News Clips

Last year, an army of paid workers with stacks of voter registration forms fanned out in Memphis, Nashville and other parts of Tennessee to persuade African Americans to vote. In response, the legislature passed a law imposing civil penalties on groups that employ paid canvassers if they submit incomplete or inaccurate voter registration forms.

Op-ed written by Cecile Scoon, vice president of the League of Women Voters of Florida. 

The arc of justice bent briefly toward Florida in November, when citizens here restored the right to vote for most people with felony convictions who have completed their sentences. However, the state legislature devised a way to once again deprive the vote of most of the people we had hoped to re-enfranchise.

Federal judges ordered the state of Michigan to draw new legislative districts on Thursday, after finding that a gerrymandered plan enacted by the state’s Republican-dominated legislature in 2011 constituted an “extremely grave” constitutional violation.

A coalition of 16 advocacy groups — including the Campaign Legal Center, Issue One, the League of Women Voters and Public Citizen — is calling on candidates for president to release lists of their top fundraisers.

Supreme Court justices heard arguments Tuesday on a North Carolina map, drawn by Republicans who explicitly sought a partisan advantage, and a Maryland voting district designed by Democrats to oust a Republican lawmaker.

One North Carolina case was Rucho vs. League of Women Voters of North Carolina.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan on Tuesday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to act on partisan gerrymandering, calling the matter “one of the most important issues in America today.”

Hogan and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke at an anti-gerrymandering rally Tuesday morning organized by Common Cause and the League of Women Voters.

A Wisconsin judge on Thursday blocked several lightning-fast actions in December by the state legislature to limit the power of its incoming governor and preserve policies implemented by his predecessor.

Small donor, public matching funds provide an opportunity for candidates to consider running for office who otherwise might not.

Voting rights groups that charge that Ohio’s congressional map was unfairly manipulated by state Republicans will have their say in federal court.

The plaintiffs include groups such as the League of Women Voters of Ohio, Democratic organizations, and Democratic voters in GOP-held districts.

Was the last re-drawing of Michigan’s political district maps so biased in Republicans’ favor, they were illegal?

That question literally went on trial Tuesday, with a three-judge panel in Detroit’s federal court hearing arguments for and against Michigan’s 2011 redistricting maps.