This week saw the war on voting carried to a ridiculous extreme. In order to prove the conservative case that conspiracies to commit voter fraud exist, James O'Keefe carried out a conspiracy to commit voter fraud. It's a stunt that turned the
families of the recently deceased into victims, and
opens O'Keefe and his minions to criminal prosecution, again.
To that end, Daily Kos has teamed up with People for the America Way to petition New Hampshire officials to investigate O'Keefe for voter fraud. You can sign the petition to Attorney General Delaney and U.S. Attorney Kacavas here.
In other news:
- On a positive note, Think Progress's Scott Keyes writes about the various states with legislation pending to either ameliorate previous voter restriction laws passed, or to expand voting rights. Proposed legislation in Florida would restore a two-week window for early voting, and ease restrictions on third party voter registration groups, like the League of Women Voters. Bills in New York would establish two weeks of early voting, allow same day registration, and make the dirty trick of deceiving voters about the time or place of an election illegal. In Virginia, a new bill would restore voting rights for convicted felons who have completed their sentences. And in Washington, a bill has been introduced to allow for same-day in-person registration, along with online registration up to eight days before an election.
- Relatedly, the Nebraska legislature has pulled a restrictive voter ID bill from its agenda, at least for now.
- While much of the attention on voter suppression in the past year has focused on what state legislatures have done, Robert M. Brandon, founder and president of the Fair Elections Legal Network, writes at Politico about what secretaries of state are doing to disenfranchise voters.
[R]ecent actions by some secretaries of state look even more disturbing, given their traditional role as a state’s chief elections officer, with a mandate to administer elections fairly.
The secretaries of state in Colorado, Kansas, Maine and New Mexico all used their office last year to throw doubt on their state’s election system. To support more restrictive voting laws, these officials called into question the eligibility of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of registered voters — though there is little evidence to support their claims of people illegally registering and voting. [...]
Policies to make voting more difficult have no place in the office of a state’s chief election administrator. The goal should be getting more citizens to vote, not fewer. We would be served better by secretaries of state who are more interested in modernizing election law and encouraging policies that ensure all eligible voters have equal access to the polls.
- The Society Pages has a detailed look at the coordinated GOP effort to suppress the vote, and the organization behind it: ALEC.
ALEC drafted model ID voter legislation, and every single new voter ID law was passed with ALEC member involvement. ALEC’s policy agenda for 2011 included bills to deregulate polluting industries, privatize education, eliminate unions, and voting restrictions. [...]
The purpose of new voter ID laws is to demobilize certain portions of electorate who are more likely to vote for Democrats, a goal laid out by ALEC founder, Paul Weyrich many decades ago who stated that “I don’t want everybody to vote… Our leverage in the elections goes up as the voting populus goes down.”
But you already knew that, didn't you?
- The Virginia Legislative Black Caucus is ringing alarm bells over efforts in that legislature to disenfranchise voters in that state.
Republican legislators this year have filed at least two bills -- one would require voters to show identification at the polls -- that black lawmakers said they object to.
Norfolk Sen. Yvonne Miller lashed out at those measures during a morning news conference at the capital, her voice rising as she said they would take Virginia "back to the bad old days when there was a very small electorate, when only men could vote and only white men who owned property could vote."
Those measures are designed to discourage voting, not prevent possible voter fraud as supporters suggest, added Sen. Donald McEachin, D-Henrico County.
"These are solutions looking for a problem," McEachin said of the Republican legislation he considers a vehicle for the GOP to vent over the fact that "an African American man is the President of the United States and they can't stand it."
- A number of groups are sounding the alarm on the very specific targeting of black college students in Texas.
In a joint letter to the Department of Justice, the Texas NAACP, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and the Brennan Center for Justice detailed how Black college students are being suppressed. African-Americans constitute 17.2 percent of Texas' total university student population and 16.9 percent of the state's public university students, despite representing a smaller share of Texas' overall voting age population.
"African-Americans are more likely to be attending a public university in Texas than whites, but student IDs were not included as an acceptable form of identification in Senate Bill 14," they said. "According to the 2009 American Community Survey, 8 percent of voting-age African-Americans in Texas were attending a public university, compared with only 5.8 percent of voting-age whites."
- It's hard to figure out what's more pitiful in this op-ed from Newt Gingrich: his blinding hypocrisy or the fact that the only place he could find to print it was the Daily Caller. How the mighty have fallen.
- Gingrich wrote that in response to the Justice Department's intervention to block the voter ID provisions of an election law passed in South Carolina. The state is retaliating, officials announced, by filing suit against the Justice Departments. The state's lawyer, Christopher Coates, is, well, nuts.
Fighting on their behalf will be a former DOJ official who claimed that the Civil Rights Division is opposed to protecting the civil rights of whites and who defended the Bush-era politicalization of the division by Bradley Schlozman as an effort to “diversify.”
He's also the guy who signed off on the New Black Panther Party case while at the DOJ, the voter intimidation case that conservatives have been flogging for years, even though lawyers were unable to find any voters who were actually intimidated.