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Never a dull moment with the Justice Department of Eric Holder, aka "the right man at the right time to protect our citizens in the critical years ahead." In fact, it would be more accurate to say he's the right man at the right time to protect our non-citizens in the critical years ahead. Unbelievably (or, perhaps, entirely too believably), Holder has told Georgia that it may no longer verify identification in order to ensure that voting is done only by citizens eligible to vote. The AP reports: ATLANTA — The Justice Department has rejected Georgia's system of using Social...

GUEST OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS With voters and the press fixated on the fiercest presidential race in decades, scant attention has been paid to a political revolution erupting on the West Coast - one that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California gave his support to this week. On Nov. 2, voters in Washington State and California are expected to approve initiatives to abolish the political party primary as we know it. Voters in Oregon may well pass a similar measure by 2006. In almost every state, voters in primary elections now nominate Republican and Democratic standard-bearers for a wide range of offices, including...

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 15 - As the secretary of state of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who is unabashed about his ambition to be governor, has issued a series of rulings on obscure issues like provisional ballots, voting notices to parolees and the weight of registration forms. To Democrats, who say he has repeatedly tried to disenfranchise Democratic voters with those rulings, Mr. Blackwell is reminiscent of Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who made her name in the chaotic election of 2000. On Friday they challenged him again, filing suit to block a directive they say will...

CAMPAIGN 2004: THE BIG ISSUES When members of Mi Familia Vota, a Latino group, were registering voters recently on a Miami Beach sidewalk outside a building where new citizens were being sworn in, the Homeland Security Department ordered them to stop. The department gave all kinds of suspect reasons, which a federal court has since rejected, but it looked a lot as if someone at Homeland Security just didn't want thousands of new Latino voters on the Florida rolls. The suppression of minority votes is alive and well in 2004, driven by the sharp partisan divide across the nation. Because...

PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 28 - Jeffrey Anderson, a paralegal from Brooklyn, took three vacation days and more than $600 out of his bank account to canvass this city this week, registering voters in the hopes of defeating President Bush. Daniel Aikin, a college student in Buffalo, gave up a weekend of rock climbing and studying to take a bus trip to Ohio to campaign for the president. Genevieve Christy stays up into the wee hours to finish her management consulting work in her apartment in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, so she can spend a few days a week here painting posters and...

Election officials should supervise voting in nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities and give brief mental tests to residents with dementia to determine whether they are competent to vote, a panel of experts in law and medicine is recommending. The experts are also urging changes in voting laws involving mental competence, which vary by state, to conform to a 2001 court decision that helped define a person's "capacity to vote." Voting by people with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia is "an emerging policy problem," the experts warn, in an article being published today in the Journal of the...

Election officials should supervise voting in nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities and give brief mental tests to residents with dementia to determine whether they are competent to vote, a panel of experts in law and medicine is recommending. The experts are also urging changes in voting laws involving mental competence, which vary by state, to conform to a 2001 court decision that helped define a person's "capacity to vote." Voting by people with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia is "an emerging policy problem," the experts warn, in an article being published today in the Journal of the...

The big story out of Florida over the weekend was the tragic devastation caused by Hurricane Charley. But there's another story from Florida that deserves our attention. State police officers have gone into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando and interrogated them as part of an odd "investigation" that has frightened many voters, intimidated elderly volunteers and thrown a chill over efforts to get out the black vote in November. The officers, from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which reports to Gov. Jeb Bush, say they are investigating allegations of voter fraud that came up during the...

CHICAGO - When poll workers could not find Kelly Pierce's name on the registration rolls during the primary here in March, they told him to take advantage of a new election rule that allowed him to cast his vote using a provisional ballot. The rule is intended to prevent one of the major problems experienced in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, when scores of voters, especially minority voters, were turned away at the polls over registration questions that could not be resolved quickly. So Mr. Pierce, who had voted regularly since 1989, filled out his paper ballot. Election administrators...