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)
they’re the reason so many people think history is boring. they sanitize the humanity out of the countries founders. i’ve never understood why they feel the need to put people on a pedestal to respect them.
i tend to think it’s a god thing. it must be pure to be good.
Elaine,
I saw that story. Of course, the Tea Party in Tennessee is not a racist organization. It is amazing that those pesky historical facts just keep getting in the way.
Off Topic:
Tennessee Tea Parties demand textbooks contain no mean things about Founding Fathers
If they get their way, history books won’t say anything about “intruding on the Indians or having slaves”
By Alex Pareene
http://www.salon.com/2011/01/13/founding_fathers_tennessee_tea_party/singleton/
Excerpt:
For a bunch of people who worship the Founders and like to play dress-up American Revolutionary War, Tea Partyers sure hate knowing anything remotely reality-based about the Founding Fathers. Tennessee Tea Party groups have introduced a proposal to take what few minorities there are in American history textbooks out of American history textbooks, along with any negative portrayals of the wealthy white men who led this young nation in its infancy.
At a press conference, two dozen activists presented their proposals — I’m sorry, their “demands” — for the new state legislative session. Among them are sweeping changes to school materials that they probably have not actually read.
Take it away, awful person:
The material calls for lawmakers to amend state laws governing school curriculums, and for textbook selection criteria to say that “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”
Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.”
quercus454,
Here are two examples of voter suppression–which I’ve taken from the NAACP’s Defending Democracy report:
– Requiring Documentary Proof of Citizenship to Register to Vote. Three states (Alabama, Kansas, and Tennessee) enacted legislation requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. While these requirements will impose burdens on all voters of limited means, they will have a uniquely burdensome impact on elderly African-American voters, many of whom, because they were born when de jure segregation prevented equal access to hospitals, were never issued birth certificates.
– 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.
quercus454,
We’re suggesting that the rights of legal citizens SHOULD be protected.
So the entire argument against instituting measures to ensure that only legal citizen voters get to vote, that they only get to vote once and that their votes are the only ones that are counted is:
“Again, where’s the proof of wide spread fraud?”
So , we as a society shouldn’t protect the rights of legal citizen voters because the rights of those who won’t register, don’t want to get a state ID or prove who they are or their residency is more valuable? What happened to equal protection under the law?
Requiring someone to register in advance or having a valid ID is not being discriminatory. Voting is a right, but not one without responsibility. When free IDs are made available, registration is free, how is asking a citizen to acquire one being unreasonable? The insistence that voting security measures are a direct attempt to suppress voters is offset by the obvious color of the argument to allow non citizens to vote or certain peoples to vote more then once.
“One vote could put someone in office…”
True, but thousands of votes NOT cast because of suppression is much more effective.
One vote could put someone in office that chooses conflict verses resolution.
What happened to days not weeks.
US deploys 12,000 troops in Libya
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/222317.html
I’m going to complain, this is only indirectly related to the topic but two years ago my wifes brother and his family lost their house and we let her brother who was 56 at the time, his wife and his 30 year old son move in with us.
The son didn’t have a car, license and hadn’t worked in over a year.
The wife and I wanted to make sure he got a job and planned to take him to a temp service but we had to get him an ID so we went to the DMV to try and get him a state ID and were unsuccesful. He was a 30 year old white male with red hair and we weren’t able to prove he was a US resident.
We had a birth certificate but they also wanted a utility bill in his name and since he was homeless and moved in with us where we paid the bills he wasn’t able to get an ID and explaining the situation fell on deaf ears and no one was able to offer us a solution on how to resolve the problem since without an ID he couldn’t even get a job.
What I ended up doing was taking him back to a DMV in the county where he lived before and we used a bill from the Bureau of Workers Compensation from his defunct carpet installing business and they accepted it because it was a government letter.
It just shocked me how hard the whole process was and seemed to me very unecessary and ridiculous. I mean it was the DMV why couldn’t they just look up his history or even his picture?
Pete,
Speaking of vote caging:
Huge voter suppression plot exposed in Wisconsin
MON SEP 20, 2010
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/09/20/903538/-Huge-voter-suppression-plot-exposed-in-Wisconsin
A massive, coordinated and illegal plan to suppress Wisconsin voter turnout in November was exposed today by One Wisconsin Now (OWN).
The plan, targeting minority voters and students, is a joint effort of the Republican Party, Americans for Prosperity, and Tea Party groups. OWN has somehow obtained both copies of the plan and a recording of a meeting at which it was discussed, both available on a new website, SaveWisconsinVote2010.org
OWN Executive Director Scot Ross said the group will request investigations by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, as well as the Wisconsin Attorney General’s Election Integrity Task Force and the Government Accountability Board, to insure the right to vote is not stolen by these plans.
The term for what the right-wing intends to do is called “vote caging,”and involves sending mail to addresses on voter lists and using returned mail to challenge voters at the polls on election day.
The result? Some voters are forced to cast provisional ballots, which require them to follow-up the day after an election for the ballot to be counted. Historically, about 35% of all provisional ballots are never counted.
Voters who have no reason to think their registrations will be challenged at the polling place may not have the required material to complete an Election Day registration, so the voter will be turned away or sent home to get more documents.
The challenges may create long lines at the polling place as the caging operation challenges voter after voter. Long lines discourage voters and many simply leave without casting a ballot.
That is why right-wing caging operations target areas which vote overwhelmingly Democratic (like Milwaukee’s central city and college campuses.)
Elaine
no need to start caging ron paul supporters.
And just to be sure about the results, “they” own the vote counting machines that guarantee the results. Check out blackboxvoting.org.
Great video Elaine. The answer to your question is Yes.
Curious,
Maybe they should bring a recent EEG. We wouldn’t want people who are brain dead voting, would we?
@Puzzling I hear that you live in Philadelphia in a ward where a cousin of my friend lives. She (the cousin) said she heard that 4,000 people voted there last election. and that 3,000 of them were dead or escaped convicts. That’s what I heard and that’s good enough for me. Well, we can’t have any of that! And we can’t wait around forever while James O’Keefe is raising funds in order to set up a sting. Therefore, the rule for your ward is that every voter must show up with an EKG taken in the last 24 hours to prove that he is still alive and with an copy of their FBI file to prove they aren’t felons. Hope this doesn’t inconvenience you too much.
If state’s are going to demand photo IDs – they ought to pay for them! And if you’re over 65 and disabled you go to the head of the DMV line. But the best idea is that they must come to you. I’m 80 and will soon stop driving. How the hell am I supposed to get to the nearest DMV once my liscense expires?