93 Y.O. TN Woman Denied Voter ID...
Newch91
Posts: 17,560
after cleaning state capitol building for 30 years.
This is sad that something like this is going on in our country. Voting is our natural born right. It should be easy to vote, not difficult.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/1 ... -voter-id/
A 93-year-old Tennessee woman who cleaned the state Capitol for 30 years, including the governor’s office, says she won’t be able to vote for the first time in decades after being told this week that her old state ID failed to meet new voter ID regulations.
Thelma Mitchell was even accused of being an undocumented immigrant because she couldn’t produce a birth certificate:
A spokesman for the House Republican Caucus insisted that Mitchell was given bad information and should’ve been allowed to vote, even with an expired state ID. But even if that’s the case, her ordeal illustrates the inevitable disenfranchisements that result when confusing voting laws enable state officials to apply the law inconsistently.
The incident is the just latest in a series of reports of senior citizens being denied their constitutional right to vote under restrictive new voter ID laws pushed by Republican governors and legislatures. These laws are a transparent attempt to target Democrat constituencies who are less likely to have photo ID’s, and disproportionately affect seniors, college students, the poor and minorities.
As ThinkProgress reported, one 96-year-old Tennessee woman was denied a voter ID because she didn’t have her marriage license. Another senior citizen in Tennessee, 91-year-old Virginia Lasater, couldn’t get the ID she needed to vote because she wasn’t able to stand in a long line at the DMV. A Tennessee agency even told a 86-year-old World War II veteran that he had to pay an unconstitutional poll tax if he wanted to obtain an ID.
This is sad that something like this is going on in our country. Voting is our natural born right. It should be easy to vote, not difficult.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/1 ... -voter-id/
A 93-year-old Tennessee woman who cleaned the state Capitol for 30 years, including the governor’s office, says she won’t be able to vote for the first time in decades after being told this week that her old state ID failed to meet new voter ID regulations.
Thelma Mitchell was even accused of being an undocumented immigrant because she couldn’t produce a birth certificate:
Mitchell, who was delivered by a midwife in Alabama in 1918, has never had a birth certificate. But when she told that to a drivers’ license clerk, he suggested she might be an illegal immigrant.
Thelma Mitchell told WSMV-TV that she went to a state drivers’ license center last week after being told that her old state ID from her cleaning job would not meet new regulations for voter identification.
A spokesman for the House Republican Caucus insisted that Mitchell was given bad information and should’ve been allowed to vote, even with an expired state ID. But even if that’s the case, her ordeal illustrates the inevitable disenfranchisements that result when confusing voting laws enable state officials to apply the law inconsistently.
The incident is the just latest in a series of reports of senior citizens being denied their constitutional right to vote under restrictive new voter ID laws pushed by Republican governors and legislatures. These laws are a transparent attempt to target Democrat constituencies who are less likely to have photo ID’s, and disproportionately affect seniors, college students, the poor and minorities.
As ThinkProgress reported, one 96-year-old Tennessee woman was denied a voter ID because she didn’t have her marriage license. Another senior citizen in Tennessee, 91-year-old Virginia Lasater, couldn’t get the ID she needed to vote because she wasn’t able to stand in a long line at the DMV. A Tennessee agency even told a 86-year-old World War II veteran that he had to pay an unconstitutional poll tax if he wanted to obtain an ID.
Shows: 6.27.08 Hartford, CT/5.15.10 Hartford, CT/6.18.2011 Hartford, CT (EV Solo)/10.19.13 Brooklyn/10.25.13 Hartford
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
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The new wave of US voter suppression
Rightwing state legislatures are pushing laws that seek to restrict voter access. It's an alarming trend, and Democrats will lose out
Amy Goodman
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 28 December 2011
All eyes are on Iowa this week, as the hodgepodge field of Republican contenders gallivants across that farm state seeking a win, or at least "momentum," in the campaign for the party's presidential nomination. But behind the scenes, a battle is being waged by Republicans – not against each other, but against American voters. Across the country, state legislatures and governors are pushing laws that seek to restrict access to the voting booth, laws that will disproportionately harm people of color, low-income people, and young and elderly voters.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund have just released a comprehensive report on the crisis, "Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America." In it, they write: "The heart of the modern block-the-vote campaign is a wave of restrictive government-issued photo identification requirements. In a co-ordinated effort, legislators in 34 states introduced bills imposing such requirements. Many of these bills were modeled on legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) – a conservative advocacy group whose founder explained: 'Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.'"
It is interesting that the right wing, long an opponent of any type of national identification card, is very keen to impose photo identification requirements at the state level. Why? Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP, calls the voter ID laws "a solution without a problem … it's not going to make the vote more secure. What it is going to do is put the first financial barrier between people and their ballot box since we got rid of the poll tax."
You don't have to look far for people impacted by this new wave of voter-purging laws. Darwin Spinks, an 86-year-old world war two veteran from Murfreesboro, Tennesee, went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a photo ID for voting purposes, since drivers over 60 there are issued driver's licenses without photos. After waiting in two lines, he was told he had to pay $8. Requiring a voter to pay a fee to vote has been unconstitutional since the poll tax was outlawed in 1964.
Over in Nashville, 93-year-old Thelma Mitchell had a state-issued ID – the one she used as a cleaner at the state capitol building for more than 30 years. The ID had granted her access to the governor's office for decades, but now, she was told, it wasn't good enough to get her into the voting booth. She and her family are considering a lawsuit, an unfortunate turn of events for a woman who is older than the right of women to vote in this country.
It is not just the elderly being given the disenfranchisement runaround. The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law points to "bills making voter registration drives extremely difficult and risky for volunteer groups, bills requiring voters to provide specific photo ID or citizenship documents … bills cutting back on early and absentee voting, bills making it hard for students and active-duty members of the military to register to vote locally, and more."
US attorney general Eric Holder recently spoke on this alarming trend. He said: "Our efforts honor the generations of Americans who have taken extraordinary risks, and willingly confronted hatred, bias and ignorance – as well as billy clubs and fire hoses, bullets and bombs – to ensure that their children, and all American citizens, would have the chance to participate in the work of their government. The right to vote is not only the cornerstone of our system of government – it is the lifeblood of our democracy."
Just this week, the Justice Department blocked South Carolina's new law requiring voters to show photo IDs at the polls, saying data submitted by South Carolina showed that minority voters were about 20% more likely to lack acceptable photo ID required at polling places.
By some estimates, the overall population who may be disenfranchised by this wave of legislation is upward of 5 million voters, most of whom would be expected to vote with the Democratic party. The efforts to quash voter participation are not genuine, grassroots movements. Rather, they rely on funding from people like the Koch brothers, David and Charles. That is why thousands of people, led by the NAACP, marched on the New York headquarters of Koch Industries two weeks ago en route to a rally for voting rights at the United Nations.
Despite the media attention showered on the Iowa caucuses, the real election outcomes in 2012 will likely hinge more on the contest between billionaire political funders like the Kochs and the thousands of people in the streets, demanding one person, one vote.
We live in a land with rules. If you can't prove who you are and that you are not an ILLEGAL...no vote for you.
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
When have you heard about voter fraud?
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
The GOP War on Voting
In a campaign supported by the Koch brothers, Republicans are working to prevent millions of Democrats from voting next year
By ARI BERMAN
As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. "What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century," says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.
Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls. "I don't want everybody to vote," the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. "As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." But since the 2010 election, thanks to a conservative advocacy group founded by Weyrich, the GOP's effort to disrupt voting rights has been more widespread and effective than ever. In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.
All told, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting. Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Maine repealed Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973. Five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia – cut short their early voting periods. Florida and Iowa barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters. And six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures – Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots. More than 10 percent of U.S. citizens lack such identification, and the numbers are even higher among constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic – including 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African-Americans.
Taken together, such measures could significantly dampen the Democratic turnout next year – perhaps enough to shift the outcome in favor of the GOP. "One of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time," Bill Clinton told a group of student activists in July. "Why is all of this going on? This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate" – a reference to the dominance of the Tea Party last year, compared to the millions of students and minorities who turned out for Obama. "There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today."
To hear Republicans tell it, they are waging a virtuous campaign to crack down on rampant voter fraud – a curious position for a party that managed to seize control of the White House in 2000 despite having lost the popular vote. After taking power, the Bush administration declared war on voter fraud, making it a "top priority" for federal prosecutors. In 2006, the Justice Department fired two U.S. attorneys who refused to pursue trumped-up cases of voter fraud in New Mexico and Washington, and Karl Rove called illegal voting "an enormous and growing problem." In parts of America, he told the Republican National Lawyers Association, "we are beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are colonels in mirrored sunglasses." According to the GOP, community organizers like ACORN were actively recruiting armies of fake voters to misrepresent themselves at the polls and cast illegal ballots for the Democrats.
Even at the time, there was no evidence to back up such outlandish claims. A major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter, which the anti-fraud laws are supposedly designed to stop. Out of the 300 million votes cast in that period, federal prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud – and many of the cases involved immigrants and former felons who were simply unaware of their ineligibility. A much-hyped investigation in Wisconsin, meanwhile, led to the prosecution of only .0007 percent of the local electorate for alleged voter fraud. "Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere," joked Stephen Colbert. A 2007 report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a leading advocate for voting rights at the New York University School of Law, quantified the problem in stark terms. "It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning," the report calculated, "than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls."
GOP outcries over the phantom menace of voter fraud escalated after 2008, when Obama's candidacy attracted historic numbers of first-time voters. In the 29 states that record party affiliation, roughly two-thirds of new voters registered as Democrats in 2007 and 2008 – and Obama won nearly 70 percent of their votes. In Florida alone, Democrats added more than 600,000 new voters in the run-up to the 2008 election, and those who went to the polls favored Obama over John McCain by 19 points. "This latest flood of attacks on voting rights is a direct shot at the communities that came out in historic numbers for the first time in 2008 and put Obama over the top," says Tova Wang, an elections-reform expert at Demos, a progressive think tank.
No one has done more to stir up fears about the manufactured threat of voter fraud than Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a top adviser in the Bush Justice Department who has become a rising star in the GOP. "We need a Kris Kobach in every state," declared Michelle Malkin, the conservative pundit. This year, Kobach successfully fought for a law requiring every Kansan to show proof of citizenship in order to vote – even though the state prosecuted only one case of voter fraud in the past five years. The new restriction fused anti-immigrant hysteria with voter-fraud paranoia. "In Kansas, the illegal registration of alien voters has become pervasive," Kobach claimed, offering no substantiating evidence.
Kobach also asserted that dead people were casting ballots, singling out a deceased Kansan named Alfred K. Brewer as one such zombie voter. There was only one problem: Brewer was still very much alive. The Wichita Eagle found him working in his front yard. "I don't think this is heaven," Brewer told the paper. "Not when I'm raking leaves."
Kobach might be the gop's most outspoken crusader working to prevent citizens from voting, but he's far from the only one. "Voting rights are under attack in America," Rep. John Lewis, who was brutally beaten in Alabama while marching during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, observed during an impassioned speech on the House floor in July. "There's a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process."
The Republican effort, coordinated and funded at the national level, has focused on disenfranchising voters in four key areas:
Barriers to Registration Since January, six states have introduced legislation to impose new restrictions on voter registration drives run by groups like Rock the Vote and the League of Women Voters. In May, the GOP-controlled legislature in Florida passed a law requiring anyone who signs up new voters to hand in registration forms to the state board of elections within 48 hours of collecting them, and to comply with a barrage of onerous, bureaucratic requirements. Those found to have submitted late forms would face a $1,000 fine, as well as possible felony prosecution.
As a result, the law threatens to turn civic-minded volunteers into inadvertent criminals. Denouncing the legislation as "good old-fashioned voter suppression," the League of Women Voters announced that it was ending its registration efforts in Florida, where it has been signing up new voters for the past 70 years. Rock the Vote, which helped 2.5 million voters to register in 2008, could soon follow suit. "We're hoping not to shut down," says Heather Smith, president of Rock the Vote, "but I can't say with any certainty that we'll be able to continue the work we're doing."
The registration law took effect one day after it passed, under an emergency statute designed for "an immediate danger to the public health, safety or welfare." In reality, though, there's no evidence that registering fake voters is a significant problem in the state. Over the past three years, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has received just 31 cases of suspected voter fraud, resulting in only three arrests statewide. "No one could give me an example of all this fraud they speak about," said Mike Fasano, a Republican state senator who bucked his party and voted against the registration law. What's more, the law serves no useful purpose: Under the Help America Vote Act passed by Congress in 2002, all new voters must show identity before registering to vote.
Cuts to Early Voting After the recount debacle in Florida in 2000, allowing voters to cast their ballots early emerged as a popular bipartisan reform. Early voting not only meant shorter lines on Election Day, it has helped boost turnout in a number of states – the true measure of a successful democracy. "I think it's great," Jeb Bush said in 2004. "It's another reform we added that has helped provide access to the polls and provide a convenience. And we're going to have a high voter turnout here, and I think that's wonderful."
But Republican support for early voting vanished after Obama utilized it as a key part of his strategy in 2008. Nearly 30 percent of the electorate voted early that year, and they favored Obama over McCain by 10 points. The strategy proved especially effective in Florida, where blacks outnumbered whites by two to one among early voters, and in Ohio, where Obama received fewer votes than McCain on Election Day but ended up winning by 263,000 ballots, thanks to his advantage among early voters in urban areas like Cleveland and Columbus.
That may explain why both Florida and Ohio – which now have conservative Republican governors – have dramatically curtailed early voting for 2012. Next year, early voting will be cut from 14 to eight days in Florida and from 35 to 11 days in Ohio, with limited hours on weekends. In addition, both states banned voting on the Sunday before the election – a day when black churches historically mobilize their constituents. Once again, there appears to be nothing to justify the changes other than pure politics. "There is no evidence that any form of convenience voting has led to higher levels of fraud," reports the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College.
Photo IDs By far the biggest change in election rules for 2012 is the number of states requiring a government-issued photo ID, the most important tactic in the Republican war on voting. In April 2008, the Supreme Court upheld a photo-ID law in Indiana, even though state GOP officials couldn't provide a single instance of a voter committing the type of fraud the new ID law was supposed to stop. Emboldened by the ruling, Republicans launched a nationwide effort to implement similar barriers to voting in dozens of states.
The campaign was coordinated by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which provided GOP legislators with draft legislation based on Indiana's ID requirement. In five states that passed such laws in the past year – Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – the measures were sponsored by legislators who are members of ALEC. "We're seeing the same legislation being proposed state by state by state," says Smith of Rock the Vote. "And they're not being shy in any of these places about clearly and blatantly targeting specific demographic groups, including students."
In Texas, under "emergency" legislation passed by the GOP-dominated legislature and signed by Gov. Rick Perry, a concealed-weapon permit is considered an acceptable ID but a student ID is not. Republicans in Wisconsin, meanwhile, mandated that students can only vote if their IDs include a current address, birth date, signature and two-year expiration date – requirements that no college or university ID in the state currently meets. As a result, 242,000 students in Wisconsin may lack the documentation required to vote next year. "It's like creating a second class of citizens in terms of who gets to vote," says Analiese Eicher, a Dane County board supervisor.
The barriers erected in Texas and Wisconsin go beyond what the Supreme Court upheld in Indiana, where 99 percent of state voters possess the requisite IDs and can turn to full-time DMVs in every county to obtain the proper documentation. By contrast, roughly half of all black and Hispanic residents in Wisconsin do not have a driver's license, and the state staffs barely half as many DMVs as Indiana – a quarter of which are open less than one day a month. To make matters worse, Gov. Scott Walker tried to shut down 16 more DMVs – many of them located in Democratic-leaning areas. In one case, Walker planned to close a DMV in Fort Atkinson, a liberal stronghold, while opening a new office 30 minutes away in the conservative district of Watertown.
Although new ID laws have been approved in seven states, the battle over such barriers to voting has been far more widespread. Since January, Democratic governors in Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire and North Carolina have all vetoed ID laws. Voters in Mississippi and Missouri are slated to consider ballot initiatives requiring voter IDs, and legislation is currently pending in Pennsylvania.
One of the most restrictive laws requiring voter IDs was passed in South Carolina. To obtain the free state ID now required to vote, the 178,000 South Carolinians who currently lack one must pay for a passport or a birth certificate. "It's the stepsister of the poll tax," says Browne-Dianis of the Advancement Project. Under the new law, many elderly black residents – who were born at home in the segregated South and never had a birth certificate – must now go to family court to prove their identity. Given that obtaining fake birth certificates is one of the country's biggest sources of fraud, the new law may actually prompt some voters to illegally procure a birth certificate in order to legally vote – all in the name of combating voter fraud.
For those voters who manage to get a legitimate birth certificate, obtaining a voter ID from the DMV is likely to be hellishly time-consuming. A reporter for the Tri-State Defender in Memphis, Tennessee – another state now mandating voter IDs – recently waited for four hours on a sweltering July day just to see a DMV clerk. The paper found that the longest lines occur in urban precincts, a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act, which bars states from erecting hurdles to voting in minority jurisdictions.
Disenfranchising Ex-Felons The most sweeping tactic in the GOP campaign against voting is simply to make it illegal for certain voters to cast ballots in any election. As the Republican governor of Florida, Charlie Crist restored the voting rights of 154,000 former prisoners who had been convicted of nonviolent crimes. But in March, after only 30 minutes of public debate, Gov. Rick Scott overturned his predecessor's decision, instantly disenfranchising 97,491 ex-felons and prohibiting another 1.1 million prisoners from being allowed to vote after serving their time.
"Why should we disenfranchise people forever once they've paid their price?" Bill Clinton asked during his speech in July. "Because most of them in Florida were African-Americans and Hispanics and would tend to vote for Democrats – that's why."
A similar reversal by a Republican governor recently took place in Iowa, where Gov. Terry Branstad overturned his predecessor's decision to restore voting rights to 100,000 ex-felons. The move threatens to return Iowa to the recent past, when more than five percent of all residents were denied the right to vote – including a third of the state's black residents. In addition, Florida and Iowa join Kentucky and Virginia as the only states that require all former felons to apply for the right to vote after finishing their prison sentences.
In response to the GOP campaign, voting-rights advocates are scrambling to blunt the impact of the new barriers to voting. The ACLU and other groups are challenging the new laws in court, and congressional Democrats have asked the Justice Department to use its authority to block or modify any of the measures that discriminate against minority voters. "The Justice Department should be much more aggressive in areas covered by the Voting Rights Act," says Rep. Lewis.
But beyond waging battles at the state and federal level, voting-rights advocates must figure out how to reframe the broader debate. The real problem in American elections is not the myth of voter fraud, but how few people actually participate. Even in 2008, which saw the highest voter turnout in four decades, fewer than two-thirds of eligible voters went to the polls. And according to a study by MIT, 9 million voters were denied an opportunity to cast ballots that year because of problems with their voter registration (13 percent), long lines at the polls (11 percent), uncertainty about the location of their polling place (nine percent) or lack of proper ID (seven percent).
Come Election Day 2012, such problems will only be exacerbated by the flood of new laws implemented by Republicans. Instead of a single fiasco in Florida, experts warn, there could be chaos in a dozen states as voters find themselves barred from the polls. "Our democracy is supposed to be a government by, of and for the people," says Browne-Dianis. "It doesn't matter how much money you have, what race you are or where you live in the country – we all get to have the same amount of power by going into the voting booth on Election Day. But those who passed these laws believe that only some people should participate. The restrictions undermine democracy by cutting off the voices of the people."
In Texas, under "emergency" legislation passed by the GOP-dominated legislature and signed by Gov. Rick Perry, a concealed-weapon permit is considered an acceptable ID but a student ID is not. Republicans in Wisconsin, meanwhile, mandated that students can only vote if their IDs include a current address, birth date, signature and two-year expiration date – requirements that no college or university ID in the state currently meets. As a result, 242,000 students in Wisconsin may lack the documentation required to vote next year. "It's like creating a second class of citizens in terms of who gets to vote," says Analiese Eicher, a Dane County board supervisor.
This is some fucked up shit right there. A fucking weapon permit is considered an acceptable ID but a student ID isn't? Who came up with this bogus law?
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
He hasn't. It just sounded like a nice excuse. Albeit one with no basis in reality.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
it is all about control, gaining control and keeping it.
it is not about voter fraud.
it never has been.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
Y'all just try and scare up that "racist" element all the time. Gets old.
Also, there is no widespread ballot suppression. You need photo ID for many things. You guys just follow the race card herd and get all worked up looking through the wrong lense. That's why I'm here, to help.
Oh, and it's cool with the Supreme Court btw
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-21.ZO.html
Look it up. Again, I'm here to help.
Woot
this is not about protecting the integrity of the vote. if it were about protecting the integrity of the vote, why would they not go back to paper ballots with paper trails that are manually counted instead of using these diebold machines that are very easy to hack and change votes?
the people rigging elections are not the the voters. they are the people running the elections. what we have in this country is not like "gangs of new york" where come election time men grew beards and long hair and went and voted, and then shaved and voted again, and then cut their hair and voted again. to think that is going on today is absurd....the way to steal an election used to be to stuff the ballot box. until the idiots doing that would stuff the boxes with more votes than there are voters.
the simplest way to rig an election now is to suppress voters and disenfranchise them. what happened in ohio with ken blackwell in 2004? why were the heavily african american districts supplied with far less voting machines than the white areas with similar population and number of voters in 2000 and 2004? it made the lines to vote drastically longer and people waited hours to vote only to be turned away for some techincality or the polls closed before they could vote. voter suppression and restricting the number of votes is the goal, and that is exactly what these republican sponsored voter id laws aim to do.
if you want voting integrity it is very simple. everyone over age 18 gets to vote. period. where in our founding documents does it say that you must provide a driver's license, an unpaid bill, a bank statement, or whatever to vote? it doesn't. making it harder for people to vote undermines the democracy and is an infringement on the most basic of american freedoms. the right to vote...
the republicans go on and on about the farce of voter fraud, like it is this major impediment to democracy or something, when the REAL impediment to democracy is voter suppression and disenfranchisement.
i challenge you to find 5 real and specific examples of white republican voters being disenfranchised in large numbers.... i mean real legitimate news stories. not blogs. not fox news opinion pieces. real news stories. because it does not happen. like i said more people get struck by lightning in a year than there are legitimate cases of voter fraud.
this is a big elaborate scheme to keep people from voting. nothing more, nothing less... period.
and al franken won that election in a recount. if coleman had been a better congressman he would have stayed in office.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
i guess you missed my post huh...
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
if the republicans were not scared of losing, why would they be doing this in the first place....it is about gaining and maintaining power.
AND how do you republicans reconcile your desire for freedom with these freedom stealing laws?????
it is the highest form of hypocracy.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
The current occupants admin is trying to whip up minority frenzy, propagating the myth of widespread ballot suppression. The goal is to foster a sense of racial persecution of blacks, intending to maximize voter turnout in November. You cry foul politics when its actualy all on YOUR end.
Ha
Attitudes like yours do nothing but set race relations back further for your OWN goal of getting the current occupant re-elected. You got it all backwards, AGAIN.
That's why I'm here, to help.
Lmfao
In the 2010 midterms, 12,000 NON-CITIZENS were registered to vote.
I'm done with the free lessons on this thread. Bub bye
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
I speak from what I see. And I see these laws as a ploy to keep people from voting..
How about this.....why don't tax payers pay for the poor to get transportation to whatever government office to get an id. And how about we pay for ids for those same poor people. I know the gop will not go for that so they fucking can not have it both ways.....
Do not attack me. If I had posted that to you you would have cited a posting guideline..
I am waiting for those 5 examples of white republicans being disenfranchised.....guess I shouldn't hold my breath huh...
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
The Republican 'voter fraud' fraud
All over the US, GOP lawmakers have engineered schemes to make voting more difficult. Well, if you can't win elections fairly…
Diane Roberts
guardian.co.uk, Monday 31 October 2011
Presidential candidate and angry white man Newt Gingrich seems nostalgic for the good old Jim Crow poll tax days: he has called for people to have to pass an American historical literacy test before they can vote. His colleagues on the anti-democratic right have not gone quite so far, but 38 states, most of them controlled by Republicans, are concocting all kinds of ingenious ways to suppress the vote. A new report from New York University's Brennan Center for Justice says that more than five million people – enough to swing the 2012 presidential election – could find themselves disenfranchised, especially if they're poor or old or students or black or Latino.
Hyper-conservative governors and legislators, working with templates produced by a shady cabal called the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), have pushed through laws to cut the number of voting days, impede groups registering new voters, demand proof of citizenship and otherwise make it more difficult to cast a ballot. Alec, partly funded by the John Birch-er billionaire Koch brothers and affiliated with Liam Fox's Atlantic Bridge, is on a mission to shrink not just government (which it regards as a cancer on capitalism), but democracy itself. Ion Sancho, elections supervisor of Leon County, Florida, and veteran of Florida's 2000 presidential election fiasco, says: "Every state that has a Republican legislature is doing this, from Maine to Florida. It's a national effort."
In the 2008 election, Barack Obama benefited from extended voting hours and early voting days, as well as rules allowing citizens to register and vote on the same day. It's pretty obvious why: students, the elderly, and hourly-wage workers who can't queue for hours without making the boss angry, tend to favor Democrats. Florida – which became a byword for Banana Republicanism and electoral corruption 11 years ago – has been positively zealous in attempts to restrict voting rights on the grounds that easy voting leads to waste, fraud and abuse. One lawmaker pitched a hissy fit, claiming that dead actors (Paul Newman, for one) constantly turn up on voter rolls and that "Mickey Mouse" had registered to vote in Orlando. State senator Mike Bennett wants to make voting "harder"; after all, he said, "people in Africa literally walk 200 or 300 miles so they can have the opportunity to do what we do, and we want to make it more convenient? How much more convenient do you want to make it?"
Florida Republicans addressed the problem of "convenience" earlier this year by cutting early voting days from 14 to eight, cutting budgets for expanded polling places and eliminating Sunday voting: African American (and some Latino) churches had successfully run a post-sermon"Souls to the Polls" operation, getting out the vote in 2004, 2006 and 2008. Florida has also attacked civic-minded people trying to register new voters. Jill Ciccarelli, a teacher at New Smyrna Beach High School, wanted to foster a sense of citizenship amongst her pupils, so she helped the ones who were old enough register. She didn't know she was breaking the law. Now, all individuals or groups must file a "third party registration organisation" form with the state, and instead of having ten days to deliver the paperwork,they must now do it in 48 hours. Failure to comply could draw felony charges and thousands of dollars in fines.
The nonpartisan League of Women Voters, promoters of civic responsibility since 1920, has now abandoned its Florida voter drives: LWV is suing the state, saying that Florida's clampdown on the franchise violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Florida's response? Governor Rick Scott, a Republican elected in 2010 and steeped in Koch-flavored Tea, wants to largely exempt Florida – a former slave state with as rich a racist history as Alabama or Mississippi – from the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Florida's not out front on this: many states, including those fat with electoral college votes such as Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Indiana, Tennessee and Ohio, have passed harsh restrictions on who can vote and how. More than a dozen states demand that people show an approved photo ID card. Surely, the middle-class reasoning goes, every red-blooded American has a driving license? But hundreds of thousands – many elderly, disabled or just plain poor – do not. Representative Terri Sewell, a member of Congress from Alabama, told the New York Times that her wheelchair-bound father had used his United States social security card as proof of identity when voting. Now that's been outlawed.
In Texas, student ID cards are no longer valid for voting; neither are ID cards issued by the federal Veterans Administration. All those students and war vets need to do is go buy a gun: concealed weapons permits are acceptable at the polls.
Republicans all sing from the same hymnal on this one: voting must be tightly controlled to prevent fraud. Never mind that there is no fraud. Indeed, the Brennan Center found that voter fraud is so "exceedingly rare" that "one is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud." Mickey Mouse was not allowed to register. Paul Newman did not vote from beyond the grave. Hordes of undocumented Mexicans have not stuffed ballot boxes (though a great many new, legal Latino voters have registered in Florida, Texas and other large states).
But why let the facts get in the way of rigging an election? Some conservative sages have let the veil slip long enough for us to see what's really going on. Former Arkansas governor-turned-paid-Murdoch-mediaite Mike Huckabee likes to say that if people have friends who don't plan to vote the rightwing line, "Let the air out of their tires on election day. Tell them the election has been moved to a different date."
Huckabee protests he's just joking. But Matthew Vadum, a Fox News favorite and part of the paranoid right's brain trust, isn't being remotely funny when he says "registering the poor to vote is un-American." Nor was American Legislative Exchange Council co-founder Paul Weyrich back in the 1980s, when he said, "I don't want everybody to vote. Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
Obviously, democracy is no fun if just anyone can play.
that article backs me up on every point i have made in this thread...
guess i am not so damn crazy now am i???
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
FIVE THOUSAND
GOP says 5,000 non-citizens voting in Colorado a 'wake-up call' for states
By Debbie Siegelbaum - 03/31/11 12:23 PM ET
Republicans on the House Administration Committee want to shore up voter registration rules in the wake of a Colorado study that found as many as 5,000 non-citizens in the state took part in last year’s election.
Rep. Gregg Harper (R-Miss.), the panel’s chairman, called the study “a disturbing wake-up call” that should cause every state to review its safeguards to prevent illegal voting.
“We simply cannot have an electoral system that allows thousands of non-citizens to violate the law and vote in our elections. We must do more to protect the integrity of our electoral processes,” Harper added.
Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a Republican, told the panel that his department’s study identified nearly 12,000 people who were not citizens but were still registered to vote in Colorado.
Of those non-citizen registered voters, nearly 5,000 took part in the 2010 general election in which Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet narrowly defeated Republican Ken Buck.
Colorado conducted the study by comparing the state’s voter registration database with driver’s license records.
“We know we have a problem here. We don’t know the size of it,” Gessler said in testimony to Administration’s Elections subcommittee.
He told Harper that Colorado would look to create a registration system that would allow his department to ask that some people provide proof of their citizenship in writing.
If individuals did not respond to the request, their registration as voters would be suspended.
Rep. Charles Gonzalez (D-Texas) raised doubts about the reporting, noting that the study itself said it was based on inconclusive data and that it was “impossible to provide precise numbers” on how many people who were registered to vote in the state were not citizens.
Gonzalez asked Gessler, a former prosecutor, if he would have pursued a court case on such evidence.
Gessler responded that the goal of the study was to expose voter registration issues and pursue administrative avenues to resolve them.
“We don’t have a screen for citizenship on the front end when people register to vote,” he said.
I don't want to imagine our country being run by corporations if Republicans win 2012.
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
Open your minds
Woot
69%
SIXTY NINE PERCENT
But, go ahead and stir the race pot.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_ ... riminatory
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Attorney General Eric Holder signaled last week that the Justice Department will be closely examining new state laws that require showing a photo ID before voting for potential racial bias, but voters nationwide overwhelmingly favor such a requirement and reject the idea that it is discriminatory.
Seventy percent (70%) of Likely U.S. Voters believe voters should be required to show photo identification such as a driver’s license before being allowed to cast their ballot. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 22% oppose this kind of requirement.
The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on December 18-19, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.
Put a fork in it, she's done! Woot
http://www.heritage.org/research/report ... -elections
Abstract: Voter fraud may be a part of America’s history, but it does not have to be a part of America’s future. Six states—Georgia, Indiana, Texas, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Kansas—have recently adopted laws requiring voters to produce a photograph identification card (voter ID) when they vote at their polling places on Election Day. Such voter ID laws are under attack from opponents armed with an array of claims—specious allegations and over-the-top tales of voter disenfranchisement—but courts continue to rule in favor of voter ID requirements. Therefore, states should continue to pursue voter ID laws. They have a valid and legitimate state interest not only in deterring and detecting voter fraud, but also in maintaining the confidence of their citizens in the security of U.S. elections.
Many state legislatures are considering whether to improve election integrity by requiring voters to produce a photograph identification card (voter ID) when they vote at their polling places on Election Day. Georgia, Indiana, Texas, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Kansas have answered that question with a resounding “yes” by implementing such voter-ID laws.[1] Those states understand that the United States has an unfortunate history of voter fraud and that requiring individuals to authenticate their identity at the polls is a fundamental and necessary component of ensuring the integrity of the election process.
Every individual who is eligible to vote should have the opportunity to do so. It is equally important, however, that the votes of eligible voters are not stolen or diluted by a fraudulent or bogus vote cast by an ineligible or imaginary voter. The evidence from academic studies and actual turnout in elections is also overwhelming that—contrary to the shrill claims of opponents—voter ID does not depress the turnout of voters, including minority, poor, and elderly voters.
The Need for Voter ID
Requiring voters to authenticate their identity at the polling place is necessary to protect the integrity of elections and access to the voting process. Every illegal vote steals or dilutes the vote of a legitimate voter. Opponents of voter ID claim that it can only prevent impersonation fraud at the polls, which rarely happens. That assertion is incorrect. Voter ID can prevent and deter:
Impersonation fraud at the polls;
Voting under fictitious voter registrations;
Double voting by individuals registered in more than one state or locality; and
Voting by illegal aliens, or even legal aliens who are still not entitled to vote since state and federal elections are restricted to U.S. citizens.
As the Commission on Federal Election Reform, headed by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, said in 2005:
The electoral system cannot inspire public confidence if no safeguards exist to deter or detect fraud or to confirm the identity of voters. Photo IDs currently are needed to board a plane, enter federal buildings, and cash a check. Voting is equally important.[2]
Voter fraud does exist, and criminal penalties imposed after the fact are an insufficient deterrent to protect against it. For example, in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board,[3] the 2008 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter ID law, the Court said that despite such criminal penalties:
It remains true, however, that flagrant examples of such fraud in other parts of the country have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists, that occasional examples have surfaced in recent years…that…demonstrate that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.[4]
For those trying to defend America’s electoral integrity, the stakes are high. The relative rarity of voter fraud prosecutions for impersonation fraud, as the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals pointed out in the Indiana case, can be “explained by the endemic underenforcement” of voter fraud cases and “the extreme difficulty of apprehending a voter impersonator” without the tools—a voter ID—needed to detect such fraud.[5] This nation should not tolerate even one election being stolen, but without the tools to detect these illegal schemes, it is hard to know just how many close elections are being affected.
In 1984, a dramatic example of such fraud was revealed by a New York State grand jury.[6] The grand jury detailed a widespread conspiracy that operated without detection for 14 years in Brooklyn. This conspiracy involved not only impersonation of legitimate voters at the polls, but also voting under fictitious names. As a result, thousands of fraudulent votes were cast in state and congressional elections.
One of the witnesses before the grand jury described how he led a crew of eight individuals from polling place to polling place to vote. Each member of his crew voted in excess of 20 times, and there were approximately 20 other such crews operating during that election.[7] This extensive impersonation fraud and voting under bogus voter registrations could have been stopped and detected if New York had required voters to authenticate their identity at the polls.
According to the grand jury in the Brooklyn case, the advent of mail-in registration—a form of registration that was implemented nationally with the passage of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993—was also a key factor in perpetrating the fraud.[8] In recent elections, officials have detected numerous fraudulent voter registration forms, many of which were submitted by ACORN—the ethically challenged organization that has been found to have engaged in the submission of tens of thousands of invalid voter registration forms in multiple jurisdictions. Given that most election jurisdictions engage in minimal to nonexistent screening efforts, however, there is no way to know how many invalid registrations slipped through. In states without identification requirements, election officials have no way to prevent the casting of fraudulent votes by unscrupulous individuals based on fictitious voter registrations.
The problem of possible double voting by someone who is registered in two states[9] is illustrated by one of the Indiana voters highlighted by the League of Women Voters in their Crawford v. Marion County Election Board amicus brief. This voter was used by the league as an example of someone who had difficulty voting because of the voter ID requirement. However, after an Indiana newspaper interviewed this voter, it turned out that the problems she encountered stemmed from her trying to use a Florida driver’s license to vote in Indiana. Not only did she have a Florida driver’s license, but she was also registered to vote in Florida where she owned a second home. In fact, she had claimed residency in Florida by filing for a homestead exemption on her property taxes, which is normally only available to individuals who claim residency in a state.[10] So the Indiana law worked as intended: It prevented someone from illegally voting twice.
Since the vast majority of states (and the federal government) will not issue an official identification to an illegal alien, requiring state or federally issued photo IDs can also prevent noncitizens, particularly illegal aliens, from voting in elections. Given the increase in reports of noncitizens voting, such measures are needed.[11] For example:
The Colorado secretary of state recently testified before Congress that a check of the voter registration rolls indicated over 11,000 individuals who were non-citizens at the time they registered to vote, at least 5,000 of whom likely voted.[12]
New Mexico Secretary of State Dianna Duran, reported that a preliminary check of voter registration rolls had already found 37 noncitizens that had voted in New Mexico elections.[13]
States that issue driver’s licenses to noncitizens who are in the United States legally (and those few remaining states like New Mexico that issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens) should ensure that such licenses note on their face that the holder is not a U.S. citizen.
Even though a small amount of fraud can sometimes tip a close election, there is no evidence that there is “massive” voter fraud in the United States—either in general or in any specific state. In fact, election officials around the country do a good job overall of administering elections, especially given their lack of resources. But there are recurring problems with America’s voter registration system because many states do not do an adequate job of checking the accuracy and validity of new voter registrations.
The potential for abuse and the casting of fraudulent ballots by ineligible voters (like illegal aliens or persons registered in more than one state) or in the names of fake voters, dead voters, or voters who have moved but whose names remain on the registration list exists, and such fraud has occurred in many reported cases. As the Supreme Court recognized, there is a “real risk that voter fraud could affect a close election’s outcome.”[14] There are enough incidents and reported cases of actual voter fraud to make it very clear that America must take the steps necessary to make such fraud harder to commit.[15] Requiring voter ID is just one such common-sense step that can stop or deter many of these problems.
Voter ID Does Not Reduce Turnout
States must protect the security of the election process, but they must also ensure that every eligible individual is able to vote. Not only does voter ID help to prevent fraudulent voting, but where it has been implemented, it has not reduced turnout. Despite many false claims to the contrary, there is no evidence that voter ID decreases the turnout of voters or has a disparate impact on minority, poor, or elderly voters; the overwhelming majority of Americans have a photo ID or can easily obtain one. Democratic Senator Harold Metts, who sponsored Rhode Island’s voter ID law, said that “as a minority citizen and a senior citizen, I would not support anything that I thought would present obstacles or limit protections.”[16]
Numerous studies have borne out the fact that requiring an ID to vote does not depress turnout. For example:
A study by the University of Missouri on turnout in Indiana showed that turnout actually increased by about 2 percentage points overall in Indiana in 2006 in the first election after the voter ID law went into effect.[17] There was no evidence that counties with higher percentages of minority, poor, elderly, or less-educated populations suffered any reduction in voter turnout. In fact, “the only consistent and statistically significant impact of photo ID in Indiana is to increase voter turnout in counties with a greater percentage of Democrats relative to other counties.”[18]
In September 2007, The Heritage Foundation released a study analyzing the 2004 election turnout data for all states. This study found that voter ID laws do not reduce the turnout of voters, including African–Americans and Hispanics. Such voters were just as likely to vote in states with ID as in states where just their names were asked at the polling place.[19]
A study by the University of Delaware and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln examined data from the 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006 elections. At both the aggregate and individual levels, the study found that voter ID laws do not affect turnout, including across racial/ethnic/socioeconomic lines. The study concludes that “concerns about voter identification laws affecting turnout are much ado about nothing.”[20]
A survey by American University of registered voters in Maryland, Indiana, and Mississippi to see whether registered voters had photo IDs concluded that “showing a photo ID as a requirement of voting does not appear to be a serious problem in any of the states” because “[a]lmost all registered voters have an acceptable form of photo ID.”[21] Less than 0.5 percent of respondents had neither a photo ID nor citizenship documentation. A 2008 election survey of 12,000 registered voters in all 50 states found that fewer than nine people were unable to vote because of voter ID requirements.[22]
In 2010, a Rasmussen poll of likely voters in the United States showed overwhelming support (82 percent) for requiring photo ID in order to vote in elections. This support runs across ethnic and racial lines; Rasmussen reports that “[t]his is a sentiment that spans demographics, as majorities in every demographic agree.”[23]
A similar study by John Lott in 2006 also found no effect on voter turnout and, in fact, found an indication that reducing voter fraud (through means such as voter ID) may have a positive impact on voter turnout.[24]
That is certainly true in a classic case of voter fraud committed in Greene County, Alabama.[25] In that county, which is 80 percent African–American, voter turnout increased after several successful voter fraud prosecutions instilled new confidence in local voters regarding the integrity of the election process.
Actual election results in Georgia and Indiana also confirm that suppositions about voter ID hurting minority turnout are incorrect. Turnout in both states increased more dramatically in 2008 in both the presidential preference primary and the general election in the first presidential elections held after their photo ID laws went into effect than they did in some states without photo ID.
There was record turnout in Georgia in the 2008 presidential primary election—over 2 million voters, more than twice as much as in 2004 when the voter photo ID law was not in effect (the law was first applied to local elections in 2007). The number of African–Americans voting in the 2008 primary also doubled from 2004. In fact, there were 100,000 more votes in the Democratic primary than in the Republican primary,[26] and the number of individuals who had to vote with a provisional ballot because they had not obtained the free photo ID available from the state was less that 0.01 percent.
In the 2008 general election when President Barack Obama was elected, Georgia, with one of the strictest voter ID laws in the nation, had the largest turnout in its history—more than 4 million voters. Democratic turnout was up an astonishing 6.1 percentage points from the 2004 election when there was no photo ID requirement, the fifth largest increase of any state.[27]
Overall turnout in Georgia went up 6.7 percentage points, the second highest increase in the country and a striking jump even in an election year when there was a general increase in turnout over the prior presidential election.[28] The black share of the statewide vote increased from 25 percent in 2004 to 30 percent in 2008 according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.[29] And according to Census Bureau surveys, 65 percent of the black voting-age population voted in the 2008 election compared to only 54.4 percent in 2004, an increase of over 10 percentage points.[30]
By contrast, the Democratic turnout in the nearby state of Mississippi, also a state with a high percentage of black voters but without a voter ID requirement, increased by only 2.35 percentage points. Turnout in the 2010 congressional election in Georgia was over 2.6 million voters—an increase of almost 500,000 voters over the 2006 election. While only 42.9 percent of registered black Georgians voted in 2006, 50.4 percent voted in 2010 with the voter ID law in effect, an increase of over 7 percentage points.[31] As Georgia’s secretary of state recently pointed out, when compared to the 2006 election, voter turnout in 2010 “among African Americans outpaced the growth of that population’s pool of registered voters by more than 20 percentage points.”[32]
The Georgia voter ID requirement went into effect because it was upheld in final orders issued by every state and federal court in Georgia that reviewed the law, including the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals[33] and, most recently, the Georgia Supreme Court.[34] As these courts held, such an ID requirement is not discriminatory and does not violate the Constitution or any federal voting rights laws, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In Georgia, as has happened in every state that has considered voter ID legislation, organizations like the ACLU and the NAACP made specious claims that there were hundreds of thousands of voters without photo ID. Yet when dismissing all of their claims, the federal court pointed out that after two years of litigation, none of the plaintiff organizations like the NAACP had been able to produce a single individual or member who did not have a photo ID or could not easily obtain one. The district court judge concluded that:
[This] failure to identify those individuals “is particularly acute” in light of the Plaintiffs’ contention that a large number of Georgia voters lack acceptable Photo ID…. [T]he fact that Plaintiffs, in spite of their efforts, have failed to uncover anyone “who can attest to the fact that he/she will be prevented from voting” provides significant support for a conclusion that the photo ID requirement does not unduly burden the right to vote.[35]
Clearly, such erroneous claims are an attempt only to frustrate proponents of voter ID.
In Indiana, which the U.S. Supreme Court said has the strictest voter ID law in the country, turnout in the Democratic presidential preference primary in 2008 quadrupled from the 2004 election when the photo ID law was not in effect—in fact, there were 862,000 more votes cast in the Democratic primary than in the Republican primary. In the general election in November, the turnout of Democratic voters increased by 8.32 percentage points from 2004, the largest increase in Democratic turnout of any state in the nation. According to Census Bureau surveys, 59.2 percent of the black voting-age population voted in the 2008 election compared to only 53.8 percent in 2004, an increase of over 5 percentage points.
The neighboring state of Illinois, with no photo ID requirement and President Obama’s home state, had an increase in Democratic turnout of only 4.4 percentage points—only half of Indiana’s increase. Turnout in the 2010 congressional election in Indiana was almost 1.75 million voters, an increase of more than 77,000 voters over the 2006 election. Indiana was one of the states with a “large and impressive” increase in black turnout in the 2010 election: “the black share of the state vote was higher in 2010 than it was in 2008, a banner year for black turnout.”[36] In fact, the black share of the total vote went from only 7 percent in 2008 to 12 percent in 2010 (this in the state with the strictest voter ID law in the country).[37]
One misleading story constantly relied on by opponents of Indiana’s ID law is the claim that elderly nuns in Indiana “were turned away from the polls for lack of picture IDs.”[38] In fact, the nuns had pointedly refused to obtain photo IDs to vote prior to the election and were turned away from the polls by another nun who ran the convent precinct, violating federal and state law that required her to provide the nuns with provisional ballots. Those ballots would have been counted if the nuns had gone to the county clerk’s office within 10 days after the election to show an ID or sign an affidavit testifying to their identity. An office where they could have easily obtained an ID was only two miles from the convent. These nuns were also all over 65, automatically entitling them to vote by absentee ballot without an ID.[39]
The nuns could have voted without difficulty were it not for their refusal (not inability) to comply with Indiana law and the refusal of the precinct election official, their fellow sister, to comply with federal and state law.[40] This incident raises the question of whether the entire incident was trumped up to generate misleading news from gullible reporters and sympathetic activists.
Just as in the federal case in Georgia, the federal court in Indiana noted the complete inability of the plaintiffs in that case to produce anyone who would not be able to vote because of the photo ID law:
Despite apocalyptic assertions of wholesale voter disenfranchisement, Plaintiffs have produced not a single piece of evidence of any identifiable registered voter who would be prevented from voting pursuant to [the photo ID law] because of his or her inability to obtain the necessary photo identification. Similarly, Plaintiffs have failed to produce any evidence of any individual, registered or unregistered, who would have to obtain photo identification in order to vote, let alone anyone who would undergo any appreciable hardship to obtain photo identification in order to be qualified to vote.[41]
Despite the efforts of opponents of voter ID, such specious claims have failed to gain traction in any courtroom across the country.
Finally, opponents of voter ID laws have charged that requiring an ID, even when it is free, [42] is a “poll tax” because of the incidental costs, such as possible travel to a registrar’s office or obtaining a birth certificate, that may be involved. Such a “poll tax” claim, for instance, was recently raised in Georgia. The federal court, however, dismissed this claim, agreeing with the Indiana federal court that:
[Such an argument] represents a dramatic overstatement of what fairly constitutes a “poll tax.” Thus, the imposition of tangential burdens does not transform a regulation into a poll tax. Moreover, the cost of time and transportation cannot plausibly qualify as a prohibited poll tax because those same “costs” also result from voter registration and in-person voting requirements, which one would not reasonably construe as a poll tax.[43]
Clearly, these absurd cries of “poll tax,” are simply another tactic in the increasingly desperate campaign against voter ID legislation.
Conclusion
Despite all of the evidence to the contrary, opponents of voter ID refuse to admit that voter turnout is unaffected by such a requirement. Their claim that the implementation of voter ID laws “smacks of vote suppression”[44] is preposterous and an outrageous libel on the American people and their elected representatives. The vitriolic rhetoric engaged in by opponents of voter ID is a sign of desperation; their claims of “suppression” and “intimidation” have been shown to be completely untrue.
America is one of the only democracies in the world that does not uniformly require voters to present photo ID when they vote. Across the globe, democracies administer such a requirement without any problems and without any reports that their citizens are in any way burdened when voting.
In fact, America’s southern neighbor Mexico, which has a much larger rate of poverty than the United States, requires both a photo ID and a thumbprint to vote—and turnout has increased in Mexican elections since this requirement went into effect in the 1990s. Mexico’s voter ID laws are also credited with reducing the fraud that had prevailed in many Mexican elections and “allowing the 2000 election of Vicente Fox, the first opposition party candidate to be elected president of Mexico in seventy years.”[45]
Requiring voters to authenticate their identity is a perfectly reasonable and easily met requirement. Such measures are supported by the vast majority of voters of all races and ethnic backgrounds. As the U.S. Supreme Court has noted, voter ID protects the integrity and reliability of the electoral process. All states have a valid and legitimate state interest not only in deterring and detecting voter fraud, but also in maintaining the confidence of their citizens in the security of U.S. elections.
this is too funny.
again, where is the systematic disenfranchisement of white republicans?
there isn't any...
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
South Carolina's voter ID laws could disenfranchise blacks
http://www.thegrio.com/specials/the-big ... o-vote.php
South Carolina's voter ID law is one of the strictest in the nation, and that could mean thousands of voters -- particularly black voters -- in the Palmetto State could find it harder to vote on Election Day. NBC News correspondent Mara's Schiavocampo looks at the arguments for and against voter ID, in this month's "The Big Issue: Voter Denied."
SUMTER, South Carolina -- These days in Sumter, a lot of voters have questions, after the state passed one of the nation's strictest voter ID laws. Starting next year, voters in the Palmetto state will have to show a government-issued photo ID in order to vote.
Activists like Dr. Brenda Williams are working to register -- and in some cases re-register -- voters like Amanda Wolf, who doesn't have a current ID, and who are often learning that getting one is not so simple.
South Carolina is not alone. In what proponents call an effort to cut down on or prevent voter fraud, 31 states now require some form of ID to vote, including several 2012 battleground state. Some of the strictest laws were passed this year, including in South Carolina.
watch the video in the middle of that page...
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."