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Collin County Elections Early Voting Webpage
CLICK HERE To Sign Up For Our Triple-Hit June ProgramWe go to work for our local 2014 Democratic Women Candidates, building our Collin County Democratic base of voters, starting 9:00 a.m., June7th. We'll canvass neighborhoods with Sameena Karmally's campaign for Texas House of Representatives, District 89 and Denise Hamilton's Campaign for Collin County Justice of the Peace, Pct 3 Pl 2.
www.tinyurl.com/Triple-Hit-June-2014
Any Democrat within the Senatorial District who is registered to vote and has taken an oath of affiliation or has voted in the Democratic primary may become a convention delegate and volunteer to serve on a Convention Committee.NOTE: Under the newly revised Texas Democratic Party rules, Precinct Conventions are no longer held immediately after polling places close on Primary Election Day.
Individual Precinct Conventions have moved from Primary Election Day to the top of the SD Convention agenda as an organizing step in Convention Day proceedings.
Under the newly revised Texas Democratic Party rules, that Precinct Convention step is moved to the top of the SD or County Convention agenda. Senatorial District and County Conventions will convene across Texas on Saturday, March 22, 2014.Under party rules revised by the State Democratic Executive Committee (SDEC) on December 14, 2013, any Democrat within each County or Senatorial District who is registered to vote and has taken an oath of affiliation or has voted in the Democratic primary may attend their SD or County Convention. Attendees may use the convention registration page, newly provided on the Statewide Texas Democratic Party website, to register for their County or SD Convention, or they may simply walk in on convention day, Saturday, March 22, 2014. From County and SD Conventions, a subset of those delegates will be elected as Delegates and Alternates to the June 26 – 28th State Convention at the Dallas Convention Center.
If you have not already received a new VRC, you are likely NOT registered to vote. You should immediately check your registration status and take action to properly register, if you find you are not registered to vote in the county where you reside. You must be registered or have mailed voter registration application by February 3rd to be eligible to vote in the March 4, 2014 primary election.
"Perhaps the idea that the party's voter base, outside of Austin, is pervasively very conservative - an idea still active espoused by long time Democratic political strategists - is no longer right. Perhaps the idea that the party and it's candidates must continue to subscribe to conservative policy strategies, shunning all progressive/liberal policy positions, is a strategy that no longer works - even in Texas.I wrote that article in Nov. 2011, after the the State Democratic Executive Committee (SDEC) refused to approve progressive ballot initiatives for the 2012 primary ballot. But the Texas Democratic Party has taken a decidedly progressive turn under the leadership of Gilberto Hinojosa, who was elected chair of the state party at the June 2012 state Democratic Party convention.
It is, perhaps, time for party leaders to seriously consider whether the party finds itself struggling to raise money and attract new candidates, not because it's not conservative enough, but because the Democratic Party offers Texas voters no real and contrasting choice to the Tea Party Republican brand of politics.
It is definitely time for the Texas Democratic Party to discuss within its ranks the need for the party to engage in a conversation with its base constituencies to understand how to rebuild the party from the grassroots. "
Ginsburg, supported by justices Sephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, said it is the very success of pre-clearance that underlines why it must be preserved. “The Voting Rights Act has worked to combat voting discrimination where other remedies have been tried and failed,” she writes.Opponents of pre-clearance under Sections 4 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act say that Section 2 will be sufficient on its own as a safeguard against future discrimination. But the burden of challenging new electoral laws now shifts from the federal government to the individual voter.
In her dissent, Ginsburg lists some of the insidious changes to voting laws that could now creep back into the American electoral landscape. Under pre-clearance, states including Texas have been blocked from racial gerrymandering by redrawing electoral boundaries in an attempt to create segregated legislative districts.
“In order to bring a Section 2 case, you’d have to as a practical matter show two things. One, that there’s a significant racial disparity and two, that the burden of getting an ID is significant enough for us to care about.Minority Leader of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Wednesday that Congressional Democrats are planning new legislation to render ineffective Chief Justice Roberts Court's decision on the Voting Rights Act. Congress must enact new Section 4 provisions that specify the states and localities that must seek election law preclearance under Section 5 requirements. But many question whether such legislation has any chance of passing in the Republican controlled House. (How to Save the Voting Rights Act)
Any Section 2 case would almost certainly have to wait until after the next election, since the evidence that the laws were discriminatory “can only be gathered during an election that takes place when the law is enacted.”
“With today’s decision, the State’s voter ID law will take effect immediately,” Abbott announced. “Redistricting maps [as originally] passed by the Legislature [in the 2011 legislative session] may also take effect without approval from the federal government.”On Thursday, June 27, 2013 the Supreme Court followed up its Tuesday, June 25th, ruling on Section 4 of the VRA, officially vacating and kicking back the DC Court three-judge panel's August 2012 ruling that blocked Texas' voter photo I.D. law. SCOTUS' action was a predictable result of its ruling, effectively ending the federal government's oversight of elections in Texas and other states with a history of discrimination in voting. The justices ordered lower courts to reconsider, in light of Tuesday's ruling, the status of previous low court rulings on appeal to SCOTUS, as was Texas' I.D. law. Legal experts remain divided on what the Supreme Court's rulings mean for the election laws that had been blocked under Section 5 review, and it could be weeks before the district courts weigh in. The district three-judge panel courts, have several options, including restarting the arguments based on SCOTUS' Tuesday ruling, or weighing the case without additional briefing. In the mean time, Texas and other states listed in Section 4 are not waiting to start enforcement of those laws. Yet, states with a district court or DOJ judgment against them, must clear that judgment to be before the law can be enforced.
"There is another provision of the law, potentially a back-up (Section 3), that allows the government to go to court to ask that a new state or local government be put under Section 5 because of its more recent history in dealing with minority voters. Two states have been brought under Section 5 that way--Arkansas and New Mexico--along with several county governments, including Los Angeles County in California. The Court's main opinion did not even mention Section 3, but the dissenters referred to it briefly as a "bail-in mechanism" that has worked. If a challenger now seeks to employ that provision, it presumably will have to show that bias is still a present-day problem there."In a 2010 Yale Law Journal article, Travis Crum called Section 3 "The Voting Rights Act's secret weapon," one that "the academic literature has ignored":
Commonly called the bail-in mechanism for pockets of voting discrimination, Section 3 authorizes federal courts to place states and political subdivisions that have violated the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments under preclearance. Designed to trigger coverage in "pockets of discrimination" missed by section 5's formula [sic; the formula is actually defined in Section 4], section 3 was included in the original Voting Rights Act.Preclearance under Section 3 does not suffer from the constitutional infirmity that doomed Section 4. It requires a contemporary factual finding of discrimination, either a decision by a judge or an acknowledgment by the defendant jurisdiction. That is to say that even absent congressional action, preclearance remains among the tools available to the Justice Department and voting-rights advocates. They just have to prove their case before using it. In 2012, a federal court ruling in the Texas' redistricting case and another federal court ruling on Texas' restrictive voter photo I.D. law found that Texas lawmakers passed legislation related to each case that had "the intent and effect" of discriminating against minorities.
Update July 25, 2013 @ 10:08 a.m. CDT -Originally set to go into effect on January 1, 2012, the Texas Photo I.D. Law (SB14) requires voters to present one of a limited selection of government issued photo I.D. to election Judges in order to qualify to vote. The accepted forms of currently dated photo identification include:
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced today that the Justice Department will invoke Section 3 of the VRA in the battle for voting rights that could block Texas from enforcing its strict voter photo I.D. law. Quote Holder, "And today I am announcing that the Justice Department will ask a federal court in Texas to subject the State of Texas to a preclearance regime similar to the one required by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. This request to “bail in” the state – and require it to obtain “pre-approval” from either the Department or a federal court before implementing future voting changes – is available under the Voting Rights Act when intentional voting discrimination is found. Based on the evidence of intentional racial discrimination that was presented last year in the redistricting case, Texas v. Holder – as well as the history of pervasive voting-related discrimination against racial minorities that the Supreme Court itself has recognized – we believe that the State of Texas should be required to go through a preclearance process whenever it changes its voting laws and practices." Click here for full text of Holder's speech:
The Justice Department will make Section 3 related filings, announced by Holder, with the the San Antonio U.S. District Court three-judge panel that controls Texas' not yet concluded interim redistricting map case, that originated in late 2011. The Justice Department will likely also join the with Congressman Marc Veasey and others in their suit filed in a Corpus Christi federal court to stop implementation of the SB14 voter I.D. law. It may take some time for the Section 3 technical legal maneuvering to play out, which may or may not result in the SA Court deciding that Texas should be bailed-into the preclearance regimen under Section 3. The court may or may not decided to block Texas' enforcement of its voter photo I.D. law, while the Section 3 bail-in question is under consideration. Even if Texas is again bailed into the preclearance regimen, it would likely take additional court maneuvering to deal with the voter SB14 voter I.D. law. For now, at least, Texas can continue plans to enforce its voter photo I.D. law for the Texas Constitutional Amendment Election in November 2013 and the 2014 primary and general elections.