| January 9, 2008 | by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, and Ali Frick Contact Us | Tell-a-Friend | Archives | Permalink |
The Obstacles Voters Face
Today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in cases surrounding the constitutionality of laws requiring voters to show photo identification. Indiana Democratic Party v. Rokita presents one of "the most important cases involving the mechanics of election administration in decades." The case challenges Indiana's strict voter ID law, which purportedly aims to eliminate voter fraud -- an issue conservatives often drum up as a serious problem facing the country. Yet as CNN legal analyst Jeffery Toobin points out, "Nationwide, despite an attempt by the Bush Justice Department to crack down on voter fraud, there were only a hundred and twenty federal prosecutions and eighty-six convictions between 2002 and 2006 -- a period in which close to four hundred million votes were cast." Even the Election Assistance Commission "found 'little evidence' of the 'problem' now being pushed nationwide by GOP operatives as evidence that disenfranchising Photo ID requirement laws should be passed in states across the country." "First and foremost, Indiana's law is a 'solution' to a problem that doesn't exist. ... In the entire history of Indiana, the total number of reported instances of" in-person fraud preventable by ID laws "is zero." Instead of preventing fraud, voter ID laws such as Indiana's tend to discriminate against low-income and minority voters. A federal judge compared Georgia's voter ID law to a modern day poll tax. The justices will rule on Indiana's law by mid-June, a decision that could affect next fall's presidential election.
THE BURDEN OF VOTER ID LAWS: According to the Transportation Department and Census Bureau, there are 20 to 21 million voting-age Americans without driver's licenses. "A 2007 study by political scientists at the University of Washington found that about 13 percent of registered voters in Indiana lacked the required identification." In Georgia, which has a requirement similar to Indiana's, "roughly 200,000 people who have no government-issued photo ID have registered to vote, and more than 60 percent of them voted in the last general election before a photo-ID requirement was imposed." Those less likely to have IDs are not only poor or minority voters, but also urban residents who don't drive, handicapped Americans, people living in nursing homes, and other elderly voters who have a harder time getting current IDs. Upholding Indiana's law, Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals wrote dismissively, "It is exceedingly difficult to maneuver in today's America without a photo ID (try flying, or even entering a tall building such as the courthouse in which we sit, without one)." Despite the judge's faulty assumption that all Americans fly frequently, voter ID laws have serious "suppressive effects" on voting, according to a Brown University study released this week. The study found that such laws lead "to lower levels of voter participation" and "discourage legal immigrants from becoming citizens, particularly for blacks and Hispanics, reducing odds of naturalization by over 15 percent."
A DEDICATION TO DISENFRANCHISEMENT: Under the Bush Administration, the Department of Justice has undergone a "sea change" from protecting minority voting rights to prosecuting voter fraud -- and indirectly disenfranchising minority voters. The Voting Rights section of the Civil Rights Division has led this effort, under the leadership of Hans von Spakovsky and John Tanner. A career lawyer in the Voting Rights section, Spakovsky used his position to pursue, in the words of six former career professionals in the section, "an agenda which placed the highest priority on the partisan political goals of the political appointees who supervised the Section." Spakovsky allegedly "used every opportunity he had over four years in the Justice Department to make it difficult for voters -- poor, minority and Democratic -- to go to the polls." He championed Georgia's voter ID law over the objection of Justice Department lawyers who said it would likely discriminate against black voters. A former Voting Rights section employee testified in October that former Section chief John Tanner was "both the cause and the effect of the politicization of the Civil Rights Division," and that until Tanner's mistakes were repaired, "the voting section of the Civil Rights Division will remain a wounded institution." Tanner also supported the Georgia voter ID law, which the employee called a "nasty piece of legislation" that had "draconian restrictions." Earlier this year, Tanner said minority voters were not affected by voter ID laws because they "die first" before becoming elderly.
THE UNPROTECTED VOTE: Even after a voter gains access to a ballot, that individual's vote is hardly safe. The New York Times magazine recently wrote that unreliabe electronic voting machines can fall victim to hackers or simply malfunction on their own. Last month, Colorado's secretary of state decertified many of the state's touch-screen voting machines, and Ohio's secretary of state released a report finding that such machines "may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process." California and Florida jettisoned their touch-screen machines last spring. As the Times magazine article explored, many touch-screen machines do not include a verifiable paper trail. They often operate using secret source code known only to the machines' vendors, creating "an environment, critics maintain, in which the people who make and sell machines are now central to running elections. Elections officials simply do not know enough about how the machines work to maintain or fix them." Some states, including Florida, have moved to replaced touch-screen machines with optical scan machines, where voters fill out bubble forms, which are then scanned and tallied electronically. Sens. Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduced a bill last fall that would eliminate touch-screen voting machines starting in 2012.
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