THE GREAT SUPPRESSION

by Randy Reynolds...

    The 4^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently struck down North Carolina’s Voter ID law, saying it targeted African-Americans 'with almost surgical precision’ by passing photo ID voting requirements that minorities were least likely to possess, reducing advanced voting and same-day registration, and reducing polling places in minority neighborhoods.

    Voter (Photo) ID is promoted as a way to keep non-citizens from voting but, ironically,  a non-citizen can get a driver’s license simply by proving residence, no citizenship required.

Voter (Photo) ID is supposed to cure the problem of people impersonating someone else at the polls or voting multiple times, but does voter impersonation really exist?  A comprehensive investigation by the Washington Post found 31 credible incidents out of one billion ballots cast (0.000000031) from elections in all states between 2000 and 2012. (The Post speculated that these 31 cases were most likely errors, not cheating.)  The kind of voter fraud that occurs, (registration fraud, missing ballots, ballot box stuffing, miscounts, state actions) have nothing to do with impersonation, which is the only thing addressed by Voter (Photo) ID. 

It’s not much of a stretch to think Voter ID laws (written from templates supplied to Republican states by ALEC) are about suppressing Democratic votes:

Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai bragged in 2012, Voter ID “…is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.” 

U.S. District Judge Nelva Ramos said that Texas’ Voter (Photo) ID law forcing registered voters to track down and pay for qualifying documents is no different than “an unconstitutional poll tax.”

......Judge Ramos also said, “(Texas) Republican lawmakers knew the law would drive down turnout among minority voters, who lean Democratic, and they passed it at least in part for that reason.”  (NYT, 10/12/14)  

U.S. District Judge Richard Posner (a Reagan appointee) said about Wisconsin’s Voter (Photo) ID law: 

—"Some of the 'evidence' of voter-impersonation fraud is downright goofy, if not paranoid, such as the nonexistent buses that according to the 'True the Vote' movement transport foreigners and reservation Indians to polling places." 

—"As there is no evidence that voter-impersonation fraud is a problem, how can the fact that a legislature says it's a problem turn it into one? If the Wisconsin legislature says witches are a problem, shall Wisconsin courts be permitted to conduct witch trials?"

—"There is only one motivation for imposing burdens on voting that are ostensibly designed to discourage voter-impersonation fraud, if there is no actual danger of such fraud, and that is to discourage voting by persons likely to vote against the party responsible for imposing the burdens."

—"The authors’ overall assessment is that 'voter ID laws don’t disenfranchise minorities or reduce minority voting, and in many instances enhance it. In other words, the authors believe that the net effect of these laws is to increase minority voting. Yet if that is true, the opposition to these laws by liberal groups is senseless. If photo ID laws increase minority voting, liberals should rejoice in the laws and conservatives deplore them. Yet it is conservatives who support them and liberals who oppose them. Unless conservatives and liberals are masochists, promoting laws that hurt them, these laws must suppress minority voting and the question then becomes whether there are offsetting social benefits—the evidence is that there are not." 

Burdens imposed by other states include, but are certainly not limited to, the following:

Florida, Arizona, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Georgia have, in recent elections, removed polling places from some urban and college neighborhoods that have a history of voting Democratic, causing wait times of up to 12 hours to vote. At the same time, they’ve added polling places in the identifiably Republican suburbs to eliminate waiting time.

    They’ve also placed fewer voting machines and fewer poll workers in some precincts to exacerbate the wait times, making voting all but impossible for people with jobs across town or in a nearby city—and with only a one hour lunch break—to vote on election day (unless they want to stand in a four, eight, or twelve-hour line after they get off work.)

    Florida makes this strategy even more onerous by closing some thoroughfares around the polling place in order to “prevent voter fraud.” On the orders of Gov. Jeb Bush in 2000 and Gov. Rick Scott in 2012 and 2014, State Troopers manned road blocks near certain polling places and searched cars at great length, adding to delays for (and possible intimidation of) people en route to vote.

    Republican sheriffs and police chiefs in Texas, Oregon and elsewhere, have been caught sending uniformed deputies at night to call on African-American voters who are already registered. The armed deputies ask for ID and warn these voters of possible legal consequences if they try to vote at the wrong precinct.

    Glossy, expensive junk mail as well as imitation official mail that looks like it came from the registrar frequently give African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods false locations for voting precincts and misinformation on voting hours, registration, and absentee voting periods.

    In Texas and Tennessee, student ID is not valid for voter identification, but concealed carry permits are.  

A Driver’s License will suffice for photo ID in all Republican states and who doesn’t have a driver’s license?  Answer: 25% of African-Americans, 16% of Latinos, and 8% of whites. Many of these are between 18 and 24. 18% are seniors.

Many married women get turned away for having a maiden name on their driver’s license and a married name on their voter registration; many use a middle name or initial on one and maiden name or initial on the other and are thus disqualified by poll workers.

   There’s a similar catch for men: If John Edgar Wells is on the voter roll and John E. Wells is on the driver’s license, John doesn’t get to vote.  It has to match up exactly.  (There is no data on whether this is enforced equally in white and black precincts.)

    Additional obstructions that happened after photo ID laws for voting were passed:

    Alabama shut down the DMV offices in all counties of the black belt!   After a public outcry, the governor recently reopened some DMV’s one day per month.

....  ...... Wisconsin shut down DMV’s in Democratic counties and extended DMV hours in white suburban counties; uniquely effective since an estimated 50% of African-Americans and Hispanics in Wisconsin don’t have driver’s licenses.

     Texas has no driver’s license office in 85 counties.

......In some states two pieces of official mail like electric bill or bank statement are required to partially identify you as a resident eligible to vote —which leaves out all adults in the household except for the one who gets the bills.

      Texas and South Carolina will accept passports as one of the two required forms of voter ID., the cost of which can be from $55-$135, plus the price of obtaining the base documents (verified birth certificates, photo etc.)

     Georgia, Texas, and others will accept a bank statement as one of your ID’s because who doesn’t  have a bank account?  (Answer: 20% of blacks; 3% of whites.)

    Pennsylvania passed strict voter ID laws but promised to provide free state-issued ID’s for people who didn’t have driver’s licenses, but they did not do so.

     Early voting was drastically reduced in all Republican-governed states with high African-American populations. Florida eliminated Sunday voting prior to Election Day. Sunday voting, often by the busload, straight from church, had been an African-American tradition.

     States with two or more weeks of absentee voting cut it back to one.

In 13 states NO early voting is allowed—you have to get off work and vote on Tuesday, which is tough to do when the wait in line has been artificially stretched to several hours.

......In 20 states, ABSENTEE voting is only available if a voter swears to having certain excuses (expecting to be out of town or hospitalized on voting day, for example.) 

Arizona and other states send “do not forward” address verification letters to certain precincts and any letter that comes back results in the voter being removed from the list.  (Poor people move most often; forwarded mail would reach them, but the “do not forward” mail, of course, does not.) This scam is not a new one: it was first instituted in 1962 by William Rehnquist, who would go on to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

     Purging voter roles by searching for duplicate names is a service provided by private companies such as ChoicePoint, which was hired by Texas and Florida in 2000 (as well as other states and the federal government since.) The way it works: If there’s more than one John Brown, Robert Smith, or Leroy Johnson in a state, they are presented to the secretary of state on a list of sometimes thousands of names.  The secretary or registrar, at their own discretion, can remove all these people from the voter rolls, or only those in low-income zip codes, or just those in Democratic-leaning counties.

    In Florida, in 2012, 180,000 people were removed from the voter roles.  An investigation showed that only 85 were properly removed; all the others were mistakes, but those “others”, 180,000 of them, didn’t get to vote.

     In Florida, the fever swamp of voter suppression, their secretary of state failed to add 36,000 newly-registered voters to the rolls in 2000 so those 36,000 didn’t get to vote in the Bush vs. Gore election which Bush "won" by 537 votes.

     Before the 2000 election, Florida also scrubbed 57,700 alleged felons from their voter lists.  A lawsuit won by the NAACP revealed that NONE of these people were felons—they were guilty only of misdemeanors. And none of them were Floridians—they were all Texans.  But those 57,700 Floridians with similar names were prevented from voting in the Bush vs. Gore election.  (The NAACP won a $75,000 judgment in the case.)

     Florida got the Texas list from DataBase Technologies, (a subsidiary of ChoicePoint), which got the names from the state of Texas.

   By the most remarkable of coincidences, the Governors of Florida and Texas, the states responsible for generating and implementing this Florida voter purge by using names from Texas, were Jeb Bush and George Bush.

     George Bush won Florida by 537 votes.

     Did Republicans suppress a quantity of votes larger than Trump's margin of victory in some of the closest states?  Undoubtedly.

    Republicans will try to build on their 21st Century voter suppression successes. Republican governors, legislators, and legions of fearful white voters will take up the hue and cry started by Alex Jones and echoed by  Donald Trump that there were three million illegal votes on November 8, 2016,  that the elections were rigged, and "something was going on."  They'll self-righteously complain to the media that they're just trying to make elections fair and honest; and this will set the predicate for ever more surgically-precise laws to target groups suspected of having Democratic inclinations.
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“Early voting violates the spirit of the Constitution and facilitates illegal votes that cancel out the votes of honest Americans.” ~ Phyllis Schlafly

“…in the states where they do have voter ID laws you’ve seen, actually, elections begin to change towards more conservative candidates.” ~Jim DeMint, Heritage Foundation

“The reduction in the number of days allowed for early voting is particularly important because early voting plays a major role in Obama’s ground game. The Democrats carried most states that allow many days of early voting…” ~ Phyllis Schlafly

“Eight out of the 16 states that have held primaries or caucuses so far have implemented new voter ID or other restrictive voting laws since 2010. Democratic turnout has dropped 37 percent overall in those eight states, but just 13 percent in the states that didn’t enact new voter restrictions. To put it another way, Democratic voter turnout was 285 percent worse in states with new voter ID laws.” ~Jane Valencia, Huffington Post

“Studies have shown that restrictions like voter-ID laws can reduce voter turnout by 2 to 3 percent, with the largest drop-off among young, first-time and African-American voters.” ~Ari Berman

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