‘Rigged’ election claims then and now

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President Biden and other leading Democrats are aghast that so many Donald Trump supporters don’t accept the results of the 2020 election. But as these two videos by Matt Orfalea show, the shoe was on the other foot for the 2016 election.

First there was the campaign to persuade members of the Electoral College to vote for candidates other than the ones the voters chose.  

Then came the charges that the election result was somehow the result of a conspiracy between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.  All the specific claims in the bogus Russiagate scandal were debunked.  

Nevertheless Democrats proceeded with an impeachment trial on the claim that Trump had tried to obstruct the investigation of the nonexistent crime, which failed.  

Then they tried again for impeachment on the claim that Trump urged the President of Ukraine to investigate a corrupt corporation in his county for the purpose of discrediting Joe Biden.  This, too, failed.

Now they are pursuing criminal investigations of Trump’s business dealings and of his failure to turn over classified information.  Of course Trump may well be guilty of something and, if tried and convicted, he should pay the usual fine.

I think the motive for these investigations is to find something – anything – that would discredit Trump or possibly prevent him from running again.  I recall Democrats took a different stance about Hillary Clinton’s problems with handling classified information.

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Here’s the thing.  It is not a crime to claim that an election is rigged.  It is not a crime to deny that an election result is legitimate.  If you believe that, and say so, this is an expression of your right to free speech. 

I myself think there is a strong possibility that the 2016 election result was swayed by hacking of voting machines.  Tests of certain voting machines showed that the results could be altered, both on-site and remotely, and that there was no way to detect the results.

I’m not claiming this is evidence that Russians could have hacked these voting machines.  I’m claiming it is proof that almost anybody could have hacked these voting machines.

There were also widespread attempts to illegitimately purge voter rolls of black people.  Investigative reporter Greg Palast has been on this topic like a bulldog.  

I am certain that the result of the 2000 election was determined by illegal purging of voter rolls in Florida and may also have been influenced by a miscount of ballots.

It also is very possible that there was ballot-tampering in the 2020 election, although, if it was, it is just as likely that it was done by Republicans as Democrats.  Yes, Republicans are the ones making the most noise about this.   Recall the strategy of Karl Rove was to accuse one’s opponents of the thing you are doing yourself.

Once the election is held, it is too late to change the result.  There is a fine line between protesting the results of an election, which citizens have every right to do, and making an insurrection or coup to overturn the results.

Fair elections depend on canceling the filibuster

Democracy is impossible if the election process is corrupted. 

The greatest threat to the election process is voter suppression and other manipulations by Republican state governments. 

The proposed For the People Act provides a way to protect the integrity of the election process. 

But the act may not pass because of a Senate filibuster.

The top priority of the Biden administration therefore should be to get rid of the fiilibuster—both for the sake of the preservation of what’s left of American democracy, and for the sake of the future of the Democratic Party.

LINKS

The For the People Act Filibuster and the End of American Politics by Osita Nwanevu for The New Republic.  This is the key link.  The rest show that the threat is real.

Threats Against Election Officials Are a Threat to Democracy by Sue Halpern for The New Yorker.

Republicans Fall Short in Voting Rights Crackdown While Adding Hassle at the Polls by Ryan Teague Blackwith, Allison McCartney and Mira Roianaskul for Bloomberg News.

The Republican Party Has Turned Fascist And Is Now the Most Dangerous Threat in the World by Patrick Cockburn for Counterpunch.  I’d say one of the most dangerous threats.

Uncovered: Illegal Attacks on 384,000 Georgia Voters by Greg Palast.

Something Extraordinary Is Happening in Texas by Judd Legum for Popular Information.

Biden, Harris and their hidden constituency

Joe BIden and Kamala Harris have turned their backs on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.  Biden rejects Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.  Harris promised a Biden administration won’t ban fracking.  Biden is possibly more of a war hawk than Trump is.  So is Harris.

Why would they refuse to pay even lip service to popular reforms?  I think it is because they are appealing to a different constitutency—-the un-elected parts of the American power structure, the permanent government, the deep state, the power elite, call them what you will.

These include Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the military-industrial complex, the intelligence agencies, the news media, the corporate lobbyists and the big campaign donors. 

They’re fed up with Donald Trump’s antics.  They’d prefer someone more predictable, provided that person doesn’t threaten their power or wealth.  Biden and Harris fit that bill.

Trump is losing support because of his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic.  I think he’s also hurt by his administration’s hamstringing of the Postal Service.  Many people depend on prompt mail delivery of medications and pension checks.

His only path to victory, as I see it now, is in Republican interference with the election process.  This includes purging of voter rolls of minority voters and students, making it difficult for minorities and students to vote and demanding that results be announced before all the votes are counted.

This isn’t new.  Such tactics provided the margin of victory for Trump in 2016 and for Bush in 2000 and, according to investigative reporter Greg Palast, for Bush in 2004 as well, not to mention whole lot of other Republican governors, senators and congressional representatives.

I think we’re  in for a repeat of the 2000 Florida recount crisis, except spread across many states.  In that crisis, the news media, the Supreme Court and other powers that be sided with George W. Bush.  But I don’t think the powers that be will side with Donald Trump.  Biden and Harris haven’t given them any reason to.

LINKS

Rochester AFL-CIO Calls For General Strike if Trump Steals Election by Mike Elk for Payday Report.

How Could Everyday People Stop a Coup? by Enzo Lorenzo with Unity and Struggle, an anarchist collective. 

[Added Later] Why would anybody in the political establishment want to risk mass strikes and political demonstrations if they could keep their power without that risk by supporting Biden and Harris?

How Trump could win: (2) by election rigging

The stability of a democracy rests on losers of an election accepting the fact that they lost fair and square and that they will have another chance to win next time.  But what if that isn’t true?  What if the system is rigged?

Greg Palast, an outstanding investigative reporter, thinks the system is rigged.  He has been devoting himself exclusively to this topic for years.

He reported his latest findings in his new book, HOW TRUMP STOLE 2020: The Hunt for America’s Vanished Voters by Greg Palast with comics by Ted Rall. The book is highly readable, but if you don’t have time to read the whole book, Ted Rall’s cartoons sum up the story.  If you can’t get the book, check out Palast’s home page.

Palast found that, in the 2016 presidential election, 5.87 million votes were cast and never counted.  These included 3.03 mail-in ballots rejected or lost.  In addition, 1.98 million voters were blocked from casting votes.

This did not happen at random.  The 7.85 million Americans who lost their vote were disproportionately African-American, other people of color and younger citizens—all Democratic constituencies.  This probably gave Donald Trump his margin of victory over Hillary Clinton.

In Michigan, for example, 75,355 votes were not counted because ballot scanners in Detroit broke down, even though they could have been counted by hand.  Trump won Michigan by just 10,700 votes.  There are similar stories in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Since 2016, 16.7 million American voter registrations have been canceled, and they are disproportionately minorities.  The Democratic politicians are not the victims here.  The victims are American citizens who have a right to expect fair elections.

Voter suppression and election rigging at this moment in American history is done mainly by Republicans.  That’s not to say that Democrats are angels.  But, according to Palast, what election rigging they do is mainly in primaries.

In the past, ballot-stuffing by Mayor Richard J. Daley’s political machine in Chicago may have give President John F. Kennedy his margin of victory.  The word “gerrymander” comes from Elbridge Gerry, a 19th century Democratic governor of Massachusetts.

Present-day Democrats are strangely indifferent to this issue, as is much of the press.  One exception is Stacey Abrams, a Georgia state legislator who fought against voter suppression even before she ran for governor in 2018.

Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams. Photo: CNN

Her opponent was Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state, who purged 500,000 voter registrations on the grounds that they supposedly had left the state.  One of them was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 92-year-old cousin, who was turned away when she tried to vote.

Palast put together a team that checked out every name.  They found that 340,134 of the purged voters had never moved.

Kemp also refused to accept registrations of some 40,000 new minority voters and threatened to arrest Korean-American voter registration volunteers.  His margin of victory over Abrams was just under 55,000 votes.

This is something that has been building up for a long time.

In 2000, George W. Bush’s margin of victory over Al Gore in Florida was 537 votes.  Florida’s vote gave Bush a majority in the Electoral College.

Palast discovered that Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris canceled 94,000 voter registrations, mostly of black voters, on the grounds that they’d committed felonies in other states.    Palast got the list and found that exactly zero were illegal voters.

This was just the beginning.  Just in the past two years, 16.7 million voters have had their registrations canceled.  Among those who’ve turned up on purge lists are Sequanna Taylor, a Milwaukee County supervisor, who, coincidentally or not, is African-American

Palast said his investigators found that, in certain states, one in seven African-American votes and one in eight Hispanic and Asian-American voters were purged.

I refer you to Greg Palast’s book and web site for details about the Crosscheck system, voter caging, voter ID laws, removal of voting machines from key districts, voting machines with verification and anti-hacking features turned off.

Instead I’ll concentrate on the main threat to the integrity of the 2020 elections, which is problems with mail-in ballots and rejection of mail-in ballots.

How the 2020 election is already being rigged

Greg Palast is an outstanding investigative reporter.  For the past few years, he’s been working on voter suppression and election rigging.  He says the 2020 election is already being rigged in favor of the Republicans.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, a lot of us Americans will vote by mail instead of risking in-person voting.  But under present rules, Palast noted, mail voting is easy to tamper with.

Historically, 22 percent of mail ballots are thrown away and never counted.  This doesn’t happen at random, Palast said.  The ballots that are thrown away are disproportionately black and Hispanic voters.

Mail ballots are not secret.  The person counting your ballot knows who you are and how you voted.  If he or she says the ballot isn’t filled out correctly, they are not going to be questioned.

Voters don’t automatically get mail-in ballots.  In many states, the state sends postcards—postcards that look like junk mail—asking if you want a mail-in ballot.  Not every citizen gets one.  If some states, if you haven’t voted in the last few elections, you’re considered “inactive” and are stricken from the mailing list.

Then there are technical requirements for filling out the ballot correctly.  In some states, voters have to include copies of their photo IDs.  Try doing that if you don’t have a copier at home.  Kinkos and other copying companies are closed during the pandemic.

Eight states, including Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Carolina, require mail-in votes to be signed by a witness, Palast wrote. Three states, including Missouri, require the signature on the mail-in ballot to be notarized, he said.  Alabama requires a notary and two other witnesses.

All but six states, he wrote, check your signature on the mail-in ballot against your signature on the voter registration rolls.  Whether or not it matches is a subjective decision by a possibly partisan election official.

I’m not saying Democratic leaders are not inherently more honest than Republicans.  The Democratic Party has a long history of voter suppression and election rigging, especially to disenfranchise black voters in the South.

But at this moment in history, it is the Republicans whose power depends on manipulating the election process.

Voter suppression in the Democratic primary

The line to vote in the Democratic presidential primary at 9:25 p.m. March 3 at Texas Southern University. Photo: Texas Observer

I don’t blame voter suppression for Bernie Sanders’ losses in the Democratic primary.  Not entirely.  There were a lot of reasons he lost and Joe Biden won.

Sanders appealed to young, first-time voters, and registering to vote for the first time can be complicated and time-consuming, even under normal conditions.

Voter registration is especially difficult for renters, because you have to re-register every time you move to a new district.  Young people, poor people and minorities are disproportionately renters.

In most states, you have to register by a certain deadline.  Michigan had same-day registration, but there were long lines of would-be new voters yesterday several hours after the polls closed.

Some state governments have closed polling stations in places where there are high concentrations of college students, minorities and poor people.  This is mainly a result of a Republican effort to discourage voting by core Democratic constituencies, but it worked against Sanders.

Also, voting in most places is done with electronic voting machines that can be tampered with.  I’ve been writing about this for years.  There are suspicious discrepancies between exit polls and the actual vote.

The only way to guarantee this won’t happen is with paper ballots counted by hand in public.  In New York state, where I vote, there are paper ballots scanned by machines.

In principle, these ballots could by hand-counted if there was a question as to whether they were scanned correctly.  But in practice, the verification would almost certainly be done in a second scanning by a different machine.

Electronic voting machines are easy to hack

Source: XKCD

Electronic voting systems have long been vulnerable to tampering and hacking.  This has been known for more than 10 years, but little or nothing has been done about it.

Having a vulnerable system is like leaving your door unlocked or the keys in the ignition of your car.  Eventually somebody is going to take advantage of you.

If we Americans want to protect our voting systems from tampering, it doesn’t matter if the suspected tamperers are Russians, Republicans or somebody else.  We need written ballots that are hand-counted in public.

That’s only one of many problems.   Our election system is increasingly rigged to favor Republicans by discouraging or disqualifying voting by poor people, young people and people of color.

LINKS

How They Could Steal the Election This Time by Ronnie Dugger for The Nation (2004)

It’s Magic! by Greg Palast (2012)

How They’re Stealing Ohio: Vote machines audit function turned off—and worse by Greg Palast  (2016)

Justice Department Warns It Might Not Be Able to Prosecute Voting Machine Hackers by Kim Zetter for Motherboard [Added 9/31/2018]

How to Fight Voter Suppression in 2018 by Edward Burmila for Dissent Magazine.  Twelve ways in which voting procedures are rigged against poor people, young people and people of color, and what to do about them.

Clinton was cheated in 2016, but not by Russians

Hillary Clinton was cheated out of her victory in 2016—not by Russians, but by Republicans.

Republican state governments changed the rules to make voting more difficult for categories of people likely to vote Democratic, and they purged thousands of legally-registered voters, mostly Democrats, from the voter registration rolls.

President Barack Obama and Attorney-Generals Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch had eight years to do something about this.

Yet they did little of nothing—that is, nothing that I know of, but I want to hedge the possibility that there was some minor effort I didn’t notice.

The Democratic Party had eight years to push back against this.  The Democrats could have started a grass-roots effort to get Democrats registered despite all barriers, and to reinstate voters who were illegally purged.  Yet they did little or nothing.

None of this is an excuse for what the Republicans did, of course, but the Republican motivation is clear.  Why weren’t Democratic leaders motivated to fight back?

The anti-democracy movement in America

Source: It Bends Toward Justice

Democracy means rule of the people. But the Gilens-Page study of 1779 legislative initiatives in 1981-2002 showed that chances of success were strongly correlated with the desires of the affluent, but not at all with average citizens.

For example, polls show a majority of Americans want Wall Street banks to be brought under control, according to Martin Gilens, a co-author of the study.  They want a higher minimum wage, better unemployment benefits and more spending on education.  On the other hand, they are less supportive of abortion rights and gay marriage than the economic elite.   But the political system follows the economic elite, not them.

In other words, the United States is a democracy in that we have freedom of speech and contested elections, but in terms of outcomes, we are an oligarchy, ruled by the rich.

This is not an accident, a matter of how things happen to play out. It is the result of a deliberate campaign that has been going on for decades.   It is not something that began with Donald Trump and it will not end when he is out of office.

The anti-democratic movement has three elements:
• Use the power of money to dominate political discourse.
• Use the power of money to dominate politics and government
• Restrict the right to vote and other democratic rights..

I recently read a good book, DARING DEMOCRACY by Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet, and a young friend, Adam Eichen, that ties all this together.

I do have a few reservations about it, particularly the fact that they let Democrats off too nightly, which I’ll get to at the end.  But I’ll first summarize their main contentions.

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The famous Powell Memo—written in1971 by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—called on U.S. business to mobilize to counteract anti-business sentiment in the news media and the educational system.

Right-wing billionaires responded by funding the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks.

They of course have a perfect right to present their point of view.  The problem was that these organizations are dedicated to political warfare, and get to be treated as equivalent to groups who, whatever their unconscious biases, are serious scholars and researchers..

When I was a newspaper reporter, and had to write about something I didn’t know much about, the first thing I’d do was phone experts on various sides of the issue.

When I phoned the Brookings Institution, the person I’d reach would give me a carefully worded opinion, quoting sources and taking into account arguments on both sides.

When I phoned the Heritage Foundation, I’d talk to some young guy who had talking points down pat, but couldn’t back them up. Yet by the rules of my game, I had to treat them as equal authorities.

The Cato Institute, funded by the Koch brothers, consisted of sincere libertarians, who sometimes came down on the side of peace and civil liberties. But when their views closed with corporate interests, the Koch brothers purged the staff.

Voter registrations disappear in Georgia

Greg Palast

The intrepid Greg Palast, who has been reporting since before 2004 on vote-rigging and voter suppression in the USA, said that 10,000 newly-registered Korean-Americans and 40,000 newly-registered African-Americans have simply vanished from Georgia’s voter registration rolls.

The registrations were the result of drives conducted respectively by Georgia’s Asian-American Legal Advocacy Center and the New Georgia Project.

When the two organizations complained, they were raided by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.   In the end, no charges were filed, but the raids themselves were disruptive and intimidating.

Voter registration in Georgia is the responsibility of Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel, a Republican,   She is a candidate for Congress in Georgia’s 6th District, running against Democrat Jon Ossoff.   Voting is tomorrow.

It’s entirely possible that she could win with a margin of victory smaller than the number of purged voters in the district.

LINK

Will new Jim Crow scam tip Georgia’s Ossoff-Handel race? by Greg Palast.

How much was the election rigged?

Greg Palast reported on how millions of registered voters, mostly African-Americans and Hispanics, were removed from the voting rolls in Ohio, North Carolina and other states.

He reported how there still are electronic voting machines that can be hacked, and how, in Ohio, a new safety feature on these machines was deliberately turned off.

So there is no question that there was vote rigging.  The question is whether this was what gave Donald Trump and the Republicans their margin of victory.

Voters were removed from the rolls by a system called CrossCheck.  The system checks to see whether people of the same name vote in different jurisdictions.  Palast said as many as one in six African-American voters lost their right to vote through CrossCheck.

I happen to know through Google that there are a number of men named Philip Ebersole throughout the country.  Assuming that all or most are registered voters, my voter registration could be canceled without me ever knowing about it until I came to vote.

Election fraud charged in Democratic primaries

An organization called Election Justice USA has filed a lawsuit charging election fraud in New York state’s primary election.  A reporter for Counterpunch obtained the complaint and the exhibits.  Here is what was charged:

According to Stewart McCauley, who helped collect the data and analyzed it by affidavit for Exhibit I, EJUSA has found that “[t]here are four broad methodologies that were used” to disenfranchise New York voters, the first two of which were also present in Arizona.

“Two by hackers (possibly), and two that had to have been carried out by BoE [Board of Elections] officials and/or employees:

1) Logging in (most likely after identifying the voter’s candidate of choice) to the BoE database remotely and tampering with registration records, including back-dating of changes

2) Crudely forged hand signatures to alter party affiliation via paper forms

3) BoE “nuclear” approach: actively purging eligible voters through a variety of methods, including intentional bouncing of maintenance letters (but note that the majority of our respondents/plaintiffs could not legally be removed as it has been less than five years since they registered)

4) BoE officials and employees actively neglecting to register new voters.”

Source: Counterpunch.

The whole U.S. civil order rests on public acceptance of the outcomes of elections as legitimate.   It is possible for a reform candidate to mobilize people power to overcome the built-in advantages that the rich and powerful have in the electoral process.  But that is only true if citizens can register to vote and the votes are counted.

The right to vote, and have your right counted, is the only way you have of ensuring your other rights are respected—short of revolution.

Voter suppression in Brooklyn, USA

Democratic election officials in Brooklyn aremay be using the same tactics to purge voter rolls as used by Republicans in Florida, Wisconsin and other states.  Investigative reporter Greg Palast has the story.

Greg Palast

Francesca Rheannon, whom you may know as the host of Writers’ Voice radio, did the civic thing by volunteering to work the polls in a town east of New York City.

“I just got off my 17 hour shift as an election official. In my election district, out of 166 Democratic voters, 39 were forced to file affidavit ballots. The last [election] I worked in, exactly ONE voter needed an affidavit ballot.”

That’s nearly one of four voters. Why? Their names had gone missing from the voter rolls.

An affidavit ballot (called a “provisional” ballot in most other states) is a kind of placebo ballot.  You get to pretend to vote – but the chance it will actually be counted is …well, good luck.  If your name is wrongly removed, kiss your vote – affidavit or not—goodbye.

Rheannon’s experience was hardly unique.  In Brooklyn alone, over 125,000 names were quietly scrubbed from the voter rolls in the five months leading up to the primary.

To put it in prospective, the number of voters purged equals about half of the number who got to vote. Scott Stringer, the New York City Comptroller will now audit the Elections Board–now that the election is over. Hey thanks, Scott.

Neal Rosenstein, the lead voting rights attorney for the New York Public Interest Research Group, which plans legal action, notes that part of the problem is that partisan hacks sit on the Elections board in New York—hacks from both parties.

Brooklyn is under the control of the Kings County Democratic Party, one of the last of the big city machines.  Would they attack their opponents’ voter registrations? 

I don’t have to guess: in my wasted younger days, I was in the Brooklyn County elections office with the hacks where we were assigned by the Party to challenge voters’ signatures en masse.  (I wouldn’t and nearly lost my state job.)

Am I saying the machine “fixed” the election for Hillary Clinton?  Without further investigation, it would be irresponsible for me to pronounce judgment.  Some of the purged may have moved, some have died.  But those who waited in line only to fill out affidavit ballots are unlikely to be deceased.

If the Machine had been aware of the mass purge underway, would they have stopped it? As they say in Brooklyn, Fahgeddabouddit.

Source: Greg Palast.

Can we have a fair election?

In a capitalist democracy, there are two sources of power—money power and people power.

These days money power is flourishing—partly because of court decisions that say spending money is free speech under the First Amendment, and that corporations have First Amendment rights, but more simply because of the enormous concentration of wealth.

At the same time, Republican state legislatures are rigging the election process through gerrymandering, and figuring out ways to disqualify voters, especially blacks, Hispanics and students, and make it more difficult to register to vote.

An analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice indicated that the reduction in the number of votes as a result of voter suppression laws in 2014 was greater than the margin of victory in the North Carolina and Virginia Senate races and in the Kansas and Florida Governorship races.

The Brennan Center can’t prove that the suppressed voters would have voted for the losing candidate, but that’s not the point.  Voting should be regarded as a basic American right.  If it isn’t, we Americans might as well go back to being ruled by hereditary monarchs and aristocrats.

Elizabeth Drew wrote that it is telling how few Republicans participated in the 50th anniversary of the Selma, Alabama, voting rights march.

Investigative reporter Brad Friedman reported electronic voting machines are an even more insidious threat to voting rights, because your vote can be canceled without your knowledge.   He told how easy it is to tamper with electronic voting machines without detection.  Internet voting is even worse.

The silence of the Democrats

It is not hard to understand the Republican motive for wanting to make it more difficult for poor people, minorities and young people to vote.

Neither is it hard to understand the motive for wanting to remove minorities from voting rolls by fair means or foul.  I don’t respect the motive, but I understand it.

What I do not understand is why the Democrats are so passive about this.  Why aren’t Democrats fighting against the obstacles that keep their constituent groups from voting, and fighting to get their supporters registered and to the polls?  It’s almost as if they don’t care about winning.

Remembering Heinlein’s Rule, I never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity and inertia.

But if I were more cynical than I actually am, I would say it as if the Democratic leaders fear being identified with poor people, minorities and the young more than they want their votes.

If I were even more cynical than that, I would say it is as if Democratic leaders would rather lose than increase the influence of poor people, minorities and the young within their party.

Voter purge may have decided Senate election

Statistician Nate Silver called the 2012 elections with almost pinpoint accuracy.  But this time around he underestimated the Republican margins of victory by an average of 4 percentage points.

Greg Palast, an independent reporter, wrote that the explanation may be less in Silver’s forecasting methods than in the systematic disqualification of Democratic-tending voters by Republican state governments using a system called CrossCheck.

CrossCheck is a system for comparing the names of voters in different states.  The assumption (if it were in effect in New York state) would be that if there is a record of a Phil Ebersole voting in Pennsylvania, Ohio or some other state as well as here in Rochester, N.Y., which is quite likely, they are all the same person voting in multiple states.

Just stop and think a minute about how crazy an idea this is.

Driving to anywhere in Pennsylvania would take two to five hours one way.  The political consultant Dick Morris said on Fox News that up to 1 million Americans are doing this.  That is, up to 1 million Americans have taken the trouble to register and vote in multiple states and then to go vote on election day.

This is—how shall I put it?—stark raving lunatic mad.

How difficult is it, really, to get voter photo ID?

Getting photo ID for voting is damned difficult if the process is set up intentionally to make it hard for you.

Richard Sobel, a researcher for Harvard’s Institute for Race and Justice, looked at what some people in Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas went through as they tried to get photo ID.  He wrote a report on what he found, which was published in June.

He said “free” ID cost $75 to $150 if you figure in the cost of getting birth certificates, naturalization documents and other documents, the cost of travel, and time spent traveling and waiting.   Sometimes there were legal fees as well.

Sobel noted that this is considerably more than the poll taxes that were outlawed by Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1964.  I don’t see how any requirement to pay money in order to vote can considered anything but a poll tax.

Here are some examples from his report of what would-be voters ran into.

In Pennsylvania

According to a September 13, 2012 letter to The Morning Call in Scranton, a Pennsylvania resident seeking a “free” voter ID had incurred costs of $94.61 so far, which were likely to eventually reach $133.61. The potential voter traveled 34 miles round trip to and from the PennDOT agency in Bethlehem, an estimated hour of travel time.

Voter suppression will decide control of Senate

Source: Candorville

If the Republicans gain control of the U.S. Senate, it will be because of the success of Republican state governments in discouraging voting by minority groups and by young people.  They hardly bother any more to disguise the real purpose of the new voting laws.

If the Democrats retain control, it will be because of the struggles of members of minority groups and young people to overcome these barriers.  It is too bad that President Obama and the national Democratic leaders do so little to repay that loyalty.

LINKS

Republicans Are Trying to Make Sure Minorities and Young People Don’t Vote This November by Stephanie Meneimer for Mother Jones.

Voter ID laws in Kansas and Tennessee dropped 2012 turnout by over 100,000 votes by Philip Bump for the Washington Post.

 

A pre-emptive counter-revolution in the USA?

Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer that people do not revolt because they are poor and miserable.  If that there the case, the world would be in a constant state of revolt.  No, Hoffer wrote, people revolt when something to which they think they have a right is taken away from them, or when hopes are raised that things will get better.  Having a lot of highly educated young people without jobs is a spark that sets off the tinder.

If that is the case, the American people are ripe for revolt right now.   Although we are wealthier and more free than much of the world’s population, our economic security and political rights are being eroded.  The younger generation knows it is worse off than the generations that came before.  And the hope of change generated by Barack Obama has proved to be an illusion.

Historically the powers that be in the United States headed off revolt by responding to the discontented and bringing them into the system.   This happened with the labor movement in the 1930s and the civil rights protests of the 1960s.  But I think this time is different.

The electoral process is being altered to increase the power of money and to shut out minority groups, poor people, young people and others who might upset the status quo.  The legislative process is being altered so as to give veto power to the opponents of progressive reform.  The administration of government is becoming interlocked with corporations and shielded from public view.

Protest and dissent are being criminalized.  The U.S. government has the legal and institutional basis to impose a police state.  And the United States is being locked into NAFTA-like trade agreements which give corporations rights that override national law.

Another problem with voter ID

The problem with voter ID laws and all the other laws intended to restrict voter registration is that they will be selectively enforced.   Republicans in voter-suppression states will not try to disqualify every married woman whose married name does not fit her identification documents.   Rather they will have this available as a tool to disqualify someone whom they wish to disqualify for other reasons.

The Constitutional remedy for voter suppression

Since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, some of the Republican-controlled state governments are going all-out to find ways of discouraging voting, especially by people in categories likely to vote Democratic.

There is a remedy for this already in the Constitution.  The Fourteenth Amendment states that when adults not convicted of a crime are denied the right to vote, then that state’s congressional representation should be diminished accordingly.  Here is the wording.

…When the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial Officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion or other crime, the basis of such representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

This by the way is the only provision of the Constitution that makes a distinction between the rights of men and the rights of women.  Susan B. Anthony objected to it for this reason, and she quarreled with her good friend Frederick Douglass for supporting it.  All this was resolved by the Nineteenth Amendment, stating that the right to vote cannot be abridged on account of sex.

This provision was never enforced.  In the years from 1880 to 1960, voter suppression in the South was much worse than it is now.  The laws and policies that kept black people from voting also kept poor white people from voting.  Fewer people voted in the 1928 presidential election in the 12 states of the former Confederacy than voted just in New York state; if this provision had been taken seriously, these states would have had less representation in Congress than New York.

I doubt the Roberts Supreme Court would be willing enforce it now.  Still, it would be interesting to see what would happen if voter suppression increases and somebody files a lawsuit.

GOP becoming the party of disenfranchisement

Republican-controlled legislatures in key states that voted for Barack Obama are considering proposals to rig their electoral system against Democrats, urban voters and members of minority groups.

Republicans in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio want to allocate their states’ electoral votes by congressional district, instead of giving all the electoral votes to the Presidential candidate who wins a majority statewide.  While this doesn’t seem unfair on the surface, the result in the previous election would have been to give a majority of these states’ electoral votes to Mitt Romney instead of Barack Obama.  That is because the congressional districts are drawn so as to dilute Democratic, urban and minority representation and give the advantage to Republican, rural and white voters.

Such proposals are only surfacing in states carried by Obama.  Republicans are content with the winner-take-all system in states where Romney won a majority of the vote.

Each state’s electoral votes are equal to their representation in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.  The Virginia state senate has reported out a bill that would award the state’s electoral votes by congressional district, and the two remaining votes not to the candidate who won a majority of Virginia voters, but the one who won the largest number of districts.  Under this system, Obama, who won 51 percent of Virginia’s vote, would have got only 4 of Virginia’s 13 electoral votes.

Meanwhile the voter ID laws and all the other voter suppression measures remain on the books.   It is true that what the Republican leaders are doing is not nearly as bad as the literacy tests, the poll tax and the other ways in which African-American voting was suppressed in the Jim Crow era.  It is true that nobody is being murdered for exercising the right to vote.  But the present vote-rigging and vote-suppression laws are intended to serve the same purpose—denying representation to minority voters.

This represents intellectual bankruptcy on the part of the Republican Party.  If they had a plausible plan for achieving peace and prosperity, they would win votes of African-Americans and urban dwellers.  By adopting their present tactics, they let the Democrats off the hook.  All the Democrats have to do to win the urban and minority vote is to not be Republicans.

Still fighting for the right to vote

Attempts to suppress and discourage voting by minority groups, poor people and young people did not affect the outcome of the election.  But that doesn’t mean that voter suppression didn’t occur, or that it didn’t matter.

On election day, I walked to my polling place, which is about five minutes from my house.  I signed in without showing any kind of photo ID.  I was immediately able to vote, on a machine-scanned paper ballot, so there would be a paper trail if anybody questioned whether the machines operated correctly.

In other places, people had to stand in line for six or more hours to vote.  Some were removed from voter registration lists for arbitrary reasons.  Never mind that it didn’t change the outcome of the election.   American citizens have a right to vote.

Voting is a right, not a privilege.  If you think differently, ask yourself what you’d say to the family of Medgar Evars or the other people killed in the American South during the 1960s for demanding the right to vote.  If you still think  it is a privilege, ask yourself who has the right to decide whether you yourself has the right to vote.

The Republican Party is doing a lot of soul-searching about why they do so badly among African-American and Hispanic voters.  I imagine the attempt to deny minorities their right to vote probably energized them to support President Obama more than they otherwise would have done.

But this doesn’t make it harmless.  Voter suppression may well determine the outcome of state and local elections that are outside the national spotlight.  The U.S. Civil Rights Commission should investigate and do what’s necessary to protect voting rights.  It’s too bad this battle has to be fought again in a new generation, but evidently it does.

Don’t forget to vote

Click on Candorville for more cartoons.

Will we have an honest election in 2012?

Dark red states have passed voter suppression legislation. Pink states have voter suppression legislation pending as of August.   Click on the Spreading Suppression link below for an interactive map giving the particulars for each state.

While I think Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are more alike than they are different on the issues that matter most to me, there is one subject on which the Republican Party is clearly in the wrong—the attempt to subvert the democratic process by creating arbitrary obstacles to voting, aimed at black and Hispanic people, college students and others likely to vote Democratic.

This is more serious than the Bush v. Gore decision, because it is not just a one-time thing.  It threatens to become a permanent change in the way we Americans choose our elected representatives.  It is a limited and partial (so far) return to the practices of the Old South of a century ago, when poll taxes and so-called literacy tests were used to to suppress voting by black people and poor white people.

Elizabeth Drew, writing for the New York Review blog, reported on what’s going on.

The Republicans have been making particularly strenuous efforts to tilt the outcomes—in most of the “swing states”: Florida, Ohio, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin.  The Republican leader of the House in Pennsylvania, previously considered a swing state, was careless enough to admit publicly that the state’s strict new Voter ID law would assure a Romney victory in November.  In fact a state document submitted in court offered no evidence of voter fraud.  On September 18, Pennsylvania’s supreme court sharply rebuked a lower court’s approval of the law, questioning whether the law could be fairly applied by the time of the election.  This battle continues despite the fact that the Romney campaign in mid-September suspended its efforts in Pennsylvania because polls show that Obama was substantially ahead.  Even if the state’s electoral votes are not in question the outcome could still decide whether a great many people will be allowed to vote in November, and could also affect the popular vote.

Eight states have already passed Voter ID laws—requiring a state-approved document with a photograph in order to register or vote, a form of identification that an estimated 11 percent or over 21 million of American citizens do not possess.  But these laws are just part of an array of restrictions adopted to keep Democrats from voting.  Some use other means to make registration difficult, or put strict limits on the number of days before the election that votes can be cast , or cut back the hours that polling places can stay open.

In the aftermath of the 2004 election, which was characterized in Ohio by lines at voting places in black districts so long as to discourage voters, Ohio Democratic officials made voting times more flexible; after the Republicans took over the state they set out to reverse that.

Iowa, Florida, and Colorado tried to purge the voting rolls of suspected unqualified voters, but their lists turned out to be wildly inaccurate.  Florida officials compiled a list of 180,000 people whose qualifications were questioned, but after voting registrars checked (some protesting the unfairness of the purge) only 207, or 0.0002 percent of the state’s registered voters, were found to be unqualified to vote.  Nearly sixty percent of the 180,000 names had Hispanic surnames, another 14 percent were blacks.  Officials said that whites or Republicans were unlikely to be on the list.

While a combination of outraged citizens and legal challenges led all three states to ostensibly give up on the idea of purging voters, Florida and Iowa officials have said that they intend to pursue those who haven’t been proven innocent.  As a result, hundreds of thousands of citizens don’t know if they’ll be allowed to vote—which, like a number of the restrictions, could be a disincentive to even subjecting oneself to what could be a hassle or humiliation at the polling place.  Florida also enacted a voter ID law, which was struck down by a federal court. 

Ever on the lookout for ways to keep Democratic supporters from the polling places, the state cut short the number of days for early voting, and established rules that in effect barred outside groups such as the League of Women Voters from conducting registration drives. Though this restriction was later overturned by a federal court, voter registration groups said that important time had been lost while they contested the new restrictions on their activities.

In Ohio—the swingyest of the swing states, now in Republican control—secretary of state Jon Husted is trying to block voting on any weekend before the election; and he has appealed the ruling of a federal district judge ordering him to allow voting even during the last weekend before the election.  Husted also made the extraordinary proposal that voting hours in Ohio be extended solely in white districts, but this preposterous idea couldn’t withstand a citizen outcry.  Two Democratic county election officials from the Dayton area (one the few predominantly Democratic counties in the state) who objected to Husted’s proposal to permit no weekend voting were fired.

Elizabeth Drew noted that many American citizens will go to the polls in November not knowing whether they will be allowed to vote or not.

Having covered Watergate and the impeachment of Richard Nixon, and more recently written a biography of Nixon, I believe that the wrongdoing we are seeing in this election is more menacing even than what went on then.  Watergate was a struggle over the Constitutional powers and accountability of a president, and, alarmingly, the president and his aides attempted to interfere with the nominating process of the opposition party.  But the current voting rights issue is even more serious: it’s a coordinated attempt by a political party to fix the result of a presidential election by restricting the opportunities of members of the opposition party’s constituency—most notably blacks—to exercise a Constitutional right.

This is the worst thing that has happened to our democratic election system since the late nineteenth century, when legislatures in southern states systematically negated the voting rights blacks had won in the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

While she and other writers focus on the Presidential election, voter suppression tactics are likely to be more effective, and more dangerous, in state and local election contests that don’t attract much attention and election tampering is less likely to provoke a big outcry.

Click on Voting Wrongs for Elizabeth Drew’s full report on voter suppression for NYRblog.

Click on Spreading Suppression for an interactive version of the above map showing the status of voter ID laws and other voter suppression legislation in the various states.

Click on The Ballot Cops for Mariah Blake’s report on voter intimidation in The Atlantic.

Click on Machine politics: the real threat of voter fraud for my earlier post on voting machines susceptible to hacking.