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Campaign Legal Center (CLC) organized a coalition sign on letter of 11 organizations to oppose a bill that would reinstate prison-based gerrymandering in Maryland. The letter advocates for the protection of the “No Representation Without Population Act” – which was in danger of repeal – to ensure that incarcerated individuals are counted as residents in the place they lived prior to their imprisonment.
Campaign Legal Center (CLC) submitted testimony to oppose the repeal of the “No Representation Without Population Act”, which was being considered by the Maryland state legislature with S.B. 619. The testimony stated that reinstating prison-based gerrymandering in Maryland would distort the redistricting process and deprive Maryland communities of fair and equal representation.
On Feb. 25, 2021, Campaign Legal Center (CLC) submitted a letter in support of SB 571 in Oregon to the Senate Committee on Judiciary. The bill would restore the right to vote to Oregonians currently incarcerated for felony convictions and reenfranchise tens of thousands of people.
On Feb. 22, 2021, Campaign Legal Center (CLC) sent a letter to New York's speaker of the State Assembly, Senate majority leader, and governor in support of a bill that would automatically restore voting rights for all New Yorkers with felony convictions upon their release from prison. This milestone legislation would reenfranchise tens of thousands of New Yorkers, streamline the rights restoration process, require state and local officials to provide formerly incarcerated individuals notice of their voting rights restoration upon release and cement New York’s commitment to rights restoration immediately upon release from incarceration, a policy which currently could be unilaterally reversed by a future governor’s office.
CLC and SPLC Action Letter Opposing Mississippi Bill that Discriminates Against Naturalized Citizens
On Feb. 15, 2021, Campaign Legal Center (CLC) joined with Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund to write a letter to Mississippi Lieutenant Gov. Delbert Hosemann and other Mississippi legislators opposing a pending bill that discriminates against naturalized citizens. The bill copies a procedure of comparing voter registration data against outdated citizenship data from Department of Motorized Vehicles (DMV) databases that has been proven to fail repeatedly, including in CLC's litigation against a similar process in Texas.
On Feb. 16, 2021, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia ruled on the state of Georgia’s motion for summary judgment on jurisdictional issues in Fair Fight Action v. Raffensperger. The court found that the plaintiffs have standing to proceed on several of their claims, and the case can now proceed to a decision on the merits of plaintiffs’ claims. Campaign Legal Center (CLC) represents the plaintiffs in this case, which include Fair Fight Action, Care in Action, Ebenezer Baptist Church of Atlanta, Baconton Missionary Baptist Church, Virginia-Highland Church, and The Sixth Episcopal District.
This report by Campaign Legal Center (CLC) and the League of Women Voters empowers those interested in strengthening democracy at the state level with the tools and knowledge needed to ensure that their respective redistricting processes are transparent and accountable and ensures members of the public at-large and communities of interest can provide meaningful input during the redistricting cycle.
Campaign Legal Center (CLC) developed a memo explaining how the democracy reforms in the For the People Act (H.R. 1/S. 1) are drawn from bills that have long had bipartisan political sponsorship at both the federal and state levels, and how H.R 1/S 1's provisions would address problematic practices employed by both Democrats and Republicans.
On Jan. 28, 2021, Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed suit against the Sheriff and Recorder in Apache County, Arizona for their persistent failure to comply with the state's public records law, which has allowed them to evade oversight for nearly ten months.
On Jan. 20, 2021, Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in Brnovich v. DNC, urging the court to affirm the Ninth Circuit of Appeal's decision finding that Arizona’s out-of-precinct and ballot collection policies violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. CLC’s brief specifically urges the court to confirm the appropriate causation standard under Section 2, which the Ninth Circuit applied in the case below.
On Jan. 14, 2021, Campaign Legal Center (CLC) sent a letter to members of Washington State House Committee on State Government & Tribal Relations urging them to support and advance HB 1078 to restore voting rights to people on probation and parole and eliminate Washington's modern-day poll tax.
In a series of explainers, Campaign Legal Center (CLC) shows how passing and signing into law H.R. 1 would improve our democracy by increasing election access and access to vote-by-mail, establishing independent redistricting commissions, promoting transparency in elections and digital ads, stopping foreign money in U.S. elections, creating a public financing system, enacting Federal Election Commission reforms, ending super PAC coordination, and creating an ethics pledge for senior executive branch officials.
H.R.1, "For the People Act" was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. This landmark legislation would: increase transparency of campaign spending; set up a system of small-donor matching funds for congressional candidates; revive the matching-fund system for presidential campaigns; expand conflict-of-interest laws; increase oversight of lobbyists; end partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts; establish nationwide automatic voter registration; and reinforce the Voting Rights Act.
CLC submitted a statement of support for HR 1, the For the People Act of 2019, to Chairperson Zoe Lofgren and Rep. Rodney Davis of the Committee on House Administration in the United States House of Representatives. HR 1 is a landmark bill designed to address the most pressing challenges to our democracy, which are the four issues CLC focuses on: the influence of money in politics, the erosion of ethical norms, threats to voting rights, and extreme partisan gerrymandering.
Campaign Legal Center (CLC) voices its strong support of the For the People Act in a letter to key House and Senate members and urges Congress to prioritize passage during the early days of the 117th Congress.
On Dec. 3, 2020, Campaign Legal Center (CLC), The Tennessee Conference of the NAACP, and five individual plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit against Tenneesse's Governor, Commissioner of the Department of Correction, Coordinator of Elections, and Secretary of State and the Rutherford County Clerk of Circuit Court. This case challenges, under the procedural due process clause, the state's unequal, inaccessible, opaque, and error-ridden implementation of the statutes granting restoration of voting rights to citizens who lost the right to vote because of a felony conviction under the procedural due process clause.