Published on Commonweal magazine (http://commonwealmagazine.org)
The Wrong Kind
Suppressing voter turnout?
Created 09/13/2012 - 5:17pm
The Editors
In 2008, Barack Obama
received only 43 percent of the white vote; without the support of
minority voters, he would have lost the election. African Americans, in
particular, turned out in record numbers for a chance to elect the
country’s first black president.
For a short time after the
election, it looked as though the GOP would respond by trying harder to
compete for the support of minorities. The Republican National Committee
chose Michael Steele, an African American, as its chairman and asked
Louisiana’s young Indian American governor, Bobby Jindal, to respond to
President Obama’s first State of the Union address. In view of the
country’s growing minority populations and shrinking white majority, the
party of Lincoln appeared to be reaching back to its roots
Since then, however, the GOP
seems to have given up on attracting many more minority voters in time
for the 2012 election, and has switched to another strategy: If you
can’t get them to join you, beat them back—with laws that make it harder
to vote. Since the 2010 midterm elections, more than a dozen
Republican-controlled states have passed laws that require photo IDs at
polling stations, impede voter-registration drives, reduce early-voting
periods, or redraw electoral-district maps. Despite their superficial
neutrality, these laws have a disproportionate effect on minorities and
the poor, as well as students, the elderly, and those with
disabilities—all groups that tend to vote Democratic.
A few of these new laws have
since been blocked as violations of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In
December 2011, the U.S. Department of Justice rejected a South Carolina
law requiring voters to present state-issued photo identification. Last
month, a federal court struck down a similar law in Texas and found that
the state’s new redistricting plan intentionally diluted the voting
power of its growing Hispanic communities. In Florida,
meanwhile, a federal district judge blocked a law that placed heavy
restrictions on voter registration, describing it as “impractical” and
“burdensome,” while a federal court in Washington, D.C., rejected part
of another law that gave Florida’s local election officials the
authority to shorten early-voting periods—this in a state where blacks
have been much more likely than whites to vote early and to register
during voter drives. In Ohio,
the Republican secretary of state arranged to cut back on early-voting
hours in Democratic counties but not in Republican ones. After the
national media got hold of the story, he was shamed into announcing that
all counties would follow the same early-voting schedule after all.
But new requirements and restrictions in other states have either gone unchallenged or been upheld. Judge Robert Simpson of Pennsylvania,
a Republican, found that his state’s recently adopted photo-ID
requirement “is a reasonable, nondiscriminatory, nonsevere burden when
viewed in the broader context of the widespread use of photo ID in daily
life.” (He chose to overlook the boast of the Republican majority
leader of the Pennsylvania House: “Voter ID, which is gonna allow
Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania—done.”)
Many conservatives agree with
Judge Simpson. The point, they say, is not to suppress voter turnout but
merely to eliminate fraud, and if this involves some inconvenience to
voters, so much the better. As Florida State Senator Mike Bennett put
it, “I don’t have a problem making [voting] harder.
I want people in Florida to want to vote as bad as that person in
Africa who walks 200 miles across the desert. This should be something
you do with a passion.” William O’Brien, New Hampshire’s Republican
House Speaker, argues that “voting is a duty of greater importance than
taking a plane, train, or going into a commercial or federal building,
which all require ID.” But voting is not just a duty; it is a right. And
we do it no honor by making it unnecessarily difficult. The reason
planes and trains require photo IDs is to avoid the real risk of
terrorism. There is no similarly compelling reason to require photo IDs
at polling stations. According to a 2011 study by the Brennan Center for Justice, “It’s more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning
than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.” The Bush
Justice Department spent five years aggressively investigating voter
fraud, and during that time not one person was prosecuted for
impersonating an eligible voter.
The real risk for the GOP is that
a high turnout among minority and low-income voters might keep Obama in
the White House. As arch-conservative Matthew Vadum has explained, “the
poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing
redistributionist politicians…. Registering them to vote is like handing
out burglary tools to criminals.” The point, then, is to protect the
electoral system not from fraud but from the wrong kind of voter, the
kind that demands policies—on taxes, entitlements, and immigration
reform—that the Republican Party is not yet willing to consider. It may
take a big loss to cure them of their obstinacy.
September 10, 2012
Source URL: http://commonwealmagazine.org/wrong-kind
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