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By Jonathan Alter
Bloomberg News
Mitt Romney campaigned in Michigan last week, where he faces a steep challenge because of his opposition to the auto bailout. But Romney has a strong ally there: legislation being pushed this month by his fellow Republicans aimed at preventing the League of Women Voters from undertaking the voter-registration drives it has sponsored for nearly a century.
Across the country, Republicans are carefully orchestrating plans to make voting harder – let’s call it the Voter Suppression Project – in order to help them win elections.
The Republican effort to restrict voting isn’t just anti-Democrat; it’s anti-democratic. No fair-minded person believes the tall tales of voters pretending they were someone else, which have been debunked by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law and others. What fool would risk prison or deportation to cast a single vote?
This isn’t about stopping vote-stealing and other corruption, for which there already are plenty of laws on the books. It’s about rigging the system to keep power.
First we saw the efforts during the George W. Bush administration by Karl Rove and Justice Department officials to get rid of U.S. attorneys who refused to pursue bogus voter-fraud cases.
Then came Crawford v. Marion County, the 2008 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mandatory photo-identification laws were constitutional on the basis of ballot protection. The evidence presented included not a single case of in-person impersonation fraud – the only fraud that photo-ID laws can prevent. And the millions of Americans – mostly less-affluent seniors – without driver’s licenses? Good luck.
The big Republican victory in the 2010 election was essential to the Voter Suppression Project. With the help of the American Legislative Exchange Council, Republicans moved with lightning speed to implement their scheme. Since 2011, 18 states have enacted voter-suppression bills, with similar ones pending in 12 more.
In the presidential race, it’s hand-to-hand legal combat, with almost every battleground state embroiled in a struggle over voter eligibility.
Michigan’s bills attack the League of Women Voters by requiring some volunteers to attend state-approved training sessions before they can register voters.
The catch is that the bill makes no provisions for such sessions. It does threaten them with penalties for registration offenses that aren’t specified.
The bill is modeled on Florida’s, parts of which a federal judge invalidated May 31 because he said they had “no purpose other than to discourage” constitutionally protected activity.
In Ohio, the Obama campaign helped collect enough signatures to put a referendum on the ballot repealing restrictions on absentee voting. Preferring not to face the voters directly on voter suppression, the Republican-controlled legislature repealed its own law, although it left intact a related measure that prohibits early voting on the three days before an election. That’s designed to discourage the tradition in black communities of busing worshippers from church to the polling place.
Several battleground states have new photo-ID requirements. Pennsylvania’s law allows valid student ID, but with a number of restrictions. Same in Wisconsin, which attached a series of bring-me-the-witch’s-broomstick demands for students looking to use a school ID. Fortunately, a state judge ruled against the Wisconsin law, although it’s being appealed.
The Obama campaign is obviously concerned about these ballot-access issues for political reasons. But even those with no dog in this fight should recognize that a great democracy doesn’t sully itself by suppressing the precious right to vote.
Bloomberg News
Mitt Romney campaigned in Michigan last week, where he faces a steep challenge because of his opposition to the auto bailout. But Romney has a strong ally there: legislation being pushed this month by his fellow Republicans aimed at preventing the League of Women Voters from undertaking the voter-registration drives it has sponsored for nearly a century.
Across the country, Republicans are carefully orchestrating plans to make voting harder – let’s call it the Voter Suppression Project – in order to help them win elections.
The Republican effort to restrict voting isn’t just anti-Democrat; it’s anti-democratic. No fair-minded person believes the tall tales of voters pretending they were someone else, which have been debunked by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law and others. What fool would risk prison or deportation to cast a single vote?
This isn’t about stopping vote-stealing and other corruption, for which there already are plenty of laws on the books. It’s about rigging the system to keep power.
First we saw the efforts during the George W. Bush administration by Karl Rove and Justice Department officials to get rid of U.S. attorneys who refused to pursue bogus voter-fraud cases.
Then came Crawford v. Marion County, the 2008 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mandatory photo-identification laws were constitutional on the basis of ballot protection. The evidence presented included not a single case of in-person impersonation fraud – the only fraud that photo-ID laws can prevent. And the millions of Americans – mostly less-affluent seniors – without driver’s licenses? Good luck.
The big Republican victory in the 2010 election was essential to the Voter Suppression Project. With the help of the American Legislative Exchange Council, Republicans moved with lightning speed to implement their scheme. Since 2011, 18 states have enacted voter-suppression bills, with similar ones pending in 12 more.
In the presidential race, it’s hand-to-hand legal combat, with almost every battleground state embroiled in a struggle over voter eligibility.
Michigan’s bills attack the League of Women Voters by requiring some volunteers to attend state-approved training sessions before they can register voters.
The catch is that the bill makes no provisions for such sessions. It does threaten them with penalties for registration offenses that aren’t specified.
The bill is modeled on Florida’s, parts of which a federal judge invalidated May 31 because he said they had “no purpose other than to discourage” constitutionally protected activity.
In Ohio, the Obama campaign helped collect enough signatures to put a referendum on the ballot repealing restrictions on absentee voting. Preferring not to face the voters directly on voter suppression, the Republican-controlled legislature repealed its own law, although it left intact a related measure that prohibits early voting on the three days before an election. That’s designed to discourage the tradition in black communities of busing worshippers from church to the polling place.
Several battleground states have new photo-ID requirements. Pennsylvania’s law allows valid student ID, but with a number of restrictions. Same in Wisconsin, which attached a series of bring-me-the-witch’s-broomstick demands for students looking to use a school ID. Fortunately, a state judge ruled against the Wisconsin law, although it’s being appealed.
The Obama campaign is obviously concerned about these ballot-access issues for political reasons. But even those with no dog in this fight should recognize that a great democracy doesn’t sully itself by suppressing the precious right to vote.
Uh-huh. Two hundred plus years of voting and suddenly we need photo IDs. If your scenario is valid, photo IDs should have been required around the time Daguerre invented the camera.
