I don’t know how many undecided voters stumble across this ‘Progressive Community’, but here’s something for you to think about. In every presidential election there is one party that works fervently to register as many voters as possible and another party that works with equal vigor to create obstacles to registration and to cull the rolls of voters (not excluding fully qualified voters). It should tell you something about the nature of the two major parties that they each follow this same pattern year after year. If you are uncertain about which party takes which action, you can begin reading here:
Republicans are moving to examine surges in voter registrations in some states. A Republican lawyers group held a national training session on election law over the weekend that included campaign attorneys for Sen. John McCain and other Republican leaders. One session discussed how party operatives can identify and respond to instances of voter fraud.
Republicans said they are particularly worried about prospects for fraud in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and are beginning to comb thousands of new registrations in those states for ineligible applicants.
Meanwhile, the Democrats:
Obama campaign general counsel Bob Bauer last Tuesday said in a memorandum to campaign supporters that their own voter legal defense operation is under way, earlier than those of previous Democratic campaigns, including legal counsel on the ground in 50 states. The campaign is working closely with the Democratic Party, which said it has spent three years building a voter-protection program that includes more than 18 paid staff and 7,000 lawyers. The personnel deployed Aug. 1 and are dealing directly with local elections officials.
Or, you can put it this way:
Traditionally, Democrats favor fewer checks on verification and greater access to voting to encourage larger turnouts, particularly among lower-income and minority voters, who tend to favor Democrats. Republicans usually push for closer monitoring, in such forms as laws with strict requirements for voters to present identification, which can result in lower turnout.
The Republicans and the Democrats each have self-serving reasons to take these positions. But it remains true that the Democrat Party favors greater voter participation and the Republicans try to keep voter participation down. One of the recent tricks utilized by the Republicans is to claim that there is widespread voter fraud. Basically, they allege that there are voters who cast more than one ballot (say, in two locations on the same day), people that vote for the dead, people voting that should be ineligible to vote (not U.S. citizens, felony record, or too young), etc. The problem with these allegations is that there have been numerous studies done that show that these types of voting fraud cases are extraordinarily rare.
In recent years, the Republicans’ favored strategy for combating voter fraud is to enact laws that require photo identification at the polls. Normally, these laws require the Photo ID to be a driver’s license or other state-issued card. Most Americans take for granted that everyone has (and needs) a driver’s license or official photo ID, but that’s not the case. In every major city in the country there are thousands of young men and women that do not have a car, do not drive, do not do any business at banks, and simply have no need or use for an official photo ID. Many times, a school-issued photo ID is sufficient for whatever limited needs they have to prove identification. There are also many elderly people that no longer drive. Oftentimes, nuns have no photo ID. The Republicans know this, and they know that requiring a photo ID will inconvenience these groups, which vote disproportionately for Democrats, by imposing an extra step (including a fee) beyond mere voter registration to voting eligibility.
The Republicans have a relatively easy time winning this argument because the vast majority of Americans can’t imagine a culture where car ownership is foreign, where people never use banks for loans, and where the small fee associated with obtaining identification is actually a hardship. Most people are easily convinced that someone that can’t be bothered to get an ID probably hasn’t reached the minimum level of civic responsibility where their vote should be valued. But, even if this is an easy argument to win, it ignores the shameful history of voting rights in this country. We did not pass the Voting Rights Act until 1965. No one wants ineligible people to vote, but if there is going to be a bias it should be in favor of maximizing minority turnout, not suppressing it as has historically been done. When study after study shows that voter fraud is exceedingly rare, the bias should be against taking strong actions to stamp out that fraud if it can be demonstrated that those same actions have the effect of suppressing minority turnout of eligible (or potentially eligible voters).
And Republicans do not restrict themselves to tactics that are at least intellectually defensible. As the Washington Post reported in May 2001, the election in Florida in 2000 was affected by a highly unethical voter purge of eligible voters. In an effort to purge the Florida voting rolls of convicted felons a private company was hired that mismatched people’s names, ignored distinct birthdates and Social Security Numbers, and disenfranchised thousands of innocent people. And it resulted in the election of George W. Bush over Al Gore.
The impact of the botched felon purge fell disproportionately on black Floridians and, by extension, on the Democratic Party, which won the votes of 9 out of every 10 African American voters, according to exit polls.
No one has proven intent to disenfranchise any group of voters, but the snafus have fueled a widespread perception among blacks that an effort was made to dilute their voting power in an election that George W. Bush won by 537 votes — a victory margin of 0.00009 of the 5.9 million votes counted.
If there had been no effort to purge felons off the voting rolls or if the effort had limited itself to purging actual felons, Al Gore would have won the state of Florida and become the 43d President of the United States. But, rather than focus on that regrettable fact, I want you to focus on the fact that Republicans engage in this type of behavior in every presidential election (and in many state-wide and local elections as well). The Republicans may not consistently break the law, but they do consistently seek to discourage eligible voters from turning out to the polls. Meanwhile, Democrats consistently do the opposite.
Set aside for a moment your position on issues like tax policy or gay rights or abortion or government regulation. You may find that you are generally more sympathetic to the Republicans’ point of view on those issues. But it should concern you that the Republicans feel it is necessary to suppress the vote (particularly the minority vote) in order to win elections. In a system like we have in America, where your preferred policies are best promoted by having the politicians that espouse them win elections, it is tempting to support (or, at least, look the other way at) tactics that give you your desired result. But more important that the outcome of any given election is the legitimacy of that election. If you can only win by denying eligible people the right to vote or by inconveniencing so many of your political opponents to the degree that it significantly depresses their turnout, then you are undermining the very principles that confer legitimacy on the winner of elections. Elections are designed to measure the Will of the People at a given point in time. It is this Will which confers legitimacy and gives a political party the right to govern. If the measurement is inaccurate or it is biased so badly as to switch the result, then the Will has not been accurately measured.
There is also an argument that the larger the sample of the Will (the more voters that participate) the more accurate (and therefore legitimate) the measurement. In any case, the Democrats consistently act to maximize the sample size and to assure the accuracy of the count, while the Republicans consistently act to minimize the sample, including by excluding eligible voters (and thereby skewing the accuracy of the measurement).
There is something fundamentally delegitimizing about the Republican tactics and even for an undecided or conservative-leaning voter, that should be a concern that gives pause to unthinkingly supporting the Republican Party at the polls.
Fantastic point, Booman, and something the mainstream should really be discussing, were they not all controlled by the establishment that benefits from as little democracy as they can get away with.
You can draw a line between Republicanism, their anti-voter tactics, and what just happened in Georgia.
Postwar Republicans, think the Dulleses, pursued a continuation of the goals of the Nazi Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, which evolved into the World Anti-Communist League, which flowered into numerous fascist coups around the world in the fifties, sixties and seventies (aided by the CIA). I get a lot of these names mixed up without looking them up but one fascist importation program had Ronnie Reagan as its spokesman (described in Christopher Simpson’s BLOWBACK).
This “rollback” policy (rolling back Communism) was a step up from Petain’s pre-WWII theory of “cordon sanitaire.” Part of the strategy of collapsing Eastern European Communist nations and states within the USSR was to import “anti-communist freedom fighters,” many with Nazi or fascist backgrounds, into the U.S. to become leaders within their ethnic communities here with the intention of reinsinuating them into their old homelands when the time was right. You’ll recall the minor dustup in 1988 when it turned out that the Republicans’ ethnic heritage group was loaded with war criminals.
[The reason why former Nazi prison guards kept being found here in the U.S. was that one branch of the government (CIA) imported them and another branch (Justice) kept finding them. These days the old Nazis are mostly dead and the Bush DOJ doesn’t look.]
There have been various programs to get these fascists and their kin back into former Communist countries. The National Endowment for Democracy was one. Lazlo Pasztor, the Arrow Cross fascist who helped Hitler in WWII, helped Richard Nixon get elected (through the ethnic arm of the Republican National Committee for Richard Nixon) helped steer money from the NED to the New Democratic Forum Party in Hungary. Paul Weyrich conducted training sessions for them through the Free Congress Foundation. This scenario has been repeated throughout the ring of former satellites around and within the former Soviet Union.
Another funding source has been the “Freedom Security Act” which funneled money (“endowments”) to candidates for “democracy” in newly “freed” countries. Saakashvili got an endowment through the State Department (read: CIA) during his stay here in the U.S. He was undoubtedly trained to put the shiv to Shevardnadze and to then be America’s puppet there in Georgia.
But to connect it to voting rights here in the U.S.?
Let us not forget Hans von Spakovsky. His parents “fled the Nazis” and came to America in 1950. This family history has some problems, the biggest being that WWII and the Nazi regime ended five years earlier, in 1945. When the von Spakovskys fled the Nazis they fled to Huntsville, Alabama, where the biggest collection of Nazis (the rocket scientists) had resettled. It doesn’t take too much speculation to put the von Spakovskys in the migration of fascists and war criminals who took the northern ratline over the Atlantic to the U.S. And it shouldn’t be surprising that a generation later Hans von Spakovsky was the Bush point man, toiling in the Justice Department for newer and better ways to keep black people from voting.
In short, you can look at the Republican Party as absorbing Nazis and Nazism (or vice versa), and you see the results.
this is incredibly important, and I have written about this as well – was actually planning on writing something very similar surrounding “voter fraud” being used as a guise for “voter suppression” or “election fraud” by republicans.
This can’t be understated enough, as we have seen from 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006.
When they hit on a winning formula, they hammer it home until proven otherwise.
Great perspective on the dirty voting suppressive tactics of the GOP. The one problem about presenting these valid facts to a Republican is they will discredit the voting fraud studies as inaccurate. They NEED the straw man to win arguments over to keep feeding their unethical/undemocratic points of views.
As a DC citizen/voter/tax payer, I would add the voting rights struggle of District of Columbia residents to your post. I have ZERO representation in Congress. The main reason given is it will help Democrats and hurt Republicans, ignoring that having equal representation should NOT be a political issue but is supposed to be a civic right of being in a democracy.
We’ve been seeing a lot of polls that indicate McCain and Obama running close, with McCain is a bit ahead in some polls. I think this is nonsense, and what is really going on is that the Republicans (with lots of help from the corporate media) are trying to set up a situation where a McCain victory is at least plausible. That way, if they succeed in cooking the results of the election, it won’t be obvious that there was any funny business.
not blogwhoring, just pointing out a blog that has made voting rights its reason for being…
http://www.bradblog.com/
I don’t always agree with Brad’s editorial comments (it’s his blog, he can say whatever is on his mind, I accept that)–but his obsessive following of Republican voter disenfranchisement efforts is highly commendable
This might be a good time to remind people to consider serving as an elections officer. In most jurisdictions your day begins at 5 AM and goes until the votes are counted, in a Presidential year that could be midnight.
One of the reasons Democrats lose is that we fail to recruit good elections officer. Just administering the election rules in a fair and just manner can make the difference between people voting or not. Many times the voter ID laws are not enforced in a just manner, for example, insisting on a drivers license in states that permit other forms of ID.
If you speak a language other than English, you can make an even greater difference.
Something to think about.
the only verifiable case of voter fraud that l can recall is ann coulter’s… and she got a pass on it.
go figure, heh.
For using the term “Democrat Party” like a right-winger. The proper name is the Democratic Party.
We should start talking about the Republic Party in retaliation.