In The News

Judge Richard Posner, one of the foremost American jurists outside the Supreme Court, once observed, “A perpetual charitable foundation . . . is a completely irresponsible institution, answerable to nobody. It competes neither in capital markets nor in product markets . . . and, unlike a hereditary monarch whom such a foundation otherwise resembles, it is subject to no political controls either.” Why, he wondered, don’t we think of these foundations as “total scandals”? read more >>

Measures proposing to expand Oregon’s current and future voters have resulted in partisan divisions this session in the Oregon Legislature.

Secretary of State Kate Brown has proposed to use driver records to expand Oregon’s voter rolls by as many as 500,000 voters on top of the 2.2 million registered for the Nov. 6 presidential election.

But the plan proposed by Democrat Brown in House Bill 2198 has run into opposition from Republican lawmakers and the Oregon Republican Party.read more >>

Big State, Small State

RUTLAND, Vt. — In the four years after the financial crisis struck, a great wave of federal stimulus money washed over Rutland County. It helped pay for bridges, roads, preschool programs, a community health center, buses and fire trucks, water mains and tanks, even a project to make sure fish could still swim down the river while a bridge was being rebuilt.read more >>

If Wednesday morning's oral arguments are any indication, the Supreme Court stands poised to require that a law written to protect the rights of black voters in the South be overhauled — even while the rest of the United States is riddled with uneven, unclear voting rules. The case has drawn the country's attention today back to a small part of a still messy, unseen, and ignored picture.read more >>

Congressional District 23 cuts across a rural swath of southwestern Texas, from the state’s border with New Mexico, hundreds of miles south along the Rio Grande, stretching east to San Antonio. It’s among the least densely populated terrain in the country—and the most electorally disputed. The district was created in 1967, two years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The voters of District 23 sent a Democrat to Congress every term until the 1992 election.read more >>

A fresh breeze of reform is blowing in from the western plains.

On Election Day, Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock was one of just three nonincumbent Democrats to win election as either governor or U.S. senator in states that went red in the presidential race. Bullock was inaugurated two weeks before this month's third anniversary of Citizens United. He had led a fight to try to keep the U.S. Supreme Court decision in that case from negating Montana's strict campaign finance law in state elections.read more >>

The Obama administration suggested Tuesday that there are signs that bipartisan cooperation might be possible on immigration reform, in light of some new ideas being championed by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.).

White House press secretary Jay Carney said that Rubio’s proposals to offer more visas to highly skilled tech workers and potentially provide legal status and citizenship to many of the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants “bode well for a productive, bipartisan debate.”read more >>

HELENA – No one showed up to oppose a bill Friday to tighten and make more specific some of Montana’s campaign finance laws after a federal judge struck down some of them as unconstitutionally vague last year.

At issue before the House State Administration Committee was House Bill 129 by Rep. Steve Gibson, R-East Helena.read more >>

WASHINGTON — Alabama's practice of discriminating against minorities at the ballot box is a relic from a bygone era and the state no longer deserves to be punished for it, according to papers filed recently with the Supreme Court.

"Alabama has a new generation of leaders with no connection to the tragic events of 1965," the state's attorney general, Luther Strange, wrote in a brief filed last week. "The effects of those events on voting and political representation have now, thankfully, faded away."read more >>

IT IS HARD to identify a federal agency in Washington more dysfunctional than the Federal Election Commission. Terms have expired for five of the six commissioners, and by next spring, the entire commission will be a lame duck if nothing is done. The number of enforcement actions — at the core of the FEC’s mission — has fallen to an all-time low. Created in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the commission now behaves as an immobilized observer while campaigns are swamped with a tidal wave of hidden cash.read more >>

In the movie “Lincoln”, there’s a scene where “Radical” Republicans are debating Democrats in congressional chambers over whether to abolish slavery with a new constitutional amendment. A speaker from the Democratic Party, arguing against abolition, delivers a rousing speech about how Negroes shouldn’t be emancipated because of the slippery slope of freedom. Once Negroes have freedom, he argued, then they’ll want the right to vote—the prospect of which caused a riotous but bipartisan chorus of disagreement from most of Congress.read more >>

"Voters overwhelmingly recognize that in a society in which people must show photo ID to board a plane, they should have to show some form of ID to vote," he said. "Americans should not have to worry about their legitimate votes being diluted by those who cannot legally cast a ballot."

There were voting issues in November in numerous states.

Some Miami-Dade County, Fla., voters, in line at the 7 p.m. poll closing time, didn't cast their ballots until after 1 a.m. Democratic operatives brought pizza to keep them from leaving.read more >>

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Tuesday that he would seek legislation to significantly expand New York’s regulation of political spending by corporations, individuals and tax-exempt groups during his third year in office.

Mr. Cuomo also said he would push to make the public financing of campaigns a part of any bill, but refused to say whether the absence of such a provision — long sought by liberal groups — would be a deal-breaker in any negotiations with Republicans in the State Senate, who have opposed public financing in the past.read more >>

The U.S. should consider automatically registering eligible voters and extending voting hours to counter the November election’s long lines and administrative hurdles, Attorney General Eric Holder said.

Holder, speaking today at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, proposed expanding access for voters and overhauling a registration system he called “antiquated.”read more >>

Here’s one way Gov. Andrew Cuomo can match the acclaim he achieved by getting same-sex marriage approved in New York State: persuade the State Legislature to make New York’s system of electing legislators the fairest and most transparent in the country.read more >>

Thankfully, Ohio’s nightmare election scenario didn’t happen.

Ohio, THE critical swing state in the nation, got enough of its votes counted on election night that the fate of its 18 electoral votes was known by midnight. The rest of the nation did not need to wait in limbo for days or weeks to find out whom the next president would be.read more >>

High-dollar super PACs and advocacy groups failed to score big wins in the recent elections, but they may have better luck with their next act: lobbying Capitol Hill. From anti-tax activists to environmental organizers, special interest players are pivoting to the policy arena and bringing their unrestricted super PACs with them. It’s a trend that worries campaign reform advocates, who warn that the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling may do more to distort policymaking than elections.read more >>

Hundreds of thousands of ballots have yet to be counted in Arizona nearly a week after Election Day, a majority of which appeared to come from Maricopa County.

Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett’s said Saturday that approximately 486,405 ballots still have to be counted across the state, representing more than a quarter of the 1.8 million votes cast. About 322,000 of those uncounted ballots came from Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and many of its suburbs. The statewide total included 307,620 early ballots and 178,785 provisional ballots.read more >>

After $4 billion, two dozen presidential primary election days, a pair of national conventions, four general election debates, hundreds of Congressional contests and more television advertisements than anyone would ever want to watch, the two major political parties in America essentially fought to a standstill.read more >>

If you believe in broadening the franchise in democracy for the many rather than the few, the complaints from people who spent a chunk of their weekend waiting at the polls are infuriating. Like this one from Myrna Peralta in the Miami Herald: "This is America, not a third-world country. They should have been prepared.” She spent almost two hours in line with her 4-year-old grandson before being shut out in Doral, Fla., the home of the election headquarters in ever-crucial Miami-Dade County.read more >>

If you believe in broadening the franchise in democracy for the many rather than the few, the complaints from people who spent a chunk of their weekend waiting at the polls are infuriating. Like this one from Myrna Peralta in the Miami Herald: "This is America, not a third-world country. They should have been prepared.” She spent almost two hours in line with her 4-year-old grandson before being shut out in Doral, Fla., the home of the election headquarters in ever-crucial Miami-Dade County.read more >>

Sitting in a Starbucks on Route 1 in Woodbridge, New Jersey, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, I wondered why I didn't vote by mail -- a recent innovation in New Jersey that allows citizens to vote absentee without an excuse. Without power, cable or Internet access, how would I and millions of voters in Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and other affected states actually vote on Tuesday? This just reinforced my conviction that voting needs to become more accessible and more convenient, a major goal of Carnegie Corporation's U.S.read more >>

With just a few dozen hours left before polls open on Election Day, here is a candidate for the most important election-law story of the weekend -- a story likely to cross over into the general political debate Sunday through Monday. This early copy from the Associated Press offered a hint:
read more >>

Hurricane Sandy spurred Maryland to suspend its early voting program for a second day on Tuesday and forced the closing of some early voting sites in battleground states like North Carolina and Virginia. But the bigger question that many state and county elections officials in storm-battered states were asking themselves was how to get ready for Election Day next week.read more >>