“To Accommodate Or To Suppress”: Election 2012, A Vote For The Future Or A Vote For The Past?
The 2012 presidential election is fundamentally a contest between our future and our past. Barack Obama’s America is the America that will be; Mitt Romney’s is the America that was. And the distance between the two is greater, perhaps, than in any election we’ve had since the Civil War.
The demographic bases of the rival coalitions couldn’t be more different. Monday’s poll from the Pew Research Center is just the latest to show Obama with a decisive lead (in this case, 21 percentage points) among voters younger than 30. Obama’s margin declines to six points among voters ages 30 through 44, and he breaks even with Romney among voters ages 45 through 64. Romney’s home turf is voters 65 and older; among those, he leads Obama by 19 points.
Age polarization is not specific to the presidential election. On a host of issues, as diverse as gay and lesbian rights and skepticism about the merits of capitalism, polls have shown that younger voters are consistently more tolerant and well to the left of their elders.
Nor is age the only metric through which we can differentiate our future from our past. The other is race, as the nation grows more racially diverse (or, more bluntly, less white) each year. While the 2000 Census put whites’ share of the U.S. population at 69.1 percent, that share had declined to 63.7 percent in the 2010 Census, while the proportion of Hispanics rose from 12.5 percent to 16.3 percent. In raw numbers, total white population increased by just 1.2 percent during the decade, while the African American segment grew by 12.3 percent and the Hispanic share by 43 percent. Demographers predict that the white share of the U.S. population will fall beneath 50 percent in the 2050 Census.
Rather than trying to establish a foothold among America’s growing minorities, however, Romney and the Republicans have decided to forgo an appeal to Hispanic voters by opposing legislation that would grant legal status to undocumented immigrants brought here as children and by backing legislation that effectively requires Hispanics to carry documentation papers in certain states. Republicans seek a majority through winning an ever-higher share of white voters. The Washington Post reported last week that its polling showed the greatest racial gap between the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates since the 1988 election, with Romney favored by 60 percent of white voters and Obama by 80 percent of minority voters (a figure that may prove low, if three-quarters of the Hispanic vote goes to Obama, as some other polls suggest it will). The problem for Republicans, of course, is that the minority vote is a far larger share of the total vote today than it was 24 years ago.
By repeatedly estranging minorities and opposing social policies favored by the young, the Republicans have opted for a King Canute strategy: standing on the shore and commanding the tide to stop. Republicans with an eye toward the future, most notably George W. Bush and Karl Rove, have urged the party to embrace immigration reform, but the base is rabidly anti-immigrant and its antipathy is reinforced daily by talk radio hosts and Fox News chatterers who depict an America under siege by alien forces.
Should Republicans prevail in this election and seek to build a more-than-one-term plurality, they will confront a stark choice: Either Romney must persuade his party to reverse its stance on immigration, or the party must seek to extend the scope of its voter-suppression efforts. Put another way, they must try to either accommodate the future or suppress it.
Accommodation with diversity and modernity, however, is simply not part of the Republican DNA. Today’s Republican Party has largely cornered the market on religious fundamentalists, even as the number of GOP scientists has dwindled (a 2009 Pew poll of scientists found that just 6 percent self-identified as Republicans, while 55 percent said they were Democrats). Many of the largest Republican funders come from economic sectors hardly distinguished by significant productivity increases or their contributions to mass prosperity (casino gambling, Wall Street), while Silicon Valley remains more Democratic turf. (By the way, all those messages Republican CEOs have been sending their employees , predicting layoffs should Obama be reelected? Have any of them promised raises if Romney wins? Just askin’.)
Two Americas are facing off in next week’s election. By their makeup, the Democrats are bound to move, if haltingly, into the future, while the Republicans parade proudly into the pre-New Deal past — some of it mythic, lots of it ugly. The differences could not be clearer.
By: Harold Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 30, 2012
“Mail In Your Ballot, Cross Your Fingers”: Votes Cast By Mail Are More Likely To Go Uncounted
Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, Jon Husted, has been under fire now for months from Democrats. They’re angry, particularly, about his moves to limit early voting hours across the state—especially those on the weekend before the election. Poor and minority voters rely on the expanded hours. Black churches have used the last Sunday before election day to bring voters to the polls; low-income voters often have inflexible work schedules and childcare demands at home. After a lengthy court battle, Husted has now authorized county election boards to offer hours in the three days before election day. But he did limit early voting hours in the weeks before, with fewer evening hours and no weekend hours.
But Husted insists he’s no 2012 version of Katherine Harris or Ken Blackwell. He’s repeatedly defended himself by pointing out that he’s also done something to make voting easier for all Ohioans: expand mail-in voting. Anyone in the state can vote by mail and this year, for the first time, the secretary of state sent applications for absentee ballots to every voter on the rolls. People have responded. Husted’s office has been churning out press releases touting the million-plus voters who’ve taken advantage of the offer and requested mail-in ballots. It sounds like a great thing. Ohio’s elections have been plagued by Election Day controversies; in 2004, in particular, lines were extremely long, particularly in minority polling places, and many worried that a lot of voters, after hours in line, gave up and went home. Mail-in ballots will take some of the pressure off of what’s sure to be a tense November 6 in the state that could swing the election to either President Obama or Mitt Romney.
But there’s a hitch—a big one. A new report from the Voting Technology Project, a collaborative research effort by MIT and Caltech, shows that votes cast by mail are significantly less likely to be counted than those cast in person. The report has serious implications given recent trends toward more and more mail-in ballots. Voting by mail has grown from less than 10 percent of ballots cast in 2000 to 17 percent in 2010. Two states, Oregon and Washington, conduct elections exclusively through the mail, while several others, including California and Colorado, allow voters to become permanent absentee voters, automatically getting a mail-in ballot every year.
That doesn’t mean the system is humming along. In 2008, 800,000 mail-in ballots were rejected by election workers for one problem or another. Another 3.9 million were requested by voters but never received, while 2.9 million were sent to voters but never made it back to election officials. In total, as many 7.6 million votes, 21 percent of those requested, may have “leaked” out of the system before the votes were counted. It’s still the case that the total number of mail-in ballots cast and rejected is small—around 2 percent of those requested—but the gap in accuracy is certainly cause for concern. And in a tight election, those uncounted ballots could make a difference.
“It continues to surprise me,” says Charles Stewart, a political science professor at MIT and one of the authors of the report, ”that with all of the growth in voting by mail, that there has been surprisingly little curiosity about how accurate the voting mode is when you vote by mail.”
It’s ironic, too, given how much effort has gone into improving voting techology in the last decade. Since the 2000 presidential election and the controversies over faulty voting machines and poorly designed ballots, most reformers have focused on fixing the technology problems. Under the Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress in 2002, voting machines must now alert voters if they’ve skipped voting for one office or if they’ve selected more than one candidate for an office. Because the voter is physically in the polling place, it’s easy for them to correct their ballot. The reforms have been extremely successful; Stewart estimates that as many as 1.5 million votes will be counted this year because a machine didn’t break. Problems with mail-in ballots, he says, “probably undercut the gains we have made by buying better voting machines.”
Mailing in your vote requires a series of steps. In most states, after filling out your preferences, you sign an outside envelope and then put the actual ballot into a second envelope to ensure secrecy. Once it’s mailed and arrives at the central counting facility, elections workers verify that your signature matches the one on file and then separate the actual ballot from the envelope with your signature—meaning no one knows who cast which vote. From there everything is scanned and counted.
The trouble is, there are a multitude of ways the process can get screwed up. First there’s the U.S. Mail; the ballot could get lost and never arrive at the facility—or be delayed and arrive too late to be counted. If it does get there on time, your signature might now look different from the one you had when you registered; elderly people, who are the most likely to use mail-in ballots, can face problems if their signatures get shaky. Even if your ballot makes it to the scanning stage, any mistake you’ve made, like accidentally filling in bubbles for two candidates, can cause the vote for that office not to count. Unlike with in-person voting, there’s no way to alert an individual that there’s a problem with his or her ballot; once it’s at the counting stage, no one knows who cast which ballot.
But while mail-in ballots appear to have significant problems, Americans clearly like having voting options and it’s easier for election workers if everything doesn’t come down to a single day of immense pressure. That’s why the best solution is to expand in-person early voting, giving people as many hours and days as possible to cast their ballots.
Americans are twice as likely to vote early now as they were in 2004. However, while mail-in voting has grown steadily, in-person early voting has only expanded in fits and starts. In 2000, only 3 percent of voters did so through showing up at polling places early. While that rose to 13 percent in 2008, it was down to 8 percent in 2010. By expanding early voting options, states would take pressure off elections officials while still making the most of improvements to voting technology. Certainly states should think twice before moving to mail-in only elections or allowing people to automatically get an absentee ballot each year.
It’s a lesson Ohio may have to learn this year. Husted may have created new problems when he decided to focus on mail-in ballots while decreasing options for early voting in several urban counties. As the Cincinnati Enquirer reported Thursday, 1.4 million Ohio voters have asked for absentee ballots, but so far state officials have only received 619,000 back. Those numbers are likely to grow. The gap is disturbing. Many who requested mail-in ballots but either did not fill them out or never received them may show up at the polls and instead fill out provisional ballots. (The provisional ballots allow workers to make sure voters aren’t voting twice.) With the presidential election extremely close—and with a good chance that Ohio will be the deciding state in determining who wins—election workers could easily wind up scrambling to validate and count those provisional ballots. Meanwhile, there could be litigation around the mail-in ballots that were not received in time or were rejected. There’s plenty of possibility for drama.
The heat on Husted may not end any time soon.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, October 26, 2012
“Ugly And Un-American”: Republicans’ Long Term Strategy Is To Limit Voting Rights
According to political prognosticators, the presidential race is once again a toss-up, settling into a familiar pattern after weeks in which President Obama seemed to be gaining a modest lead. The pundits are wrong to suggest a new dynamic: The race has always been too close to call.
That’s always been the contour of this campaign — periodic gaffes and brilliant debate performances aside. Republican strategists have long expected a close election; they prepared for it years ago. How did they do it? With Machiavellian strokes, GOP leaders around the country passed laws designed to block the ballot for a small number of voting blocs that tend to support Democrats.
It’s no secret — and no surprise — that the strict voter ID laws in vogue in Republican circles target poorer voters, especially those who are black and brown. Black and Latino Americans tend to vote for Democratic candidates.
No matter how much the right yells “voter fraud,” its spokesmen cannot conceal an ugly and old-fashioned strategy: Suppress the vote. Keep poor people of color from casting a ballot. Deny to certain citizens a fundamental democratic right. There is virtually no in-person voter fraud at the polls, and that’s the sort of chicanery that voter identification laws ostensibly prevent.
Instead, voter ID laws are intended to help Republicans win elections. Because the GOP brain trust is excellent at executing a long-term strategy, its demographers saw the party’s weakness years ago and began to plan for it. As the nation’s ethnic minorities, especially Latinos, grow in number, the Republican Party would have to become more inclusive or face extinction.
President George W. Bush tried to make the GOP more inclusive, but he couldn’t persuade the nativists in his party to back comprehensive immigration reform. Instead, the Republican base became more exclusionary, more jingoistic, more suspicious of diversity.
That’s why voter ID laws became so important to the party’s future. In a deeply polarized country, important races are increasingly decided by very narrow margins. In 2000, the popular vote was essentially tied. In 2004, Bush won the popular vote by about 2.5 percentage points over John Kerry. In such tight contests, Republicans need not disenfranchise large numbers of voters — just a few.
The GOP insists it just wants to protect “ballot integrity,” but sometimes its lesser lights fail to stay on message. In June, Pennsylvania state House Majority Leader Mike Turzai, a Republican, proudly recited a list of accomplishments at a state party meeting. “Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it’s done. First pro-life legislation — abortion facility regulations — in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”
Since young adults voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008, college students have also been the targets of stringent voter ID laws. In New Hampshire, for example, state House Speaker Bill O’Brien, also a Republican, pushed hard for a ban on college-issued photo IDs at the polls and an end to same-day voter registration in 2011.
Allowing students to register and vote on the same day, he later told a group of tea partiers, would simply lead to “the kids coming out of the schools and basically doing what I did when I was a kid, which is voting as a liberal. That’s what kids do — they don’t have life experience, and they just vote their feelings.”
Neither Turzai nor O’Brien mentioned voter fraud.
If protecting the ballot from con artists were the real issue here, Republicans would zero in on absentee ballots, which have been at the heart of most of the biggest voting scams over the last several decades. The Commission on Federal Election Reform, headed by James Baker and Jimmy Carter, cited absentee ballots as the “largest source of potential voter fraud” in its 2005 report.
Curiously, rules for absentee ballots have been loosened in many states. That’s because of the widespread perception that those ballots of convenience are more likely to be used by Republican voters.
The Republican Party ought to be ashamed of this ugly and un-American strategy. For all its talk about the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution, it seems to have little respect for one of its basic principles: the right to vote.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, October 13, 2012
“Crying Fraud, Then Creating It”: Republicans, The Villains Of Their Own Conspiracy Theories
For once, the Republicans were right.
They have been obsessively claiming that voter-suppression measures are necessary because of widespread “ballot fraud.” However extensive investigations by the mainstream media have shown that ballot-fraud is a convenient myth.
Even the Bush administration, in an extensive five-year search, turned up no evidence of the kind of voting fraud—fake IDs, voting in the name of dead people, folks being bribed to vote—that the Republicans routinely allege. Republicans, evoking the tactics of the pre-civil rights segregationist South, simply want to make it more difficult for people who might support Democrats to exercise their right to vote. Some five million people, mostly minorities and the poor, are at risk of being denied their right to vote in 19 states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures, according to a report from the Brennan Center. Happily, the courts have struck down the most extreme of these measures, in Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, and most recently Pennsylvania.
Now, however, Republicans can claim some vindication. Serious voter fraud has emerged in Florida. But the ballot fraud is being perpetrated by Republicans!
The Florida GOP had hired a firm with a very sketchy record, called Strategic Allied Consulting. And guess what? The firm tried to register dead people! It also refused to register live people who tried to register as a Democrat or an independent.
An embarrassed party turned over evidence to state prosecutors and fired the firm.
But, hey, the Republicans should be pleased. They’ve now demonstrated, at long last, that ballot fraud does exist. Of course, the remedy is not suppression of legitimate voting, but prosecution of fraudsters. They seem to exist only on the Republican side.
By: Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, October 3, 2012
“In The Face Of Federal Law”: Republicans Decided To Commit Voter Fraud To Prove That It Existed
A confusing but heartening decision in Pennsylvania today, where the judge basically ruled that people can vote with or without picture ID.
This is at least the fourth state where conservatives and Republicans trying to pursue voter suppression legislation have lost. We have Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and now the good old Keystone State. Here for example is the Florida news from late August. And here’s a little summary. A few voter ID laws did get pre-clearance from the Justice Department, in Virginia and New Hampshire, but these are “non-strict” voter ID requirements, meaning that voters without ID can still vote by signing an affadavit vouching for their own identity.
Multiple choice quiz. What is happening here?
A. Vast conspiracy among left-wing judges, joined by the media, to let the freeloaders of America vote without paying taxes.
B. Plot by Acorn, Hugo Chavez, Bill Ayres, and Frantz Fanon, and if you think it matters that Fanon has been dead for 51 years, you don’t understand how these things work.
C. This Little Thing We Have Called Federal Law
In other words, friends, federal law very clearly, and for what I should think are rather obvious historical reasons, comes down on the default side of letting people vote. The law, and the judges seated to uphold it, will generally frown on attempts to impinge upon the franchise in the ways Republicans wish to do.
It’s also just amazing, isn’t it, that the only voter fraud scandal of this election (alleged, at this point) is a Republican one. Unable to find any cases of actual voter fraud on the Democratic side, the Republicans have apparently decided to go out and commit some to prove with finality that the problem exists!
It’s nice to see that open cheating still doesn’t work.
Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 2, 2012
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