Turn Your Clocks Back One Hour Tonight — NOT 50 YEARS! Voting Rights Speech Monday!

By
Greg Diamond
– November 2, 2013Posted in: Fresh Juice, voter suppression
Voting rights speech, Madison Kimrey of NC

12-year-old Madison Kimrey of North Carolina wants to talk to you about voting rights.

Two notices remind me to remind you to turn your clocks back tonight at 2 a.m. — but only by one hour! (The second one is a local event — so be sure to read on past the video!)

The subject is voting rights — so meet 12-year-old Madison Kimrey of North Carolina, Ground Zero in this year’s voting rights wars.  We Californians are lucky enough to have one of the best Secretaries of State in the country in Debra Bowen, who in her two terms has championed making voter registration easier and more accurate, including allowing teenagers to “pre-register” to vote before they turn 18 (and for all of us to register via the Internet!)

Not every state is so fortunate.  Some states are downright lousy — such as North Carolina.  Madison will tell you about that:

Election law decisions — Bush v. Gore and Citizens United and last year’s Shelby County case (which allowed this year’s voting shenanigans) and probably this year’s McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (which would blow the top off of individual limits on direct contributions to federal campaigns) — are among the Supreme Court’s most important and far-reaching.  You may not live in North Carolina, but California is still part of the U.S. — so if you want to know more about them, you’re lucky to live in a county with one of the nation’s foremost legal experts on the topic: Prof. Rick Hasen of UCI’s Law School.

Hasen is speaking on the topic of “Voting Rights, Voting Wars & the Supreme Court” in Laguna Woods this Monday.  (It’s a regular meeting of the Democratic Club there, but their business should end by about 7:00, at which time he’s scheduled to begin.  Hasen is a top expert in that area of voting/election/campaign law. The talk and Q&A from Hasen is described by an informant as “Chemerinsky-level” — that’s like a five-star hotel rating — but will focus entirely on election law: the Supreme Court (and other court) cases, voter-suppression tactics, litigation push-back against same, politics and legal points of Congress reviving the Voting Rights Act, etc.

So turn remember back those clocks tonight — but try to leave yourself in November 2013.  (2009 would be better, so far as election law goes, but many of our readers don’t have that level of time machine technology.)

About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)