I am so fucking pissed off right now I'm actually using profanity in the public forum. I was raised to say "I beg your pardon?" instead of "what?" and "if you would be so kind . . ."--but I'm so fucking pissed off I can hardly speak. So I am banging out my anger on the keyboard, to keep from screaming down the streets of my sleepy college town, throwing rocks at windows and getting arrested. God Damn it! I have a relative who signed the Declaration of Independence, whose cousins signed both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. They placed their lives on the line when they signed their names on documents that would provide the foundation of our republic. They meant to guarantee the rights of us all to vote. These asshole Republicans, with the blessing of their five asshole enablers on the SCOTUS, have declared war on our democracy with their voter suppression laws, and if the early battles are any indication, they are winning.
Just twelve days ago the Supreme Court rejected the stay on the onerous Texas voter ID law entered by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on October 14, 2014. What is playing out now on the ground in Texas proves that in Justice Ginsburg's eloquent dissent she got it right.
The potential magnitude of racially discriminatory voter disenfranchisement counseled hesitation before disturbing the District Court’s findings and final judgment. Senate Bill 14 may prevent more than 600,000 registered Texas voters (about 4.5% of all registered voters) from voting in person for lack of compliant identification. Id., at 50–51, 54. A sharply disproportionate percentage of those voters are African-American or Hispanic. Ibid. Unsurprisingly, Senate Bill 14 did not survive federal preclearance under §5 of the Voting Rights Act. A three- judge District Court unanimously determined that the law would have a prohibited discriminatory effect on minority voters. See Texas v. Holder, 888 F. Supp. 2d 113, 115, 138 (DC 2012) (Tatel, J.). Although this Court vacated the preclearance denial in light of Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U. S. _ (2013), racial discrimination in elections in Texas is no mere historical artifact. To the contrary, Texas has been found in violation of the Voting Rights Act in every redistricting cycle from and after 1970. Op. 7. See, e.g., Texas v. United States, 887 F. Supp. 2d 133 (DC 2012) (Griffith, J.). The District Court noted particularly plaintiffs’ evidence—largely unchallenged by Texas— regarding the State’s long history of official discrimination in voting, the statewide existence of racially polarized voting, the incidence of overtly racial political campaigns, the disproportionate lack of minority elected officials, and the failure of elected officials to respond to the concerns of minority voters. Op. 3–13, 122–126, 144–147.
As Huffington Posts reports in
Ginsburg Was Right, the chickens have come home to roost. In Texas, voters and election officials confirm that in early voting there are many people who have been unable to exercise their right to participate in our democracy, simply because they are a student, or are poor, elderly and disabled. While Ginsburg predicted 600k disenfranchised voters, the final number will be known soon enough. Damage done.
And just two days ago in Georgia:
On Tuesday, Judge Christopher Brasher of the Fulton County Superior Court denied a petition from civil rights advocates to force Georgia’s Secretary of State to process an estimated 40,000 voter registrations that have gone missing from the public database.
Though early voting is well underway in the state, Judge Brasher called the lawsuit “premature,” and said it was based on “merely set out suspicions and fears that the [state officials] will fail to carry out their mandatory duties.”
http://thinkprogress.org/...
With the election only a week away, tens of thousands of legitimate voters have not received a registration card, many of them filling out all of the necessary paper work over six months ago.
Dr. Francys Johnson, President of the Georgia NAACP, who represented the 40 thousand voters in the court, called the ruling “outrageous.”
“All in all – a republican appointed judge has backed the republican Secretary of State to deny the right to vote to a largely African American and Latino population,” Johnson wrote in a press release.
Civil rights lawyer Marsha Burrofsky suspects foul play.
"Burrofsky said the people she registered in Dunwoody, Georgia, a more affluent and conservative community, did show up in the system, while those in more diverse and low-income communities in DeKalb County mysteriously disappeared."
And how about this for a stab in the back of democracy? Aljazeera America reported just yesterday that according to a six month nationwide investigation:
Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voters from the rolls. Millions, especially black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters, are at risk. Already, tens of thousands have been removed in at least one battleground state, and the numbers are expected to climb . . .
This is all because of the Interstate Crosscheck program, initiated by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, which has generated a master list of nearly 7 million names of people suspected of double voting. Al Jazeera obtained the lists from three of the 27 participating states, Georgia, Virginia and Washington, containing over 2 million of the 7 million names on the list.
The three states’ lists are heavily weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim — ones common among minorities, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, fully 1 in 7 African-Americans in those 27 states, plus the state of Washington (which enrolled in Crosscheck but has decided not to utilize the results), are listed as under suspicion of having voted twice. This also applies to 1 in 8 Asian-Americans and 1 in 8 Hispanic voters. White voters too — 1 in 11 — are at risk of having their names scrubbed from the voter rolls, though not as vulnerable as minorities.
Based on the Crosscheck lists, Virginia officials have begun removing 41,637 names from the voting rolls. They are doing so without even following the criteria for matching names of these mythical double voters.
According to a 2013 presentation by Kobach to the National Association of State Election Directors, the program is a highly sophisticated voter-fraud-detection system. The sample matches he showed his audience included the following criteria: first, last and middle name or initial; date of birth; suffixes; and Social Security number, or at least its last four digits.
The actual lists released to Al Jazeera show that middle names are mismatched, suffixes ignored and mismatched social security numbers are ignored.
Perhaps 93 year old SCLC co-founder, Rev. Joseph Lowery, says it best: "It’s Jim Crow all over again . . .”
The Republicans have the balls to complain about Colorado voting laws possibly allowing a few dozen Hispanic people to cast illegal votes while they pass laws denying millions of American citizens their right to participate in our democracy. Democrats consistently push laws that strive to increase voter participation, that may run the risk of a allowing few dozen questionable ballots in a state election, while Republicans promote laws that do just the opposite. If they were true patriots, as they claim to be, instead of complaining about Democrats recruiting new voters, Republicans would be out signing up their own new voters. But there are so few new voters sympathetic to their ideology and likely to benefit from their policies that voter suppression is really their only path to victory.
They have been carefully planning for this moment at least since Goldwater's lopsided defeat to LBJ 50 years ago. They have counted on us not paying attention while they won statehouse elections in off years, gerrymandered congressional districts to ensure an easily defended majority even with a minority share of the vote, and stacked courts with partisan judges, including the SCOTUS. If we want to live in a country run by billionaire oligarchs, who would throw their constituents overboard after rowing their fat asses to the islands of prosperity, then we can sit back and let them have our country. We will have no one to blame but ourselves. We can tell our children and grandchildren, "sorry, we just weren't paying that much attention." Or we can make them pay by getting off our fucking asses and turning out on Tuesday in such epic numbers that their defeat will resonate through the streets of our cities and the hallowed halls of our great republic, kicking the malevolent traitors to the gutter of history with the likes of Marie Antoinette.