Welcome to the return of our war on voting series, a joint project of Meteor Blades and Joan McCarter.
The Brennan Center continues its invaluable work on elections in America with a new paper that demonstrates there would be smart ways to secure the integrity of our voting process without taking the vote away from eligible people. Voter fraud isn't really a thing, but there are steps that could be taken in the name of combatting fraud that would actually make for more efficient, accessible election processes, things that could secure and expand the vote.
"We don’t have to choose between election integrity and election access. In fact, free and fair access is necessary for an election to have integrity," wrote report author Myrna Pérez, deputy director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program. "It is vital that we protect voters from the real threats to the integrity of elections. Fortunately, it is possible to protect election integrity without disenfranchising eligible voters."
Here is the six-part plan:
1. Modernize Voter Registration to Improve Voter Rolls
2. Ensure Security and Reliability of Our Voting Machines
3. Do Not Implement Internet Voting Systems Until Security is Proven
4. Adopt Only Common-Sense Voter Identification Proposals
5. Increase Security of Mail-In Ballots
6. Protect Against Insider Wrongdoing
The paper points out that "most fraud has been committed by insiders, not individuals," and that the kinds of actions most states have taken to supposedly protect the vote have the result of disenfranchising eligible voters. So if states really want to put their money where their rhetoric is on voter fraud, here's the blueprint for fixing it.
It's a particularly resonant argument this week, the week we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr., when the nation is shamed.
However, as we head into the next presidential elections of 2016, more than 50 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, King’s dream has become his greatest nightmare:
What happened? Let’s rewind back to the 2010 elections in America, when the ultra-conservative Tea Party gained control in 30 state legislatures. Shortly after, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted a key provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, ushering in loopholes that allowed State lawmakers to pass voter suppression laws that made it harder to vote.
From 2011 to 2015, 395 new voting laws have been introduced in forty-nine states (Idaho is the lone exception), making it harder to vote, particularly for African-American voters in rural areas, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. These new provisions include shutting down voter registration drives, requiring state IDs, cutting early voting, ending same-day registration, required proof of citizenship for voter registration, disenfranchising ex-felons–-basically curtailing virtually every reform that made it easier to vote.
Below, you'll find some briefs about what's happened this week in the war on voting.
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Missouri House votes to join the list of states with photo ID requirements for voters. The Senate has yet to take up their version of the bill, which would require photo ID to vote, allowing state-issued IDs, military IDs, but disallowing student ID. Back in 2011, Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, vetoed a similar voter ID bill. Now there are enough Republicans in the legislature to override his likely veto.
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The Maryland House voted to override Gov. Larry Hogan's veto of legislation that would restore voting rights to convicted felons who have been released from prison. The Senate is waiting to hold an override vote until an open seat in the chamber is filled, in the first week of February. The Senate should have the necessary votes to override Hogan's veto.
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Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach got a very well deserved legal kick in the ass from Shawnee County Judge Frank Theis, who ruled for the ACLU that "Kobach has no legal authority to set up a dual election system in which people who register using a federal form may only vote in federal elections." Kobach forced through a law that required registrants using the state form to provide proof-of-citizenship. The federal form, of course, doesn't require that. So Kobach was trying to prevent people who registered with federal forms from voting in all elections in the state. Kobach says he'll appeal the decision.
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The county of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, decided to issue "municipal identification cards" to assist those who lost their driver's licenses when the state clamped down on people without "proper documentation" from obtaining or renewing their licenses. Thousands lost their ID, and with it access to things like medical care, bank accounts, gym memberships, library cards—some pretty basic things. Republican legislators, of course, immediately responded with legislation to prohibit cities and counties from issuing these cards and any people who might have received these cards prior to their ban from getting any kind of public benefit with it. In an op-ed this week, one of the sponsors of the legislation made it clear what they really are going after—voting. "Distributing municipal IDs that people may believe qualifies them for voting and public benefits is potentially misleading and unfair to the cards' recipients," he wrote. Typically, he claims that Republicans are only looking out for the people they are victimizing.
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Albuquerque, New Mexico Public Schools (APS) and Central New Mexico Community College (CNM) have been embroiled in an early voting site fight over a February 2 bond election in which APS is asking for $575 million in a bond and mill levy and CNM $84 million. Critics have accused CNM of "empire-building" and "hiking taxes," and "disenfranchising voters" by not providing adequate early voting sites. This week the APS board voted unanimously to add two new early voting sites, while pointing out that getting voters interested in a February 2 bond election is probably more of a problem than having enough early voting sites. But, democracy prevails in Albuquerque.