Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Last December, the NAACP released a report titled Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America. The report reveals “direct connections between the trend of increasing, unprecedented African American and Latino voter turnout and an onslaught of restrictive measures across the country designed to stem electoral strength among communities of color.”
Benjamin Jealous, NAACP President and CEO, said, “It’s been more than a century since we’ve seen such a tidal wave of assaults on the right to vote. Historically, when voting rights are attacked, it’s done to facilitate attacks on other rights. It is no mistake that the groups who are behind this are simultaneously attacking very basic women’s rights, environmental protections, labor rights, and educational access for working people and minorities.” He added, “Voting rights attacks are the flip side of buying a democracy. First you buy all the leaders you can, and then you suppress as many votes as possible of the people who might object.”
I should add that African American and Latino voters aren’t the only people who are being targeted by the “block the vote” effort. Young people and the elderly in some states may also face hurdles if they hope to exercise their right to vote in the November elections.
From the NAACP report:
“The heart of the modern block the vote campaign is a wave of restrictive government-issued photo identification requirements. In a coordinated effort, legislators in thirty-four states introduced bills imposing such requirements. Many of these bills were modeled on legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—a conservative advocacy group whose founder explained: ‘Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.’”
In a Nation article titled The Koch Brothers, ALEC and the Savage Assault on Democracy, John Nichols addresses the issue of ALEC’s involvement in the “block the vote” effort:
For the Koch brothers and their kind, less democracy is better. They fund campaigns with millions of dollars in checks that have helped elect the likes of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Ohio Governor John Kasich. And ALEC has made it clear, through its ambitious “Public Safety and Elections Task Force,” that while it wants to dismantle any barriers to corporate cash and billionaire bucks’ influencing elections, it wants very much to erect barriers to the primary tool that Americans who are not CEOs have to influence the politics and the government of the nation: voting.
That crude calculus, usually cloaked in bureaucracy and back-room dealmaking, came into full view in 2011.
Across the country, and to a greater extent than at any time since the last days of Southern resistance to desegregation, voting rights were being systematically diminished rather than expanded.
ALEC has been organizing and promoting the assault, encouraging its legislative minions to enact rigid Voter ID laws and related attacks on voting rights in more than three dozen states.
With their requirements that the millions of Americans who lack driver’s licenses and other forms of official paperwork go out and purchase identification cards in order to cast ballots, the Voter ID push put in place new variations on an old evil: the poll tax.
Some states are becoming extremely selective about the types of voter ID’s that they will accept at the polls. Take Texas, for example: In the Lone Star State, you’ll be allowed to vote if you present a military ID or a concealed-gun license—but not if you present your college ID.
Democrats have argued that the enactment of these new restrictive voter laws was politically motivated. They have claimed that groups that tend to vote Democratic—the elderly, the young, minorities, and the poor—include many people who lack photo ID’s.
Last October, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University released a report about the new voting laws and how they could affect the 2012 elections. Here is an excerpt from the report’s summary:
State governments across the country enacted an array of new laws making it harder to register or to vote. Some states require voters to show government-issued photo identification, often of a type that as many as one in ten voters do not have. Other states have cut back on early voting, a hugely popular innovation used by millions of Americans. Two states reversed earlier reforms and once again disenfranchised millions who have past criminal convictions but who are now taxpaying members of the community. Still others made it much more difficult for citizens to register to vote, a prerequisite for voting.
These new restrictions fall most heavily on young, minority, and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities. This wave of changes may sharply tilt the political terrain for the 2012 election. Based on the Brennan Center’s analysis of the 19 laws and two executive actions that passed in 14 states, it is clear that:
- These new laws could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012.
- The states that have already cut back on voting rights will provide 171 electoral votes in 2012 – 63 percent of the 270 needed to win the presidency.
- Of the 12 likely battleground states, as assessed by an August Los Angeles Times analysis of Gallup polling, five have already cut back on voting rights (and may pass additional restrictive legislation), and two more are currently considering new restrictions.
Is this what our legislators and others who have been elected to represent us should be working on—writing and enacting laws that will make it more difficult for some citizens to vote?
From the ACLU’s Oppose Voter Registration Fact Sheet:
VOTING IS A FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT, NOT A PRIVILEGE
- Nothing is more fundamental to our democracy than the right to vote.
- The right to vote is protected by more constitutional amendments – the 1st, 14th, 15th, 19th, 24th and 26th – than any other right we enjoy as Americans.
- There are additional federal and state statutes which guarantee and protect voting rights, as well as declarations by the Supreme Court that the right to vote is fundamental because it is protective of all our other rights.
We have heard a lot about voter fraud in the past couple of years. So…one has to ask: “How big a problem is voter fraud in this country?” An editorial that appeared in the New York Times last fall says that there is actually little voter fraud in America—and that “none of the lawmakers who claim there is have ever been able to document any but the most isolated cases.” The Times editorial also suggested that Republicans are passing these restrictive voter laws in order “to give themselves a political edge by suppressing Democratic votes”
Would you describe these attempts by politicians to disenfranchise voters in this country as un-American? Do you think it’s an attack on democracy?
SOURCES
Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America (NAACP)
A Report by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. & the NAACP (PDF)
NAACP Denounces Role of ALEC in “Jim Crow, Esquire” Voting Laws (PRWatch)
Voting Law Changes in 2012 (Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law)
The Koch Brothers, ALEC and the Savage Assault on Democracy (The Nation)
ALEC Exposed: Rigging Elections (The Nation)
New Hampshire GOP Speaker Discourages Students From Voting Because They’ll Vote ‘Liberal’ (ThinkProgress)
Students hit by voter ID restrictions (Politico)
GOP War on Voting: AG Holder Joins the Fight (Rolling Stone)
The Myth of Voter Fraud (New York Times)
“There Is Almost No Voter Fraud in America.” (ACLU)
How would we know? Without ID, there is really no way to audit it, nor prosecute offenders. Elections are often narrowly won, and as a result there is great temptation to commit fraud, and little risk of being caught.
Seconded.
Bron, whether an office is underutilized or not is irrelevant for this discussion. The simple matter is that voter caging is a much more serious problem for our country than voter fraud, which is a strawman of epic proportions. created entirely by Republican political operatives.
Bron: “I hear stories from friends who live in other states about polls staying open past time and of people voting twice and abuse of absentee ballots. Is that all BS?”
—
Yes, basically. Elaine just posted a good refutation and here is a more general explanation from the Brennan Center for Justice:
“Many vivid anecdotes of purported voter fraud have been proven false or do not demonstrate fraud. Although there are a few scattered instances of real voter fraud, many of the vivid anecdotes cited in accounts of voter fraud have been proven false or vastly overstated. In Missouri in 2000, for example, the Secretary of State claimed that 79 voters were registered with addresses at vacant lots, but subsequent investigation revealed that the lots in question actually housed valid and legitimate residences. Similarly, a 1995 investigation into votes allegedly cast in Baltimore by deceased voters and those with disenfranchising felony convictions revealed that the voters in question were both alive and felony-free.
Many of the inaccurate claims result from lists of voters compared to other lists – of deceased individuals, persons with felony convictions, voters in other states, etc. These attempts to match information often yield predictable errors. In Florida in 2000, a list of purged voters later became notorious when it was discovered that the “matching” process captured eligible voters with names similar to – but decidedly different from – the names of persons with felony convictions, sometimes in other states entirely. A 2005 attempt to identify supposed double voters in New Jersey mistakenly accused people with similar names but whose middle names or suffixes were clearly different, such as “J.T. Kearns, Jr.” and “J.T. Kearns, Sr.,” of being the same person. Even when names and birthdates match across lists, that does not mean there was voter fraud. Elementary statistics students are often surprised to learn that it is more likely than not that among just 23 individuals, two will share a birthday. Similar statistics show that for most reasonably common names, it is extremely likely that at least two people with the same name in a state will share the same date of birth. The ostensible “matches” may not represent the same person at all.
Other allegations of fraudulent voting often turn out to be the result of common clerical errors, incomplete information, or faulty assumptions. Most allegations of voter fraud simply evaporate when more rigorous analysis is conducted.”
http://www.brennancenter.org/page/-/d/download_file_38347.pdf
Also, My polling place stays open late if people are still in line at the closing time. Civilized countries make it easy to vote, they do it over the weekend or include a holiday instead of having working people try to get to a polling place before or after work. Of course, if unemployment is high enough that isn’t as much of a problem for a lot of folks.
Regarding folks that meet the criteria you listed I can name two off the top of my head- my deceased father and the better half. If the better half (disabled, no govt. assistance/programs etc) had to present a current photo ID on pain of death he couldn’t do it. Same for my father prior to his death.
And keep in mind that the states are requiring specific types of ID that often require things like a birth cert to acquire- supporting documentation. If the better half needed a copy of a current state photo ID along with his ballot request to vote absentee (which was proposed in one state) it would cost the $15. for a BC copy plus the cost of a wheelchair taxi to get him to the DMV.
My father would have had even greater expense because if he didn’t have someone to go to the DMV with him he would have to pay the nursing home 25$ per hour (old figure- it might have gone up) to send someone with him per the nursing home rules. This is not small change and a medicaid patient in a nursing facility would be severely, severely taxed to come up with the money if it were even possible to do so.
You don’t hear any of the proposed rules including a ‘we come to you’ clause to make it easy or free for elderly or disabled folks. Why is that?
Why the ‘voter fraud’ myth won’t die
http://www.southernstudies.org/2010/11/why-the-voter-fraud-myth-wont-die.html
Excerpt;
Most serious political experts know that real, documented voter fraud is an extremely small problem.
When the Department of Justice under President Bush launched a crackdown on fraud in 2002, five years later it only had 86 convictions to show for the effort. That’s .00007 percent of the 122 million people [pdf] who voted for president in the 2004 elections.
Even if the DOJ’s aggressive efforts only caught 1 percent of the actual fraud going on, it would still be one of the smallest problems facing our electoral system. For example, an MIT study last year found that cracks in our country’s patchwork voter registration system kept up to 3 million registered and fully-qualified voters from casting a ballot.
So why does the phantom of voter fraud keep appearing? The biggest reason is that powerful forces with very deep pockets are able to relentlessly push the message. In 2010, independent groups with mysterious millionaire donors — such as American Majority Action, peddler of a voter fraud iPhone app — have joined with Tea Party activists, Republicans and media outlets like Fox News to bring hysteria about voter fraud to a fever pitch.
They purveyors of voter fraud fear also have decades of practice. The modern crusade against voter fraud started in the civil rights era of the 1960s, with growing anxieties among white politicians and voters over the growing power of black and urban voters.
As historian Rick Perlstein documents, Republicans tapped into — and inflamed — these fears with outrageous claims of black voter fraud, which not only riled up the conservative base, but also laid the groundwork for “anti-fraud” campaigns that could depress Democratic turnout.
Election Officials, Experts: O’Keefe Implicated In Another Illegal Stunt
January 12, 2012 11:56 am ET by Matt Gertz
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201201120007
Excerpt;
In 2010, conservative videographer James O’Keefe and three associates pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of entering federal property under false pretenses in connection with an attempted video sting at the office of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu.
Now election officials and election law experts are suggesting that he may be implicated in another illegal scheme. They say that in attempting to create an undercover video showing how easy it is to commit voter fraud, James O’Keefe’s associates may have run afoul of those laws themselves.
Those experts and officials are questioning whether the conservative videographers may have violated laws banning individuals from falsely identifying themselves at the polling place and requiring both parties to consent to be videotaped.
In their investigation, the conservative videographers entered polling places, gave the name of recently deceased New Hampshire residents, and were offered ballots by poll workers. In one case, the videographer fled the scene after a poll worker became aware that he was not the deceased voter.
I call on those of you who believe that voter fraud is a major problem in this country to produce proof that it is. I’m open. I’m willing to listen.
OS:
“Sometimes it is really blatant, such as Scott Walker shutting down or de-staffing DMV offices in largely Democratic areas while leaving those in Republican (read: white, upper middle class) areas fully staffed and open.”
here in Virginia they have shut down offices as well but those are the ones that were under utilized. Could that be the case?
if there is no fraud where do the stories come from? The political machines in Chicago and Kansas City and New York were notorious for voter fraud.
Maybe it is gone and we are hearing the historical echoes of the Daley and Pendergast machines and Boss Tweed?
I hear stories from friends who live in other states about polls staying open past time and of people voting twice and abuse of absentee ballots. Is that all BS?
Puzzling, You think I look up stuff and post links because I don’t have a life? I’m trying to help you shake off the cloud of disinformation settled around you by forces that would steal your vote if they could and which aim to subvert the democratic process. Read the study I posted. Voter fraud is a myth. You are being played. You can buy into your own intellectual subversion or not. It’s your call.
What OS said!
If the Republicans put one tenth the effort into stopping voter caging that they do trying to find nonexistent voter fraud, we would come closer to having honest elections. Stuff like the eighty-three year old woman who is going to have to stand in line at the DMV for two hours to get a new photo ID, even though she is well known to everyone at her local voting precinct because she has voted in every election since Eisenhower was President. And guess what. There seem to be fewer and fewer employees at the DMV. The local DMV office is next door to my office and every time I go over there, the published waiting times seem longer.
Sometimes it is really blatant, such as Scott Walker shutting down or de-staffing DMV offices in largely Democratic areas while leaving those in Republican (read: white, upper middle class) areas fully staffed and open.
Gene,
You are correct that allegations of voter fraud are just a smoke screen to hide the real reason. Republicans are pulling out all the stops to prevent legal and registered voters from casting their vote.
“Shouldn’t legal voter rights include the assurance that only living citizens of legal age get to vote and that all legal votes are counted?”
Again, where’s the proof of wide spread fraud? Not some dog whistle appeal to racism, but actual proof? And everyone knows actually counting votes is a nicety after Bush v. Gore.
Voter fraud is a non-issue. A handy distraction from real issues that happens to foster a racist agenda and suppress voting all at the same time.
It is literally nothing – both in actual impact and as a concrete issue -compared to the prevalence and negative impact of corporate political spending and the corruption of the electoral and legislative processes carried out by their lobbyist minions.
I understand the arguments made above, but isn’t voting a right for citizens only? Let’s take California for example. It has perhaps the highest population of illegal foreign nationals in the county. For the sake of discussion suppose there was a ballot measure where the California legislature and governor supported giving illegal foreigners some massive benefit. If California or any other state didn’t have a way to insure that only citizens voted, how much real democracy/representation would be achieved for the legal citizens? Certainly the rights of the citizen who got to vote are as equally important as those who may be disenfranchised. Shouldn’t legal voter rights include the assurance that only living citizens of legal age get to vote and that all legal votes are counted?
Require picture ID when voting, or a valid Driver’s license. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.
However, NAACP, etc… do not want something like that because they know that people are voting in multiple districts, dead people are voting, family pets are voting, people in jail are voting, homeless people are voting that aren’t even registered. By law, you’re only supposed to vote ONCE. Imagine what would happen if as much attention and BS was directed when President Bush won the election, was applied to when obama stole the election. But nobody uttered a word, despite rampant voter fraud everywhere.
There were even districts that had more votes cast than they had people registered to vote in that district!
And these idiots try to make this out to be vote blocking. NO – just common sense checkpoints to make sure someone only votes once, and they are registered to vote. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Where is the fraud that you are trying to prevent puzzling?
If the voting is a right, why not protect that right from being canceled by fraud?
So we have a widespread group in society that does not travel, does not drive, does not drink, does not receive medical care, does not use mail services, and does not get married?
I should add that this group must also not work – for failure to meet government employment documentation requirements – nor do they cash checks or use banking services, nor rent movies, nor buy drain cleaners, nor use public libraries, nor own a gun, not do they ever return purchases to Target?
And these millions are waiting in line to vote?
Please.