Welcome to the latest edition in our war on voting series. This is a joint project of Joan McCarter and Meteor Blades.
The Associated Press
has taken notice that new laws and court rulings could make things confusing for millions of American voters in the upcoming election. Ya think? Duh. That’s one of the chief goals of the folks who made those laws. If someone isn’t clear on whether they need a voter ID to cast a ballot or are unsure they have the right one, they just may decide not to show up at the polls at all. That certainly was the intent in Texas where election officials have been sending out information on voter ID that violates a federal court order. We’ll get to that in a moment.
Christina A. Cassidy reports:
“You would think that by 2016 we would have gotten our act together, but in fact it seems things are as litigious and confusing as ever,” said Rick Hasen, an expert on election law and professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law.
The battle over voting mirrors the larger battle for political power in the U.S.
While Democrats and Republicans have both supported efforts to expand access, particularly online registration, it’s largely been Republicans who have been pushing restrictive laws, such as those requiring voters to show photo identification before casting ballots.
In Texas, this week, U.S. District Court Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos smacked down state authorities who the Department of Justice said have been violating a previous Ramos order mandating that Texas spend $2.5 million to educate voters about the state’s ID law. In a legal filing, the U.S. Department of Justice had the “educational” materials the state has been disseminating tell voters that the strict ID law still applies. But it doesn’t. A citizen can vote by signing an affidavit stating they had a “reasonable impediment” for not having the proper ID.
Ramos ordered the officials to remedy the situation by editing “digital materials on its website page(s) that address voting rights and procedures, including titles or headlines and FAQs to reflect that voters who ‘do not possess an acceptable form of photo identification and cannot obtain one due to a reasonable impediment’ may vote after signing the Reasonable Impediment Declaration.” She also said the plaintiffs in the lawsuit in the matter would get a chance before publication to read (and object to) any changes being made in the voter materials.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said in an interview that the Texas legislature may pass a new ID law in the next session. “I was one of the authors of our photo voter ID law that the court struck down. We have a judge, a Democrat who’s just eviscerating our photo voter ID. We’re going to have to pass it again come January when we go back into session.”
You can read our more detailed analysis here.
• A three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit reversed a lower court ruling on Ohio voter purge: The ruling was 2-1. Secretary of State Jon Husted, who has been embroiled in repeated voting procedure fights over the past few years, decided to dump people from the voting rolls if they hadn’t cast a ballot in six years. They were sent a postcard asking for a reply if they were voting and still living at the same address where they were registered. But nowhere were they told that if they didn’t reply they would be purged from the rolls.
Who gets affected by this? Urban citizens who are more likely than other voters to move often. Plaintiffs sued because of these summary purges, arguing that they violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. But they lost at the district court level. The appeals court panel overturned that ruling, sending the case back to the district judge for further proceedings. The dissenting judge noted that the case could still go to the U.S. Supreme Court despite the fact the election is less than seven weeks away, and many thousands of Ohioans have already asked to receive early ballots.
Nobody knows for certain how many voters were purged, according to an investigation by the Cincinnati Inquirer.
• In The Canvass, the National Conference of State Legislatures explains in detail what state officials need to know about security and elections. A fascinating, in-depth, look:
The last time the mechanics of elections got as much scrutiny as now was in the aftermath of the 2000 election. For two months, a steady stream of news stories about election security has flowed by, each with a different twist. Are Russians purposefully creating chaos for Election Day? Will every vote be counted? Are some people voting more than once? Can a U.S. general election be rigged?
The Canvass is asking one extra question: What should legislators (and the public) worry about when it comes to election security, and what shouldn’t legislators (and the public) worry about? We turned to some of the nation’s best experts on election administration to address parts of the overall issue.
• Shadow of N.C. voter procedure ruling hovers over 4th Circuit Court of Appeals’ review of Virginia ID law: Just a couple of months ago, the court ruled that North Carolina’s legislators had intentionally drafted a law making it more difficult for minorities to vote. The question lawyers raised in Thursday’s hearing was whether the Virginia law is just as bad as North Carolina’s.
“Is what Virginia did just as egregious?” Judge Dennis W. Shedd asked the attorney for the state Democratic Party that brought the challenge to Virginia’s photo-identification requirement. “Is the evidence of intentional discrimination as strong?”
Attorney Bruce V. Spiva said the law is “just as bad” because of its disparate impact on minority voters who he said are less likely than white voters to have the required identification.
• The National Rifle Association urged voters to send registration materials to the state instead of local officials. By Monday, the state has received 24 NRA-voter registration applications that should have gone to local clerks. Here is an NRA mailer that went to rural Wisconsin. Rick Hasen, who runs the Election Law Blog, says: “While some people are wondering if this is some kind of dirty trick, my guess is that it is more a question of incompetence.”
• The New York Times wrote what, for it, was a scathing editorial—“The Success of the Voter Fraud Myth”: It’s a lie and it’s gained ground, the Times said, because it’s been repeated often and ever more loudly.
Credit for this mass deception goes to Republican lawmakers, who have for years pushed a fake story about voter fraud, and thus the necessity of voter ID laws, in an effort to reduce voting among specific groups of Democratic-leaning voters. Those groups — mainly minorities, the poor and students — are less likely to have the required forms of identification.
Behind closed doors, some Republicans freely admit that stoking false fears of electoral fraud is part of their political strategy.
Not exactly news, but it makes the key points voter advocates have been stressing for several years.
• Meanwhile, the Brennan Center’s Andrew Cohen also takes on “The Myth of Voter Fraud”:
One of the most distressing indications of failure in American journalism today is the release of a poll last week that reveals that nearly half of the country believes that voter fraud occurs “very or somewhat often.” Since there is no rational basis in law or fact for this belief, since you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to be a victim of in-person voter fraud, the poll results tell us that reporters, analysts, and commentators who try to cover this topic have failed to adequately explain to our audiences the contours of the myth of voter fraud or to highlight how the issue has been hijacked by one party to try to disenfranchise those likely to vote for the other party.
• Wisconsin making ID law worse. Rick Hasen calls what’s happening “disgusting”: The state has one of the stricter ID laws. But in response to voter advocates who noted that people who have no ID have to jump through hoops and pay money to acquire underlying documents need to get identity cards, supporters of the law came up with a paternalistic argument. Being forced to get a state ID for voting would be useful in helping them in other ways—such as opening a bank account.
But now there's a move on by the Scott Walker administration to stamp “for voting purposes only” on the free, state-issued IDs. And the Wisconsin DMV wants those free IDs to be cheaper to make by removing the some of the fraud protections that the IDs were supposed to eliminate in the first place.
Shameless.
• Iowa Republicans back early voting: That’s almost unheard of on Republican turf, but party leaders there, who back Trump, think early voting will benefit them.