By M.Bali
From: Progressive agenda and wish list report: progressivewishlist.wordpress.com
Paul Weyrich, an ALEC co-founder and influential operative considered to be the “founding father of the conservative movement” famously laid out the GOP’s voter suppression strategy at a 1980 training session for 15,000 conservative preachers in a 1980 speech in Dallas:
“I don’t want everybody to vote”, he said. “Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
In the 27 years since Paul Weyrich's incredibly sincere confirmation, the radical conservatives in America, now supported by the Supreme Court, has added to a variety of unpretentious and obvious strategies to smother voter registration and turnout. The techniques are focused to voting demographics most likely to oppose conservative causes and competitors: low-salary families, minorities, senior citizens and eligible residents for whom English is a second language.
Since 2013, after the Supreme Court’s decision that reversed the voting rights act, states all over the nation have been passing measures that make it increasingly hard for Americans – especially the poverty-stricken African-Americans — part of a minority that has long borne the brunt of voter suppression in this country and as such were protected by federal law from discrimination at the polls — the elderly, the young and individuals with handicaps – to practice their principal right to cast a vote. The flood of voting rights restrictions followed court’s undermining of the 1965 law that required that the lawmakers in states with a history of discriminating against minority voters to get federal permissions before changing voting rules.
This was a direct challenge to The Voting Rights Act, that was signed on Aug. 6, 1965, and was meant to correct “a clear and simple wrong,” as Lyndon Johnson said. “Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. This law will ensure them the right to vote.” It banned literacy tests, abolished the poll tax and other Jim Crow strategies used to restrict the minority voters' rights to vote, and sent federal officials to the South to monitor elections, to make sure that once new voters were registered, elections weren't stolen, and — in a key provision called Section 5 — required southern states with histories of black disenfranchisement to submit any future change in statewide voting law, regardless of how minor, for pre-clearance by federal authorities in Washington.
In Shelby County v. Holder, in which Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, declared that the Voting Rights Act had done its job by arguing that Section 4 was unnecessary because “things have changed dramatically” in the South since 1965, eliminated Section 4 — which determines the states and localities covered by arguing that a new coverage formula is needed that determines which jurisdictions are subjected to pre-clearance based on their histories of discrimination in voting, effectively ending the federal government's role as a monitor to state voting changes until a new formula is approved by Congress.
Republican state legislators, using the specter of the non-existing voter fraud as the impetus for their action, even when there’s no evidence that voter fraud exists in this country in any significant way, or that identification requirements would fix the problem if it were to exist, and to limit the surging minority vote, as evidenced by the high turnouts of 2008 and 2012 elections, proceeded with a new round of restrictive voting laws.
Just after the Shelby County decision, Alabama’s strict voter ID law, that Brennan Center for Justice called it "most restrictive since the Jim Crow era”, was passed by the GOP legislature in 2011, and was allowed to go into effect without federal approval. This is the very type of voting change–one that disproportionately burdens African-American voters–that would have been challenged under Section 5 of the VRA, which the Supreme Court rendered inoperative.
Subsequently, in 2015, Alabama added insult to injury by making it much tougher to obtain the government-issued ID required to vote by closing 31 DMV locations in the state, many in majority-black counties. Al.com newspaper columnist John Archibald reported that eight of the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of black registered voters saw their driver’s license offices closed. “Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver license office closed,” Archibald wrote, “Every one.” First the state demands that you get a photo ID, and then it makes it harder to do so, particularly in areas heavily populated by African-Americans. (Alabama’s Republican governor says the closures are nothing more than a cost-cutting measure, but advocates say it’ll keep blacks from the polls.)
As a response to recent anti-voting provisions in their elections law, the U.S. Department of Justice vowed to sue Alabama for not complying with the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, (also known as the “NVRA” and the “Motor Voter Act”), which requires the states to provide voter registration services at motor vehicle offices and other public agencies. The U.S. Department of Transportation also has dispatched a government investigation concerning the DMV closures and the NAACP filed a legal challenge to Alabama's voter ID law in light of the closures.
“This was a racist attack on our sacred right to vote, a right that was won with blood and the lives and souls of martyrs throughout the south,” North Carolina NAACP President Rev. William Barber boomed out from the pulpit. “50 years after Bloody Sunday, we find ourselves having to have our own Selma now, because of the worst voter suppression law we’ve seen since the 1960s. I say we’re at war. But the weapons of our warfare are not molotov cocktails, or guns or hatred. The weapons of our warfare are love and truth and righteousness and a concern for justice.”
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 21 states have passed 468 new voting restrictions to reshape the makeup of the electorate from 2011 to 2015. Recent efforts to restrict voting rights—there were 180 different bills introduced across 41 states in 2011 and 2012 alone—have a disproportionate impact on demographics like blacks, Latinos and the poor, who surveys had shown are more likely than the general population to vote for the then opposition, the Democratic party, or the Greens, voting-rights experts say, adding that new barriers to the ballot box could produce low turnout that benefits the GOP.
Changing demographics are driving the voter suppression attempts, largely pushed by pro-1 Percent, pro-GOP groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC based on their template "model" voter ID act, and funded in part by the billionaire Koch brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states passed legislation in recent years designed to limit minority and millennial voters at every step of the electoral process. In 2008, about 48 million millennial generation voters—born between 1978 and 2000—became old enough to vote. By 2012 that increased to 64 million, or 29 percent of all eligible voters. Two-thirds of these young voters and Hispanic voters delivered their votes to then-Sen. Barack Obama. There is no question that minority support was largely responsible for President Obama’s wins in both 2008 and 2012. The combined minority vote gave him net advantages of 21.2 million and 23.5 million over his Republican rivals, John McCain and Mitt Romney, according to a study by Brookings Institution. By 2020, 90 million will be eligible to vote, or 40 percent of all eligible voters, according to Center for American Progress.
The Brennan Center for Justice likewise found that of the 11 states with the highest black turnout in 2008, seven passed laws making it harder to vote. Of the 12 states with the largest Latino population growth in the 2010 Census, nine have new restrictions in place. In 15 of those states, the new laws including voter registration rollbacks to early voting cuts to voter ID requirements will be in effect for the 2016 election making the first presidential election in 50 years that will come to pass without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act.
"We don't know exactly how much these news laws will affect turnout or skew turnout in favor of Republicans," said Richard Hasen, author of the recently released The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown. "But there's no question that in a very close election, they could be enough to make a difference in the outcome."
Even past the Deep South, GOP controlled legislatures around the nation are using the fake non-issue of “voter fraud,” which is basically non-existent, as a reason to make it harder for voters, especially ethnic minorities, the elderly, students and poor people, from registering to vote or voting. “There are more UFO and Bigfoot sightings than documented cases of voter impersonation,” quipped one Texas Democrat. From 2002 to 2012, there were only two cases of voter impersonation out of 35 million votes cast in North Carolina alone, according to expert witness Lori Minnite of Rutgers University.
These new measures incorporate demanding an official personal ID to vote and proof of citizenship to register, eliminating early voting, purging voter rolls, banning election day registration, eliminating the Sunday early voting in states where black churches organized popular “Souls to the Polls” drives, new restrictions on voter registration drives by organizations like the League of Women Voters, which have traditionally helped to register new voters, eliminating pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, so they would be automatically registered to vote at 18, extra barriers to voting directed against individuals with criminal convictions and shutting down voting sites and more.
According to a study from NYU's Brennan Center, 11 percent of voting-age citizens (that is over 21 million citizens) mainly the poor, racial minorities, senior citizens and students – who do not have a driver’s license, lack necessary photo ID while many people in rural areas have trouble affording photo IDs or accessing ID offices. For example, one study by a Harvard Law School researcher found, the price for applying a legally recognized voter identification card can range from $75 to $175, when you include the costs associated with documentation, travel and waiting time.
The net result of this state of utter disorder was a significant drop in registrations. For example, in 2008, around six million eligible voters did not vote because of difficulties associated with registration requirements (13 percent), long lines at the polls (11 percent), uncertainty about the location of their polling place (nine percent) or lack of proper ID (seven percent), according to the Census Bureau.
The number and complexity of new voting restrictions across the country are staggering. As Yale Law Professor Heather Gerken put it, “It’s a death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy.”
It is about time to pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015 (H.R.2867 – 114th Congress (2015-2016)). (The Senate version, Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015 (S. 1659) , was introduced in Jun 24, 2015 by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt)). In Oct 2015, The Voting Rights Advancement Act had 119 cosponsors in the House and 39 in the Senate, including Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska who became the first Republican to cosponsor the legislation in September.
The new bill requires states with well-documented history of recent voting discrimination to clear future voting changes with the federal government, requires federal pre—clearance for future voter ID laws, and outlaws new GOP-led efforts to suppress the growing poor and minority votes. That criterion would initially target 13 states with 15 voting rights violations over the past 25 years — or 10 violations if one was statewide — have to get clearance from the Justice Department before making any changes to how they conduct elections. Those states would the be able to free themselves of the preclearence provision by going 10 consecutive years without a voting rights violation, according to The Nation.
Automatic voter registration
California introduced in October 2015 “New Motor Voter Act” and was marked into law by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, the second state–following Oregon, whose law, passed in March 2015, and was expected to add about 300,000 new voters to the rolls, to implement automatic voter registration on those who request a driver’s permit or state ID from the DMV unless they opt out. Similarly, one of the effects of the California law is registering an additional 6 million unregistered voters to the rolls, which would be the biggest voter-enlistment drive in state history. California, like Oregon, is using the power of the legislature to bring a huge number of new voters into the political process– regarding the vote as a principal right, as opposed to a special privilege.
Citing a new automatic voter registration laws passed in Oregon and California in 2015 to register eligible citizens, who apply for or renew driver’s licenses and state IDs, as long as they don’t opt out, Rep. David Cicilline [D-RI-1] and 45 cosponsors introduced Automatic Voter Registration Act (H.R.2694 -114th Congress (2015-2016) for federal elections at all state DMVs.
“The Automatic Voter Registration Act will protect the right to vote and expand access for eligible voters across the United States. I thank my colleagues who have co-sponsored this important legislation that helps to expand one of our most essential rights as Americans", Cicilline said in a statement in June 10, 2015.
Supporters of strategies like automatic voter registration, which is shifting voter registration responsibilities from the individual to the state, push it as a major aspect of a development to modernize voting registration system that’s largely seen as a “relic” and to build a bipartisan one that transcends the bitter Republican-Democratic divides. Small technological advances, like online registration, have been embraced in both blue and red states. In 2015, 27 states had set up electronic voter registration and 24 had online voter registration, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Even in key swing states like Florida and Virginia, online registration laws passed Republican-controlled legislatures and were marked by GOP governors.
All these advances in promoting the access to voting and the federal automatic voter registration bill, if passed, would help register many of the 51 million Americans—1 in 4 eligible voters— who are still not registered to vote. “Among eligible voters, some 30 percent of African Americans, 40 percent of Hispanics, 45 percent of Asian Americans, and 41 percent of young adults (age 18-24), were not registered to vote in the historic 2008 election,” according to Demos.
Finally, even if there’s no explicit right to vote in the U.S. Constitution, even if the Constitution mentions "the right to vote" five times, (for example, see Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000)), for the implicit voting right be made more iron-clad right, the candidates for president and congressional seats should be educated on this universal issue and be pushed to finally support a constitutional amendment to enshrine the right to vote (despite the relentless or intensifying threats to voting rights) , of the similar sorts that were once used to broaden voting rights for various groups of voters such as that guaranteed for African-American men and other men with the 15th amendment in 1869, for women with the 19th amendment in 1920, for the residents of the District of Columbia (as respect to presidential elections) with the 23rd amendment, for those voters without means to pay a poll tax or other fees that some states used to chase ethnic and poor people away from the ballot box, with the 24th amendment, and finally for Americans who matured 18-to-21 with the 26th amendment.
A constitutional amendment (113th Congress 2013 H. J. RES. 44) for universal right to vote was proposed by Reps. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.), which would codify the principle that "every citizen of the United States, who is of legal voting age, shall have the fundamental right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides." An alternative language of such an amendment could take several forms, such as one proposed by Heather Gerken of Yale Law School: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State.”
Enshrining the right to vote in the Constitution would help resolve most of these cases in favor of voters in all these conflicts that constitute what the election scholar Richard Hasen calls “The Voting Wars.”
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