The Eclipse of American Democracy, Part Six: Voter ID Laws

"Ahead of Trial, Pennsylvania Admits There is No Voter Fraud Problem"

The above headline encapsulates the farcical nature of all the fighting that's been done over new Voter ID laws and the non-existent problem of voter fraud in America in the last decade. Let's take a look at Pennsylvania, and how what happened there is a reflection of how Republicans all over America found yet another vehicle to subvert democracy.

In early 2012, Pennsylvania passed a strict voter identification law. From Jamelle Bouie of the Washington Post, "Under the law, voters are required to show an unexpired government-issued ID. If an ID is not issued by either the state of Pennsylvania or the federal government, then it will not be accepted (for instance, student IDs from schools outside of the state). If you do not have an ID, you can receive a free one as long as you have a Social Security card, official birth certificate, and two proofs of residency."

There's a lot that's wrong with this law and similar laws in other states. From the same WaPo article: "It’s hard to overstate the problems with this requirement. A report released by the Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this month, which compared voter registration rolls with transportation department ID databases, found that more than 758,000 Pennsylvanians lack a driver’s license. According to the report, that amounts to 9.2 percent of the state’s 8.2 million voters. This disproportionately includes students, minorities and the elderly, who tend to lack government-issued ID. According to the report, more than 21 percent of nonwhites in the state lack ID. In cities with heavy minority populations, like Philadelphia, 18 percent of the voting population lacks official identification. The ID itself is free, but when you consider the time and money involved in assembling the documents necessary to get one, this gap is likely to remain."

In other words, Republicans made voting more difficult for people who tend to vote for Democrats. In fact they're quite proud of it, with GOP House Leader Mike Turzai saying that the law would, "allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania."

And it's not as if Republicans can claim that the new voter ID laws are in response to a legitimate problem. The Brennan Center for Justice at the New University of Law has studied election-related fraud and found for example, 31 credible instances of impersonation fraud from 2000 to 2014, out of more than 1 billion ballots cast.

Do Republicans believe that there is widespread voter fraud? That's impossible to know. President Trump claims without evidence that millions voted illegally in 2016, but then he admits to playing somewhat fast and loose with the truth. In Pennsylvania's case at least, there's a smoking gun: the Republicans attempting to defend their voter ID law in court made the astonishing admission that there "have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania; and the parties do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states."

The Pennsylvania story has a happy ending. In 2014, a state judge threw out the law, ruling, (from Rick Lyman of the New York Times), "that the law hampered the ability of hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians to cast their ballots, with the burden falling most heavily on elderly, disabled and low-income residents, and that the state’s reason for the law — that it was needed to combat voter fraud — was not supported by the facts", and that, "the free IDs that were supposed to be made available to those without driver’s licenses or other approved photo identification were difficult and sometimes impossible to obtain."

The issue of the supposedly "free IDs" is an important one because it's indicative of the lengths Republicans will go to stop some people from voting. Alabama passed a strict voter ID law in 2011. Then, (surprise!) it began closing DMV offices in predominately black counties, making it all the more difficult for people to obtain the identification needed to vote. And again, some Republicans in Alabama aren't shy about what they are really trying to accomplish. From Scott Douglas of the New York Times, "A state senator who had tried for over a decade to get the bill into law, told The Huntsville Times that a photo ID law would undermine Alabama’s "black power structure." In The Montgomery Advertiser, he said that the absence of an ID law "benefits black elected leaders.""

In Texas, voters can use a concealed handgun permit to vote, but they cannot use student IDs from state universities. More gun nuts vote Republican, more students vote Democratic. Federal courts have repeatedly ruled that the strict Texas law illegally discriminates against minorities; unfortunately, a slight loosening of the law means it will go into effect this year.

A recent study from the University of California San Diego found that strict ID laws doubled the turnout gap between whites and Latinos in the general elections, and almost doubled the white-black turnout gap in primary elections. Democrats can add this to the list of Republican disasters they need to fix, if and when they ever regain power in this country.

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The Eclipse of American Democracy, Part Five: Gerrymandering and Race

Gerrymandering is such a big topic, I couldn't cover it all in my previous post on the subject. Let's take a look at another way Republicans have long manipulated the system of creating legislative districts: racial gerrymandering. Even before technology allowed those in control to precisely draw districts to their advantage on practically a house-to-house basis based on demographics, Republicans effectively gerrymandered congressional districts through the creation of majority-minority districts.

Here's how it works. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits the once-common practice of spreading minorities across voting districts, leaving them too few in number in any given district to elect their preferred candidates. The practice was known as "racial gerrymandering." Wow, conservatives must hate being required to create districts where minority voters are the majority, right? Wrong! They love it! Why? Because creating majority-minority districts allows them to racially gerrymander more effectively than ever.

There's a reason why Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina each send exactly one Democrat (and one person of color) to the US House despite the fact that those states have a lot of minority voters. It's because most of those minority voters are carefully packed into a single congressional district.

Grant Hayden, a Professor of Law at Hofstra University has written a good summary the problem: 

"[M]ajority-minority districts give rise to a dynamic that undercuts the very goal they are designed to achieve. While they improve the ability of minority voters to elect a candidate of their choice in a particular district, they also cost their preferred political party other valuable seats in the legislature."

"Majority-minority districts have at least one very curious effect: they help Republicans. This is curious because minority voters, especially blacks, vote for Democrats in overwhelming numbers. But upon closer study, this by-product of majority-minority districts merely fulfills a longstanding theoretical prediction."

"The theory goes like this. When creating a majority-minority political district, the additional minority voters must come from somewhere. That somewhere is adjoining districts, which are drained of their minority voters. Those voters, though, are not merely minority voters-they are also reliably Democratic voters. And this makes it more likely that the Republican candidates will prevail in those adjoining districts."

Would this actually happen in practice? It's well-documented that it already has. After the 1990 census, scores of majority-minority districts were created in order to comply with the mandates of the Voting Rights Act. For example, thirteen additional majority-black Congressional districts were created. They, in turn, produced thirteen additional black representatives. Majority-minority districting did, indeed, lead to the election of the candidates of the minorities' choosing."

"Unfortunately, a large number of studies of the 1992 and 1994 Congressional elections revealed that this additional representation came at a cost. As a result of majority-minority districting, Democrats lost at least ten seats to Republicans. When minority voters were drained out of adjoining districts, Republican majorities were the result." 

"Both parties apparently notice that majority-minority districts tend to help Republicans overall, and hurt Democrats overall. In the early 1990s, the Republican National Committee pushed for the creation of more black and Hispanic districts as part of a strategy to win additional seats in the House."

This January, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear a case on racial gerrymandering of the kind described above orchestrated by Texas Republicans. This is in addition to the two cases the Court had already agreed to hear on gerrymandering, the first from Wisconsin regarding the extreme Republican gerrymander in that state, the second regarding the gerrymander of a single congressional seat in Maryland by Democrats.

As noted by Pema Levy of Mother Jones:

"This summer, a three-judge panel in San Antonio found that Texas Republicans intentionally weakened the voting power of African American and Latino voters when it drew multiple state House and congressional districts. This was the ninth racial discrimination in voting case the state has lost since 2011, which includes a long legal battle over its stringent voter ID requirement. Now, the Supreme Court will determine whether Texas’ maps can stand."

Whether Texas intentionally weakened the voting power of minorities through gerrymander in that state is not really a question, given that Texas Governor Greg Abbot has said, "[i]n 2011, both houses of the Texas Legislature were controlled by large Republican majorities, and their redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party’s electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats."

The real question is, how long and to what degree with the Court (and Americans at large) will continue to let Republicans get away with this garbage.

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