“In The Face Of Federal Law”: Republicans Decided To Commit Voter Fraud To Prove That It Existed
A confusing but heartening decision in Pennsylvania today, where the judge basically ruled that people can vote with or without picture ID.
This is at least the fourth state where conservatives and Republicans trying to pursue voter suppression legislation have lost. We have Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and now the good old Keystone State. Here for example is the Florida news from late August. And here’s a little summary. A few voter ID laws did get pre-clearance from the Justice Department, in Virginia and New Hampshire, but these are “non-strict” voter ID requirements, meaning that voters without ID can still vote by signing an affadavit vouching for their own identity.
Multiple choice quiz. What is happening here?
A. Vast conspiracy among left-wing judges, joined by the media, to let the freeloaders of America vote without paying taxes.
B. Plot by Acorn, Hugo Chavez, Bill Ayres, and Frantz Fanon, and if you think it matters that Fanon has been dead for 51 years, you don’t understand how these things work.
C. This Little Thing We Have Called Federal Law
In other words, friends, federal law very clearly, and for what I should think are rather obvious historical reasons, comes down on the default side of letting people vote. The law, and the judges seated to uphold it, will generally frown on attempts to impinge upon the franchise in the ways Republicans wish to do.
It’s also just amazing, isn’t it, that the only voter fraud scandal of this election (alleged, at this point) is a Republican one. Unable to find any cases of actual voter fraud on the Democratic side, the Republicans have apparently decided to go out and commit some to prove with finality that the problem exists!
It’s nice to see that open cheating still doesn’t work.
Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 2, 2012
“The Rest Of The Story”: What’s The Deal With The Pennsylvania Voter-ID Law?
The Keystone State goes to court this week over its voter-ID law. So what is that again? And where does the Department of Justice fit in?
We get it. Real-life court dramas are not as exciting as Judge Judy (and definitely not as exciting as Judge Joe Brown). So we totally don’t judge you for not knowing why the hell Pennsylvania’s voter-ID law is suddenly in court.
Of course, you thought you’d covered your bases when you read our early explanation of voter-ID laws. (If you didn’t, well, you only need to be a little embarrassed.) You know there’s basically no evidence of in-person voter fraud where one person impersonates another—the only type of fraud voter ID guards against. You know that the big fights were in Texas and South Carolina. So why is everyone so worked up about some court case in Harrisburg?
Well let us be quick and leave you plenty of time for Court TV.
So a bunch of states have voter-ID laws—what’s the big deal about Pennsylvania?
Well, not shockingly in a presidential election year, a lot of it boils down to politics. Pennsylvania is a swing state in a close election, so every vote each side can pull counts big. Most people believe voter-ID laws help Republicans win elections, because poor and nonwhite voters tend to vote Democratic and also tend to be the populations less likely to have the necessary ID. In case there was any doubt about those intentions, the state House majority leader told an audience that passing voter ID was “going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” (He evidently didn’t get the whole memo about pretending we need this to combat nonexistent voter fraud.)
But as it turns out, the number of voters in Pennsylvania who might get disenfranchised is huge. The state law requires a government-issued photo id with an expiration date. The law was geared toward voters using an ID issued by the state Department of Transportation. During the debates earlier this year, the governor’s office said that 99 percent of state voters already had such an ID. But when the secretary of the commonwealth did a study in early July, it showed that as many as 758,000 people—or 9 percent of voters—didn’t have an ID from the Department of Transportation. Other studies estimate that there could be a million Pennsylvania voters without ID. That’s more than the margin of victory Barack Obama had in 2008.
While some people are worked up about what this means for the presidential election, there’s also this little-bitty other detail: that the right to vote is a cornerstone of our democracy. In Philadelphia (you know, that place where the Declaration of Independence was signed) as many as 18 percent of voters lack the necessary identification. Democrat or Republican, the whole denying-tons-of-people-their-right-to-vote thing has got some pretty upset as well.
Is someone trying to fight the law?
Damn straight someone is. Wednesday is the first day of court for a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Advancement Project, and other voting-rights groups. This lawsuit argues that the voter-ID law violates the “free and equal” elections clause in the state constitution and adds a new and unnecessary burden to voters. The case has some pretty sympathetic plaintiffs, including a 93-year-old civil-rights activist who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. Several of the plaintiffs are elderly women of color who cannot get a photo ID because they cannot get copies of their birth certificates.
“What they’re saying in Pennsylvania is that the fundamental right to vote in Pennsylvania is broader than the right to vote under the Constitution,” says Jon Greenbaum, the chief counsel at the Lawyers Committee. That means that even though the Supreme Court said voter-ID laws didn’t violate the 14th Amendment, which guarantees the right to vote, the ACLU and others claim that it does violate Pennsylvania’s guaranteed right to vote.
Greenbaum says that if the court agrees that the right to vote in Pennsylvania is broader than it is under the 14th Amendment, then the state will likely have to prove that the voter-ID law is necessary to prevent voter fraud. That’s going to be tough, because the state has already admitted that there are no known cases of in-person voter fraud.
However, if the state decides that the right to vote in Pennsylvania is no different than it is under the U.S. Constitution, then the burden will be on the plaintiffs. They will have to show that this is an extreme burden for voters and one that will result in many people losing their right to vote. That would be a harder case for them to prove. Either way, the case is supposed to last about a week.
Why isn’t the Department of Justice bringing them to court? Didn’t they stop Texas’s and South Carolina’s laws?
Chill out, Nancy Grace—the Justice Department isn’t just hanging around watching American Idol. As it turns out, not all states get the same treatment when it comes to the old D of J. Texas and South Carolina are both listed under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. That section specifically targets states with a history of voter discrimination, and for the nine states listed, the law requires the feds to approve all changes to election laws. (It’s pithily known as “preclearance.”) So before Texas and South Carolina could implement their voter-ID laws, they had to show the Department of Justice that the laws would not have a discriminatory impact. Neither state succeeded, and the Justice Department prevented the laws from being implemented. (Now both states are suing the department. Fun times in court dramas!) However, Pennsylvania is not listed under Section 5, so it did not need to get preclearance to implement the law.
But the Justice Department just announced that it’s investigating whether Pennsylvania violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits laws that have a discriminatory intent or effect.
So what are the grounds of the investigation, and how is it different from the state lawsuit?
While the state constitution case is about the fundamental right to vote, the investigation dealing with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act will likely be all about racial discrimination. The section forbids any election law that is intended to cause discrimination or that will, in practice, result in discrimination. Greenbaum says that will be the main focus of the Justice Department effort: whether this law will make it disproportionately harder for nonwhite voters to cast their ballot. While in Section 5 cases, it falls to the state to show that it’s not discriminating, in Section 2, the burden is on the department to prove that the state is discriminating.
Right now, the Justice Department is just collecting evidence—it’s asked for tons of documents in 16 different categories. (The paper cuts alone will probably lead to some bitter Pennsylvania state employees.)
If the department winds up taking Pennsylvania to court, in some ways it will be in uncharted territory. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is usually used for “voter dilution” cases like redistricting. For instance, a state violates Section 2 when it spreads out minority voters into different districts where their votes are a small percentage, rather than keeping them in a district together where they can elect their candidate of choice. But until the voter-ID fad hit, there weren’t many cases of states trying to deny voters their right. According to Greenbaum, while there’s a lot of precedent to show what you have to prove in a “voter dilution” case, there’s not much to go on when it comes to showing that voters are getting denied the right to vote.
Both the state lawsuit and any potential Justice Department case face a similar hurdle: Trying to prove the impact of a law before an election is a whole lot harder than waiting until the election is over. But the groups cannot wait until afterward to litigate, since that would mean waiting until people were denied the right to vote and the election outcome would already be decided. But litigating the cases now is much harder.
The reasons are obvious. Before an election, you must show the effect of the law before it’s put in place. After the election, you can show exactly what happened and who was denied the right to vote. Before the election, evidence is harder to collect. For instance, many people who currently lack ID may still get one before the election. That’s why it’s good that the ACLU case has focused on several plaintiffs who cannot get an ID no matter how hard they try, for lack of documentation.
A pre-election Section 2 case would likely be an even greater challenge. But Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, says it’s certainly worth pursuing, particularly if the Justice Department can gather a lot of evidence from the state. “If Section 2 could never be used preemptively,” she says, “it would not be a sufficient protection of voting rights.”
So scratch it. This drama may give Judge Judy a run for her money.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, July 25, 2012
“Wrong Kind Of People”: The GOP’s Crime Against Voters
Spare us any more hooey about “preventing fraud” and “protecting the integrity of the ballot box.” The Republican-led crusade for voter ID laws has been revealed as a cynical ploy to disenfranchise as many likely Democratic voters as possible, with poor people and minorities the main targets.
Recent developments in Pennsylvania — one of more than a dozen states where voting rights are under siege — should be enough to erase any lingering doubt: The GOP is trying to pull off an unconscionable crime.
Late last month, the majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Mike Turzai, was addressing a meeting of the Republican State Committee. He must have felt at ease among friends because he spoke a bit too frankly.
Ticking off a list of recent accomplishments by the GOP-controlled Legislature, he mentioned the new law forcing voters to show a photo ID at the polls. Said Turzai, with more than a hint of triumph: “Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania — done.”
That’s not even slightly ambiguous. The Democratic presidential candidate has won Pennsylvania in every election since 1992. But now the top Republican in the Pennsylvania House is boasting that, because of the new voter ID law, Mitt Romney will defy history and capture the state’s 20 electoral votes in November.
Why on earth would Turzai imagine such a result? After all, the law applies to all voters, regardless of party affiliation. It is ostensibly meant only to safeguard the electoral process and eliminate fraud. Why would a neutral law have such partisan impact?
Thanks to figures released last week by state officials, we know the answer. It turns out that 758,939 registered Pennsylvania voters do not have the most easily obtained and widely used photo ID, a state driver’s license. That’s an incredible 9.2 percent of the registered electorate.
Most of the voters without driver’s licenses live in urban areas — which just happen to be places where poor people and minorities tend to live. More than 185,000 of these voters without licenses, about one-fourth of the total, live in Philadelphia — which just happens to be a Democratic stronghold where African Americans are a plurality.
Could suppressing the urban minority vote really give Pennsylvania to Romney? It probably wouldn’t have made a difference in 2008, when Obama trounced John McCain handily. But the statewide contest is often much closer — and turnout in Philadelphia typically is key to a Democratic candidate’s prospects. In 2004, for example, John Kerry’s margin over George W. Bush in the state was a mere 144,248.
Perhaps these numbers are so intoxicating that Turzai forgot the cover story about how voter ID is supposed to protect the franchise rather than selectively restrict it. His spokesman later explained that Turzai meant “the Republican presidential candidate will be on a more even keel thanks to voter ID” — in other words, there will be a level playing field once the new law eliminates all that pesky voter fraud.
That might be reasonable, except for one fact: There’s no fraud to eliminate.
Prodded by GOP political activists, the Justice Department under Bush conducted an extensive, nationwide, five-year probe of voter fraud — and ended up convicting a grand total of 86 individuals, according to a 2007 New York Times report. Most of the cases involved felons or immigrants who may not have known they were ineligible to vote.
Not one case involved the only kind of fraud that voter ID could theoretically prevent: impersonation of a registered voter by someone else. Pennsylvania and other voter ID states have, in essence, passed laws that will be highly effective in eradicating unicorns.
The Pennsylvania law and others like it are under attack in the courts; this week, a federal three-judge panel in Washington is hearing arguments on Texas’s year-old law, with a ruling expected next month. Meanwhile, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, a conservative Republican, broke with orthodoxy last week and vetoed bills that would have toughened an existing voter ID statute. Maybe the tide is turning. If it doesn’t, these laws will potentially disenfranchise or discourage millions of qualified voters.
In a previous column, I wrote that voter ID was a solution in search of a problem. I was wrong: The problem seems to be that too many of the wrong kind of voters — low-income, urban, African American, Hispanic — are showing up at the polls. Republican candidates have been vowing to “take back” the country. Now we know how.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 9, 2012
“Here They Go Again”: How Florida Governor Rick Scott Could Steal The Election For Mitt Romney
On Wednesday, November 7, Mitt Romney could wake up as the President-elect thanks to one man: Florida Governor Rick Scott. With little fanfare, Scott is undertaking an audacious plan to kick thousands of Floridians off the ballot just before this year’s elections. It’s a sloppy, chaotic and possibly illegal plan. But it just might work. Here’s how:
1. Scott has created a massive list of Floridians to purge from the voting rolls before the election. Late last year, Governor Scott ordered his Secretary of State, Kurt Browning, to “to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls.” But Browning did not have access to reliable citizenship data. The state attempted to identify non-U.S. citizens by comparing the voting file with data from the state motor vehicle administration, but the motor vehicle data does not contain updated citizenship information. The process, which created a list of 182,000 people, was considered so flawed by Browning that he refused to release the data to county election officials. Browning resigned in February and Scott has pressed forward with the purge, starting with about 2600 voters.
2. The list of “ineligible” voters is riddled with errors and includes hundreds of eligible U.S. citizens. According to data obtained by ThinkProgress, in Miami-Dade county alone, 1638 people were flagged by the state as “non-citizens.” Already, 359 people on the list have provided the county with proof of citizenship and 26 people were identified as U.S. citizens directly by the county. The remaining 1200 have simply not responded to the letter informing them of their purported ineligibility. Similar problems have been identified in Polk County and Broward County.
3. Scott’s list is heavily targeted at Democratic and Hispanic voters. A study by the Miami Herald found that “Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters are the most likely to be targeted in a state hunt to remove thousands of noncitizens from Florida’s voting rolls.” For example, Hispanics comprise 58 percent of the list but just 13 percent of eligible voters. Conversely, “Whites and Republicans are disproportionately the least-likely to face the threat of removal.”
4. Florida election officials have acknowledged that, as a result of Scott’s voter purge, eligible voters will be removed from the rolls. “It will happen,” Mary Cooney, a spokeswoman for the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, told ThinkProgress. On or about June 9, anyone who hasn’t responded to the ominous and legalistic letter informing them of their purported ineligibility will be removed from the rolls. Some eligible voters won’t have been able to respond by that time due to travel, work obligations, family obligations or confusion as to the purpose of the letter. Some will forget to open it. Others may have moved.
5. Florida will likely be a close contest in 2012 and purging eligible Democratic and Hispanic voters could tip the balance to Romney. In the latest Real Clear Politics average of polling in the state, Romney and Obama are separated by just 0.5 percent. Hundreds of eligible voters in Democratic strongholds, wrongfully purged from the rolls, could easily make the difference for Romney.
6. Winning Florida could clinch the election for Mitt Romney. Nationally, the race between Obama and Romney is within two points. It’s expected to be close all the way to election day and Florida’s 29 electorial votes would be the deciding factor in many plausable electorial scenarios.
Will history repeat itself in Florida this year? By one estimate, 7000 Florida voters were wrongfully removed from the voter rolls for the 2000 presidential election — 13 times George W. Bush’s margin of victory in that state after the U.S. Supreme Court halted the post-election recount.
By: Judd Legum, Think Progress, May 28, 2012
“Disingenous Circular Arguments”: Conservatives Make Nonsense Arguments Against Voting Rights
As the media shine a spotlight on conservative efforts to disenfranchise Democratic voters through aggressive anti–voting fraud measures, conservatives have begun their counterattack. A pair of op-eds published by conservative activists and pundits in the wake of a national anti&endash;voter fraud conference in Houston demonstrates the approach they will take. They also provide a case study in disingenuous, tautological conservative argumentation. They use statistics that are misleading, irrelevant or evidence of nothing more than the success of their own propaganda.
Both pieces cite polling data showing majorities support requiring voters to show photo identification. “Rasmussen Reports showed that 73 percent of Americans approve of Photo ID laws—and in fact, states that have Photo ID in place are seeing increased turnout at the polls, including minority groups (according to data from Indiana and Georgia),” writes Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder and president of True the Vote, a conservative anti-voter fraud group in Houston which sponsored the recent conference.
John Fund of National Review cites the same source. “A brand-new Rasmussen Reports poll finds that 64 percent of Americans believe voter fraud is a serious problem, with whites registering 63 percent agreement and African-Americans 64 percent,” he writes. “A Fox News poll taken last month found that 70 percent of Americans support requiring voters to show ‘state or federally issued photo identification’ to prove their identity and citizenship before casting a ballot. Majorities of all demographic groups agreed on the need for photo ID, including 58 percent of non-white voters, 52 percent of liberals and 52 percent of Democrats.”
These are circular arguments. Rasmussen Reports and Fox News are both Republican-leaning. Conservatives love to cite poll numbers, especially from sympathetic pollsters, that the public agrees with a false claim as if that made it true. But it doesn’t. Rasmussen finds 73 percent think photo ID requirements “do not discriminate.” That’s up from 69 percent the previous time Rasmussen asked the question. Does that mean photo ID laws became 4 percent less discriminatory during the intervening five months?
Whether voter fraud is a regular occurrence, and whether photo ID laws discriminate by disproportionately disenfranchising minorities, city-dwellers, young people and the disabled are matters of fact, not opinion. They should be answered empirically, not by taking a poll. One needs to only look at the data to discover that in-person voter fraud is virtually nonexistent in the United States today. The Republican solution to this imaginary problem, photo identification requirements, is clearly discriminatory, because members of some demographic groups are much less likely to have IDs than others.
If polling shows that a majority of the public disagrees with these factual findings, that just proves they are ignorant or that they have been misled by conservative propaganda. And then conservatives turn around and cite the evidence of mass ignorance, or successful conservative propaganda, as proof that their false claims are true.
Even the majorities in favor of photo ID laws cited by Engelbrecht and Fund are not dispositive. Unlike incorrect beliefs about factual matters, popular opinion on what voting law should be does have some relevance. But unlike some other policy matters, voting rights law should not be decided solely on the basis of popular opinion. Voting rights are civil rights. And it is a fundamental American value that civil rights cannot always be legislated away. A majority’s desire to oppress or disenfranchise the minority must be constrained.
The remainder of Engelbrecht’s and Fund’s analysis are mere sophistry and speculation. That’s election law expert Rick Hasen awarded Fund’s piece the “Fraudulent Fraud Squad Quote of the Day” for the following contention: “Most fraudsters are smart enough to have their accomplices cast votes in the names of dead people on the voter rolls, who are highly unlikely to appear and complain that someone else voted in their place.”
Hasen responds, “I’d love to see the evidence of a single election in the last quarter of a century in which in person impersonation voter fraud using dead people affected the outcome of an election.” Opinion polls notwithstanding, photo ID laws remain a solution in search of a problem.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, May 6, 2012
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