The Long Struggle for Voting Rights and Voter Suppression in
Pennsylvania (two posts)

1. The Long Struggle for Voting Rights - Al Hart, UE News
2. The Voter ID Struggle in Pennsylvania: Losing ID Is about
   Losing More than the Right to Vote - Hannah Jane Sassaman,
   RH Reality Check

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The Long Struggle for Voting Rights

by Al Hart, UE News Managing Editor

UE News
August 20, 2012 - Summer 2012 issue

http://www.ueunion.org/ueactionupdates.html?news=698

Since the founding of the United States, working people have
had to fight to win, and to keep, the right to vote. And
through American history, rich and powerful people, often
calling themselves "conservatives", have tried to maintain
their privileges by depriving other Americans of the right to
vote.

The story of the long struggle for voting rights in America is
thoroughly and brilliantly told in The Right to Vote: The
Contested History of Democracy in the United States, by
Alexander Keyssar, who teaches history and social policy at
the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. This highly-
readable account was first published in 2000, and the 2009
revised edition brings the story up to nearly the present,
when voter suppression has again become a national issue.

Before and immediately after the American Revolution, the
right to vote in most of the 13 original states was limited
mainly to white men, and in most states, only those who owned
a certain amount of property. Free blacks who owned property
had voting rights in some Northern states and, for a while,
North Carolina. The most common property qualification was a
freehold of 50 acres (among others, this disqualified tenant
farmers who leased land.) In some states the requirement was
property of a certain monetary value, such as 50 pounds, or a
taxpaying requirement. When Vermont gained statehood in 1791,
it was immediately the most democratic state, with no property
or tax requirements for voting.

The U.S. Constitution adopted in 1789 said very little about
the right to vote - determining who could vote remained a
state prerogative. But the trend through the first half of the
19th century was to remove restrictions on white male
suffrage. This was in part motivated by the drop in the number
of people who met property qualifications, as fewer men owned
large farms. War veterans - men who did not own property but
had fought for the country in the Revolutionary War and the
War of 1812 - mobilized to demand the right to vote. For
southern elites, the motive for enfranchising poor white men
was racial: they needed them to serve in the militia and catch
runaway slaves. The new western states and territories adopted
liberal voting rules to attract settlers, and some of them -
starting with Wisconsin in 1848 - even allowed non-citizen
immigrants to vote, if they'd declared their intention to
become citizens. But conservatives continued to resist
expansion of the electorate, and warned that with the growth
of industry, the country would soon be overrun by a dangerous
class of people who should never be allowed to vote: urban
factory workers.

The first big push to shrink voting rights came from the
"Know-Nothings" of the 1850s - an anti-immigrant, anti-
Catholic movement especially hostile to the working-class
Irish. Running as the American Party, Know-Nothings won state
and local elections on a platform of restricting immigrant
voters, through literacy tests, long residency requirements,
and long waits for new citizens to gain voting rights. The
Know-Nothings proposed that naturalized citizens be kept from
voting for as long as 21 years; in Massachusetts they passed a
compromise two-year waiting period.

CIVIL WAR AND RACE

When the Civil War began, only five states, all in New
England, permitted African-American property owners to vote.
But a war in which hundreds of thousands died, in the words of
the "Battle Hymn of the Republic", "to make men free" created
support for more democracy. The traditional sentiment in favor
of letting veterans vote now applied to 180,000 black men who
fought to save the Union. General William Tecumseh Sherman
forcefully made the case for black suffrage: "When the fight
is over, the hand that drops the musket cannot be denied the
ballot." Still, racism persisted even in the North; between
1863 and 1870, proposals to allow blacks to vote were defeated
in 15 northern states and territories.

Violent southern resistance to federally-directed
Reconstruction led to dramatic political and constitutional
changes. The 14th Amendment declared "all persons born or
naturalized in the United States and subject to the
jurisdiction thereof" to be citizens - including African
Americans. It also prohibited states to deny citizens "equal
protection of the laws", but did not explicitly address
voting.

In the face of racist terrorism in the South, more Republicans
became convinced that black enfranchisement was needed.
Following the 1868 election, Congress began drafting the 15th
Amendment. The final version prohibited the denial of the
right to vote "on account of race, color or previous condition
of servitude." But Congress considered, and came close to
passing, a version that would have protected African
Americans, immigrant citizens, the poor and other groups by
outlawing voting restrictions on the basis of "race, color,
nativity, property, education or creed."

During Reconstruction, and even after Northern troops withdrew
from the South in 1877, black men in the South enjoyed the
right to vote, and some were elected to Congress, state
legislatures and local office. Political alliances between
blacks and poor whites threatened the power of the local
elites. Their response was a renewed campaign of racial
division and terror, through which they imposed the "Jim Crow"
system - strict racial segregation and the end of black civil
and political rights, enforced by Ku Klux Klan terrorism and
one-party rule by ultra-racist Democrats.

ROLLBACK OF RIGHTS

If the stronger version of the 15th Amendment had been
adopted, it would have ruled out one of tricks used to steal
black voting rights: literacy tests. Other voter-suppression
tactics were poll taxes, difficult registration requirements,
all-white Democratic primaries, and violence. Poll taxes and
literary tests could also disenfranchise many poor whites, and
in some parts of the South they were used for that purpose as
well, while in other places they were selectively applied to
exclude only blacks. From the 1880s until the 1960s, the
federal government and courts showed little interest in
enforcing the 15th Amendment, so the voting rights of southern
blacks (and many northern blacks) were nullified.

The post-Reconstruction restoration of white supremacy in the
South was known as "Redemption." Keyssar titles one of his
chapters, "The Redemption of the North." While not nearly as
brutal as what happened in the South, the late 19th and early
20th centuries was also a time of reduced democracy in the
North. The nightmare of antebellum northern conservatives - a
massive, largely foreign-born and often militant industrial
working class - had become reality. So a variety of measures
were enacted in the North and West to keep people - especially
workers - from voting. These included literacy tests,
difficult voter registration requirements, long waiting
periods for new citizens and transient workers, and closing
the polls earlier. California changed its constitution to say
no one born in China could vote.

Many state constitutions barred "paupers" from voting, and
this was used to prohibit striking workers, or the unemployed
during the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s, from voting.

Other states decided that, despite the 14th Amendment, Native
Americans were not citizens because reservations were outside
the state's jurisdiction. By the early 20th century most
states with significant Native American populations allowed
voting rights, but only to those who severed their tribal
connections. Voting rights were offered, essentially as a
bribe, to induce Indians to privatize collective tribal lands
so they could be sold to non-Indians. Even after Congress
passed the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, many states still
found ways to disenfranchise native people.

Keyssar summarizes the impact of these attacks on democracy in
the North and West:

"...depending on the state or city in which he lived, a man
could be kept from the polls because he was an alien, a
pauper, a lumberman, an anarchist, did not pay taxes on his
property, could not read or write, had recently moved from one
neighborhood to another, did not posses his naturalization
papers, was unable to register on the third or fourth Tuesday
before an election, could not prove that he had canceled a
prior registration, been convicted of a felony, or been born
in China or on an Indian reservation."

WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE

The struggle for women's suffrage began with a women's
convention in Seneca Falls, NY in 1848, and the early movement
grew in alliance with abolitionism. But the prioritization of
black emancipation, and the silence of 14th and 15th
Amendments on women's rights, led to a split between these
movements. During the postwar anti-democratic retrenchment,
some women's suffrage activists - even key leaders such as
Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Carrie Chapman
Catt - pandered to bigotry with the argument that the votes of
white Anglo-Saxon Protestant women would counter the votes of
"ignorant" foreign, black and working-class men.

But after the turn of the century, a new generation of leaders
began to address issues of women workers and reach out to
unions. With backing from labor and better tactics, the
women's suffrage movement won the right to vote in several
states, and growing momentum led to the ratification of the
19th Amendment - women's suffrage - in 1920.

CIVIL RIGHTS VICTORIES

The mass movements of the 1960s - civil rights and the student
movement - led to major breakthroughs for democracy. The
courage of civil rights activists in the South built national
sentiment for change, and the brutal police assault on a
peaceful voting rights march in Selma, Alabama in 1965
prompted President Lyndon Johnson's push for passage of the
Voting Rights Act (VRA). This critically-important law
dramatically expanded American democracy and, nearly 100 years
after the fact, implemented the 15th Amendment. Some parts of
the bill were written as temporary emergency measures, but the
law was renewed and strengthened in 1970, 1975, 1982, and
2006.

Among other things, the Voting Rights Act struck down literacy
tests, which were always in English and were used in
southwestern states to keep Latino citizens from voting. Even
New York had a literacy test that prevented many Puerto Ricans
from voting. The 1975 amendments to the VRA made the ban on
literacy tests permanent and added "language minorities" to
the protected groups.

The 24th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1964,
permanently banned poll taxes. Another fruit of the '60s
social movements was the 26th Amendment (1971), which lowered
the voting age from 21 to 18.

The most important gain in voting rights in the past 30 years
was the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (also called
the Motor Voter Law), which requires states make voter
registration easier by allowing it by mail and in a variety of
government offices - including motor vehicle bureaus. Congress
passed the bill in 1992 over fierce Republican resistance, but
was vetoed by President George H.W. Bush. After the 1992
election, President Bill Clinton signed it into law.

THE 2000 ELECTION DISASTER

Despite these gains, we were reminded in 2000 election of
major weaknesses in American voting rights. Al Gore won the
popular vote for the presidency by 200,000 votes, but George
Bush won the White House in the Supreme Court. Florida is one
of a few states in which people convicted of a felony are
banned for life from voting. Shortly before the 2000 election,
Florida conducted a massively-mismanaged purge of voter lists;
many people who had never been convicted of a crime were
disenfranchised for having a name similar to that of an ex-
convict.

Many of us recall the other massive irregularities with the
2000 election in Florida, and the decision of the Supreme
Court, by a 5-4 vote, to stop the Florida recount and hand the
presidency to Bush. What you may not remember is that in its
decision in Bush v. Gore, the court's narrow Republican
majority declared that "the individual citizen has no
constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of
the United States..." State legislatures can allow voters to
choose the states' electors who vote for president in the
Electoral College, said the five justices, but the legislature
can also "take back the power to appoint electors." (The
Republican majority in Florida's legislature was preparing to
do just that, until the U.S. Supreme Court did it for them.)

That shocking ruling from the nation's highest court - and the
recent efforts by Republican state politicians to chip away at
voting rights - point to some fundamental weaknesses in our
democracy. We are long overdue to get rid of the anachronism
known as the Electoral College, and allow American voters to
directly choose their president by majority popular vote. Our
Constitution also needs one more amendment, like the one
proposed in 2001 by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL) but never
acted upon by Congress - a constitutional amendment declaring
all citizens of the United States age 18 or older have the
right to vote to choose their representatives.

Read about current attacks on voting rights here.
http://www.ueunion.org/ueactionupdates.html?news=696

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The Voter ID Struggle in Pennsylvania: Losing ID Is about
Losing More than the Right to Vote

by Hannah Jane Sassaman

RH Reality Check
August 8, 2012

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/08/07/voter-id-struggle-in-pennsylvania-losing-far-more-than-right-to-vote

[also on Organizing Upgrade - August 22, 2012
http://www.organizingupgrade.com/index.php/modules-menu/community-organizing/item/641-the-voter-id-struggle-in-pennsylvania ]

We're taking up a collection at my office, here at the Media
Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia, PA, for some of our radio
producers and campaigners.

For six years, we've believed that the right to speak means
little without the right to be heard - and hundreds of
Philadelphia and Pennsylvania residents have agreed with us.
we're poor and working people producing media that tells the
untold stories of people in Pennsylvania - and developing
those people into leaders united to change our city and state.
we're a tight crew, so when folks are having trouble, we come
together to help each other out. One young man, Marco (not his
real name), is a producer at Radio Unidad, Philadelphia's only
Spanish-language community news show. Andres and Paulita (not
their real names) are leaders in another immigrant rights
campaign that's been meeting since January. Even though they
work hard, support families, and in many cases own homes and
pay taxes--the state has unceremoniously canceled their
drivers' licenses, saying that the Tax ID numbers they used to
get their licenses aren't proof enough of their right to live
in the US.

But they have families to support, and work to do. So they get
in their cars and drive -  hoping for the best. But they were
stopped by the police, and charged fines of several hundred,
up to a thousand dollars, for driving without licenses. They
need to drive to work, to pay those fees. And they might get
stopped again, and again - and their hard-earned money will go
to filling the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation's
coffers. And that's what gets me.

As Charlene Carruthers said in her powerful piece on the
relationship between voter suppression and reproductive
rights, the current fight to make sure that thousands of
Pennsylvanians without ID get to vote is important - vital -
to making sure that our communities get to the polls to make
important decisions on the direction of our state and country.
Recent data from the Pennsylvania Department of State,
processed and analyzed by the labor federation AFL-CIO, shows
that 20 percent of Pennsylvania voters - and 43 percent of
Philadelphia voters - might not possess ID valid enough to get
them into the voting booth. But we need to understand two
things.

First - when states take away ID from poor and working folks,
or limit poor and working people's access to getting ID in the
first place - those people lose far more than their right to
vote. They often lose their right to work, to bank without
exorbitant fees, to get benefits for which they and their
family qualify, and, as noted, to drive even though they've
passed a drivers' test. They become even more invisible in our
society, and state governments and corporations profit off of
their struggle to meet their and their families' daily needs.

And second, when the state limits access to ID and access to
society unless you have a valid ID, it also takes away the
rights of multiple communities, in many locations in the
state, from many different kinds of people who need ID for
different reasons. When the electorate is divided - immigrants
from citizens, poor from near and new poor, working class from
middle class - everyone loses. In order to change that
reality, we need to do more than re-empower folks without ID
to get their chance to vote... though that matters. First, we
need to frame the voter ID fight as one that unites everyone
who has lost access to the tools necessary to build a
dignified life--no matter where they live and who they are. We
need to do the hard movement-building work of uniting poor and
working people across rural and urban, race, and origin lines
so Pennsylvanians are powerful enough to never lose their
right to vote again.

Bringing the voices together:  What you lose when you lose
your ID

After years of knitting together student, immigrant, low-wage
worker, and other communities across Philadelphia with
community media production, storytelling, and study and
leadership development programs, we trained a team of 30 folks
to canvass areas of Philadelphia that probably haven't had a
door knocked by an organizer for a little while. MMP leaders -
poor and working people from across the city - fanned out in
the neighborhood around 52nd and Sansom, a low-income West
Philly area where the city had ordered rolling brownouts and
regular closures of local fire stations in an attempt by Mayor
Nutter to save money in a growing budget crisis.

We surveyed residents on the struggles they were facing--
learning about folks getting by without jobs, without
healthcare, with aging relatives or young kids to support. We
cared about the context: What did it mean when Philly cuts
services in your community, when you're already going through
so much?

As we knocked on doors, we met one gentleman who had served
time in prison, but who'd been home, back in his community,
for 12 years. For all that time, he hasn't had an ID.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University has
described how recent laws passed in Pennsylvania, Tennessee,
and a handful of other states will affect the rights of
Americans to vote. But the right to vote might be the smallest
thing on the minds of people locked out of society without an
ID.

Lack of ID: One more blow to the poor

Many of the undocumented immigrants who came to the United
States for work didn't have ID at home, either, because their
parents were too poor to secure birth certificates and other
documents for them at home. When they travel to the United
States for work, they don't have the consular papers or
passports that other immigrants have, and they can't get GEDs
or marry. If deported, they are more likely to be separated
from their families.

Ex-offenders find it challenging to get IDs, a necessary first
step to applying for and securing a job that allows someone
coming home from prison to leave behind street hustles or
other ways or making money. As recently as 2007, Michigan
parolees were given parole ID cards with a prison photo and ID
number, but, according to the Michigan Poverty Law Program,
parolees couldn't use these cards to secure state services, or
exchange their ID for a state one.

One Pennsylvania group, Impact Services Corporation, has
helped more than 3000 ex-offender Pennsylvanians connect to
jobs and more than 1000 get the IDs they need after serving
their sentences. But, according to Impact, 35,000 ex-offenders
return to Philadelphia alone each year from local, state, or
federal prisons. Groups like Impact are helping, but ex-
offenders need more. Having an ID is the first step.

(Oh, and of course, ex-offenders have the right to vote in
Pennsylvania, but if they can't get IDs, now they really can't
vote).

Residents without ID are locked out of affordable digital
access and all the deals and purchasing power online access
provides.  Comcast, the cable, broadband, voice over IP phone
and NBC content company, rules the roost in Philly, where it
is headquartered here and serves as the major telecom
provider. But in order to get Comcast service, you need to
have a credit history (hard to establish without valid ID),
pay a large deposit, or prove who you are at a Comcast Service
Center with a social security number or driver's license.
Without online access, poor and working people also don't have
access to many of the tools that allow people to get out of
poverty. It's hard to research scholarships for school, job
opportunities, and available government benefits if you can't
get online. You can't even get a MegaBus ticket for the most
affordable advertised price of $1, find inexpensive hotels or
plane tickets (not that you could get on a plane or into a
hotel without ID), or invest hard earned money to make it work
for you.

Without ID: A shared struggle of millions of poor and working
people in the US

Some of the folks in Pennsylvania who don't have ID are
undocumented immigrants.  Some are people who've served their
time. Others are seniors who have never needed papers to prove
who they were in towns where they raised children and
grandchildren.  More are folks who have reason to distrust a
system increasingly interested in asking residents for papers,
or folks who had ID and haven't gotten a chance to get it
renewed.  But most importantly, when State Representative Mike
Turzai said that requiring voter ID would allow Governor
Romney to win the state, he likely wasn't just thinking of
Philadelphia and Pittsburgh; and he probably wasn't just
thinking about the top of the ticket. Pennsylvania has kept an
overwhelming Republican majority in the State Senate for over
ten years, and a majority Republican house since 2010, a
majority they aim to increase and solidify, by isolating poor
and working people from each other.

While unemployed people in Philadelphia are primarily people
of color, 75 percent of those without jobs in the rest of the
state are white, according to the Pennsylvania Department of
State. And according to estimates made based on the 2010
Census, more rural people than urban residents are poor (14.2
percent instead of 13.2 percent, and that's just according to
the stingy federal definitions of poverty.

We need to fight against this voter ID law. And we need to
win. But media messages and government policies have divided
us in the cities from our natural community in smaller cities
and rural areas in this state and in this country. What does
uniting across these geographies, and across race and color
lines, look like?

Carmen Cuadrado lives in a North Philly community that the
city of Philadelphia calls "blighted." When she saw her
neighbors lose their homes for pennies on the dollar, she
joined with Rosemary Cubas' Community Leadership Institute to
save her neighbors' homes. "I joined Community Leadership
Institute because I knew that it was needed in the area," says
Carmen, "And I'd seen that redevelopment was just a way of
moving us - the low income families - out of our
neighborhood."

After years of learning and leading at MMP, Carmen is now a
member of our Executive Committee. As part of our listening
and storytelling campaign, she traveled with other MMP leaders
across the state to collect stories that show how much our
struggles have in common. They met with residents of Jersey
Shore, Pennsylvania's Riverdale Village Mobile Home Park, 37
families that are being evicted from their community to make
way for a water extraction plant that will supply natural gas
fracking operations.

"Now that I own my own place... now, I'm losing it," said
Amber Daniels in the video MMP produced with this community.
"For once in my life, and now I've got to give it up, either
go live in a camper, or under a bridge. Where else do you have
to go?"

In talking together, Carmen, other MMP members, and Jersey
Shore leaders saw that poor homeowners in North Philly and
rural trailer park communities in central PA had something
powerful in common. MMP and other groups in Pennsylvania - and
in other states across the country - are working to bring us
together as a true 99 percent. While we must invest now in the
struggle to make sure that we can vote, consider the power we
will wield when thousands, millions of votes each represent an
informed, powerful person united with their brothers and
sisters. We are working to see ourselves as a class of people
who, united, can make sure that no state government ever has
the power to take away our right to vote - or to live in
dignity - again.

[Hannah Sassaman is an organizer living and working in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As the longtime Campaign Director
at the Prometheus Radio Project, Hannah helped lead and design
the grassroots organizing and legislative strategy that
resulted in the passage of the Local Community Radio Act-- a
bill that will open up the FM dial to potentially thousands
more community radio stations nationwide. Hannah is an
experienced trainer in communications and legislative planning
and strategy, and is currently a strategic development
consultant working with her longtime allies at the Media
Mobilizing Project. Hannah is a member of the Board of
Directors of Allied Media Projects, an adjunct fellow at the
Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation...]

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