Hillary Clinton has always seemed to me to be a bit more willing to use the Big Hammer, as Bartcop would say, than either Bill or Barack. So it's no surprise to see her going after voter suppression hammer and tongs, and not just with speechifying, either, but with Marc Elias ,who you may remember from his successful pro-voter fights in Minnesota in 2008 and Virginia this year.
Another line of attack against voter suppression is the one that worked in Minnesota in 2011 and 2012. It can be summed up thus: "Emphasize the Cost".
Follow me below the orange curlicue and I'll explain.
As in most states, voter suppression legislation started out to be pretty popular in Minnesota (80% backed it in a May 2011 StarTribune Minnesota Poll), and for many of the same reasons, not least of which being that it not-so-secretly served a racist purpose. (As a University of Delaware study showed last year, the popularity of voter ID laws among whites jumped six points after those whites saw stories illustrated by pictures of black people voting.)
This meant, of course, that by continually pointing out the racism driving these laws and ballot amendments, foes of voter suppression were to a large extent playing into the suppressionists' hands.
What to do? Bring up a new angle to use in conjunction with the racism angle -- and in rural Minnesota, that angle was cost:
First it was Rice County. Then it was Kittson County. Now, as BSP’s Sally Jo Sorensen notes, yet more parts of greater Minnesota are noticing the huge holes that the state Republicans’ “Photo ID” vote-restriction amendment would blow into their budgets –budgets that the Republicans controlling the state legislature are already hurting by slashing Local Government Aid...
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Over in the northwestern Minnesota city of Detroit Lakes, Nathan Bowe, writing for DLOnline, the online arm of the local daily paper, lists all the hassles and headaches — including provisional balloting and the long lines and bogged-down vote counts that entails — and finishes up by describing the financial burden to the state’s taxpayers:
If the Voter ID amendment passes, Minnesota can expect to spend millions of dollars providing free identification cards to thousands of residents and educating residents on the state’s new voting requirements, according to Association of Minnesota Counties President Randy Maluchnik.
The provisional balloting requirements alone will cost Ramsey County an estimated $150,000 every two years, said Maluchnik, who is also a Carver County commissioner.
“Minnesota’s townships expect to spend upwards of $3 million statewide to implement provisional voting during their March elections,” he wrote. Local property tax payers will foot the bill if the state makes it an unfunded mandate.
The provisional balloting process will “require local governments to print special ballots, purchase new equipment, hire and train additional election judges, provide special business hours to allow provisional voters to prove their identity, and pay for storage and security of provisional ballots,” Maluchnik said.
Turns out there’s a lot more to the Voter ID amendment than just showing your driver’s license at the polling place.
That last sentence should be internalized by all the people out there (they know who they are) who think getting proper ID is a breeze and that people like Marc Elias need to shut up and sit down. But I digress.
The focus on this unfunded Republican mandate (the full cost breakdowns by county can be found here) sent shock waves through Minnesota. People who were fine with the amendment when the only arguments against it were its racism and its ineffectiveness at stopping real vote fraud, suddenly freaked out when they realized that implementing it would mean that their roads wouldn't get plowed, much less fixed, anymore.
Why? Because, as Gustavus Adolphus professor and elections expert Max Hailperin pointed out, the replacement costs of the laptops and other gear required by the amendment meant that these huge costs weren't just one-time costs, but would be replicated every two to three years, the lifespan of a typical laptop.
Republicans, who had sat back and chuckled as amendment foes unwittingly helped sell the amendment to white Minnesotans by pointing out its racism, watched in horror as the cost argument started cutting into the amendment's popularity. The cost argument scared them so much that they actually tried to counter it with a counter-study from the right-wing talking-points mill think tank "The Center of the American Experiment", something they never bothered to do with the racism argument. This counter-study was easily demolished by Professor Hailperin, who neatly exposed the fuzzy math and even fuzzier assumptions behind it.
And that's how we defeated ALEC-backed voter suppression in Minnesota.