Here are two NC stories of groups setting out to exert power – one taking the hard road of community organizing and grassroots democracy, the other using their big-money connections to buy an election. The first story describes how and why Stokes County neighbors came together to wage an impressive campaign against the prospect of [...]
In the midst of Super PAC spending and candidates hustling big-dollar donors, here’s a positive story from North Carolina: Candidates are actually agreeing to accept strict campaign spending limits and to rely only on small donations and a public grant authorized by hundreds of registered voters! Today, the State Board of Elections sent notices to [...]
In a historic decision today, Superior Court Judge Gregory Weeks found that prosecutors deliberately excluded qualified black jurors from serving on the jury in the case of death row inmate Marcus Robinson. The hearing was the first to apply North Carolina’s landmark Racial Justice Act. Following the law’s directives, the judge resentenced Robinson to life [...]
A trio of groups that analyze judicial elections today released a report documenting a national campaign “to intimidate America’s state judges into becoming accountable to money and ideologies instead of the Constitution and the law.” The New Politics of Judicial Elections, 2010 examines the “hostile takeover” of judicial elections by special interests and the attacks on [...]
Anti-public financing lawyer James Bopp has filed a lawsuit to make North Carolina abandon part of the “voter-owned elections” program for state judicial candidates. It’s the part that awards candidates in the public program extra money if their privately financed opponents spend beyond a certain limit. But the US Supreme Court has already ruled that [...]
The racial bias of too many elected white judges and state legislators continues to undermine America’s promise of fair courts and representative government. The opening of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial is the occasion of a series of essays by the American Constitution Society, including one by Sherrilyn Ifill about elected judges in [...]
The US Supreme Court issued its expected 5-to-4 rejection of the matching or rescue funds provision in Arizona’s public campaign financing program. Some worried that the activist justices would overreach (as they did in the Citizens United decision) and find some means to outlaw public financing altogether. That didn’t happen; maybe the public’s outrage over [...]
The same rightwing law firm that engineered the Citizens United decision also attacked North Carolina’s judicial public financing program a few years ago; they took their challenge all the way to the US Supreme Court and lost. Now they’re representing a “right to life” group in Wisconsin, claiming that state’s new judicial program (modeled on [...]
A hodgepodge of anti-voter bills resurfaced this afternoon in the House Committee on Elections as a single 44-page proposal, without warning or even a summary of its complex contents for committee members. Republican chair David Lewis wanted the bill voted on that afternoon. Rep. Deborah Ross (D-Wake County) called the process “legislative malfeasance,” and others [...]
The photo ID bill, known by opponents as the “Voter Suppression Act,” passed its final House vote by a party line vote of 68 to 48. The goal of Democracy North Carolina and other voting rights groups has been to keep the conservatives’ margin of victory small enough to send a message to Gov. Bev [...]