Archive for the ‘Democracy’ Category

Democracy Alerts – North Carolina Court Strikes Down New Election Law That Would Strip Power From Democratic … – Democracy Docket

WASHINGTON, D.C. A unanimous panel of three North Carolina judges this morning sided with North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D), striking down a new Republican-sponsored power grab law that would have removed the governors authority to make appointments to the state board of elections and instead granted it to the GOP-controlled Legislature.

In addition to stripping Coopers appointment power, the law would have required state and county boards of elections to have an even number of Democratic and Republican-appointed members, increasing the potential for deadlock. The now-struck down law departed from the current structure that allows a majority of state and county board members three out of five to be from the governors political party.

The law would have also given the Legislature the final say on appointing leadership positions to state and county boards of elections if board members were unable to reach a decision and also prevented the governor from removing members from state and county boards for any reason.

The North Carolina State Board of Elections oversees election administration and works in conjunction with the states 100 county boards of elections that are engaged in conducting local elections, preparing ballots, operating voting sites and more.

Prior to todays ruling permanently blocking the power grab law from taking effect, the legislation remained temporarily blocked due to a decision from the same three-judge panel, which granted Coopers request for a preliminary injunction in late November 2023.

The panel consisting of two Republicans and one Democratic judge today held that the law infringes upon the Governors constitutional duties and is a stark and blatant removal of appointment power from the Governor that must be permanently blocked.

Todays ruling is not the first time that North Carolina courts have found Republicans power-grabbing attempts unconstitutional. Back in 2017, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in favor of Cooper who filed a similar lawsuit seeking to thwart an earlier attempt by Republicans to restructure North Carolina election boards.

A vast majority of North Carolina voters have also opposed such efforts, voting in 2018 to soundly reject a proposed constitutional amendment that would have overhauled the structure of state and county election boards and transferred appointment power to the Legislature.

In response to todays ruling, Cooper said in a statement that Republican leaders should stop their efforts to control the ballot box and sow chaos before the November elections. Bipartisan courts and voters have repeatedly rejected these clearly unconstitutional attempts to seize control of elections.

Read the order here.

Learn more about the case here.

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Democracy Alerts - North Carolina Court Strikes Down New Election Law That Would Strip Power From Democratic ... - Democracy Docket

Why does Putin always win? What to know about Russia’s pseudo election. – The Washington Post

In a three-day election that leaves no room for doubt, Russian President Vladimir Putin is poised to win a fifth term on Sunday, allowing him to stay in power until 2030 and, should he run again, to 2036.

But many analysts believe the 71-year-old autocrat will rule this nation of 146 million people for life.

It was not supposed to be this way. Under Russias constitution, Putins term in power was supposed to end in 2008 but under a tricky bait-and-switch, he effectively ruled Russia as prime minister for four years, swapping places with Dmitry Medvedev. Putin returned as president in 2012, sparking massive protests that changed nothing.

In 2020, Putin engineered changes to the constitution in a nationwide vote marred by irregularities that allowed him at least two more six-year terms.

Putin has centralized power, invaded Georgia and Ukraine, and destroyed the Russian opposition. The two most charismatic opposition leaders are dead: Boris Nemtsov was gunned down near the Kremlin in 2015, and Alexei Navalny survived a state-ordered poisoning in 2020 but died in prison last month. His widow says he was killed on Putins direct order. Other opposition figures are either in prison, silenced or have fled the country.

Having cleared the field, the Kremlin responds indignantly to suggestions that Russias democracy is fake. Last week, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow would not tolerate such criticisms. Our democracy is the best and we will continue to build it, he said.

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Why does Putin always win? What to know about Russia's pseudo election. - The Washington Post

On the Heels of Recent Shakeup, RNC Files Lawsuit in Michigan Seeking to Purge Voters – Democracy Docket

WASHINGTON, D.C. On the heels of a recent shakeup in its senior leadership, the Republican National Committee (RNC) today filed a federal lawsuit in Michigan seeking to purge allegedly ineligible registrants from the states voter rolls.

Following a swift overhaul in the past week, the RNCs former leadership has now been replaced primarily with close allies of former President Donald Trump. With former North Carolina GOP chair Michael Whatley and Trumps daughter-in-law Lara Trump at the helm as co-chairs, the RNC has assumed an avowedly more offensive election integrity strategy.

In an interview with the Washington Post on Tuesday, Trumps campaign advisor, Chris LaCivita stated that [t]he RNCs new posture as it relates to litigation is much more offensive and much less defensive. Lara Trump, who appeared on Fox News the same day, told Sean Hannity that the RNC is devoting massive resources to the organizations first ever election integrity division.

The new Michigan case is the third anti-voting lawsuit filed by the RNC just this year and many more are expected to be filed ahead of the 2024 elections. The complaint, which was filed on behalf of both the RNC and two Republican voters, alleges that Michigans top election officials are failing to properly maintain clean and accurate voter registration records in violation of a federal law known as the National Voter Registration Act.

The complaint claims that at least 53 counties across the state have more active registered voters than adults over the age of 18 and an additional 23 counties have active voter registration rates that exceed 90% of adults over 18. Based on these statistics, the RNC maintains that Michigans number of registered voters is impossibly high and inflated.

The lawsuit goes on to raise concerns how the states purported failure to maintain accurate voter lists undermines the integrity of elections by increasing the opportunity for ineligible voters or voters intent on fraud to cast ballots. Citing scant evidence, the complaint adds that [v]oter fraud is very real in Michigan. Several recent elections have suffered from voter fraud.

Just two weeks ago, a federal judge tossed out a very similar lawsuit brought by the right-wing Public Interest Legal Foundation that mounted claims against Michigans voter list maintenance program. In its rejection of that lawsuit, the court held that [t]he record demonstrates that deceased voters are removed from Michigans voter rolls on a regular and ongoing basis, adding that [f]rom 2019 to March 2023, Michigan cancelled between 400,000 and 450,000 registrations because the voters were deceased.

Against the backdrop of the RNCs new lawsuit, Republicans and right-wing activists are engaging in a nationwide, conspiracy-ridden effort both in and out of the courtroom to purge eligible voters from the rolls. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) is currently working to reinstate the voter registrations of over 1,000 individuals residing in Detroit-area suburbs, whose registrations were improperly canceled as a result of a right-wing voter purge scheme.

As of today, the RNC is involved in 23 anti-voting lawsuits across 14 states, many of which seek to restrict the voting process in key swing states including Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin ahead of the 2024 elections.

Read the complaint.

Learn more about the case here.

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On the Heels of Recent Shakeup, RNC Files Lawsuit in Michigan Seeking to Purge Voters - Democracy Docket

Rishi Sunak’s plan to redefine extremism is disingenuous and a threat to democracy – The Conversation Indonesia

Unhappy with large protests against the increasingly dire situation in Gaza, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is seeking to update the UKs definition of extremism. This, he has argued, is needed because our democracy itself is a target of antisemitic and Islamophobic extremists.

However, the reality is that no measures do more damage to democracy than policy proposals like the one Sunak is promoting.

The UK already has a definition for extremism, which is used in efforts to tackle terrorism. We may think of the police as leading those efforts, but the UKs Prevent strategy now also places a duty on certain other authorities to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.

These authorities include local government, education institutions and the NHS. In reality, the UK has placed teachers and NHS staff on the frontline in the fight against terrorism, on top of all their other duties that they were actually trained to do.

To help those with a duty under Prevent to identify people at risk of being drawn into terrorism, the government currently defines extremism as vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. Also included are calls for the death of members of our armed forces.

This definition is not contained in any law, however. Instead, it features in the governments Prevent guidance. A key reason why this definition is not contained in legislation is because it is so vague and unclear. It would be difficult to legally oblige anyone with a duty under Prevent to apply the definition and even more difficult for a court to determine what it means.

Even as guidance, there are still problems with the definition. It offers enormous discretion to the people deciding who is at risk of being drawn into terrorism. Discretion can lead to inconsistent application. That, in turn, can lead to discrimination.

It has been suggested that the new definition of extremism will include the promotion or advancement of ideology based on hatred, intolerance or violence or undermining or overturning the rights or freedoms of others, or of undermining democracy itself.

What does it mean to undermine or overturn the rights or freedoms of others? Would arguing for the UK to leave the European convention on human rights count meet the bar?

Likewise, what does it mean to undermine democracy? Does excessive corporate lobbying do so? What about calling for restrictions on the right to free speech or the right to protest? These are fundamental rights that are absolutely necessary for a democracy to flourish. Would they be extremist?

Sunak is presenting the new definition of extremism as a response to protests he depicts as being out of control. But the UK already has numerous laws in place to tackle what it considers to be unacceptable behaviour at protests. The Terrorism Act (which is also incredibly broad) can be used to prosecute people who damage property or create a serious risk to public safety during protests.

Counter-terrorism laws can also capture forms of expression at public demonstrations or online. It is already a crime to express support for a proscribed (unlawful) organisation, or to wear clothing, symbols or publish images in a way which can raise suspicion that you support an unlawful organisation. So, for example, if you express support for Hamas a proscribed organisation you are already committing a crime and can be prosecuted for it.

Meanwhile, the Public Order Act contains offences dealing with hate speech. These include using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or displaying written material which is intended to or likely to stir up racial or religious hatred.

In 2022, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act expanded the criminal offence of causing a public nuisance to include serious distress, serious annoyance, serious inconvenience or serious loss of amenity. This can now be applied by he police to criminalise protests that are considered to be making too much noise.

It is hard, therefore, to see which bases are not already covered for a government looking to prosecute people for extremism. These mechanisms have already been used to clamp down on all kinds of activism. In reality, there is no gap in the law that needs fixing. Rather, this proposal looks like a classic example of a government talking tough on crime and terrorism in order to boost its poll ratings in an election year.

Adding new definitions for extremism only creates problems. The vaguer a definition gets, the easier it is to misuse. It can also have a pervasive chilling effect on free speech. People may self-censor out of fear of being identified as extremist, not least when their employer has a duty under Prevent.

The fact of the matter is that human rights law allows for protests to be disruptive. Otherwise, they could be simply ignored. Human rights law also allows people to shock, offend, and disturb through speech.

The government may not be happy with large public protests against its foreign policy but it should not be viewed as extremist to march for a ceasefire in Gaza. Likewise, it should not be viewed as extremist to vocalise opposition to the potential genocide being committed by the Israeli Defence Forces. If this were so, then the International Court of Justice is extremist.

There is a deep danger of conflating protest with extremism and terrorism, undermining the legitimacy of these protests. To stretch the concept of extremism to cover these views is what is actually undermining democracy and the rights and freedoms of others.

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Rishi Sunak's plan to redefine extremism is disingenuous and a threat to democracy - The Conversation Indonesia

The Our in Our Democracy – The Catholic Thing

More than forty years ago and shortly before he entered the Catholic faith, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote an essay worth revisiting today. MacIntyre is a brilliant scholar but a sometimes-tedious writer. As a result, his essay Social Science Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority has all the eloquence of an air-conditioning repair manual. But as background to our current political environment, its value is very real. Ill explain.

For MacIntyre:

Modern liberal politics is dominated by a conception of the political process as one of bargaining between interests. Political morality consists in the observance of certain legally enforceable restrictions upon conduct; morality in general is relegated to private life. There is largely lacking any conception of political life as being the pursuit of the common good. . .[nor can there] be, for our dominant effective notion of the common good is merely that of an artifact compounded out of individual and partial interests as a result of the bargaining process.

Such a feeble sense of the common good has consequences. As MacIntyre argues, in the modern worlds understanding, for example, the notion of a just price makes no sense; justice belongs in one realm and the price mechanism in another. Plus, the relationship of the good citizen to a good man is an essentially Aristotelian question. . .about the distribution of certain dispositions (virtues) in a systematic way within the entire community.

Put simply: In todays world dominated by technology and the social sciences, the common good and a virtuous citizenry have only a marginal connection. The common good is a statistical abstraction amounting to the sum of similar appetites. Aristotle and his concern for a civic life anchored in the cultivation of personal virtue have about as much relevance to political reality as a blacksmith and the needs of his craft.

This implies an equally feeble anthropology. In other words, it suggests a degraded understanding of who and what a human being is, and what if anything our unique dignity as creatures might be. This in turn affects our politics which becomes unmoored from any stable, Biblical grounding.

In practice, the social sciences tend to treat the human person as a data point and an object of study, not a subject with conscience, free will, and a transcendent destiny demanding reverence. Religious belief is typically assumed to be a self-imposed, irrational mystification; an effort to create higher meaning where otherwise none exists.

The irony, as MacIntyre notes, is that the social sciences themselves very easily become an exercise in technical sophistication [that ends] in mystification. For MacIntyre, social science can be seen as essentially a histrionic subject: how to act the part of a natural scientist on the stage of the social sciences with the more technical parts of the discipline functioning as do greasepaint, false beards and costumes in the theater.

The difference is that actors in the theater always know that they are actors, and so do their audience. The methodologists of social science and their audiences too often dont.

This is why Christian Smith, himself a distinguished social scientist, described American sociology as, not merely the science of society nor merely a politically liberal-leaning discipline, but a particular sacred project, a movement to venerate, protect, and advance certain ideological goals and assumptions with the zeal of new religious converts.

Its why a thoroughly secular scholar like Neil Postman reclassified social science as a branch of moral philosophy rather than genuine science, and why the historian Christopher Lasch never a religious believer and always a man of the old working-class left showed such skepticism toward the social sciences in his own writing on matters of society, family, mature citizenship, and culture.

The problem with social science isnt the collection of statistical data. On the contrary, the value of such data is often very important. The problem, as MacIntyre notes, lies in the logical gap between all statistical statements and all causal statements, with many social scientists interpreting their data through the lens of presuppositions shaped by a highly particular and partial view of the social world.

As it happens, this is good news for political leaders seeking to extend bureaucratic authority and thereby to reshape social life according to their own problematic agendas. In the process, social scientists serve as a kind of clergy in a new liturgy of authority and power that may have very little to do with the beliefs of the ordinary citizen whom government (theoretically) serves.

So why ramble on about any of this? Heres why.

In an election year, concerns about our democracy and its future become predictably urgent. Our democracy is on the brink of a theocratic coup. Our democracy is being hijacked by racists, fascists, homophobes, and misogynists. And so on.

Its worth noting that the word our in the expression our democracy has very different meanings for what Christopher Lasch describedas a self-flattering leadership class dressed in the vestments of social science, and for ordinary citizens raising families, struggling to survive, and operating off common sense and the remains of this nations biblical morality.

Graham Greene once wrote that behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities. The good news about reversing the worst and renewing the best ideals of our democracy, is that its actually pretty simple. The bad news is that its hard and takes a long time.

The reason its hard is because it involves changing ourselves from comfortable religious fellow travelers and pew sitters to committed witnesses of Jesus Christ not just in our private lives but in our public actions, including our civic engagement. Most of us dont really want to do that. It cuts us out of the herd and invites the derision of todays mainstream, enlightened bigots.

The reason it takes so long is that individuals and communities, and their habits, are much harder to rewire than structures.

But if we dont start now, change will never happen. And the responsibility for whatever comes next will be on us.

*Whoever refuses to obey the general will, will be forced to do so by the entire body; this means merely that he will be forced to be free. Rousseau in The Social Contract (1762)

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The Our in Our Democracy - The Catholic Thing