There is absolutely no question that Republicans are trying to suppress non-whites from voting, throughout the Southern states, in an effort that has been accelerating since 2010. It is not difficult to catalogue this abusive Republican mission, which unfortunately has spread, in a few instances, to states above the Mason-Dixon Line as well.
Nor is there any doubt whatsoever about why Republicans are doing this, since the demographics of the states where it is happening suggest that it is becoming increasingly difficult for white descendants of the Confederacy, with their puppet conservative politicians, and for conservatives in general, to retain control of government.
Frankly, I find this voter suppression disgusting. Southern conservatives, who now control the GOP, have succeeded in destroying the party of Abraham Lincoln, with its once long and proud tradition of seeking to extend the voting franchise, not restrict it.
The effort started in the last few years (2006 to 2008) of the Bush II Department of Justice, when Bush’s political appointees tried to force U.S. Attorneys throughout the country, but particularly in the South, to prosecute voter-fraud cases. However, the Administration had a fundamental problem: There was no evidence of voter fraud. But this did not end the effort. After Republicans won control of twenty-one states (occupying both the legislature and the governor’s office) in 2010, they began—in the name of preventing nonexistent voter fraud—enacting legislation to restrict voting.
More specifically, they adopted laws that fell into the following areas: they cut early voting, eliminated registration on Election Day, created voting challenges that could be made by one’s fellow citizens, and required photo identification for voting. And even now, they are still making efforts to change the Electoral College. As Ari Berman writes in his piece for The Nation, “Voter Suppression: The Confederacy Rises Again [ http://www.thenation.com/blog/169709/voter-suppression-confederacy-rises-again ],” these efforts have been particularly focused in the South, where they are clearly intended to block non-whites from voting.
Using the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as amended, the U.S. Department of Justice has blocked many of these efforts to suppress the vote—most recently, in Texas and Florida. But efforts to block these voter-suppression laws at the state level have been mixed, with Republican judges often refusing to block these unconstitutional efforts to impede voting. While this situation has dominated in the South, a few Republicans in the North are now playing the game as well.
For example, a politically-ambitious Republican Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court Judge, Robert Simpson, refused to enjoin a new Pennsylvania voting law, finding a technical reason to let it go into effect, notwithstanding there being no showing of potential fraud, but rather a clear showing of likely voter suppression among minorities in big cities, if the bill were to survive judicial review.
What is striking about this radical and regressive behavior is that Republicans were once champions of increasing, and spreading, the vote. But that, of course, was before the Southern conservatives took effective control of the GOP.
Repudiating Republican History
From the election of President Abraham Lincoln until that of President Ronald Reagan, Republican Presidents had been leaders in, and the Republican Party had been highly supportive of, all efforts to empower voters. Before Reagan, I am not aware of any widespread thinking that would have even tolerated the idea of intentionally disenfranchising voters. Citing a few examples, from the 1920s to the 1970s, of which I have personal knowledge or involvement will broadly make my point.
President Warren G. Harding. When writing a biography of Warren G. Harding [ http://www.amazon.com/Warren-Harding-Presidents-President-1921-1923/dp/0805069569 ], I was surprised to find that, in the early 1920s, he actively considered how to create a two-party South that would include blacks in the Republican Party. By the 1920s, Lincoln and the post-Civil War Reconstruction era had driven most whites in the South into the Democratic Party, where they remained until they were wooed in large numbers with radical GOP policies in the 1980s.
Harding’s predecessor, President Woodrow Wilson, had grown up in the South and never overcame the racism he learned there. Indeed, Wilson actively discriminated against blacks as President, blatantly removing them from any and all positions that he controlled within the federal government.
On October 26, 1921, President Harding launched his delicate initiative to bring Southern blacks into the GOP by traveling to Birmingham, Alabama, where a large—albeit segregated—audience had been assembled to hear him. As I wrote in my Harding biography, it was a “bold and atypical in-your-face move by Harding toward Democratic office-holders in the South,” not to mention a “daring and controversial speech” at the time it was delivered.
Harding told his audience that it was time for political and economic equality of the races, and he made very clear what he meant by political equality: “I would say let the black man vote when he is fit to vote; prohibit the white man voting when he is unfit to vote.” Citing the New York News, I reported that the white audience sat in stony silence, as Harding “squared his jaw and pointed straight at the white section” and declared, “Whether you like it or not, unless our democracy is a lie you must stand for that equality.”
Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon. GOP President Dwight Eisenhower announced his support, in a 1954 State of the Union address, for eighteen-year-olds to be given the vote. While the idea was not voted against, nothing serious developed.
By 1970, the Nixon Administration, acting through yours truly—who was then the Associate Deputy Attorney General for Legislation—informed Congress, quietly and off-the-record because there were serious potential Constitutional issues, that the president would not veto an extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that included a provision requiring a voting age of eighteen for all local, state and federal elections.
Congress then passed the law and, in June 1970, President Nixon signed it. The law was quickly challenged by Texas and Oregon, and by December 1970, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Oregon v. Mitchell [ http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=18035308696879166506 ] that while Congress could set the qualifications for voting for federal elections, it could not do so for state or local elections.
Young people, many of whom were fighting in Vietnam, were not happy. Thousands let Congress know of their displeasure. By March 10, 1971, the Senate voted 94-to-0 for a Constitutional Amendment to enfranchise those who were eighteen years of age and older. Within two weeks, the House of Representatives voted 401-to-19 for the Amendment; and within four months, the requisite three-fourths of the state legislatures had adopted it. It was the fastest that any amendment to the Constitution had ever been adopted.
On the afternoon of July 6, 1971, I happened to be going to the East Wing of the White House and I could hear singing floating into the hallway. It was a truly magnificent rendition, by young voices, of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I was drawn by the sound into the East Room, where I discovered that the President was hosting a certification ceremony for the adoption of the 26th Amendment, attended by young people—some 500 boys and girls of the Young Americans In Concert choir.
Although a president has no formal role in the Constitutional amendment process, other than modern presidents’ tradition of being witnesses to the certification, Nixon was clearly showing his support for young people to vote, with the ceremony. A few days later, I received a message from the president. He wanted all of his younger aides to think of ways to get young people to vote. Today, I seriously doubt that a President Romney would encourage young people to vote, since they have overwhelmingly become Democrats, or progressive independents. Any initiative to reach the young now would only be likely to deny a hypothetical President Romney a second term.
Be Thankful for the Voting Rights Act of 1965
While I was serving as Minority Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, landmark Voting Rights legislation was making its way through Congress. Its purpose was to implement the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which was adopted following the Civil War, and which states that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged . . . on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Remarkably, almost a century had passed since the 15th Amendment’s adoption in 1870, yet States of the Confederacy had, for almost a century, schemed to deny people of color the right to vote. Using strict voter-eligibility requirements, like literacy tests and poll taxes, the infamous Jim Crow laws were also accompanied by tactics of violence and intimidation, and thus they enabled whites in the South to keep blacks from voting. In addition, many Southern states used the centennial census-based redistricting as an opportunity to draw congressional (as well as state legislative) district lines in a manner that would maximize white power. All these tactics would be outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA).
As I was from the North, it was at this time that I first understood racism, from witnessing its most subtle as well as its most ugly and overt forms. President Lyndon Johnson had pushed for and obtained the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 by breaking the Senate filibuster by Southern Senators. Without strong Republican support, the Civil Right Act of 1964 could not have passed, nor could the VRA. Every Republican I knew in the House of Representatives, in varying degrees – a group of over a hundred members—believed voting to be a basic human right, and believed, as well, that the consent of the governed is the core of our democracy.
Final passage of the VRA had 30 of 31 Republican Senators joining 49 Democrats in voting in favor, with the only GOP holdout being former South Carolina Democrat Strom Thurmond, a longtime open racist who started the movement of conservative Southern politicians to the Republican Party. In the House, 111 of 131 Republicans joined 217 Democrats to pass the VRA. The 20 GOP members who refused to vote for it were conservatives, most all of them from border states.
As Southerners moved into the GOP, opposition to the VRA grew. To keep the VRA viable and alive, it was amended in 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and, most recently, in 2006—with that last amendment giving the law further life for twenty-five years, or until 2031. To make the story of this law very short, since the 1980s Republicans have increasingly tried to weaken it, and while it survived GOP attacks in 2006, I seriously doubt that the VRA would pass either the House or Senate today. Republicans would kill it.
We should be thankful that the VRA passed earlier in our history, because it has been among the most effective tools in preventing and controlling the new GOP voter-suppression abuses. If anyone thinks that the 2012 election cycle, and the reelection of America’s first black president, are not about race and our racist roots, which have surfaced, once again, during the first term of the Obama Administration, he or she needs to wake up and smell the rot that is created by frightened white people preventing people of color from voting. It stinks.
US election system criticised over finance rules and voting restrictions
Commission led by Kofi Annan says the rise of Super Pacs and voter ID laws has 'shaken citizen confidence' in elections
Protesters unveil a banner at the Lincoln Memorial in 2010 to protest the Citizens United ruling. The Annan report criticises the ruling for shaking Americans' confidence in the political process. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Karen McVeigh Thursday 13 September 2012 19.00 EDT
US campaign finance rules, which have allowed wealthy individuals to pour millions of dollars into the 2012 presidential election, have shaken public confidence in the political process, according to a report by the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy and Security.
The commission, which is headed by former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, and comprises former world leaders and Nobel prize winners, has identified a rise in "uncontrolled, undisclosed, illegal and opaque" political finance across the world as a key threat to electoral integrity, in a new report due to be launched in the UK on Friday.
The report singles out the US as an example of a country where lack of transparency and controls in political finance have left it struggling to restore the public's confidence in its elected officials to act in their interest.
The commission blamed a series of court decisions – in particular the controversial Citizens United ruling, which turned campaign finance reform on its head and spawned Super Pacs, effectively removing barriers to corporate and union spending to influence elections
Citizens United has "undermined political equality, weakened transparency of the electoral process and shaken citizen confidence in America's political institutions and elections", the report said.
It also criticizes US states which have sought to introduce voter identification laws and other measures that have the effect of suppressing African American participation in the political process.
Vidar Helgessen, secretary general of International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, said that US system was cited as just one example of flaws in democracies worldwide. But, he said the US, as the most powerful nation in the world, had a responsibility to set an example.
"If a vast majority of citizens say the systems is undermining political equality and weakening transparency of the electoral process, then there is an issue of trust in the government," he said.
Political finance was an important issue which had not received the attention and reform it deserved, he said.
"We are seeing increasing inequality and we are in a global economic recession and it is an issue that will only grow. It is not only in new and emerging democracies that provide challenges and have elections that lack integrity"
"Nearly two-thirds of Americans said that they trust government less because big donors have more influence over election officials than average Americans," the report said.
It concluded that, although Super Pacs must disclose their contributors and may not coordinate directly with candidates by law, in practice, "both constraints have been flouted".
It compared the US unfavourably to Canada, which has faced many of the same campaign finance struggles and concludes: "In contrast to the USA, Canada has managed to strike a balance between safeguarding individuals speech and protecting the overall integrity of the electoral process."
It argued that the rise of "uncontrolled political finance" was one of five major threats to democracy, which could rob it of its unique strengths to promote political equality, the empowerment of the disenfranchised and the ability to manage societal conflicts peacefully
The report looked at a host of problems, including post-election violence in places such as Kenya and Nigeria, illicit finance in Costa Rica, and disenfranchised populations in Europe.
Voting’s Outcasts: Why One in Five Blacks in Kentucky Can’t Cast a Ballot
Aura Bogado, Meta Mendel-Reyes and Voting Rights Watch 2012 on September 18, 2012 - 10:53 AM ET
One of every thirteen African-Americans are already disenfranchised, and it’s not because of voter ID laws, voter purges or cut-offs to early voting but because they’re caught up in the criminal justice system. According to a new study .. http://sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/fd_State_Level_Estimates_of_Felon_Disen_2010.pdf .. released this summer by the Sentencing Project, in 2010, 5.85 million otherwise eligible voters were disenfranchised because they’re current or former felons. Of these, a full 75 percent were already out on parole or probation or had already completed their complete sentence. Nationwide, nearly 8 percent of African-Americans have lost their right to vote, compared to nearly 2 percent for non-African-Americans—illustrating the lasting effects of a racially biased criminal justice system.
Kentucky is one state that makes it nearly impossible for former felons to vote, and a grassroots group there has been challenging this form of disenfranchisement. If the numbers nationwide are dismal, it’s even worse in Kentucky, where nearly a quarter million people have lost their right to cast a ballot.
Meet Meta Mendel-Reyes. She’s on the Steering Committee of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth ..http://kftc.org/, a statewide, grassroots social justice organization that seeks to restore the right of former felons to vote. She explains that former felons who have already served their time are subjected to an onerous process to attempt to get their voting rights restored—but even that process doesn’t guarantee they’ll be able to cast a ballot.
—Aura Bogado
Go to Jail, Lose Your Vote
Rev. Damon Horton wasn’t always a minister. More than a decade ago, he was a gang member, and a dealer who was arrested in 2003 and 2004 for drug trafficking. He was convicted and sentenced to twelve years in prison. While Horton was incarcerated, he felt the call to the ministry. After completing 20 percent of his sentence, he was released on parole in 2006. Soon after, he married, started a family and became a minister. Yet despite turning his life around, there is one act of citizenship closed to him: he is not allowed to vote. “I can pay taxes again,” Horton says, “but I can’t vote or have a real voice in the government.”
And Horton is not alone. More than one in five African-Americans in Kentucky can’t vote because they have been convicted of a felony. In most states, after people have served their time, they are given their voting rights back. Not in Kentucky, where more than 243,000 residents have lost the right to participate in democracy.
Under the state constitution, former felons have to petition the governor in order to have their rights restored. It’s a tricky process that takes time and doesn’t guarantee a result, partly because each governor sets up his or her own procedure during his or her tenure.
Under current Governor Steve Breshear, former felons have to wait until they have served out all their prison time, probation and parole. Then, they have to get the signature of a probation or police officer, and have that notarized. Then, their paperwork gets kicked around a bit between Corrections, the local Commonwealth Attorney and the governor. If everything goes well, the applicant can get the right to vote back in as little as sixty days.
But the Commonwealth Attorney has a lot of leeway. Some give back rights easily, while others approve only a few. Making the process even more complicated is the fact that many elections officials and corrections staff don’t know the process themselves. According to Dave Newton, KFTC organizer, “Many former felons don’t even realize that they can get their voting rights back.”
Restoration of voting rights is not only a matter of democracy. Former felons who vote are half as likely to recidivate than former felons who don’t vote. It makes sense—when a former felon feels like part of the community, he or she is less likely to act out against that community.
Under the state constitution, former felons have to petition the governor for a pardon in order to have their voting rights restored. This makes Kentucky one of the four most difficult states, along with Virginia, Florida and Iowa, for former felons to regain their full citizenship rights.
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth .. http://kftc.org/ .., a statewide, multi-issue, grassroots organization has been leading the fight to restore voting rights to former felons like Reverend Horton. House Bill 70, introduced earlier this year, would allow Kentucky voters to decide whether to grant automatic restoration of voting rights to most former felons once they have paid their debt to society (the law would exclude former felons convicted of treason, murder, sex crimes or bribery). Although the bill has passed overwhelmingly in the House, it has been stalled in the State Senate, largely due to the efforts of one hostile Committee Chairman. Sympathetic legislators plan to introduce it again in 2013.
State Senator Gerald Neal, a longtime supporter of the restoration of voting rights, eloquently asked, “Why would you give them a life sentence from democracy? It makes no sense. It’s inconsistent with our system of democracy.”
Kentucky effectively targets African-Americans, other people of color and low-income folks who will be unable to cast a ballot because of a past conviction for which they have already served their time. With an upcoming election that threatens to disenfranchise people through voter ID laws, let’s not forget the millions of former felons who have already been kept from voting.
Brentin Mock and Voting Rights Watch 2012 on September 14, 2012 - 10:25 AM ET
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court hearing on Applewhite v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, over the state’s voter ID law, was serious enough that it drew the presence of Ben Jealous, the president of the national NAACP. After ninety minutes of arguing about the fundamental right to vote before the state’s six supreme court justices, Jealous said he was “cautiously optimistic” that civil rights groups might prevail in the case.
Perhaps cautiously pessimistic, I couldn’t help but think, But what if they don’t? When I asked Jealous this, he said:
“We will have volunteers throughout the state demanding that everyone who is eligible to vote and who has a right to vote will be able to vote. And then we will make sure every provisional ballot is counted and make sure the polls stay open and we will fight to make sure the polls stay open as long as necessary.”
In other words, the NAACP, and a lot of civil rights and liberties organizations like them, would be absorbing the burden imposed by the Pennsylvania law, which mandates specific forms of photo ID in order to vote.
There was a lot of argument about what constituted “the fundamental right to vote” as guaranteed by Pennsylvania’s constitution, and also how many people would be disenfranchised by the law. But at root, this hearing was about burdens, and as Gang Starr once asked, who was gonna take the weight? There were many questions about which Pennsylvanians would have to carry the extraneous burdens of this law in order to vote, and who would not. There was also debate about whether the burden was on the state or on voters to prove that those extraneous burdens even existed. When supreme court justices asked why they should overturn the lower court ruling—a huge ask—the plaintiff’s lawyer David Gersch said that “the fact people are burdened by this law triggers” their intervention.
And yet while the photo voter ID law was created on the premise that it would protect against voter fraud or unearth it, the state legislators never had the burden of having to prove that fraud actually exists—evidence of it was never entered in the court record. Governor Corbett’s lawyer Alfred Putnam Jr. said yesterday that the Commonwealth didn’t need to prove it (Also read great analysis by Pittsburgh City Paper’s Chris Potter .. http://www.pghcitypaper.com/Blogh/archives/2012/09/13/voter-id-gets-its-day-in-supreme-court ). Yet voters now have the burden—voters of color disproportionately—of complying with the law. It’s as if voters are guilty of the potential of fraud until proven innocent by an ID card.
Jealous, who enlisted the NAACP in a rally held outside the courtroom, was asked by reporters who would be hurt by the law. He said, “We fight everyday to motivate people who until the day before may not have been thinking about voting. Well this puts an entire bureaucracy between them and their vote. So now they may not be able [to vote] if they wake up that morning and decide to vote for the first time. this hurts people of color, it disproportionately hurts poor people, and it hurts working people of all colors.”
The silver lining was that some of the judges, the two liberal ones and Chief Justice Ronald Castille, asked with some frequency what would be wrong with giving a couple of years before implementing the law instead of rushing it. At one point, chief deputy attorney general for the state John Knorr conceded that the law “could be made better” if activated later rather than for this election.
But all that really did was confirm that passing the law was simply inevitable. Gersch consistently agreed with judges that while the law is terrible for 2012, that it’s at least reasonable for 2014, if not good for 2016. Election law professor Rick Hasen .. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/12/usa-campaign-vote-laws-idUSL1E8KBCO620120912 .. told Reuters “If you write a play you wouldn’t premier it on Broadway. If you implement a brand new law in time for the presidential election, it could just be bad.” But the state wasn’t fearful of that.
Sitting next to me was Olivia Thorne, president of the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania .. http://www.palwv.org/ . We got into a discussion of the early women’s suffrage and abolitionist movements. This is a thorny history, she acknowledged. Many white women at that time were fully down for the abolitionist cause in the beginning, with the understanding that they’d help African-Americans get the right to vote, and in turn everyone would push for women’s voting rights. It didn’t quite work out. Sexism among both the allies and the enemies of women suffragists drove women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton out of the abolitionist movement, and toward an unseemly racist turn. Read more about this in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Great Schism .. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/the-great-schism/246640/ .”
But now the LWV, inheritors of the women’s suffrage movement, are going hard in the paint for voting rights in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Florida, Wisconsin and many other states—and down to the mat, when many organizations threw in the towel or decided to play the sidelines.
Thorne was in Harrisburg for the voter ID hearing, and left “disappointed” by that decision, but showed right back up for yesterday’s hearing. She spoke with me about the unique challenges faced by women and the elderly under this voter ID law, but she seemed to understand the other forces of race and class that draw additional burdens. She noted the long lines people will have to stand in on Election Day, “three to five hours in Philadelphia, but one to two hours in the suburbs,” where she said her organization works most often.
The idea of shared but unequal burdens was lost upon Pennsylvania’s lawyers and Justice Michael Eakin, one of the conservative justices. “There will never be a point where everybody can get something the legislature requires,” said Eakin. “There will always be someone left burdened” by legislation.
That may be so, but the Voting Rights Act .. http://colorlines.com/tag/Voting%20Rights%20Act .. expressly protects people of color from having to incur burdens that white Americans vote freely without. And yet now organizations like NAACP, whose members fought and died for that law, have acquired the new burden of spending time, money, shoe leather, gas and other resources to align people with the new voting rules. Our community journalist James Ceronsky .. http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/09/philadelphia_groups_scramble_to_help_voters_get_voter_id.html .. spent time with NAACP civic engagement director John Jordan earlier this week, who told him:
“Four years ago we were paying canvassers to do voter registration work,” he says. Now, tasked with informing voters about ID requirements in addition registering them, his organization is “pleading and begging” for volunteers in the effort to get IDs in the hands of voters.
The state’s attorney Knorr was oblivious to this. “The burden is quite minimal,” he told the judges.
“It’s minimal if you already have ID,” Judge Debra Todd snapped back.
I caught Knorr in the court hallway afterward and asked him: What if you’re wrong? What if thousands are burdened to the point of disenfranchisement on Election Day? “I can’t answer that,” he responded.
I asked Jealous the same, but he was more blunt: “If the Pennsylvania Republican leadership succeeds in stealing this election by denying people the right to vote there will be hell to pay.”
Jamie-Andrea Yanak/AP Voters make their choices at voting booths set up on the stage of the auditorium at East High School, in Cleveland, Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2004.
The Republicans’ plan is that if they can’t buy the 2012 election they will steal it.
The plan, long in the making and now well into its execution, is to raise great gobs of money—in newly limitless amounts—so that they and their allies could outspend the president’s forces; and they would also place obstacles in the way of large swaths of citizens who traditionally support the Democrats and want to exercise their right to vote. The plan would disproportionately affect blacks, who were guaranteed the right to vote in 1870 by the Fifteenth Amendment; but then that right was negated by southern state legislatures; and after people marched, were beaten, and died in the civil rights movement, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Now various state legislatures are coming up with new ways to try once again to nullify that right.
In a close election, the Republican plan could call into question the legitimacy of the next president. An election conducted on this basis could lead to turbulence on election day and possibly an extended period of lawsuits contesting the outcome in various states. Bush v. Gore would seem to have been a pleasant summer afternoon. The fact that their party’s nominee is currently stumbling about, his candidacy widely deemed to be in crisis mode, hasn’t lessened their determination to prevent as many Democratic supporters as they can from voting in November.
This national effort to tilt the 2012 election is being carried out on the pretext that the country’s voting system is under threat from widespread “voter fraud.” the fact that no significant fraud has been found doesn’t deter the people pursuing this plan. Myths are convenient in politics. Want to fix an election? No problem. Just make up a story that the other side is trying to rig the election—and meanwhile try to rig the election. (Jon Stewart recently concluded a searing segment about the imagined voter fraud by saying: “Next, leashes for leprechauns.”)
The Republicans have been making particularly strenuous efforts to tilt the outcomes—in most of the “swing states”: Florida, Ohio, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin. The Republican leader of the House in Pennsylvania, previously considered a swing state, was careless enough to admit publicly that the state’s strict new Voter ID law would assure a Romney victory in November. In fact a state document submitted in court offered no evidence of voter fraud. On September 18, Pennsylvania’s supreme court sharply rebuked a lower court’s approval of the law, questioning whether the law could be fairly applied by the time of the election. This battle continues despite the fact that the Romney campaign in mid-September suspended its efforts in Pennsylvania because polls show that Obama was substantially ahead. Even if the state’s electoral votes are not in question the outcome could still decide whether a great many people will be allowed to vote in November, and could also affect the popular vote.
Eight states have already passed Voter ID laws—requiring a state-approved document with a photograph in order to register or vote, a form of identification that an estimated 11 percent or over 21 million of American citizens do not possess. But these laws are just part of an array of restrictions adopted to keep Democrats from voting. Some use other means to make registration difficult, or put strict limits on the number of days before the election that votes can be cast , or cut back the hours that polling places can stay open.
In the aftermath of the 2004 election, which was characterized in Ohio by lines at voting places in black districts so long as to discourage voters, Ohio Democratic officials made voting times more flexible; after the Republicans took over the state they set out to reverse that.
Iowa, Florida, and Colorado tried to purge the voting rolls of suspected unqualified voters, but their lists turned out to be wildly inaccurate. Florida officials compiled a list of 180,000 people whose qualifications were questioned, but after voting registrars checked (some protesting the unfairness of the purge) only 207, or .0002 percent of the state’s registered voters, were found to be unqualified to vote. Nearly sixty percent of the 180,000 names had Hispanic surnames, another 14 percent were blacks. Officials said that whites or republicans were unlikely to be on the list.
While a combination of outraged citizens and legal challenges led all three states to ostensibly give up on the idea of purging voters, Florida and Iowa officials have said that they intend to pursue those who haven’t been proven innocent. As a result, hundreds of thousands of citizens don’t know if they’ll be allowed to vote—which, like a number of the restrictions, could be a disincentive to even subjecting oneself to what could be a hassle or humiliation at the polling place. Florida also enacted a voter ID law, which was struck down by a federal court. Ever on the lookout for ways to keep Democratic supporters from the polling places, the state cut short the number of days for early voting, and established rules that in effect barred outside groups such as the League of Women Voters from conducting registration drives. Though this restriction was later overturned by a federal court, voter registration groups said that important time had been lost while they contested the new restrictions on their activities.
In Ohio—the swingyest of the swing states, now in Republican control—secretary of state Jon Husted is trying to block voting on any weekend before the election; and he has appealed the ruling of a federal district judge ordering him to allow voting even during the last weekend before the election. Husted also made the extraordinary proposal that voting hours in Ohio be extended solely in white districts, but this preposterous idea couldn’t withstand a citizen outcry. Two Democratic county election officials from the Dayton area (one the few predominantly Democratic counties in the state) who objected to Husted’s proposal to permit no weekend voting were fired.
Where did all this come from?
Florida 2000 was the poisoned apple of our electoral system. Republicans saw that by manipulating the rules they could –when it comes down to it—steal an election. Ample evidence exists that a majority of Floridians intended to, did, or thought they did, vote for Al Gore. Following the success of the George W. Bush team in winning Florida and thus the election came Karl Rove’s zealous use of alleged “voter fraud” as an instrument for expanding the power of the party and the Bush White House. At the behest of the Bush White House in 2007, the Justice Department fired seven US Attorneys on the ground that they hadn’t pursued voter fraud, which the attorneys said they could find no evidence of. (Rove had other motives.) The next step would be gaining control of as many state governments as possible: The Republicans took over twelve in 2010, to reach a total of twenty-two. Through them, the Republicans launched a national drive to intimidate and hinder the Democratic party’s constituencies from voting—in the name of protecting the political system against a cooked-up threat.
Conveniently, the five conservative Justices of the Supreme Court, in an unusual bout of the “activism” they usually deplore, overturned in Citizens United over more than a century of law protecting the political process from uncontrolled contributions by corporate interests as well as labor (which cant compete on raising such funds). Corporations that would prefer more relaxed regulatory policies and lower corporate taxes have combined with the Republicans and others who want to get rid of Obama in making huge contributions to the new Super PACs. And Sheldon Adelson, under legal challenge for his management of his casinos in Macao, and willing to shell out $100 million to get a friendlier Justice Department, became one of the most powerful people in America. Candidates, including the newly chosen Republican vice presidential contender, paid court to Adelson in his Las Vegas headquarters.
The highly conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), financed by the Koch brothers and big corporations drew up a “model law” to guide Republican-controlled states in designing ways to keep Democratic supporters from voting. Other conservative groups—some originating in the Tea Party, which is also supported by the Koch brothers—have also sprung up to join the fight to restrict voting by allies of the Democrats. The group True the Vote, for example, is operating on a theory of pure fantasy: its literature imagines busloads of unqualified You-Name-The-Democratic-Group being dropped off at registration places. True the Vote officers say that they will go to polling places to make sure that unqualified people are not permitted to vote. The country may now be entering into a period marked by confusion or even chaos in our election system. Hundreds of thousands of people are about to start to go to the polls before their states have settled their voting requirements, or without knowing what they are. Though the rules have yet to be decided in either state, voting has already begun in North Carolina, and is scheduled to begin in Ohio on October 2. Either candidate needs to win by decisive margins in both the popular and electoral college vote to avoid a legal mess.
The challengers to a democratic system think long-term, something which the Republicans are better at than the Democrats. Some of these laws cannot be finally enacted or survive court challenges in time for the 2012 election, but voting rights advocates are even more alarmed about 2016. According to census data, whites will become a minority in the coming year, a shift that is likely to spur even more attempts to restrict voting participation by blacks and Hispanics. Many also fear that the Roberts court will strike down a special provision in the 1965 Voting Rights Act – Section 5 –which requires nine states, all in the South, and parts of an additional seven states, to submit any proposed changes in their voting laws to Justice Department for prior clearance. States covered by Section 5 have long complained that they are being discriminated against and the Supreme Court is expected to take up challenges to the provision’s constitutionality in its next term.
Having covered Watergate and the impeachment of Richard Nixon, and more recently written a biography of Nixon, I believe that the wrongdoing we are seeing in this election is more menacing even than what went on then. Watergate was a struggle over the Constitutional powers and accountability of a president, and, alarmingly, the president and his aides attempted to interfere with the nominating process of the opposition party. But the current voting rights issue is even more serious: it’s a coordinated attempt by a political party to fix the result of a presidential election by restricting the opportunities of members of the opposition party’s constituency—most notably blacks—to exercise a Constitutional right.
This is the worst thing that has happened to our democratic election system since the late nineteenth century, when legislatures in southern states systematically negated the voting rights blacks had won in the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
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