Five Million Voters May Lose Rights in the 2012 Elections 

By Brentin Mock 
Color Lines 
March 6, 2012

http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/03/voter_id_card.html

Today’s Super Tuesday primary involves 10 states and 437
delegates at stake for the Republican Party’s presidential
prospects. There are two states among that crop that are
worth taking a look at: Georgia and Tennessee. Both are
emblems for a growing, and troubling, legislative trend in
which new election laws mandate citizens to produce photo
identification to vote, ask people to prove their citizenship
to vote, or outright curtail voter registration efforts.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as many as five
million eligible voters could meet difficulties this Election
Day due to these new, imposing voter laws.

There are currently eight states with photo voter ID laws
containing specific criteria for what qualifies as
"identification" for voting purposes. Some states require
that identification be state-issued and only for the state a
person is voting in; some prohibit college IDs; some demand
that the full name and address on the card be current; while
some require that an ID card has an expiration date.

Looking at those stipulations, it’s not hard to imagine how
low-income citizens, African Americans, Latino Americans,
college students, and elderly voters - groups the Brennan
Center has identified as the most burdened by new voter laws
- might get tangled up on voter day. The Center estimates
that as many as 11 percent of eligible voters lack proper
identification right now. For African Americans, it’s 25
percent - that’s 5.5 million voting-age black Americans who
could get turned away at the polls for being undocumented and
unphotographed.

Other groups like Native Americans, transgendered people,
newly divorced, newly married couples or people who’ve
recently lost their homes could all have information on their
drivers licenses that reflect names, addresses and faces that
aren’t current. The costs for these groups will be more than
an inconvenience: fees for new birth and marriage
certificates, hours lost waiting in lines for updated
materials and transportation costs to handle it all.

How did we get to this point? Let’s just say the emergence of
these laws are no coincidence. Thousands of Republicans from
dozens of states didn’t all just wake up one day and decide
we need an ID card to vote. And yet almost every voter ID law
now in play or pending happened in the last four years -since
Barack Obama ran for and became the nation’s first black
president.

Republicans in state legislatures around the country have
tried to pass these laws for years. Their efforts had been
repeatedly voted down or vetoed out, mostly because the U.S.
Constitution prevents meddling with voters’ rights. But in
2010, Republicans not only took over Congress, they became
majorities in state legislatures across the country. Numerous
states that previously had Democratically controlled general
assemblies turned Tea Party-red, and one of the chief items
on their agendas was changing the rules of the voting game.

An example of this is Tennessee, which for the first time
since the Civil War ended saw its House of Representatives,
Senate and governor’s office all controlled by Republicans in
2010. Swiftly, Tennessee passed new voter ID laws, and last
year made headlines when a 96-year-old African American woman
named Dorothy Cooper was denied an ID to vote.

Georgia was one of the first states with a voter ID law,
first passed there in 2005, and today hosts one of the Super
Tuesday primaries. Today’s vote in Georgia, and fellow photo
voter ID state Tennessee, will probably reveal little about
how the new restrictions impact minorities and other at-risk
voting groups because they mostly vote Democrat - a fact that
voter ID critics stress is not lost on the Republicans who
push it. Nonetheless, election officials in Tennessee and
Wisconsin, which have already hosted local elections using
their new voter ID laws, have bragged about how there have
been no problems.

In Wisconsin, the chief elections officer Kevin J. Kennedy
noted only a few voter ID glitches where people showed up
with the wrong kind of ID to vote.

The story, however, is not as much what happens at the polls
when the wrong ID is used as it is what happens when people
don’t bother showing up at the polls at all because they
think they don’t qualify due to lack of identification. The
U.S. has a long history of voting shenanigans, from Jim Crow
era poll taxes to current era rumors circulated, often
exclusively in black communities, about who can and can’t
vote.

Come this November, during the general election, the impacts
of the new laws will begin to surface. Besides the eight
states already holding strict voter ID laws, there are 31
more states lurking hoping to do the same. At least eight of
those states could pass voter ID laws before Election Day.
And of the eight that already have strict voter ID laws, five
want to pass legislation this year that would make them even
stricter.

Who are the movers, shakers and shapers of these potentially
disenfranchising laws? A great deal of funding comes from the
Koch Brothers, who’ve vowed to remove President Obama from
the White House by any means, and by any billions of dollars
necessary. Another player is ALEC- or, the American
Legislative Exchange Council- a body that includes banks and
corporations working alongside Republican legislators to
craft laws that would dismantle not only voter rights, but
also environmental and labor protections.

ALEC, which has Koch funding, has drafted the model
legislation that many states with strict voter ID laws have
followed.

This is at least true for Tennessee, but is also true for
many other states. In Nebraska, where a voter ID law is being
mulled, a state senator flat-out lied when a news reporter
asked him about his ties to ALEC. Sen. Charlie Janssen said
he wasn’t a member of ALEC and had never been to their
functions, but then was confronted with the evidence that his
name was listed on their site as a committee member.

Other states share similar connections. ALEC’s Minnesota
state chairman, state Sen. Mary Kiffmeyer, is also the author
and pusher of a voter ID proposal that the governor has
already vetoed once.

In Iowa, a voter ID law co-sponsor, state Sen. Linda Upmeyer,
is ALEC’s treasurer. And in Tennessee, the state’s GOP Caucus
Chairman, Sen. Bill Ketron, is an ALEC member.

All of this has set up a massive and high-stakes battle for
civil rights organizations in 2012. The NAACP, the League of
Young Voters, AARP, black church groups and college student
organizations are all rallying to preserve voter protections
by scrapping photo ID laws.

In Wisconsin, lawyers from The Advancement Project, League of
Women Voters, ACLU and Voces de la Frontera, are in the
courts battling to have Wisconsin’s law repealed on the
grounds that it discriminates against people of color.

This week, Rev. Al Sharpton and his National Action Network
is leading a march from Montgomery to Selma, in commemoration
of the historic Civil Rights march and to protest stifling
voter ID and immigration state laws. In the federal
government, the Department of Justice has intervened,
blocking voter ID laws in South Carolina and redistricting
laws in Texas (where there are also voter ID laws), by saying
they both violate the Voting Rights Act. Attorney General
Eric Holder has denounced the laws across the board and the
department is side-eyeing other states that have passed them.

The irony, though, is that voter ID law proponents are using
the same civil rights arguments made to secure voting rights
protections to now upend them. In Texas, the state initially
failed to provide data on the number of African Americans
that would be impacted by new voting laws as requested by the
Department of Justice. As an excuse, they said they didn’t
collect data on race because the Voting Rights Act told them
to be colorblind.

In South Carolina and Georgia, election officials argue that
they should be released from federal oversight "put in place
because of the South’s violent history with stopping African
Americans from voting" because civil rights legislation has
worked, and no discrimination exists now.

The states are perverting and exploiting civil rights laws in
order to pretend that racial discrimination has been
completely eradicated. Some even point to the election of the
first black president and the record turnout of voters of
color in 2008 as evidence that no traces of discrimination
are left in the system. Instead, they claim to trace voter
fraud "people voting with the names of other displaced,
deceased or fictionalized voters" and argue this is why voter
IDs are needed.

All the data shows that instances of voter fraud are
negligible at best. The voter fraud argument is in many cases
a ploy to disguise the racial animus that fuels the voter ID
push, especially as it pertains to Latino voters. Many state
legislators will state emphatically that the need for voter
IDs is driven by the need to keep "illegal immigrants" from
voting. Former Maryland governor and congressman Robert
Ehrlich Jr., now an attorney, wrote in defense of a Maryland
voter ID law that, "This ‘welcome wagon’ for illegal
immigrants may reflect a majoritarian view in progressive
Maryland; nevertheless, it makes the realization of free and
fair elections far more difficult. - Every illegal vote cast
and counted degrades our democracy. Lax immigration
enforcement only magnifies the problem."

Many voter ID proponents might argue that voter ID are made
possible by the success stories of the civil rights movement,
but they also want to place barriers to voting because civil
rights legislation may have been too successful, as evidenced
by a U.S. president who’s not only a Democrat but is black.
Those working to put voter restrictions in place don’t want
that kind of election to happen again.

© 2012 Color Lines 
Brentin Mock is a contributor at ColorLines.com.

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