Voting // Current

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The Other Side

Filmaka is entering the final stretch of its world-wide Feature Film Competition. Undiscovered filmmakers compete each month by... more

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Iran Needs MORE Guns

Submitted for your approval, meet Marco Rubio - Republican and former member of the Florida state legislature. Mr. Rubio believes... more

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Jim Crow Alive and Well?

Less than six months after the nations first non-white president took office the Supreme Court makes it just a little harder for a... more

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Thom Hartman on Obama - Part 2

Radio show host Thom Hartman on progressives and the Democratic Party. Thom Hartmann is a host of a nationally syndicated daily... more

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Abortion Doctor Shot Dead in Wichita, Kan. - ABC News

The Religious Reich Strike Again!

Delta_Wave
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New iPhone app helps you keep tabs on politicians' voting records

You cast your ballot in November, but your job as a citizen isn't finished. Now that 111th Congress is in session,... more

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Democracy at its best: 1 in 4 expat votes NOT counted in 2008 US election

One out of every four ballots requested by military personnel and expat Americans for the 2008 US election may have gone... more

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Republican comedians?

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7 ACORN workers charged in voter probe

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ClipsFC
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Supreme Court on voting rights case 'discrimination provision is outdated'?

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court's conservative justices led a sustained attack Wednesday on a key element of the Voting Rights... more

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Texas at Center of Supreme Court Battle Over Voting Rights

The community of Canyon Creek was ranchland rich with limestone and cedar trees when Jim Crow held sway in the South. The first house wasn't built until the late 1980s and not even a hint of discrimination attaches to this little slice in suburbia.

President Obama won more than 48 percent of the vote in November in this overwhelmingly white community northwest of the state capital.

Yet Canyon Creek, the heart of Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One, is the site of a major Supreme Court battle over the federal government's often used and most effective tool in preventing voting discrimination against minorities.

The utility district's elected five-person board manages a local park and pays down bond debt. Because it is in Texas, the board is covered by a section of the Voting Rights Act that requires approval from the Justice Department before any changes can be made in how elections are conducted.

That requirement applies to all or parts of 16 states, mostly in the South, with a history of preventing blacks, Hispanics and other minorities from voting.

The utility district is challenging that section of the law, which Congress extended in 2006 for 25 years. The Obama administration is defending it.

The Voting Rights Act, enacted in 1965, opened the polls to millions of black Americans. The law "has been the most important and transformative civil rights act in our country's history," said John Payton, director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

The federal government has used the provision, known as Section 5, to "stop things that would have perverted our democracy," Payton said. His group represents Texans and organizations seeking to preserve the section.

On the other side are the utility district, an array of conservative legal groups and some Southern Republicans.

Texas and other Southern states once might have deserved to be under federal supervision, but the time for this "unparalleled federal intrusion" on a traditional power of state and local governments has passed, the utility district says in its challenge.The community of Canyon Creek was ranchland rich with limestone and cedar trees when Jim Crow held sway in the South. The first... more