Welcome to the latest edition in our war on voting series. This is a joint project of Meteor Blades and Joan McCarter.
Every now and then, a Republican lawmaker experiences a sudden gust of honesty. It happened in Wisconsin this spring, when Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Of course) said "I think Hillary Clinton is about the weakest candidate the Democrats have ever put up. And now we have photo ID, and I think photo ID is going to make a little bit of a difference as well." He was one of the guys who cheered passage of that state's voter ID law because "what it could do for us."
This week it's Republican Carter Wrenn, "a fixture in North Carolina politics," who admitted North Carolina's law had nothing to do with voter fraud in this great Washington Post piece detailing how the "monster" law was developed and passed.
“Of course it’s political. Why else would you do it?” he said, explaining that Republicans, like any political party, want to protect their majority. While GOP lawmakers might have passed the law to suppress some voters, Wrenn said, that does not mean it was racist.
“Look, if African Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, they would have kept early voting right where it was,” Wrenn said. “It wasn’t about discriminating against African Americans. They just ended up in the middle of it because they vote Democrat.”
And of course it's also racist, because politics and racism are most certainly not mutually exclusive things. There's also the part about how a representative democracy is supposed to have free and fair elections, a concept Republicans are apparently now explicitly and openly rejecting.
Some of the more egregious parts of North Carolina's voter suppression law will not be in effect this November, having been rejected by the Supreme Court, at least for the time being. The state had requested that the Supreme Court lift a stay on the law imposed by a lower court, and four of the Supremes said no. Unfortunately, that lower court ruling left one big loophole for the suppressors—it continues to allow local entities to restrict early voting. While they have to provide opportunities to vote for the 17 days prior to the election, county boards get to decide the hours and the locations of that voting.
About a third of the state's county election boards (all with Republican majorities) heeded a memo from the NC GOP that urged them to "make party line changes to voting" and now the state elections board "is poised to wade into what could be a lengthy county-by-county fight over how much early voting should be allowed." It's a fight that could easily end up back in court.
And court is where we're headed in Ohio and Michigan, too. For that and more head below the fold.
- Want to help fight voter suppression? Election Protection, a coalition of advocacy organizations, is one place to start. Go to their website, www.866ourvote.org, to find out what's happening in your state, to volunteer for election protection, or to donate to their efforts. You can also call your local Democratic party office and volunteer to help with voter registration and education drives.
- A win for North Dakota's American Indian voters last month will set important precedent for future challenges by native people throughout the country.
The Brakebill court identified many challenges to obtaining an acceptable voter ID that disproportionately impact American Indians. The court based these findings on a statistical survey of North Dakota voters which found that American Indian voters in North Dakota were much less likely than their non-Indian counterparts to have a current acceptable photo ID, to have a current North Dakota driver’s license, and to own or lease a car. Further, American Indian voters in North Dakota were more likely to lack the underlying documents necessary to obtain an acceptable ID and were, on average, required to travel twice as far as non-Indians to visit a Driver’s License site. Tellingly, the State of North Dakota did not dispute or challenge any of these findings. The court then found that the voter ID laws had disenfranchised American Indian voters in North Dakota and that North Dakota lacked any proof that the allegations of in-person voter fraud which purported to establish a public interest in the challenged voter ID requirements were real.
Brakebill is an important decision going forward for American Indian voters across the country. The challenges facing American Indian voters in North Dakota that the court recognized in Brakebill are not, unfortunately, unique to the Flickertail State. Nor are they unique to issues of voter ID. Rather, they are representative of the challenges to voting that face many American Indian and Alaska Native communities.
- Ohio Democrats have asked Supreme Court Justice Elana Kagan to allow "Golden Week" voting—a week in early voting in which you can register and vote on the same day—in the November election. This one has been back and forth in the courts, with the latest ruling from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowing the reduction in early voting by a week—the Golden Week—to stand. Kagan has given the state one week, until September 8, to respond to the petition. (The petition went to Kagan as she's the justice assigned to this circuit.)
- Justice Kagan is going to be busy next week. On Wednesday, September 7, she'll be reading Michigan's petition that she stay another ruling, on that requires the state to reinstate straight party voting, a long-standing option for Michigan voters to vote an entire party's slate with just one mark on their ballot. Straight-ticket voting has been used in the state for 125 years, and "is popular in Michigan cities with large African-American populations." Three guesses why the state's Republican lawmakers have tried to do away with it.
- In Virginia the Republican lawmaker who sued Gov. Terry McAuliffe over his order reinstating voting rights to former felons introduced legislation to restore voting rights to some former felons. He would restrict the right to just those convicted of non-violent crimes, and his legislation would effectively block any others from regaining the franchise. For that reason, McAuliffe and the state's Democrats are opposing it.
- Kris Kobach lost a skirmish in his long war against Kansas voters, but he won a battle anyway. Four days before the state's primary last month, courts ruled that "more than 17,000 people who had registered at the DMV would be able to vote in all races for the August primary even though they hadn’t provided proof of citizenship as required by state law." But the last-minute rulings didn't dispel confusion about who was eligible among those 17,000 and what they'd have to do to be able to vote. Only 73 of them turned out for the primary.
- In Wisconsin, election officials are grappling with the nightmare Gov. Scott Walker's voter ID law has created for them. Of course the law was challenged, and in the most recent litigation, the upheld the law but said the state had to "provide free voting credentials to people who don’t have IDs, even if they lack birth certificates or other identity documents." Complying with that will be a challenge for the state's DMV, which mails out a good chunk of the IDs—for those people who don't have birth certificates or other identity documents—by mail, and there might just not be time to process the applications and get the IDs in the mail to them.
- Then there's this.
- Closing out for the week, yes, voter suppression is real and it is the aim of all these laws. And it's working. Here's the Scholars Strategy Network telling you so.
Our findings are clear: strict voter identification laws double or triple existing U.S. racial voting gaps, because they have a negative impact on the turnout of Hispanics, blacks, and Asian Americans, but do not discourage white voters. In general elections, Hispanic turnout is 7.1 points lower in general elections and 5.3 points lower in primaries in states with strict identification laws, compared to turnout in other states. For blacks, the drop is negligible in general elections but a full 4.6 points in primaries. Finally, in states with strict rules, Asian American general election turnout falls by 5.4 points in general elections and by 6.2 points in primaries. Whites are little affected, except for a slight boost in their turnout for primaries.