Matt Schultz (Gage Skidmore)
Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz, a Republican, has written himself some rules designed to purge voters from the rolls. The American Civil Liberties Union and League of United Latin American Citizens have filed for an injunction, calling the rules illegal.
By some secret means known only to it, Schultz's office can now, based on rules only it has vetted, determine whether someone ineligible, say a non-citizen, has registered. The office is sending letters to these voters which say they have 14 days to dispute the state's claim and prove they are eligible to vote or face removal from the state list. And possible prosecution. At this time of year especially, such voters could simply be on vacation.
The second rule allows anyone to claim voter fraud without swearing to their accuracy. That, says Ben Stone, the chief of the ACLU-Iowa, is against state law. But that apparently makes no never mind to Schultz.
Schultz has also brought in an agent from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation to look into voter fraud. County auditors, who run local elections, were surprised and some quite taken aback by the announcement. And not just Democrats. For instance, Ken Kline, a Republican auditor in Cerro Gordo County, said he had many questions about what the DCI agent will look at since many cases are simply data errors.
"I wish we had better communication as to what databases were compared, what were the procedures, what were the parameters, the controls," he said. "We do a lot of that in this office and you have to be very careful, especially with something of this volatile of a nature."
(For more of this week's news, continue reading below the fold.)
In the News
- Election App designed to help boost voting. The new app was designed by Election Protection, a coalition of voter and civil rights advocates. It works on all smartphones and will let users fill out a voter registration form, verify their registration status, look up their polling place on a map, verify the type of voting machine in use and access information about key election-related dates for their state.
Rock the Vote President Heather Smith said:
With an electorate that is increasingly young, diverse, mobile, and technologically savvy, finding ways to leverage new technology to increase civic engagement and education is critical. We’re excited to be partners in this effort to bring voting information directly into the hands of the people that need it most.
- Team Romney's challenge to nonprofit voter registration group in Virginia got shot down by the state board of elections this week. You may recall that late last month, Team Romney sent a letter to Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli seeking an investigation into the Voter Participation Center, a group that focuses on registering young citizens, single women, minorities and seniors. The letter was passed on by the attorney general's office to the Virginia Board of Elections.
VPC had been the subject of an article in the Richmond Times Dispatch describing how some Virginians had received in the mail voter registration forms for them to sign and return. The problem wasn't that the forms were "pre-populated," that is, sent with names and addresses already filled out—a standard and perfectly legal practice—but that hundreds of forms had been sent to children, pets and dead people. VPC said it had mailed 197,000 forms altogether.
The center said this was the fault of inevitable errors in commercial mailing lists it had acquired, not some nefarious plot to register Fluffy, Fido, toddler Timmy and the late Aunt Dolores. The organization, the nonprofit group's president said, always does its best to weed out errors when it finds them. But error-free lists simply do not exist, said a VPC attorney.
After the Romney letter was sent, the organization announced it would no longer use pre-populated forms. That seemed to make the difference for the state board:
During a lengthy Monday meeting, the three-member state board of elections voiced concerns over the number of complaints and the confusion generated by the organization's mailings. But the board opted not to request a criminal investigation of the flap, saying local registrars can determine whether or not an individual is eligible to vote. [...]
"Even in the absence of a formal investigation, we are heartened that the group is being forced to stop mailing misleading, pre-populated voter registration forms in Virginia," said [Romney campaign spokeswoman] Amanda Henneberg.
Carmen Taylor, vice president of the Virginia State Conference NAACP, said her organization, which is partnering with VPC, has boosted its outreach and education campaign this year.
"We recognize this challenge to question or invalidate out voter registration initiatives for what it is—the latest attempt to stifle the voices of Virginia voters," Taylor said.
- Michigan voters turned away in primary. Some Michiganders who refused to check a box confirming they were U.S. citizens in Tuesday's primary were told they couldn't vote. Which was illegal advice. The state legislature had passed a measure requiring this, but surprisingly, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder vetoed the bill. Nonetheless. Secretary of State Ruth Johnson sent out applications for ballots with the check-off box included and didn't inform election officials of veto. Citizens already are required to state they are citizens when they register to vote.
- A pair of partisan hacks have claimed in a new book that felons put Democrat Al Franken into his Senate seat by voting illegally. The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund and George W. Bush Justice Department attorney Hans von Spakovsky made the claims. Minnesota election officials in both parties shot them down.
- Canceled driver's licenses means more than not voting. Pennsylvania has been canceling the driver's licenses of individuals who have used their tax ID numbers as documentation, stating that this isn't proof enough of their right to live in the United States. As the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia points out:
First—when states take away ID from poor and working folks, or limit poor and working people’s access to getting ID in the first place—those people lose far more than their right to vote. They often lose their right to work, to bank without exorbitant fees, to get benefits for which they and their family qualify, and, as noted, to drive even though they’ve passed a drivers’ test. They become even more invisible in our society, and state governments and corporations profit off of their struggle to meet their and their families’ daily needs.
And second, when the state limits access to ID and access to society unless you have a valid ID, it also takes away the rights of multiple communities, in many locations in the state, from many different kinds of people who need ID for different reasons. When the electorate is divided—immigrants from citizens, poor from near and new poor, working class from middle class--everyone loses. In order to change that reality, we need to do more than re-empower folks without ID to get their chance to vote... though that matters. First, we need to frame the voter ID fight as one that unites everyone who has lost access to the tools necessary to build a dignified life—no matter where they live and who they are. We need to do the hard movement-building work of uniting poor and working people across rural and urban, race, and origin lines so Pennsylvanians are powerful enough to never lose their right to vote again.
- Candidate caught in ridiculousness of Pennsylvania voter ID law. Larry Maggi wants to represent Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district. The Washington County Commission chairman already faces an uphill climb against Tim Murphy, the Republican who has represented the district since 2003. But Maggi may not even be able to vote for himself because of the law.
That's because the name on his driver's license is "Lawrence Owen Maggi." But his voter registration reads "Larry Maggi." The new law require names on both voter registration and driver's licenses to "substantially conform." Since Maggi's don't, he received an advisory letter from the Pennsylvania's Department of State. Other people have been advised that a missing middle initial can mean a registered voter could be denied a ballot.
Hundreds of thousands of other Pennsylvanians may be in the same boat. Thus, Maggi has set up a website—Let Larry Vote—where the state residents can sign a petition seeking repeal of the law.
- New Mexico Secretary of State Diana Duran, a Republican, says she has identified 177,768 "non-residents and non-voters"—15 percent of registered voters in the state—who will soon have their voting registrations terminated.
One of those caught up in the purge: Diane Wood. She is Voting Rights Director of Common Cause New Mexico, a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring fair and accurate elections in the state. After receiving a notice from the state to check her voting status at a website, Wood discovered that status "had been changed to 'INACTIVE' [...] alongside a list all of the elections she has voted in since 1992, a total of 44." Wood's most recent vote was just 88 days before she received the notice sent to alleged non-voters.
- USA Today weighed in with an editorial:
We agree with the recommendation of the bipartisan commission headed by former Democratic President Jimmy Carter and former Republican Secretary of State James Baker, which called for uniform photo ID for voters. But ID supporters typically ignore the other half of the panel's advice: Any ID requirement should be phased in over five years, and states should make sure eligible voters can get free IDs.
That's not what's happening. The almost exclusively Republican state lawmakers and governors who have rushed to impose voter ID laws in time for this fall's elections seem to care more about requiring an ID than ensuring that every legal voter can get one.
- Jon Stewart skewered voter ID laws: "If you have ever spoken voluntarily to a police officer, you might be eligible to vote."