When it comes to destroying Democratic institutions, nobody does it quite like North Carolina Republicans. Gerrymandering, racist voter ID laws, closing the polling places - sure, Republicans are doing all that in the Tarheel state, but they're bringing so much more to the game.
From a Time magazine article by Wendy Weiser and Daniel Weiner called, Democracy in North Carolina Could Disappear. Is Your State Next?:
In 2016, "the incumbent Republican Governor lost his reelection bid to Democrat Roy Cooper. Then things turned ugly. Seventeen days before Cooper was to take office, the Republican-dominated legislature passed a package of sweeping changes designed to limit his authority, which the outgoing Republican governor signed into law. The centerpiece of this effort was a plan to ensure continued Republican dominance of powerful state and county boards of elections, which are responsible for running elections in the state and have been controlled by appointees from the Governor’s party for more than a century. (The original law was struck down by a state court in March but then reenacted over Cooper’s veto with only minor changes.)
The new law extends the tenure — indefinitely, for all intents and purposes — of the sitting Republican-appointed Executive Director of the State Board of Elections, North Carolina’s leading election official. She would otherwise have been supplanted by a new Democratic appointee. The law also awards half the seats on state and local election boards to Republicans, which allows them to block any changes to voting rules adopted by the previous Republican-controlled bodies. The law even says Republicans get to chair all election boards during every crucial election year when the President, Governor and all statewide officials are on the ballot.
These changes leave little doubt as to who would really be in charge of North Carolina’s election process — and that is the point. Some legislative leaders openly admitted that one of their main goals of the election board law was to keep Republicans in power."
So in other words, because a Democrat managed to get elected Governor, the Republican sate legislature changed the laws to keep other Republicans in power, and they weren't shy about it. Nor have Republicans limited recent changes to the powers delegated to the Governor to elections boards. They also passed a law that requires that all cabinet appointments be approved by the legislature and that limits the number of state employees the governor can hire and fire to 425. The old limit was 1,500 and was increased from 400 around the time Republican Gov. Pat McCrory took office. Yes, the Republican legislature will cheerfully increase the Governor's powers when a Republican takes over from a Democrat, they reduce them again when another Democrat wins the office.
What else have North Carolina Republicans been up to? How about:
* A 2013 law that made cuts to early voting, created a photo ID requirement and eliminated same-day registration, out-of-precinct voting and preregistration of high school students. North Carolina legislators had requested data on voting patterns by race and, with that data in hand, drafted a law that would "target African-Americans with almost surgical precision," according to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
* Gerrymandering so severe that Republicans control 10 of North Carolina's 13 US House seats despite the fact the state splits its vote nearly evenly between Republicans and Democrats in Presidential elections.
* Packing the courts. From Ari Berman of Mother Jones: "The GOP attack on the courts began in 2013, when the legislature ended public financing for judicial elections, which had helped elect more minority and women judges. These efforts accelerated after liberal judges gained a 4-3 majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2016. The legislature promptly changed the judicial election system by requiring candidates to represent a political party, the first time a state has moved from nonpartisan to partisan judicial elections since 1921. Republicans reasoned that having to identify as a Democrat would make it harder for liberal judges to win in a GOP-leaning state. The legislature then canceled judicial primaries, giving incumbents (who were mostly Republicans) an advantage due to their name recognition in races where voters were asked to choose among many candidates." Paul Blest of vice.com also notes: "The legislature has passed a number of laws in recent years aimed at limiting the power of the courts, including one (over Cooper’s veto) that phased out three seats on the Court of Appeals, preventing Cooper from making any new appointments in the case of a retirement."
Some good news, over the past two years the courts have not looked kindly on the Republican power grab. The 2013 voter ID law was thrown out by federal courts, and a federal panel has also thrown out the state's congressional map as an illegal racial gerrymander (although the US Supreme Court has put this ruling on hold). A North Carolina court blocked much of the law limiting the Governor's powers of appointment, and another state court blocked the changes to elections boards.
So how are North Carolina Republicans reacting to these judicial rulings? By trying to get rid of the judges responsible, of course. From the Ari Berman article linked above, "Now the legislature has embarked on an unprecedented plan to transform the state’s courts by gerrymandering judicial maps to elect more Republican judges, preventing (Governor) Cooper from making key judicial appointments, and seeking to get rid of judicial elections altogether."
Next time we'll look at Michigan, where Republicans have come up with some novel ways to disenfranchise folks that we haven't discussed yet.
Showing posts with label vote suppression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vote suppression. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Monday, May 28, 2018
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.
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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