“Foul Subterfuge”: A GOP Witch Hunt For The Zombie Voter
Republicans are waging the most concerted campaign to prevent or discourage citizens from exercising their legitimate voting rights since the Jim Crow days of poll taxes and literacy tests.
Four years ago, Democrats expanded American democracy by registering millions of new voters — mostly young people and minorities — and persuading them to show up at the polls. Apparently, the GOP is determined not to let any such thing happen again.
According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which keeps track of changes in voting laws, 22 statutes and two executive actions aimed at restricting the franchise have been approved in 17 states since the beginning of 2011. By the center’s count, an additional 74 such bills are pending.
The most popular means of discouraging those young and minority voters — who, coincidentally, tend to vote for Democrats — is legislation requiring citizens to show government-issued photo identification before they are allowed to cast a ballot. Photo ID bills have been approved by Republican-controlled legislatures in Alabama, Kansas, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin, and by referendum in Mississippi. Only one state with a Democratic-controlled legislature — Rhode Island — passed a law requiring voters to produce identification, and it does not mandate a government ID with a photo. In Virginia, Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell has not decided whether to sign a voter ID bill the legislature sent to his desk.
In theory, what could be wrong with demanding proof of identity? In the real world, plenty.
As Republican strategists are fully aware, minorities are overrepresented among the estimated 11 percent of citizens who do not have a government-issued photo ID. They are also painfully aware that, in 2008, President Obama won 95 percent of the African American vote and 67 percent of the Hispanic vote. It doesn’t take a genius to do the math: If you can reduce the number of black and Latino voters, you improve the Republican candidate’s chances.
If photo ID laws were going to be the solution, though, Republicans had to invent a problem. The best they could come up with was The Menace of Widespread Voter Fraud.
It’s a stretch. Actually, it’s a lie. There is no Widespread Voter Fraud. All available evidence indicates that fraudulent voting of the kind that photo ID laws would presumably prevent — someone shows up at the polls and votes in someone else’s name — just doesn’t happen.
For a while, the GOP pointed to South Carolina, where Republican Gov. Nikki Haley said that “dead people” had somehow cast ballots in recent elections. But then the state’s election commission investigated claims of 953 zombie voters and, um, well, never mind.
The number of voters came from a crude comparison of records done by the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. The elections commission actually found 207 contested votes. Of that total, 106 reflected clerical errors by poll workers, 56 reflected errors by the motor vehicles department, 32 involved people who were mistakenly listed as having voted, and three involved people who had cast absentee ballots and then died before Election Day.
That left 10 contested votes — count ’em, 10 — that could not be immediately resolved. However, the commission found no evidence of fraud. Or of zombies.
Of course, there are other potential kinds of electoral fraud; crooked poll workers, for example, could record votes in the names of citizens who actually stayed home. Election officials could design ballots in a way that worked to a specific candidate’s advantage or disadvantage (see Florida, 2000). But none of this would be prevented by photo ID, which still hasn’t found a problem to solve — except, perhaps, an excess of Democratic voters.
Even more sinister are new laws, such as in Florida, that make it much more difficult for campaigns — or anyone else — to conduct voter-registration drives. If you thought Republicans and Democrats agreed that more Americans should register to vote, you were sadly mistaken.
Florida requires that groups conducting registration drives be vetted and that registration forms be submitted within 48 hours of when they are signed — an onerous and unnecessary burden that only serves to hamper anyone seeking to expand the electorate. Let’s see, who might try to do such a thing? The Democratic Party, maybe? The Obama campaign?
In the name of safeguarding the sanctity of the ballot, Republicans are trying to exclude citizens they consider likely to vote for Democrats — the young, the poor, the black and brown. Those who love democracy cannot allow this foul subterfuge to succeed.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 30, 2012
“Promiscuous Fabrication”: Mitt Romney’s Lying is the Real Voter Fraud
Forget ACORN. If you really want to know who’s defrauding millions of Americans out of their right to vote it’s Mitt Romney and the Republican Party. And they’ve got lots of ways to do it.
One of the most popular is obvious enough. In those states where Republicans control both the governor’s office and state legislature a systematic effort has been underway in earnest over the past two years to erect barriers to voting by those traditional Democratic Party constituencies such as the elderly, the poor and the young who might stand in the way of the Conservative Movement’s drive for a monopoly of power.
But another form of voter fraud is less obvious. It involves stealing people’s votes by – and let us not flinch from the word – lying to them.
In a glorious eight-minute dissection (what Fox News would surely call a shrill and unhinged screed) Rachel Maddow cites chapter and verse to prove her case that “the degree to which Mr. Romney lies, about all sorts of stuff, and doesn’t care when he gets caught, may be the single most notable thing about his campaign.”
Maddow Blog editor Steve Benen has been filing regular updates to what he calls his “Chronicles of Mitt’s Mendacity.” And Benen is now up to Volume XII.
For example, campaigning in Wisconsin, Romney complained “The President put an ad out yesterday talking about gasoline prices and how high they are. And guess who he blamed? Me!”
Not true, says Benen.
Another Romney campaign ad argues that Obama “has managed to pile on nearly as much debt as all the previous presidents combined.”
Not even close, says Benen.
In the same ad, Romney claimed “President Barack Obama named himself one of the country’s four best presidents.”
That’s blatantly untrue, says Benen. And on and on and on it goes.
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank was equally gob-smacked by the audacity of Romney’s dishonesty.
Writing about Romney’s most recent speech in Washington, Milbank judged as “incorrect, wrong, false and fictitious” Romney’s serial falsehoods that: 1.) President Obama: was responsible for the “weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression;” that 2.) eliminating Obamacare would save “about $100 billion a year;” that 3.) Obama was “taking a series of steps that end Medicare as we know it;” and that 4.) the President had created an “unaccountable panel, with the power to prevent Medicare from providing certain treatments.”
Milbank noted that Romney’s speech earned no fewer than three “Pants on Fire” ratings from PolitiFact for his bald faced lies – just some of the more than 32 times PolitiFact has flagged Romney for similar fibs, falsehoods and fabrications.
Not only does Romney’s lying seem gratuitous it’s also epidemic on the right. In his New York Times column on Saturday, for example, Joe Nocera marvels at conservative efforts to pull the plug on the growing popularity of Chevrolet’s electric hybrid Volt by flat out lying about the vehicle, which was recently named European Car of the Year and is coming off its best month yet with 2,200 cars sold.
Yet for months, the conservative propaganda machine has been mocking the Volt as “roller skates with a plug,” says Nocera.
Nocera quotes the Volt’s inventor, legendary auto executive Bob Lutz (“who is about as liberal as the Koch Brothers,” says Nocera) as dismissing as “nuts” conservative criticisms of a car that he says makes “a significant achievement in the auto industry.”
In his Forbes blog, Lutz counters what he called the “rabid, sadly misinformed right.” Nocera also says Lutz “has largely given up” on conservatives after even his conservative intellectual hero, Charles Krauthammer, described the electric car as “flammable.”
Although Lutz remains deeply conservative, Nocera said he’s “become disenchanted with the right’s willingness to spread lies to aid the cause.”
With the nation now celebrating the 50th anniversary re-release of the classic movie To Kill a Mockingbird, Mitt Romney reminds me of that loathsome pair, Bob and Mayella Ewell, the father-daughter tandem who Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch described as “victims of cruel poverty and ignorance” who brought false charges of rape against the Negro tenant farmer Tom Robinson in “the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted.”
Like Atticus’s all-white, Southern male jury, Romney seems to assume that American voters will merely “go along” with his assumption – the “evil assumption” – that all Democrats lie, that all Democrats are immoral beings, that all Democrats are not to be trusted.
It should be noted that Atticus Finch lost his case before a jury that was more receptive to its own prejudices than to the truth. And if Mitt Romney also exhibits that “cynical confidence” his falsehoods won’t be doubted, the reception he got from the Newspaper Association of America last week may explain why.
There was Mitt Romney standing before a gathering of journalists, making a series of “incorrect and dishonest accusations,” writes David Corn, and not once was Romney “hooted out of the room” by the nation’s assembled press corps. Indeed, says Corn, “he faced no penalty” at all.
The nation’s press, like Attitus’ backward Alabama jury, has its own rigid and time-honored codes which prevent it from seeing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And among them, says Atlantic magazine’s James Fallows, is the “false equivalence syndrome” – that “objective-seeming” method of covering the news that unwittingly and inexcusably awards Republicans a license to lie because it compels the media to give equal credence to “both sides” in every dispute even when one of those sides just makes stuff up.
It has never been enough for a people to merely have the formal right to vote. That vote must also count for something when cast by an “informed” voter whose choice is an accurate reflection of the voter’s genuine wants and beliefs.
While it may not be possible to plant democracy at the end of a bayonet it has always been possible to create the appearance of democracy using physical threats or force. We are all familiar, for example, with the cynical charade of right wing dictators and left wing revolutionaries whose legitimacy derives from their having been “elected” in a campaign when they were the only candidates allowed on the ballot, or chosen by voters who were manipulated and coerced.
It is also possible for partisans to manufacture an artificial legitimacy through lies and distortions of the critical information voters need to make an informed judgment on the important issues of the day – the bare minimum that’s required in a democratic political system that claims to be founded on “consent of the governed.”
And a party or a candidate that seeks political power by depriving voters of their rightful connection with reality is engaged in a coup d’etat every bit as real as if the overthrow had been carried out with guns.
But let’s be clear. Lying is not merely a moral failing. In a democratic republic like ours whose legitimacy is rooted in popular sovereignty and consent of the governed the routine, almost promiscuous fabrication of basic facts by Republicans and Republican candidates like Mitt Romney is as much a theft of a citizen’s right to vote as if that citizen was prevented from ever voting at all.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, April 9, 2012
“A Matter Of Basic Values”: Burden Of Proof In The Battle Over Voting Rights
One of the most predictable characteristics of the battle over voting rights in this country, which now largely centers on Republican efforts in a number of states to institute various photo ID requirements, is a very different take on the burden of proof. Again and again, progressives point to the signal lack of evidence of any “voter fraud” problem anywhere. In Texas, the state that has filed suit to strike down the entire preclearance procedure of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because the Justice Department refused to preclear its new photo ID law, there have been during the last two election cycles a grand total of four allegations made to the Attorney General’s office of people ineligible to vote impersonating qualified voters. As Think Progress’ Josh Israel notes, these are pretty damning statistics:
Though [Gov. Rick] Perry has claimed Texas has endured “multiple cases” of voter fraud, even of the paltry 20 election law violation allegations the state’s attorney general handled in the 2008 and 2010 elections, most related to mail-in ballot or campaign finance violations, electioneering too close to a polling place, and a voter blocked by an election worker.
It is unclear how many Texans attempt to illegally check out library books while impersonating neighbors or dead people, each year. But in a state of more than 25 million people, the odds of being even accused of voter impersonation in the Lone Star State are less than one in 6,250,000.
Conservatives typically ignore these numbers and instead of answering “why” new and burdensome voting requirements need to be instituted, ask “why not,” comparing proposed voting hurdles to the identification often demanded for various legal or commercial transactions, or more indirectly, asking why honest people would object to verification of their identities? Others rely on public opinion polls to “prove” the reasonableness of voter ID laws, a particularly shaky argument for conservatives who in other contexts believe unnecessary regulations and mandates are intolerable regardless of public support for their purposes.
Aside from the obvious fact that people in both parties understand these requirements would have a disproportionate impact on people more likely to vote Democratic, this kind of dispute often misses the rather obvious point that many conservatives do not view participation in elections as a fundamental right of citizenship. Occasionally they even admit it, but more often that conviction is simply reflected in how the question of “voter fraud versus voting rights” is framed. Anyone viewing the right to vote as fundamental is most unlikely to support burdens placed upon it without a compelling case to show the burden is necessary. “It wouldn’t hurt you” arguments or comparisons to other transactions that do not involve the exercise of fundamental rights are irrelevant.
No wonder a growing number of conservatives favor repeal of the Voting Rights Act altogether. The reasoning is closely parallel to the now-common-place argument on the Right that the discrimination against people of color is largely a thing of the past, and that exceptional government efforts to fight such discrimination amount to a racist effort to discriminate against white people. If that’s the case, then “why not” make access to the ballot just like any other public service, many of which are conditional on compliance with all sorts of rules?
So while the debate over voting in this country often sounds like a competition of people with competing views of the facts, it’s really not: it’s a matter of basic values, and of the burden of proof borne by those who support or oppose a right to vote.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 26, 2012
“Denied The Right To Vote”: Texas Had ‘Fewer Than Five’ Voter Impersonation Cases Over Three Years
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice blocked a new Texas state law that would institute strict photo identification requirements for all citizens trying to vote. The DOJ refused to grant the law pre-clearance under the Voting Rights Act, noting that the bill would unfairly disenfranchise Hispanic voters.
Supporters of the bill say the law is needed to prevent voter impersonation. Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) argued:
Texas has a responsibility to ensure elections are fair, beyond reproach and accurately reflect the will of voters. The DOJ has no valid reason for rejecting this important law, which requires nothing more extensive than the type of photo identification necessary to receive a library card or board an airplane. Their denial is yet another example of the Obama administration’s continuing and pervasive federal overreach.
How big has the problem been? According to the San Antonio Express-News:
Fewer than five “illegal voting” complaints involving voter impersonations were filed with the Texas Attorney General’s Office from the 2008 and 2010 general elections in which more than 13 million voters participated.
The Texas attorney general’s office did not give the outcome of the four illegal voting complaints that were filed. Only one remains pending, according to agency records.
And as ThinkProgress Justice previously reported, more people than that have been denied their right to vote due to these sorts of strict voter ID laws.
Though Perry has claimed Texas has endured “multiple cases” of voter fraud, even of the paltry 20 election law violation allegations the state’s attorney general handled in the 2008 and 2010 elections, most related to mail-in ballot or campaign finance violations, electioneering too close to a polling place, and a voter blocked by an election worker.
It is unclear how many Texans attempt to illegally check out library books while impersonating neighbors or dead people, each year. But in a state of more than 25 million people, the odds of being even accused of voter impersonation in the Lone Star State are less than one in 6,250,000.
By: Josh Israel, Think Progress, March 26, 2012
“Mount Up For More Republican Swagger”: Conservative Hobbyhorses for 2012
Traditional Republican concerns—opposition to domestic spending and gender equality—have dominated the Republican presidential campaign thus far. But there are some new conservative fixations that will be important in the months to come. Generally, they have all been invented—much like opposition to an individual health insurance mandate—in reaction to President Obama’s moderate and generally successful policies and political strategies. Here’s a guide to five of them.
Election fraud: Ever since the paranoid fringe of the right, by which I mean most Republicans, convinced itself that ACORN stole the 2008 election, conservatives have been trying to pass laws to prevent voter fraud. Republican-controlled state legislatures all over the country are passing rules that risk disenfranchising large numbers of voters, especially the poor, minorities and people with disabilities. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, DC, earlier this month, Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former member of the Federal Elections Commission, told a panel what he thinks are “three best things your state can do to prevent voter fraud”: require presentation of a photo identification when voting, require proof of citizenship when someone registers to vote and “tighten up the rules on absentee ballots, so [for example] when you request an absentee ballot you have to put in a copy of your driver’s license.”
As Laura Murphy, Washington Legislative Officer of the ACLU noted Thursday at the National Press Club, “There is a long history of efforts to restrict the right to vote to gain partisan advantage.” Murphy says laws requiring proof of citizenship or photo identification at the polling place, along with restricting early voting or eliminating same day registration, are all examples of these Republican vote suppression tactics. People who lack mobility due to disability or inability to afford a car may be disenfranchised. “These anti-fraud laws are the real threat to our constitutional rights,” says Murphy.
Down with the EPA: Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), the leading climate change denier in Congress, spoke at CPAC this year, the first time he has done so in five years. He proudly restated his famous assertion that climate change is the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” receiving big cheers.
What happened in the intervening years? Republicans flirted with reality. Their 2008 presidential nominee, John McCain, supported taking action against climate change. But Barack Obama won the election. As soon as he did, Republicans dropped their concern for the environment in favor of rigid partisan opposition. The energy magnate Koch brothers have largely funded the rise of the Tea Party movement and other current Republican campaigns, and the grateful beneficiaries in the new Republican Congress have introduced reams of legislation to repeal or prevent actions taken by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
It has become a conservative shibboleth, repeated by Republican presidential candidates on the campaign trail and at conferences such as CPAC and the Americans for Prosperity “Defending the American Dream” summit in November 2011 that the EPA is preventing economic and job growth. With Republican candidates promising that increased oil drilling would reduce rising gasoline prices, you can expect to hear a lot more of this argument in months to come.
Keep out the immigrants: Republicans and conservatives typically claim that their concern about immigration from Mexico is in no way racially motivated; it’s supposedly all about border security. But when conservatives speak to each other, they sometimes admit the truth: they’re afraid that more Latinos will mean a diminution of the cultural and political power of non-Latino whites. “After Obamacare, immigration is the most important issue [in this campaign], otherwise the whole country goes the way of California and we never win again,” Ann Coulter told CPAC.
When I interviewed anti-immigration leader and former Republican congressman Tom Tancredo in South Carolina last month, he was even more blunt. “Santorum has actually taken a step in the right direction, and did so in a pretty gutsy way, by saying we need to reduce legal immigration,” said Tancredo, when I asked why he hasn’t endorsed Romney, as he did after dropping out in 2008. “One of the biggest problems with immigration today is lack of assimilation…. we are trying to actually stop [assimilation]. All the crap about multiculturalism is just that, crap.”
Tancredo’s sentiments were echoed at an anti-multiculturalism CPAC panel that featured notorious xenophobes such as Peter Brimelow, with a guest appearance by Representative Steve King (R-IA).
Obama is bad for Israel: “If you want to see how to treat an ally, look at how Obama has treated Israel and do the opposite,” declared former UN Ambassador John Bolton at CPAC, to big applause. “He has pressured Israel mercilessly not to attack Iran.” The presupposition that it would be in Israel’s interest to attack Iran is debatable at best, but it’s one that conservatives share.
Obama’s position on the Middle East peace process has been no less favorable to Israel than his predecessors’, including George W. Bush. But Republicans have been attacking him repeatedly for imaginary infractions, such as supposed rudeness to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They also complain that Obama called for a two-state solution that begins with the pre-1967 borders with land swaps to follow. This has always been US policy, but that hasn’t stopped Republican presidential candidates from complaining that Obama “failed to stand for Israel.”
This is, of course, all about politics rather than Israel’s security. Evangelical Zionists want Israel to steal the entire West Bank and eject its Arab residents to fulfill a biblical prophecy. By supporting Israeli expansionism, Republicans are hoping to excite that element of their base and, if possible, win over a few Jewish votes in Florida. It also helps keep Sheldon Adelson’s money flowing.
Obama kowtows to America’s enemies. Given that Obama has done a much better job than Bush of finding and executing members of Al Qaeda, Republicans will have a hard time painting Obama as weak on national defense. But they’re trying to find a way. Since Obama has been more effective at taking out the organizations and regimes that have actually attacked the United States than President Bush was, Republicans are reviving the cold war menace from China and Russia, and fear-mongering about Iran.
Bolton and National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, among others, repeated this theme frequently at CPAC. “The Obama administration has forgotten that American strength is not provocative to our enemies, American weakness is,” said Bolton, “and Obama specializes in that…. What are we doing about Russia and China? Zip.” Specifically, Republicans such as Romney complain that Obama has failed to confront China for manipulating the yuan. They also argue that Obama was mistaken to try to sooth tensions with Iran and Russia, and that those efforts have gone unrewarded. While some of the specific accusations may be debatable, the overall theme—that Obama is endangering American security through cowardice—is preposterous. But since Republicans equate foreign policy strength with boisterous swagger, it’s fair to assume they actually believe it.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, February 27, 2012
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