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    Federal Judge Rules Undated Mail-In Ballots in Pennsylvania Must Be Counted

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    The judge said that a state law requiring voters to date the return envelope violated the voting protections of the Civil Rights Act.A federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled on Monday that mail-in ballots that are received on time but are undated should be counted, arguing that a state law rejecting such votes violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964.The ruling was an opening victory for voting rights groups in a case with national implications heading into the 2024 election, as Republicans and conservative advocacy groups continue to push for stricter voting laws.“We applaud today’s court decision,” said Susan Gobreski, a vice president of the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, which is a plaintiff in the case. She added: “Pennsylvania citizens must have complete and unfettered access to the ballot box, free from unnecessary obstacles or interference.”The ruling is likely to be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, where the court’s most conservative members have previously supported the state law that requires voters to write the date on the return envelope when sending in their ballots.The Republican National Committee, a defendant in the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.In a 77-page opinion, Judge Susan Paradise Baxter of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania said that the law violated the voting protections of the Civil Rights Act because the requirement that voters date their ballots was not “material to the act of voting.”“The provision protects a citizen’s right to vote by forbidding a state actor from disqualifying a voter because of their failure to provide or error in providing some unnecessary information on a voting application or ballot,” Judge Baxter wrote in her opinion, adding that “the ballots of the individual plaintiffs should be counted because their statutory rights have been violated.”Judge Baxter was first nominated for her position by President Barack Obama and was ultimately appointed by President Donald J. Trump.A protracted legal battle has raged over the validity of undated mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered state officials a week before the 2022 election to refrain from counting ballots that were undated, after the Republican National Committee and other party-aligned groups sued to block those votes from being counted.The N.A.A.C.P. and several other voting rights groups then sued to reverse the order, arguing that failing to count votes because of a missing or incorrect date would potentially disenfranchise thousands of voters. More

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      New Jersey Gov. Murphy Signs Bill That Reshapes Campaign Finance Laws

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      The bill doubles New Jersey’s campaign contribution limits and quashes investigations by a watchdog agency.In January, a watchdog agency created 50 years ago to safeguard the integrity of campaign fund-raising in New Jersey filed four complaints. Three cited irregularities in powerful Democrat-led accounts, and one dinged a committee set up to elect Republicans.All of the complaints had the potential to result in hefty fines. And all of them vanished Monday afternoon when the governor, Philip D. Murphy, signed a controversial bill that fundamentally reshapes New Jersey’s campaign finance laws.The bill, which narrowly cleared the State Legislature last week, began as a way to double donation limits to candidates and to require some so-called dark money fund-raising groups to disclose large donors, whose identities are currently secret.But as the legislation moved through Trenton, where Democrats control the Assembly and Senate, amendments were added that make it harder to rein in — or police — campaign spending.One change gives Mr. Murphy an easier way to replace the executive director of the Election Law Enforcement Commission, known as ELEC. Another lets state and county political committees collect contributions to pay for operating expenses — funds that Philip Hensley, a policy analyst for the League of Women Voters of New Jersey, has decried as unregulated “slush money.”And a third alteration to the bill slashes the time for investigating allegations of impropriety to two years, down from 10. The change is retroactive, and the four complaints filed in January, which stem from fund-raising done in 2017, will be quashed, along with an estimated 80 percent of the agency’s other open investigations, officials have said.On Monday afternoon, the governor’s office sent an email that noted he had signed the bill, but it offered no additional comment.The overhaul of New Jersey’s campaign finance rules comes 13 years after a United States Supreme Court ruling in favor of Citizens United unleashed limitless federal spending by corporations and unions. Since then, some Republican and Democrat-led states have also taken steps to curb the enforcement powers of agencies set up to limit the influence of money in government. “At a time when people everywhere are concerned about the health of democracy in our country,” Mr. Hensley said, “this is just the antithesis of good government.”He called New Jersey’s new law a “frontal assault on some of the rules that have protected good government.”After the bill passed, the election agency’s three commissioners — two Democrats and one Republican — resigned in protest. The fourth seat on the board had been vacant.Stephen M. Holden, a Democrat and former state judge who quit the board last week, called the legislation a “transparent abuse of power.”“It eviscerates our authority and independence,” he said.The two-year time clock for investigations will start at the moment an infraction occurs. But allegations of impropriety rarely surface until at least six months to a year after an election, Mr. Holden said.“If we didn’t get to you within two years, you’re home free,” he said ruefully.Nicholas Scutari, the Democratic president of the State Senate and a sponsor of the bill, has defended the altered statute of limitations, likening the 10-year time frame to a police officer writing a ticket long after a traffic infraction.The agency’s executive director, Jeffrey M. Brindle, had argued that a five-year window would be appropriate, bringing New Jersey in line with many other states.Opponents of the bill said that the two-year statute of limitations was a bald political effort to quash pending investigations and to be free of risk from any as-yet-undiscovered campaign finance violations that took place before April 2021.“What is in those previous eight years yet to be investigated that they don’t want to be investigated?” asked Assemblyman Brian Bergen, a Republican and one of the most vocal opponents of the bill.“Just wiping it off the books? This doesn’t pass the sniff test,” he added.He found rare common cause with many of the state’s left-leaning advocacy organizations, which fought for over a month against the bill.“It rolls back decades of reform,” Mr. Bergen said.The bill became intertwined with the Murphy administration’s efforts to remove Mr. Brindle from a job he has held for 14 years after the discovery of an email he wrote, which the attorney general’s office later concluded was “demeaning” to members of the gay community.Mr. Brindle has since sued the governor and several aides for what his lawyer has said was an effort to extort Mr. Brindle’s resignation by threatening to publicize the email. Mr. Murphy’s spokesman has said that Mr. Brindle was never threatened.The new law gives Mr. Murphy 90 days to appoint an entirely new four-person election board, circumventing the traditional approval needed from the State Senate. The commissioners, who are empowered to hire and fire the agency’s executive director, would also be paid a $30,000 annual stipend.In Mr. Murphy’s most recent comments about the legislation, during a March 22 radio broadcast, the governor declined to discuss the merits of the bill, instead noting that his administration had expanded voting access over the last several years.“Anything that we believe is on the side of transparency that is responsible, that opens up democracy, that shines a light as opposed to the opposite, assume that we’re going to be for it,” he said, noting that at the time, the bill was still being amended. “I think we wait and see what the final, what this looks like as it iterates.” More

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      Republicans Face Setbacks in Push to Tighten Voting Laws on College Campuses

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      Party officials across the country have sought to erect more barriers for young voters, who tilt heavily Democratic, after several cycles in which their turnout surged.Alarmed over young people increasingly proving to be a force for Democrats at the ballot box, Republican lawmakers in a number of states have been trying to enact new obstacles to voting for college students.In Idaho, Republicans used their power monopoly this month to ban student ID cards as a form of voter identification.But so far this year, the new Idaho law is one of few successes for Republicans targeting young voters.Attempts to cordon off out-of-state students from voting in their campus towns or to roll back preregistration for teenagers have failed in New Hampshire and Virginia. Even in Texas, where 2019 legislation shuttered early voting sites on many college campuses, a new proposal that would eliminate all college polling places seems to have an uncertain future.“When these ideas are first floated, people are aghast,” said Chad Dunn, the co-founder and legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. But he cautioned that the lawmakers who sponsor such bills tend to bring them back over and over again.“Then, six, eight, 10 years later, these terrible ideas become law,” he said.Turnout in recent cycles has surged for young voters, who were energized by issues like abortion, climate change and the Trump presidency.They voted in rising numbers during the midterms last year in Kansas and Michigan, which both had referendums about abortion. And college students, who had long paid little attention to elections, emerged as a crucial voting bloc in the 2018 midterms.But even with such gains, Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights program for the Brennan Center for Justice, said there was still progress to be made.“Their turnout is still far outpaced by their older counterparts,” Mr. Morales-Doyle said.Now, with the 2024 presidential election underway, the battle over young voters has heightened significance.Between the 2018 and 2022 elections in Idaho, registration jumped 66 percent among 18- and 19-year-old voters, the largest increase in the nation, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. The nonpartisan research organization, based at Tufts University, focuses on youth civic engagement.Gov. Brad Little of Idaho gave his approval to a law that bans student ID cards as a form of voter identification.Kyle Green/Associated PressOut of 17 states that generally require voter ID, Idaho will join Texas and only four others — North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina and Tennessee — that do not accept any student IDs, according to the Voting Rights Lab, a group that tracks legislation.Arizona and Wisconsin have rigid rules on student IDs that colleges and universities have struggled to meet, though some Wisconsin schools have been successful.Proponents of such restrictions often say they are needed to prevent voter fraud, even though instances of fraud are rare. Two lawsuits were filed in state and federal court shortly after Idaho’s Republican governor, Brad Little, signed the student ID prohibition into law on March 15. “The facts aren’t particularly persuasive if you’re just trying to get through all of these voter suppression bills,” Betsy McBride, the president of the League of Women Voters of Idaho, one of the plaintiffs in the state lawsuit, said before the bill’s signing.A fight over out-of-state students in New HampshireIn New Hampshire, which has one of the highest percentages in the nation of college students from out of state, G.O.P. lawmakers proposed a bill this year that would have barred voting access for those students, but it died in committee after failing to muster a single vote.Nearly 59 percent of students at traditional colleges in New Hampshire came from out of state in 2020, according to the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at Tufts.The University of New Hampshire had opposed the legislation, while students and other critics had raised questions about its constitutionality.The bill, which would have required students to show their in-state tuition statements when registering to vote, would have even hampered New Hampshire residents attending private schools like Dartmouth College, which doesn’t have an in-state rate, said McKenzie St. Germain, the campaign director for the New Hampshire Campaign for Voting Rights, a nonpartisan voting rights group.Sandra Panek, one of the sponsors of the bill that died, said she would like to bring it back if she can get bipartisan support. “We want to encourage our young people to vote,” said Ms. Panek, who regularly tweets about election conspiracy theories. But, she added, elections should be reflective of “those who reside in the New Hampshire towns and who ultimately bear the consequences of the election results.”A Texas ban on campus polling places has made little headwayIn Texas, the Republican lawmaker who introduced the bill to eliminate all polling places on college campuses this year, Carrie Isaac, cited safety concerns and worries about political violence.Voting advocates see a different motive.“This is just the latest in a long line of attacks on young people’s right to vote in Texas,” said Claudia Yoli Ferla, the executive director of MOVE Texas Action Fund, a nonpartisan group that seeks to empower younger voters.Students at the University of Texas at Austin lined up to cast their ballots on campus during the 2020 primary. A new proposal would eliminate all college polling places in the state.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesMs. Isaac has also introduced similar legislation to eliminate polling places at primary and secondary schools. In an interview, she mentioned the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers — an attack that was not connected to voting.“Emotions run very high,” Ms. Isaac said. “Poll workers have complained about increased threats to their lives. It’s just not conducive, I believe, to being around children of all ages.”The legislation has been referred to the House Elections Committee, but has yet to receive a hearing in the Legislature. Voting rights experts have expressed skepticism that the bill — one of dozens related to voting introduced for this session — would advance.G.O.P. voting restrictions flounder in other statesIn Virginia, one Republican failed in her effort to repeal a state law that lets teenagers register to vote starting at age 16 if they will turn 18 in time for a general election. Part of a broader package of proposed election restrictions, the bill had no traction in the G.O.P.-controlled House, where it died this year in committee after no discussion.And in Wyoming, concerns about making voting harder on older people appears to have inadvertently helped younger voters. A G.O.P. bill that would have banned most college IDs from being used as voter identification was narrowly defeated in the state House because it also would have banned Medicare and Medicaid insurance cards as proof of identity at the polls, a provision that Republican lawmakers worried could be onerous for older people.“In my mind, all we’re doing is kind of hurting students and old people,” Dan Zwonitzer, a Republican lawmaker who voted against the bill, said during a House debate in February.But some barriers are already in placeGeorgia has accepted student IDs only from public colleges and universities since 2006, so students at private institutions, including several historically Black colleges and universities, must use another form of identification.Georgia has accepted student IDs only from public colleges and universities since 2006, a rule that means students at private institutions, like several historically Black colleges and universities, must use another form of identification. Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesIn Ohio, which has for years not accepted student IDs for voting, Republicans in January approved a broader photo ID requirement that also bars students from using university account statements or utility bills for voting purposes, as they had in the past.The Idaho bill will take effect in January. Scott Herndon and Tina Lambert, the bill’s sponsors in the Senate and the House, did not respond to requests for comment, but Mr. Herndon said during a Feb. 24 session that student identification cards had lower vetting standards than those issued by the government.“It isn’t about voter fraud,” he said. “It’s just making sure that the people who show up to vote are who they say they are.”Republicans contended that nearly 99 percent of Idahoans had used their driver’s licenses to vote, but the bill’s opponents pointed out that not all students have driver’s licenses or passports — and that there is a cost associated with both.Mae Roos, a senior at Borah High School in Boise, testified against the bill at a Feb. 10 hearing.“When we’re taught from the very beginning, when we first start trying to participate, that voting is an expensive process, an arduous process, a process rife with barriers, we become disillusioned with that great dream of our democracy,” Ms. Roos said. “We start to believe that our voices are not valued.” More

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      New Jersey to Extend Early In-Person Voting

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      New Jersey, a state controlled by Democrats, will offer more than a week of early in-person voting for the first time before November’s election.Months after a divisive presidential election pushed voting rights to the fore, the issue has become a key political battlefield.Bills restricting ballot access are moving quickly in Republican-led states even as President Biden and his fellow Democrats in Washington press for passage of the most ambitious voting rights legislation in decades to help blunt their effect.In New Jersey, the Democratic governor, Philip D. Murphy, is about to sign a bill authorizing early in-person voting, sending a clear signal that making it easier to vote is crucial for a healthy democracy.It will be done in a ceremony laden with symbolism: Mr. Murphy will be joined on Tuesday in a videoconference by Stacey Abrams, whose decade-long effort to enroll voters in Georgia helped Mr. Biden win the state and cemented the Democrats’ slim majority in the United States Senate.New Jersey lawmakers’ final approval of two bills that expand voter access were not surprising in a state where Democrats control the State House and Democratic voters outnumber Republican voters by more than one million. And the practice of early in-person voting is hardly novel: New Jersey will become the 25th state to allow voters to cast ballots in person before elections for a period that includes a weekend day.But Thursday’s final votes came on the same day that Georgia became the first major battleground state to restrict voting access since the tumultuous 2020 presidential contest, adopting a law that added voter identification requirements for absentee voting, limited drop boxes and expanded the Legislature’s power over elections.Republicans have already passed a similar law in Iowa, and are moving forward with efforts to limit voting in states including Arizona, Florida and Texas.Mr. Biden, criticizing voting restrictions that appear designed to appease a conservative base still outraged by the results of the presidential election, said that Georgia’s new law made “Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.”“What an ironic moment,” said New Jersey Assemblyman Andrew Zwicker, a Democrat who was a prime sponsor of the early-voting legislation. “While New Jersey is doing one thing, Georgia is doing the exact opposite.”New Jersey’s legislation requires each of the state’s 21 counties to open three to seven polling places for machine voting in the days before an election. For the Nov. 2 contest, there would be nine days of early in-person voting, including two weekends, ending the Sunday before Election Day. The bill calls for fewer days of early voting before primaries.“Our accountability over government, opportunities to better our lives and the chance to elect our representatives all depend upon our ability to access the ballot,” said Senator Nia Gill, a Democrat who represents parts of Essex and Passaic Counties and was a sponsor of the bill.Separate legislation that was also approved on Thursday calls for drop boxes for paper vote-by-mail ballots to be spaced out more evenly throughout counties, ensuring that there are access points closer to residential neighborhoods.“Across our nation, there is a concerted effort to limit access to the ballot box among eligible voters,” Mr. Murphy said in a statement. “Those efforts are un-American and fly in the face of the principles that generations of Americans, from soldiers to civil rights activists, have fought for and in many cases given their lives to defend.”Some county elections leaders, while supportive of the intent of the early-voting bill, had urged lawmakers to delay implementation until after November’s election, when the governor and all members of the Legislature are up for re-election. The bill will require most counties to purchase new voting machines and electronic poll books, and could cost upward of $50 million.Some New Jersey Republicans objected to the cost and the timeline for implementing the legislation, which cleared the Assembly earlier this month and passed in the Senate on Thursday, 28 to 8, largely along party lines.Senator Kristin M. Corrado, a Republican and a former county clerk who managed elections in Passaic County for more than seven years, said she supported early in-person voting. But, she said, she voted against the measure mainly out of concern that there would not be enough time before Election Day to update the voter rolls, purchase new machines and sync them to new electronic poll books.“I hope we’re not setting everyone up for failure, but we’re just not there,” she said. “We don’t have the machines. We don’t have the poll books. We don’t have the workers.”Senator Declan O’Scanlon Jr., a Republican who represents much of the Jersey Shore, said he opposed the bill for similar reasons.“Like many things we do in Trenton, we’re doing it incompetently,” he said. “It’s impossible to do it instantly, yet we make no allowance in the bill for any delay.”Still, supporters of expanding voting rights said they were hopeful that county election officials could successfully complete the necessary preparations in seven months.“We applaud the Legislature’s commitment to removing obstacles to the ballot in recognition of the simple truth that our democracy is better when all voices can participate,” Jesse Burns, executive director of the League of Women Voters of New Jersey, said in a statement.Henal Patel, a director at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, a nonprofit that advocates racial and social justice, said the inclusion of voting on two Sundays would encourage more nonwhite churchgoers to cast ballots as part of a nationwide tradition known as “souls to the polls.”“Early in-person voting encourages participation by more people, increases satisfaction, and results in shorter lines on Election Day,” Ms. Patel said in a statement.During the pandemic, voting in New Jersey has occurred primarily with vote-by-mail ballots. Last fall, every registered voter in the state was sent a paper ballot, which could be mailed back or delivered by hand to drop boxes or election offices, resulting in record-setting voter turnout in November.Under the new legislation, drop boxes would be positioned farther apart and efforts would be made to include more in poor communities.“Passing legislation for early voting and allowing more equitable drop-box placement will expand our democracy for New Jersey’s Black voters, who have historically faced obstacles to the ballot,” Richard T. Smith, president of the state chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., said in a statement.Ms. Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia Statehouse, spent a decade building a Democratic political infrastructure in the state, first with her New Georgia Project and then with Fair Fight, the voting rights organization she founded after losing a campaign for governor in 2018.Her efforts contributed to January’s election of two Democratic U.S. senators in Georgia, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, swinging the balance of power in the Senate back to the Democrats.Mr. Zwicker, who represents parts of several counties near Princeton, said he was excited by Ms. Abrams’s expected participation in Tuesday’s bill signing.“If there’s anything good about doing things online, it’s that you can do things like this,” he said. “Talk about a single person changing the course of our country’s history with the work she did in Georgia. I’ll be thrilled to be within the same electrons as her.” More