Vote Tuesday

Next Tuesday (April 17) is the Consolidated General Election in Jackson County. We have posted the lists of candidates on the easel near the front door of the law library.

Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse

The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse at Washington University Law provides access to documents and information about civil rights cases via its free website. The Clearinghouse focuses on cases seeking change (injunctive relief), rather than cases seeking money damages.

For each category of case, the goal is a close-to-comprehensive catalog of cases in which plaintiffs have been awarded or have negotiated policy or operational change. The categories include:

• Prison and Jail Conditions,
• Election/Voting Rights,
• Juvenile Institutions,
• Mental Health and Mental Retardation Facilities,
• Immigration,
• Nursing Home Conditions,
• Child Welfare,
• Police Practices,
• Public Housing,
• School Desegregation,
• and others.

The site currently has at least partial information, including a litigation summary, for 1009 cases; 6088 dockets, complaints, filings, settlements, court orders, and other documents; and citations to 3852 opinions. There are also case studies of individual litigations, written by law students, and other articles.

The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse is searchable by case name; case type, issue, and cause of action; docket number; court or jurisdiction; facility name; or name of attorney, monitor, or judge.

See Margo Schlanger and Denise Lieberman, Using Court Records for Research, Teaching, and Policymaking: The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, 75 UMKC L. Rev. 153 (2006) for more information about the Clearinghouse.

Vote Tuesday

The Southern Illinoisan had a Voter's Guide with sample ballots in this morning's paper. We have posted it on the bulletin board in the law library for your reference. More sample ballots are also supposed to be available on The Southern's Election 2006 web page, but they are not there yet.

You can also find voter information at:

• Illinois Campaign for Political Reform
  • home page
  • Illinois Voters' Guide 2006
• Illinois State Board of Elections
  • home page
  • Illinois Voters Guide
• Illinois State Bar Association's Ratings by County of Judicial Candidates

If you are on the SIUC campus network, you can also access the Southern Illinoisan and other news sources in the NewsBank InfoWeb.

New Report on Electronic Voting Machines

According to an Aug. 28, 2006 press release from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, the Center has "released a report and policy proposals, concluding that two of the most commonly purchased electronic voting systems today are better at recording voter intentions than older systems like the punchcard system used in Florida in 2000. At the same time the report faulted one electronic voting system under consideration in New York and in use in parts of New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Kentucky and Tennessee that continues to unduly hamper voters’ ability to easily and accurately cast a ballot for their preferred candidate without undue burden, confusion and delay."

The 27-page report, titled "The Machinery of Democracy: Usability of Voting Systems," is available here in PDF format.

SOURCE: beSpacific