GREG PALAST, leni at gregpalast.com, @Greg_Palast
Palast’s investigation, “Jim Crow Returns: Millions of Minority Voters Threatened by Electoral Purge,” was recently aired on Al-Jazeera America.
WENDY WEISER, MYRNA PÉREZ, via Erik Opsal, erik.opsal at nyu.edu, @BrennanCenter
Weiser is democracy program director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. She co-wrote the in-depth report “The State of Voting in 2014.” Pérez is deputy director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program and leads the group’s Texas voter ID work.
More recent pieces are available on their blog, including “Voter ID Law Turns Away Texans.” The group notes: “This is the first federal election since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, which would have required Texas to get government approval for these changes.” They have pieces that include “stories from actual voters and the difficulties they’ve encountered during early voting. … In many cases, Texas failed these voters twice — first by requiring identification they did not have, and second by not training election officials to help them navigate the rules.”
The Brennan Center adds: “Voters in need of assistance should call 1-866-OUR-VOTE, where trained volunteers are standing by to assist voters and answer any questions they may have.”
Weiser also co-wrote “We Already Know Who Won the 2014 Election” about the Supreme Court. The piece states: “When the Court dismantled our laws regulating money in politics and gutted core voting rights protections, we knew those decisions would have consequences. But only now are we seeing the full scope of their impact: a return to pre-Watergate, pre-Civil Rights era practices. Cash from unknown sources is flooding the most important races, while state politicians have instituted new barriers to the ballot box for millions of Americans. Regardless of who wins, the integrity of our elections has been undermined.”