Once again, I allowed myself to waste a morning online, arguing with a conservative troll who calls me a liberal fearmonger and an Alinskyite for suggesting that one of our major parties is working to curtail voting rights. I'm never gonna change his mind, but I've got 750 words and a bunch of links, so I might as well feed my moribund website...
Is it a democracy or a republic? Throughout our history,
we’ve seen struggles between those who preferred one to the other. The founders
were very suspicious of democracy, but even at that time, and certainly ever
since, people have struggled to expand their voting rights. So the answer is, a
little of both. But these days, a whole lot less of the former.
I’ll let you ponder the views of the late Lee Atwater, who
helped Reagan and the Bushes to modernize Nixon’s southern strategy, when it
comes to the GOP’s views on civil rights. It’s true that for 100 years after
Reconstruction, the Democratic party was home to racists. But since the
enactment of the Voting Rights Act, the parties have switched places, and
there’s a good reason why the KKK was cheering on the recent GOP victory.
You want to know why requiring voter ID is curtailing voting
rights? The problem is not with the ID per se, but with the discriminatory ways
in which the requirements are applied. That’s why a top Pennsylvania Republican
could brag that his state’s voter ID law could help swing his state to the GOP.
Minority voters are far less likely to have driver’s licenses in the first
place, and red states are full of hurdles like making the IDs available only in
certain offices many miles away, keeping them open only on a limited basis (in
one county, literally only on the fifth Wednesday of the month), and requiring
exorbitant fees if you can’t lay your hands on a birth certificate or a
passport. In some jurisdictions, a hunting license or military ID is sufficient
to allow you to vote, but a college ID card gets you turned away. But this is
just one of many tactics used to suppress the minority vote.
Red states play all kinds of games with voter registration,
enacting more stringent deadlines and hindering efforts by groups like the
League of Women Voters to help enfranchise people. They have consistently cut
back on early voting, weekend voting, vote by mail, and other methods designed
to make it easier for people to vote – while the other party has fought to
expand those rights. When it comes to Election Day, long lines at the polls in
minority communities are a familiar story. Rich neighborhoods are allocated
plenty of machines and poll workers so that voters can breeze in and out -
while poor communities are saddled with outdated polling equipment, fewer
polling places, shorter hours, fewer poll workers, and hence long lines that
can cost you most of the day, a special hindrance to those who can’t afford
time off from work.
None of this happens by accident, as my citation above
illustrates. That’s why Chris Christie made an explicit pitch in 2014 that
electing more GOP governors would allow his party to win the White House by
controlling more of the “voting mechanisms.”
These methods are enhanced by putting elections systems in
the hands of elected party hacks (like Katherine Harris in FL or Ken Blackwell
in OH), rather than making it a nonpartisan position. This allows red states to
use a voter suppression method far more effective than voter ID laws: purgingthe voter rolls. Red states are using a vast computer database called the
Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program to strike names from the rolls
of hundreds of thousands of people who are supposedly voting in multiple states
(only four people have been convicted of doing so). The database can also be used to force eligible voters to
cast provisional ballots, which are often discarded, uncounted, after the election has been called.
These lists can be used to specifically target minority
communities and are subject to lax oversight. NC, for instance, was found to
have illegally purged 6700 voters and ordered to reinstate them, but simply
ignored the court order. In NC, WI and other states that provided Trump’s
electoral vote win, the numbers of purged voters far exceed his margin of
victory.
And all of this was made possible in part by the three
Supreme Court decisions gifted to the GOP by conservative majorities: Bush v Gore, Citizens
United v FEC, and Shelby County v Holder. 2016 was the first election
held after the Voting Rights Act was gutted. Absent that, states with a proven
history of racist vote suppression would have been unable to enact such
sweeping restrictions to voting rights – and the results speak for themselves.
You may call it liberal fear-mongering, but I say, let the facts be submitted
to a candid world.
