AUGUST 2, 2012
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THE GOP IS supposed to pretend that its 2012 strategy doesn’t include the systematic disenfranchisement of lower-income blacks and Latinos. But in June, Mike Turzai, Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania House, blew his party’s cover by blurting out: “Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor [Mitt] Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania? Done.” The press was jubilant. It was as if Koch Enterprises had acknowledged global warming.
Since at least 2008, when minority voters gave Barack Obama his victory margin––Obama won only 43 percent of the white vote––Republicans have increasingly relied on voter suppression to counterbalance the steady shrinkage of America’s white majority. Former Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer (currently under indictment for stealing party funds) stated in a deposition released in July that a 2009 party meeting included discussion of “voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting.” In December, Paul Schurick, a top aide to former Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich, was convicted of election fraud for using automated phone calls to suppress the African American vote during Ehrlich’s unsuccessful 2010 bid. “The first and most desired outcome is voter suppression,” stated one consultant’s memo entered into evidence. It described a “Schurick Doctrine” to “promote confusion, emotionalism and frustration among African American Democrats.”
Most of the disenfranchisement is less obviously crude and presented to the public as hygienic electoral reform. But the pathogens it seeks to remove are African Americans, Latinos, and other lower-income folks who resist voting Republican. You’ve probably heard something about it, but Turzai’s gaffe invites us to review, with open eyes, how this racket actually works. It’s an obscenity no longer hiding in plain sight.
Voter ID. The preeminent tool. Attorney General Eric Holder has correctly likened voter ID laws, which have passed in 33 states, to poll taxes. Their popularity derives from their reasonableness. Why shouldn’t we prevent imposters from committing electoral identity theft? Because it solves a nonexistent problem. New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice calculates the incidence of individual voter fraud to be literally equivalent to the incidence of individual Americans getting struck by lightning.
What voter ID laws are useful for is reducing voter participation by you know who. Requiring an unexpired government-issued ID, a bank statement, or a utility bill is good. Requiring an unexpired government-issued photo ID, such as a driver’s license or a passport, is better, because about 25 percent of African Americans and 16 percent of Latinos don’t have any––as against 11 percent of the general population. The nine states with the strictest photo ID requirements are mostly rural, which means the government offices where such ID can be obtained are likelier to be far away and to keep irregular hours. The Woodville, Mississippi office is open only on the second Thursday of every month. Wisconsin’s Sauk City office is open only on the fifth Wednesday of every month, and since eight months in 2012 don’t even have a fifth Wednesday, the office will open its doors only four days this year.
Voter registration. Before you vote, you have to register. Five states now require proof of citizenship with an unexpired passport (something fewer than one-third of Americans possess) or a birth certificate or a naturalization certificate (to which about 7 percent lack easy access). Since acquiring these documents can easily cost as much as $100, this requirement has the virtue of weeding out both legal immigrants and the native-born poor. The ostensible target is undocumented immigrants, but they have even less incentive to commit voter fraud than American citizens do: In addition to steep fines and imprisonment, they’d risk deportation.
Another tactic, favored in Texas and Florida, is to target nonprofit groups that conduct voter-registration drives (the League of Women Voters, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). This is achieved by imposing onerous new training, registration, and/or liability burdens on the groups’ volunteers. The proportion of African American and Latino voters who register through third-party drives is about twice what it is for whites.
Closing the polls. Since lower-income voters more often work early in the morning or late at night, Republicans tend to favor shorter polling hours. They justify this with feigned concern about the stamina of (often elderly) volunteers. A similarly motivated opposition has mobilized against early voting arrangements that let people vote on weekends. Sunday voting is a particular target. The stated reason is that it’s impious. (Glenn Beck: “This is an affront to God.”) The actual reason is that Sunday voting allows black churches to provide “souls to polls” transport after services. Ohio and Florida have eliminated it.
Purging. States have to update their voter lists, right? Federal law requires certain safeguards, such as notifying those found ineligible so they can dispute erroneous removals. But many such formalities go unobserved, especially if you purge close enough to Election Day. (In this, as in many other subcategories, the gold medal goes to Republican Florida Governor Rick Scott, who has been doing battle with the Justice Department over the legality of his planned purge of noncitizens.) A variation on purging is caging, wherein nonforwardable letters are sent to voters in African American neighborhoods. Whichever letters get returned unopened occasion instant purges. The Republican National Committee got caught doing this in the 1980s, and now the party is not allowed to under a consent decree. But considerable evidence suggests the GOP has quietly resumed the practice anyway.
Robocalls. Automated phone calls aimed at discouraging people from going to the polls. Before the failed June vote to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a robocall said anyone who signed a recall petition didn’t have to vote (which wasn’t true). Maryland’s Schurick put out a robocall in 2010 assuring voters in African American neighborhoods that his candidate’s Democratic opponent, Governor Martin O’Malley, was well ahead (and thus unlikely to need more votes).
The GOP has other, similarly repulsive schemes afoot, but these are the most egregious. As for the Republican nominee: Don’t hold your breath waiting for Mitt Romney to condemn something his party sees as essential to victory.
This article appeared in the August 23, 2012 issue of the magazine.
14 comments
A great summary of an egregious set of practices. This is banana republic stuff, except more sophisticated.
- Thunderroad
August 7, 2012 at 7:45pm
Time for another French Revolution, only American this time. Bring out the tumbrils and the guillotines. This time, televise the revolution. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS3QOtbW4m0
- skahn
August 7, 2012 at 10:12pm
Those wascally wabbits in the GOP are at it again, building the foundation for a future police state. I hope the people who vote for these fascists like it when it gets here. I'm sure many of them will.
- magboy47.
August 8, 2012 at 12:46am
My advice: Don't get mad, get even. I was challenged in Madison WI in the election of 1964, probably due to my slightly hippy appearance. At the time (and maybe still), any poll watcher could challenge anyone they chose; the person challenged had to fill out a special ballot which was sealed and not counted till the challenge was resolved. Law abiding fellow that I was, I filled out my ballot and went on my way. The Democratic poll watcher, as I found out later, suspected what was going on and immediately called the Democratic and Republican state committees to say that if anyone else was challenged in this way, Democratic poll watchers would challenge everyone in sight (presumably mostly in Republican precincts) and make a mess out of the election. And so, I was the only person the be challenged. ... And I see the Republicans are still at it.
- jonrysh
August 8, 2012 at 1:55am
Maybe because I am a foreigner, but I still don't understand what is the big deal about ID. Every western civilized country I know requires some sort of picture ID to vote. Why is this a problem? How can you live in a modern state without having a picture ID?
- rmakover@swbell.net-OLD
August 8, 2012 at 6:50am
Voter suppression is repugnant to the spirit of this nation. Three cheers for Noah for calling the Republicans out on this. We all need to be more vocal on this issue. But you may want to update your examples Noah. Sauk City WI may make it tough to get a drivers license locally, but it's also a place where a) virtually every adult has a license because you need one to get to work, to the grocery store, and virtually anywhere else - it's not like you can take a taxi or citi bus, 'cause there are neither in the village of Sauk City. More generally, you don't have to spend much time in rural American to realize that requiring a drivers license to vote out here impacts far fewer people as a percentage of the potential electorate than in urban areas. 95% plus of kids where I live get a driver's license within a year of their 16th birthday, regardless of race or income - you just can't get around without one. None of this is to say the Republicans aren't being anti-democratic, Machiavellian assholes on this subject. They are. But it's not the rural Midwest and intermountain west where they are having the impact. It's in cities.
- IowaBeauty
August 8, 2012 at 7:40am
Oh, and I meant to say in the second paragraph, "and b) you only need to get 12 miles to Madison to get a license any day of the week."
- IowaBeauty
August 8, 2012 at 7:41am
makover - There are two factors at work here. First, some people in the U.S. are both motivated and able to function without picture IDs. Their reasons vary widely, from elderly folks who have family or friends conduct their business for them and only rarely have to present anything themselves to members of minority groups who avoid organized banking, pay with cash wherever they can, and stay as "off the grid" as possible. For them, decades of organized discrimination has produced a societal bias to stay the hell away from banks, credit checks, and anything of that ilk; as a side-effect, it means that they either don't need an ID or are motivated to find ways around having one. While no one group without ID is huge, once you look at all the possible reasons and difficulties involved, it does add up-apparently to about 11% of the population, per TN's stat above. The second factor is American schizophrenia. The same Republicans pushing for such exacting voter ID laws are the ones who will shriek hysterically at any hint of proposing a uniform national identification standard. State governments need to be able to check your ID at the polling place, you see, but the federal government can't be trusted with all citizens' identity records, lest it use that incredible font of knowledge to herd undesirable citizens into concentration camps. And no, I'm not kidding. The issuing of social security cards to all U.S. citizens decades ago, which do not include photos, led to all manner of conspiracy theories. Within the last couple of years, discussions of FEMA building concentration camps for conservatives got pretty popular, stirred up by Glen Beck and his ilk, saying that if there was a push for a "National ID," it would be proof that the government was embarking on such a plan... This is the kind of thinking you get when you have an ideology that believes that government should be as small and powerless as possible-except for outlawing gay sex and making sure that Muslims can't build mosques. The unfortunate result for the sane citizens of this country is that we have no single standard for what an ID is, nor how to get one; we have 50. Only very recently (after 9/11) was there a push to make sure all 50 states required an actual picture on their ID, but some states still have exceptions that allow you to get one without a photo. More pointedly, there is no common understanding that the state has any requirement to provide you with identification; some states provide them for free, while others can charge significant fees. Many cities have dozens of offices where you can go 5 or 6 days a week to get an ID, while Sauk City, WI is open every fifth Wednesday. Why do we have such problems? Because we don't do consistency well. Or, put more simply-because we're nuts.
- janus
August 8, 2012 at 8:11am
Iowa - I don't think that Sauk City was pointed out as a hotbed of voter suppression, but merely pointed out as an example of the ridiculous extremes that make the whole system we have laughable. That there is anywhere in this country where you can only get an ID four days out of the year makes clear that our country feels no sense of responsibility to provide its citizens with the opportunity to function in a modern society-and yet, this same country is getting more and more strict in punishing people for "choosing" to decline that opportunity. We're losing our sense of fairness and justice, and this is one of the prime exemplars.
- janus
August 8, 2012 at 8:17am
Just to clarify: there is no constitutional right to vote. That may seem like an odd thing for America, but the founders were not lower case d democrats. Extension of the franchise (to non-property owners, etc.) was slow in coming (see Sean Wilentz's book), and the two amendments to the constitution addressing the right to vote only prohibit the denial of the right to vote based on race or gender; so, presumably, any other basis for denying the right to vote (should as not having a picture ID or having blue hair) is okay. What's more, if we were to have a constitutional amendment (or plebiscite) to add a right to vote, is there much doubt about the outcome.
- rayward
August 8, 2012 at 9:29am
"First, some people in the U.S. are both motivated and able to function without picture IDs." And these people are not motivated to vote? I have spent all of maybe 10 hours in the last 40 years maintaining my driver's license. That's too much to ask for me to be able to vote? Frankly, I don't think it is. I think the crime here is not requiring the ID, it's the fact that Republican's know that in many places it IS hard to get an ID, so they can use their underfunding of basic government function as a lever to disenfranchize people in those situations. And that is completely unacceptable. But having to have the ID per se. I really don't have a problem with that. "That there is anywhere in this country where you can only get an ID four days out of the year makes clear that our country feels no sense of responsibility to provide its citizens with the opportunity to function in a modern society" Sure, but Sauk City is still a lousy data point to bolster your case. It's 12-15 miles from Madison, and I guarantee you that the people in and around Sauk City almost to a person go to Madison multiple times per year if they are self sufficient and mobile at all. There are only about 15,000 people at most for whom Sauk City and Sac Prairie (a contiguous "city') is the closest "commercial center" - and for most of them it's barely that, because they shop routinely in Madison or other larger cities. Anyone motivated to have a picture ID - and that's almost every adult in such a community will have one.
- IowaBeauty
August 8, 2012 at 10:31am
Iowa - Some of the people we're talking about are motivated to vote-and they've also not needed a photo ID to do so for...well, ever. And I absolutely agree with you that it isn't requiring a photo ID by itself, it's requiring a photo ID while knowing that it's a monstrous pain in the ass to get one for many people that constitutes the ugliness here. As for Sauk City...eh. I don't know the area, you obviously do, and I was just attempting to guess at why TN included it. I have a particular sensitivity to accessibility problems, whether because of short hours or the need to travel ridiculous distances, largely because it painfully reminds me of things like the story about having to help my mom get an ID that I shared a couple of days back.
- janus
August 8, 2012 at 10:54am
Well don't forget Seattle sage words that only those at the top 20% of income earnings have earned the right to vote.
- singlspeed
August 8, 2012 at 11:17am
Just wondering, but does anyone know the purported justification for requiring that the government-issued photo id be unexpired?
- Spieg
August 8, 2012 at 1:41pm