This week in the war on voting: Republican states continue to flout judges' orders

By Joan McCarter
Saturday Oct 15, 2016 · 9:01 AM EDT

Welcome to the latest edition in our war on voting series. This is a joint project of Meteor Blades and Joan McCarter.

Wisconsin, Ohio, Texas, and North Carolina continue to ignore judges' rulings and suppress the vote, Ari Melber writes at The Nation.

Reporting in The Nation and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, based on DMV recordings provided by VoteRiders, confirmed that across the state Wisconsin was systematically failing to promptly issue IDs for voting as required by the court order. [...]

[D]espite the well-documented problems, one of the country’s worst voter-ID laws will be in effect for November and the very state agencies that have been non-compliant with federal court orders will be relied upon to implement it. [...]

Ohio has purged more than 2 million voters since 2011, more than any other state, and refused to mail absentee ballots to 1 million registered voters. A federal struck down the state’s voter purge in late September and ordered the voters to be put back onto the rolls. But Ohio is now refusing to reinstate many of the purged voters before the election, according to Think Progress. “This is shameless behavior that endangers our democratic process,” says State Rep. Kathleen Clyde.

In Texas, a federal court ordered the state to relax its voter-ID law and allow those without strict forms of photo ID to cast a ballot. But even after the court order, the state has issued misleading information for voters and is now threatening to prosecute voters who sign an affidavit instead of showing photo ID.

 In North Carolina, after a federal court restored a week of early voting, the North Carolina Republican Party called on GOP-controlled county boards of elections to further cut early voting hours and days. “Republican can and should make party line changes to early voting,” wrote executive director Dallas Woodhouse, which included adopting fewer early-voting days and prohibiting Sunday voting, when black churches hold “Souls to the Polls” mobilization drives, and polling places on college campuses. The state board of election rejected many of these cuts, but five major counties in the state will state have reduced early voting.

Read more
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/10/15/1582580/-This-week-in-the-war-on-voting-Republican-states-continue-to-flout-judges-orders