Constitutional Law, Justice, Politics

The GOP And Voter Disenfranchisement

-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger

There are two ways to increase your chances of winning an election, get more voters to cast their ballots for you, or get fewer voters to cast their ballots for your opponent. The GOP had decided to pursue the latter option.

There is nothing more sacred in a democracy that the right to vote, so an attack on voting rights is an attack on democracy. That is exactly what is happening in many states across our land. Republican governors and legislatures are passing laws making it extremely difficult for certain Americans to vote.

The Republicans use the illusion of voter fraud to mask their contempt of the Constitution. A report from the Brennan Center for Justice found the incidence of voter fraud at rates such as 0.0003 percent in Missouri and 0.000009 percent in New York. Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center said  “Voter impersonation is an illusion.” The Brennan report also states:

We are not aware of any documented cases in which individual noncitizens have either intentionally registered to vote or voted while knowing that they were ineligible.

Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas and longtime conservative activist, has led the voter ID drive in his state. Kobach explained that between 1997 and 2010, Kansas has experienced “221 cases of reported voter fraud.” A dubious claim since not a single criminal conviction has resulted. Over the same period of time, Kansans cast 10 million votes. Even if everyone of the claimed cases of voter fraud were accurate, the rate of fraud would be miniscule.

Numerous surveys show that blacks, Hispanics, the elderly, and the young are less likely like to possess a form of government-issued identification. Except for the elderly, the other demographics are more likely to vote Democratic. The elderly are more likely to vote Republican. In a shameless display of the falsity of their voter fraud motivations, Republicans in Texas simply exempted the elderly from the new voter ID law.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, after signing a voter ID law requiring voters to have a photo ID, then closed DMV offices in Democratic areas and expanded DMV operating hours in Republican areas. South Carolina governor Nikki Haley said she “will go take them to the DMV myself and help them get that picture ID.” Even with carpooling, it would take 7 years, 4 months, 3 weeks and 5 days to take the 178,000 voters to the DMV. That assumes good traffic conditions.

H/T: WaPo, Bloomberg, E.J. Dionne, Think Progress, Daily Kos.

143 thoughts on “The GOP And Voter Disenfranchisement”

  1. Remember, only Otteray Scribe’s left-wing sources are valid and beyond reproach. That’s how the game works. Nothing to see here. Move along.

  3. OS,

    My comment was not intended to be dismissive of the other valid points made in your last comment.

    All legal votes should count, and the process should be such that the potential for should be minimized. I’m all for a voter receipt.

  4. From HotAir. How appropriate. Hang onto that ACORN stuff sport. Maybe you will turn into a mighty oak someday.

    How about the massive voter caging, strange bags of unsealed ballots, electronic votes that shift strangely in the middle of the night, and IT experts who have bad things happen to them? Lets be sure and go after a few low level people who register a handful of voters. Those are the REAL criminals in the eyes of the Republican spin machine.

  7. Well, well, well. A dozen or so paid employees fill out paperwork improperly and get caught. No votes were ever cast based on that improper paperwork.

    On the other hand, there are big corporations like Diebold who cannot seem to invent a voting machine that can do the same thing, vis-à-vis paper receipts, as their ubiquitous ATM machines can do. Then there are the phone calls telling voters the voting day has been changed, or they cannot vote for some other reason. Or the punch ballots with styluses too short to punch the card, found only in largely Democratic precincts. Or the bags of unsealed votes that magically change the outcome of a major judicial election several days after the polls close. My fingers are getting tired, so I will stop here. I could go on for several pages about voter fraud that has NOT been prosecuted–and ol’ cynical me speaking–probably never will be prosecuted, because that would destabilize the halls of power.

  9. Nal,

    Please tell us; How is a person, who is not required to present an ID, going to be identified as not being the person casting the vote?

    When no ID is required, and no image of the person placing the vote is recorded, how likely is it that a person who committed in-person voter fraud is going to be convicted? Care to provide a scenario inwhich a conviction would be likely?

  11. From the report linked (but apparently not read) in the original post:

    More precisely, “voter fraud” occurs when individuals cast ballots despite knowing that they are ineligible to vote, in an attempt to defraud the election system.

    This sounds straightforward. And yet, voter fraud is often conflated, intentionally or unintentionally, with other forms of election misconduct or irregularities.

    …

    Conflating these concerns is not merely a semantic issue. First, the rhetorical sloppiness fosters the misper- ception that fraud by voters is prevalent. That is, when every problem with an election is attributed to “voter fraud,” it appears that fraud by voters is much more common than is actually the case.

  12. Ah yes, I was wondering how long it would take before one of the morans brought up Acorn. Read a tiny bit and you discover that the fraud was committed by people paid to register voters. Because they were paid by the name they made up names to get paid. Acorn itself weeded out as many of those as they could and worked with officials to eliminate more. There has never been a bit of evidence of a single illegal vote cast based on these registration drives.

    Acorn was the defrauded not the ‘defrauder’.

  14. “How Common Is Fraud?
    Election fraud does exist, but hasn’t been shown to be widespread. The New York Times reported in 2007 that a five-year crackdown on such fraud by the Bush administration’s Justice Department had produced 70 convictions at the federal level, including 40 campaign workers or government workers convicted of vote-buying, intimidation or ballot forgery, and 23 cases of multiple voting or voting by ineligible voters. But the Times described these as unconnected incidents and said the Justice Department had turned up no evidence of “any organized effort to skew federal elections.”
    Bush administration officials have pushed hard to find such evidence, too hard in one case, according to an investigation by the Department of Justice’s internal watchdogs, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR). Their report into the firing of nine United States attorneys concluded that the “real reason” for the firing of New Mexico’s U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was “complaints about Iglesias’s handling of voter fraud and public corruption matters.” The complaints included gripes by state Republican Party officials who believed that widespread fraud by Democrats had prevented George Bush from winning the state in the 2000 presidential election. Iglesias launched a task force that worked with the FBI but found that “there was insufficient evidence in any of the cases the Task Force reviewed to support criminal prosecution by the [U.S. Attorney’s Office] or state authorities,” according to the report of the OIG and OPR. These included cases involving ACORN workers. Republicans charged that Iglesias was showing insufficient rigor in prosecuting the cases.”

    http://www.factcheck.org/2008/10/acorn-accusations/

  15. anon nurse,

    That link to the story on Wikipedia was incredibly interesting … I remember very well the fund raising efforts and rhetoric of O’Dell …Walden O’Dell, chief executive of Diebold and a top fundraiser for the Bush campaign, wrote in a fund-raising letter in 2003 that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year (2004).”

    Remember the “Pioneer” ($200,00) and “Ranger” ($100,000) status that could be bought with enough fundraising money in the Bush campaign? O’Dell was quite proud of his badges: “I am one, and proud of it,” O’Dell said in a statement issued by Diebold’s corporate headquarters. Yep, he was issuing political statements from his corporate headquarters and still claiming his voting machines were honest.

    Diebold’s Board finally got rid of ol’ Wally in 2005 and set a new policy banning top executives from making political donations. Their stock immediately jumped $2.00 a share when Wally “resigned, effective immediately, for personal reasons.”

    Somehow messing with Wikipedia pages seems so “business as usual”.

  16. Nal (Author): “A dubious claim since not a single criminal conviction has resulted.”

    Ready to retract that statement, Nal?

  17. From Election Law Blog:

    No evidence of any NAACP complicity offered. No evidence of any in-person voter impersonation fraud, which would support the voter id law so fervently supported by the fraudulent fraud squad members in the linked reports.

    Let’s see the squad start calling for an end to absentee balloting, and then I’ll take their concerns more seriously.

  18. “On May 17, Carmen R. Davis became the latest casualty of an ongoing case of election theft on a grand scale. Davis, 38, a former ACORN worker, pleaded guilty in Kansas City federal court to filing false election paperwork. She had been among several defendants earlier charged with voter registration fraud and/or identity theft. Rathke and other ACORN leaders insist that the indictments were part of an organized effort to suppress minority turnout at the polls. But as Union Corruption Update indicated at length back in January, the evidence is damning: ACORN activists in the Kansas City and St. Louis areas padded the voter rolls with 35,000 or more fraudulent or questionable registration cards.

    Interim U.S. Attorney Bradley Schlozman brought charges in Kansas City against four people less than a week before Election Day. Prosecutors later dropped the charges against one of the defendants, Stephanie Davis. Her identity had been stolen by Carmen Davis; information as to whether the two are related was not available in the four-count indictment dated January 5, 2007. Carmen Davis, who also goes by the name Latisha Reed, was accused of using Stephanie Davis’s Social Security number while employed as a voter registration recruiter for ACORN in August and September of 2006. Ms. Davis/Reed allegedly caused three false registration applications – all in the name of the same person, but with different addresses – to be filed with the Kansas City Board of Election Commissioners.

    Three other persons accused of offenses during their tenure as ACORN voter activists also are paying the price. Dale Franklin, who pleaded guilty in February to filing false registration forms, received probation only days before Davis entered her guilty plea. Brian Gardner pleaded guilty in March and is awaiting sentencing. And Kwaim A. Stenson is scheduled to go on trial in July. These are victories for public integrity, but minor ones in the overall scheme of things. No four low-level operatives, no matter how clever, could have created tens of thousands of phony or suspect registration cards on their own. Moreover, the states of Colorado, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin each recently have investigated, and on due occasion, convicted ACORN members for vote fraud. The leadership of ACORN doesn’t seem fazed. Why should they? The Democratic Party and organized labor are the organization’s prime beneficiaries. (KansasCity.com, 5/17/07; U.S. Department of Justice, 1/5/07; other sources).

    http://nlpc.org/stories/2007/06/04/acorn-worker-pleads-guilty-vote-fraud-kansas-city-mo

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