2001,

If you are expecting the predictable "politically correct" position on issues from me this year, think again. I believe it is time for us to posit solutions applicable to the century we live in, not the one we just left behind. We must look critically at the old paradigms; where they no longer fit new realities, we must have the courage to change them. We must also have the courage to proclaim in the face of demands for change that "if it ain't broke, it don't need fixing."

The beginning of a new century is always a raucous place to be, full of the clash, clang, boom of a civilization going places. Part of our local raucous debate ought to be over how best to maintain diversity in our local body politic.

Since approximately the last quarter of the 20th century, our community has demonstrated support for heterogeneous political bodies - councils, boards and commissions that represent a diversity of economic, ethnic and political opinions. The first indication of this trend was the election of Fred Alexander to City Council by only a few votes.

Another important indication was the switch from pure at-large to a combination of district and at-large representation.

The switch was grassroots-driven, welling up from a belief that the City Council, and by extension all local government, was no longer representative of all our citizens. At-large representation had concentrated our elected officials into a few neighborhoods and underrepresented ethnic minorities and women. District representation opened the electoral process. It was the right thing to do at that time.

The problem with electoral heterogeneity and district representation is that the size and make up of districts change over time. Ethnic populations disperse. Suburban areas are annexed. District lines grow to accommodate population growth. The county towns, like the city neighborhoods before them, want clearer voices articulating their needs. Latin and Asian populations emerge with unique needs of their own.

I believe that heterogeneous political bodies are in and of themselves beneficial to our community, bringing as they do many voices to the civic dialogue. The question for us as we start into a new century is how to maintain heterogeneity in the face of urban growth.

One answer is to decrease the size of districts, while increasing the number of representatives. This solution could ultimately produce New York-style urban politics. Another solution is to change the electoral system while maintaining modest size councils, commissions and boards.

Any replacement electoral system must protect the essential interests of the existing stakeholders, while permitting new stakeholders to emerge. Several voting methods, using at-large election, permit these seemingly mutually exclusive outcomes. They are limited voting (voters have fewer votes than the number of seats open), preference voting (voters rank their choices) and cumulative voting (each voter has the same number of votes as the positions to be filled. The votes can be used any way the voter desires - place them all on one candidate or spread them out; it's the voters choice).

None of these systems is a magic bullet; each has advantages and disadvantages. They all make it more likely that our community will maintain heterogeneous political bodies of reasonable size.

The price of maintaining heterogeneity under these systems will be increased voter education. Straight ticket voting, though not prohibited, is more difficult to sustain. In effect, each voter creates a "district of the imagination." The grass roots will of necessity become more politically sophisticated. Candidates will be unable to write off sections of the community, because their constituents will live everywhere. Political extremists should find it more difficult to win elections. County-wide voter alliances will be relatively more important, as successful candidates seek to represent us from the center of the political spectrum.

Noting is done in our community without a study or two. So I humbly request that our county commissioners, City Council, school board and board of elections, along with the respected political science departments of our local universities, jointly study the impact of changing demographics on the composition of our elected bodies.

The study should assume heterogeneity as a given on all our political bodies and explore how best to maintain it. The public debate on our electoral future should be fueled by studied analysis, not conjecture or blind adherence to the status quo.

(Community columnist Kelly M. Alexander Jr., community activist and past chairman of the state NAACP, is executive vice president of Alexander Funeral Home in Charlotte.)

"Punch-card ballots all but dead after vote Senate panel backs electronics, matching steps taken by House"

by Mark Silva, Miami Herald , 4/6/01

TALLAHASSEE -- Florida will ban the embattled punch-card ballot and place an electronic vote-counter in every precinct next year, under a sweeping bill approved unanimously Thursday by a Senate committee crafting the most comprehensive election reform of the legislative session....

In the House, a pivotal committee has approved the same concepts in separate bills, setting the stage for both Senate and House in the weeks ahead to overhaul an election machinery that cast Florida's 2000 presidential vote into chaos...

...The measure (S 1374) cleared the committee 11-0. The bill:

Bans punch-card balloting in Florida and requires that any electronic vote-counting be done by machinery placed in each voting precinct, with the equipment programmed to reject overvoted ballots and advise voters who undervote. This allows both optical scanners, already placed in the precincts of 26 counties, and touch-screen computers, once the state authorizes their use.

Authorizes the secretary of state to distribute $20 million that the Legislature is budgeting for new voting machinery to the counties.

Eliminates the second primary in party primaries, averting runoff elections for the top-two vote-getters when no one wins a majority of the vote in a primary. Instead, the leading vote-getter in any primary becomes the winner, and in the event of a tie the top two ``choose lots.''

Requires the state to develop a standard ballot for use by all counties in primary and general elections, listing candidates alphabetically, with each name on one line, so that there is no confusion about the choice.

Makes the election of supervisors of election nonpartisan and prohibits members of canvassing boards from activity in campaigns.  

Authorizes a statewide database for voter registration, which will enable poll workers to verify a voter's eligibility with a laptop computer.

Requires recruitment and training of poll workers, with at least six hours of training in procedures before Election Day.

Calls for posting a ``Voters' Bill of Rights'' at each polling place, asserting the right of each person to have a vote counted and to cast a vote if standing in line when the polling place closes at the end of the day.

"U.S. judge won't halt new voter districts"

by David Kinney, Newark Star-Ledger , 4/17/01

A federal judge yesterday refused to block elections in New Jersey's newly redrawn legislative districts, sweeping aside Republican complaints that the new map will hurt the chances of black and Hispanic candidates to win elections.

In a ruling issued from the bench after 20 minutes of reflection, U.S. District Judge Dickinson Debevoise said the map "quite clearly" does not violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by dismantling two majority-black districts in Essex County.

Republicans -- who said they would appeal today to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia -- called the decision unprecedented.

"This is the first court anywhere in the country to say it's OK under the Constitution to eliminate majority-black districts," said Matt Stowe, a lawyer with Patton Boggs, a Washington, D.C.-based law firm representing the state GOP.....

Both parties acknowledge that the new map could help Democrats take back the Legislature in the fall after a decade out of power. But Republicans say that is not why they are fighting the plan.

"We are going to demonstrate what we said today: This is a regression of civil rights," said Frederick Whitmer, the lawyer who argued the Republican side. Calling it a "test case," they vowed to fight it to its conclusion.

Democrats say the argument is ironic from a party that has just two of the state's 21 minority lawmakers. "How disingenuous is that?" said Senate Minority Leader Richard Codey (D-Essex). "Every 10 years, they want to come to the aid of minorities."

Debevoise, sitting in Newark, gave the first judicial endorsement to a new argument Democrats are pressing around the nation: "unpacking." Democrats say the old New Jersey map concentrated minorities into a handful of districts, assuring the election of blacks and Hispanics there. But Democrats argue that more could win if minorities were scattered into surrounding districts. 

Toward that end, the new map "unpacks" two of three majority-black districts in Essex County, distributing some of the voters into surrounding Republican districts.

But Whitmer said that when voting-age population is considered, no district would have a black majority. He appealed to the judge not to "jettison" the very majority-black districts that helped black candidates win over the past decade, calling the strategy "untested" and warning that it could scale back minority gains in the Legislature. Democrats argued that the new map retains nine districts in which all minorities -- blacks, Hispanics plus others -- outnumber white voters. Debevoise said that was an important point. Responding to GOP arguments that the Voting Rights Act bars the dismantling of majority-black districts, he said, "I can't agree less."....

The arguments are the first salvos in what will become a national battle as other states prepare to redraw their legislative and congressional districts to comport with the 2000 census. An official from the Republican National Committee watched the proceedings, and in Congress and in state legislatures, Democrats are arguing for "unpacking."