“Blacking Out The Vote”: Republicans Impose Second-Class Citizenship On People Who Threaten The Status Quo
Voters are facing an ugly surprise on their way to the voting booth on Tuesday. What most people don’t realize is that since 2006, some 34 state legislatures have worked diligently to chip away at the fundamental right to vote — and overwhelmingly, people of color are the target.
This year alone, 14 states have implemented legislation that would end same-day voter registration, limit early voting, and require voters to present forms of ID that many voters lack and cannot easily obtain. What do these measures have in common? Each would disproportionately impact African-American voters, making it more difficult for them to vote or have their vote count in a meaningful fashion.
To make matters worse, the Supreme Court pulled the rug out from under decades of effective voting rights protections in its decision in Shelby County v. Holder. The court’s decision gave a free pass to state and local politicians manipulating voting laws for their own gain, allowing them to pick and choose who will be able to vote. That is why the right to vote is in danger across the country.
Some of these state legislatures, while attacking the right to vote, also diminish the value of each vote counted through all kinds of creative methods. Some recent examples include drawing boundaries of an election district to ensure that minority voters cannot constitute a majority, and “packing” minorities in only one or a limited number of districts to ensure they are a majority, which weakens the voting power of minority groups that could otherwise constitute an influential voting bloc. Smaller districts can also be drawn in such a way that the voting power of a minority group is reduced by dividing minorities into several districts that are predominantly white.
I know, the term “voting matters” has probably lost its value over the years because of over use, but it really does matter. Voting isn’t just about electing candidates. It’s about feeling a sense of dignity and empowering people to take part in the democratic process. It’s about influencing policies and holding the federal and state governments accountable for promoting social and economic equity for ALL people.
Withholding the right to vote is a way to impose second-class citizenship on people who threaten the status quo. Throughout our country’s history, the right to vote was denied to white men without property, African-Americans, women, Native Americans, Chinese-Americans, and adults under 21 years of age.
While the 15th Amendment was adopted in 1870 and prohibited denial of the right to vote on account of race or color, in reality, African-Americans who wanted to exercise their right to vote were beaten, chased by dogs, bludgeoned by police and sometimes killed. It’s somewhat unimaginable that African-Americans were only able to vote within recent memory — with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But that’s all history, right?
Some claim today, that America is no longer plagued by the racial injustice of the civil rights era. Unfortunately, less overt strategies have been implemented more recently to block African-Americans and other minorities from the ballot. I can’t believe how close we are to losing what many fought so hard, and sometimes died, to achieve.
Now more than ever, new tools are needed to prevent voter discrimination before it happens. In January 2014, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the Voting Rights Amendment Act (VRAA) to repair the damage done by the Shelby decision. Congress had the opportunity to pass a new, flexible and forward-looking set of protections that work together to guarantee our right to vote — however, they failed to act on it.
In September, voting rights advocates, including myself, delivered petitions from over 500,000 voters seeking to restore VRA protections to the office of Speaker John Boehner. We found ourselves confronted by a locked door, perfect symbolism for the disenfranchisement many voters of color will experience come Tuesday. Next year the Voting Rights Act will be celebrating a dubious 50th anniversary, unless Congress acts immediately to pass new protections. Next week, voters of color will be immersed in the least protected election since the passage of the act in 1965.
The Voting Rights Act was born from the premise that all Americans have the right to vote — regardless of race or language proficiency. It was critical to the civil rights movement, turning hateful policies like poll taxes and literacy tests into historical footnotes. We cannot allow those footnotes to be rewritten into modern forms of vote suppression.
If you have any questions about your right to vote in this upcoming election, contact the ACLU at letmevote@aclu.org or call the Election Protection Hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683).
By: Laura W. Murphy, Director of the Washington Legislative Office of the American Civil Liberties Union; The Huffington Post Blog, November 3, 2014
“After Voter Suppression”: Focusing The Nation’s Attention On The Magnitude Of The Problem
So much has happened in so many parts of the judicial system regarding Voter ID and other recent efforts to restrict the franchise that it’s hard to get a fix on the big picture. But at the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin has seen the future of SCOTUS action on voting rights in its rulings on Wisconsin (halting implementation on grounds of timing) and Texas (giving that state the green light) Voter ID laws, and it’s not good:
The Wisconsin and Texas rulings were just preliminary requests for emergency relief, and the Supreme Court may yet hear the cases in full on the merits. But there seems little chance that a majority of the current Court will rein in these changes in any significant way. In courtrooms around the country, it’s been made clear that these Republican initiatives have been designed and implemented to disenfranchise Democrats (again, usually of color). But the Supreme Court doesn’t care.
So Toobin thinks it’s time to make a mental adjustment back to the mid-1960s, when hostile state laws and practices on voting were overwhelmed by the sheer moral and physical presence of people exercising the rights they still had and participating in elections whatever the difficulty:
Certainly, the obstacles for voters in the contemporary South do not compare to those that the civil-rights pioneers, black and white, faced until the early nineteen-sixties. In the Freedom Summer of 1964, the still nascent civil-rights movement coalesced around an effort to register voters in Mississippi. It was during that summer that the infamous murders of the civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner took place. In addition, of course, black Mississippi residents endured less well-known but equally horrific abuse from state authorities during this time. In those days before the Voting Rights Act, the effort did not succeed in registering great numbers of voters, but it did focus the nation’s attention on the magnitude of the problem.
So it could today. In light of the changes in the state laws, it’s difficult but not impossible to register voters and make sure that they get to cast their ballots. And it’s absolutely mandatory in a democracy for that to be done.
The title of Toobin’s essay is “Freedom Summer, 2015.” It’s sobering to realize that’s what we may need to restore voting rights long thought to be relatively secure. But it’s also a reminder that reactionaries who fear democracy (not just judicial conservatives, but the Con Cons who think “losers” have forfeited the right to have any say in what “winners” do with their money and power) have been defeated before in more extreme circumstances.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, October 28, 2014
“The Courts’ Baffling New Math”: By What Logic Do Hundreds Of Thousands Of People Simply Stop Counting?
The Supreme Court of the John Roberts era gets one thing very right: It’s one of the most free-speech-protective courts in modern history. There is no purveyor of semi-pornographic crush videos, no maker of rape-aspiring violent video games, no homophobic funeral protester, no anti-abortion clinic counselor, and no filthy-rich campaign contribution–seeker whose rights and privileges will not be treated by the court with the utmost reverence and solicitude.
This is important and vital, and one doesn’t want to slag the court for the boundless attention and care it lavishes upon the most obnoxious speakers in America. After all, the First Amendment is kind of the constitutional gateway drug, the portal to the rest of the Bill of Rights. And without securing meaningful protection for the rights to speak, assemble, worship, and publish, so many of our other rights might be illusory. Great. Stipulated.
That makes it extra weird whenever the assorted (lets call them largely “conservative”) justices of the Roberts court, and judges on lower courts across the land, turn their attention to the protection of other rights—equally crucial but perhaps less sexy—like, say, the right to vote or to obtain an abortion. That’s when the nameless, faceless rights seekers all blur into oblivion, a great unwashed mass of undifferentiated shadow people. And that is when some judges find it all too simple to bat these rights away with a stroke of the pen.
In the past few weeks, it’s been astonishing to contrast the regard afforded to individual speech rights with the cavalier dismissal of other, equally precious hallmarks of democracy.
There was no better reminder of this phenomenon than watching the justices simply write off the voting rights of what may well amount to 600,000 Texas voters, many black and Latino, last weekend, in the wee hours of the morning, without stated reasons or written opinion. As Richard Hasen has explained, after a nine-day trial, a district court determined that there were “hundreds of thousands of voters potentially unable to get IDs because they were hours away from the government offices issuing IDs.” The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals was not much bothered by the fact that hundreds of thousands of Texans would be forced to travel for hours to obtain proper ID for the midterms, and the Supreme Court agreed. Meh, what’s a few hundred thousand disenfranchised voters when you have “electoral integrity” to protect?
This is of course the same 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that, only weeks earlier, was not much bothered by the prospect that 900,000 women in Texas will soon live more than a 150 miles away from the nearest clinic offering a safe and legal abortion, or that 750,000 would live more than 250 miles away, if Texas’ draconian new abortion restrictions are allowed to stand and a majority of reproductive health clinics must shut down. For now, at least, the Supreme Court has blocked the law, in another unsigned order. But the staggering lack of concern for not just hundreds, not just thousands, but tens or hundreds of thousands of women was all over the 5th Circuit’s opinion.
The 5th Circuit evinced a kind of Marie Antoinette approach to individual justice in these cases. When it shut down access to both voting and abortion in Texas, it indicated without precisely saying so that as long as citizens have fast cars and flexible work schedules, they are not burdened by Texas’ regulations. And seemingly there are no Texans without fast cars and vacation time in their view. At oral argument in the case about the shutdown of 20 Texas clinics, Judge Edith Brown of the 5th Circuit heard that abortion clinic closures would leave the Rio Grande area without any providers, forcing women who live there to drive 300 miles round trip to Corpus Christi. The judge sniffed, “Do you know how long that takes in Texas at 75 miles an hour? … This is a peculiarly flat and not congested highway.”
Looking at the 5th Circuit’s screwy fractions earlier this month, Amy Davidson noted that it’s astonishing on its face that the judges who agreed to shut down Texas reproductive health clinics would deny one-sixth of Texas women reasonable access to a clinic. More astonishing still is the fact that the judges were perfectly aware that this burden would fall most heavily on women without cars, who couldn’t afford to take several days off work to travel to distant clinics. And that was OK. These facts of life affected their conclusions not at all.
The idea that judges would simply vaporize the interests of hundreds of thousands of poor and minority voters is perhaps just as amazing. By what logic do thousands of abortion-seekers and would-be voters simply stop counting?
A panel of judges on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals was similarly unfazed by the possibility that 300,000, or 9 percent, of Wisconsin voters would be disenfranchised by that state’s new voter ID law. Whether it’s 500,000 voters or 300,000 voters or almost a million women, these numbers are just not capable of moving the judicial heartstrings.
Perhaps these hundreds of thousands of people—a seeming multitude to you and me—are dismissible because they are poor or minorities or just women, or in any event people who don’t drive really fast cars. As Judge Richard Posner painstakingly explained in his dissent in the Wisconsin voter ID case, the cost of obtaining the appropriate documentation to vote under the new Wisconsin law is somewhere in the range of $75 to $175. Adjusted for inflation, he noted, that is higher than “the $1.50 poll tax outlawed by the 24th amendment in 1964.”
There’s an equally obvious and far more troubling problem with the math on the other side of the ledger, as Michael Hiltzik points out, where people are worried about infinitesimal percentages of potential fraud. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker defended his state’s voter ID law by claiming it is worthwhile whether it stops “one, 100, or 1,000” illegal votes. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, another big fan of voter ID, similarly argued recently that a glitch that would result in the disenfranchising of 12,000 people wouldn’t be a “major problem” because they represent a “tiny percentage” of Kansas’ voters. Walker and Kobach pooh-pooh the disenfranchisement of tens or hundreds of thousands of state voters in order to fight the scourge of vote fraud, of which there were seven incidents in Kansas in the past 13 years, and two documented in Texas. It’s not just bad that real votes and real abortions are blocked to deter an imaginary problem (vote fraud and botched abortions). It’s that even if the problems were genuine, the math still wouldn’t work.
It’s utterly baffling, this new math. Math that holds that seven incidents of vote fraud should push hundreds and thousands of voters off the rolls. Or that hundreds of thousands of women can be denied access to safe abortion clinics, supposedly to prevent vanishingly small rates of complications. I don’t know how we have arrived at the point where members of the judicial branch—the branch trusted to vindicate the rights of the poorest and most powerless—don’t even see the poor and powerless, much less count them as fully realized humans.
This brings us back to the First Amendment, seemingly the only right that truly counts anymore in America. Why has the constitutional right to be heard all but overmastered the right to vote or legally terminate a pregnancy? Maybe the court is still capable of hearing even as it loses the ability to see? Or maybe the powerful voices of Fred Phelps, Shaun McCutcheon, and Anthony Elonis—the creatures who rightly are allowed to say and do horrible things in the name of free speech—count for more than the hundreds and thousands of voiceless voters and abortion-seekers who are seemingly not even important enough to name?
By: Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, October 24, 2014
“Don’t Let Them Silence You: Vote, Dammit”: The Way We All Become Equal On Election Day Is That We Cast That Ballot
Our country’s oldest and longest struggle has been to enlarge democracy by making it possible for more and more people to be treated equally at the polls. The right to participate in choosing our representatives – to vote — is the very right that inflamed the American colonies and marched us toward revolution and independence.
So it’s unbelievable and frankly outrageous that in the last four years, close to half the states in this country have passed laws to make it harder for people to vote. But it’s true.
But don’t stop there. Engage, and start the conversation of democracy where you live — in your apartment complex, on your block, in your neighborhood. There is always at least one kindred spirit within reach to launch the conversation. Build on it.
As this country began, only white men of property could vote, but over time and with agitation and conflict, the franchise spread regardless of income, color or gender. In the seventies, we managed to lower the voting age to 18. Yet a new nationwide effort to suppress the vote, nurtured by fear and fierce resistance to inevitable demographic change, has hammered the United States.
And this must be said, because it’s true: While it once was Democrats who used the poll tax, literacy tests and outright intimidation to keep Black people from voting, today, in state after state, it is the Republican Party working the levers of suppression. It’s as if their DNA demands it. Here’s what Paul Weyrich, one of the founding fathers of the conservative movement, said back in 1980: “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
So the right has become relentless, trying every trick to keep certain people from voting. And conservative control of the Supreme Court gives them a leg up. Last year’s decision – Shelby County v. Holder – revoked an essential provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and that has only upped the ante, encouraging many Republican state legislators to impose restrictive voter ID laws, as well as work further to gerrymander Congressional districts and limit voting hours and registration. In the past few weeks, the Supreme Court has dealt with voting rights cases in Texas, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Ohio and upheld suppression in three of them, denying the vote to hundreds of thousands of Americans. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in opposition, “The greatest threat to public confidence… is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminating law.”
The right’s rationale is that people — those people — are manipulating the system to cheat and throw elections. But rarely – meaning almost never — can they offer any proof of anyone, anywhere, showing up at the polling place and trying illegally to cast a ballot. Their argument was knocked further on its head just recently when one of the most respected conservative judges on the bench, Richard Posner of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, wrote a blistering dissent on the legality of a Wisconsin voter ID law. “As there is no evidence that voter-impersonation fraud is a problem,” Posner declared, “how can the fact that a legislature says it’s a problem turn it into one? If the Wisconsin legislature says witches are a problem, shall Wisconsin courts be permitted to conduct witch trials?”
The real reason for the laws is to lower turnout, to hold onto power by keeping those who are in opposition from exercising their solemn right — to make it hard for minorities, poor folks, and students, among others, to participate in democracy’s most cherished act.
And you wonder why so many feel disconnected and disaffected? Forces in this country don’t want people to vote at the precise moment when turnout already is at a low, when what we really should be doing is making certain that young people are handed their voter registration card the moment they get a driver’s license, graduate from high school, arrive at college or register at Selective Service.
In a conversation for this week’s edition of Moyers & Company, The Nation magazine’s Ari Berman put it this way: “This is an example of trying to give the most powerful people in the country, the wealthiest, the most connected people, more power. Because the more people that vote, the less power the special interests have. If you can restrict the number of people who participate, it’s a lot easier to rig the political system.” And Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, noted, “For people who don’t have the power to engage in terms of money in the political process, the way we all become equal on Election Day is that we cast that ballot… [So] it’s not just about corporate interests. It is about power. And it is about trying to suppress the voice of those who are the most marginalized.”
So vote, dammit. It is, as President Lyndon Johnson said when he signed the Voting Rights Act, “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice.” But don’t stop there. Engage, and start the conversation of democracy where you live — in your apartment complex, on your block, in your neighborhood. There is always at least one kindred spirit within reach to launch the conversation. Build on it. Like the founders, launch a Committee of Correspondence and keep it active. Show up when your elected officials hold town meetings. Make a noise and don’t stop howling. Robert LaFollette said democracy is a life, and involves constant struggle. So be it.
By; Bill Moyers and Michael Winship; Moyers and Company, Bill Moyers Blog, October 24, 2014
“In Service Of Ideological Gain”: Chris Christie Just Exposed His Entire Party’s Deceitful Voter Suppression Plan
Every now and again a Republican state party operative or elected official will drop the ruse and admit that the purpose of state-level voter restrictions isn’t to curtail voter impersonation fraud or to cut election costs, but to keep the wrong kinds of people from voting.
Usually the admission is purely cynical, as when Pennsylvania’s House Majority Leader Mike Turzai said, “Voter ID … is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” (It didn’t.) Other times it’s suffused with racism—the forefather of vote suppression—as when Don Yelton, then a Republican precinct chairman from North Carolina, appeared on “The Daily Show” last year to announce that “the law is going to kick the Democrats in the butt… If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.”
Governors, senators and national operatives are better at keeping a lid on this kind of candor. But as evidence that voter fraud is a right-wing superstition mounts, alongside evidence that the GOP’s remedies measurably suppress the vote, savvier arguments for voting restrictions are reducing toward either naked appeals like Turzai’s and Yelton’s or toward a kind of post-modernist denial of objective reality in service of ideological gain.
“Would you rather have Rick Scott in Florida overseeing the voting mechanism, or Charlie Crist?” New Jersey Governor Chris Christie asked this week at a Chamber of Commerce event in Washington. “Would you rather have Scott Walker in Wisconsin overseeing the voting mechanism, or would you rather have Mary Burke? Who would you rather have in Ohio, John Kasich or Ed FitzGerald?”
Christie went on, “The fact is it doesn’t matter if you don’t really care what happens in these states, you’re going to care about who is running the state in November of 2016, what kind of political apparatus they’ve set up and what kind of governmental apparatus they’ve set up to ensure a full and fair election in 2016.”
By no coincidence, Republicans in each of those states have already imposed disenfranchising restrictions, which makes it clear that Christie sees these kinds of laws as an existential necessity, the key to Republican self-perpetuation. In Christie’s mind, American election outcomes are a direct function of partisan control of states. Republicans, who “oversee the voting mechanisms,” need to win so that they can continue to “oversee the voting mechanisms.” If they don’t win now, they’ll lose control of the voting mechanisms ahead of an election in which fundamentals will favor the Democrats, and be doomed.
There’s a blinkered and an unblinkered way to interpret such a view. The former—a more generous interpretation—is that Christie believes, against all evidence, that when Republicans lose control of the voting apparatus, fraud becomes rampant and cheaters swing elections to Democrats. The latter, to quote the Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore, is that Christie is “treating the right to vote as discretionary, depending on [his] party’s needs, which makes voter suppression just another day at the office”—that he believes Republicans must cheat to win now, so that they can live to cheat another day.
Neither of these readings flatters Christie. If the extent of voter fraud were an open question, Christie could make a real, but contestable case that GOP-backed voting restrictions yield election outcomes that more closely resemble the will of the voting public. But this is not an open question. What we know about voter fraud, and the right’s insistence on fighting it by limiting the franchise, makes its anti-fraud agenda a mirror image of its rejection of climate science. Republicans oppose the regulatory remedies to climate change, so they question its existence. They support the regulatory remedies to voter fraud, so they insist it exists.
In that way, voter fraud is the dark matter of Republican politics. Except that unlike dark matter, whose existence can be inferred from the way it tugs at the outer stars of our galaxy, the only way to infer that voter fraud swings elections to Democrats is to stipulate that Democratic victories are intrinsically aberrant.
This, again, is the charitable view. The simpler view is that Christie et al understand that voting restrictions suppress the Democratic vote, and see that as a feature rather than a bug. Either way, it suggests that conservatives will cling to the voter fraud myth, in the same way they cling to the myth that upper-bracket income tax cuts pay for themselves; or that they will posit the exact same voter suppression tactics as the solution to other problems, real or imagined.
Earlier this week, Vox’s Matthew Yglesias reprised his argument for building a movement to create a constitutional right to vote. The argument has three prongs. A Voting Rights Amendment would serve as a valuable organizing tool, until adopted; if adopted, it would flip the burden on Republicans, to demonstrate that their efforts to restrict voting don’t violate the Constitution; and it would be hard to defeat along the way, because the substantive and moral arguments for a Voting Rights Amendment are incontestable. Pair it with a national Election Day holiday, and Republicans would have a much harder time sculpting the electorate. The alternative is that Democrats will continue to expend tremendous energy and capital to beat back tactics Republicans are unlikely to abandon on their own.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, October 22, 2014
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