Alabama's front line advocates focused on disability, voting and civil rights are taking legal action against what they see as voter suppression.
Organizations including the ACLU, the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program, and Greater Birmingham Ministries have filed a lawsuit to block Senate Bill 1, which has just become state law. It restricts community groups, churches and even neighbors from helping people with absentee ballot applications.
Backers of the bill claim it will minimize "undue pressure" on voters and so-called "ballot harvesting."
Alison Mollman, legal director for the ACLU of Alabama, said it directly affects the state's most vulnerable communities.
"Given how ambiguous the law is written, given how it directly targets those that are not providing assistance with absentee ballots, but specifically with absentee ballot applications, this is about voter suppression," Mollman contended. "It's not about anything else."
Mollman argued the bill contains vague language about payments. For instance, it is now illegal for anyone to pay or be paid for ballot application assistance. However, the law does not specify what counts as compensation. She argued it puts people at risk of violating the law, even through offering something as small as an "I Voted" sticker.
Mollman also raised concerns over the bill's penalties, equating them to those for serious crimes like manslaughter, statutory rape or first-degree property theft.
"What we know from how this bill is written is that it is going to put people in harm's way of being incarcerated for decades, if they're just doing basic work and trying to make sure that people can exercise their right to vote," Mollman contended.
The lawsuit names Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, the 42 District Attorneys in the state, and Secretary of State Wes Allen. According to Mollman, the legal action claims the bill is unconstitutional on multiple grounds.
"We're very concerned that SB1 violates the Voting Rights Act. We're concerned that it violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, the ADA, and that it's limiting access to the ballot in a way that directly contradicts federal law," Mollman outlined. "There's several counts that we've raised in our lawsuit."
The lawsuit also challenges the bill for violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution and the Help America Vote Act of 2002.
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Wyoming's State Capitol building has been a National Historic Landmark since 1987 and last month, the Department of the Interior updated the designation with a new context: women's suffrage.
The updated federal designation honors Wyoming's important role in being the first governing body to allow women the full right to vote, in 1869, when the area was a recognized territory. When Wyoming joined the union in 1890, local leaders brought women's suffrage with it.
Keren Meister-Emerich, a member of the League of Women Voters of Cheyenne, said there were national attempts to block the move.
"That was a big controversy nationally," Meister-Emerich pointed out. "And the governor said, 'Well, we'll wait a hundred years if you don't let our women come in voting.' So, very different from other states."
Wyoming, the 44th state to join the union, coincidentally ranks 44th in the nation for the proportion of women currently in its state legislature, according to the Center for American Women and Politics.
It is difficult to tell what the state's historical motivations were for women's suffrage.
Robin Hill, a member of the Governor's Council for the Wyoming Women's Suffrage Celebration and a representative of League of Women Voters of Wyoming, said some theories include territorial leaders wanting more women to move there, one political party believed it would win women's votes, or women pressed male members of the legislature with a strong case for suffrage.
"My view, or my hope anyway, is that all those motivations might have played a part, but maybe they didn't need a whole lot of motivation," Hill observed. "Maybe it just seemed like the obvious thing to do at the time."
The 19th Amendment federally recognized women's right to vote in 1920, more than 50 years after the Wyoming territory did so. Wyoming has other claims to women's rights fame, including the country's first woman appointed to public office, first women jurors and first woman governor.
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By Marilyn Odendahl for The Indiana Citizen.
Broadcast version by Joe Ulery for Indiana News Service reporting for the Indiana Citizen-Free Press Indiana-Public News Service Collaboration.
The basement of the Indiana Supreme Court Law Library is home to papers of former justices, renovation records and other things that tell the story of the state's judicial system, but while inventorying all the different materials and mementoes in the subterranean space, Cathrin Verano, special collections development librarian, found an unexpected treasure.
Packaged in a cardboard box with a handwritten yellow Post-it attached to the lid that said "library may want to display" was a framed copy of a single page from a 1788 printed copy of the Federalist Papers. The page was taken from the second of a two-volume set containing all 85 essays written by founding fathers Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay to promote ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
The box was nestled among the materials from retired Indiana Chief Justice Randall Shepard's office.
"It was well-packed, well-stored and well-taken care of," Verano said of the printed artifact of American history. "It just hadn't quite made its way up to the library yet."
About the size of a human hand, the page is suspended between two pieces of glass so the black printed text on both sides of the paper can be read. The glass has been mounted into a wood frame so the single sheet can be displayed on a tabletop or bookshelf.
How the framed Federalist Papers page ended up at the law library remains a mystery. Nevertheless, Shepard thinks the excerpt from the essays that push the citizens of the New World to achieve higher aspirations fits the values the Hoosier state espoused in its early days. In particular, Shepard noted "the ink was hardly dry on the Indiana statehood documents" when the state Supreme Court issued two opinions in the 1820s prohibiting slavery.
"I think there are topics where Indiana law was very progressive for the period, including the abolition of slavery, where Indiana's record was sterling, much better and different than either Ohio or Illinois," Shepard said. "It was a state where interests in law and progression were something that people engaged in."
Written in haste under a pseudonym
When she first opened the box, Verano recognized the framed document as a Federalist Paper but knew none of the details. Only after exercising her librarian research skills, honed by her studies in Europe and her work at the Lilly Library, was she able to trace the origin of the page to Federalist Paper No. 65, printed 236 years ago.
"Much like the rest of our rare books collection, it's going to be used in display and in education as much as we can," Verano said, noting she most recently included it as a highlight in her presentation during the Indiana Judicial Conference in September. "We hope to use it for display, outreach and education, the things that we're really trying to prioritize in the library."
Hamilton, Madison and Jay wrote the essays that became known as the Federalist Papers between the fall of 1787 and the spring of 1788. Initially, the columns were primarily printed in New York City newspapers since the authors were trying to convince New Yorkers to ratify the new Constitution that had been drafted earlier in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
None of the authors collaborated or discussed with each other the essays they wrote, legal scholar Gregory Maggs wrote in his article, "A Concise Guide to the Federalist Papers as a Source of the Original Meaning of the United States Constitution," which was published in the October 2007 issue of the Boston University Law Review. Indeed, Madison explained later that most of the essays were dashed off "in great haste and without any special allotment of the different parts of the subject to the several writers." Also the individual authors did not put their own bylines on any of the written works, opting instead to use the pseudonym of "PUBLIUS."
Hamilton got the idea to reprint the essays in a two-volume set. Brothers John and Archibald McLean, immigrants from Scotland who owned and operated the printing company J. & A. McLean in New York, published the first volume in March 1788 and the second volume in May 1788.
The McLeans printed 500 copies of their two-volume collection. Although today scholars and historians refer to the twin volumes as "the McLean edition" and consider it an invaluable original source, Americans in 1788 were seemingly indifferent. The publishers were complaining in October 1788 about the "several hundred unsold copies" they still had in stock, according to Maggs.
Time has significantly increased not only the appreciation of the books but also their worth. A first edition of the McLean second volume, just like the one from which Indiana's page was taken, was sold at auction in 2023. The selling price for the complete book was $27,500.
The excerpt in the law library came from volume two of the McLean edition. It is a portion of Federalist Paper No. 65, which historians have determined was written by Hamilton, explaining why the U.S. Senate is a better forum than the U.S. Supreme Court for impeachment proceedings.
"But juries are frequently influenced by the opinions of Judges," the excerpt in the law library opines. "They are sometimes induced to find special verdicts which refer the main question to the decision of the court. Who would be willing to stake his life and his estate upon the verdict of a jury, acting under the auspices of Judges, who had predetermined his guilt?"
Because the authors were racing against New York State's impending ratification convention to get their pro-Constitution message out to the public, the essays are not examples of perfected prose. Rather, Maggs noted, they are littered with "errors and repetitive discussions."
Leaning close to the framed page, Verano pointed to a sentence near the bottom. There the word "would" has been used in place of the original "could" that appeared in the newspaper version of the 65th Federalist Paper. Verano was hesitant to speculate on the reason behind the word substitution.
"I don't want to characterize McLean's intentions," Verano said, noting the different words could have been the result of some editorializing, a revision Hamilton made, or a misreading of the handwritten text.
Maybe it was "just some oversight as the typesetter was putting letter there," Verano continued. "I've done some typesetting, it'd be easy enough to grab the wrong letter and put it in."
Grant leads to major discovery
Indiana's lone page from a multi-volume work is a common sales technique of published materials, Verano said. Taking a book apart and selling the single pages will enable a modern-day bookseller to sell 300 separate things as opposed to just selling one book.
However, Verano said the single page pairs nicely with the law library's copy of Swift-Folwell Statutes, which bear the print date as 1796. The volumes include the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Treaty of Paris and all the laws passed by the first through fourth Congresses. Of the 4,500 copies printed, 500 were distributed to Congress and the remainder were sent to the states and territories.
The Swift-Folwell Statutes is just one of the centuries-old tomes in the law library's collection of more than 200 rare books. With the help of a $4,500 Preservation Assistance Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded in 2023, the law library was able to bring in a rare-book conservator who evaluated the collection and made recommendations for repairing and protecting the books.
Verano credits the grant with sending her into the basement. She was downstairs looking through the remnants, heirlooms and gems of Indiana Supreme Court history that could be protected and preserved in the archival boxes and folders provided by the grant when she saw the box with the Post-it attached.
"I was very excited," Verano said. "That was, I would say, probably one of the major discoveries that came out of the grant work. I'm sure eventually I would have gone down there and found it, but it was definitely the archival part of the grant work that motivated me to go down in that instance."
Marilyn Odendahl wrote this article for The Indiana Citizen.
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Former President Jimmy Carter, who passed away on Sunday at 100 years of age, had a huge effect on the Golden State far beyond his presidency, according to California nonprofit leaders.
Carter and his wife Rosalynn volunteered for four decades with Habitat for Humanity, helping to build more than 200 homes in California and more than 4,000 nationwide.
Erin Rank, president and CEO of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles, said his selfless example has inspired thousands of people over the years.
"We hear from the homeowners who talk about the impact that had on the trajectory of their life," Rank explained. "Both to have a stable place to live but also to have a president who was humble enough to show up and get his hands dirty and really build."
Rank noted she will join a number of families helped by the Carters to pay homage in Washington, D.C., next week when he lies in state at the Capitol Rotunda. Carter's influence is still widely felt, as he fought to desegregate schools and founded the Department of Education. He also created the cabinet-level Department of Energy and was the first to put solar panels on the White House.
Jimmy Carter was also a leader in civil rights.
Jorge Reyes Salinas, communications director for Equality California, said Carter was the first chief executive to invite LGBTQ+ people to the White House.
"Even stating that Jesus would be accepting of same-sex marriage, which -- as a Christian at that time -- it was a huge message for the American people to have those conversations," Salinas recounted.
Carter was also a major opposition figure condemning the failed Briggs initiative in 1978, a proposition on the California ballot that would have banned LGBTQ+ people from teaching in public schools.
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