General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBad Habits: Nuns Nixed over No Voter-ID
In my email from Greg Palast:
With Supreme Court blessings, voter ID laws are taking the nation by storm, or storm troops.
Stop me if you heard this one. See, these ten nuns walk into a polling station in Indiana and the guy in charge says, Whoa, Sisters! What do think youre doing?
Voting, says Sister Mary.
Well, not here, ladies; not without your ID! He demanded their drivers licenses, but the ten quite elderly Sisters of the Holy Cross, including a 98 year-old, had long ago given up cruising.
Scram, Sis! said the man, and kicked their habits right out of the polling station.
I may not have gotten the dialogue exactly right, but I got the gist of it and the facts: the ten nuns whod been voting at that station for decades were booted out in 2008, just after the state of Indianas Republican legislature imposed new voter ID laws.
The reason for nixing the nuns? To stop voter identity theft. There wasnt exactly a voter identity crime wave. In fact, despite no photo ID requirement, there wasnt a single known case of false identity voting in the state in over one hundred years.
About four hundred thousand voters (9 percent of Indianas electorate) are African American. Nearly one in five (18.1 percent) lack the ID needed to vote, according to Matt Barreto of the University of Washington.
Thats twice the number of whites lacking ID. Therefore, as many as 72,000 black voters will get the boot when they show up to vote this November. Coincidentally, thats three times Barack Obamas victory margin in that state in 2008. Coincidentally.
And who are the white folk lacking ID? The elderly, like the sisters, and students like Angela Hiss and Allyson Miller, whose official state IDs dont list their dorm room addresses and so cant be used to vote.
Black folk, the elderly, students, poor whites blocked from registering and votinga federal judge didnt think it was all that coincidental. Justice Terence Evans could see a pattern: The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too- thinly veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.
But Supreme Court Justice is blind. The Indiana law does provide a voter the chance to obtain an ID from government offices. The average voters distance to the office is seventeen miles. By definition, the folks that need the ID dont drive. And the ninety-eight-year-old is pretty darn slow in her walker.
This is an excerpt from Greg Palast's brand new book:
Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps.
A lawyer for Indiana voters told me that the average bus trip back and forth, requiring two changes, takes an entire work day. They tested it. But Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that the law was fair and provided equal protection to all voters because seventeen miles is seventeen miles for the rich and the poor.
Our investigative team decided to check that assump- tion. Justice Scalia drives a black BMW. No kidding. What he meant to say is that whether a poor person or a rich person is driving a BMW, it takes the same time. And whether the BMW is black or white doesnt matter either.
With Supreme Court blessings, voter ID laws are taking the nation by storm, or storm troops.
Apparently, the idea came to Karl Rove while buying his pampers. He told the Republican National Lawyers Association, I go the grocery store and I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I have to show a little bit of ID. [So, why not when] it comes to the most sacred thing in our democracy?
(Actually, Karl, you dont have to show ID to swallow the Eucharist or matzo. But if by most sacred thing in our democracy you mean making donations to American Crossroads, you dont need ID for that anymore either. If you mean voting is sacred, then it shouldnt be dependent on taking a driving test, should it?
Anyway, Id love to see Rove actually cashing a check at a grocery store, especially one written by the Ice Man. But I digress.)
Santiago Juarez sees some truth in Roves remarks. I met with Santiago in Espanola, New Mexico, where he was running a registration drive among low-riders, the young Mexican Americans who cruise the street in hopping, bopping, neon-lit Chevys. He says, And whos going to give these kids a credit card? Of course, you can always get ID from a state office . . . if you already have ID.
Voting-rights lawyer John Boyd, who works for both parties, is alarmed by the thousands and thousands of poor people in each state that will lose their vote because of new ID laws. I dont have any doubt this could decide the election, he told me. People dont understand the enormity of this.
People dont. But Karl does.
And so does the Brennan Center. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School brings together Americas most prestigious scholars in the field of voting rights who are widely ignored because of their unquestioned expertise. The Brennan Center reports that the ID laws are racist, ageist, classist, and the stupidest way to stop fraud.
Heres the Brennan Center breakdown of those without government photo ID:
6.0 million seniors
5.5 million African Americans
8.1 million Hispanics
4.5 million 18-24 year olds
15 percent voters with household income under $35,000 a year.
Now, dont add them up because theres a lot of double-counting here. Poor, black, and young go together like stop and frisk.
But lets cut to the chase: the draconian ID law and other voting and registration restrictions passed in just the year before the 2012 election, according to the Brennan Center, are going to cause five million voters to lose their civil rights.
Overwhelmingly, the changes were made in twelve battleground states, with the most radical exclusion laws adopted in Florida and Wisconsin. The cheese-chewer state will require government-issued IDs to vote. But the IDs issued by the state itself to University of Wisconsin students wont be accepted. Thats okay because, as a New Hampshire legislator, hoping to emulate Wisconsin, points out, Kids, you know, just vote liberal.
Using a formula provided by the Brennan Center, we can calculate that 97,850 student voters were barred, turned away, blocked, challenged, or given provisional ballots (left uncounted) on recall Election Day in June. No US paper listed Wisconsin as a swing state that month. Well, it swung.
Altogether, the 2012 changes in Wisconsin law were sufficient alone to account for the victory of Republican Governor Scott Walker in staving off that recall vote in June 2012. Walker did have the popular support of $31 million (versus $4 million raised by his Democratic opponent).
...Read the rest in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal and Election in 9 Easy Steps.