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)
Amen to that OS.
Bdaman, one illegal vote is the same as a battlefield casualty? Really? Rafflaw’s comment about bad taste is an understatement. Are you that cavalier about dead soldiers?
How do you explain the widespread caging of poor voters and increasingly high hurdles to making it harder for them to vote? We are a family whose military service tradition goes back centuries. One of the things fought and bled for was to make this country a viable democracy, not a playground for the 1% to exploit.
Bdaman,
your comparison of a fallen hero in a military conflict to an imaginary episode of voter fraud is in poor taste, to say the least.
Bdaman,
How do you feel about thousands of people losing the right to vote in an election because their names were purged from registration lists due to typos and clerical errors?
The following excerpt was taken from The NAACP’s “Defending Democracy” report:
– Voter Purges. Several states, such as Florida and Mississippi, are also improperly purging voters from the registration rolls. Purge programs purport to maintain the purity of voter registration lists by removing the names of individuals ineligible to vote in that state or jurisdiction, but too often disqualify eligible voters. For example, in Florida, a flawed purge program erroneously flagged and purged 12,000 voters (mostly due to typos and other obvious clerical errors). Over 70% of those flagged voters were African American or Latino.
http://naacp.3cdn.net/67065c25be9ae43367_mlbrsy48b.pdf
One Casualty in a war is too many as such, one illegal vote imo is the same.
Get Ready Not to Vote: Why 2012 Just Got More Interesting
By Charles P. Pierce
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/new-voting-laws-2012-6504832
Excerpt:
Back in 2000, when the Supreme Court stepped in and foozled a presidential election to achieve the outcome that some of its members desired — oh, don’t bother to deny it — the dismissal du jour was to tell grumpy liberals to “Get over it!” This was so successful that not a single Democratic senator was willing to stand up with John Lewis and contest the election, and if you won’t stand up with John Lewis on an issue of voting rights, then you’d have rolled dice for the robe on Golgotha.
The problem, of course, was that a lot of the forces demanding that people “get over” 2000 were far from getting over it themselves. They set about trying to make sure that their side wouldn’t come that close to losing an election again, and they worked to turn “voter suppression” into a science. It used to be that Ed Rollins could suppress votes by buying off a few preachers. Now, though, it can be done through willing local satraps — Katherine Harris, say, or Ken Blackwell, or that woman in Waukesha, Wisconsin, who apparently keeps election results in her freezer. It can be done through willingly partisan judges who wink and nod — hi, there, Tony Scalia! — or through the wholesale corruption of the Department of Justice, which is what happened during the Bush Administration when U.S. Attorneys were fired because they declined to conduct political prosecutions at the request of political appointees up to and including the president’s political guru.
In short, voter suppression has moved out of Ed Rollins’s wallet and it now has come to mean the use of the government’s own powers and institutions to reduce the power of the people to affect that government at the ballot box. Put that together with the egregious Citizens United decision on campaign finance, and you’ve pretty much guaranteed that people will look at elections as a game rigged for the wealthy anyway, in which they have to jump through an increasing number of hoops just to play the decreasing part that is allowed them. If there’s a better recipe for increasing public cynicism in politics so as to enable the ascendance of private profit over the political commonwealth, then even Vladimir Putin hasn’t thought of it yet.
As it happens, the process was slowed just a bit in 2006 and 2008. The president who’d benefited from the Supreme Court’s meddling proved to be such a bungler that even the pros couldn’t suppress the general revulsion. However, as soon as those two elections were over, they set about it again. They were so diligent about it that by 2010, when the Republicans swept to power in a number of statehouses across the country, they already had voter suppression laws ready to go all across the country, and passing them was Job One. (Or at least Job One-A. Restricting abortion may have been Job One in some states.)
You can Google almost anything and get megahits on the search. The wild card in the search is the thousands upon thousands of Republican accusations of voter fraud, and Google counts every one of those as well. Instead of bogus, non-scientific, methodology, lets see the REAL fraud. There is one or two here and there across the country. Many were deliberate due to Republican operatives signing fake names such as Mickey Mouse and Osama bin Laden to registration papers. All names are required to be turned in, but in every one of those instances, the registration gatherers flagged the fake names for the local election commission. That such shenanigans as registering a known fake name is a felony in most jurisdictions did not seem to slow down the likes of O’Keefe and his enablers.
Yet, there was a hue and cry when there appeared to be a discrepancy in about .0001% of the voter registrations. I want to know more about the many thousands of poor people who were disenfranchised. Poll taxes were banned as unconstitutional a half century ago, but now they are back in the form of requiring people to have to purchase an “official” photo ID.
And up until 2004, no baseball players used steroids in the 1990’s.
Great article Elaine…
Conviction in GOP voter-suppression scheme
By Steve Benen
December 07, 2011 10:00 AM
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_12/conviction_in_gop_votersuppres033951.php
Last November, there was a fairly competitive gubernatorial race in Maryland. Late on Election Day, robocalls targeted more than 100,000 Democratic households, telling voters to “relax” and not bother voting because Dems were going to win. It was one of the most blatant examples of GOP voter-suppression tactics in a long while.
Fortunately, those responsible got caught. Yesterday, a jury convicted the Republican ringleader.
Paul E. Schurick, the 2010 campaign manager for former Maryland governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., was convicted Tuesday by a Baltimore jury of four counts stemming from a robocall that prosecutors said was intended to suppress the black vote.
The call, which Schurick acknowledged authorizing, was placed on Election Day to 112,000 voters in Baltimore and Prince George’s County, the state’s two largest majority-African American jurisdictions. Recipients were told by an unidentified woman that they could “relax” because Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) had been successful.
Fortunately, other members of the former Republican governor’s team will also stand trial for their role.
Obviously, there’s a problem when Republican officials believe the best way to win an election is to suppress political participation. But the larger issue here is that GOP officials keep pushing the “war on voting,” putting new hurdles between voters and the ballot box, ostensibly because they fear the scourge of fraud.
The irony is, the fraud Republicans are worried about is imaginary, while the real-world fraud is coming from their side of the political divide.
Wisconsin Set To Disenfranchise Likely Democratic Party Voters
5/10/11
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2011/05/10/wisconsin-set-to-disenfranchise-likely-democratic-party-voters/
Excerpt:
The Wisconsin Joint Finance Committee has reported out a bill that will require all Wisconsin voters to present certain forms of ID as a condition for voting.
The legislation, which is expected to pass both houses of the state legislature this week before arriving on Scott Walker’s desk for signature, is in response to the rising concern that voter fraud is fast infecting Wisconsin elections.
Except there is no such voter fraud epidemic in the Badger State – and it’s not like the Republican State’s Attorney General hasn’t been looking high and low to find some.
A study of the 2008 election conducted by the Wisconsin Justice Department has turned up just two instances of people “double” voting, six people who engaged in voter registration shenanigans and 11 ex-cons who violated the prohibition on felons voting.
In fact, there has been a sum total of 20 people charged with some form of voter fraud out of the millions of Wisconsin residents who voted in the 2008 election. And over half of them are already on voter denial lists as they are convicted felons.
This is hardly what one would call a justification to create a crisis of confidence in Wisconsin’s voting system– particularly when you consider that the program will cost Wisconsin taxpayers millions of dollars at a time when Governor Walker tells us things are so bad he had to end collective bargaining, deny schools the money they need to provide a basic education, and dramatically alter the retirement programs of state employees.
Here’s your assignment. Google voter fraud followed by name of state and do this for all fifty.
You have til Friday to next weekend to turn your assignment in. Papers will be graded that afternoon. Those who do not complete this assignment will not receive any extra credit for the entire election cycle.
Page 1 of About 34,800,000 results (0.08 seconds)
FBI arrests 8 in Florida for absentee ballot fraud
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SACRAMENTO — The owner of a firm that the California Republican Party hired to register tens of thousands of voters this year was arrested in Ontario over the weekend on suspicion of voter registration fraud.
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Daytona Beach Commissioner Arrested On Fraud Charges
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8 REPUBLICAN Officials ARRESTED and CONVICTED of Voter Fraud
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Dec 21, 2010 – ALBANY, Ga. — A five-month probe into voter irregularities in Brooks County by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has resulted in 10 arrests.
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TROY — Former Troy City Clerk William A. McInerney pleaded guilty Friday to a charge that he signed a voter’s signature to a Working Families Party absentee primary ballot in 2009 to steer the vote to his Democratic Party candidates.
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1 Voter, 72 Registration. “Acorn Paid In Cash And Cigarettes
CLEVELAND – A man at the center of a voter-registration scandal told The Post yesterday he was given cash and cigarettes by aggressive ACORN activists in exchange for registering an astonishing 72 times, in apparent violation of Ohio laws.
Page 2 of About 34,800,000 results (0.08 seconds)
You get the idea
If you folks dont want to talk to a dog then I will get off of this dumb blog.
Boy you folks are mouthy about this topic. Guess what? This dog has voted and many time. Want to know how?
Americans have not sense of history. Hell history here is ten days. As a dog with generations of being a human and then a dog and then a human, this dog has a sense of fido history.
Ok folks: How about the 15th and 26th Amendments To The Constitution of the United States? What do they say?
Go Google becasue you dont dogknow, do ya?
Hey Blouise, I hope Tex is feeling better and you are de-stressed on that front. I have to keep in mind that the election is still 10 months away and if I start taking it real serious now, on top of my usual dislike for what the government has become and, like, real life, I’ll be nuts (or totally nuts) by August. 🙂 I’m going to watch Maher now, he usually gets me grinning.
You are right Lotta. We need every win we can get.