Voting Rights & Election News Roundup: April 6, 2007 Edition

By Erin Ferns

This an entry in a series of blogs to keep people informed on current election reform and voting rights issues in the news.

Featured Stories of the Week:

Clemency board votes to automatically restore felons' rights - Associated Press

Flawed voter ID ruling - The Journal Gazette

This week, we focus on two separate but equally important issues affecting voting rights: felon re-enfranchisement and voter ID. Thursday, an Associated Press story published in the St. Petersburg Times reported a movement to re-enfranchise ex-felons in Florida and an editorial in Monday's printing of Fort Wayne Newspapers' Journal Gazette examined "Draconian" ID requirements upheld in Indiana with a focus on a recent academic paper discussing why ID requirements have a severe impact on historically marginalized voters.

There's more...

Project Vote's Voting Rights & Election News Roundup: March 30, 2007 Edition

By Erin Ferns

This an entry in a series of blogs to keep people informed on current election reform and voting rights issues in the news.

Featured Story of the Week:

Justice Department tugged to the right: Under Bush, the department has been tainted by politics, many say - Los Angeles Times

In the wake of the Department of Justice's firings, revelations emerged of "partisan political priorities" that have plagued the DOJ since the start of the Bush Administration, according to a Los Angeles Times story Sunday.

In addition to the two of the eight recently fired attorneys who purportedly lost their jobs for not actively pursuing voter fraud cases, former DOJ Civil Rights Division career officials are claiming to have felt similar pressures that ultimately had an impact on the voting rights of minority and other marginalized communities.

There's more...

By Erin Ferns

This an entry in a series of blogs to keep people informed on current election reform and voting rights issues in the news.

Featured Story of the Week:
Citizens Who Lack Papers Lose Medicaid - New York Times
WASHINGTON, March 11 -- A new federal rule intended to keep illegal immigrants from receiving Medicaid has instead shut out tens of thousands of United States citizens who have had difficulty complying with requirements to show birth certificates and other documents proving their citizenship, state officials say.

The loss of health Medicare coverage for some low-income American opens a window to the problems with proof-of-citizenship requirements in other context.

Although this week's top election story is not directly related to casting ballots, it might as well be, considering that new proof of citizenship requirements for Medicare are similar to proof of citizenship requirements for voting proposed by bills in a number of state legislatures. The ostensive intent is the same: to prevent "fraud." but there's little evidence of a problem.

There's more...