Tag Archives: voter ID

On the Brnovich and AFP decisions, and why federalism is terrible for voting rights

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Part 1

After these voting rights and campaign finance decisions by SCOTUS today, state governments which purport to be the leaders on voting rights should be having a long, serious think about how to work together and strengthen each other against a SCOTUS which wants to devolve everything about elections to the state level, feed their most craven aristocrats and gut the social safety net.

This fight should not entirely rest on non-profit orgs working together, nor on attorneys-general mounting multi-state fights in the federal judiciary, nor on mere voting rights expansion at the state level. How are these state legislatures working together? Enacting interstate compacts between each other? Blurring the bureaucratic lines between each other?

How are these pro-voting rights states counteracting the Federalist Society’s obsession with states’ rights when it comes to elections? How are these pro-voting rights states maximizing their own impact beyond state lines? Or are any and all of these voting rights expansions simply for those residents who are “lucky” to still live in these pro-voting rights states?

The VRA is dying by 1,000 papercuts. Be a bit more creative.

Part 2

How many other countries have these legal fights over voting rights? I NEVER hear about fights over redistricting in other countries.
In other countries, I never hear about “color-blind” opportunistic attacks by random regional poobahs on the ability and confidence of urban residents, car-less people, people on reservations, people who have been released from prison and finished their sentence, disabled residents, illiterate residents, introverted people, working-class people, elderly people, college students, and homeless people to register to vote, cast a vote, have that vote counted, and have proportionate legislative representation based on that vote.

What do I hear about in other countries’ elections? Citizenship being stripped. Ballot stuffing. Candidates being removed from the ballot over specious reasons. Mis- and dis-info trafficking. Violent voter intimidation at the polls. The John Howard government in Australia ending the week-long grace period for federal voter registration in 2006, which was then reversed by their Supreme Court.

But here? It’s bureaucratic and systemic. And so many people strongly believe that all of these opportunistic attacks are worth it for the sake of maintaining a majority which protects their “way of life” against some random bunch of out-groups which may undermine it.

And yet, we continue to fight these state governments because we live in these states, we have higher, broader expectations about our basic rights than the limitations of the privileged in-group, we can’t up and relocate ourselves as the monied and able-bodied can, and people don’t really factor voting rights into their reasons for relocating to any state.
But so much of how our elections are ran, and how our voting rights are put through the meatgrinder, results from the fact that we use single-winner districts and first-past-the-post elections for our legislative bodies and assume that this winner-take-all system can be improved in any way.

If our legislative elections, from local to federal, are opportunistic winner-take-all exercises, then why the hell do we expect our legislative districts or operations of legislative sessions or appointments to judicial and bureaucratic bodies to be any different? How could we possibly think that nonpartisan redistricting would make for fairer boundaries in a winner-take-all system? How could we possibly think that the Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute, and other chronically-aristocratic actors would have any interest in inserting nonpartisan mechanisms when the winner can literally win EVERYTHING and nonpartisanship does not exist in a two-way fight? How could we think that Democrats who hold office by virtue of winner-take-all in captive jurisdictions like VRA districts would want to give that up by virtue of their own magnanimity?

We sleptwalked right into this over the last 50-60 years, and our “nonpartisan”, “bipartisan” solutions for fixing this two-player, winner-take-all system aren’t worth shit.

These decisions from SCOTUS today should be your wake-up call. Your winner-take-all elections are the utter rot that is sinking your community. Stop with the “nonpartisan” narrative. Use a better election system than winner-take-all, or suffer the consequences as you already were.

Liberals and progressives are losing against the voter ID regime

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The Voter ID mongers seem to have won the longer narrative war when Joe Manchin tees it up as a federal compromise for voting rights reform and Democrats treat it as something worthwhile if feds can set the standards.

I don’t think we appreciate how deeply and broadly that Voter ID has been mainstreamed since 9/11, and how opponents have not done a good job countering the demand for it or rebutting the arguments of pro-Voter ID advocates, despite the pro-Republican bias of most advocates. Even the ACLU has done a terrible job countering the Voter ID narrative.
It has been successful in arguments such as “Mexico and Canada have identification, why don’t we?” and “Democrats assume minorities are too stupid to get ID” and “Democrats register dead people and ‘illegals’ to vote”. Now it has progressed to “Black people are in favor of Voter ID according to polls”.

It has been a long and sustained campaign. But for the first time since the 2nd Bush admin, we’re now talking about federally tightening and streamlining laws on voter ID to mollify “both sides”, even though at least 14 states have never adopted (or have ditched) ID requirements at polling places (most recently Virginia).

And maybe the Voter ID supporters are right something that numerous other countries with varying levels of political freedom require at the polling place, including Mexico and Canada. Maybe those 14 states are backwards-facing in terms of election administration.

But the United States, as a whole, is uniquely obstinate, stubborn and backwards-facing in terms of voter registration. And even HR1 gets it wrong by not including one thing that could move voter registration forward: a federal voter roll.

But we never developed a rebuttal to the argument that “maybe you think minorities are too stupid to get ID”.

Something about that argument sends me up the fucking wall. Maybe that was the intent.

The logic is that minorities should prove their intelligence by obtaining “free” ID because white conservatives are inconvenienced by having to use ID to buy a gun, buy a beer or go through TSA. And if “welfare is slavery” and the Democratic Party is a “plantation”, then Black people are “slaves” who are not really intelligent and who need to prove our ability to cast the “right” vote, so we must prove our intellectual worth by jumping through the “simple”, “free” exercise of obtaining an ID.

This is weird. For so many Dems, Voter ID is a costly, anti-working-class poll tax. For Republicans, it’s a literacy test of intelligence, a shibboleth, and a necessity.

Idea: National Voter ID Card

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Hazardous Thought:

I’m seeing on Twitter that ardent Trumpists are very receptive to a “national ID card” as an anti-immigrant measure. They look a great deal at Mexico’s National Voter ID card as an inspiration.

A national ID card would go quite a ways to combat the “voter fraud” boogeyman.

I know that the ACLU is most consistent in opposing both national ID and voter ID.

But I’m wondering if we should support a National ID card while opposing the state-level Voter IDs.

“Demographic Threats” and Voter ID Laws

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QUESTION: Among Republican-governed states, Idaho, a state which is 0.6% African-American, has one of the looser Voter ID laws in the United States, requiring non-strict Photo ID.

Map of US Voter ID Laws by State, Strict vs Non-Strict, Nov 2016.svg
By Peterljr888 – Vector map from Blank US Map.svg by User:Theshibboleth.
Information from NCSL.org, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

 

Similarly:

  • North Dakota, with 1.2% African-descended population, has strict non-photo ID.
  • Montana, with 0.4%, has non-strict non-photo ID.
  • Wyoming, with 0.8%, has no Voter ID law.
  • Utah, with 1.1%, has non-strict non-photo ID.
  • Maine, with 1.2%, has none.
  • South Dakota, with 1.3%, has non-strict Photo ID.
  • New Mexico, with 2.1%, has none.
  • Iowa, with 2.9%, has none.
  • Alaska, with 3.3%, has non-strict non-photo ID.
  • West Virginia, with 3.4%, has none.
  • Colorado, with 4.0%, has non-strict non-photo ID.

Meanwhile, the Southeastern United States from Texas to Virginia is covered in Voter ID laws ranging from non-strict non-photo (like South Carolina, Oklahoma and Arkansas) to Strict Photo ID (Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee and Virginia). Similarly, among the 4 Red States in the Midwest with the highest percentage of African-American population, Voter ID laws range from strict non-photo (Ohio) to strict Photo ID (Wisconsin and Indiana).

And today, Missouri’s GOP is succeeding in getting their Voter ID to the same strict Photo ID level as Kansas and Nebraska; Kansas has 5.9%, Nebraska has 4.5% and Missouri has 11.6%.

I wonder if the Republican rush to stricter Voter ID laws correlates to the percentage of the African-American population under their state governance. Is our mere demographic existence as voters that much of a problem to conservative Whites that the GOP would nationally inconvenience even the White elderly, the White college students, and the White disabled at the ballot box just to spite us?

Why are we such a threat to your interests that the Voter Fraud enemy which you have chosen to curb is usually African-American and perhaps a woman? Are we Black people the ones committing all of the possible or real cases of vote fraud which can be counted on your fingers?

By curbing this fraudulent voter, do you feel safer at the ballot box? Are we the cause of your vote fears, and would it be more of a convenience for you if we left your state? Or is it really the Mexican-Americans?