Robbie Wilson
In the wake of recent violence and protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after a white police officer, Darren Wilson, shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, the national spotlight has once again focused on the inhibition of constitutional rights, especially of those within the African-American community. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 celebrated it’s 50th anniversary just last month, it would seem that America still has a long way to go to bridge the divide between minorities and a system that seems to favor “white privilege.” In the past month in Ferguson, we have witnessed the suppression of citizen’s First Amendment right to protest and their right to free speech; we have seen a complete disregard for the Fourteenth Amendment’s guaranteed application of due process under the law; arguably, we have also seen the misapplication of the Second Amendment, as no “well regulated militia” should ever be considered above the rule of law. However, these are not the only examples of how the constitutional rights of many Americans are suppressed today. 144 years after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibits the government from denying a citizen’s right to vote on the basis of their “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” we are in the midst of a systematic nullification of minority voter’s rights in America.
Republican lawmakers, in recent years, have asserted that restrictive voter ID laws are necessary in order to prevent what they allege to be an epidemic of unbridled voter fraud across the nation. Despite the rash of academic and statistical analysis disproving this so-called outbreak of rampant voter fraud, state legislatures in 34 states, largely controlled by the GOP, have passed laws mandating that voters show some form of identification before they are allowed to cast their ballots. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, as of this May only 31 of these states still have voter ID laws currently in place. They noted in their recent report that: “Pennsylvania’s law has been struck down and will not be appealed; Wisconsin’s law has been struck down and may be appealed; and North Carolina’s law, enacted in 2013, goes into effect in 2016.” My home state of Arkansas has enacted a strict photo voter ID law, which was struck down by a lower state court in April. Subsequently, the Arkansas Supreme Court rendered a stay on that ruling. The law was still in effect as of our primary election held on May 20th, but it remains unclear if the case will be resolved before the coming Congressional Election on November 4th.
Republicans, as well as the Conservatives on the Supreme Court, may jeer at the notion that these kinds of laws were, in fact, meant to unreasonably disenfranchise minorities, young voters, older voters, and poor voters until the proverbial “cows come home,” but studies have proven that it is the cruel reality surrounding these new voter ID laws. It may be true that some lawmakers have rationalized the implementation of such harsh limiting factors on voters out of fear that election results somehow lack integrity, but as I pointed out earlier there is a substantial consensus among constitutional scholars and legal experts that in-person voter fraud is extremely rare—by that I mean it’s virtually non-existent. Still, many Republican lawmakers insist that voter fraud is a problem and that their efforts are in no way designed to keep members of certain demographic groups, who typically vote for Democrats, away from the polls. With all this in mind, let’s take a closer look at what some researchers, legal experts, and others in the government have found or what they have to say regarding voter fraud and the recent push by many states to curtail it with these strict voter ID laws.
In an extensive research project entitled The Politics of Voter Fraud, Lorraine C. Minnite, Ph.D., a professor of Political Science at Columbia University, notes that there is a clear distinction between election fraud and voter fraud. She defines voter fraud as the “intentional corruption of the electoral process by the voter,” which is not the same as when a collective or group, from election officials to political party affiliates, engages in fraudulent election activity on a broader scale. This distinction is very relevant to the debate because the sudden increase of voter ID laws are primarily aimed at putting an end to in-person voter fraud, hence the rationale behind the many states requiring voters to show a government issued photo ID before voting. Interestingly enough, her findings also show that voter fraud on the individual level is a tremendous rarity. “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.”
Another fascinating discovery of Minnite’s research is that although voter fraud is “exceedingly rare,” many of the hypothetically valid cases often turn out to be false claims after a candidate or the candidate’s supporters “cry foul” merely because they suffered defeat in the election. She writes in her report, “…a review of news stories over a recent two year period found that reports of voter fraud were most often limited to local races and individual acts and fell into three categories: unsubstantiated or false claims by the loser of the race, mischief and administrative or voter error.” Essentially, it is not necessarily the perceived purity of the election process that drives this push for stringent voter ID laws, but rather it stems from the intense desire to manipulate the process in such a way that their favored candidate wins. This “sore loser” concept—also echoed in research by Justin Levitt of the Loyola University Law School—seems to jive well with the assertion many Democrats have been making all along: Republican controlled state legislatures are attempting to systematically rig elections in order to keep groups who typically vote for Democrats out of the voting booth. Clearly the GOP, struggling to remain relevant with such voting blocs as African-Americans, Latinos, the poor, college students, and recent college graduates—just to name a few—has the motive and would very likely find a great deal of perverse pleasure in eliminating as many of these votes as possible, especially considering their latest nefarious endeavors to gerrymander districts in Florida and Texas, among a plethora of other states, to favor Republican candidates.
Earlier this month, Marcia Coyle of the National Law Journal interviewed Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the topic of the racial strains that continue to plague America, many of which the conservative, male dominated SCOTUS has largely ignored in recent years. Justice Ginsburg spoke about how the “real racial problem” in the United States will doubtfully improve if the way in which whites and “people of color” coexist “remains divided.” The 81 year-old justice alluded to a time in the 1970s when the Supreme Court, then headed by Chief Justice Warren Burger, forged a sensible understanding of the “disparate impact” of laws that affect minority groups in a disproportionate manner. In 1971 the “Burger Court” issued a unanimous ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which supported the busing of black students into predominately white school districts in order to end what many considered to be “de facto” racial segregation. “It was a very influential decision and it was picked up in England,” noted Ginsburg. “That’s where the court was headed in the 70s.”
It would seem that the course of SCOTUS had turned opposite by 2013, as the “Roberts Court” removed a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through it’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder. In a 5-4 decision, they ruled that Section 4(b), which contains the coverage formula determining which jurisdictions are subjected to preclearance based on their histories of discrimination in voting, was unconstitutional. Now, states would no longer be required to seek preclearance, meaning prior approval, from the Department of Justice in order to change their voting laws. This was a major victory for opportunists who seek to manipulate voting requirements in such a way that discourages certain groups of citizens from voting. It is unmistakably a far cry from the Supreme Court that Justice Ginsburg had previously described, a SCOTUS that was “once a leader in the world at rooting out racial injustice.” Indeed, the 2013 ruling inspired Texas, North Carolina, and Alabama, as well as a host of others, to adopt laws almost immediately that allowed for the cartographic redistricting and the implementation of restrictive voter ID laws, seemingly aimed at keeping minority voters from effectively participating in our electoral system. What is so frustrating for many of us on the left is that all of this has been done under the guise of protecting our country from fraudulent voting, which Dr. Minnite discovered in her research was not a viable threat.
Another interesting bit of investigation, perhaps even the most telling of current voter fraud research, comes from Justin Levitt, a constitutional and democratic law expert, from the Loyola University Law School. Throughout the course of the study, he probed primary, general, special, and municipal elections from the years 2000 to 2014, reporting that in “…general and primary elections alone, more than 1 billion ballots were cast in that period.” This comprehensive study was designed to “…track any specific, credible allegation that someone may have pretended to be someone else at the polls, in any way that an ID law could fix.” Levitt found only 31 instances out of the aforementioned 1 billion ballots cast across the country—including the instances involving multiple ballots—in which strict voter ID laws might have prevented in-person voter fraud.
Dr. Levitt concluded:
“Election fraud happens. But ID laws are not aimed at the fraud you’ll actually hear about. Most current ID laws (Wisconsin is a rare exception) aren’t designed to stop fraud with absentee ballots (indeed, laws requiring ID at the polls push more people into the absentee system, where there are plenty of dangers). Or vote buying. Or coercion. Or fake registration forms. Or voting from the wrong address. Or ballot box stuffing by officials in on the scam. In the 243-page document that Mississippi State Sen. Chris McDaniel filed…with evidence of allegedly illegal votes in the Mississippi Republican primary, there were no allegations of the kind of fraud that ID can stop.”
He went on to say:
“Instead, requirements to show ID at the polls are designed for pretty much one thing: people showing up at the polls pretending to be somebody else in order to each cast one incremental fake ballot. This is a slow, clunky way to steal an election. Which is why it rarely happens.”
Although I was not at all surprised to find that instances of in-person voter fraud were practically nil, I must admit that I was astounded at the sheer volume of research that has been conducted regarding the efficacy of strict voter ID laws in relation to the prevention of fraudulent activity at the polls. How can any Republican continue to allege with a straight face that voter fraud is some terrible blight upon our republic in light of all of this evidence to the contrary? That’s easy—because they know it isn’t a real problem. In the words of Don Yelton, a former GOP leader in North Carolina, who said in an interview last year with Daily Show correspondent, Aasif Mandvi:
“The law is going to kick the Democrats in the butt. If it hurts a bunch of college kids too lazy to get up off their ‘bohonkas’ and go get a photo ID, so be it. If it hurts a bunch of whites, so be it.”
Later in the interview, he elaborated further:
“If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.”
Yelton, who was forced to step down shortly after he made his racially insensitive remarks, is not the only Republican boss at the state level to weigh in on the issue. The GOP leader of Pennsylvania’s state House, Mike Turzai, suffered from a bit of foot-in-mouth syndrome when he listed voter ID laws on his program of Republican political victories for 2012:
“Voter ID, which is ‘gonna’ allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”
Can someone please tell us again how these strict voter ID laws are not intended to disenfranchise certain voters who tend to poll Democratic? As we can clearly see from these examples, GOP leaders are not afraid to tell us that they were designed to do just that.
The Republicans are aware that there are thousands of people in our country who either do not have or cannot afford to procure a copy of their birth certificate. In some case, especially with the elderly or with recent immigrants, a certificate of live birth may never have been issued. Sometimes records get destroyed or cannot be found. Some people in larger cites do not have a valid driver’s license because they depend on public transportation and do not own a car. Some people cannot even afford to purchase a state issued ID card because they would rather buy groceries. We must venture to keep in mind that not everyone has the same access to all the same amenities as everyone else. But, that most certainly doesn’t render them any less of a citizen and it should never preclude them from voting. In remarks to the NAACP in Houston a few years ago, Attorney General Eric Holder rightly referenced the Twenty-fourth Amendment:
“Many of those without IDs would have to travel great distances to get them – and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them. We call those poll taxes.”
For those of you who are not too familiar with the Constitution, the Twenty-fourth Amendment, adopted in 1964, made that variety of a taxation illegal.
While all of us can agree that we aspire to uphold the integrity of our electoral process, after reviewing the facts, we can safely say that there is no substantial proof of a voter fraud problem in America. However, there is plenty of evidence that Republican posturing for political gains has played a huge roll in bringing these unnecessary—dare I say morally repugnant—voter ID laws into fruition. There is also plenty data that indicates a concentrated effort on the part of the GOP to rig our electoral system through the gerrymandering of districts as well as by attempting to deprive certain citizens of their right to vote; a privilege that many hold sacrosanct in our country. Republicans, as per usual, are once again on the wrong side of history when it comes to standing up for the rights of the underprivileged and minorities in America. Through their cleverly devised schemes, the GOP has utilized smoke and mirror tactics to confuse the American public into thinking that in-person voter fraud is actually a major problem that we face as a nation, when in reality what they are doing is purposefully disenfranchising minority groups. Once again, the most comprehensive research available has proven that the odds of in-person voter fraud are an infinitesimal 31-in-a-billion. Therefore, I can logically conclude, as I hope you can, dear reader, that the Republican rationale behind the recent outbreak of voter ID laws is truly fallacious. By their own admission the laws are racist and intended to marginalize a huge bloc of Democratic voters. Without a shred of doubt, we can conclude that voter ID laws are the red herring of the red states.
The Hefty Lefties 