One Man, No Vote

Voter ID laws and other restrictions focused on making sure that people casting ballots are indeed citizens seem to be pretty popular. “[A recent] poll showed that 74 percent of American adults supported voter ID laws, including 65 percent of African-Americans. What’s more, several key voter fraud cases in the past few years have occurred in majority-black districts in Georgia and Mississippi, suggesting to proponents of tougher voting laws that voter fraud is a concern for not just white, conservative voters… Some experts, meanwhile, have suggested that many Americans don’t understand the issue well enough to form a cogent opinion about voter ID laws or the stakes they raise.” Christian Science Monitor, September 1^st. Not what most people might have expected. But as we know, the main proponents actually sponsoring voter ID legislation are conservative Republicans, most using stamping out voter fraud as justification, mostly about undocumented aliens and voting in the place of another.

The case of voter fraud most cited, the justification for having the requisite ID, is voter “impersonation fraud.” The Republican National Lawyers Association, for example, has claimed 375 cases of such fraud. “But News21, a national investigative reporting project funded by the Carnegie-Knight Initiative, investigated each of those cases and found that not one showed evidence of impersonation fraud. News21 reporters also reached out to election personnel in all 50 states, requesting information on every single reported case of alleged fraud at the polls. The organization’s analysis of 2,068 cases found only 10 related to impersonation. Using those figures, the frequency of poll impersonation is about one in 15 million.

“A partisan motivation behind the voter ID laws has been evident from the start. People without IDs are more likely to be poor and in a minority, groups that vote disproportionately for Democrats. If lawmakers were serious about maintaining the integrity of the vote without depressing minority voting, they would at least include provisions in their legislation to help voters get IDs.” Washington Post, August 13^th.

Pennsylvania, one of the many states passing such legislation in order to prevent “voter fraud” – which would seem to be a compelling argument where elections may actually have been determined fraudulently – actually admitted in court that they had no evidence that such practices had indeed taken place. “[B]ack in July, state officials signed a stipulation agreement, conceding that they have no evidence of in-person voter fraud or any reason to believe such crimes would happen more frequently without an ID requirement, nor do they plan to offer any evidence that such fraud would occur in this year’s elections without the law.” WSJ.com, September 13^th.

Another category of the disenfranchised, people who in many cases have to justify their right to vote anew, are people who have suffered a foreclosure (hence losing their old voting address). The number of Americans who have lost their homes number about 18 million, and obviously, these people seem to fit a profile that would be more likely to vote on the Democratic side. Equally clearly, if Republicans can keep people who are likely to oppose their views away from the ballot box, mission accomplished.

The desire to keep the opposition with the lowest possible impact has been a favorite of the political party in power. Gerrymandering – redistricting to favor incumbents or slant an election – has been a seriously manipulative tool used by both parties for such machination over many generations. If you can dilute voters likely to vote against your candidate or issues by spreading them into districts where they will like be outvoted by the folks you like… or pushed into a twisted districted so they can elected fewer representatives, mission accomplished.

But given how open sponsoring legislators and the signing governors have been about keeping likely Democrats from the polls, the judicial response has been pretty obvious. “In the span of a week, federal court panels struck down three key voting-related efforts in Texas and Ohio, even as South Carolina argued its case for a new voter ID law to a federal appeals panel in Washington. So far, the only ruling that has backed up mostly Republican efforts to create tougher voting rules came from a state judge in Pennsylvania, who [in mid-August] ruled that the Keystone State’s new voter ID law should apply in November.” Christian Science Monitor. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court heard this latter case on September 13^th, and remanded the matter to the trial court on September 18^th all but requiring the trial court to block the law immediately, saying “"the most judicious remedy, in such a circumstance, is the entry of a preliminary injunction, which may moot further controversy as the constitutional impediments dissipate.”

The proximity of the passage of these laws to this election, and the interminably long appellate process to bring them to full judicial review, suggests that whatever challenges to these new laws might be, they may be discredited (the trend in almost all cases that have found their way before an appellate court), some of these laws may still be in place for this coming election.

So in summary, here’s what these cases have consistently found: 1.The disenfranchised are likely to be minorities and people on the lower end of the economic spectrum, likely to punch the Democratic choices in November. 2. There has been no evidence produced at any of these judicial reviews of the restrictive statutes of any measurable voter fraud. Assume you are a committed Republican and you know these facts too, do you support the new legislation because it enhances your political views or do you question the tactic because it undermines the essence of American democracy?

I’m Peter Dekom, and for those Republican who are smiling with the new laws, the fact that this justifies a parallel response – which is equally toxic for the nation – when the pendulum swings back to put the Democrats in the same position should be a sufficient cause for concern.