http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2013/03/massachusetts-official-slams-chief-justices-comments-158275.html?hp=r4
The Massachusetts secretary of state is calling out Chief Justice John Roberts over comments he made disparaging the state during the Supreme Court’s oral arguments Wednesday on the Voting Rights Act of 1965.Roberts, while questioning Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, brought up Massachusetts, a state not covered by the act's preclearance rule, in comparison with Mississippi, which is, as an example of how black voter turnout numbers don’t correlate with the states covered by the provision.“Do you know which state has the worst ratio of white voter turnout to African-American voter turnout?” Roberts asked, according to the transcript. When Verrilli said he didn’t, Roberts said: “Massachusetts. Do you know what has the best, where African-American turnout actually exceeds white turnout? Mississippi.”“Which state has the greatest disparity in registration between white and African-American?” Roberts continued, cutting off Verrilli’s response. “Massachusetts. Third is Mississippi, where again the African-American registration rate is higher than the white registration rate.”The problem, Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin says, is that the data does not back up Roberts’s claim.“It’s just disturbing that the chief justice of the United States would spew this kind of misinformation,” Galvin told POLITICO.
i may not have noticed before was not into politics as much, but i don't remember a time when Justices were so media involved and in this day and age spouting not so popular rhetoric. if they are so involved now how can they act like racism and acts to disenfranchise voters not republican is not a major issue, if they don't know then they are rendered useless and incapable of doing the job.
Galvin's office assumes that Roberts was going off U.S. Census Bureau data, which is one of the only national datasets on voter turnout by race, but they say the 2010 numbers don't support what Roberts is saying."He's wrong, and in fact what's truly disturbing is not just the doctrinaire way he presented by the assertion, but when we went searching for an data that could substantiate what he was saying, the only thing we could find was a census survey pulled from 2010 … which speaks of noncitizen blacks," Galvin said. "We have an immigrant population of black folks and many other folks. Mississippi has no noncitizen blacks, so to reach his conclusion, you have to rely on clearly flawed information."The 2010 tables show that Massachusetts does have a high discrepancy between turnout of white and black voters, but is in line with several other states, including Minnesota, Kansas and Washington, which actually has a wider ratio. The states are also similar on registration numbers. Additionally, the margin of error on each of these states' data is over 10 percentage points, and many states on the list had populations of blacks so small, data wasn't even available.
we have a infection of right wing hate in our SCOTUS, first Scalia and his racial entitlement and now Roberts quoting non facts Fox News style. "NO MORE LIFETIME APPOINTMENTS OF ANYTHING OR ANYBODY IN GOVERNMENT"!!!
