Black to the Future

  Photo ID required (Strict)

  Photo ID requested (Non-strict)

  Non-photo ID required (Strict)

  Non-photo ID requested (Non-strict)

  No ID required to vote

Something surprising happened on December 12^th. Although cantankerous accused child-molester and self-admitted white supremacist, evangelical-hypocrite Roy Moore, cannot believe that God abandoned him to a victorious Democrat, African American voters overcame voter restrictions and turned the tide. Ruby red Alabama elected a liberal Democrat to the United States Senate. While Moore will not concede a vote count he could not possibly reverse and has become a laughing stock, it seems when the targets of those voting restrictions get angry enough, they can make a huge difference.

“That turnout, in which registered black voters appeared to cast ballots at a higher rate than white ones, has become the most recent reference point in the complicated picture about race and elections laws.

“At issue, at a time when minorities are becoming an increasingly powerful slice of the electorate, is how much rules like Alabama’s voter ID law serve as a brake on that happening. The turnout by black voters in Alabama raises a question: Did it come about because voting restrictions were not as powerful as critics claim or because voters showed up in spite of them?

“Whether blacks and other minorities vote has become an evermore crucial element in the national political calculus. Minority voters, who lean overwhelmingly Democratic, were 29 percent of eligible voters in 2012 and 31 percent in 2016; by 2020, the figure is expected to rise to nearly 34 percent.

“LaTosha Brown, an Alabama native and a founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, which backed voter-mobilization efforts in the Senate contest, said the impact of voter suppression in Alabama was real, but that the policies were sometimes a motivating factor…

“Alabama, where a bloody history of battling for the right to vote gave birth to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a lawsuit led to the 2013 Supreme Court case that dramatically weakened the law, is seldom described as a model for voting rules.

“Like only 12 other states, Alabama does not permit early voting, which is disproportionately used by minorities and the poor. Its restrictions on voting by people with felony records were recently relaxed, but remain among the nation’s toughest and likely curb black turnout. The state’s voter ID law, which was challenged in federal court, threatened to disenfranchise at least 100,000 registered voters, many of them black or Hispanic, according to the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund. And a panel of federal judges ruled this year that 12 state legislative districts had been gerrymandered to dilute African-American voting power. The congressional map is also gerrymandered.” New York Times, December 24^th. And still they came. Angry. Determined. Powerful. Mostly, they prevailed, perhaps sending a strong signal to all those other voters facing restrictions that where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Here are the states with strict voter identification laws (Wikipedia, per above chart): Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin require a compliant photo ID, while Arizona and Ohio require an official ID (that does not have to have a photo). Slightly less stringent photo ID states include: Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Texas, while these states require somewhat less stringent ID (that do not have to have a photo): Alaska,  Arkansas,  Colorado,  Connecticut,  Delaware,  Hawaii,  Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, and Washington.

Where there are voter ID requirements, they are/were almost uniformly passed by Republican-controlled legislatures and signed by GOP governors claiming that they are preventing voter fraud, which has never been statistically supported. The same legislative pattern is the source of the dramatic levels of gerrymandering in our reddest states. But today’s blog is focused on voter restrictions.

The most common form of official ID is, of course, a driver’s license. But poorer folks and people in big cities – typically blue voters – are disproportionately less likely to own a car. And if you don’t allow pre-voting by mail and keep those polling stations far away from poor neighborhoods – most in lily-white neighborhoods – well, it would seem to be prevent “they’re not our kind” from voting. That’s why non-partisan groups, like VoteRiders (VoteRiders.org), help folks get alternative IDs and organize car pools and busses to take minority voters to those distant polling stations.

Indeed, the election commission (haughtily named the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity”) – headed by VP Mike Pence – appointed by the President to investigate voter fraud was motivated by Trump’s unfounded belief that his loss of the popular vote (by millions of votes) in November was entirely due to fraudulent votes. Probably realizing that any genuine inquiry wouldn’t produce the desired result, the commission has seldom met and has kept what few findings it has generated secret. Put in other words: “The election commission set up to investigate President Trump’s charges of voter fraud seems to have gone dark in recent weeks.” USA Today, November 3^rd.

Even the few places where internal reports have been generated have been kept secret from Democratic members of the commission. It took a federal court order to change that. “A judge has ruled in favor of a member of President Donald Trump's voting commission who sued the panel, handing a preliminary victory to a critic who accused the panel of hiding its activities from view.

“Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, a Democratic member of the panel tasked with investigating voter fraud, sued the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity last month in US District Court.

“Dunlap argued that the panel should be subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires commissions to be ‘fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented’ and that all materials from the commission are made available to its members.” CNN.com, December 25^th. The Trump administration was slowly coming to the realization that his desired “proof of massive voter fraud” was never going to happen – Donald Trump actually did lose the popular vote by approximately 3 million votes.

Effectively, Donald Trump faced the humiliating proof of his unpopularity. So rather than allow that truth to come out, on Wednesday January 3rd, the President disbanded his Pence-led Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. But true to Trump’s constant refusal to acknowledge that he is/was ever wrong, “White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said there is ‘substantial evidence of voter fraud’ and blamed the ending of the commission on the refusal of many states to provide voter data sought by the commission and the cost of ongoing federal lawsuits.” Washington Post, January 3rd. Alternative facts. So the GOP led Congress and the presidency have to find other means of making sure that voting rules that keep minorities (mostly Democrats) from casting meaningful ballot remain intact.

With that rural tilt favoring land mass (states) over people and lots of leeway accorded states to control voting set out in our Constitution, Republicans know that the only way they can sustain control of Congress, the majority of state legislatures and governorships is to insure that minority voters are disproportionately excluded from the voting process. And as demographic trends confirm, the United States is becoming a nation of a majority-of-minorities.

I’m Peter Dekom, and how do you feel about a purported democracy that fosters, even encourages, disenfranchising voters who might challenge incumbents?