Carpet_pissr wrote: Wed Dec 13, 2023 10:29 am
It’s a region-specific ruling?!
Correct but other Circuit's could take it up if they get enough extremist judges to do so. The Supreme Court in their VRA rulings laid out a road map to essentially make the VRA's protections irrelevant.
This case is an example of the profound way the judiciary is breaking down. In this case, the District Court read the law as it's been read for 50 years and said the map is illegal. The extremists in the 5th Circuit essentially overruled them. They composed their rationale using the breadcrumb trail of language the Supreme Court blessed in their recent VRA rulings. In other words, the Supreme's have essentially created the room for states to gerrymander by pretending the lines aren't racial and simply political. The District Court tried to frame this as a racial gerrymander and the 5th Circuit essentially used the Supreme's own language to pretend that part of the ruling away into the Texas/Louisiana swamps.
In short, it's regional for now but other regions can (and eventually will) take this approach up to racially gerrymander with the Supreme Court's blessing.
Carpet_pissr wrote: Wed Dec 13, 2023 11:13 am
Sorry, question referred to your wording ‘the south’.
Just the circuits where we're seeing this the most shenanigans along these lines at present. We could see some of this in the mid-west in the 6th for instance but that seems less likely right now.
And Thomas thinks they shouldn't even be hearing racial gerrymandering cases. He says politicians should be creating voting maps, not federal judges. JFC this guy.
In a 4-1 ruling, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court blocked enforcement of a law requiring election officials to reject otherwise valid mail-in ballots with missing or incorrect handwritten dates on their outer return envelopes.
The battleground state’s contested handwritten date requirement resulted in the disqualification of over 10,000 mail-in ballots during the 2022 midterm elections alone and several thousand more during the 2024 presidential primary.
In a 4-1 ruling, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court blocked enforcement of a law requiring election officials to reject otherwise valid mail-in ballots with missing or incorrect handwritten dates on their outer return envelopes.
The battleground state’s contested handwritten date requirement resulted in the disqualification of over 10,000 mail-in ballots during the 2022 midterm elections alone and several thousand more during the 2024 presidential primary.
Good news.
I'm also curious how one judges "misdated" dates. Like if I put a ballot in the mailbox tonight (after mailbox pickup hours), I would date it 9/4, but when it gets picked up and processed at a post office, it would be 9/5. Would an elections person call that misdated? What if a ballot gets held up by mistake in a post office for a couple days?
In a 4-1 ruling, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court blocked enforcement of a law requiring election officials to reject otherwise valid mail-in ballots with missing or incorrect handwritten dates on their outer return envelopes.
The battleground state’s contested handwritten date requirement resulted in the disqualification of over 10,000 mail-in ballots during the 2022 midterm elections alone and several thousand more during the 2024 presidential primary.
Good news.
I'm also curious how one judges "misdated" dates. Like if I put a ballot in the mailbox tonight (after mailbox pickup hours), I would date it 9/4, but when it gets picked up and processed at a post office, it would be 9/5. Would an elections person call that misdated? What if a ballot gets held up by mistake in a post office for a couple days?
They are just talking about the date that you wrote on the envelope. From what I read, this tends to disenfrachise young people who aren't used to signing and dating papers, like, with a pen and stuff... So the date is left blank, or people accidentally write the year as 23 instead of 24 (because 2023 was probably the last time they had to write the date on something), or they'll put down their birthdate instead of today's date because, again, force of habit.
If the ballot gets held up to the point where it doesn't get to the election office by the EOD day of voting, that ballot won't count, that's state law and no one is arguing that (some states look at postmark, but not in this case).
