Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Tuesday entered the turbulent political waters of voting rights, signaling that the Justice Department would be aggressive in reviewing new voting laws that civil rights advocates say will dampen minority participation in next year’s elections.
…Mr. Holder also laid out a case for replacing the “antiquated” voter registration system by automatically registering all eligible voters; for barring state legislators from gerrymandering their own districts, and for creating a federal statute prohibiting the dissemination of fraudulent information to deceive people into not voting.
We now have a decade’s worth of evidence that vote fraud, of the type that involves unregistered people voting or people voting multiple times, is so rare as to be inconsequential, while reports of voter suppression (almost all by Republicans) have over the same period been epidemic.
Holder and the Obama administration should run with this. It is, first of all, morally the right thing to do. Secondly, it’s politically advantageous, given who is primarily being targeted by these local efforts. But it is also a winning argument. On the one side, you have Republicans engaging in self-serving behavior ostensibly to combat a problem that according to the experts does not exist. On the other side, you have a large group of Americans being denied a fundamental constitutional right.
It’s also good to see that Holder is expanding this discussion beyond voter ID laws, and treating such laws, gerrymandering, and voter suppression tactics as of a piece. Hopefully he will add caging, frivolous voter eligibility challenges, and other vote suppression tactics to his agenda. And in the best of all worlds his people will also explore and highlight the coordinated national effort to enact such laws on the local level.
Politically, taking on this issue should be a no-brainer for the Obama administration, particularly since it’s not just minorities but also the elderly, disabled, and young adults who are disproportionately affected by many of these tactics. It’s always easy to scare people, and Fox News has raised it to an art form. But there are probably literally millions of people who can tell stories of being shut out from their own democracy, where a straight line can be drawn from their stories to the coordinated Republican efforts to shut them out. That sort of storytelling needs to happen. If the civil rights division of the Department of Justice can document the abuses and get some of these laws shut down, great. But even the effort to do so has the benefit of telling a story: Republicans don’t want you to vote.
Also, too, there’s no reason the White House and civil rights advocates should be taking this on alone. Hopefully, somewhere, some PAC is making a slick “I deserve to vote” TV ad with a rainbow of people (young, old, white, minority) describing how some politicians are passing laws and enacting policies and regulations because they’re afraid of us exercising our constitutional rights. It dovetails perfectly with the 99% narrative, too, since most of the politicians pursuing that agenda are in the pocket of the one percent. It’s an issue that needs to be pushed. Hard.