“Today’s GOP Confederates And Dixiecrats”: Amazing How The Only Group Voter Suppression Doesn’t Target Is White Men
The Republican defense of laws requiring identification to vote usually goes like this: “Who doesn’t have ID? And why can’t they get it?”
They’re forced to this defense because they can’t point to one election in modern American history that was swung by the phantom scourge of in-person voting fraud. They know they can’t because the Bush administration tried to find one for years and couldn’t.
These questions are rhetorical, because any serious attempt to answer them indicts the effort to make voting more difficult.
Who doesn’t have voter ID?
In 2012, “the state admitted that between 603,892 and 795,955 registered in voters in Texas lacked government-issued photo ID, with Hispanic voters between 46.5 percent to 120 percent more likely than whites to not have the new voter ID,” according to The Nation‘s Ari Berman.
And why can’t they get it?
The laws purposely make it difficult to get IDs. In Texas, residents had to pay a minimum of $22 to get the necessary documentation at a government office, such as the Department of Motor Vehicles. “Counties with a significant Hispanic population are less likely to have a DMV office, while Hispanic residents in such counties are twice as likely as whites to not have the new voter ID (Hispanics in Texas are also twice as likely as whites to not have a car),” Berman points out.
But Texas’s law doesn’t only make it more difficult for Latinos to vote, it also places an undue burden on one specific gender. Guess which one!
The New Civil Rights Movement‘s Jean Ann Esselink explains: As of November 5, Texans must show a photo ID with their up-to-date legal name. It sounds like such a small thing, but according to the Brennan Center for Justice, only 66 percent of voting age women have ready access to a photo document that will attest to proof of citizenship. This is largely because young women have not updated their documents with their married names, a circumstance that doesn’t affect male voters in any significant way. Suddenly 34 percent of women voters are scrambling for an acceptable ID, while 99 percent of men are home free.
Democratic strategist Alex Palambo points out, “Similar to how poor, minority, and elderly voters in Pennsylvania had trouble getting to the DMV to obtain a state ID or driver’s license before the election, women in Texas are having trouble getting an acceptable photo ID that matches their most current name.”
Palambo feels it’s more than a coincidence that voting is becoming more difficult for women just as State Senator Wendy Davis (D-Fort Worth) prepares to take on Texas attorney general Greg Abbott to replace Rick Perry as the state’s governor.
“Greg Abbott has a reason to be scared of Davis, his own popularity with women is low, most likely due to his strict reproductive health restrictions, gutting of childcare funding, and opposition to equal pay,” she notes. The party may also be thinking ahead to 2016, when another Democratic woman might be on the ballot.
Regardless, voter ID is a policy that seems designed to make it harder for everyone to vote, except white men.
Even the conservative federal judge who wrote the majority opinion in the 2008 case that ultimately upheld that such laws were constitutional now admits the true agenda of these laws.
In his new book, Stephen A. Posner admits that he regrets his decision in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, noting that the law it upheld is “now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention.”
The Reagan-appointed federal appeals court judge now agrees with Judge Terence T. Evans, his colleague who wrote the minority decision in Crawford. “Let’s not beat around the bush: The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage Election Day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic,” Evans wrote.
Posner admits that he wasn’t aware of the “trickery” inherent in the law when he made his decision just two years after a Republican Congress and president had renewed the Voting Rights Act, which was recently gutted by the Roberts court.
“I plead guilty to having written the majority opinion,” he writes in Reflections On Judging.
Perhaps he should have asked himself a question: Why would the party that claims to hate government regulation demand government regulation to solve a problem that doesn’t exist?
The answer — unfortunately — is sad and simple.
“The Confederates and Dixiecrats of yesteryear are the Republicans of today,” writes Berman.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, October 20, 2013
“The Summer Of Voting Discontent”: Texas’ Voter ID Laws Are Plain And Simple Discrimination
Last month, the Department of Justice sued Texas over the state’s discriminatory and punishing voter ID law, SB 14. The same law was blocked by a federal court last summer, which determined that a “law that forces poorer citizens to choose between their wages and their franchise unquestionably denies or abridges their right to vote.”
In a state and country where voters of color are significantly more likely to live in poverty than white voters, the impermissible choice that Texas has imposed on voters discriminates on the basis of class and race both. In the wake of Supreme Court’s decision earlier this summer in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, which immobilized a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Justice’s lawsuit represents the next phase in pushing back against measures that are intended to make it harder for people of color to vote, and less likely that our votes will count when we do.
Texas, like many states, passed SB 14 for the ostensible reason of combating in-person voter fraud, which Hillary Rodham Clinton recently called a “phantom epidemic.” But Texas has not been able to identify a single instance of in-person voter fraud. Texas has said that the law is not intended to discriminate against Black and Latino voters, whose communities represent 90 percent of the state’s population grown in the past decade, and yet the state’s legislature refused to accept any of the amendments offered that would have mitigated any of SB 14’s burdens that disproportionately affect voters of color — amendments that, for example, would have created a way for poor voters to get free identification, or would have accepted student IDs.
A single comparison of the accepted and not accepted forms of photo ID makes the priorities of the law clear: SB 14 will allow voters to present a concealed handgun license at the polls, but not a student ID from any of Texas’s public universities.
In addition to challenging the discriminatory ID law itself, the DoJ lawsuit also seeks to bail Texas in to a preclearance structure similar to the one that was lost in the Shelby County decision. Texas’s longstanding history of crafting discriminatory voting laws and schemes extends far past the voter ID law at issue now; in fact, Texas boasts the inglorious accolade of being the only state for which federal authorities have challenged at least one of its statewide redistricting plans after every decennial census since 1970.
As recently as last year, a federal court concluded that the state had drawn up its various redistricting plans with the intent to suppress the growing political power of African-American and Latino districts. A provision of the Voting Rights Act asserted in the DOJ’s case can bring back to Texas the preclearance defense lost in June’s Shelby County decision.
As the summer of our voting discontent draws to a close, it should serve as a powerful message that the first major voting lawsuit filed by the DOJ since the Shelby County decision goes directly to a state with one of the most well-documented histories of racial discrimination in voting, and seeks to use the full power of the remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act both to invalidate SB 14 and to bring Texas back under federal review.
By: Natasha Korgaonkar, Assistant Counsel of the Political Participation Group at the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, U. S. News and World Report, September 3, 2013
“It’s Not Just Freaks”: Who’s Affected By Pennsylvania’s Voter-ID Law?
The ACLU’s smart lawsuit shows it’s not just freaks who don’t have government-issued identification.
As the first big lawsuit against the Pennsylvania’s voter-ID law starts its third day at trial, arguments about the legality of the law have focused largely on who’s impacted by it. First, the secretary of the commonwealth estimated as many as 758,000 Pennsylvanians lacked the most common form of ID—those issued by the state Department of Transportation. A political scientist’s study showed that number to be around a million. Either way, it’s a lot of people, and we know a disproportionate number of them are poor, nonwhite, and elderly.
Still, those supporting strict voter-ID laws, which require citizens to show government-issued identification before voting, often cast suspicion on anyone without an ID. They argue that you need photo identification for pretty much anything these days, and people without them must be freaks or criminals—people we don’t want voting anyway. Republican Texas state Representative Jose Aliseda exemplifies this position; he recently said that anyone lacking a photo ID is probably in the country illegally or a recluse like the Unabomber.
In response, the ACLU, along with the other groups involved, made a brilliant move to publicize the stories of the ten plaintiffs. They’ve written up summaries of each person’s plight, made videos, and pushed the stories in the press. Those wondering just who these strange people without ID are getting an answer: Quite a few are little old ladies.
Of the ten people in the lawsuit, five are over 80. The chief plaintiff, Viviette Applewhite, is 93, and arrived in court in a wheelchair wearing “a gray sweater and a white lace hat,” according to Reuters. She was a civil-rights activist who marched in Macon, Georgia, with Martin Luther King, but even with all the time between now and the election, she’s probably not going to be able to get the necessary ID. Applewhite, who does not drive, took her husband’s name. That is the name she had on her Social Security card. But when her purse was stolen, the only document that she could get was a birth certificate—with her maiden name. Applewhite had a common-law marriage, so there’s no document to account for the mismatched name.
Applewhite isn’t the only elderly woman on the plaintiff list. There’s also Joyce Block, a spring chicken at 89, whose Social Security card and birth certificate were in her maiden name while her voter registration was in her married name. Block’s marriage certificate is in Hebrew and apparently the the clerks at the DMV were a little rusty in their ancient languages—they said the certificate could not be used as a proof of name change. Several of the other octogenarians in the case could not get copies of their birth certificates (necessary to get the IDs) because the state where they were born does not issue them.
Of course, older ladies aren’t the only ones in the lawsuit or the only ones with powerful stories. There’s Grover Freeland, a veteran whose only photo ID is his veteran’s card, issued by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. But that card is not an acceptable form of ID under the Pennsylvania law. The ten plaintiffs all have different reasons why they cannot get an ID, but almost all of them are regular voters who now stand to lose their ability to cast a ballot.
Voting is a citizen’s fundamental duty and right, and those who fall outside of the mainstream have just as much of a right to vote as the mainstream. However, for the purposes of winning public support in this case, the ACLU was smart to choose and highlight relatable people who are impacted by the law. As with Republicans’ claims that voter ID laws were motivated purely by the need to cut down on voter fraud (which is virtually nonexistent), their claim that there’s something downright weird about people who lack photo IDs is now being exploded.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, July 27, 2012
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