Voter Suppression 2014

"There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the voter Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit a franchise that we see today."  

- Former President Bill Clinton, July 2011

Besides the threat to democracy from the Roberts Court's decisions removing restrictions on campaign financing (Citizens United and McCutcheon), there is an even more blatant and direct threat in the numerous state laws aimed at suppressing voter turnout.  Republicans quickly realized after the 2008 election of Barack Obama that voter turnout was a key to his successful bid for the Presidency.  They began a widespread effort to suppress the vote in states that they held - starting with voter ID laws, then purging voter rolls, then making it more difficult to register, then reducing early and absentee voting and, then, Obama's initiative to make voting easier notwithstanding, making it more difficult for people to make it to the polls.  I don't think even Republicans believe their original canard of enacting these laws to "prevent voter fraud," which is less common than shark attacks.  The suppression of the vote is nothing less than an assault on the most basic democratic right. 

The Republican momentum towards this widespread denial of voting rights was well underway by the time of the 2012 elections.  Based on the Brennan Center for Justice's October 2011 analysis, the laws in place by year end 2011 would have made it "significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012." Even so, it was not enough to stop Obama's re-election.  Then in 2013, the Roberts Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act in Shelby County vs. Holder.  Encouraged by the ruling and now in control of several more state legislatures, the voter suppression effort was cranked up.  The worst voter suppression laws were passed in North Carolina the month after the Roberts Court's ruling.  As Ari Berman summarizes in his excellent article on the North Carolina law: "In short, the bill eliminates practically everything that encourages people to vote in North Carolina, replaced by unnecessary and burdensome new restrictions. At the same time, the bill expands the influence of unregulated corporate influence in state elections."  In 2013 alone, at least 93 new restrictive voting bills were introduced in 33 states.  [Brennan Center for Justice, Dec. 19, 2013] 

Dana Liebelson writing on April 9 for Mother Jones notes the absolute wrong-headedness of the Roberts Court's decison to strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act on the basis that "our country has changed," and that blanket federal protection wasn't needed to stop discrimination.  "States that were previously covered in some part by Section 5 moved quickly after it was invalidated." Besides North Carolina, the states of Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, Mississippi, Florida and South Carolina pushed through actions to restrict voting rights.  Liebelson continues: "We found that 8 of the 15 states [previously covered by the Voting Rights Act], or 53 percent, passed or implemented voting restrictions since June 25, compared to 3 of 35 states that were not covered under Section 5—or less than 9 percent. Additionally, a number of states not covered by the Voting Rights Act actually expanded voting rights in the same time period.  The three states not covered by the VRA that did pass restrictive laws after the decision (Kansas, Ohio, Wisconsin) are all in the hands of Republicans.  No surprise there.

In addition to the state level actions, action at the local level by politicians and operatives designed to discourage voting are also being implemented.  These actions or attempted actions range from moving polling places out of the reach of public transportation in minority districts  to attempts to squash voter registration efforts and absentee balloting to closing bathrooms at polling places.  Honestly, you just can't make this stuff up.

The road back to fairness will be a long one.  None of the Congressional efforts to restore voting rights have gone anywhere.  Being somewhat cynical, I wonder: why should any Republican support fairness in voting when the objective of their party's effort is to suppress the vote of traditionally Democratic voters? 

Some law suits have been filed - most notably in North Carolina where the ACLU and others filed in late March to overturn the voter suppression laws there.  "The suit specifically targets provisions of the law that eliminate a week of early voting, end same-day registration, and prohibit "out-of-precinct" voting. It seeks to stop North Carolina from enacting these provisions, arguing that they would unduly burden the right to vote and discriminate against African-American voters, in violation of the U.S. Constitution's equal protection clause and the Voting Rights Act of 1965." [ACLU website]  The challenge is not expected to be heard until 2015, although the litigants may be able to get some provisions blocked before the 2014 midterms.  Texas and Virginia voter ID laws are also being challenged, while, on the opposite side, Arizona and Kansas are suing the Federal government "for the right to require people to provide proof of citizenship when they register to vote. A win for the states could not only make it much harder to register voters in those places.... It would also do major damage to Congress’s authority to establish minimum national standards for voting—a power that’s crucial for any effort to improve elections." [MSNBC, Jan 15]

There is no more basic right nor distinguishing feature of a democracy than the right to vote.  That right is now under attack and America is quickly losing its mantle as the chief supporter of democracy.  Let's hope we can regain some of the moral ground we have lost in the coming months and years.