-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
Although Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) does not believe “there is any particular evidence of polls barring African Americans from voting,” there is plenty of evidence that States are making it more difficult for African Americans to vote. Paul is using a strawman argument to recast the voting issue to one in which African Americans are prohibited from voting. Preventing African Americans from voting is the intended result of Republican efforts in numerous states. Using analysis of voting habits, Republicans have passed laws that intentionally create voting difficulties for groups that traditionally vote Democratic. Jim Crow has been dressed up a little, to become James Crow, Esq., but statistically speaking, the results are the same.
In Florida, minority voters waited to vote nearly double the time of white voters, as shown by this graph. 
Statistical analysis of voting patterns showed that 61.2 percent of all early voting ballots were cast by Democrats, compared with 18.7 percent by Republicans. The Republican solution: delete six days of early voting and extend voting hours to accommodate those voters who have jobs. A GOP consultant noted that “cutting out of the Sunday before Election Day was one of their targets only because that’s a big day when the black churches organize themselves.” Although not directly targeting African Americans, the intention is to reduce African American voter turnout.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker closed down DMV offices in predominately Democratic areas after passing a voter ID law. In Ohio, Republicans curtailed early voting from thirty-five to eleven days, including the Sunday before the election when African-American churches historically rally their congregants to go to the polls.
In North Carolina, voter suppression has been taken to new levels. Among the new measures are:
- The end of pre-registration for 16 & 17 year olds
- A ban on paid voter registration drives
- Elimination of same day voter registration
- A provision allowing voters to be challenged by any registered voter of the county in which they vote rather than just their precinct
- A week sliced off Early Voting
- Elimination of straight party ticket voting
- Authorization of vigilante poll observers, lots of them, with expanded range of interference
- An expansion of the scope of who may examine registration records and challenge voters
- A repeal of out-of-precinct voting
- A repeal of the current mandate for high-school registration drives
- Elimination of flexibility in opening early voting sites at different hours within a county
North Carolina now has the strictest voter ID law in the country. US military ID cards will be accepted, but IDs from students at state colleges will not be accepted. In the election of 2012, 1.4 million voters voted straight-ticket Democrat, while just 1.1 million voted straight ticket Republican, so that feature is gone. During the first seven days of early voting in the 2012 election, now eliminated, 458,258 Democrats used in-person early voting, while just 240,146 Republicans did so. Although not directly targeting African Americans, the intention is the same.
There doesn’t appear to be any help from the Constitution which states:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
In a 2007, the Brennan Center for Justice reported (pdf) that “by any measure, voter fraud is extraordinarily rare.” If Republicans can’t win by getting more votes than Democrats, they’ll lessen the number of Democratic voters and achieve an identical result.
As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965 regarding the right to vote:
Every device of which human ingenuity is capable, has been used to deny this right.
H/T: Tom Anstrom, Dara Kam and John Lantigua, Ian Millhiser, Washington Post, Associated Press, Charles P. Pierce.
A friend of mine is from Africa, the country he came from requires photo ID to vote. If you dont have one, you cant vote. Everyone he knows has a photo ID and he comes from a third world country. They cant just catch a bus and go across town to the DMV yet they get an ID.
Is that voter suppression?
The majority of counties go red anyway so I am not sure why republicans care. If they would stop acting like democrats they might win some national elections.
It is easy to blame others for your problems.
Vote early, vote often unless the blue hairs ask for a picture ID. In the precint I vote in, you couldnt vote twice if you paid those little old ladies. They would pocket the money and show you the door. The money would be used for cocktails once the polls closed.
They take voting seriously.
@Nal:
First, a short comment got trapped just above somewhere.
Here is where I think the whole argument breaks down, in this statement: “The motivation of those who pass the laws determines the racist question. In the sources I provided in the post and the Rachel Maddow video Elaine embedded, it seems reasonable to infer racism was a motivating factor.
I don’t. I think it is reasonable to make several different inferences, including but not limited to:
a. legitimate fear of voter fraud, through impersonation, whether justified or not;
b. desire to maintain better control over the logistics of the electoral process, for egs., by eliminating same day registrations;
c. partisan desire to increase the cost of the Democrat’s superior ground game;
d. partisan desire to increase the confidence of Republican voters in the system, ala, my vote does count;
e. desire to decrease effect of “political machine” voting, either Demcratic or Republican; and
f. desire to make it difficult for minorities to vote because of their heavy bias toward Democrats.
Sooo, I ask myself why it is that the more vocal and intense Democrats automatically gravitate to “f.” My initial thought is, because they always opt to play the race card. If you don’t like Obama, it’s because he’s black. If you doubt where he is born, it’s because he’s black. Which, I have been fighting the idiots for two years now, and I haven’t seen that to be true of most of them. If a White-Hispanic, whatever that is, shoots a black mugger, it’s because he’s black. There is a constant litany of racism in a country that has twice elected a black president. Go figure.
But, I try to be fair, sooo I look to see if anything else is going on. Is there any real suppression. I have to hunt for the SCOTUS decision on Photo-ID because that link wasn’t in the story. IMO, it should have been. I find it, and lo and behold, the Democrats couldn’t produce a plaintiff who had been harmed. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but they should be fairly easy too find, There is no stigma or liability attached to getting screwed out of the right to vote.
OTOH, Indiana couldn’t prove massive voter fraud, But by its very nature, that is going to be harder to find, and prove. There is both stigma and liability to being found in that class.
The Court found it instructive to mention the partisan implications for the Democrats, that it would make them work harder to drag some of their base to the polls. Sooo, if there are partisan implications, is it unreasonable to extend to that the race card stuff? Nope.
Then, I got to reading around a little, and again it was lo and behold, but a Democratic state, Rhode Island instituted the Photo ID, phased in over time, but again, that significant fact got left out. Now, you say that is because there are big differences between Indiana’s provisional ballot and Rhode Island’s provisional ballot. Really? Is that the basis for the racism claim? That one state uses signature verification after provisional voting, and the other, in part,: “No photo identification is required in order to register to vote, 3 and the State offers free photo identification to qualified voters able to establish their residence and identity.”
No, that is not a big enough difference to convince me. It gets worse. Then I find the bi-partisan commission, and its proposals are based around Photo ID. So, your response is that is part of a comprehensive system of proposals. True, but still, sometime, nearly everybody has to get their picture made to fit into their system. So, conceptually it can’t be all that bad. Plus, there were Democrats who had no problem with it. What, are these the racist Democrats or something???
Another thing, is that the claim is made that the elderly and disabled are going to be adversely affected. I note that Indiana does NOT require photo ID for nursing home residents. But are some of these people are also white people??? How do they manage to slip into the “racist” characterization? Plus, 60% of Democrats are white to start with. How does any “suppression” become “racist” with regard to them?
The “racism” claim is becoming even more attenuated.
Now, I find a poll which shows that 52% of Democrats think Photo ID is a good idea. Is that the “racist” wing of the Democratic party? If over half of your own party is guilty of the same “racism” you accuse Republicans of, shouldn’t your efforts start there???
So, with all of this considered, I backed up a little and tried to analyze exactly what it was that was most at contention. I think it is Photo ID. Frankly, on the other issues, cutting out some early voting, or eliminating cross-precinct voting, you did not provide enough information to decide one way or the other. Further, I am not sure that 15 days of early voting is “racist” while 21 days is proper. What’s the conceptual basis of such a claim? My goodness, most states didn’t even have early voting a few years ago, did they?
Sooo, is Photo Id, in and of itself, a racist or Jim Crow-y thing? I am just not seeing it. As I said before several times, Photo ID is required for a lot of stuff, including buying beer, and getting into federal buildings. Where is all the Democratic outrage? You said that voting is just different from those other things, but I am seeing a distinction without a difference. Then, when more blacks vote than whites, it is hard to take the whole “racism” thing seriously. The worst it may be is just inter-party hijinks, of the same sort as the Colorado Democrats and their Vote By Mail enactments right into the eye of the fraud storm, as even several Democrats have said here. Which is also what the SCOTUS decision revealed, finding it not to be “suppressive.”
Elaine has been thoughtful enough to post a ton of other links, which make it even more obvious that all this stuff is really just Democratic talking points. If I am wrong about you, and what you say really is your heartfelt beliefs, and not just a lot of partisan dissembling, then maybe you need to consider whether or not the constant playing of the race card has boomeranged on your party, to the point where now, nothing you or they say about race gets taken seriously.
Respectfully,
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Slarti:
you rich yet? How is the idea working out?
I’m talking about a philosophical restriction that is not surmountable practically without damaging fundamental rights in many ways (including those often nasty unintended consequences), Blouise.
Appealing to emotion may be a practical methodology of achieving a political agenda’s particular end, but that does not make it sound choice when fundamental rights come into conflict with one another, especially when they are conjoined and equal. Reason will trump even if emotion holds sway temporarily. You know I’m not a “gun nut”, but I do have a solid grasp on the firmament upon which the 2nd is built. Anything beyond a reasonable restriction is simply doomed to failure. And you know I have no issue with reasonable restriction. We just differ on what constitutes reasonable and where the cost/benefit analysis breaks down in examining restrictions and their value to society.
Gene,
Aah … you are talking philosophical … I am talking practical politics. The rabble, son, the rabble. (rabble being soccer moms and the like)
Slarti,
I’ll be on the boards tonight … I promise … and you are being very modest … to the point that I am beginning to suspect you are a country gentleman whose mother taught courtly manners. 😉
Steve “pimp my Twitter feed” Florman said:
“Unfortunately, hard as it is to doubt that voter suppression is in fact occurring, it is equally impossible to doubt that larger Democratic voter turnout would be an economic disaster for this poor, overstressed nation.”
What a completely idiotic thing to say. Since the election of Ronald Reagan, the deficit has gone up during Republican administrations and down under Democratic administrations. In addition, according to this study, not only do businesses do better under Democratic governance, small businesses (you know, the engine of job creation) do much better.
We can’t afford any more fools like you voting Republican against your own (and everyone else’s) self-interest. As someone trying to start a small business, there is no way in which a vote for a Republican candidate (at any level) would help me to succeed.
Unfortunately, hard as it is to doubt that voter suppression is in fact occurring, it is equally impossible to doubt that larger Democratic voter turnout would be an economic disaster for this poor, overstressed nation.
Squeeky:
It is the difference in provisional ballot counting that is the crucial difference.
The BIPARTISAN group decided that mobile ID offices were necessary to prevent the voter ID from being a barrier to voting. Where are the mobile ID offices? Your BIPARTISAN group recognized that voter ID would be a barrier to voting.
The onus of proof is on those claiming that voter fraud is a problem. So far, all that’s been presented has been exaggerations and lies.
I’ve provided reports of actual investigations into the claims of voter fraud. If people have doubts, those doubts are unreasonable.
The motivation of those who pass the laws determines the racist question. In the sources I provided in the post and the Rachel Maddow video Elaine embedded, it seems reasonable to infer racism was a motivating factor. Of course you occasionally have Republican politicians who freely admit that minority voter suppression was their goal.
When someone claims their motivation for voter ID is to prevent voter fraud and it’s shown that their claims of voter fraud are false, their claims of motivation are also false. When someone claims that the disproportionate racial impact of voter ID laws is incidental to the cause of preventing voter fraud, and their claims of voter fraud are shown to be suspect, the claim of incidentalness is also suspect.
When one looks at voter ID laws combined with the other measures that disproportionately affect minority voters, such as reduction of early voting, eliminating straight party line voting, prohibiting counties from extending voting hours when they have long lines, removal of voting places in African-American areas, and elimination of provisional ballots for those who go to the wrong precinct, it all adds up to minority voter suppression. They might catch some non-minority voters, but that’s the price they’re willing to pay to obtain minority voter suppression.
Conservative Corporate Advocacy Group ALEC Behind Voter Disenfranchisement Efforts
By Tobin Van Ostern | March 9, 2011 at 12:20 am
http://genprogress.org/voices/2011/03/09/16433/conservative-corporate-advocacy-group-alec-behind-voter-disenfranchise/
Excerpt:
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative organization linked to corporate and right-wing donors, including the billionaire Koch brothers, has drafted and distributed model legislation, obtained by Campus Progress, that appears to be the inspiration for bills proposed by state legislators this year and promoted by Tea Party activists, bills that would limit access of young people to vote.
Student Voting Laws By State.
ALEC describes itself as a “nonpartisan membership association for conservative state lawmakers who shared a common belief in limited government, free markets, federalism, and individual liberty.”
In Wisconsin, where public attention now is focused on Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) efforts to undermine the rights of workers to engage in collective bargaining, there is another piece of proposed legislation that could have a substantial negative impact on the state’s young and minority voters. Conservative representatives in the state have proposed a law, backed by Walker, that would ban students from using in-state university- or college-issued IDs for proof-of-residency when voting. If this legislation became law, it would become one of the strictest voter registration laws in the country and would provide significant logistical and financial barriers for a variety of groups, including student and minority voters.**…
How the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) spurred restrictive voter ID laws
Many of the state proposals appear to stem from model legislation known as the Voter ID Act (also known as Photo ID) that was developed by the American Legislative Exchange Council.
In a 2009 public report [PDF], ALEC described Voter ID legislation as “proactive” and offered up examples of states successfully passing the legislation as providing “a helpful guide” for other states to follow.
Deemed the “political player you’ve never heard of” by Fortune magazine earlier this year, ALEC was launched in 1973 by Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich and is funded by conservative organizations including the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the John M. Olin Foundation. ALEC’s “Private Enterprise Board,” includes representatives from companies including Peabody Energy, Coca-Cola, AT&T, Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and Wal-Mart, as well as Koch Industries.
ALEC charges corporations a fee and gives them access to members of state legislatures. Under ALEC’s auspices, legislators, corporate representatives, and ALEC officials work together to draft model legislation, generally on business-related issues. As ALEC spokesperson Michael Bowman told NPR, this system is especially effective because “you have legislators who will ask questions much more freely at our meetings because they are not under the eyes of the press, the eyes of the voters.”
Tea Party organizations, like the Wisconsin Patriot Coalition, also look to ALEC for guidance. The group lists the Voter ID Act in its legislative agenda [PDF] and directly links back to ALEC as its source.
Charles Monaco, the press and new media specialist at the Progressive States Network, a state-based organization that has been tracking this issue, says, “ALEC is involved with a vast network of well-funded right wing organizations working to spread voter ID laws in the state legislatures. It is clear what their purpose is with these laws—to reduce progressive turnout and tilt the playing field towards their preferred candidates in elections.”
Voter Suppression 101
How Conservatives Are Conspiring to Disenfranchise Millions of Americans
By Scott Keyes, Ian Millhiser, Tobin Van Ostern, and Abraham White
April 4, 2012
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/progressive-movement/report/2012/04/04/11380/voter-suppression-101/
Excerpt:
The right to vote is under attack all across our country. Conservative legislators are introducing and passing legislation that creates new barriers for those registering to vote, shortens the early voting period, imposes new requirements for already-registered voters, and rigs the Electoral College in select states. Conservatives fabricate reasons to enact these laws—voter fraud is exceedingly rare—in their efforts to disenfranchise as many potential voters among certain groups, such as college students, low-income voters, and minorities, as possible. Rather than modernizing our democracy to ensure that all citizens have access to the ballot box, these laws hinder voting rights in a manner not seen since the era of Jim Crow laws enacted in the South to disenfranchise blacks after Reconstruction in the late 1800s.
Talk about turning back the clock! At its best, America has utilized the federal legislative process to augment voting rights. Constitutional amendments such as the 12th, 14th, 15th, 17th, 19th, 23rd, and 26th have steadily improved the system by which our elections take place while expanding the pool of Americans eligible to participate. Yet in 2011, more than 30 state legislatures considered legislation to make it harder for citizens to vote, with over a dozen of those states succeeding in passing these bills. Anti-voting legislation appears to be continuing unabated so far in 2012.
Unfortunately, the rapid spread of these proposals in states as different as Florida and Wisconsin is not occurring by accident. Instead, many of these laws are being drafted and spread through corporate-backed entities such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, as uncovered in a previous Center for American Progress investigative report. Detailed in that report, ALEC charges corporations such as Koch Industries Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and The Coca-Cola Co. a fee and gives them access to members of state legislatures. Under ALEC’s auspices, legislators, corporate representatives, and ALEC officials work together to draft model legislation. As ALEC spokesperson Michael Bowman told NPR, this system is especially effective because “you have legislators who will ask questions much more freely at our meetings because they are not under the eyes of the press, the eyes of the voters.”
The investigative report included for the first time a leaked copy of ALEC’s model Voter ID legislation, which was approved by the ALEC board of directors in late 2009. This model legislation prohibited certain forms of identification, such as student IDs, and has been cited as the legislative model from groups ranging from Tea Party organizations to legislators proposing the actual legislation such as Wisconsin’s Voter ID proposal from Republican state Rep. Stone and Republican state Sen. Joe Leibham.
Registering the poor “to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals.”
-Conservative columnist Matthew Vadum
@nal:
That was a very good link you just gave on the Chait article. Did you read the comments? A lot of people are saying the same kind of things I did. And probably a lot better. I liked this one:
Yep, I hadn’t thought about the beer angle.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
nick spinelli 1, August 21, 2013 at 11:45 am
raff, Once again. In the 2012 election, 66.2% of blacks voted, compared to 64.1% of whites.
*****
What does that prove? That whites are more apathetic about voting than blacks, perchance???
Jonathan Chait:
Modern Vote Suppression Better Than Jim Crow, Still Pretty Bad
Segregated states used violence and “literacy tests” to disenfranchise the vast majority of the black population. The modern analogue instead works around the margins. Nobody is forcibly prohibited from voting. Instead, bureaucratic hurdles discourage some small share of disproportionately Democratic voters from voting.
raff, I think we can agree that voter fraud occurs in all Chicago elections. How much, we can only guess. But, there won’t be any voter ID laws there. We know that.
Raff,
Don’t look at me, he was here when I left! 😉
Blouise,
I heard that he lost his business, so I’m not so sure that he’s happy wherever he is…
The paid trolls might have gone away, but there seems to be no lack of people who like to make straw men out of their opponents positions and use other dishonest debating tactics. Personally, I think that if my arguments can’t win on the merits then I need new arguments (or a different position), but apparently some people would rather delude themselves into thinking they won a great victory rather than admit that all they’ve done is soiled their own integrity.
p.s. Will you finish me off in our Scrabble game so that we can start a new one and I can delude myself into thinking that I might be able to beat you this time for at least a turn or two? 😛
OS,
You’d think the propaganda trolls would have realized by now that this is a forum where their technique is visible, vulnerable and eviscerated.
But it does provide for good sport.
Blouise,
Not to psychically divine your argument, but the right to self-defense and the right to life are inexorably intertwined on both a philosophical and legal level. There is no right to be either free from harm or free from threat of harm. To quote the band Killing Joke, “Creation is no gentle place.” To argue for limiting a fundamental right as a means of mitigation will pit two equally important rights against each other and is doomed to failure as a philosophical proposition. The right to self-defense and the right to life are not concomitant, but equal and conjoined.
The technique of just making up stuff, such as “voter fraud” as an excuse for repressive measures has its historical foundations. Like what this guy said:
The same philosophy was applied in the runup to the war in Iraq, passage of the despicable Patriot Act and creation of the Department of Homeland Security.