“The Republican Self-Preservation Act”: Texas Voter ID Law Discriminates Against Women, Students And Minorities
Texas’s new voter ID law got off to a rocky start this week as early voting began for state constitutional amendments. The law was previously blocked as discriminatory by the federal courts under the Voting Rights Act in 2012, until the Supreme Court invalidated Section 4 of the VRA in June. (The Department of Justice has filed suit against the law under Section 2 of the VRA.) Now we are seeing the disastrous ramifications of the Supreme Court’s decision.
Based on Texas’ own data, 600,000 to 800,000 registered voters don’t have the government-issued ID needed to cast a ballot, with Hispanics 46 to 120 percent more likely than whites to lack an ID. But a much larger segment of the electorate, particularly women, will be impacted by the requirement that a voter’s ID be “substantially similar” to their name on the voter registration rolls. According to a 2006 study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a third of all women have citizenship documents that do not match their current legal name.
Just yesterday, this happened (via Rick Hasen), from KiiiTV in South Texas:
“What I have used for voter registration and for identification for the last 52 years was not sufficient yesterday when I went to vote,” 117th District Court Judge Sandra Watts said.
Watts has voted in every election for the last forty-nine years. The name on her driver’s license has remained the same for fifty-two years, and the address on her voter registration card or driver’s license hasn’t changed in more than two decades. So imagine her surprise when she was told by voting officials that she would have to sign a “voters affidavit” affirming she was who she said she was.
“Someone looked at that and said, ‘Well, they’re not the same,’” Watts said.
The difference? On the driver’s license, Judge Watts’s maiden name is her middle name. On her voter registration, it’s her actual middle name. That was enough under the new, more strict voter fraud law, to send up a red flag.
“This is the first time I have ever had a problem voting,” Watts said.
The disproportionate impact of the law on women voters could be a major factor in upcoming Texas elections, especially now that Wendy Davis is running for governor in 2014.
Moreover, the state is doing very little to make sure that voters who don’t have an ID can get one. As I mentioned, 600–800,000 registered voters don’t have an acceptable voter ID, but according to the Dallas Morning News “only 41 of the new cards were issued by DPS [Department of Public Safety] as of last week.”
Getting a valid photo ID in Texas can be far more difficult than one assumes. To obtain one of the government-issued IDs now needed to vote, voters must first pay for underlying documents to confirm their identity, the cheapest option being a birth certificate for $22 (otherwise known as a “poll tax”); there are no DMV offices in eighty-one of 254 counties in the state, with some voters needing to travel up to 250 miles to the closest location. 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). “A law that forces poorer citizens to choose between their wages and their franchise unquestionably denies or abridges their right to vote,” a federal court wrote last year when it blocked the law.
Texas has set up mobile voter ID units in twenty counties to help people obtain an ID, but has issued new IDs to only twenty voters at the sites so far.
Supporters of the voter ID law, such as Governor Rick Perry, argue that it’s necessary to stop the rampant menace of voter fraud. But there’s no evidence that voter impersonation fraud is a problem in Texas. According to the comprehensive News21 database, there has been only one successful conviction for voter impersonation—I repeat, only one—since 2000.
Texas has the distinction of being one of the few states that allows you to vote with a concealed weapons permit, but not a student ID. Provisions like these suggest that the law was aimed less at stopping voter fraud and more at stopping the changing demographics of the state. Based on what we’re seeing thus far, the law might better be described as the Republican Self-Preservation Act.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, October 23, 2013
“Let’s Not Beat Around The Bush”: Voter ID Laws Have But One Intent, To Limit The Franchise
Belatedly, federal Judge Richard Posner has arrived at the obvious conclusion about voter identification laws: They are enacted as a barrier to the franchise, an un-American tactic hatched by conservatives to prevent certain people from voting. It’s too bad that his epiphany came so late.
Posner is one of the nation’s most respected conservative jurists. As a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, he might have led the nation’s highest court to reject new restrictions around voting. Instead, in 2007, Posner wrote the majority opinion that upheld Indiana’s stringent law, setting the stage for the U.S. Supreme Court to reason that it did no harm to an unfettered franchise.
That was quite wrong, as Posner now acknowledges. While he disavowed his earlier endorsement of the law in a new book, Reflections of Judging, he went further in a video interview earlier this month with The Huffington Post, saying that the dissenting view was the right one.
In that dissent, the late Judge Terence Evans wrote: “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.” That about sums it up.
Still, I see in Posner’s late-arriving epiphany occasion for hope that debates about obstacles to voting, which have proliferated in states controlled by Republicans, will now proceed with more intellectual honesty. Let’s give up the preposterous justification that the barrage of new restrictions around the franchise — regulations that include limits on early voting — are intended to prevent voter fraud.
Recently, the consequences of those restrictions have been clear in Texas, which was among the states that rolled out new measures after the U.S. Supreme Court decimated the Voting Rights Act earlier this year. (Posner has had interesting comments about that decision too, dismissing its intellectual and legal foundations as non-existent. “The opinion rests on air,” he wrote.)
Eighty-four-year-old Dorothy Card, a Texas resident, has voted for six decades, but she stopped driving 15 years ago and doesn’t have a driver’s license, the ID preferred in voter-suppression states. By late last month, she had tried three times to obtain an ID that would allow her to vote in November elections, according to Think Progress, a left-leaning political blog. Her daughter said she would keep trying but with little expectation of success since each attempt required a different set of documents.
But perhaps the case that poses the biggest challenge for the Texas voter-suppression camp concerns a sitting judge, Sandra Watts. She was nearly barred from voting earlier this month because her name is listed slightly differently on her driver’s license than on voter registration rolls. Her driver’s license lists her maiden name as her middle name, while the voter registration roll lists her real middle name. As a consequence, she was told she’d have to vote using a provisional ballot, which would be checked to assure her identity.
As she told a Texas TV station, it’s not unusual for a married woman to condense her name by putting her maiden name in the middle. “I don’t think most women know that this is going to create a problem. That their maiden name is on their driver’s license, which was mandated in 1964 when I got married …” she said.
Meanwhile, there are no — zip, zilch, zero — comparable stories of fraud prevented by the new laws. Perhaps that’s because in-person fraudulent voting of the sort the new laws ostensibly prevent is virtually non-existent. Analyses have consistently shown that voter fraud is much more likely to occur through absentee ballots, which the voter-suppression crowd have usually ignored.
Here’s the not-so-hidden agenda behind voter ID laws: blocking the franchise for voters who lean toward Democrats. Those voters can be found easily enough among poorer blacks and Latinos, who tend to be less likely to own cars and to have driver’s licenses. Target them, and you can shave off several hundred or a few thousand votes — enough to win a close election.
That’s what Republicans are up to. Let’s hope Posner’s acknowledgment might at least spark more honesty about their motives.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, October 26, 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
“Going Once, Going Twice, Sold”: Under A New Texas Law, The Police Can Act As Gun Dealers
For decades, weapons confiscated by the police in Texas were supposed to be used for law enforcement purposes — or else destroyed. Starting next month, police departments across the state will be allowed to sell some of them.
Some local departments have already been selling confiscated weapons, operating under a gray area of existing law, said T. Edwin Walker, president of Texas Law Shield, which provides legal services to Texas gun owners.
House Bill 1421, which passed during the last legislative session, formally permits law enforcement officials to sell found or unclaimed weapons to licensed firearms dealers. They can also sell confiscated weapons that are left unclaimed after cases that were never prosecuted or did not result in a conviction. In cases that do result in a conviction, police departments keep the firearms as evidence in case they are needed for appeals.
The new rule gives law enforcement another option, said State Representative Charles Perry, Republican of Lubbock and the author of the bill. “It has a fiscal impact in a positive way, and it makes sense if the weapons are in good shape.”
It is unclear how well the measure will meet its stated goal, which Mr. Walker said is allowing the police to “recoup some money, to put some money back in their budget.” Police departments in large Texas cities like San Antonio, Houston and Austin, which destroyed hundreds of guns in 2012, have said they would not participate.
Some law enforcement officials said they already had department policies against selling confiscated firearms and worried about putting more weapons back on the street.
The Waco Police Department has not yet decided if it will sell confiscated guns, but “at first blush it is probably not something we will be willing to do just for the fact that we don’t want to put additional weapons back out there on the street that have already been confiscated or used in a crime,” said Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton, the department’s public information officer.
Those who might rely on the new law? Small, cash-starved departments in rural Texas, some of which have already been making such resales.
In Crane County, home to about 4,300 people at the base of the Texas Panhandle, even two gun confiscations a year are a lot, said Chief Deputy Andrew Aguilar of the county sheriff’s office. Firearms his department has seized in the past have already been sold, he said.
In many rural towns, sheriffs’ sales of seized property are common sources of income, said Alice Tripp, the legislative director of the Texas State Rifle Association.
After the law takes effect on Sept. 1, law enforcement agencies will be able to sell confiscated guns to licensed weapons dealers. The proceeds will first cover outstanding court or auctioneer’s fees; the remainder will go to the police department that seized the weapon.
Jason Knowles, the manager of Patriot Firearms in Lubbock, said he doubted the confiscated gun market would be bustling.
“The majority of firearms seized by law enforcement typically are relatively cheap and of low quality,” he said. “You don’t get a lot of high-end guns in the seizure world.”
Sgt. Jason Lewis, the Lubbock Police Department’s public information officer, said the department had destroyed 56 firearms in 2012, many of them cheap, stolen guns in very poor condition. He said it would not participate in gun sales.
“Every once in a while, you get something that you are like ‘Whoa, that’s too bad that you are melting that,’ ” Sergeant Lewis said. “For the most part, it is junk.”
By: Ian Floyd, Texas Tribune, Published in The New York Times, August 24, 2013
“Not In This Lifetime”: Republican Jim Sensenbrenner Asks Attorney General Holder To Back Off In Texas
As we discussed yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder is challenging new voting restrictions imposed by Texas Republicans, hoping to use the remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act to protect Texans’ access to the ballot box. GOP officials, not surprisingly, weren’t pleased with the move, but there was one reaction in particular that I found interesting.
But Mr. Holder’s moves this week could endanger that effort, said Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Wisconsin Republican, who led the latest reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act in 2006.
“The lawsuit would make it much more difficult to pass a bipartisan fix to restore the heart of the VRA that the Supreme Court struck down earlier this year,” Mr. Sensenbrenner said.
He said he had spoken with Mr. Holder and asked him to withdraw the lawsuit.
It’s worth noting for context that Sensenbrenner may be a conservative Republican, but he’s also earned a reputation as a long-time supporter of the Voting Rights Act. Indeed, among GOP lawmakers, it’s probably fair to say the Wisconsin Republican is the VRA’s most reliable ally. When Sensenbrenner says he’s working on a legislative fix in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling, I’m inclined to believe him.
That said, for Holder to back off now would be crazy.
Look, I don’t blame Sensenbrenner for this, but literally every indication suggests congressional Republicans intend to block efforts to pass a new-and-improved Voting Rights Act. The Attorney General has a simple calculation to make: protect Americans against discriminatory voter-suppression tactics or wait for the House GOP to work in a bipartisan fashion on voting rights.
Can anyone seriously blame Holder for preferring the former to the latter? It seems far more realistic for the A.G. to turn Sensenbrenner’s request around and say, “When Congress passes the Voting Rights Act, I’ll stop filing these lawsuits, not the other way around.”
Remember this story from July?
If House Republicans are interested in patching the Voting Rights Act, they aren’t showing it.
“Historically I fully understand why they addressed the situations they did,” Republican Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona, who chairs the House judiciary subcommittee that would handle new voting rights legislation, said to reporters after the hearing. “I am just of the opinion today that we should do as the court said and that is to not focus on punishing the past but on building a better future.”
As we talked about at the time, most of the Republican members of the panel apparently didn’t think the hearing was especially important — which is to say, they didn’t show up — and the witnesses GOP lawmakers called reinforced fears that the party simply isn’t interested in a constructive debate.
The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, for example, was called by Republicans to offer his “expert” testimony on voting rights, despite the fact that von Spakovsky is best known for the loathsome voter-suppression tactics he championed during his tenure in the Bush/Cheney Justice Department. If this is the guy GOP lawmakers are turning to for guidance, the future of the Voting Rights Act is bleak.
Indeed, von Spakovsky assured the Judiciary Committee panel that the “the systematic, widespread discrimination against blacks has long since disappeared” — a claim we know to be ridiculously untrue.
Sensenbrenner’s worthwhile efforts notwithstanding, those waiting for House Republicans to do the right thing on voting rights are going to be waiting a very, very long time.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 23, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 