Foreclosures + Elections = Voting Rights Lawyers
The Blog of the Legal Times yesterday posted a piece about the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund preparing to deal with possible challenges to voter residency requirements based on voters’ homes being in foreclosure.
Two years ago, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed suit in Indiana and stopped what it said was a threat to disenfranchise homeowners facing foreclosure. Now, after countless more
foreclosures, an NAACP lawyer says it’s ready to litigate again if needed.
At issue in the 2008 lawsuit was whether a list of homeowners facing foreclosure could be used to challenge their eligibility to vote. A local Republican Party official had been quoted saying that presence on such a list “would be a solid basis” to ask someone to cast a provisional ballot.
The official later backtracked, and a state judge ordered that such a list is not by itself evidence that someone doesn’t meet the residency requirements for voting.
The PSLawNet Blog wonders whether this contentious election cycle will produce a lot of, well, legal contention. Letting alone this voter residency issue, how could there not be legal wrangling over the Senate election in Alaska, a three-way race in which current Senator Lisa Murkowski is running as a write-in candidate because she lost the Republican primary? Is there is enough voter intent shown if someone writes in “Lisa M.” as opposed to “Murkowski”? Oh, brother. We were hoping all this stuff had died 10 years ago in Florida.