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Paul Smith

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Updates

 

 

On March 6, 2020, the Virginia House of Delegates passed legislation to amend the state’s constitution and reform how new congressional and legislative election maps are drawn, limiting the ability of lawmakers to redraw maps for their own political advantage. It will now go before voters on the November General Election ballot.

Virginia has long...

Issues

Senate Republicans announced they will hold a confirmation hearing next week for Federal Election Commission (FEC) nominee Trey Trainor.

Trey Trainor’s nomination as a commissioner on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is yet another example of how the current nomination process continues to produce commissioners who are opposed to the mission...

On behalf of a coalition of 11 nonpartisan groups who advocate for a better democracy, Campaign Legal Center (CLC) sent a letter to the leadership in the Virginia House of Delegates, urging state lawmakers to put principle over party and move past its history of gerrymandering. By passing the fair maps constitutional amendment now being considered...

Issues

A three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed a decision by a federal district court in Jones v. DeSantis, which found that it was unconstitutional for Florida to deny people with past felony convictions the right to vote based on their inability to pay legal financial obligations (LFOs) – the fines, fees, and...

Campaign Legal Center (CLC) believes that democracy works best when all citizens can vote without barriers. That’s why CLC works to remedy state policies that make voting more difficult.

Iowa has been in the news lately, and for all the wrong reasons. Most news reports have focused on the mishandling of its important responsibility to conduct a...

In a strong display of bipartisan support, a proposed constitutional amendment to create the Virginia Redistricting Commission passed out of the House of Delegates by a wide margin of 83-15 and by the State Senate unanimously in February 2019.

At the time, Republicans maintained a slim majority in both houses of the General Assembly.

Together...

Issues

Campaign Legal Center (CLC), called for an investigation of Attorney General Bill Barr, Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, and U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Timothy Shea for their highly unusual involvement in criminal proceedings against associates of President Donald Trump.

CLC’s complaint states their intervention in matters...

Issues

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit affirmed the district court ruling in Jones v. DeSantis, finding it unconstitutional to deny people with past felony convictions the right to vote based on their inability to pay fines, fees, and restitution.

The unanimous panel decision upholds the district court’s preliminary injunction of a...

In the wake of a court’s denial of his motion to dismiss, the Secretary of State has agreed to settle a federal voting rights lawsuit brought by two Native American Tribes and several individual voters over North Dakota’s voter ID law.

The law requires voters to present identification listing their residential street address – a substantial...

The Supreme Court opened the floodgates to corporate political spending with the 2010 decision Citizens United v. FEC. But Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, promised that transparency of political spending would act as a check on corruption.

“With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide...

For the first time, the State of Maine joins numerous municipal jurisdictions across the U.S. in using ranked choice voting all of its primary and general elections.

Ranked choice voting (RCV), also known as instant runoff voting, asks voters to rank the candidates for an office in order of preference; then, when results are tallied, the votes...

A newly-created Hawaii Limited Lability Corporation (LLC) appears to have illegally laundered $150,000 in funds from unknown sources to a Maine super PAC supporting U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, new campaign finance records show.

The facts are strikingly similar to those that led to the arrest of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.

The Society of Young...

Asking foreign governments for dirt on political rivals is entirely permissible, and might even be good for democracy, President Trump’s lawyer told the Senate on Wednesday.

“Mere information is not something that would violate the campaign finance laws,” deputy White House counsel Pat Philbin argued at the president’s impeachment trial.  

In...

Campaign Legal Center (CLC) co-director of voting rights and redistricting Danielle Lang appeared before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to highlight the injustice of using wealth-based discrimination to stop hundreds of thousands of people from voting.

Florida’s anti-voter law, passed in the summer of 2019, has made it...

As the 2020 Census gets underway, the Census Bureau should be giving its undivided attention to the task of counting every U.S. resident. Instead, the Bureau is trying to juggle that massive undertaking with a separate project that will likely do much more harm than good: gathering records from state governments to help estimate the number of adult...

Issues

Tuesday marks the 10-year anniversary of Citizens United v. FEC, a decision that has led to an explosion in secret spending in our elections, and rigged politics in favor of special interests. 

CLC’s Adav Noti explains the case’s impact in this video.  

America’s broken campaign finance system largely stems from misguided U.S. Supreme Court...

When the public financing program for county elections in Montgomery County, Maryland was implemented for the first time in the 2018 elections, 35 of the 57 county election candidates chose to participate in the program, and of the 35 candidates that participated, 24 candidates qualified for matching funds. 

Contributing to candidates is an...

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has said he “will sign an executive order that automatically restores voting rights for Kentuckians who complete their sentences after being convicted of a nonviolent felony.”

This would be a major victory for the rights restoration movement, but the order must be well-crafted to meet its goals.

Kentucky has one of...

Campaign Legal Center (CLC) launched DemocracyU: A Toolkit for Action in Your Community to help policymakers and concerned citizens learn more about solutions to the biggest threats to our democracy. 

As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, states are the laboratories of democracy, experimenting with new ideas that might deliver a more...

In 1965, Congress passed a bill that would change the course of this country’s history and the shape of our democracy forever. That bill was the Voting Rights Act, or the VRA. For almost 50 years, the VRA protected the political voices of voters of color and ensured all voters could participate in the democratic system. Those protections, though...

The first stage of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s abuses of office, now complete, has revealed how career diplomats were troubled by the ability of Igor Fruman, Lev Parnas, and Rudy Giuliani to help engineer a corrupt shadow foreign policy in Ukraine.   

“How could our system fail like this? How is it that foreign corrupt interests...