Always on top of the ongoing threat to representative democracy posed by Republican office-holders,
The Nation's Ari Berman caught a
telling moment from FOX News:
As President Obama spoke about Representative Paul Ryan’s budget yesterday, Fox News broke away from the president’s remarks to cover “a stunning case in South Bend, Indiana.” The story covered an indictment by the St. Joseph County prosecutor’s office alleging that local Democratic officials forged signatures to get Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards on the Indiana Democratic Primary ballot in 2008. “Indiana State Police investigators identified a total of 22 petitions that appeared to be faked, yet sailed through the Voter Registration Board as legitimate documents,” Fox reported. Eric Shawn, of the Fox News Voter Fraud Unit, said that a local election worker was “ordered to forge presidential petitions for Barack Obama, illegally faking the names and signatures of unsuspecting voters to put the then-Illinois senator on the presidential primary ballot.”
Of course, FOX News interrupted a speech by President Obama with a story that, however shaky it will undoubtedly prove to be, suggests that he was not legitimately elected. This indictment, as Berman notes, is already being used by conservative commentators to scream for more voter suppression laws nationally. There are a couple of problems with that, however.
Number one: there’s no evidence that the alleged forgeries played a decisive role in getting the Democratic candidates on the Indiana ballot in 2008 or determining the outcome of the primary or general election. [...]
Number two: Indiana’s voter ID law, passed in 2008 and the model for the nine states that have adopted similar laws since the 2010 election, did nothing to prevent the alleged signature fraud, nor did it stop Indiana’s Republican Secretary of State, Charlie White, from committing felony voter fraud in the 2010 election. (White was sentenced to a year of home detention on felony fraud convictions.)
(Ever notice that an awful lot of the true voter fraud that occurs is done by Republicans?)
Beyond the problems Berman notes with the Republican argument, petition signatures are not votes, and there is no evidence in Indiana that rampant voter fraud occurred in 2008. Just as there is no evidence anywhere that rampant voter fraud happened in any state in 2008, or in 2004, or in 2000.
Indeed, between 2000 and 2007, there were 32,299 UFO sightings in the United States, 352 deaths caused by lightning, but only nine cases of voter impersonation, according to a great new infographic by Craiglist founder Craig Newmark.
For more of the week's news, make the jump below the fold.
In other news:
- If you haven't yet seen it, watch Rachel Maddow's report on the systematic effort on the part of Michigan's Republicans to end democracy in their state.
- Here's an interesting idea for fighting voter suppression laws from the Jurist: take the example of Wisconsin, and use state constitutional voting protections to challenge the laws.
Many state constitutions offer greater protection for the right to vote than does the US Constitution. The Wisconsin Constitution, for example, provides, "Every United States citizen age 18 or older who is a resident of an election district in this state is a qualified elector of that district." The Wisconsin Constitution allows the legislature to enact laws excluding the right to vote to convicted felons or those judged "incompetent" or "partially incompetent." It also permits the legislature, subject to ratification "by the people," to expand voting rights to "additional classes." The Virginia Constitution similarly grants the "right of suffrage" to "all men." This is in stark contrast to the US Constitution, which does not enumerate an affirmative right to vote, instead simply placing certain limits on denying the franchise. That is, a right to vote under the federal Constitution is merely implied. Plaintiffs have invoked the Wisconsin Constitution's more robust protection in state court to challenge the new voter ID law.
- A new issue brief from Campus Progress and Center for American Progress provides a great overview on current voter suppression efforts around the country. It's too long to reproduce here, but here's a snippet: The five worst states for voting rights in the past year are Florida, Texas, Wisconsin, Tennessee and Kansas. Read the report to find out why and for the stories of nine specific voters who have been denied the vote by laws in these states.
- And this piece by Lindsay Mark Lewis and Jim Arkedis from the Progressive Policy Institute in The New York Times details how SuperPACs will work to curtail voting in areas where legislatures might not have been able to. It talks about how the vast sums of money these organizations raise will likely be used to harass, misinform, and confuse voters in an effort to keep them away from the polls.
- Texas is ratcheting up states-rights claims in its suit against the Department of Justice, which has blocked a voter ID bill there on grounds that it violates the Voting Rights Act. Texas is arguing that all “communications between members of the state legislature, communications between state legislators and their staff, and communications between state legislators and their constituents” should not be subject to discovery, and be kept secret.
“These discovery requests represent an unwarranted federal intrusion into the operations of the Texas Legislature, and threaten to push section 5’s already-questionable incursions on state prerogatives past the constitutional breaking point,” Texas argued.
States have had little luck pursuing this line of argument in the past, Samuel Bagenstos, a former official in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, tells TPM. Another case we will be closely following here.
- Minnesota's Senate did it. They passed a proposed constitutional amendment that would "significantly change Minnesota's voting system. It would require all voters at the polls to show a photo ID, would create a new system of provisional voting, would stiffen eligibility requirements for registration and would state that the only acceptable ID's are 'government-issued.'" The amendment is likely to see a court challenge and will be on the November 6 ballot for voter approval. Ironic, no?
- Ending on a good note, four companies (as of this writing) have announced that they will allow their membership in the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—the legislation mill for voter suppression—expire. PepsiCo, Coca Cola, Kraft Foods, and Intuit have all said they will break ties with the organization.