A notoriously restrictive voter registration law was struck down in Arizona today after the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit issued its long-awaited decision in Gonzales v. Arizona. And it was worth the wait.
By a 2-1 vote (the majority included retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor), the court struck down Arizona's documentary proof of citizenship requirement for all new voter registrants because it is superseded by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA). Project Vote is a plaintiff in this case.
Just two weeks before Election Day, a potentially detrimental (and ultimately unlawful) voter registration procedure was uncovered in San Diego, Calif. that could affect the turnout of thousands of voters. San Diego CityBeat was on the story and contacted Project Vote in hopes of clearing the confusion before November 2.
Until this week, the San Diego County Registrar of Voters wrongfully denied the federal voter registration form that thousands of San Diegans completed after downloading it from the California Secretary of State Web site, including CityBeat reporter and voter hopeful, Dave Maass, who contacted Project Vote director of advocacy, Estelle Rogers, after his voter application was rejected, twice.
Last night, Rachel Maddow did a segment on voter suppression [clip on the flip], situating it in very easy-to-understand terms: If you're going to campaign by stoking white fears and blaming minorities, then you need to make sure that minorities don't turn out in large numbers to vote against you. You need "downside insurance":
Last night on this show, we talked about what we think of as the southern strategy 2.0., the apparent calculation that it mathematically and strategically makes sense to really overtly offend minorities, to turn the minority vote against you, almost deliberately, because if by doing that, you may lose that smaller number of votes for minority voters, but you may also lock up solidly a larger number of white voters. And so you get candidates who send around really, really, really racest jokes and videos, right, Carl Paladino? Or you get candidates who run virulently anti-Latino ads and then that same candidate makes a comment like this to Latino high school students:
[Sharron Angle:] I don't know that all of you are Latino. some of you look a little more Asian to me.
The inimitable Sharron Angle speaking this week at a Nevada High School to that school's Hispanic students' association. The only way the math makes sense for a strategy like this, though, is if you take out, I guess you think of it downside insurance. You have to be sure that in locking up the white vote, which is the thing you're trying for, particularly in locking up the white scared vote, you have to sort of protect your downside. You have to make sure that you don't accidentally turn out too many voters on the other side to vote against you. Too many many voters who are out to vote against you, in part because of the way that you are campaigning.
How do you do that?
The answer, Maddow explained, was to have a highly active birther, Sharon Maroni working as one of the key Republicans putting together their voter [so-called-fraud] suppression team in Illinois.
Think about that a second. just for a second, right? It's not just the birthers taking it upon themselves to police the polls this year. It's the birthers working with a major political party and referring all questions about their role as birther poll watchers to the Republicans. Last week the Illinois Republican running for president Obama's old senate seat, Mark Kirk, was caught on tape discussing his campaign's plans for election day. He said that he will be deploying people to very specific districts in Chicago. districts with large minority populations. To, you know, watch over things.
There's already stories of voter intimidation happening in Houston, where early voting has already begun:
Mark Kirk Sends Poll Monitors To 'Vulnerable,' Largely African-American Neighborhoods
Ryan J. Reilly | October 12, 2010, 2:45PM
In a private phone conversation that was secretly recorded, Mark Kirk, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Illinois, told state Republican leaders last week about his plan to send "voter integrity" squads to four predominately African American neighborhoods of Chicago "where the other side might be tempted to jigger the numbers somewhat."
Kirk's campaign confirmed the candidate was secretly taped last week as he was talking about his anti-voter fraud effort.
"Voter fraud" is, of course, an entirely mythical phenomena used by conservatives and the GOP as an excuse to intimidate minority and low-income voters. (This is well documented, for example in the September 2007 report from Project Vote, "Caging Democracy: A 50-Year History of Partisan Challenges to Minority Voters" by Teresa James, J.D., which I quote from on the flip.) The highly politicized Bush DOJ was unable to come up with a single case of organized voter fraud to prosecute in 8 years. According to Barnard polisci professor Lorraine C. Minnite, in "The Politics of Voter Fraud", there were just 24 DOJ convictions for voter fraud from 2002 to 2005, but none were the result of organized efforts, such as Kirk baselessly and maliciously alleges to exist in Chicago. But the Bush DOJ did manage to unlawfully fire at least three US Attorneys for failure to prosecute such non-existent cases.
Here's the tape of Kirk (transcript below):
"I have now funded at the largest voter integrity project in 15 years in the state of illinois. These are lawyers and other people that will be deployed in key, vulnerable precincts, for example, South and West sides of Chicago, Rockford, Metro East, where the other side might be tempted to jigger the numbers somewhat,"
In the local news coverage, there's a total failure to provide any historical or political context. Instead of focusing on the stark reality of decades of efforts to suppress minority votes, the focus is on Kirk's use of the term "jigger", a reflection of how trivialized the discourse on racism in politics has become:
It's impossible to tell from this clip how much the systemic misunderstanding of the issues involved is actually shared by the black community, but it's quite clear that there is simply no contest in terms of the hegemonic struggle in the media. There is not even a hint of the long history of racist voter suppression that this latest incident is part of.
In sharp contrast, Project Vote's report referred to above, "Caging Democracy: A 50-Year History of Partisan Challenges to Minority Voters" explains:
One of the things that we see as we look at Glenn Beck's work that's been fascinating to me, is we see a more true and accurate history of the United States, and we see it documented at levels of rigor that, in fact, one would expect out of Ph.D. dissertations - it is serious, scholarly work....[Liberal critics] don't have to argue with Glenn Beck. They have to argue with his documentation and they can't match that level of rigor.
Then a few days later, Think Progress noted, he weighed in with some heavy knowledge of his own;
Dick Armey Advances Bizarre Voter Fraud Theory: 3 Percent Of Democratic Voters Are Dead People
At a meeting with "well-heeled" Republicans at the GOP Lincoln Club in Irvine, CA yesterday, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) promoted his book, "Give Us Liberty - A Tea Party Manifesto," and outlined many of his familiar political arguments. But he also shared an odd conspiracy theory:
Armey bashed Barack Obama and Democrats even harder - the former economics professor said the president was "economically ignorant" and accusing Democrats of widespread voter fraud, saying it bad votes accounted for 3 percent of elections.
"I'm tired of people being Republican all their lives and then changing parties when they die," quipped Armey, 70.
The idea that dead people are voting Democratic is even more of a reach than popular and well-debunked ACORN conspiracy theories. While it's true that many states have dead people on their voter rolls, it's simply an administrative problem that is easily resolved by checking voter rolls against the Social Security Administration's national death list. While some far-right outlets like CNS News scare-monger over supposed "zombie voters" being used in fraud schemes, there has been no evidence of any widespread practice of voters pretending to be dead people.
Armey seems to believe that not only does this happen, but that it accounts for 3 percent of votes cast during elections. In the 2008 general election, 132,645,504 people cast a vote, which means that if Armey's theory is correct, almost 3.8 million of them were dead.
It's an instructive pairing: first collective ego inflation out the wazoo. Then collective victimology. Because, of course, if you are so brilliant and wonderful, the only way you can be beaten is by trickery and guile. But this particular form of victimology has a familiar ring to it: it's yet another example of conservative victimology that helps justify voter suppression, which I wrote about quantifying last January. And Armey has now added another data point.
As I explained in my earlier diary, "Quantifying conservative victimology--my new project needs your help & advice", I'm starting a new project (beginning as a series of diaries, but hopefully turning into a book at some point) devoted to quantifying conservative victimology. The idea of doing a series occurred to me almost simultaneously with the identification of several examples, one of which was was a topic that I've been writing about for quite some time--the conservative fear of virtually non-existent voter fraud, as an excuse for voter suppression.
Voter fraud is extremely rare. At the federal level, records show that only 24 people were convicted of or pleaded guilty to illegal voting between 2002 and 2005, an average of eight people a year. The available state-level evidence of voter fraud, culled from interviews, reviews of newspaper coverage and court proceedings, while not definitive, is also negligible
Even that level of fraud, however, is an exaggeration of what conservatives fear, since none of it has been due to organized efforts by groups like ACORN. Properly speaking, therefore, the victimology ratio for voter suppression compared to voter fraud is infinite (or, technically, undefined). But let's give conservatives the benefit of the doubt, and treat this handful of cases as if it were the sort of thing that they fear. With an average of one election cycle per year (a primary and general election every other year), that's an national fraud rate of 8 cases per election cycle. Our next challenge is to come up with figures for voter suppression.
This is not an easy task, since we first need to define what we mean by "voter suppression," and there are several different credible sorts of definitions that produce vastly different sorts of figures. Then, having decided on a definition, we need to gather the relevant data--which may well be very fragmentary. Because of these two factors, and because I've written about voter suppression a number of the times over the years, I take this issue very seriously and really want to do it right. So this diary is just a preliminary sketch of what sort of results a serious inguiry would produce.
If we return to our underlying concern, conservative victimology, that will help guide us in clarifying how we might define voter suppression. The conservatives fear expressed in their panic over alleged "voter fraud" is that they will be politically overwhelmed by the wrong sorts of people, people who shouldn't be voting, people voting illegally. While the primary focus is on the threat of outright illegal voting--because who can argue that that would be wrong?--the actual fear is simply that they will lose political control, a fact that's quite clear from the historical record.
Tuesday was a good day for voting rights when a New Jersey federal judge ruled to extend restrictions against partisan voter suppression efforts that primarily target minority voters, effectively rejecting the Republican National Committee's claim that such protections are no longer needed.
In 1965 the course of American democracy changed when the Voting Rights Act was enacted to ensure proper enforcement of the 15th Amendment of the United States Constitution, which grants equal voting rights to people of color. While many strides have been made since the VRA's enactment, including rising voter participation among the nation's historically underrepresented citizens, voting rights advocates argue that it is still a long road to truly non-discriminatory voting practices and a balanced electorate. Now, the course of American democracy may change again as the U.S. Supreme court is considering a high profile case that challenges the constitutionality of a key provision of the VRA.
On the eve of the Presidential election, facing an historic defeat, the Republican National Committee quietly filed a motion to dissolve an existing consent decree in which they'd agreed not to engage in voter caging or other types of voter intimidation. Since 1982, the RNC has been restricted from conducting so-called "ballot-security" measures that have historically been used to deter thousands of Americans--largely low-income and minority citizens--from voting. Now, the RNC wants to be free of these restrictions. A hearing on the RNC motion is scheduled for next Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for New Jersey.
Calling voter registration "the lifeblood of our republic," Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), chairman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, opened the committee's hearing this morning on current problems in America's voter registration system. A focus of the discussion was a new study produced by the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey-conducted by researchers at thirty universities across the country-that finds that up to three million voters actively tried to vote in 2008 but were denied, and an additional four million were discouraged from voting due to administrative barriers.
After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld one of the country's strictest voter ID laws in April, several states rushed to pass similar bills before the year's end. By December, more than 25 states introduced legislation to require voter ID at the polls. Though none of these bills were successful this year, lawmakers in several states are hoping to revive such restrictive requirements in 2009.
Since July of this year, at least seven states have pre-filed or carried over voter ID legislation for the 2009-2010 sessions, including Nevada, Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.
A country created by slaveholders, that denied women the right to vote until 1920, and that needed a “second Reconstruction” in the 1960’s to guarantee the right to vote for Black Americans, elected the former community organizer and quintessentially American mixed-heritage Barack Hussein Obama to its Presidency.
Wow.
We made history despite the ugly campaign of fear and lies run by John McCain, a central tactic of which was to demonize ACORN and, in classic guilt-by-association innuendo, raise questions about President-Elect Obama’s fitness for office. We know that not only did that tactic fail, but that voters responded to a campaign that challenged us to be our better selves, to believe in the promise of America, and our resilience as Americans of countless backgrounds and strengths.
The thank you's and ACORN's policy priorities in the new political climate on the flip
The Our Vote Live website is the place to go for info about voting problems. Built with the assistance of the Electronic Freedom Foundation it documents the groundbreaking voter assistance work of the Election Protection Coalition in real time. You can report problems by calling Election Protection's toll-free hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE. They recoded over 40,000 incidents before today, and have already recorded more than 10,000 incidents today.
Highlights are recorded on their blog. Incidents can also be tracked through their map interface. They also have a versatile search interface. Here's a sample from their blog:
With an historic Election Day coming tomorrow, it is increasingly clear that the McCain-Palin campaign’s ACORN-voter fraud endgame may be to use their relentless attacks as a justification for a wave of legal challenges to close election results in key states. Over the weekend, McCain-Palin campaign manager Rick Davis made the rounds of the Sunday news shows claiming that polls showed McCain “structurally tied” in New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada. Never mind that, as SilentPatriot at Crooks and Liars points out,
“In Nevada, Barack Obama leads in the last eight polls, with a margin between 4 and 12 points.
In Colorado, excluding John Zogby's garbage internet polls, Barack Obama has lead in every single poll taken since the end of September. What's more, the most recent PPP poll has him up a staggering 10 points.
And in New Mexico, Obama leads in every poll since the second week in September. The last four polls average out to a 10.5 [point] Obama lead.”
Campaigns historically make claims of pushing towards victory on the closing weekend before an election, but the McCain-Palin campaign and the Republican National Committee have been engaged in six weeks of smears and attacks on ACORN’s record-breaking voter registration work, all part of a coordinated effort to cast doubt on the integrity of the election. Where this is headed on the flip.
STATE BLOGS
