“An Electoral Facsimile Of Jim Crow”: Virginia Republicans Move Forward With Mass Voter Disenfranchisement
This morning, I wrote on an emerging Republican plan—in swing states won by President Obama—to rig presidential elections by awarding electoral votes to the winner of the most congressional districts. Because Democratic voters tend to cluster in highly-populated urban areas, and Republican voters tend to reside in more sparsely populated regions, this makes land the key variable in elections—to win the majority of a state’s electoral votes, your voters will have to occupy the most geographic space.
In addition to disenfranchising voters in dense areas, this would end the principle of “one person, one vote.” If Ohio operated under this scheme, for example, Obama would have received just 22 percent of the electoral votes, despite winning 52 percent of the popular vote in the state.
For this reason, I didn’t expect Republicans to go forward with the plan—the risk of blowback is just too high. My skepticism, however, was misplaced. In Virginia, a local news station reports that just this afternoon, a state Senate subcommittee recommended a bill end Virginia’s winner-take-all system and apportion its 13 electoral votes by congressional district.
Unlike similar proposals in Pennsylvania and Michigan, this one wouldn’t award the remaining electoral votes to the winner (Virginia has 11 districts). Rather, the winner of the most congressional districts would get the final two votes. If this were in effect last year, Obama would have gotten just 4 of the state’s votes, despite winning 51 percent of its voters.
The bill’s sponsor, Republican Senator Charles W. “Bill” Carrico, says the change is necessary because Virginia’s urbanized areas can outvote rural regions, weakening their political strength. In other words, Carrico thinks winning land is more important than winning people when it comes to presidential elections.
It should be said that this scheme, if carried out on a large scale, will guarantee an explosion of recounts. In any district where there is a narrow margin between the two candidates, there will be every incentive to challenge the results. Republicans present this as a way to streamline elections, but in reality, it would complicate them, and drag out the process for weeks—if not months. It would be Florida in the 2000 election, multiplied by 435.
It should also be said, again, that this constitutes a massive disenfranchisement of African American and other nonwhite voters, who tend to cluster near urban areas. When you couple this with the move on Monday to redraw the state’s electoral maps—eliminating one state senate district and packing black voters into another, diluting their strength—it’s as if Virginia Republicans are responding to Obama’s repeat victory in the state by building an electoral facsimile of Jim Crow.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, January 23, 2013
“Ugly And Un-American”: Republicans’ Long Term Strategy Is To Limit Voting Rights
According to political prognosticators, the presidential race is once again a toss-up, settling into a familiar pattern after weeks in which President Obama seemed to be gaining a modest lead. The pundits are wrong to suggest a new dynamic: The race has always been too close to call.
That’s always been the contour of this campaign — periodic gaffes and brilliant debate performances aside. Republican strategists have long expected a close election; they prepared for it years ago. How did they do it? With Machiavellian strokes, GOP leaders around the country passed laws designed to block the ballot for a small number of voting blocs that tend to support Democrats.
It’s no secret — and no surprise — that the strict voter ID laws in vogue in Republican circles target poorer voters, especially those who are black and brown. Black and Latino Americans tend to vote for Democratic candidates.
No matter how much the right yells “voter fraud,” its spokesmen cannot conceal an ugly and old-fashioned strategy: Suppress the vote. Keep poor people of color from casting a ballot. Deny to certain citizens a fundamental democratic right. There is virtually no in-person voter fraud at the polls, and that’s the sort of chicanery that voter identification laws ostensibly prevent.
Instead, voter ID laws are intended to help Republicans win elections. Because the GOP brain trust is excellent at executing a long-term strategy, its demographers saw the party’s weakness years ago and began to plan for it. As the nation’s ethnic minorities, especially Latinos, grow in number, the Republican Party would have to become more inclusive or face extinction.
President George W. Bush tried to make the GOP more inclusive, but he couldn’t persuade the nativists in his party to back comprehensive immigration reform. Instead, the Republican base became more exclusionary, more jingoistic, more suspicious of diversity.
That’s why voter ID laws became so important to the party’s future. In a deeply polarized country, important races are increasingly decided by very narrow margins. In 2000, the popular vote was essentially tied. In 2004, Bush won the popular vote by about 2.5 percentage points over John Kerry. In such tight contests, Republicans need not disenfranchise large numbers of voters — just a few.
The GOP insists it just wants to protect “ballot integrity,” but sometimes its lesser lights fail to stay on message. In June, Pennsylvania state House Majority Leader Mike Turzai, a Republican, proudly recited a list of accomplishments at a state party meeting. “Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it’s done. First pro-life legislation — abortion facility regulations — in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”
Since young adults voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008, college students have also been the targets of stringent voter ID laws. In New Hampshire, for example, state House Speaker Bill O’Brien, also a Republican, pushed hard for a ban on college-issued photo IDs at the polls and an end to same-day voter registration in 2011.
Allowing students to register and vote on the same day, he later told a group of tea partiers, would simply lead to “the kids coming out of the schools and basically doing what I did when I was a kid, which is voting as a liberal. That’s what kids do — they don’t have life experience, and they just vote their feelings.”
Neither Turzai nor O’Brien mentioned voter fraud.
If protecting the ballot from con artists were the real issue here, Republicans would zero in on absentee ballots, which have been at the heart of most of the biggest voting scams over the last several decades. The Commission on Federal Election Reform, headed by James Baker and Jimmy Carter, cited absentee ballots as the “largest source of potential voter fraud” in its 2005 report.
Curiously, rules for absentee ballots have been loosened in many states. That’s because of the widespread perception that those ballots of convenience are more likely to be used by Republican voters.
The Republican Party ought to be ashamed of this ugly and un-American strategy. For all its talk about the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution, it seems to have little respect for one of its basic principles: the right to vote.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, October 13, 2012
“Subsidized By Taxpayers”: Pennsylvania Makes It Even Harder To Vote
Pennsylvania has gotten a lot of attention recently for its new restrictive voter ID law which was just affirmed by a state judge this week. However, that’s not the only barrier to voting that the Keystone State has imposed recently.
On Wednesday, Pennsylvania suddenly reversed course on implementing a system that allows voters to register and sign up for absentee ballots on the Internet. In an email, a state official said implementing the new system before the November election would be too difficult. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, this news came as a shock to the top elections official in Philadelphia, that state’s largest municipality.
In contrast, New York unveiled its new online system for voter registration this week, just before the voter registration deadline for the state’s September primaries. This was not thought to present any additional complications.
Online voter registration, which is now available in 13 states, does make it mildly easier for people to register to vote. But that’s not the only benefit. It also saves a lot of money.
The data from handwritten voter registration and absentee ballot forms has to be manually entered into computers. This takes time and costs money (not to mention creates a lot of potential for error). A form filled out on a computer can be directly input into a state’s voter database. There are estimates that New York’s law would lead to taxpayers saving at least $250,000 a year as a result.
The decision by Pennsylvania to hold off implementing its online system until after November is bad enough because it may make it more difficult for some to register and to vote. But the fact that this additional obstacle to voting will be subsidized by taxpayers makes it even worse.
By: Ben Jacobs, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 18, 2012
“Voter Rights Lose in Pennsylvania”: To Protect Your Right To Vote, You Must Lose Your Right To Vote
Let’s imagine a world in which Pennsylvania’s voter-ID law did not disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters. The law, which requires voters show government-issued identification in order to vote, has created significant burdens for voters without IDs, a population disproportionately made up of poor people and minorities. In our imaginary world, the state would do a stellar job of educating voters, reaching out to African Americans—who disproportionately lack state IDs—and Spanish-language media. They would send postcards as early as possible to tell every voter in the state about the change. A “card of last resort” would be available to any voter who could not easily access the required documents for a standard ID, which include a birth certificate and a Social Security card. Employees at the state’s driver’s license centers would be well-versed in the law and give voters advice about what was needed and what they were entitled to receive for free. Election workers would be well-trained and poll places would have provisional ballots for those who did not have ID on election day. If every single component of that implementation went perfectly, then maybe the law would not have the disastrous impact that almost all voting-rights activists predict it will have.
According to Pennsylvania Commonwealth Judge Robert Simpson, the mere possibility of that counterfactual scenario is enough. This morning, the judge denied a request from four voting-rights groups to block the law. The lawsuit will now head to the state supreme court—”as quickly as possible,” says Penda Hair, executive director for the Advancement Project, one of the parties to the suit.
Over the phone, Hair was deflated. “It’s a very sad day for democracy,” she said.
Simpson’s decision centered on a few key legal questions: Whether the law was unconstitutional “on its face”—as opposed to in practice—and what standard should be applied to judge its constitutionality. In evaluating laws, judges apply different standards. “Strict scrutiny” is an elevated standard, which is most typically applied when the law in question targets minorities or involves a fundamental right; to be ruled constitutional, the law must be narrowly tailored, serve a “compelling state interest,” and be the only way the state can achieve the intended effect. In other words, the state has the burden of showing that we really, really need this law. The “rational basis” is much more lenient—all the state has to show is that the law serves some legitimate purpose (i.e., that it’s not totally frivolous). In his lengthy opinion, the judge determined that, based on prior cases, including the U.S. Supreme Court case over Indiana’s voter-ID law, a strict scrutiny test was not “the appropriate measure” for the case. Because of this, the law’s proponents did not need to show that the Pennsylvania law served a “compelling state interest.” In other words, even though the law was ostensibly passed to prevent voter fraud, the fact there is no voter-fraud problem in the state doesn’t matter. Simpson also wrote that the plaintiffs’ case hinged on the many things that would or could go wrong, but that the law was not unconstitutional as written—the plaintiffs would have to wait until after the election to see if it had been harmful.
In a conference call with Hair and the other plaintiffs’ lawyers, the legal team was eager to point out that should the state Supreme Court subject the law to stricter scrutiny, they would stand a much better chance of winning. The lawyers pointed to cases in Missouri and Wisconsin, where courts found that similar voter-ID laws violated their state constitutions, based on a strict-scrutiny test. Simpson had relied more heavily on precedent from a U.S. Supreme Court case that ruled on violations to the federal Constitution—a different argument than the one the plaintiffs were making.
Hair had harsh words for the judge’s decision. The ruling implied “voters have to wait until after the election, after they’re barred from voting, and then you can show that the harm is actually applied to them,” she said. “To protect your right to vote you have to lose your right to vote in one important election. That’s the only way I can read this.”
In the conference call, attorney David Gersch was even more blunt. “The court was wrong about that,” he said, pointing to the judge’s acknowledgement that certainly more than 1 percent of voters would be impacted. In Pennsylvania that means at least 89,000 people may lose a fundamental right.
The state has talked a lot about its plans for voter outreach and making it easier to obtain an ID. But so far, the only thing the state has done is to allow those born in Pennsylvania to retrieve a “certified birth record” by providing their personal information at a driver’s license center. It’s easier than obtaining a birth certificate for sure, but it still requires two trips—one to request the record and another to get an ID. There are other measures in the works: For those lacking documents, an ID “of last resort” is supposed to become available by the end of August, and by the end of September, postcards will go out to every voting household in the state informing people of the new law. Pennsylvania has also hired a PR company to do media outreach.
But many doubt these efforts will be sufficient. The PR company the state hired is controlled by Republicans, which some say will be disinclined to alert poor and nonwhite voters—voters who lean Democratic—about the law. It is also unclear how many people—and where—the law will affect. The state’s data showed more than 750,000 without a state ID, but that data has significant flaws. In testimony, a state official explained that he expected fewer than 10,000 IDs to be issued for voting purposes.
Voting-rights advocates are suspicious of the state’s efforts. The Pennsylvania Voter ID Coalition, made up of 140 civic, religious and voting-rights groups, has opted not to educate any voters on the “card of last resort” until it’s actually available, since the state doesn’t always make its deadlines. Meanwhile, several studies have shown that employees at the driver’s license centers are not sufficiently familiar with the law and have misinformed voters about the rules.
Judge Simpson, however, put great faith in the state’s voter-outreach efforts. He was dismissive of the plaintiff’s expert witness, a political scientist who showed through survey research that a third of voters were unaware of the law and as much as 12.6 percent of the state’s registered voters may lack the necessary ID. “I am not convinced any qualified elector need be disenfranchised by Act 18,” Simpson wrote, pointing to absentee voting and provisional ballot options for those struggling meet the requirements.
Oddly, however, the judge did acknowledge that the law would hurt voter access. He gave the plaintiffs credit for establishing that the law would prevent some legitimate voters from casting ballots and that some would unfairly be charged for their IDs. He even addressed statements from Mike Turzai, the Republican House Majority Leader who said in an audience that voter ID would ensure a Romney victory, calling the statements “disturbing, tendentious” and “boastful.” But he chose to believe Turzai was alone in his cynical and partisan views, and decided granting the injunction would do more to hurt than help the problems.
To Hair, Simpson’s opinion amounts to a punt to the state Supreme Court. “I interpret it as the lower court saying, ‘If I make a ruling one way or another and then the Supreme Court changes that ruling on appeal, which is going to be worse?” she said. (As I’ve written, this is a concern many activists have had about the ruling.) Hair is already focusing on the Supreme Court, where she believes the plaintiffs can prove that with so many impacted, the law creates an undue burden.
“There won’t be a question that close to a million people will be affected by this law,” she says. “You don’t need to show absolutely without any doubt that you will be barred from voting. We showed massive burdens that these voters have to overcome.”
“We believe that just like the poll tax wasn’t an absolute barrier—you could pay the tax and vote—overcoming these burdens should not be a requirement.”
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, August 15, 2012
“Red, White And Untrue”: Romney’s Big Lie About Military Voting
No, Obama is not trying to restrict military voting in Ohio.
If Ferris Bueller taught us anything, it was this: If you’re going to lie or mislead, do it in a big, over-the-top kind of way. At least it’ll be memorable.
It’s a lesson Mitt Romney’s campaign took to heart this past weekend. But instead of stealing a Ferrari or taking over a parade, they opted for something much darker. Halfway through the general-election campaign, attacks from both campaigns have been so relentless as to make each one fade into a low background buzz. Getting something to cut through the noise is hard. So when President Obama’s campaign filed a lawsuit to restore the rights to all Ohio citizens to cast early ballots up until the Sunday before Election Day—a right that the Ohio legislature had restricted to active-duty military personnel casting their ballots in person—the Romney side decided to go all in with a charge so outlandish it was bound to capture attention.
“President Obama’s lawsuit claiming it is unconstitutional for Ohio to allow servicemen and women extended early voting privileges during the state’s early voting period is an outrage,” the Republican candidate’s Facebook message proclaimed. Next came a statement from the campaign: “We Must Defend the Rights of Military Voters.” Right-wing bloggers took it from there, and the outraged headlines came pouring forth. When 15 military groups filed paperwork to be interveners in the case, requesting that the Obama campaign’s suit be dismissed in court, the whole thing really caught fire.
After months of backing voting restrictions—like voter ID laws that could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands across the country—you almost have to admire the chutzpah of the Romney campaign for lashing out against Obama on the issue of voting rights, and accusing him of restricting military voters. Particularly because the charge is entirely untrue.
If there’s one thing that’s certain in Ohio, it’s that voters in the military will have the right to vote on the Saturday, Sunday, and Monday before the November 6 election—no matter what happens with Obama’s lawsuit. Active-duty soldiers who are stationed outside of Ohio still get to send in their ballots, too. It’s the rest of the state—including a much larger number of veterans and military families—whose early-voting rights the Obama campaign is suing to protect. The president wants to ensure that all Ohio voters can vote early, as they could in 2008. Ohio’s Republican leadership wants to keep it limited to active military—making voting harder for everyone else, and likely decreasing turnout among poorer and likely Democratic voters. But they still want points for patriotism!
While the motivations for the skirmish are almost entirely political, the fight will have a real impact on voters in one of the nation’s most fiercely contested battleground states. So let’s break it all down:
What exactly is the Obama campaign suing over?
Thanks to its status as a key swing state, many will remember the infamous Election Day lines at Ohio polling stations. After it got particularly horrendous in 2004, the state extended its early voting period to ease the pressure at the polls. Famously in 2008, black church congregations showed up en masse to vote for Obama on the Sunday before the election; around 93,000 Ohioans voted in the three days before the election. There’s nothing unusual about this: Across the country, early voting has been successfully adopted by most states as a way to increase turnout and make Election days go more smoothly. The extra days particularly help those without access to transportation or with inflexible job schedules—poorer voters who tend to vote Democratic.
But after Obama’s win, Republicans began promoting a voter-restriction strategy across the country, including Ohio. The state’s majority-Republican legislature passed a bunch of new voting laws in 2011. Among other things, they halted early voting on the Friday before the election; it had previously continued until Monday, the day before the election. But as the Washington Post explains, “there was a problem: The measures contained conflicting deadlines for military personnel and their families, who benefit from the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voter Act.” To resolve the conflict, Ohio’s secretary of state determined that while military voters would get to vote through Monday, the rest of the state would have an early voting deadline three days earlier. In other words, while an active-duty solider could cast a ballot on the Sunday before an election, a military veteran, like the rest of the state’s voters, could not.
And that’s where the lawsuit comes in?
Right. The Obama campaign argues that all state voters should have the same deadline: the Monday before Election Day. By creating two different classes of voters, the Obamacampaign argues, Ohio now violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. “Whether caused by legislative error or partisan motivation,” the lawsuit reads, “the result of this legislative process is arbitrary and inequitable treatment of similarly situated Ohio voters with respect to in-person early voting.”
The Romney campaign is charging that, by calling for equal treatment for all Ohio voters, the Obama campaign is saying that it’s unconstitutional for military voters to have extended early voting priviledges. That’s patently false. “They’re not asking for the court to somehow withdraw the rights of military and overseas voters,” says Sonia GIll, an associate council for the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “They’re asking for the rest of Ohioans to have the same rights afforded in-person military voters.”
Meanwhile, military voters overseas or in combat will not be impacted one way or another—they can still send in absentee ballots as always.
But if military voters aren’t being affected, why are military groups working to have the lawsuit dismissed?
Good question. Fifteen groups representing active soldiers have “intervened” in the Obama campaign’s suit, asking that the judge dismiss the case. The groups are afraid that the campaign’s argument will undercut privileges for members of the military: “Although the relief Plaintiffs seek is an overall extension of Ohio’s early voting period,” their motion to intervene states, “the means through which Plaintiffs are attempting to attain it—a ruling that it is arbitrary and unconstitutional to grant extra time for early voting solely to military voters and overseas citizens—is both legally inappropriate and squarely contrary to the legal interests and constitutional rights of [the military groups intervening].”
In other words, the government must be allowed to make accommodations to military voters that are not made for the rest of the population, even when the military voters in question are voting in-person in their state. (Calls to two of the groups in the suit were not returned.)
But the government already makes special accomodations for military voters—thanks in part to President Obama. He signed the Military Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act, which made a number of extra voting guarantees to servicemen and women overseas. For example, military bases now must have voter-registration services, and those serving overseas are allowed to send and receive their applications for voter registration and absentee ballots by email or fax as well as through the mail.
But when it comes to the lawsuit, it’s Team Obama versus a united military and Team Romney?
Hardly. When it comes to special privileges on U.S. soil, many have argued against the groups intervening in the Ohio lawsuit. Diane Mazur, a law professor at the University of Florida and a former Air Force officer, told Buzzfeed that the groups’ argument is “extremely misleading.” While military voters get special privileges when away on duty and voting absentee, Mazur says there’s no history of providing particular accomodations to military voters casting a ballot in person. “The idea that service member are fuller citizens than the rest of America is a disaster for military professionalism,” she says.
Jon Stoltz, who heads the group VoteVets, has been outspoken in support of the Obama campaign’s lawsuit. “What appalled me so much about the narrative in Ohio,” he said on a telephone call with reporters, “is that the Romney campaign is supporting legislation that actually denies 900,000 veterans in the state of Ohio the right to vote early.”
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, August 8, 2012
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