The Republican Threat To Voting
Less than a year before the 2012 presidential voting begins, Republican legislatures and governors across the country are rewriting voting laws to make it much harder for the young, the poor and African-Americans — groups that typically vote Democratic — to cast a ballot.
Spreading fear of a nonexistent flood of voter fraud, they are demanding that citizens be required to show a government-issued identification before they are allowed to vote. Republicans have been pushing these changes for years, but now more than two-thirds of the states have adopted or are considering such laws. The Advancement Project, an advocacy group of civil rights lawyers, correctly describes the push as “the largest legislative effort to scale back voting rights in a century.”
Anyone who has stood on the long lines at a motor vehicle office knows that it isn’t easy to get such documents. For working people, it could mean giving up a day’s wages.
A survey by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law found that 11 percent of citizens, 21 million people, do not have a current photo ID. That fraction increases to 15 percent of low-income voting-age citizens, 18 percent of young eligible voters and 25 percent of black eligible voters. Those demographic groups tend to vote Democratic, and Republicans are imposing requirements that they know many will be unable to meet.
Kansas’ new law was drafted by its secretary of state, Kris Kobach, who also wrote Arizona’s anti-immigrant law. Voters will be required to show a photo ID at the polls. Before they can register, Kansans will have to produce a proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate.
Tough luck if you don’t happen to have one in your pocket when you’re at the county fair and you pass the voter registration booth. Or when the League of Women Voters brings its High School Registration Project to your school cafeteria. Or when you show up at your dorm at the University of Kansas without your birth certificate. Sorry, you won’t be voting in Lawrence, and probably not at all.
That’s fine with Gov. Sam Brownback, who said he signed the bill because it’s necessary to “ensure the sanctity of the vote.” Actually, Kansas has had only one prosecution for voter fraud in the last six years. But because of that vast threat to Kansas democracy, an estimated 620,000 Kansas residents who lack a government ID now stand to lose their right to vote.
Eight states already had photo ID laws. Now more than 30 other states are joining the bandwagon of disenfranchisement, as Republicans outdo each other to propose bills with new voting barriers. The Wisconsin bill refuses to recognize college photo ID cards, even if they are issued by a state university, thus cutting off many students at the University of Wisconsin and other campuses. The Texas bill, so vital that Gov. Rick Perry declared it emergency legislation, would also reject student IDs, but would allow anyone with a handgun license to vote.
A Florida bill would curtail early voting periods, which have proved popular and brought in new voters, and would limit address changes at the polls. “I’m going to call this bill for what it is, good-old-fashioned voter suppression,” Ben Wilcox of the League of Women Voters told The Florida Times-Union.
Many of these bills were inspired by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a business-backed conservative group, which has circulated voter ID proposals in scores of state legislatures. The Supreme Court, unfortunately, has already upheld Indiana’s voter ID requirement, in a 2008 decision that helped unleash the stampede of new bills. Most of the bills have yet to pass, and many may not meet the various balancing tests required by the Supreme Court. There is still time for voters who care about democracy in their states to speak out against lawmakers who do not.
By: The New York Times, Editorial, April 26, 2011
Wisconsin Supreme Court Election Needs Fraud Investigation
Partisans on both sides were ready to scream “fraud at polls” as the balloting wound down in Wisconsin in the recent state Supreme Court election.
Normally, the race would have been a snoozer. Incumbent Justice David Prosser, a former GOP state assembly speaker and failed congressional candidate, won 55 percent of the vote in the first round of balloting. His opponent, an ultra-liberal named Jo Anne Kloppenburg, ran a distant second. But that was before Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker proposed and won enactment of a series of reforms that change the rules for state government workers in a way that limited their collective bargaining power.
After that, the election was presented as a referendum on Walker’s reforms, one the unions opposed strongly, going so far as to occupy the state capitol building in an effort to block the legislature from doing its business.
Since the court will inevitably rule on the legality of Walker’s reforms, a victory by Kloppenburg would have been a major setback for the new governor since it would have shifted the 4-3 majority on the seven-member Supreme Court from 4-3 conservative to 4-3 liberal.
The morning after the election, the Associated Press was reporting Kloppenburg ahead by just over 200 votes, enough for her to declare victory, even though the margin was close enough to trigger an automatic recount. The GOP was concerned because the heavy presence of pro-union activists in the state from around the country may have been able to take advantage of weaknesses in the state’s election code to unfairly, perhaps even illegally, influence the election.
The GOP was ready to question the validity of the outcome when a reporting error in heavily-GOP Waukesha County was discovered that gave Prosser a lead of more than 7,000 votes.
Now it was the Democrats‘ turn to cry, “Foul!” and to raise the specter of vote fraud.
Both parties are right to be concerned. Elections in Wisconsin are a messy business, particularly because the state allows same-day registration on Election Day, and because of something known as “vouching,” in which voters who can prove who they are can attest to the identity of others seeking to vote.
Something needs to be done. It’s time for a bipartisan effort to look at the entire election. As the Wall Street Journal‘s John Fund wrote recently, “An independent investigation is called for, if for no other reason than to clear the air and to recommend procedures to ensure such errors don’t happen again. Just as many Wisconsin officials have ignored or downplayed evidence of vote fraud (see the Milwaukee Police Department’s 2008 detailed investigation) so too have sloppy election procedures been allowed to fester in some counties.”
He’s right. Too many people choose to look the other way when the issue of voter fraud is raised, especially if their party is the one that benefits. Elections are too important to not take these allegations seriously. Wisconsin has the reputation for being a “good government state.” If they want to keep it, Governor Walker should appoint an independent panel to review the election and use it as the basis for a set of electoral reforms that could be a model for the nation.
By: Peter Roff, U.S. News and World Report, April 11, 2011
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