On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr., urged states to repeal laws that prohibit people who were formerly incarcerated from voting, a move that would restore the right to vote to millions.
This timely announcement does not just address officials in states such as Florida or Mississippi, but has implications here at home. California is currently facing its own disenfranchisement crisis.
Last week, the ACLU of California and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area (LCCR) charged the state with unconstitutionally stripping 60,000 Californians of their right to vote.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of three people who have lost or will soon lose their right to vote, along with the League of Women Voters of California and All of Us or None, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the rights of formerly and currently incarcerated people and their families.
Characterizing felony disenfranchisement "unwise," "unjust" and "not in keeping with our democratic values," Mr. Holder echoed the sentiment argued in our lawsuit.
Addressing the elephant in our nation's room, the attorney general said what most elected officials have not had the courage to admit: "Although well over a century has passed since Post-Reconstruction, states used these measures to strip African Americans of their most fundamental rights. The impact of felony disenfranchisement on modern communities of color remains both disproportionate and unacceptable."
According to the lawsuit, the state clearly violated state law when the California secretary of state issued a directive to local elections officials in December 2011 asserting that people are ineligible to vote if they are on post release-community supervision or mandatory supervision. These are two new and innovative community-based alternatives to parole created under California's Criminal Justice Realignment Act for people recently incarcerated for low-level, non-violent, non-serious crimes.
Sadly, the consequence of secretary of state's memorandum and the legislature's failure to reverse it is that new voters have been disenfranchised from participating in our democracy.
The California Constitution clearly and rightfully established a presumption in favor of the right to vote, with only limited and specific exceptions. After California voters in 1974 approved Proposition 10, state law has provided that the only people ineligible to vote in California are those who are in state prison or on parole.
The secretary of state unilaterally expanded these exceptions, without any public comment or input, disenfranchising thousands of members of our community and creating confusion around the voting rights of formerly incarcerated people.
Court intervention is necessary because a state official should not be able to disenfranchise 60,000 voters with the stroke of a pen.
California has dismal rates of voter registration and participation. The secretary of state is making this even worse by disenfranchising tens of thousands of California citizens who are trying to re-engage with their communities. With voting rights under attack across the nation and the U.S. Supreme Court's disappointing decision striking down a critical law that protected the right to vote for people of color and language minorities, California needs more protection -- not less -- for voting rights.
The secretary of state should be working to increase voter participation, not to undermine it.
Society is much more secure when all people feel they are fully part of it. If we want formerly incarcerated Californians to be good citizens, we need to convince them that they are a part of society, too.
Voting should be part of a successful reintegration into one's community, but the secretary of state's decision takes us in the wrong direction.
This blog is cross-posted from the Huffington Post. Hector Villagra is executive director of the ACLU of Southern California. Follow him on Twitter.

Hollywood's annual awards season culminates with the Academy Awards, a night honoring the best films and performances of the year. This year, all five directors nominated for the Best Director award are men. Last year, all the nominees were men. In fact, a woman hasn't been nominated for Best Director since 2010, the year that Kathryn Bigelow took home the honor for directing The Hurt Locker. Bigelow is the only woman to have ever won the award, and she is one of only four women who has ever been nominated for it in the Academy Awards' 86 year history.
The lack of female director Oscar nominees is no accident. The number of women employed behind the camera in film and television is far too few in comparison to the number of employed male directors and to the number of women seeking work. Women made up 6 percent of all directors that worked on the top 250 domestic grossing films of 2013, and 14 percent of directors on television shows during the 2012-2013 season.
These numbers do not mean that talented female filmmakers do not exist or that women don't want to make films. They do reflect that women face persistent gender discrimination within the industry. Nevertheless, incredible women filmmakers are out there. Just this past weekend, the Athena Film Festival, which celebrates the achievements of women in film, took place at Barnard College. The Festival's events included panel discussions with directors, workshops for filmmakers, and screenings of documentaries, feature films and shorts created by and/or starring women.
I attended director Lexi Alexander's discussion of the ways in which women are excluded in Hollywood. This event was a continuation of the conversation she started a few weeks ago in her viral blog post that exposed some of the problems faced by women in the industry, including: discriminatory hiring practices, inequitable movie and advertising budgets, and lack of mentorship opportunities. She was candid about the sexism she's encountered as a woman director. During her talk, it was clear that she was not alone in her experience or in her willingness to speak up; many courageous women came forward to share their stories of trying to find work in an industry dominated by men.
So what can be done to increase the numbers of women in film and television? For starters, we can continue the conversation about what's happening to women in Hollywood. Further, we must recognize that the gender inequality in film goes beyond just percentages. Real, creative, talented women report consistently being denied job opportunities within a major industry. Putting a human face on the problem, like Lexi Alexander and others who are speaking out, will inspire change. Are you a director who has faced discrimination? Tell us your story.
This blog is cross-posted from ACLU National. Emily Carter is legal assistant for the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU.

Like many awkward teenagers in the mid-90s, I was obsessed with the television drama My So-Called Life. But while some peers dyed their hair red and wore their fathers’ flannels and others picked up sheet music to learn “Blister in the Sun” and “I Wanna Be Sedated” on their violins and oboes—or whatever they played in orchestra, I simply yearned for Angela’s privacy.

I sat agog when she had her friends Rickie and Rayanne over and closed her bedroom door to stew in their hormone-drenched problems. At our house we had a strict open-door policy. And it changed our behavior: we didn’t practice our curse words until they were second nature or loudly obsess over puberty or rail against our parents’ rules. We behaved differently; we edited ourselves.
Perhaps my adolescent obsession with My So-Called Life explains why it struck a chord when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper referred to the “so-called domestic surveillance programs” last month and when President Obama mentioned “sifting through the so-called metadata” last year. I learned from Angela years ago that the words “so-called” often cast judgment on whoever believes the whole sentence. I could see her eyes roll in the title and sense the whiff of pronominal doubt that hangs on the word “life.” It would be lazy to think that the president and Director Clapper were unaware of the connotation and were merely trying to explain or set off concepts in which the media and the American public were already steeped. Downplaying has been the name of the government’s surveillance game. In reality metadata is breathtakingly revealing, and its mass compilation, which allows the government to contextualize our most private secrets, is a surveillance program—no qualifier needed.
Here are some other examples of the government downplaying in recent times:
Downplay: On June 7, 2013, President Obama called the collection of phone and Internet metadata “modest encroachments on privacy.”
Reality: The Verizon order published in The Guardian two days before the president’s downplay required Verizon to provide the National Security Agency with every single call record “on an ongoing daily basis.” As ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer noted, “It is as if the government had seized every American’s address book—with annotations detailing which contacts she spoke to, when she spoke with them, for how long, and (possibly) from which locations.” This is not a modest encroachment but the most invasive and widespread American domestic spying program in our history.
Downplay: “That’s a very small number of times,” Senator Dianne Feinstein said on June 17, 2013, in response to an intelligence statement that “less than 300 unique identifiers […] were queried” in 2012.
Reality:  Sure, 300 sounds like a small number of times, but we know from John Inglis’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee last year that the NSA can see the call records of those within three hops of the person targeted. As this infographic shows, if you have only 40 contacts, three hops could include the phone numbers of 2.5 million people. Now, multiply that by the 300 queries and you have 750 million.  Now, multiply that again by the seven years the program has been in place...you get the picture.
Downplay: In his speech on NSA reform in January, President Obama let us know that we frustrate him when we worry about being constantly misled. “And I'll admit,” he said, “the readiness of some to assume the worst motives by our government can be frustrating.”
Reality: President Obama is a constitutional law scholar and a runner on the platform of hope and change (ostensibly from the Bush administration, which instated the warrantless wiretapping program that the FISA Amendments Act ratified). We don’t exactly know why he thinks the current spying programs need only minimal reforms, but he wants us to trust him on this. So tuck away any discomfort you might feel when you realize you don’t know whether the government is collecting information on you or what the information is. Keep it to yourself when you fret about your information in the hands of the next Joe McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover or Ashcroft or Nixon. Chill out if you think the separation of powers melts away when the executive branch knows everything about members of the other two branches. You don’t want to frustrate the president.
The current surveillance state is not okay, and it should not be downplayed. Our government is not supposed to treat us like children with our doors open. President Obama’s so-called reforms are not enough and neither are Director Clapper’s so-called assurances. We need real reform and real assurance that the surveillance state can be rolled back. Good news: the USA FREEDOM Act does just that.
As of today, “The Day We Fight Back”, the following 22 California representatives are not co-sponsoring the USA FREEDOM Act. Is your rep on this list? Take back your privacy now and urge your members of Congress to sponsor the USA FREEDOM Act. Then when it passes you can feel like this.

District	Representative
5	Mike Thompson
8	Paul Cook
9	Jerry McNerney
10	Jeff Denham
11	George Miller
12	Nancy Pelosi
16	Jim Costa
21	David Valadao
22	Devin Nunes
23	Kevin McCarthy
25	Buck McKeon
28	Adam Schiff
29	Tony Cárdenas
31	Gary Miller
32	Grace Napolitano
33	Henry Waxman
34	Xavier Becerra
35	Gloria Negrete McLeod
36	Raul Ruiz
38	Linda Sanchez
39	Ed Royce
40	Lucille Roybal-Allard
41	Mark Takano
42	Ken Calvert
43	Maxine Waters
44	Janice Hahn
45	John Campbell
46	Loretta Sanchez
51	Juan Vargas
52	Scott Peters
53	Susan Davis

Jessica Farris is community engagement and policy and advocacy counsel at the ACLU of Southern California. Follow her on Twitter.