AL Voting Rights Restoration Project

The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) and Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) announced their efforts to Re-Enfranchise Alabama Voters with Felony Convictions.

The Alabama Voting Rights Project will take a simple Message across the State: A Felony Conviction does not Permanently take away a Person’s Right to Vote.

Many Alabama Residents who have Paid their Debts to Society are Eligible to Vote or to have their Voting Rights Restored by obtaining a Certificate of Eligibility to Register to Vote.

The Campaign's Workers will Organize and Train Local Leaders in Communities across the State, Participate in Community Events and Forums, and go Door to Door, to Inform formerly Incarcerated People that they may have the Right to Vote, despite the fact that they have Felony Convictions.

The New Initiative comes about a year after the Passage of a State Law called the Definition of Moral Turpitude Act, which allows People Convicted of certain Felonies in Alabama to become Eligible to Register to Vote or Reclaim Voting Rights that had been stripped from them.

The Law established a List of Felony Convictions deemed Acts "of moral turpitude" that result in Automatic Disqualification from Voting in Alabama. Being Convicted only of Felonies not on that List no longer results in Automatic Disenfranchisement.

Previously, Decisions about which Felonies were considered "of moral turpitude", and therefore resulted in Loss of the Franchise, were made on an Arbitrary, Case-by-Case basis by each County's Board of Registrars. And Tens of Thousands of Alabamians who Lost their Voting Rights after being Convicted only of Crimes no longer considered "of moral turpitude" under the New Law are now Eligible to Restore their Right to Vote.

But Information about the Definition of Moral Turpitude and its Impacts on many Alabama Residents has not reached every Felon who could be helped by it. And State Secretary of State John Merrill said last year that he does Not Intend to Expend State Resources to inform People who are impacted by the Law that they are now able to Register to Vote.

That's where the CLC and SPLC hope that they can help, by getting the word out to Everyone in the State who is newly able to Register to Vote or Regain the Franchise under the New Law.










NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker

Watchdog Groups Call on DOJ to Investigate Trump Campaign

Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center called for an investigation, on June 29th, into whether Trump’s Campaign Committee has engaged in knowing and willful violations of Federal Campaign Finance laws.

According to their letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ), “Based on numerous published reports, it appears that the Trump committee has solicited contributions from foreign nationals, in violation of the ban on soliciting any contribution in connection with a federal, state, or local election from a foreign national.”

Published reports further indicate that the Trump Campaign Committee has knowingly continued to send fundraising solicitations to foreign nationals after it was made aware that the solicitations were prohibited by Campaign Finance laws.

“The Department of Justice has its own separate responsibility to enforce the campaign finance laws against “knowing and willful” criminal violations of the law,” says the letter. “The DOJ Handbook lists the foreign national contribution ban as one of the “heartland provisions” of the campaign finance laws that warrants criminal prosecution.”

“This is an open and shut case of the Trump campaign illegally soliciting foreign contributions,” said Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer. “It is striking and inexplicable that these solicitations brazenly continued after the Trump campaign was informed they were prohibited by law. As apparent knowing and willful violations of the law, the foreign money solicitations by the Trump campaign raise the issue of criminal conduct and require a Justice Department investigation.”

“It boggles the mind that the Trump campaign would continue violating the ban on fundraising from foreign politicians even after receiving a formal complaint alleging it was breaking the law,” said Brendan Fischer, Associate Counsel at the Campaign Legal Center. “Tapping foreign politicians for cash and flouting U.S. law is no way to make America great.”

Numerous media outlets asked the Trump campaign about the emails in response to the Federal Election Committee (FEC) complaint filed by the watchdog groups, but received no comment.

The letter concluded that, “The Department should conduct an investigation and take appropriate action in light of these apparently knowing and willful violations of the law by the Trump Committee.”











NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker

FEC Made It Easier for super PAC Donors to Hide Their Identities

A divided Federal Election Commission (FEC) cannot agree to investigate whether super PAC donors used corporations to mask their identities in the 2012 campaign, effectively giving a green light to contributors writing checks through limited-liability companies (LLC) in this year's elections.

FEC Assistant General Counsel William Powers wrote in letters to the nonprofit advocacy group Campaign Legal Center last week that the six-member panel was split about whether to look into corporate donations that were made in 2011 to Restore Our Future, a super PAC backing then GOP Presidential nominee Mitt Romney. At least four commissioners must agree that there is a basis for an investigation before the agency's lawyers can proceed. Absent that consensus, the FEC closed the cases, he wrote.

At issue were three $1 million donations that Restore Our Future received from corporate entities in 2011. Among the donors was W Spann LLC, a company that had been incorporated in Delaware in March 2011 and was dissolved that July. The Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 filed a complaint alleging that W Spann's contribution violated a Federal ban on straw donors. Shortly afterward, former Romney business associate Edward Conard came forward and admitted he set up the LLC and made the donation through it.

Paul S. Ryan, Deputy Executive Director of the Campaign Legal Center, said Conard appeared to have violated a Federal law that prohibits an individual or entity from making a donation in the name of another entity. "The FEC was not able to muster four votes to even open an investigation," he said. "It took them almost five years to get to it, and then they deadlocked."

The Campaign Legal Center is now considering suing the FEC over the case, Ryan said, noting that the Supreme Court endorsed the robust disclosure of donors in its 2010 Citizens United decision, which allowed corporations to spend unlimited sums on independent political activities.

Charlie Spies, the Attorney for Restore Our Future, said in a statement that the super PAC "fully complied with all FEC rules and regulations here, and the FEC’s resolution of these matters is consistent with Constitutional free speech protections articulated in Citizens United."

While donations from limited-liability companies were still novel in 2012, super PACs now routinely report receiving money from hard-to-trace or recently formed corporations.

"We’ve seen an increase in contributions from LLCs and other business entities to super PACs, with no disclosure of the human or humans behind these contributions," Ryan said. "Unless the FEC is reconstituted with commissioners willing to do their job, straw donors will continue to get away with laundering their money into federal elections."











NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker

Bill to Improve Disclosure of TV Stations’ Political Files

The Campaign Legal Center called on the House Energy and Commerce Committee to move expeditiously to report out H.R. 4179, “The Fair and Clear Campaign Transparency Act.” This legislation, introduced December 3rd by Representative Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), directs the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to issue regulations requiring television broadcasters’ political files to be made available in a machine-readable format.

“With the 2016 elections less than a year away, there are a record-breaking number of political advertisements running on the publicly-owned airwaves,” said Meredith McGehee, Policy Director of the Campaign Legal Center. “While establishing an online FCC database for the statutorily required public files kept by television broadcasters was an important step forward, the FCC has not finished its work because it has not required stations to make the information included in the public inspection file available in a searchable, sortable, downloadable format.”

Currently, broadcasters are uploading in pdf format whatever paper documents would have been placed in the public file. Every station keeps its records somewhat differently. As a result, the current database is difficult to navigate and does not permit the aggregation of spending by a particular campaign or outside group.

When the FCC first required that public files be placed online, it found that “certain information in the public file would be of much greater benefit to the public if made available in a structured and database-friendly format that can be aggregated, manipulated, and more easily analyzed; this continues to be our ultimate goal.” The FCC’s own Information Needs of Communities Report observed that “it matters greatly how government data is organized. It needs to be put out in standardized, machine-readable, structured formats that make it easy for programmers to create new applications.”

The letter points out that the FCC can use the data to create a database that facilitates analysis, including, among other things, an easy-to-use graphic interface as well as an application programming interface (API) to permit searching and downloading of the documents and metadata.

“Moving from pdfs to a database format may appear to simply be a technical matter. It’s not. Getting the information in a television station’s political file into database format is a key step in providing some of the disclosure the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld,” said McGehee.

CLICK HERE to read the two page (PDF) letter.











NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker