While readers of The BRAD BLOG may be familiar with many of the items covered in Ari Berman’s fine new article “The GOP War on Voting” at Rolling Stone today (and in its Sept 15, 2011 issue on newsstands), it’s great to have a summary of all of the latest state-based assaults on voting rights instituted to date, in the wake of last year’s Republican wave election, all in one place.
Berman covers all of these and more in his piece on the “unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008,” described by one civil rights advocate as “the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century”…
All told, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting. Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Maine repealed Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973. Five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia – cut short their early voting periods. Florida and Iowa barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters. And six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures – Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots. More than 10 percent of U.S. citizens lack such identification, and the numbers are even higher among constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic – including 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African-Americans.
Taken together, such measures could significantly dampen the Democratic turnout next year – perhaps enough to shift the outcome in favor of the GOP.
Berman even offers the context, cited many times over the years here, of ALEC’s late founder and Rightwing demi-god Paul Weyrich who offerd the Rosetta Stone for the GOP’s long-waged voter disenfranchisement campaign when he intoned at a convention of Baptist preachers in Dallas back in 1980 (see video at right): “I don’t want everybody to vote…As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
Yes, that is precisely what this is all about, keeping legal (Democratic-leaning) voters from being able to cast their vote. It has nothing, of course, to do with “voter fraud”, as Berman spells out quite clearly (and with facts to back it up), no matter how many democracy-hating Republicanist clowns and disinformation specialists hide behind that entirely unsupportable claim.
Berman details the four main front ends to the GOP’s War on Voting, namely: “Barriers to Registration”, “Cuts to Early Voting”, “Photo IDs” and “Disenfranchising Ex-Felons”.
“Even in 2008, which saw the highest voter turnout in four decades,” Berman concludes, “fewer than two-thirds of eligible voters went to the polls. And according to a study by MIT, 9 million voters were denied an opportunity to cast ballots that year because of problems with their voter registration (13 percent), long lines at the polls (11 percent), uncertainty about the location of their polling place (nine percent) or lack of proper ID (seven percent).”
“Come Election Day 2012,” he adds, “such problems will only be exacerbated by the flood of new laws implemented by Republicans. Instead of a single fiasco in Florida [as in the 2000 Presidential election], experts warn, there could be chaos in a dozen states as voters find themselves barred from the polls.”
The piece is very much worth reading in full, as the Republican assault on voting remains among the most undereported story affecting the 2012 elections — even as the bulk of the mainstream corporate media remains dysfunctionally fixated on the horse race, as usual, rather than the track conditions which may actually end up determining both the results of the Presidential race as well as hundreds of others across the nation.
Bad Seed Story. Partisan attack of GOP.
The Truth?
Secretary of State Controls local elections.
If they wanted to fix this situation and let the public vote and count and do the whole thing, they would have done it.
We now have the best Government that Government can elect and profit from.
The fate here is sealed, and there is only one way to break a seal.
By breaking it.
Oh and why didn’t you talk about the gibson raid with rolling stone?
Re felon voting: If you aren’t willing to follow the law yourself, then you can’t demand a role in making the law for everyone else, which is what you do when you vote. The right to vote can be restored to felons, but it should be done carefully, on a case-by-case basis, not automatically. Read more about this issue on our website: http://www.ceousa.org/content/b...ategory/64/93/
It makes sense to me to suspend the right to vote of incarcerated felons, maybe even paroled felons. Once they are released from prison and from parole obligations that right should be restored IMO. Randomly taking away a certain right from someone doesn’t pass the sniff test.
Setting aside the sociological issues entailing whether it is preferable to remove some of the stigma of a conviction once felons have done their time and to encourage reintegration into society by reinstating the right to vote automatically upon release, there are several salient points Roger Clegg overlooks in his high-and-mighty attitude of forcing ex-felons into a case-by-case effort to prove they should have the right to vote.
Clegg conveniently overlooks how easily felony disenfranchisement can be misused to illegally suppress the vote — a point poignantly demonstrated nearly a decade ago by Greg Palast in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
Palast described an illegal purge in the run-up to the 2000 election from Florida’s computerized voter rolls by then FL Sec. of State Katherine Harris and ChoicePoint’s DBT unit. Tens of thousands of innocents, who were guilty of nothing more than having registered to vote while being Black, a Democrat, or both, were disenfranchised when they were falsely labeled as felons and then illegally prevented from casting votes that could well have changed the course of history.
Next, Clegg ignores the inequities of the U.S. Justice system. The U.S. has less than 5% of the world’s population but nearly 25% of its prisoners. One in 11 African-Americans (9.2%), one in 27 Latinos (3.7%), and one in 45 whites (2.2%).
In Prof. Campos’ call to “Throw Clarence Thomas Off the Bench” in March, he expressed the belief that it “is very unlikely [that Thomas would] be prosecuted or otherwise sanctioned for the simple reason that, in the United States in 2011, we have a two-tiered system of laws” where, for the vast majority of citizens, “an unusually harsh criminal code” has given rise to “by far the biggest prison population in the world”. Nonetheless, he added, “our political and financial elites operate with something approaching complete impunity.”
It is the height of hypocrisy to demand felony disenfranchisement when there are many who operate at the pinnacle of the economic and political system who should be behind bars.
I am thankful that BradBlog.com is still here. Brad Friedman and Ernest Canning are the best investigative journalists in the United States of America. Fascist entities may pull the plug on it. Don’t believe it?
–they could start unnecessary wars based on lies, with mainstream media aiding and abeting their crimes, and enthusiastically cheer-leading like the morally depraved harlots that they are.
–They’ve gotten away for gutting American democracy via electronically compromised (that is, rigged) vote “counting” systems that produce statistically impossible results, a range of voter-suppression measures, and the criminal New York Times aided and abetted destruction of ACORN via publishing the racist pimp hoax and other lies as truth and refusing to retract it when called on it.
— They’ve taken over the news media, and removing any semblance of real journalism from the New York Times and other despicable minsinformation disseminators.
— They’ve enabled de facto corporate ownership of the US government.
— They own the Supreme Court.
Would pulling the plug the plug on bradblog.com be harder than the above?
I find it alarming that I agree with Ernie.. I NEED A VENTI EARL GREY STAT!
That should be “among the best”.
Yeah, be an ex-felon republican hack, get your own show on radio or Fox Noise. Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy, I’m sure there’s a few more. Or be Ann Coulter, and get away with ACTUAL voting fraud, while hypocritically preaching about the evils of non-existant democratic voter-fraud
Be a poor and/or black ex-felon in a repug state… have no say in determining your future, no matter the current state of your life or whether you paid y your debt to society. Awesome.
It seems to me that folks most affected by the laws of our land, such as felons, ought to have a say in those laws. How many folks are jailed for things that, just a few years later, aren’t crimes at all?
When it comes to people who have already paid their debt to society, of course, the notion that they shouldn’t be allowed to vote is outrageous, and nothing but another form of Jim Crow, essentially.
Why should a felon serve the time given to him/her by the courts, but then STILL not have their rights back thereafter? Worse, they aren’t returned those rights simply by happenstance of where they happen to be and who is making the political decisions there.
A former felon can’t vote now in FL, again. Last year they could. Before that, they couldn’t. If they simply moved to a neighboring state, the same person would be allowed to vote again.
Does that sound like conservative, constitutional, equal protection under the law to you??
. At first glimpse I thought it meant “Help yourself to a new Glock45 and help get out the vote.
http://bobcesca.com/wp-content/...lockRaffle.jpg
Felons are allowed to vote in Canada. Good thing or bad I’m not sure.
Adam. Thank you for your kind words. Glad you amended them @8.
My favorite has always been Bill Moyers.
Oh, and WingnutSteve. I previously noted our agreement on this one. What’s the world coming to?
Unless the states that passed legislation requiring a state issued ID card are giving the card away free, it’s no different than the old poll tax outlawed by the Supreme Court years ago, and this needs to be challenged in court.
Ernest, I imagine you’ve come across this gem:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011...s-un-american/