Voting Rights

When Walnut city officials were asked before their local election in 2006 whether federal observers could watch the process, the locals said they happily agreed to the chance to receive positive feedback. "We were a little disappointed that our positive feedback was in the way of a lawsuit," said City Manager Rob Wishner. A suit filed in April by the U.S.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to decide whether states can require voters to show government-issued photo identification before they cast a ballot. The justices' ruling, due by the end of June, could have a major effect on the 2008 presidential election and on congressional races in several states. New photo ID laws in Indiana, Georgia and Arizona have been upheld in the last year, while a Missouri law was blocked from taking effect.

China decided today to consider introducing universal suffrage for Hong Kong in 2017, the official New China News Agency said. But China's parliament ruled out full democracy at the next chief executive election, in 2012, saying only that "appropriate revisions" could be made to the selection method. It added that the city's legislature could be fully directly elected by 2020.

Gov. Ed Rendell said he would veto a bill that would require voters to show identification at the polls, because he believed it would disenfranchise some of the state's most vulnerable residents. "At a time in our nation's history when voter participation is dropping to alarming levels, the government should not be taking action that will turn away bona fide voters from our polls," Rendell said in Philadelphia.

News Corp. said Thursday that it had agreed to let shareholders vote on whether to extend an anti-takeover defense, settling a suit and limiting Chairman Rupert Murdoch's control over any sale of the company. The accord averts a trial set for April 24. Delaware Chancery Court Judge William B. Chandler III allowed a group of investors to go ahead with breach-of-contract claims in December, saying New York-based News Corp.'

An investor in New York Times Co. withheld votes for directors at the company's annual meeting Tuesday in protest of the Times' dual-class share structure. Like several other publicly held newspaper publishers, the Times is still in effect controlled by descendants of its founding family -- in this case, the Sulzbergers -- through special shares of stock. Morgan Stanley Investment Management, which owns about 5.

Re "What was lost in the crowd," Opinion, May 3 Erin Aubry Kaplan was struck by the preponderance of American flags carried by the marchers "with no animus toward what it represented." Did she believe the marchers had reason to feel some animosity toward a country they invaded, and then had the nerve to demand all the rights of a citizen of that country? Is Kaplan really so naive? Why was she surprised about the absence of black people, when they are the ones being shut out of the kind of jobs that once supported their families?

Federal challenges to English-only initiative petitions are roiling election officials across the state and have thrown into doubt a handful of citizen-spawned ballot issues. The question is whether petitions circulated for signatures to qualify initiatives and referendums for the ballot must be translated for voters who speak another language. California began providing Spanish-language ballots statewide in 2002, and local jurisdictions also provide multilingual election materials.

With less than two weeks to go before the July 18 primary, a judge in Atlanta issued a restraining order blocking the state's new voter ID law, saying that requiring photos as proof of identity was an unconstitutional burden. Superior Court Judge Melvin Westmoreland said that the Legislature did not have the authority to enforce the law and that an amendment to the state constitution would be required instead.