5th Circuit Denies GOP Request To Block Drive-Through Voting In Harris County, Texas
November 2, 20203:27 PM ET
Updated on Nov. 3 at 7:55 a.m. ET
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal has denied a bid by Texas Republicans to block Election Day drive-through voting in Harris County.
In a terse order, the three-judge panel wrote: "It is ordered that appellants' motion for injunctive relief to issue a preliminary injunction banning drive-thru voting on Election Day, November 3, 2020, is denied." No explanation was given.
The move is yet another loss for Texas Republicans who had sought to challenge the legality of some 127,000 votes cast at drive-through voting sites in the Houston area. On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen threw out that suit, ruling the plaintiffs don't have legal standing to sue. The Texas Supreme Court dismissed a similar challenge on Sunday.
Harris County, Texas' most populous county and majority-Democratic, erected 10 drive-through sites, mostly tents, to expedite the early voting process as a way of allowing people to cast ballots safely during the coronavirus pandemic. They were also in place this summer before the state's primary. Noting that point, Hanen, a George W. Bush appointee, asked plaintiffs, "Why am I just getting this case?" He later said that the suit was not timely and that "this has been going on all summer."
The suit was brought by Republican activists, who argued the move by Harris County Clerk Chris Hollins, a Democrat, was an illegal expansion of curbside voting, which is permitted under Texas law.
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/02/930365888/federal-judge-dismisses-effort-to-throw-out-drive-through-votes-in-houston?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=socia
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where the SCOTUS threw out Section 4, which then essentially dissolved Section 5.
They say that it is outdated. “The violence, intimidation and subterfuge that led Congress to pass Section 5 and this court to uphold it no longer remains,” said the Shelby County challenge. And as NPR noted, the formula still relies on election data from 1972. Tuesday's court decision involved Shleby County, Alabama. Shelby County Attorney Frank Ellis explained the opposition in this CBS News report:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2013/02/27/the-supreme-court-voting-rights-act-case-explained/
and of course Democrats have had several iterations of bills since that ruling that deal with updating the Voting Rights Act, which have been DOA each time Turtle spots one. If anything, this election is truly providing all the evidence to show "who" and "how" when it comes to voter suppression and intimidation in the modern electoral era.
The Democrats’ New Voting-Rights Moment
The party hopes to restore and extend key provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
Vann R. Newkirk II
March 2, 2019
The third time will certainly not be the charm for the Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill was introduced Tuesday in the House by Representative Terri Sewell of Alabama and in the Senate by Patrick Leahy of Vermont, and it seeks to restore and extend key provisions of the Voting Rights Act that have been neutralized. Sewell has championed the bill and introduced it in 2015 and 2017, but with a Republican-controlled Senate and President Donald Trump in the White House, the 2019 version also has no chance of becoming law.
But that doesn’t mean that this time around is purely symbolic, either. This incarnation of the VRAA comes during a time when voter suppression against black, Latino, and indigenous populations has substantially altered elections and politics since the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which defanged key portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The bill’s introduction also comes shortly after an election cycle in which Democrats fared well by championing voting rights and mobilizing unlikely voters. And, as big, new progressive ideas like the Green New Deal, Medicare for all, and reparations permeate the 2020 presidential-primary conversation, the reality for Democrats is that voting rights could be the only thing everyone agrees on—and the thing necessary for all of the other potential policies to ever become reality.
The Voting Rights Advancement Act is written to “restore and bolster the Voting Rights Act, and undo the damage done by the Shelby County decision,” Sewell said in a press release. In that decision, Chief Justice John Roberts invalidated the Voting Rights Act’s “coverage formula,” a list of jurisdictions that had to seek federal preclearance for any changes to elections laws. In Roberts’s reckoning, racism in the country had been pared back, and continuing to require special scrutiny of those jurisdictions—despite the numerous laws they proposed over the years that failed preclearance tests and resulted in litigation—was unconstitutional.
Since then, voting-rights advocates and several Democrats argue that the country has been mired in a new—and predictable—age of accelerated voter suppression and restrictive voting laws. “We’ve just seen since Shelby an onslaught of more restrictive voting laws,” Sewell told me a few weeks ago in her office.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/03/democrats-hope-restore-key-section-voting-rights-act/583969/
And what makes this worse this go-around is that the GOP has actually participated in and passed "bipartisan" voting processes like "early in- person voting", and like here in PA, "no excuse absentee mail voting" and then suddenly, a few RW loons start screaming on Faux Snooze and from the WH, and that becomes the clarion call for them to start kneecapping the very laws that THEY drafted that were designed to expand voting and make the process easier but still secure.
