NAACP

Vote by Email? How D.C. Attempts To Overcome Mail Delays for Absentee Ballots

jaboone · November 2, 2020 ·

By Madeline Shay Williams

As the 2020 presidential election quickly approaches, there is widespread concern about voting in the midst of a global pandemic. In an effort to socially distance, many voters will opt to cast their ballot via absentee voting and vote-by-mail. However, delays in mail service and missing absentee ballots have already spelled impending disaster for the presidential election. During the presidential primary in June, the District of Columbia’s Board of Elections allowed voters cast their ballots by email after receiving many complaints from voters who never received their absentee ballots by mail.

Racial Vote-Dilution Lawsuit Transforms Small Town City Council

Election Law Society · October 12, 2020 ·

By Jeffrey Tyler

A lawsuit brought by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund has finally allowed the Black residents of a small Alabama city to elect their preferred candidates for City Council. Since its incorporation in 1937, Pleasant Grove has not elected a single non-white City Council member – until now. The NAACP’s legal challenge, brought under the Voting Rights Act’s anti-racial-vote-dilution provisions, argued that Pleasant Grove’s “at-large, numbered-place” electoral system violated Section 2 of the Act because Black residents were consistently prevented from electing their preferred candidates.

An Even More Cynical Form of Gerrymandering for Connecticut

Election Law Society · April 9, 2019 ·

By: Sarah Crowe

In a lawsuit being touted as the “first of its kind”, Connecticut was hit with a federal lawsuit in late June 2018 with the aim of ending the practice of prison gerrymandering. According to the NAACP, prison gerrymandering is “the practice of counting prisoners in the towns where they are incarcerated, rather than at their pre-incarceration address, for the purposes of drawing state legislative district lines. The inmate population in Connecticut is a largely African American and Latino population, and these prisoners disproportionately come from urban centers. The prisons in Connecticut, however, are almost all in rural areas. Though many prisoners have lost their voting rights due to felony convictions, they are still counted as residents where they are incarcerated, inflating the votes of those who live in the rural areas near prisons, who are predominately white.