Tag: Article

October 10, 2014

On the heels of two Supreme Court rulings upholding voting restrictions in Ohio and North Carolina came some good news Thursday for voting rights supporters: The Supreme Court put Wisconsin’s voter ID law on hold for this election, and a federal judge overturned Texas’s strict voter ID law. The high court’s 6-3 vote overturned a federal appeals court ruling Monday that would have allowed the Wisconsin law, passed in 2011 by the state’s Republican-held legislature and supported by Gov. Scott Walker (R.) to take effect. Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented, but they acknowledged “the proximity of the upcoming general election” as a reason for the majority decision along with concern that some Wisconsin voters have already cast absentee ballots for November without using the identification the law would require.
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October 9, 2014

I wrote here Wednesday about the partisan legal battles over voting rights, just hours before the Supreme Court issued an order upholding a North Carolina law that eliminated same-day registration and voting and disqualified ballots cast in the wrong precincts. This action, from which Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, followed the court’s 5-4 decision last week upholding limits on early voting in Ohio.
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October 8, 2014

With less than a month until midterm elections that will decide control of the Senate and a number of close governor’s races, there are still states where the rules about who will be able to vote, and when and where they can cast a ballot, remain uncertain because of legal challenges. Republicans and Democrats are attempting to use election-law litigation to help their candidates, and the Supreme Court is expected to weigh in soon on election laws in North Carolina and Wisconsin as it has already done in Ohio.
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September 29, 2014

Much has been written about President Barack Obama‘s dinner with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the elected leader of the world’s largest democracy and the third-largest economy–mostly because Mr. Modi is said to be fasting for a Hindu festival. Less attention has been paid to the leaders’ potential agendas, which are likely to feature prickly trade and defense issues. There are 3 million Indian Americans in the U.S. According to the Pew Research Center, 90% of the adults in this group were not born here. Many of them are highly educated and earn more than the median U.S. household income; they also retain strong ties to India.
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September 27, 2014

The British Parliament in a resounding 524-43 vote Friday approved airstrikes against Islamic State in Iraq although not in Syria. British Prime Minister David Cameron, who called Parliament back from recess to debate the matter, said, “The hallmarks of this campaign will be patience and persistence, not shock and awe.” It was a not-so-veiled reference to the Bush administration’s long, costly and ultimately unsuccessful war in Iraq and former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s support for that effort.
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September 24, 2014

The National Football League’s handling of the arrest of Ray Rice, the recently cut Baltimore Ravens running back who was caught on video assaulting the woman who is now his wife, has drawn attention to the league’s business practices and its tax-exempt status. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, criticized for his decisions surrounding Mr. Rice’s punishment, earned $44 million last year. That is almost three times as much as the $15 million average for CEOs of major U.S. corporations.
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September 23, 2014

When it comes to understanding how our government works a shockingly large number of Americans have very little knowledge. A recent Gallup poll found that fewer than 40% of Americans could identify which party controls each chamber of Congress. Another survey, by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, found about the same number of Americans were able to correctly name all three branches of government.
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September 19, 2014

The fight over removing a candidate’s name from the Kansas ballot for November has devolved into a partisan struggle over Senate control–underscoring why elections should be administered in a nonpartisan fashion. The Kansas Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the name of Democrat Chad Taylor, who withdrew from the contest this month, should be removed from the ballot. This puts in play a Senate seat that had long been considered safely Republican.
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September 18, 2014

The referendum on Scottish independence from Great Britain has been a long time coming – arguably 700 years. In 1320, a group of Scottish noblemen issued the Declaration of Arbroath, also known as the Scottish Declaration of Independence — the founding document of Scotland. In it, the noblemen vowed “never a whit to bow beneath the yoke of English dominion. It is not for glory, riches or honours that we fight; it is for liberty alone.” Among Scots it is a well-known and time-honored passage which pretty much sums up what this election means to supporters of Scottish independence.
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September 16, 2014

If the race for the Senate is as close as predictions show now, a couple of independent senators could be the kingmakers who determine which party controls the chamber. For a Daily Beast piece Tuesday, I talked to Sam Wang, a Princeton neuroscientist who wrote two books on the brain and whose recent work focuses on autism. Mr. Wang runs the Princeton Election Consortium and has devised a computer program that predicts Democrats have a 70% chance of holding on to control of the Senate.
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