Voter-ID laws are a good ole fashioned poll tax

Rank-and-filed Republicans can never be convinced that there has never been an incidence of group voter fraud, much less an incidence that swayed an election. (Republican leaders know it's a sham to give them an excuse to suppress voting.)

So my conservative friends, just read this parallel in Hong Kong that Beinart found. It blew me away, because this Leung guy is speaking aloud what Republican leaders are saying behind closed doors:

If Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters succeed in booting C.Y. Leung from power, the city’s unelected chief executive should consider coming to the United States. He might fit in well in the Republican Party.

In an interview Monday with The New York Times and other foreign newspapers, Leung explained that Beijing cannot permit the direct election of Hong Kong’s leaders because doing so would empower “the people in Hong Kong who earn less than $1,800 a month.” Leung instead defended the current plan to have a committee of roughly 1,200 eminent citizens vet potential contenders because doing so, in the Times’ words, “would insulate candidates from popular pressure to create a welfare state, and would allow the city government to follow more business-friendly policies.”

And for those who say getting a new photo-ID just to vote (not for any other use by the voter) isn't a poll tax, consider this:

Acquiring that free ID requires showing another form of identification—and those cost money. In the states with voter-ID laws, notes a report by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, “Birth certificates can cost between $8 and $25. Marriage licenses, required for married women whose birth certificates include a maiden name, can cost between $8 and $20. By comparison, the notorious poll tax—outlawed during the civil rights era—cost $10.64 in current dollars.”

It's not like poll taxes are OK if they are "affordable" by somebody else's standards. No. Poll taxes are forbidden, period. 

Should the Poor Be Allowed to Vote?

By Peter Beinart

October 22, 2014 | The Atlantic

URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/the-new-poll-tax/381791/?single_page=true

Cox: Gerrymandering and voter-ID laws are systemic racism

I'll say it again: I'm not necessarily against voter ID in order to vote, although I think it's an extravagant non-necessity.  But any such ID should be a national  ID; it should be free of charge (because voting must be free/poll taxes are illegal); it should have a very long duration (at least 10 years) and be renewed at any number of places; and any kind of photo-ID law should be grandfathered in, along with state and national outreach programs, hotlines, etc.  

But really, given modern technology, voting doesn't require a photo-ID to avoid the rare case of fraud. Voting can and should be as easy and secure as using an ATM. Polling stations, while they should always probably exist in some quantity to serve poor areas, are as outdated as tricorn hats.

If the true goal was to prevent voter fraud (even though there is none to begin with) while preserving citizens' most sacred democratic right -- the right to vote -- then we would certainly go about it otherwise, not making people who are lifelong eligible voters suddenly ineligible, as Republican state legislatures have. 

Voter-ID laws are a cynical and desperate ploy coordinated by the national GOP; and they a prime example of systemic racism that conservatives deny even exists.

Voter ID's last stand: let's finally declare laws what they are – racist on purpose

By Ana Marie Cox

July 16, 2014 | Guardian

This week, the US Department of Justice and the state of Texas started arguments in the first of what will be a summer-long dance between the two authorities over voting rights. There are three suits being tried in two districts over gerrymandering and Texas's voter identification law – both of which are said to be racially motivated. In its filing, the DoJ describes the law as "exceed[ing] the requirements imposed by any other state" at the time that it passed. If the DoJ can prove the arguments in its filing, it won't just defeat an unjust law: it could put the fiction of "voter fraud" to rest once and for all.

These battles, plus parallel cases proceeding in North Carolina, hinge on proving that the states acted with explicitly exclusionary intent toward minority voters – a higher standard was necessary prior to the Supreme Court's gutting of Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) back in January. Under Section 3, the DoJ had wide latitude to look at possible consequences of voting regulation before they were even passed – the "preclearance" provision. Ironically, because the states held to preclearance had histories of racial discrimination, some of the messier aspects of the laws' current intentions escaped comment.

But meeting that higher standard of explicit exclusionary intent comes with the opportunity to show some of the many skeptical Americans the ugly racism behind Republican appeals to "fairness" and warnings about fraud. Progressives have tried, and mostly failed, to show the institutional racism underpinning the sordid history behind voter ID laws; that may have been too subtle. In courts in Texas and North Carolina, the DoJ will make the jump from accusations that laws have a racial impact to straight-up calling voter ID laws racist.

This ought to be interesting.

The DoJ filing in Texas lays it all out pretty clearly, putting the voter ID law in context of a concerted legislative strategy to deny representation to the state's growing Hispanic population, including Republicans advancing more and more aggressive voter ID bills over the years. The filing points to the anti-immigrant rhetoric that laced the floor debates over the law, and to the measures taken by the Republican-controlled state house to limit the participation of Democratic minority lawmakers in considering or amending the legislation (the bill was heard in front of a special committee selected by the governor, on an expedited schedule). And, the DoJ notes, lawmakers produced "virtually no evidence during or after enactment of SB 14 that in-person voter impersonation – the only form of election fraud addressed by the identification requirements of SB 14 – was a serious problem."

Perhaps the most significant piece of context in the voter ID suit is how Texas's voter ID law came on the heels of the redistricting that the DoJ claims was also racially motivated. In the redistricting cases, DoJ's allegations of malicious intent have been helped along by the admission of the state that it had malicious political intent. The Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, chose as his defense in that case what only can be called the Lesser Evil Strategy – stating up front that the state's GOP legislators had ulterior motives, but not the ones that the VRA outlaws:

[R]edistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party's electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats ... [They] were motivated by partisan rather than racial considerations and the plaintiffs and DOJ have zero evidence to prove the contrary.

Abbott's smugness – and his apparent faith in partisanship as a permissible and distinct form of discrimination – will take center stage as the DoJ presses on with both suits. In court, Abbott will be asked to prove his ignorance of demographics for the very state in which he is currently running for governor. Out of court, other GOP defenders of the law will have to do more or less the same. And they will need to defend the outrageous details of the law – such has how a concealed carry permit is a permissible form of voter ID but a federally-issued Medicare card carried by an elderly woman is not.

Some people of Texas may support the kind of bullying Abbott has prepared to defend, and most progressive activists are hardened to it, but I think average Americans hate it. Putting malice under a national spotlight might be the best way to turn people against voter ID laws in general.

Right now, Americans support the idea of voter ID laws by huge margins: polls show favorable attitudes toward a generic "ID requirement" to be between 70 and 80%. Approval exists across all demographic groups – even among black voters (51%), one of the groups that is, of course, disproportionately disenfranchised by these laws.

But the reasons that the public supports such laws aren't the same as the GOP's reasons for pursuing them: Republicans want to prevent specific types of people from voting; the American public wants voting to be fair.  That's why conservatives have had to hammer so hard on the false narrative of "voter fraud" – to convince everyone that it's what the laws are really about.

Add context to the "ID requirement" poll question that Americans get behind, though, and public support changes dramatically. Asurvey in North Carolina (taken as the state was considering taking up an amendment on the issue) found initial support for voter ID to be 71%. Pollsters then drilled further down and came up with numbers that speak to a truly democratic impulse:

• 72% say it's wrong to pass laws that make it harder for certain people to vote.
• 62% say they oppose a law that makes it harder for people of one party to vote.
• 74% say there should be demonstrated problems before legislators apply a fix.

If nothing else, these results suggests that Abbott's argument that supposedly party-based redistricting isn't the free pass – at least, from the public's standpoint, if not the court's – that he thinks it is.

In North Carolina, pollsters found that support for the law decreased as the 2012 election neared and voters started to pay attention and become educated on the issue. Voting rights advocates filled yet another suit based on disenfranchising young voters, which could make a further difference. (Way to keep pissing off millennials, GOP!)

That context effect is true nationwide. A different survey found that informing respondents that "Opponents of voters ID laws argue they can actually prevent people who are eligible to vote from voting" brought support for voter ID down by 12 points.

Pollsters have not publicly investigated whether Texan voters would show a similar shift, though it could be significant that support in the state for voter ID has remained at around 66% for the past two years, less than its support nationwide. Of course, 77% of Texasbelieve "voter ID laws are mainly used to prevent fraud," an alternate-reality bubble that attention to these cases may just yet pop.

It's the Department of Justice that'll have to bring this to pass. The GOP has always easily waved away "systemic" racism charges, like those made under the non-gutted VRA, as either outright inventions or the result of looking for equal outcomes rather than equal opportunities. Making clear the racist intent of voter ID laws will bring the discussion back to where it belongs: on equal opportunities, in the voting booth.

Civil War redux over Southern voting rights

Yeah, well, this pretty much says it:

[W]hite southern Republicans enact voter ID laws because they do not want Democratic constituencies to vote, particularly people of color. Rather than embrace the changing demographics in the US and adopt platforms to address the needs and concerns of voters of color, Republicans have chosen to eschew these voters and wage an assault on civil rights, immigration and policies of diversity and inclusion. This is the endgame for the Republican Southern Strategy of race card politics. The GOP was able to win elections on the margins by appealing to the racial insecurities of disaffected working class whites. In the process, southern whites fled the Democratic party, and the GOP became the party of the white South. Now, this marginalized base of angry white voters is all that is left of the Republican strategy and of the GOP as well, so Republicans must remove the segments of the electorate that will not vote for them.

What the GOP is doing to itself, employing short-term, racist fixes like gerrymandering, voter ID and anti-immigration, reminds me of one of those over-injured, desperate, ageing athletes who keeps on taking cortisone and steroid shots in the hopes of eking out one more winning season, but in the process is destroying his bones, rupturing his tendons, and basically killing himself.

This voter ID thing may work for the GOP in 2014, but blacks and Latinos will remember it; and birthrate wins. They won't trust the GOP for another generation, at least. The Republican Party is killing itself to save itself for one more go-round.

The US civil war is playing out again – this time over voter rights

By David A. Love

August 2, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3hytm

Democracy denied: 4th phase in U.S. voting rights history

History will not look kindly on what we're doing to restrict and suppress voting in America today.  

The argument on its face that we are justified in spending so much effort to make voting harder and more inconvenient in order to prevent fraud is absurd, considering it's a crime that doesn't exist.  It's a hyper-partisan attack aimed at the heart of our democracy: one man, one vote.

Incidentally, today I'm in another country with its own national elections.  It's a Sunday and polling stations are open from early morning till late evening.  Administrative judges are required to work all day to resolve, immediately, any questions about voters' registration.  Meanwhile, the United States routinely criticizes other countries' elections for not being free and fair.  Matthew 7:3-5 comes to mind.

Democracy denied: Millions of Americans blocked from voting

Voter suppression efforts today echo 19th century efforts to block urban immigrant working class from casting vote.

By Paul Rosenberg

October 28, 2012 | Al Jazeera

URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/20121022125746737657.html

Texas voters plead: 'We're not dead yet!'

Before they can vote, 80,000 citizens have to prove to the Republic of Texas that they're not dead yet.  This absurd scenario reminds me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail:  "You're not fooling anyone."

Many Texans Bereaved Over 'Dead' Voter Purge

By Wade Goodwyn

September 16, 2012 | NPR

URL: http://n.pr/OuTj6w

Invisible voters v. imaginary fraud

Wrote Columbia law professor Nathaniel Persily about new state voter ID laws:

The greatest irony of the new crop of voter ID laws is that they do nothing to combat the more frequent problem of absentee ballot fraud.

In fact, they might even make such fraud more likely because the number of absentee voters might increase, given that absentee voters do not need to have a photo ID in order to vote. Worse still, absentee votes are much more likely to be otherwise disqualified because of errors committed by either the voter or the vote counter. They present the perfect storm of fraud and mistakes that conjures up images of the cockeyed Florida vote counters in the 2000 election.  [...]

This will all be done in the name of preventing voter fraud. Yet if these laws lead unwittingly to an increase in the number of voters casting absentee votes out of public view, then they will not even have addressed the fraud they intend to solve. Indeed, they might even make it worse.

Voter ID cases: Invisible voter v. imaginary fraud

By Nathaniel Persily

August 31, 2012 | CNN

URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/31/opinion/persily-voter-id-laws/index.html?hpt=hp_bn4

Michael Steele was too sensitive, pragmatic to lead GOP?

Gee, in this interview Michael Steele sounds kind of normal.  No wonder the GOP fired him as party chair and replaced him with a white guy. 

Maybe Steele is not just sensitive to issues of race, but can also read the writing on the wall:

The Republican nominee [Mitt Romney] is doing so poorly with non-whites -- a recent poll even put his share of the black vote at 0 percent -- that, as reported in the National Journal, he will probably need to win three of every five white voters in order to win the White House. ("This is the last time anyone will try to do this," a Republican strategist told the Journal, of trying to win the presidency with a primarily white coalition.)

This is the last time anyone will try to do this.  Wow.  So we're witnessing the end of an era, folks.  I wonder if it'll work this time?...

Michael Steele: Voter ID Rhetoric Is 'Irresponsible,' Party Needs New Approach To Black Voters

By Gene Demby

August 31, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/PHBJq3

An oldie but a baddie: Restricting the franchise

Ay-ay-ay.  In uncertain economic times even 18th century junk ideas get dusted off and put up for re-sale to credulous political consumers.  

I'm ashamed but not surprised that this Bill Flax person is from Cincinnati, one of the most reactionary cities on Earth.  Correction: the mostly white area surrounding the City of Cincinnati.  

If On The Dole Why Do You Still Get To Go To The Poll?

By Bill Flax

August 4, 2012 | Forbes

URL:  http://www.forbes.com/sites/billflax/2011/08/04/if-on-the-dole-why-do-you-still-get-to-go-to-the-poll/

A heartbreaking voter-ID story for my GOP friends

Conservatives and Republicans are very emotional when it comes to politics, therefore they trust personal anecdotes over statistics.  So here's a personal story for them, to show why new voter-ID laws being rammed through Republican state houses are bad:

Applewhite, a great-grandmother who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s, has worked as a hotel maid for most of her adult life.  She has never had a driver's license.  Her purse was stolen four years ago along with her only copy of her Social Security card.  She was adopted as a child and has been married twice.  As a result, she does not have the necessary documentation to acquire a state-sanctioned voter ID card and if the law is upheld, Applewhite will not be able to vote in a presidential election for the first time since 1960, when she pulled the lever to vote for John F. Kennedy.

OK, and if you're an independent or Democrat, here are some stats for you from just one state: 

Under Pennsylvania's harsh new voter ID law, as many as 20 percent of voters in the state lack the photo IDs required to cast a vote, an estimated 1,636,168. In Philadelphia alone, however, 437,237 people, a whopping 43 percent of the voting population, may be ineligible to vote under the law.

If Pennsylvania is like other many other states, it could take weeks or even months to get a state-sanctioned photo ID, even if you follow all the procedures punctiliously.

Nationwide, "11 percent of eligible American voters lack such ID.  Poor, minority, and elderly voters are especially likely to fall into that group: 25 percent of African-Americans, 16 percent of Hispanics, and 18 percent of Americans over 65 don't have the necessary identification."

Without a preceding drive to inform people about coming changes and help them obtain free picture IDs, these new state laws can be interpreted only one way: a cynical ambush timed for November 2012 on the most basic right we have in our republican democracy, the right to vote.  

If Republicans were serious about picture IDs then they would spend the time and budget resources to institute a national ID card.  Gee whiz, by 2017 every Mexican under the age of 17 will be given a biometric ID card.  Can't we do as well as them?  (And then we wouldn't have to worry about non-current addresses, misspelled names, expired licenses, and other silly obstacles to voting.)

Dems want alien abductions, Bigfoot attacks and voter fraud to continue

Bigfoot says: "We're off to the polls to steal your vote!"

Here's what you really need to know:

The numbers [of blocked state ballots in 2008] suggest that the legitimate votes rejected by the laws are far more numerous than are the cases of fraud that advocates of the rules say they are trying to prevent.  Thousands more votes could be in jeopardy for this November, when more states with larger populations are looking to have similar rules in place.

"But without photo ID law, anybody could walk into a polling station, give them my name, and steal my vote!" I've heard Republicans protest.  

Well, maybe.  But the moment it was discovered that ballot would be thrown out, thus defeating the purpose of attempting such fraud.  (If this hypothetical vote thief voted before you, then his fraud would be discovered when you went to vote.  If he tried to vote after you, his fraud would be detected by the polling official before he could even vote.)  

The success of such an attempt is absurd enough, but imagine -- as many conservative conspiracy-theorists do -- of an orchestrated attempt (by dastardly Democrats, no doubt) to do that on a large scale.  If dozens or hundreds of those ballots were determined to be fraudulent, that would not only cancel their validity, but also set off alarm bells and criminal investigations.  Don't forget, voter fraud in a federal election carries a $10,000 fine and five years in jail, plus state penalties.  Indeed:

Election administrators and academics who monitor the issue said in-person fraud is rare because someone would have to impersonate a registered voter and risk arrest.  A 2008 Supreme Court case drew detailed briefs from the federal government, 10 states and other groups that identified only nine potential impersonation cases over the span of several years, according to a tally by the Brennan Center at New York University.

So, there are zero cases large-scale voting fraud in the U.S.  None.  Zilch.  Nobody can find any, even though Republicans have certainly tried.  Statistically, people are more often struck by lightning.  What all these voter ID laws are really about -- even if you give Republicans the benefit of the doubt -- is preventing a terrible but almost impossible what-if scenario.  Now, weigh that hypothetical what-if against the thousands of documented, proven cases of legitimate ballots being blocked because of new state photo ID laws, when voters weren't aware of the change.  

Which violation is more harmful to our democracy?  Exactly.  And indeed, remembering our hypothetical identity thief, the best defense against such attempts is... having more people vote.  Because the only chance this ploy would work is if the identity thief was fairly certain you weren't going to vote.  Thus, we should encourage voting and make it as easy as possible!

However, I don't give Republicans the benefit of the doubt.  I don't trust them, at least politicians smart enough to know the truth.  This is really about suppressing the votes of the very young, the very old, and minorities -- all groups that tend to vote Democrat.  It's a cynical political attack aimed at the heart of our democracy: the right to vote.  

Indeed, elections are like the holiest sacrament of our democracy... and Republicans want to post a bouncer at the church door.

Many voters may be deterred by tough ID laws

By Mike Baker

July 8, 2012 | AP

URL: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/07/08/2252266/tough-id-laws-could-block-thousands.html#storylink=cpy

No bank + no photo ID = 2nd class U.S. citizen

It may be news to you that at least 17 million U.S. adults have no bank account, and 43 million adults are considered "underbanked."  Taken together, that's about 26 percent of all U.S. households!  These are disproportionately located in the South, of course.

(Similarly, it is probably news to most people that at 25 percent of all blacks and 18 percent of all senior citizens have no picture ID -- because they have never needed one.  And to get an ID, you need an ID, a nice Catch-22.  But since 2008, 15 Republican states have started requiring photo ID to vote, thereby creating a need; meanwhile, there has not been any corresponding government outreach to help poor folks get state photo IDs.  It's all about suppressing Democratic votes.  But I digress.)

As for the un- and under-banked, financial institutions -- including banks bailed out by U.S. taxpayers -- are more than happy to smack them with usurious interest rates, outrageous fees and hidden penalties.  If it were up to me -- and up to them, if Congress would let them do it -- the U.S. Postal Service would be the low-cost bank for all comers.  Japan Post bank, for example, holds 25 percent of that country's household assets!

So by all means, let me join in piling on Magic Johnson (figuratively, definitely not literally) for his apparent blacksploitation.  Indeed, according to the FDIC, 54 percent of black households are either unbanked or underbanked.  But to be fair, Magic isn't alone: recently U.S. banks "have turned to an array of celebrities, including reality TV star family the Kardashians, rap mogul Russell Simmons and personal finance guru Suze Orman" to hawk these awful financial products, which are disproportionately purchased by minority groups.

So Magic, my man, please have more integrity than the Kardashians (who evidently enjoy screwing black people) and stick to more wholesome products for the black community... like Coors beer.  And tell your people to open a damn checking account and stay away from the payday lenders, rent-to-own stores, and money order windows!  Knowledge is power; ignorance is slavery.

Shame on you, Magic Johnson

By Dion Rabouin

July 11, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dion-rabouin/magic-johnson-prepaid-debit-card_b_1663671.html