Wow, what a democracy we have. Early Saturday morning the Supreme Court, without any opinion to explain its ruling, refused to remove the stay on Texas’ strict voter ID law that had been granted by a the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Despite the lack of any majority opinion, Justice Ginsberg filed a dissent, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan which you can read here in full. Here’s the story posted by The Washington Post:
“The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters,” Ginsburg wrote. […]
But Ginsburg said the court had shirked its duty, since a district court after a full trial had said the law was written with discriminatory intent and could keep an estimated 600,000 registered voters from casting ballots.
This is a blatantly political decision by the court. The most comprehensive study of the alleged “voter fraud” these voter ID laws are supposed to prevent (i.e., voters showing up at the polls claiming to be someone they are not) could find only thirty-one cases of such voter impersonation out 1 billion ballots cast since 2000.
So far, I’ve found about 31 different incidents (some of which involve multiple ballots) since 2000, anywhere in the country. If you want to check my work, you can read a comprehensive list of the incidents below.
To put this in perspective, the 31 incidents below come in the context of general, primary, special, and municipal elections from 2000 through 2014. In general and primary elections alone, more than 1 billion ballots were cast in that period.
Thus because of the infinitesimal risk of a few wrongful votes being cast, over 600,000 people have just been disenfranchised in Texas. As Justice Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit, a conservative Reagan appointee, and no friend to liberals, but perhaps the most respected jurist in the country, recently wrote in his own damning opinion of a similar voter ID law in Wisconsin:
“There is only one motivation for imposing burdens on voting that are ostensibly designed to discourage voter-impersonation fraud, if there is no actual danger of such fraud, and that is to discourage voting by persons likely to vote against the party responsible for imposing the burdens.”
Well, we now know that the Roberts’ Court cares more about helping elect Republicans to office by preventing likely Democratic Party supporters from voting, than it does in legitimate elections and a true democracy.
