Voter ID Laws: Voter Supression Under the Guise of Preventing Individual Voter Fraud

"The GOP has transformed the legal apparatus of the United States into an instrument of partisan force." – Scott Horton "Vote Machine: How Republicans hacked the Justice Department" (PDF)

The GOP has been engaging in a cynical and deliberate attempt to use the justice system to punish their political enemies, justify and legitimate their systematic voter suppression programs, and seek electoral advantage by undermining the neutrality and credibility of our criminal justice system. Any citizen of conscience, liberal and conservative alike, should condemn these practices before their entrenchment in our legal culture enables Democrats to abuse power in a similar fashion as they move into positions of power.

Once an instrument of power becomes legitimate through repeated use, it is naive in the extreme to expect those who seek power to lay such tools aside voluntarily. The GOP’s misuse of our justice system in this fashion therefore threatens the freedom of every citizen and undermines the integrity of our democratic system of governance.

The GOP’s campaign seeks to build a myth of individual voter fraud in which large numbers of ineligible persons (usually non-citizens) seek to subvert our elections by voting fraudulently or multiple times. Concern about such fraud is exploited to pass draconian voter ID laws, the purpose of which is to differentially reduce Democratic voter’s effective participation (i.e. a voter’s ballot actually counting) by 3-5%, thereby allowing victory for the GOP in more close contests.

The second, even more pernicious aspect of their campaign is to subvert the Justice Department (and even some local prosecutorial authorities, such as The Maricopa County Attorney’s office) to bolster the claims of individual voter fraud by issuing voter fraud cases on flimsy and deficient evidence. This has happened repeatedly and is behind at least some of the U.S. Attorney firings that drew a great deal of attention last year.

In addition, the Justice Department has been used, as have the investigative resources of the FBI, to bring prosecutions for public corruption against political enemies and rivals of the GOP. From 2001 to 2006, the Justice Department had initiated 375 investigations of public officials: 298 of those investigations targeted Democrats, only 67 of them targeted Republicans.

The odds of such an imbalance being the result of random chance is 1 in 10,000. Based on the great number of public corruption scandals that have engulfed the GOP and dragged its reputation into the gutter with voters, neither is it based on the underlying proclivities of Democratic officials (who, being in the minority for those years, had much less opportunity to misuse their offices, in any case).

Recent Senate hearings have shown there is no evidence to support GOP concerns about individual voter fraud, which is the only kind of election fraud that could be addressed by voter ID laws. Watch the hearing (RealMedia).

Arizona’s voter ID law, requiring proof of citizenship to register and to vote at the polls, is back in effect for the 2008 races. The effect of this law will not be to stop voter fraud, but to stop a class of people, including the poor and minorities, from effectively exercising their franchise, giving a preferential advantage to Republican candidates.

An Indiana voter ID law is now before the Supreme Court, and in the oral arguments the Justices admitted frustration that they haven’t been provided any reliable data on which to judge the seriousness of the ‘problem’ of individual voter fraud. Download Oral Argument Transcript

(PDF)

A State must have a compelling interest in preventing such fraud in order to burden a fundamental constitutional right such as voting. As the method of remedying the problem imposes a known cost of effectively disenfranchising a statistically measurable number of the most vulnerable Americans, there must really be a significant problem and the court must examine the State’s method of addressing that problem to ensure that it is narrowly tailored to avoid burdening that right to the extent possible.

The Court has no such record establishing there is a serious problem with individual voter fraud, therefore the State’s response cannot possibly be narrowly tailored to impose the least possible burden on the fundamental right to vote. If the Court upholds the Indiana law, the ruling will be utterly illegitimate and primarily based on the partisan bias of the Court.

Voter ID is merely a legal means of harassing certain classes of voters. Voter turn-out is not the issue, as turn-out is apparently not much affected by voter ID laws. Rather, it is the effective exercise of the voter’s franchise that is the issue. A person without adequate ID may go to poll, and even cast a provisional ballot, but the likelihood of his vote actually being counted becomes much, much less.

Preventing people from coming to the polls and voting is much harder than simply creating a legal basis on which to ignore their votes. Provisional voting provides just such a legal mechanism that targets undesirable voters (i.e. preponderantly Democratic ones) by means of the ID requirement.

Many Republicans express derision for the idea that significant numbers of citizens lack a government issued ID acceptable under voter ID laws: an estimated 11% of the population (21 million Americans) lack such ID. Many of those citizens lack the resources (time, money, transportation, documentation) to obtain such ID in order to make their franchise effective. In the absence of any evidence that individual voter fraud is a significant problem, the burdens placed on these citizens to make their franchise effective is intolerable.

Every American should be outraged when any political party resorts to legalistic methods of voter suppression in order to win more elections. There is a clear echo of the legal methods of effectively destroying the franchise of black Americans for over a century in these laws, prompting many to call the new laws "José Crow."

Just as "Jim Crow" will forever stain the honor of my own Democratic Party, "José Crow" will become a source of eternal dishonor for the GOP. The temporary gains made as a result of such a shameful policy cannot even begin to compensate for the permanent reputational harm it imposes.