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On July 1, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision holding that Arizona's out-of-precinct policy and its ban on ballot collection do not violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and the ban on ballot collection was not enacted with a racially discriminatory purpose. On Jan. 20, 2021, Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in the case.
Order granting motion for preliminary injunction.
On May 24, 2020, the Court issued its Opinion on the Merits following the historic 8-day trial in Jones v. DeSantis. The Court found that Florida’s “pay-to-vote” system violates the Constitution as applied to all individuals who genuinely cannot pay their legal financial obligations as a condition of voting. The opinion further held that the conditioning of voting rights restoration on the payment of court costs and fees is an illegal poll tax that violates the 24th Amendment, and that Florida’s voter registration forms violate the National Voter Registration Act. The Court established a new procedure for Floridians with past felony convictions to determine their eligibility to register and vote.
This decision applies not only to the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, but to the entire plaintiff class, represented by CLC.
The 11th Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision in Florida’s case on fines and fees, upholding the preliminary injunction which prevents the state from preventing the plaintiffs from voting based solely on their genuine inability to pay legal financial obligations.
U.S. District Judge Steve Jones issued a ruling denying CLC and Fair Fight Action’s request for a preliminary injunction to halt Georgia’s voter purge.
On December 19, 2019, a judge from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio Eastern Division issued an order denying stay.
On December 6, 2019, the Court of Appeals issued an opinion affirming the decision below, which granted in part the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction.
The district court in Alabama ruled on CLC’s supplemental complaint in an order entered on Dec. 3, 2019. The judge has allowed CLC to proceed to trial on all major claims.
The court granted the Plaintiffs' motion for summary judgment and motion for class certification. The Court enjoined the State of Ohio from treating the class of late-jailed voters differently from late-hospitalized voters for purposes of absentee voting, and directed the Ohio Secretary of State and County Boards of Election to accept applications for absentee ballots from late-jailed voters that are properly delivered by 3:00 pm on Election Day.
On October 18, 2019, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida Tallahassee Division issued an order denying the motion to dismiss or abstain and granting a preliminary injunction.
On August 26, 2019, a California appeals court in Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association v. Newsom affirmed a decision striking down a state law that would have enabled public financing programs at the state and local level in California. The legislature enacted the law in 2016 in an effort to rein in political corruption and broaden electoral participation.
Judge Aleta A. Trauger for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, issued a decision denying the State of Tennessee’s request to dismiss a legal challenge to a new state law that would restrict and penalize voter registration efforts.
On July 11, 2019, the Supreme Court of the State of Washington affirmed a lower court decision upholding Seattle’s innovative democracy voucher public financing program. Plaintiffs challenged the public funding program as an unconstitutional use of tax dollars. The State Supreme Court rejected this argument holding that the program does not restrict plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights.
On May 30, 2019, a unanimous 6th Circuit panel upheld all challenged provisions of Kentucky’s ethics and campaign finance laws. The appellate court found that the provisions barring state legislators from receiving gifts and campaign contributions from state lobbyists were constitutional, and that plaintiffs—one sitting state senator and one legislative candidate—lacked standing to challenge the corresponding restrictions on lobbyists themselves.
The Fifth Circuit ruled against the Plaintiffs in this case challenging the Hattiesburg City Council wards under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The Fifth Circuit affirmed a lower court decision, finding that the ward plan adopted after the 2010 census does inhibit African-American voters' opportunity to participate in the electoral process. CLC represented the Plaintiffs on appeal.
On May 21, 2019, the en banc D.C. Circuit rejected all three of the Libertarian Party’s constitutional challenges to the federal contribution limits, finding that the First Amendment does not require “as applied” exceptions from facially valid contribution limits for supposedly non-corruptive bequests, and upholding the higher special-purpose “cromnibus” limits as a valid “tweak in Congress’s decades-long project to fine-tune” our campaign finance laws. The decision reaffirms that contribution limits are permissible preventative anti-corruption measures and that courts should defer to Congress’s empirical judgments about where precisely to set the dollar amounts of such limits.
In August 2017, CLC received a series of documents in response to a FOIA request regarding the Pence-Kobach Commission. United States District Judge Amy Berman Jackson is now ordering the government to release the names of three individuals that were selectively redacted by the government in an email that played a role in the formation of the Pence-Kobach Commission.