“Clever Assaults On The Right To Vote”: Restrictive Voting Laws Deserve Justice Department Scrutiny
In certain circles, it has become fashionable to believe that the Voting Rights Act is an outdated vestige of a crueler time, an unnecessary bit of bureaucracy that imposes its own injustices. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed that view when it threw out one of the act’s more powerful provisions.
Those who believe that the Voting Rights Act is an artifact of a bygone era eagerly point out that the nation has elected its first black president — proof, they say, that racism is dead. In that view, the right to vote is guaranteed and each person is equally represented in the political system of this great democracy.
Eric Holder, the outgoing attorney general, knew better. He understood that the right to vote is under assault, and he did what he could to protect it, starting with a rehabilitation of the Civil Rights Division, which had fallen into dysfunction in the administration of George W. Bush. That may be Holder’s defining accomplishment.
During the Bush era, conservative partisans launched the most insidious onslaught against minority voting rights since the 1960s: the voter ID movement. Claiming, falsely, that the ballot needs more protection against fraud, they promoted restrictive voting laws in state legislatures around the country. Those partisans had their own agents within the Civil Rights Division, where they worked to ensure that dubious voter ID laws would not undergo any scrutiny.
Their mischief making has largely succeeded, not only in disenfranchising legitimate voters, but also in fooling the public about their intent. Polls show overwhelming support for laws that supposedly protect against fraud.
But make no mistake about it: Voter ID laws have next to nothing to do with protecting the ballot box. Instead, they are a relatively clever assault on the right to vote. As the nation has become browner, the GOP has found that neither its politicians nor its policies are popular among voters of color. So, rather than adopt a more inclusive brand of politics, the party has decided that denying the franchise to even a few hundred Democratic-leaning voters can be useful.
How do they accomplish that? Most of the state legislatures that have enacted such laws — and most of those are dominated by Republicans — have insisted that voters use a driver’s license as proof of identity. Research has shown that poor black and Latino voters, who usually vote for Democrats, are less likely to have automobiles than white voters.
Some elderly voters don’t even have birth certificates because they were born at home in an era when such documents were not required for daily life. In Texas, for example, voting rights groups say some rural residents would have to travel 100 miles to get proper documents.
But isn’t this necessary to prevent voter fraud? In fact, research has also shown that in-person fraud of the sort that voter ID laws are designed to prevent is virtually nonexistent. No matter what you’ve heard about voter fraud, you’ve probably not heard of a case of voter impersonation. In other words, no one shows up at the polls claiming to be John Boehner except John Boehner.
With that in mind, Holder entered the fray, sending Justice Department lawyers to challenge onerous voting requirements, including provisions in some states that sought to roll back conveniences such as early voting. They mounted successful challenges in Texas, South Carolina and Florida.
Even after the Supreme Court gutted the VRA, the Justice Department has kept up the good fight. It has filed suit against a restrictive law in North Carolina and joined lawsuits in Ohio and Wisconsin. Ultimately, some of those cases will likely end up before the nation’s highest court — and many civil rights lawyers are predicting the worst. A Supreme Court that doesn’t mind showing its partisan stripes could effectively abolish the Voting Rights Act.
But that will only make the work of the Civil Rights Division more important, not less. Here’s hoping that Holder’s successor is up to the job.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, October 4, 2014
“Undue Burdens”: Voter ID Laws Are Costing Taxpayers Millions
One federal judge has allowed a voter ID law to take effect in Wisconsin. Another is now contemplating whether to do the same in Texas. Defenders of these laws, which exist in some form in 34 states, insist that requiring people to show government-issued identification at the polls will reduce fraud—and that it will do so without imposing unfair burdens or discouraging people from voting. In North Carolina, for example, Republican Governor Pat McCrory wrote an op-ed boasting that the measures fight fraud “at no cost” to voters.
It’s not surprising that McCrory and like-minded conservatives make such arguments. The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has steadily weakened the Voting Rights Act and related legislation, which for generations federal officials used to make sure minority voters had equal voice in the political process. But in 2008, when the Court approved Voter ID laws, the Court left open the possibility of new challenges if plaintiffs can demonstrate the laws impose a burden on would-be voters.
There are now good reasons to think the laws do exactly that.
One reason is a report, published over the summer, from Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. Researchers there complied published articles and legal testimony, in order to calculate the cost of of obtaining a government-issued identification. They included everything from the cost of waiting to the cost of traveling and obtaining documentation. Their conclusion? The costs can range anywhere from $75 to $400 per person. The study is not a comprehensive, since it examines evidence from just three states— Texas, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, which had its law blocked by the U.S. Justice Department but upheld by a District Court. But as many as 11 percent of voters don’t have a photo ID, according to the Brennan Center, and the study illustrates the challenge these people—many of them very poor—would face trying to get new identification documents. “The more it can be shown that is a substantial financial cost, the clearer it is that these laws are unconstitutional,” said Richard Sobel, author of the study.
Of course, some people would face higher costs than others. According to the study, people who move from another state can have a particularly hard time, because they’ll have trouble tracking down—and then paying for—the documentation they’ll need to get an identification card. Many states require that people present birth certificates in order to get Voter ID cards, but in at least two states, South Carolina and North Carolina, people who want a new birth certificate must present some other form of government identification. In other words, somebody would need a photo ID in order to obtain a voter ID.
Another group that can face extra costs and difficulty getting ID cards is women—specifically, women who have changed their names after marriage. A study by the Brennan Center from 2006 showed that just 48 percent of women with access to a birth certificate have access to identification with their legal name. “It’s clear the costs are much much greater largely because we change our names,” Elisabeth Macnamara, president of the League of Women Voters, told me. The League of Women Voters in Wisconsin has challenged Wisconsin’s voter ID law, partly on this basis. “We are seeing courts considering the Photo ID and see how much it takes to get one.”
A separate issue is the hassle people face when they try to get Voter ID cards. “We’ve experienced people being treated differently depending which DMV they go to or which examiner they talk to as to whether which document is sufficient,” Bob Hall, executive director of Democracy North Carolina, said in an interview. These difficulties should strengthen legal challenges to the requirement, he said: “It does bolster the argument that it amounts to a poll tax.”
Individual voters aren’t the only ones who face extra costs because of Voter ID laws. State governments’ do, too. The report from Harvard’s Houston Center showed the laws could cost Pennsylvania between $15.75 million and $47.26 million; South Carolina’s law would cost the state between $5.9 million and $17.70 million; and in Texas, could see the costs for its law go between $26.07 million and $78.22 million. “This is a huge amount of money to get a free ID, especially when the right to vote is a right that should be exercised freely and these resources could be used to getting people out to vote,” Sobel said.
By: Eric Garcia, The New Republic, October 3, 2014
“The Wrong Kind Of People Voting”: Why Voter ID Laws Pose Long Term Danger To GOP
A trial begins today in a federal courtroom in Texas to determine the constitutionality of the state’s voter identification law, which is widely acknowledged to be the most restrictive in the nation. It has gone through a number of twists and turns: Passed in 2011, it was struck down in federal court in 2012 as a violation of the Voting Rights Act. Then in 2013 the Supreme Court gutted the VRA. Now the law faces a new trial based on a different VRA section.
In the end, the Republicans who passed this law may prevail, particularly since the only racial discrimination the conservative majority on the Supreme Court apparently finds troubling is the kind that might affect a white person somewhere. But Republicans may have underestimated just how much damage they continue to do to their party’s image by trying, anywhere and everywhere, to make it as hard as possible for the wrong people to vote.
True, voter ID is not at the forefront of the national debate. Majorities do tell pollsters that you should have to show ID to vote, since it has a certain intuitive appeal. But when the subject is actually debated and discussed in the news, it drives people away from the GOP — and not just any people, but precisely the people the party wants so desperately to improve among to stay competitive in national elections.
First, some background. While there is a certain amount of voter fraud in American elections, almost all of it happens through absentee ballots. The only kind of fraud prevented by voter ID laws is in-person voter impersonation, which is incredibly rare. As Zachary Roth has detailed, when Greg Abbott became the state’s attorney general, he vowed a crusade against the “epidemic” of voter fraud in the state. How many cases did he find that would have been stopped by the ID law? Two. Meanwhile, according to the state’s own figures, almost 800,000 Texans lack the appropriate state-issued ID to vote.
The best you can say about the Texas law and others like it is that the motivation for them isn’t so much old-style racism as naked partisanship. The problem today’s Republicans have with black people voting isn’t the fact that they’re black, it’s the fact that they’re Democrats. Republicans also want to make it hard for Latinos to vote, and young people, and urban dwellers who don’t drive. When they wrote into the Texas law that a student ID from a state university wouldn’t count as identification but a concealed carry gun permit would, they made it quite clear that the point was to discriminate on the basis of your likelihood to vote Democratic. These laws often are accompanied by measures doing things like restricting early voting, particularly on Sundays when many black churches conduct voting drives.
So let’s dispense with the laughable notion that the reason many Republican-controlled states have passed a voter ID law is nothing more than deep concern for the integrity of the ballot. With the exception of the claim that laws mandating absurd restrictions on abortion providers are really just about protecting women’s health, there is probably no more disingenuous argument made in politics today. Yes, Democrats who oppose these laws are also thinking about their party’s political fortunes. But one side wants to make it easy for people to vote, and one side is trying to make it harder.
The success of voter ID laws in suppressing votes has been mixed. Some studies have found little or no impact on turnout, while others have shown significant declines in it. Where the laws fail to achieve their goal of suppressing votes, it’s probably because Democrats often undertake substantial effort to counteract them by registering people and helping them acquire the proper identification.
In any case, this law and others like it may well end up surviving. While this year courts have struck down voter ID laws in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the laws are likely to get a friendly hearing from the conservatives on the Supreme Court, which first upheld a voter ID law in 2008. And for Republicans, the calculation seems straightforward enough. They know that the groups with whom they’re strongest, like older white voters, homeowners, rural voters, married voters, and so on, are the ones most likely to have driver’s licenses and therefore not find an ID law to be a hindrance. Make voting an extra hassle for the wrong kind of voters, and you may get a few thousand, or a few hundred thousand, to stay home — making the difference in a close election.
But for a party that is struggling to appeal to precisely those demographic groups targeted by voter ID laws, such short-term gains risk getting swamped by long-term damage to its image. The voter ID debate reinforces everything the GOP doesn’t want people to think about it: that it’s the party of old white people, that it has contempt for minorities, that it knows nothing about the lifestyles and concerns of young people (who are far less likely than their parents were to get driver’s licenses), and that it will do virtually anything to win. You can’t spend a bunch of energy doing something that will make it harder for, for instance, Latinos to cast ballots, then turn around and say, “By the way, if you manage to make it past all these obstacles we’ve put in your path, we’d really like your vote.” But so far, few in the GOP seem to understand that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, September 2, 2014
“A Plainly Visible Reality”: Proof That Voter Impersonation Almost Never Happens
An enduring Republican fantasy is that there are armies of fraudulent voters lurking in the baseboards of American life, waiting for the opportunity to crash the polls and undermine the electoral system. It’s never really been clear who these voters are or how their schemes work; perhaps they are illegal immigrants casting votes for amnesty, or poor people seeking handouts. Most Republican politicians know these criminals don’t actually exist, but they have found it useful to take advantage of the party base’s pervasive fear of outsiders, just as when they shot down immigration reform. In this case, they persuaded the base of the need for voter ID laws to ensure “ballot integrity,” knowing the real effect would be to reduce Democratic turnout.
Now a researcher has tried to quantify this supposed threat by documenting every known case of voter fraud since 2000 — specifically, the kind of impersonation that would be stopped by an ID requirement. (Note that this does not include ballot-box stuffing by officials, vote-buying or coercion: the kinds of fraud that would not be affected by an ID law.)
There have been more than 1 billion votes cast in local, state and federal elections over the last 14 years. Out of all of them, the researcher, Justin Levitt, a voting expert at the Loyola University Law School, found 31 cases of impersonation fraud. It’s hardly a surprise that the number is so low; as he writes in the Washington Post today, casting individual fake ballots “is a slow, clunky way to steal an election. Which is why it rarely happens.”
A look at some of the 31 cases shows how pathetic the fraudulent-voter threat really is. In May, Ben Hodzic was accused of voting in his brother’s name in the Catskill, N.Y., School District Board of Education election. In June 2011, Hazel Brionne Woodard of Tarrant County, Tex., allegedly arranged for her son to vote in the municipal runoff elections in the name of his father. In 2004, an unknown person signed the pollbook line as Rose-Mary McGee, of Albuquerque, N.M.
These conspiracies were the pretext for the voter ID laws that have now been passed in 34 states. And the arguments in many of those states have reached an absurdly high pitch. In Virginia, for example, Republicans are saying that the ID card required in their law has to be current; if you happen to let your driver’s license expire, you can’t vote, even though the photo on the card clearly demonstrates your identity. The state’s Democratic attorney general, Mark Herring, says that’s unconstitutional.
But neither the Constitution nor plainly visible reality is likely to halt the Republican crusade to keep certain people from participating in democracy. As the National Commission on Voting Rights documented in a new report, voting discrimination remains “a frequent and ongoing problem,” particularly in the South and Southwest, in part because of new barriers to voting thrown up by state legislators.
“It is difficult not to view these voting changes with a jaundiced eye,” the report says, “given the practical impediments they create and the minimal, if any, measurable legitimate benefit they offer.”
By: David Firestone, Taking Note, Editorial Page Editors Blog, The New York Times, August 6, 2014
“Voter ID’s Last Stand”: Let’s Finally Declare Laws What They Are – Racist On Purpose
This week, the US Department of Justice and the state of Texas started arguments in the first of what will be a summer-long dance between the two authorities over voting rights. There are three suits being tried in two districts over gerrymandering and Texas’s voter identification law – both of which are said to be racially motivated. In its filing, the DoJ describes the law as “exceed[ing] the requirements imposed by any other state” at the time that it passed. If the DoJ can prove the arguments in its filing, it won’t just defeat an unjust law: it could put the fiction of “voter fraud” to rest once and for all.
These battles, plus parallel cases proceeding in North Carolina, hinge on proving that the states acted with explicitly exclusionary intent toward minority voters – a higher standard was necessary prior to the Supreme Court’s gutting of Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) back in January. Under Section 3, the DoJ had wide latitude to look at possible consequences of voting regulation before they were even passed – the “preclearance” provision. Ironically, because the states held to preclearance had histories of racial discrimination, some of the messier aspects of the laws’ current intentions escaped comment.
But meeting that higher standard of explicit exclusionary intent comes with the opportunity to show some of the many skeptical Americans the ugly racism behind Republican appeals to “fairness” and warnings about fraud. Progressives have tried, and mostly failed, to show the institutional racism underpinning the sordid history behind voter ID laws; that may have been too subtle. In courts in Texas and North Carolina, the DoJ will make the jump from accusations that laws have a racial impact to straight-up calling voter ID laws racist.
This ought to be interesting.
The DoJ filing in Texas lays it all out pretty clearly, putting the voter ID law in context of a concerted legislative strategy to deny representation to the state’s growing Hispanic population, including Republicans advancing more and more aggressive voter ID bills over the years. The filing points to the anti-immigrant rhetoric that laced the floor debates over the law, and to the measures taken by the Republican-controlled state house to limit the participation of Democratic minority lawmakers in considering or amending the legislation (the bill was heard in front of a special committee selected by the governor, on an expedited schedule). And, the DoJ notes, lawmakers produced “virtually no evidence during or after enactment of SB 14 that in-person voter impersonation – the only form of election fraud addressed by the identification requirements of SB 14 – was a serious problem.”
Perhaps the most significant piece of context in the voter ID suit is how Texas’s voter ID law came on the heels of the redistricting that the DoJ claims was also racially motivated. In the redistricting cases, DoJ’s allegations of malicious intent have been helped along by the admission of the state that it had malicious political intent. The Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, chose as his defense in that case what only can be called the Lesser Evil Strategy – stating up front that the state’s GOP legislators had ulterior motives, but not the ones that the VRA outlaws:
[R]edistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party’s electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats … [They] were motivated by partisan rather than racial considerations and the plaintiffs and DOJ have zero evidence to prove the contrary.
Abbott’s smugness – and his apparent faith in partisanship as a permissible and distinct form of discrimination – will take center stage as the DoJ presses on with both suits. In court, Abbott will be asked to prove his ignorance of demographics for the very state in which he is currently running for governor. Out of court, other GOP defenders of the law will have to do more or less the same. And they will need to defend the outrageous details of the law – such has how a concealed carry permit is a permissible form of voter ID but a federally-issued Medicare card carried by an elderly woman is not.
Some people of Texas may support the kind of bullying Abbott has prepared to defend, and most progressive activists are hardened to it, but I think average Americans hate it. Putting malice under a national spotlight might be the best way to turn people against voter ID laws in general.
Right now, Americans support the idea of voter ID laws by huge margins: polls show favorable attitudes toward a generic “ID requirement” to be between 70 and 80%. Approval exists across all demographic groups – even among black voters (51%), one of the groups that is, of course, disproportionately disenfranchised by these laws.
But the reasons that the public supports such laws aren’t the same as the GOP’s reasons for pursuing them: Republicans want to prevent specific types of people from voting; the American public wants voting to be fair. That’s why conservatives have had to hammer so hard on the false narrative of “voter fraud” – to convince everyone that it’s what the laws are really about.
Add context to the “ID requirement” poll question that Americans get behind, though, and public support changes dramatically. A survey in North Carolina (taken as the state was considering taking up an amendment on the issue) found initial support for voter ID to be 71%. Pollsters then drilled further down and came up with numbers that speak to a truly democratic impulse:
- 72% say it’s wrong to pass laws that make it harder for certain people to vote.
- 62% say they oppose a law that makes it harder for people of one party to vote.
- 74% say there should be demonstrated problems before legislators apply a fix.
If nothing else, these results suggests that Abbott’s argument that supposedly party-based redistricting isn’t the free pass – at least, from the public’s standpoint, if not the court’s – that he thinks it is.
In North Carolina, pollsters found that support for the law decreased as the 2012 election neared and voters started to pay attention and become educated on the issue. Voting rights advocates filled yet another suit based on disenfranchising young voters, which could make a further difference. (Way to keep pissing off millennials, GOP!)
That context effect is true nationwide. A different survey found that informing respondents that “Opponents of voters ID laws argue they can actually prevent people who are eligible to vote from voting” brought support for voter ID down by 12 points.
Pollsters have not publicly investigated whether Texan voters would show a similar shift, though it could be significant that support in the state for voter ID has remained at around 66% for the past two years, less than its support nationwide. Of course, 77% of Texas believe “voter ID laws are mainly used to prevent fraud,” an alternate-reality bubble that attention to these cases may just yet pop.
It’s the Department of Justice that’ll have to bring this to pass. The GOP has always easily waved away “systemic” racism charges, like those made under the non-gutted VRA, as either outright inventions or the result of looking for equal outcomes rather than equal opportunities. Making clear the racist intent of voter ID laws will bring the discussion back to where it belongs: on equal opportunities, in the voting booth.
By: Ana Marie Cox, The Guardian, July 16, 2014
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