hese meetings will be important opportunities for community members to learn about the new law, get their questions answered, and advocate for strong, timely, and community-centered implementation of AVR.
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One eligible voter called us after an election judge told him, "You can't vote today, just come back in November." That just shouldn't happen in Illinois.
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On Monday, the Illinois State Board of Elections (SBE) held a hearing in Springfield and Chicago to receive public comments on the implementation of the new automatic voter registration (AVR) law. Read our testimony here.
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Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights has joined with other non-partisan voting rights groups in advocating to the Illinois State Board of Elections because of significant concerns about our state’s participation in a highly risky voter database program.
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Automatic Voter Registration could impact as many as one million eligible voters, many of whom are people of color and low-income residents who have traditionally faced obstacles in the voter registration process.
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Last night, Just Democracy once again sent ISBE a letter signed by Ami Gandhi detailing our serious concerns about the Commission's revised request, which would risk the privacy of each of Illinois’s eight million voters.
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This week, Chicago Lawyers’ Committee says farewell to an exceptional lawyer, Ryan Cortazar.Ryan is completing the prestigious Redstone Fellowship for Harvard Law graduates, and we are deeply honored that he chose to make Chicago Lawyers’ Committee home for his fellowship. We congratulate him on his upcoming clerkship with Judge David Hamilton on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Bloomington, Indiana.
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On Wednesday, the vice chairman of Donald Trump's Election Integrity Commission, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, sent a letter to election authorities across the United States seeking voter roll data that includes name, address, birth date, the last four digits of Social Security numbers and voting history going back to 2006. Read our letter to the Illinois State Board of Elections.
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During the 2016 general election, our Voting Rights Project ran a hotline to assist people experiencing problems trying to vote. More than 300 legal volunteers were trained to answer phone calls and monitor hundreds of polling places throughout Chicago and the suburban counties. With the help of Moment Design, you can now explore the data to see how different Illinois voters experienced various barriers to the polls in 2016.
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"You have to make volunteerism accessible, encouraged, and highly valued, and I think the best way to do that is to eliminate all possible obstacles, aggressively support students who want to volunteer, and help make it easy for them to do so. You can encourage or require faculty to record lectures, implore them not to have tests or things they can’t miss on that day. Our law schools need to demonstrate that these are important values.
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