“Congratulations Republicans”: There Is Actual GOP Voter Fraud In Arizona
When Republican officials nationwide launched an aggressive voter-suppression campaign in advance of the 2012 elections, they did so under the dubious auspices of “voter fraud.” The tactics are necessary, the GOP said, not to rig elections, but to protect the integrity of the process.
The problem, of course, is that actual, real-world voter fraud is exceptionally rare, as even most proponents of voter-suppression efforts are willing to admit. But I’m curious: why is it that when legitimate examples come to light, they always seem to come from one party?
A Pinal County supervisor candidate has withdrawn from the race in the wake of voter-fraud allegations involving a former companion who, records show, has continued to vote by absentee ballot in the five years since her death.
John Enright, 66, had been seeking the Republican nomination for county supervisor of District 5, an area that includes Apache Junction and Gold Canyon.
Enright ended his candidacy last week, but his written statement failed to explain why he allegedly has been voting by absentee ballot for his former girlfriend.
It’s also worth noting that voter-ID laws — the preferred Republican method of cracking down on fraud — wouldn’t have prevented the kind of scheme Enright allegedly used in Arizona.
The news comes on the heels of Republican Charlie White, the former Indiana secretary of state, who was convicted earlier this year of several felonies, including voter fraud. (His crimes also wouldn’t have been prevented by voter-ID laws.)
So, congratulations Republicans, we now have some actual examples of genuine voter fraud. Whether the GOP tries to use these examples to justify voter-ID laws is up to them.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 1, 2012
“A Whole New Form Of Voter Suppression”: Do We Need A New Voting Rights Act?
Ten states have enacted voter-ID laws that will discriminate against minorities and seniors. But the Department of Justice can do little to stop the discrimination in five of them.
On Friday, two counties in Southern states requested that the Supreme Court reconsider a key element of the Voting Rights Act. Both Kinston, North Carolina and Shelby County, Alabama hope the Court will find that Section 5 of the Act—the one that requires states and counties with a history of voter suppression to get permission from the feds before implementing changes to election law—is unconstitutional. The government has previously justified Section 5 under the Fifteenth Amendment, which guarantees the right to vote and prohibits discrimination based on race. The counties—both in states with new voter-ID laws—argue that the provision violates the Tenth Amendment, which gives states the right to regulate elections. Furthermore, they claim it unfairly gives states different levels of sovereignty by treating some differently than others.
With voter-ID laws proliferating around the country, the Voting Rights Act has been in the national conversation for months now, and Section 5 has played a major role in the debate. Voter-ID laws create barriers to voting, particularly for poor and non-white voters who are more likely to lack the necessary photo ID. The effort to suppress the vote is exactly what the Voting Rights Act sought to prevent, and it’s come in handy. While the Bush administration’s Department of Justice approved Georgia’s strict voter-ID law—which became a national model—under Obama, the DOJ has blocked Texas and South Carolina from implementing theirs, finding them to have a discriminatory effect. (Decisions on Mississippi and Alabama’s laws are still pending.) Thanks to the proceedings, we’ve learned a lot more about the impact of these laws. Documents from Texas revealed that Hispanic registered voters were between 47 and 120 percent more likely to lack the necessary ID, while in South Carolina, minorities were almost 20 percent more likely to have no government-issued identification.
Because of Section 5, the Department of Justice has been able to stop voter-ID laws from going into effect in four states. The trouble is, Section 5 only applies to nine list states, based largely on what those states were doing 50 years ago. And with the voter ID frenzy that began after Republicans swept into power in 2010, the states working to suppress the vote don’t totally align with those that require preclearance. In recent years, ten states have passed strict voter-ID laws which require a voter to show government-issued identification to vote and will likely prevent hundreds of thousands from voting. But of those ten, only five require preclearance. Indiana, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Wisconsin all got to enact their versions of these laws without any say from the feds. Across all of them, the impacts are similarly devastating for poor and non-white populations.
As more and more states pass laws that functionally disenfranchise poor and nonwhite voters, it’s increasingly clear that Section 5 is no longer sufficient. The Department of Justice needs a broader ability to be proactive in preventing voter discrimination. When the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, Congress authorized Section 5 for only five years, with the idea that it might not be necessary after that. Since then, however, the section has been reauthorized several times—most recently in 2006, when Congress renewed it for another 25 years. But the section no longer reflects the voting landscape. It seems logical that the Department of Justice’s role should be expanded, so that states not listed in Section 5 cannot implement laws that infringe on voters’ rights.
The right to vote is integral to our political system, one of the defining acts of citizenship, and we should ensure it’s protected. Furthermore, who votes often determines which candidate wins. In 2012, the stakes could hardly be higher. Not including Alabama, where the law is not scheduled to take effect until 2013, the states with strict voter-ID laws comprise 127 electoral votes—almost half the number needed to win.
A report by the Brennan Center for Justice last week offered a devastating look at just how difficult getting ID actually is, and how many people are impacted. Nationwide, 11 percent of eligible voters lack the required ID; among African Americans, that number skyrockets to one in four eligible voters. Hispanics and seniors also disproportionately lack a government-issued photo ID. The Center’s report focuses on two key factors: the cost of acquiring the necessary documents, and the difficulties of getting to an office that issues IDs. Even in states that offer free IDs for voting, most still charge people to obtain the documents necessary to get that ID—and the costs are not insignificant. Birth certificates can run anywhere from $8 to $25. In Mississippi, there’s a special Catch-22: You need a birth certificate to get a government-issued ID, but you need a government-issued ID to get a birth certificate. Meanwhile, 10 million eligible voters live more than 10 miles away from a government office that can issue an ID—and in Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Wisconsin, those ID issuing offices are closed on weekends.
While many of the most egregious examples are in Section 5 states, many are not. In Wisconsin, which does not have to preclear its election laws, more than 30 percent of the voting-age population lives more than 10 miles from an ID office. In Kansas, which also isn’t listed in Section 5, the voter-ID law shows similar problems with discrimination. Outside of Wichita, there’s one office that issues IDs for every 22,000 eligible voters; in downtown Wichita, there is one office for every 160,000. Twenty-two percent of Kansas’ black population lives in downtown Wichita where, in order to get their free IDs, they must wait much longer than their neighbors outside the city. In Tennessee, another state that doesn’t need preclearance, three rural regions have large populations but no offices that issue IDs.
Perhaps the best argument for expanding the Voting Rights Act is unfolding in Pennsylvania. Only a few months ago, the state legislature passed a strict voter-ID law that required a government-issued ID that included an expiration date. The state’s House majority leader, Republican Mike Turzai, openly touted it as a law that will guarantee that Mitt Romney wins the state. There’s reason for his confidence: A recent study from the Secretary of the Commonwealth in Pennsylvania showed that as many as 9 percent of state voters may lack necessary identification. In Philadelphia, a Democratic stronghold with a high number of African-American voters, it could be as high as 18 percent. Yet the DOJ cannot block the law.
For those states not listed in Section 5, challenges must be fought in the courts, where the bar is much higher. The DOJ or others can claim that voter-ID laws violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination either in practice or procedure. But Section 2 cases are difficult. “In order to bring a Section 2 case, you’d have to show two things. One, that there’s a significant racial disparity and two, that the burden of getting an ID is significant enough for us to care about,” Samuel Bagenstos, former deputy assistant attorney general, told Talking Points Memo. That means the DOJ will have a harder time winning a case against a voter-ID state before the November elections. Instead, the department may have to wait until the election is over and voters can testify to the discrimination. The DOJ may have to spend the 2012 election collecting evidence of discrimination—cold comfort for those whose votes are suppressed, particularly when their votes could change the outcome of a close presidential election.
Civic groups can also sue states for violating their constitutions. The ACLU has already brought suit against the Pennsylvania law on those grounds. In Wisconsin, a court found the voter-ID law violated the state constitution, and has granted a permanent injunction, though that decision is being appealed. These lawsuits require funding from civic groups that can afford and endure lengthy legal fights, of course, and the constitutional protections vary state to state.
The Voting Rights Act was passed at a time when certain states adamantly and openly refused non-white citizens the right to vote. These new laws are less obvious and more insidious, and have been implemented in states without voter-supression histories of Texas, South Carolina, and Georgia. But regardless of a state’s history, the result of voter-ID laws is still the same: Many, particularly those who are poor and not white, will lose their right to vote.
With a whole new form of voter supression spreading, it’s imperative that we look at new ways to safeguard that right. Norman Ornstein, among others, has called for an expanded Voting Rights Act. At the very least, the Department of Justice should have broader authority to examine discriminatory laws and at least hold up implementation as officials examine the potential impact. States like Pennsylvania should not be able to take away minority rights so easily, and with so little scrutiny. Unfortunately, as so many states move to make it harder for poor and nonwhite citizens to vote, the momentum is on the other side, with states and counties pushing to knock down Section 5 entirely and take away the procedural protections we do have in place, incomplete though they are.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, July 23, 2012
“Money In, People Out”: The Twin Pillars Of The GOP’s Voter Disenfranchisement 2012 Plan
Mitt Romney escaped the record heat this weekend by attending several parties in his honor in the Hamptons. Early predictions were that one afternoon in this elite enclave would net the candidate more than $3 million for his campaign.
Less than 200 miles away in Philadelphia, where the median income hovers at $36,000 and a quarter of the city lives below the poverty line, there were no beach parties, but some disturbing news. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that state election officials upped the number of statewide voters potentially affected by the new voter ID laws from the 90,000 that Governor Corbett claimed to 758,000. A full 9.2 percent of the state’s eligible voters could be turned away from the polls in November, despite being eligible. In Philadelphia, where over half of the city’s residents are people of color, 18 percent of registered voters lack proper ID under the state’s new laws—laws that Pennsylvania House leader Mike Turzai claimed will deliver the state to Romney in November.
These twin anecdotes seem to perfectly capture the GOP 2012 plan for victory: “voters out, money in.” Despite the massive capital advantage the Republicans have accrued, they’re still driving a strategy of disenfranchisement and destruction that imperils our democracy and seeds distrust among a populace already experiencing record lows of confidence in their elected leadership.
Next week, pundits will be hyperventilating over the political fundraising totals from the last quarter. The cover of the Sunday NY Times Magazine breathlessly asks the rhetorical question, “Can Democrats Catch Up in the Super-PAC game?” Let’s get it clear: no, they can’t and no one ever claimed they could. But they also don’t need to—what they need is to raise some money, spend it smarter than their counterparts, and provide millions of people the legal means and the emotional desire to exercise their constitutional right to vote. The right understands this key to Democratic victory, which is why outraising is not enough. Victory requires dominating the system at both ends.
More than two dozen states have passed voter ID laws, with eleven passing in the last two years. Republicans, sensing the opportunity, have continually hyped the negligible threat of voter fraud in order to make voting tougher and tougher for the elderly, the poor, Latinos and African-Americans—all of whom tend to lean Democratic. Meanwhile, back in April, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson gave $10 million on one day to Romney Super PAC, Restore Our Future. Combined with $20 million to Newt Gingrich’s failed bid plus millions more to Rove and Koch brothers front groups, Adelson has given close to $60 million all told, and has stated publicly that he’ll spend up to $100 million to defeat Barack Obama.
What’s driving these actions at both ends of the spectrum is a mix of personal entitlement, business efficiency and good old-fashioned elitism, with a healthy dose of racism. Take Adelson: he’s in for high stakes because his personal stakes are high. He’s under investigation by both the Department of Justice and the Security and Exchange Commission for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) by paying off local officials and working with organized crime to further his gambling empire in Macau, China. The Obama administration has been diligent about prosecuting FCPA cases, while Adelson presumes the heat would be off under a Romney presidency. When you have $25 billion, what’s $100 million to secure your freedom?
Adelson also makes 90 percent of his earnings from his casinos in Macau and Singapore, a high number, but not unheard of for US companies operating abroad. Obama has promised to close the loopholes that allow these corporations to shelter earnings overseas, robbing US treasuries of billions in tax dollars. Preserving offshore tax havens is not the only place where donating big bucks to GOP Super PACs is a highly efficient business model. Mega-donors David and Charles Koch’s company, Koch Industries, spent a whopping $40 million on disclosed lobbying expenditures between 2008 and 2010. The price of a fundraiser in the Hamptons is peanuts compared to that tab. Between the tax plan and the estate tax, high-net-worth folks stand to save millions annually under Romney. The candidate himself would save almost $5 million per year under his own plan.
Apparently, when the stakes are this high, you don’t take chances. Hence, the full court press on disenfranchisement. In Florida, the GOP governor has been so intent on purging voter rolls of Latino-sounding names that the Justice Department filed an injunction and sixty-seven election supervisors courageously refused to implement the program until he proves his claims in each case.
Self-serving economics is a repugnant driver, but the psychology that allows lawmakers to deny fundamental rights to their constituents while their rank and file stand by is even more insidious. In a rare moment of honesty, a GOP donor that shelled out $25,000 to attend one of the Romney events yesterday had this to say to a LA Times reporter:
“I don’t think the common person is getting it,” she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. “Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them… But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies—everybody who’s got the right to vote—they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income—one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”
While it’s the money they flaunt, it’s the people they fear, a fact that would serve us well to remember as limited resources are spent in 2012 and beyond. As progressives work to protect the vote for every American citizen in the short term and to blunt the impact of big money on our democratic process, let’s not lose focus on long-term investments in our own not-so-secret weapon: the people—of all colors and ages, all incomes levels, in the cities and on the farms—that make this country great. When they all have a voice, we all win.
By: Ilyse Hogue, The Nation, July 9, 2012
“Letting The Right People Vote”: Control And Power Through Voter Suppression
For some years, the Republican party has tried to convince Americans that they have put their ugly legacy on issues of race behind them, that Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and Willie Horton have no relationship to the GOP of today. They call themselves the “party of Lincoln,” hoping people will forget that the Republican and Democratic parties were very different in 1864 than they are today. (Consider: If the likes of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and the rest of the leading lights of the GOP had been alive 150 years ago, which side would they have been on? The answer seems pretty obvious.) Sometimes, they may even go as far as the National Review did recently, publishing an unintentionally hilarious cover article claiming that Republicans are the real civil-rights heroes, because the Democratic party was once home to white Southern segregationists, so there! Never mind that those folks, like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, eventually found their rightful home in the Republican party, as part of the realignment process that gave us the parties of today.
The protestations would be a little more convincing if every election—every election, without fail—didn’t see Republicans searching for new ways to exploit white racial animus and, more importantly, keep minorities from voting. This year’s election will be no different; Republicans are working harder than ever to make sure that if you’re not their kind of person, you will find voting as difficult as possible. That doesn’t mean that deep in their hearts Republicans are racists. It isn’t about hate. It’s about power.
This isn’t anything new. The history of voting in America is one of vicious battles over who would be able to cast ballots, battles that go well beyond the passage of the 15th and 19th Amendments, which extended voting rights to blacks and women, respectively. For decades, dozens of states had “pauper exclusions” on their books preventing poor people from voting. In some cases that meant that only property owners were allowed to vote; in other cases, going on any form of public assistance meant giving up your franchise. Incredibly, these laws were not finally repealed in most places until the 1960s. As Alexander Keyssar detailed in The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, classes of people with power have always sought to restrict the ability of those without power to vote:
They did so both to defend their own interests and because their beliefs and prejudices led them to view others as something less than responsible or worthy citizens. Most men did not want to enfranchise women until the twentieth century; most whites did not want to enfranchise blacks or other racial minorities in their own states; the native-born often were resistant to granting suffrage to immigrants; the wealthy at times sought to deny political citizenship to the poor; established community residents preferred to fence out new arrivals. There is nothing peculiarly American or particularly surprising about these patterns; those who possess political power commonly are reluctant to share it, and they have easily developed or embraced ideas that justify and legitimize that reluctance.
At various times in their histories, both political parties have sought partisan advantage in keeping certain people from the polls. But it has been some time since the Democratic party had a means by which to exclude whole classes of people from voting. The most reliable Republican voters today are groups like older white men. Even the most creative legislator would have a tough time coming up with some way to take away their voting rights.
But the reliably Democratic groups—blacks, Hispanics, poor people, young people—are easier to go after. You don’t have to stop all of them from voting, just enough to make a difference. And few things work better than voter ID laws, since those who don’t have such an ID are so much more likely to be the kind of people who vote Democratic. The fact that people impersonating other people at the polls is so rare as to be almost non-existent matters not at all. Write a voter ID law, and the cruder methods of keeping minorities from voting become less necessary. You don’t have to spend as much time distributing flyers in black neighborhoods threatening people with prosecution if they go to the wrong polling place, or mailing notices to voters claiming that if they have any unpaid parking tickets they won’t be allowed to vote, or posting signs around the neighborhood saying that the election has been moved to Wednesday.
All those things have happened may times before. But after their success in taking control of state legislatures in 2010, Republicans decided that kind of thing was for amateurs. You don’t need election day shenanigans if you’ve passed a law disenfranchising the right people. Minorities may be at the core of these efforts, but it isn’t just about them. Young people, college students, ex-felons, anyone who might be more likely to vote Democratic has been targeted by eager Republican legislators elected in the 2010 sweep. A dozen states with Republican legislatures have erected new barriers to voting since 2010. These barriers include voter ID laws, restrictions on early voting and same-day registration, and laws barring all ex-felons from voting. And no state’s Republicans have moved as aggressively as Florida, which has a bit of a history with this sort of thing.
You may have forgotten it by now, but the razor-thin margin of the 2000 presidential race there had its roots well before election day, when governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris assembled a list of people who were allegedly ex-felons and should therefore lose their voting rights. It turned out that thousands of them weren’t ex-felons at all, but just had names that resembled someone who had committed a felony. But too bad – they lost the right to vote anyway. In the last few years, Florida has passed an ID law, and passed a law imposing absurdly onerous requirements on those who register voters (voter registration is always a part of liberal and Democratic organizing campaigns). They also restricted early voting, most importantly by eliminating early voting on the Sunday before the election. Why that Sunday? Well, many black churches were organizing “Souls to the Polls” voting drives after church on that day. The Republicans solved that problem. And most recently, the government of Republican governor Rick Scott told local boards of elections to purge tens of thousands of people from the voter rolls, on the grounds that they might not be citizens. Many Florida citizens have already gotten threatening letters from the government, telling them they had 30 days to prove their citizenship or lose the right to vote.
Many of these plainly partisan moves are under legal challenge, but our system unfortunately allows much of what Republicans are trying to do. For instance, when the 2000 election controversy revealed the miasma of corruption and incompetence that was the Florida election system, many people were amazed that the Secretary of State, the person in charge of running the election, could be allowed to serve as state co-chair of one of the competing presidential campaigns. The idea that Bush co-chair Katherine Harris was an objective arbiter of election rules and processes was beyond absurd; it was like going to a Yankees-Red Sox game and learning that the home-plate umpire was also the Yankees’ batting coach. But that’s perfectly fine in America; you might remember that four years later, the Secretary of State in Ohio, Ken Blackwell (the state co-chair for the Bush-Cheney campaign) responded to a successful Democratic registration campaign by issuing a decree that any registration form not printed on heavy card stock would be declared invalid (his order was overturned by a court). And just recently the Arizona Secretary of State, Ken Bennett, declared that he might not allow Barack Obama on the state’s ballot, since he wasn’t convinced Obama was actually born in the United States. Bennett, who eventually backed off his birtherism, is–you guessed it–the state co-chair of the Romney campaign.
Few things are more absurd than to hear Republicans claim that in enacting restrictive voting laws, they are motivated not a whit by partisanship, but only by their deep and abiding concern for the integrity of the ballot. The Republicans who swept into office at all levels in 2010 had a policy agenda, to do things like restrict reproductive rights, roll back environmental and consumer regulations, and cut taxes. But their political agenda, designed to increase the chances that they will retain power, got nearly as much of their attention. And few things can more effectively ensure that you’ll retain power than making it harder for the wrong kind of people to vote.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 4, 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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