This week, Project Vote’s new report, “Caging Democracy: A 50-Year History of Partisan Challenges to Minority Voters” was featured in McClatchy Newspapers and AlterNet reports. Download the report here and find more information below.
Weekly Voting Rights News Update
By Erin Ferns
Two controversial news items this week potentially impact the course of election law before the 2008 election. First, the Supreme Court has agreed to decide upon the constitutionality of voter ID laws, one of the country’s most hotly debated issues with a deeply partisan divide. Second, the names of Federal Election Commission nominees have been sent to the full Senate this week, including a key player in promoting the so-called “voter fraud epidemic,” Hans von Spakovsky – and civil rights groups are not happy.
This week, Project Vote’s new report, “Caging Democracy: A 50-Year History of Partisan Challenges to Minority Voters” was featured in McClatchy Newspapers and AlterNet reports. Download the report here.
Weekly Voting Rights News Update
By Erin Ferns
Two controversial news items this week potentially impact the course of election law before the 2008 election. First, the Supreme Court has agreed to decide upon the constitutionality of voter ID laws, one of the country’s most hotly debated issues with a deeply partisan divide. Second, the names of Federal Election Commission nominees have been sent to the full Senate this week, including a key player in promoting the so-called “voter fraud epidemic,” Hans von Spakovsky – and civil rights groups are not happy.
The high court will hear the Indiana case in January and come to a decision just “in time to settle for the 2008 election an issue that is generating fiercely partisan litigation and conflicting rulings around the country,” Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times reported Wednesday. The decision may have an impact on election law on a national scale.
“With the 2008 election around the corner, the fewer disputes we have over the rules, the better,” said Richard Hasen, professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles in this this Indianapolis Star story story. “We don’t have to be in the situation of another razor-thin election with a big question mark over whose vote is going to be counted”.
Considered one of the “‘most onerous'” voter ID laws in the country, Indiana requires voters to present state or federal-issued photo identification at the polls on election day, Greenhouse wrote. Voters may use a provisional ballot, but must go to the circuit court or election board and provide ID or sign an affidavit, saying she or he is indigent and cannot obtain ID. It should be noted that absentee voters and residents of state-licensed institutions are exempt from such requirements.
“But somewhere between 13 million and 22 million Americans of voting age, most of them poor, get by without driver’s licenses, passports and other kinds of government documents bearing their pictures, perhaps because they do not have the money to drive, much less fly,” wrote Adam Liptak of the New York Times Tuesday. Without evidence of actual fraud, supporters of voter ID have relied on an “unusual argument,” which the Supreme Court seemed amenable to in recently upholding Arizona’s voter ID law.
Liptak broke the argument down: “The reason to risk actual disenfranchisement is to combat the possibility that some voters may ‘feel’ disenfranchised because they think their votes may count less thanks to unproven fraud.”
That same “bit of legal logic” was cited to uphold Georgia’s voter ID law as well. It is expected to be challenged again in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and could be affected by the court’s Indiana ruling because the “central argument in both cases is the same,” said plaintiff lawyer in the Georgia case, David Bracket in this Atlanta Journal-Constitution report.
“In cases in which the right to vote is burdened, there is a sliding scale,”he said. “You have to look at the interests that the state is trying to protect and you have to look at the magnitude and character it imposes on the right to vote.”
Georgia’s ID historically differs from other states that have introduced or passed legislation barring against “voter fraud.” The state’s 2006 ID law was aggressively lobbied for by controversial Federal Election Commission nominee, Hans Von Spakovsky. Earlier this week, a coalition of civil rights groups sent a letter to the Senate in a “last ditch” effort to caution against considering his nomination, according to this Roll Call report.
“Mr. von Spakovsky is one of the architects of the Bush Administration’s voter suppression efforts targeting minority voters,” president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Wade Henderson wrote in his letter. “From 2001 to 2005, as an official at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, von Spakovsky helped steer the federal government toward voting rights policies not seen before, imposing sweeping restrictions that would make it harder for poor and minority voters to cast ballots.”
On Wednesday, the Rules Committee gave the full Senate the names of the four nominees, “but in an unusual move the panel did not include a recommendation to approve or reject the nominees,” the Washington Post reported. Now, leaders of both Parties must decide whether to consider nominees as a group in the full Senate or “face a vote individually.”
J. Gerald Herbert, executive director of the Campaign Legal Center and “opponent of von Spakovsky’s confirmation” hopes the Senate will chose to vote separately: “If they do, von Spakovsky will not be confirmed,” he said.
As we embark on another major election, our fundamental right to vote is in question, not only through legislation that disenfranchises voters as a preventive measure against “unproven fraud,” but by considering the confirmation – as Slate writer Dahlia Lithwick so passionately wrote on Tuesday – of “someone who symbolizes contempt for what it means to cast a vote.” Please see the links below for more information on voter rights issues.
Quick Links:
Contact:
How do you feel about the von Spakovsky nomination? Contact the Senate leaders who will decide whether the FEC “nominees are to be considered as a group in the full Senate, or whether each will have to face a vote individually”(see links below):
Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, D-NV
Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, R-KYMedia:
Follow news reports on von Spakovsky from 2004 to present in Project Vote’s media profile, DOJ Voting Rights Watch.
Reports and Briefs:
Politics of Voter Fraud. Project Vote. March 5, 2007.
Restrictive Voter Identification Requirements. December 2006.
In Other News:
“In 2004, Republicans used a Jim Crow-era tactic to target the voter registrations of a half-million likely Democratic voters — often minorities — for Election Day challenges in nine states, a national voting rights group has charged in a new report.” Read more on vote caging in this AlterNet report.
The institutionalization of partisan tactics are suppressing minority votes, including vote caging, the passage of voter ID and debilitating amendments to existing election law, particularly in Ohio and Florida. Read more on vote caging and disenfranchising election laws in this McClatchy report.
Erin Ferns is a Research and Policy Analyst with Project Vote’s Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD).
