Welcome to our war on voting series, a joint project of Joan McCarter and Meteor Blades.
It should be a source of amazement and disgust to every American when efforts are made to suppress other Americans’ access to the ballot. People lost their lives in the long struggle to extend the vote to everyone beyond property-owning white men. Nonetheless, some high muckety-mucks still have no qualms about making it difficult for certain people to vote, those certain people being the poor, people of color, youth—young women especially, and elders.
Progressives don’t believe in cruel and unusual punishments, but it’s not easy to keep tar and feathers out of mind when thinking about the mostly Republican elected officials who seek to curtail these voters because they know that shaving a couple of percentage points off the turnout can mean victory for their side.
For South Carolina’s Republican primary today and the Democratic primary next week, officials have chosen one of the easiest ways to suppress the vote: Information omission.
As Kira Lerner at Think Progress reports, South Carolina’s voter ID law is not as tough as most other states. While voters will be asked to show an approved photo ID, they can still cast a ballot with their voter registration card if they sign an affidavit explaining why there was a “reasonable impediment” to their obtaining a photo ID. And their ballot will be counted. And people who leave their photo ID at home can cast a provisional ballot.
All well and good except that state officials, including Gov. Nikki Haley, are not telling voters about these provisions. Thus, they’re making it seem as if a voter ID is absolutely required. Some people will likely not show up to vote because they lack any of the photo IDs that are allowed, or they will not vote because they’re confused about what they need. Either way, the officials who are playing this game are no friend to democracy.
Back before the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to gut a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, South Carolina was one of the states required by past discrimination to get any changes in its voting laws cleared in advance by the U.S. Department of Justice.
In 2011, when the Republican-controlled state government tried to get a voter ID law “pre-cleared” in this way, the DOJ said no on the grounds that the law would discriminate against minority citizens because they would be 20 percent more likely not to possess a photo ID. The department’s Civil Rights Division noted that 81,938 minority citizens already registered to vote did not have proper ID based on the state’s own records. South Carolina then resubmitted the voter ID law in 2012 with the “reasonable impediment” clause included. Had officials there waited for the 2013 Supreme Court decision wrecking a big part of the Voting Rights Act, they could probably have gotten away without making that improvement.
Now they’re weakening that provision by only letting voters who read the fine print know about it.
• Many Democrats raised a bit of ruckus Friday in the West Virginia House of Delegates Friday as the Republican-dominated body passed a new voter ID law by a vote of 64 to 34.
The law isn’t as strict as other state voter ID laws in that, like South Carolina, it allows for provisional ballots to be cast by people who forget their ID or don’t have one. But that didn’t make some Democrats happy:
“This bill is taking a a very ugly page out of the ALEC playbook,” said Del. Mike Pushkin (D-Kanawha), referring to the free-market lobbying group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Before 2012, ALEC was a leader in pushing state voter ID bills.
“Groups like ALEC and the Koch brothers run bills like this, in my opinion, to suppress minority votes in many states,” Pushkin said.
Pushkin wasn’t alone in his sentiment. Del. Mike Caputo (D-Marion) spent considerable time pushing bill sponsor Patrick Lane (R-Kanawha) to say whether there have ever been any cases of voter fraud in West Virginia that would be solved by the bill. He noted that Voter ID laws only prevent “voter impersonation” — someone pretending to be someone else — and that there have been no reported cases of voter impersonation in West Virginia since 2000.
As for the provisional balloting provision, Democratic Del. Stephen Skinner noted that these ballots take longer to fill out: “Every time that you have to vote a provisional ballot, it’s going to take about 15 minutes, and everybody in line behind that person is going to have to wait.” If the line gets too long, it could spur some people to leave without voting, he said.
• Oregon has automatically registered to vote anyone who gets a driver’s license, permit or state-issued non-driving photo ID since January 1 under a law that passed last year. In the first four weeks of 2016, 4,300 people registered as a consequence of this law, about twice as many as the monthly average in the past. In addition, another 17,000 already registered voters updated their addresses. That’s important because the state mails ballots to all registered voters, and it’s crucial to deliver them to the right place.
Not a single Republican voted for the law.
But it got high praise when it passed from Myrna Perez, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Project at the Brennan Center for Justice. She said: “Oregon takes it further than any other state by putting the burden on the government “Instead of asking voters, ‘Do you want to register to vote?’ they ask voters, ‘Do you not want to vote?’”
• A federal judge ruled Wednesday to allow a disputed provision of Alabama’s 2011 photo voter law to be enforced in the state’s March primary. Civil rights groups have challenged the law on a number of issues, but for now they were seeking an emergency injunction against the “positively identify” portion of the law. This states that a person who doesn’t have the right ID at the polls can get two poll officers to personally confirm the identity of the individual by affidavit.
Attorneys for the Alabama NAACP said this smacks of Jim Crow-era voucher tests. They wanted a ruling allowing people to answer questions to confirm their identity or to use IDs accepted before the law passed five years ago. U.S. District Judge L. Scott Coogler, an appointee of President George W. Bush, said the challenge seemed like a “"a backdoor method of invalidating" the law. He also strongly hinted that the challenge will succeed on the merits or that the plaintiffs even have standing to bring the case to court.
• Secretary of State Kris Kobach has been sued over the proof of citizenship requirement to register to vote in Kansas. The suit was brought by a man who was asked when he renewed his driver’s license if he wanted to register. He said yes because he was concerned about cuts in education. But then things went awry. He found out when he went to vote that his name hadn’t been added to the voting rolls because he hadn’t shown proof of citizenship when he registered. This he couldn’t do because he has no passport and was born on a long-closed military base and has no idea where to hunt for his birth certificate. He still isn’t registered.
The lawsuit argues that the Kansas statute fails to follow federal law by requiring people to show proof of citizenship if they try to register at the DMV. Lawyers in the case say that as many as 30,000 people have been kept off the rolls by the law. They also want to stop the trashing of 35,000 incomplete voter registration applications that were suspended because the applicant did not return with proof of citizenship.