This week in the war on voting: Disabled Americans hurt by voter-ID laws; 'slimy' dealings by Kansan

Meteor Blades for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff Emeritus

Saturday April 02, 2016 · 6:01 AM PDT

2016/04/02 · 06:01

no image description available — People wait to vote in the U.S. presidential primary election outside a polling site in Glendale, Arizona March 22.

Welcome to the latest edition in our war on voting series, a joint project of Joan McCarter and Meteor Blades.

When voters cast their ballots in Wisconsin’s primary April 5, they’ll be doing so in a state with some of the most screwed-up voter-ID laws in the nation. Some 300,000 citizens of the state don’t have the required government-issue ID needed to vote. That 9 percent of the Wisconsin electorate that could be disenfranchised under the law, which will be in effect for the first time this year.

The law, writes Ari Berman, a leading progressive analyst of voter suppression, will have its most pernicious effect on Latinos and blacks, who are far less likely to have the proper ID than white citizens, and on many students. Only 11 of the state’s 36 private and public universities provide student IDs that include the state’s required expiration date. Getting an ID from the DMV means standing in line for hours. And, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, most of the state’s DMV offices aren’t open that many hours: “Only 31 of our 92 DMVs maintain normal Monday through Friday business hours. Forty-nine of them operate only two days a week. One, in Sauk City, is open for just a few days a year. Only two are open at 5 p.m., and just three are open on weekends. For the whole state,” the Journal-Sentinel reports.

For some citizens, there are other problems. Berman recounts the case of a few, including these:

The lead plaintiff who challenged the voter-ID law, 89-year-old Ruthelle Frank, has been voting since 1948 and has served on the Village Board in her hometown of Brokaw since 1996, but cannot get a photo ID for voting because her maiden name is misspelled on her birth certificate, which would cost $200 to correct. “No one should have to pay a fee to be able to vote,” Frank said.

Others blocked from the polls include a man born in a concentration camp in Germany who lost his birth certificate in a fire; a woman who lost use of her hands but could not use her daughter as power of attorney at the DMV; and a 90-year-old veteran of Iwo Jima who could not vote with his veterans ID.

One of the key improvements we can make has been proposed by the folks at the Brennan Center for Justice is to modernize voter registration. Here’s their proposal:

Automatic, permanent voter registration is a transformative policy innovation. It would permanently add up to 50 million eligible voters to the rolls, save money, increase accuracy, curb the potential for fraud, and protect the integrity of our elections.

While citizens have a responsibility to take part in the democratic process, government should also do its part by clearing bureaucratic obstacles to the ballot box. A modern voter registration system would do that with four key components:

Automatic registration. States adopt electronic systems for receiving and transmitting registrations and also take responsibility for signing up citizens so they are automatically added to the voter rolls when they interact with government agencies, unless they opt out.

Portability. Once citizens are signed up to vote, they remain registered when they move within their states.

Online registration.

Election Day safety net. This gives people the opportunity to register or update their information at the polls.

This should become the new national standard. The best way to get there is for Congress to mandate a modern voter registration system.

Why This Can Be Achieved

We know this can be done because the federal government has made similar improvements in the past. In 2002, in response to concerns over the election system after the 2000 Florida debacle, the Help America Vote Act required states to adopt computerized voter rolls and upgrade their voting machines, providing federal funds to help them do it. Congress can fund a similar upgrade for the registration system now.

• Top executive of U.S. Election Commission used connections to get job and then suppressed voting: Brian Newby, a Johnson County, Kansas, elections official used his ties to one of the nation’s leading advocates of restricting voting to help him get the top post at the federal agency charged with making voting more accessible and then implemented a policy to reduce voter registration in three states. He decided on his own that the residents of Georgia, Alabama and his home state of Kansas would no longer be allowed to register anyone using a federal from without showing proof of citizenship.

As a finalist for the job of executive director, Newby said in a June email to his benefactor, Kansas’ Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach, that he was friends with two of the commissioners at the federal agency, and told Kobach: “I think I would enter the job empowered to lead the way I want to.”

A Kansas City Star columnist labeled Newby’s efforts “slimy.” Kobach has been strongly criticized for his efforts inside and outside Kansas to suppress the vote.

• Jim Sensenbrenner wrote a New York Times Op-Ed in support of his bill that would update the Voting Rights Act. The act was gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court three years ago when it ruled in the Shelby case. Sensenbrenner said:

I introduced the Voting Rights Act of 2015 as a response to that decision. When the justices handed down the ruling, nine states, mostly in the Deep South, as well as parts of six other states, had to preclear their voting changes with the government. My bill would modernize the act so that the preclearance rules applied equally to every state in the country.

Under the bill, a state or jurisdiction could be subject to preclearance if a court ruled that it had discriminated against voters on the basis of race five or more times in the most recent 15 years. States that stopped discriminating automatically would fall out of the bill’s protections; states that started discriminating would fall in.

In this way, the bill responds to the Supreme Court’s concerns about the dated formula and resurrects the protections of the law that have been a part of American elections for five decades.

• Vox points out that ID laws make its harder for people with disabilities to vote than it already was:

Disabled Americans often endure voting horror stories like voting booths that can't accommodate wheelchairs, or machines that don't work for visually impaired people. But some people with disabilities are simply blocked from polls in the first place, because of a growing number of voter identification laws.

These laws, warns Doug Kruse of Syracuse University, are a looming issue for disabled voters, for a simple reason: They’re generally less likely to have identification, an issue noted by the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups along with disability activists.

• And a couple of stories on the Arizona situation:

Was Arizona's primary debacle voter suppression, incompetence, or both? by Joan McCarter

Arizona's primary mess no surprise to American Indians familiar with history of voter suppression by Meteor Blades

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