51 years they’ve pursued this woman who marched with Dr. King . . .

May 6, 2012

. . . and now they’ve figured out how to keep her from voting:  A “voter I.D. law” in Pennsylvania.  Viviette Applewhite is suing to keep her right to vote.

From the website of ACLU of Pennsylvania:

On May 1, 2012, the ACLU of Pennsylvania, the Advancement Project, the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia (PILCOP), and the Washington, DC law firm of Arnold & Porter LLP filed a lawsuit in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania to overturn the voter ID law passed by the General Assembly in March 2012.

The lawsuit alleges that the state’s voter photo ID law violates the Pennsylvania Constitution by depriving citizens of their most fundamental constitutional right – the right to vote. The plaintiffs are asking the Commonwealth Court to issue an injunction blocking enforcement of the law before November’s election. If the law is not overturned, most of the plaintiffs will be unable to cast ballots in the fall, despite the fact that many of them have voted regularly for decades.

Voter identification laws passed through several legislatures in the past half decade frequently cause more voters to lose their voting privileges than frauds prevented.  While there is no evidence of significant voter fraud caused by someone stealing another’s identity to vote — the only voter fraud voter identification laws is aimed at — there are thousands, or tens of thousands of people in every state where these laws are passed who cannot get suitable identification papers to vote.

Although these citizens often are long-time voters, good citizen parents who have raised outstanding children and performed their civic duties thr0ughout their lives, they often lack the technically picky identity documents to get a voter identification card.  Their stories are not unique, but surprisingly common, shared by millions of Americans:

  • Many were born outside hospitals, and lack birth certificates.  Though no one doubts their life history, the voter laws do not allow usual forms of identification to get a voter card.  These people can get credit cards, can buy and sell property, and can cash checks in their towns.  But the identification used to secure financial transactions do not satisfy the voter identification laws.
  • A significant portion of these people are simply elderly, and gave up driving.  Consequently they lack a current drivers license.  Clearly they cannot get a new drivers license, but they also cannot get a voter identification card without great effort, sometimes without great cost, and almost always, in time to vote in this year’s elections.
  • In Texas, the now-stayed-by-a-federal-court voter ID law allows a handgun license to be used as identification, but not a photo identification from a state college or university.  Among other arguments the courts found convincing in staying the law, in 81 of Texas’s 254 counties, there is no office of any state agency that can issue an accepted voter identification card.  In other words, in a third of Texas counties, it’s impossible to get a valid voter identification card if you don’t already have one.
  • (Updated; see comments) Young people — students, soldiers at basic training, high school graduates still living at home to save money while working to make money — frequently cannot produce the documentation the voter identification laws ask for, like a utility bill in their name.  See the story at Radula, where Dorid discusses one state’s rejecting another state’s birth certificates (as if we hadn’t known that would happen . . .) and other problems; young voters don’t vote as they should, and now we know many who want to vote, will probably be denied.

Meanwhile, from time to time a real case of voter fraud shows up.  I have yet to find one that could have been prevented by voter identification laws.

How many of the voter identification laws were drafted in the smoke-filled, alcohol-laced backrooms of ALEC conferences?

Resources: 

More (with help from Zemanta):

30 Comments | Civil Rights, History, Politics, Voting, Voting Rights Act | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Can you help Ruthelle to keep her right to vote?

April 10, 2012

An 84-year-old Wisconsin woman, told she can’t vote for the first time in 75 years, because she lacks an “appropriate” birth certificate, and perhaps she’s been spelling her name differently from how Wisconsin wants her to spell it, for more than 80 years.

Meanwhile, has anyone ever found any voter fraud that I.D. can stop?

Since voting is a civil liberty, the ACLU is working to keep Ruthelle voting.

Volunteer to help, here.

198 Comments | Civil Rights, Politics, Voting, Voting Rights Act | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

How about we get a government big enough, strong enough, and smart enough to protect your right to vote?

November 7, 2011

Oy.  Here’s a doozy from the Northwest Progressive Institute Advocate newsletter:

Washingtonians who recently registered to vote using the Department of Licensing’s website may not have actually been added to the rolls, the Secretary of State’s office disclosed today in a late afternoon media advisory.

The Department of Licensing, which issues driver’s licenses, vehicle licenses, and boat licenses, allows voters to request that their voter registration be updated when they update their driver’s license. DOL also allows Washingtonians to register to vote when obtaining a license through its website.

But apparently, DOL hasn’t been forwarding these new and updated voter registrations to the Secretary of State’s office. Until last Friday, that is.

The Secretary of State’s office says a total of 21,000 voters may potentially be affected in some way by the blunder.

Here’s a more detailed explanation from co-elections director Katie Blinn:

When people update their address for their driver’s license with the state Department of Licensing, they can also request to update their address for voter registration purposes. This program is commonly known as Motor-Voter. DOL recently added a question about voter registration to its address update page on its website. However, the Secretary of State’s office has not been receiving these voter registration updates from DOL, and therefore has not been able to pass these updates on to the county elections offices. The Secretary of State’s Office just received the information Friday evening, just two business days before Election Day.

Obviously, ballots have already been mailed to voters, so this is a problem. The question is… how big of a problem?

Approximately 14,800 address updates were submitted to DOL that were not received by the Secretary of State’s Office. However, we think that county elections offices had already received some of these address changes due to voters contacting the elections office directly, or receiving address update information from the Post Office.

We think? Wouldn’t it be better to know for sure?

An additional 5,900 people requested to update their voter registration information on the DOL website, but were not previously registered. The information previously provided by the DOL address update system is not sufficient to complete a new voter registration so these people will be receiving a notice from their county elections office asking them to complete the registration. They can respond to the notice or fill out a new voter registration form. If anyone wants to vote in this General Election, they can go to their county elections office to vote a provisional ballot and complete the registration.

Great. So that means nearly six thousand people who thought they’d done what they needed to do to be added to the rolls didn’t actually get added, and now they’re going to have jump through more hoops in order to vote.

KING-TV Channel 5 points out a dispute between two arms of the state government, each giving different versions of the story behind why the 21,000 Washingtonians didn’t get their ballots as required by law.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

WA Secretary of State: As many as 21,000 ballot…, posted with vodpod

Is this the result of years of budget cuts?  Have we finally cut even great state governments like Washington to the point that they cannot even get the ballots out anymore?

Time to stop cutting government budgets, eh?

5 Comments | Democracy, Elections, Voting | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Apathy wins again

August 11, 2011

Apathy is a cruel political philosophy.  It supports despots, fools, crooks and partisan hacks — more often than it supports good government, in my humble opinion.

In Wisconsin, had all those who signed the petitions to recall Tea Party Republicans, voted, the results would have been more favorable to Democrats.  Tea Partiers won big in 2010 on the basis of poor voter turnout nationally (could it really have been as low as 18% of all voters?).

In Wisconsin on Tuesday, apathy turned the tide for them again.  Post-Crescent editorial writers in Appleton wrote:

Look at it this way — 26,000 people in the 2nd Senate District signed the petition to recall Sen. Rob Cowles of Allouez in the spring. But only 18,000 people ended up voting for Cowles’ opponent, Nancy Nusbaum on Tuesday.If the 26,000 petition-signers would have voted for Nusbaum, she only would have needed 1,500 more votes to beat Cowles, who had 27,500 votes.

From Appleton, in one contested district, only 35 voters showed up to vote.

It is clear why Republicans work so hard, nationally, to restrict voter turnout by making it difficult, onerous, or just bothersome to vote.  And no doubt, they think that they will make better decisions than those who didn’t vote and thereby handed them the reins of power.  Despots, fools, crooks and partisan hacks rarely confess they are not the purveyors of good, democratic government.

 

5 Comments | Democracy, Democracy in action, Politics, Voting, Voting Rights Act | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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