Ari Berman has a great piece on the voting rights hearing yesterday in North Carolina:
Nearly fifty years after marching for voting rights in Alabama, Coleman testified in federal court today in Winston-Salem against North Carolina’s new voting restrictions, which have been described as the most onerous in the nation. The law mandates strict voter ID, cuts early voting by a week and eliminates same-day registration, among many other things. After the bill’s passage, “I was devastated,” Coleman testified. “I felt like I was living life over again. Everything that I worked for for the last fifty years was being lost.”
The federal government and civil rights groups, including the ACLU and the North Carolina NAACP, asked Judge Thomas Schroeder, a George W. Bush appointee for the Middle District of North Carolina, to enjoin key provisions of the law before the 2014 midterms under Section 2 of the VRA.
After the hearing, eight hundred North Carolinians gathered in downtown Winston-Salem for a “Moral March to the Polls” event protesting the law. “I know it’s hot out here,” Barber told the crowd. “But it’s going to be hotter if you let them take our vote away.”
The Rev. William Barber, president of the state NAACP, was among the first at the court house this morning.
In other news, True the Vote had to dismiss their Mississippi lawsuit. Despite this headline:
Tea Party surrogates True the Vote have voluntarily given up a lawsuit in North MS Federal District Court after Judge Michael Mills read them the riot act on Monday.
I don’t think the judge “read them the riot act”. He thinks they’re in the wrong court so ordered them to “show cause” why they filed where they did and they then dismissed. It’s not like he told them to STFU.
schrodinger's cat
True the Vote; is that even a grammatically correct construction?
Davis X. Machina
@schrodinger’s cat: Legit as a verb, if slightly old-fashioned. One ‘trues’ something that was built or installed crooked. Sometimes ‘true up’ is the preferred locution. Used routinely by cyclists, of a wheel.
Joey Maloney
Did you click through? The judge basically accused them of deliberately trying to mislead the court to conceal that they have no freaking case. In judge terms, that’s STFU punctuated by a couple of shotgun blasts.
Alce_y_Ardilla
That sentence gave me pause for just a second
schrodinger's cat
@Davis X. Machina: Thanks! I hadn’t seen true being used as a verb before.
Kay
@Joey Maloney:
I did read it. I think they just rework it and file elsewhere. The claim itself is really sketchy, IMO. They’re using law and a case that deals with voter registration and they say that applies to poll books.
RaflW
There is a lame trend in media these days to say things like “Person X Destroys Fox News host Blondie Bubble in This Interview” that nearly always turn out to be a mild scolding, or even a full nothingburger.
The “riot act” thing is part and parcel.
scav
@Davis X. Machina: I was vaguely aware of it from more a carpentry background. More usually as make true maybe??
Kay
@RaflW:
I’m always disappointed too. “Really? I wouldn’t be ‘destroyed’ by that.”
J R in WV
Kay,
Thanks for keeping track of the election molestation that the Republicans have been dealing out for the past few years!
I know it’s a hard job dealing with those asses day by day, and you deserve more than this pat on the back for sticking to it. I hope from time to time you have the chance to stick it to the Republicans, when they try to mess with an election in your area! When that happens, stick them where it hurts! By taking back the vote, and winning the election!
I can’t believe they get away with so many irregularities, and then THEY act like the Democratic Party is the group violating the voting rules! I will never believe they won the Ohio vote in 2004 fairly. I believe they cheated, miscounted, moved people to new precincts without telling them about it, and I know I’m leaving out dozens of sneaky things I’m too honest to even imagine.
Grrrr!
Best of luck this fall!
flukebucket
What is a riot act to one is a nothing burger to another.
Davis X. Machina
@scav: I think they usually spell it treu — the Teabaggers, not the carpenters…
Emerald
@J R in WV:
Me neither. Somebody’s gonna have a helluva Ph.D. dissertation on that subject in years to come. History, I believe, eventually will reveal that George the Lesser was never elected president–he lost both times.
Of course, that will depend on who writes History. The villagers think it’s gonna be them. Maybe so, but once the Rs finally start circling the drain of demography, even the Very Serious People will want to be on the side of the winners.
Roger Moore
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yes, it is. “True” can be used as a verb, meaning to make true, i.e. to straighten or adjust until it’s correct. A good example is truing the wheels of a bicycle; you adjust the tension on the spokes until the rim is planar and won’t rub on the brake pads as it rotates.
SFAW
@J R in WV:
That’s because the “P” in “GOP” stands for “Projection.”
It’s all they have. Well, that, and treasonous/seditious behavior.
And lying.
And evil.
Amongst their weaponry …
SFAW
@Roger Moore:
Which is ironic, because the Rethugs/TeaTards do whatever they can to prevent progress.
So, I guess, “True” the Vote is yet another example of Vizzini Syndrome.
Calouste
@Emerald:
History is written by the winners. So if there was indeed fraud on a relevant scale in Ohio in 2004, it won’t come out until the GOP has gone the way of the Whigs, and the Bushes have gone the way of the Hohenzollerns..
Roger Moore
@SFAW:
They’re trying to true the vote, i.e. to adjust it until it gives the desired result.
scav
@Davis X. Machina: “Treu for Tea and Tea for Treu and Me for Me and Not for You!”
schrodinger's cat
What the Republicans really want is to Screw the Vote (of everyone who doesn’t vote for them)
SFAW
@Roger Moore:
Po-TAY-toe, po-TAH-toe
Kay
@J R in WV:
I don’t think they “cheated” right out. I think the Ken Blackwell stuff probably hurt total vote count somewhat (long lines, not enough machines, all the screwing around with registration in the months prior) but as far as counting votes I don’t think 88 county bds of election were corrupted, in synch.
John Kerry wasn’t a very good candidate for this state, IMO. I don’t blame him for it. He had a nice humility about his limitations as someone who was not “connecting” that was missing in Mitt Romney, was my sense. I got some idea of a person there, some self-awareness. Republicans were better at getting their voters out. I knew it by 3 PM of election day. They wouldn’t be now, after Obama’s people, but they were then. We had too many orgs, too many disorganized groups, too much running around in circles.
WereBear
@Emerald: Hope I live long enough for THAT bit of vindication to get done.
Kay
@J R in WV:
I do think they cheated in Florida in Bush v Gore, which is why the distinction is important. I think that was outrageous. I don’t know to this day why Jeb Bush is treated like a decent person after what I see as a deliberate effort to disenfranchise black people. That election had everything that is wrong and bad all rolled into a toxic stew of complete venality :)
Kay
@J R in WV:
My eldest son was not old enough to vote in Bush v Gore but he was a Gore supporter and to this day he does this sort of recitation of catastrophic events of civic life that starts there. Partly his age of course, but for him it’s completely valid :)
“That was the beginning…”
Davis X. Machina
@Kay: I had people tell me at the time that the best warrant for Bush getting the White House was that ‘he cared enough to steal it.’ That of course being the natural result of the tough-mindedness we need in our Presidents. Think of it as constitutional bump-drafting.
Not like that wimpy rule-of-law process-respecting Gore.
Just win, baby.
Kay
@Davis X. Machina:
As far as I’m concerned he was the only adult in the room, and that includes the justices.
There was nothing to challenge in Ohio in ’04. The Greens say there is every election year, but that’s about splitting off Democrats and growing the Greens. I don’t blame them for doing it, it’s a tactic, but that’s all it is. I was ready to strangle them in ’12 because their lawsuit on the computer “patch” would have muddled or delayed a final vote count, and “muddled” is not good if you’re going to win, and Obama was going to win. Thankfully it went nowhere outside of blogs,
WaterGirl
I wrote to my niece who lives in North Carolina, asking her what her thoughts are on Moral Mondays. She wrote back to say she had never heard of Moral Mondays until she received my email, so she had to google it. I was shocked.
She lives in winston-salem and she was guessing that Moral Mondays get more national press than local press in NC.
Citizen Alan
While I have enormous respect for Judge Mike Mills, he is a reasonably staunch Republican (if one of the last I’ve known to have either a brain or a soul). I will be curious to know what effect it has going forward once it enters the Teatard consciousness that this Bush 2 appointee is actually an America-hating Marxist plant.
bemused
@Calouste:
Right. Rats don’t abandon ship until it is on fire or sinking.
Cheryl from Maryland
So much deliberate obfuscation between voter rolls and actual voters. Yeah, deceased people are on voter rolls. So what. It takes a while for voter registration to catch up with death records. And we should let it. Why — because when my brother and I called about my mother’s death, the registrar mentioned she couldn’t cancel a registration based on our telephone call. And that is a good thing – they should wait for official notification and not random phone calls. There is no evidence that deceased people such as my mother actually voted (although if she was alive in November 2008, she would have voted Obama).
rikyrah
thanks for the report from North Carolina.