![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
When I got into the story, I was expecting "Bush v Gore II: Bush Harder," yet another 5:4 vote by which the Republican judges sided with the Republicans. And I could already feel myself getting pinched in a tight place, pinched by my own insistence, a while back, that there are still enough safeguards in place to prevent dishonest and/or ignorant and/or partisan hacks from getting a majority on any appellate court bench in America. But then I went over to SCOTUSblog, which unsurprisingly has some excellent coverage of this, and saw that maybe, just maybe, my faith in the universe and in the robustness of American democracy was not entirely misplaced. Because the actual vote was 6-3, the actual official ruling has some interesting implications, and I think maybe there's a coincidence that even the analysts at SCOTUSblog haven't noticed. First, some links to the SCOTUSblog.com coverage, all dated 4/28/08:
- Lyle Denniston, "Court rejects voter ID challenge; no new grants," their main news story,
- Ben Winograd, "From Election Law Blog: Initial Thoughts on the Supreme Court’s Decision in Crawford," by a lawyer who filed an amicus brief against the Indiana voter ID law, and
- Jason Harrow, "More on Crawford: The Court Steps Back From Electoral Refereeing," by a lawyer who filed an amicus brief in favor of the Indiana voter ID law.
And if you look at the official ruling, its defense of this law is pretty tepid. Because what's really going on here, the side that really won (of the three sides), is the side that's on the winning side of a very long argument that's been going on these last couple of years about an entirely unrelated point of constitutional law: namely, the role of the Supreme Court in what are called facial challenges. A facial challenge is one in which someone argues that even though they can't show any one person who's been hurt yet by a law or other government action, and can't even show one actual plaintiff who will be hurt by it, they can still challenge the constitutionality of the law in front of the Supreme Court by arguing that the law is so blatantly awful on the face of it (the "face" in "facial challenge") that it must be struck down, preemptively, to protect the U.S. Constitution. What's going on here, pretty much all of the analysts from both sides agree, is that this is just the latest in a series of rulings, this year, in which the Supreme Court is sending a clear message: they want to get completely out of the business of hearing facial challenges. The three-vote ruling majority (by virtue of the 3-vote non-binding concurrence) as much as says, in the ruling, show us even one voter who's been improperly disenfranchised by this law, bring us a case in which that person has first been harmed by a voter ID law, then proven in a lower court that they've been harmed, and then that person will have the legal standing to challenge the constitutionality of these laws. Until then? They're saying "get out of our ... well, get out of our face," not to make too awful a pun out of it, I hope.
Which brings me to an interesting observation of my own. Note the timing of this ruling: one week, to the day, before the Indiana primary. One week from today, there will be Indiana voters who will have to vote by provisional ballot, then at their own expense travel to the nearest county seat sometime in the next 1 to 10 days and file an affidavit confirming that it was them who cast their ballot. (What, exactly, this proves, escapes me; anybody who impersonates a voter once will quite cheerfully do it twice, won't they? But that, apparently, is irrelevant to this one case, to Crawford v Marion County, IN.) And since there's an existing case, brought up in the footnotes of Crawford, that reminds us that even a $1.50 non-discriminatory poll tax was struck down as an improper burden on the right to vote, if it takes them more than 2/3rds of a gallon of gas to drive the round-trip, then they'll have standing to challenge this law. And isn't it an amazing coincidence that they issued this ruling in time for this new, non-facial challenge to be filed with respect to an election in which the Republicans can not actually benefit from any disenfranchisement that happens? Bet your bottom dollar that the Indiana Civil Liberties Union will be on the ground, next Tuesday, looking for that one victimized legitimate voter. And if nobody changes their votes between this case and that case, then the voter ID laws will be struck down, permanently, by the same bipartisan 6-3 majority, while allowing the Court to make its little political point about how much it hates having to decide facial challenges.
- Mood:
optimistic
Comments
Wow - you are an optimist!
What I've been wondering about, it whether this ruling is a new salvo in the National ID battle.
Here's how it looks to me: Getting an ID card is ridiculously cheap in most states (it costs $10 here in WA and is good for many years), so cost isn't a factor. Most people already have some form of acceptable ID anyway (like a driver license), so while some folks might have to go spend the hour-plus at the DMV to get an ID to vote, the vast majority won't. It is reasonable to verify that persons voting are actually registered voters and can prove that they are who they say they are. The threshold for doing so is actually pretty low. We do that for lots and lots of other things where there is far less at stake.
On it's face, the appearance is that the only reason one might object to voter ID requirements is if one wanted to leave the door open for people who are not eligible to vote to do so, or engage in some other sort of electoral chicanery (regardless of whether or not this is actually happening, it does make it much easier to accomplish). I admit that may be an over-simplification, but it's the clear implication.
So, what, if anything, am I missing?
The number of people for whom this is an issue is vanishingly small, and special accommodations can (and have) been made for them. If stuff like this is as far as objections go, then I have to say there's no case at all against voter ID requirements.
Besides, since when do ultra-conservative islamic men let their wives and daughters vote, or even drive? These women have an entirely different set of problems to deal with beyond getting a valid ID card.
No one has to have a passport or a driver's license to live. Why should they have to have one to vote, especially when to some it is an actual, humiliating burden, as many have mentioned here. Just because YOU don't think it's a burden doesn't make it an easy choice to them.
I don't think this is possible... and you're right. There is nothing unreasonable about requiring proof of identity to vote. (After all, why should buying alcohol require a greater burden of proof than voting?)
The partisan bit comes in with the assumption that requiring ID would suppress the minority vote and generally aid more conservative candidates. Now, I haven't seen any evidence to support this- and I don't think it exists. (Not to say that they're not some wacky op-ed piece that's going to get thrown in my face, but I doubt there's any substantial evidence.)
As for the actual legalities and any possible barriers to voting, I simply don't know. I'm not legally well-versed enough to even have an opinion on the subject of constitutional law.
Simple, it shouldn't, but that doesn't prove your point, it just proves that the first step on this slippery slope was the completely absurd requirement that ID be shown to buy alcohol.
Which is to say, it's not difficult, or inherently disenfranchising to produce a photo I.D. of some kind. It was simply an example to show that photo I.D.s are a staple of modern living. I have one. I'm sure you have one. It is clearely not an undue burden.
But, then again, I grew up in New Orleans and, personally, found the whole "drinking age" concept somewhat alien.
The post: there's an existing case, brought up in the footnotes of Crawford, that reminds us that even a $1.50 non-discriminatory poll tax was struck down as an improper burden on the right to vote
We're plainly not talking about the "vast majority", who generally don't need help protecting themselves from discrimination. And it should be obvious that preventing someone from voting, unlike preventing that person from buying booze, would create the problem you're allegedly trying to solve!
But I've got one friend, for example, who was born on an overseas military base, which refuses to release the birth certificate to her; a lawyer friend of hers looked into it, and while I don't remember the details of what they were going to want in order to reissue or release it, but I remember that it was going to cost her hundreds of dollars, not even counting the possibility of having to travel all the way there and back at her own expense.
I know it's incomprehensible to most of you, but especially among those of us who don't drive, it is entirely possible for someone to live their entire life without owning a single government issued photo ID, using no ID more official than their Social Security ID card. And for many of those people, the expense and burden of "proving," to the standard required in this and similar laws, that they're who they say they are and that they're a US citizen, can be time consuming at best and expensive at worse.
And given that we're talking about the most sacred right in American democracy, the right to vote? And given that the entire federal prosecutor system, all of whom were told that prioritizing these cases was a minimum condition of getting to keep their jobs, were only able to turn up 4 people suspected of the kind of fraud that voter ID would detect in the entire country, none of which resulted in convictions, that nobody has been convicted of voter impersonation fraud in over 140 years? And given that I've been registered to vote for over a quarter of a century? I think that it's entirely reasonable for my county's election board to bear the burden of proof that I'm not who I say I am or that I'm not a citizen.
But, that's beside the point. Without ID requirements, there really is no way to easily see if fraud is taking place or not, because there is zero accountability at even the most basic level. You can argue that the lack of proof for fraud means ID requirements are unnecessary, but that's circular reasoning. The fact is, lack of ID requirements makes the potential for fraud large and essentially untraceable. The fact that nobody can prove fraud conclusively could just as easily stem from the lack of ID requirements as it could mean the fraud isn't actually present. So, bringing that case history into it says nothing on the subject.
Or are you suggesting categorically that there has never been voter fraud in Chicago?
On a further note, yes, it can be difficult to establish proper proof of citizenship and identity for some people. The people to whom this applies are in a small minority, but they should not be discriminated against. It would be inexpensive and trivially easy to make any voter ID legislation contain monetary and legal support provisions to assist people who are facing these sorts of background documentation problems. Personally, I'd be happy to see tax money spent on getting that sorted out for people, and it wouldn't cost much from that perspective.
No, you want to talk Chicago vote fraud? Fine. The most common kind of over-vote fraud involves insider help from within the election board, especially in single-party cities like Chicago, and you know it. If some fraudster has an insider in the election board, what makes you think they'll have any harder a time coming up with an ID? If you can corrupt the voter registration process, corrupting the DMV is trivially easy. Except that it's not. It's not the 1940s any more, the mafia trials of the 1970s and 1980s gutted the infrastructure of official corruption in almost every city in America, leaving behind a weak shadow that hasn't demonstrably changed the outcome of a single election since before most of my readers were even born.
Now let's talk about fraud that DOES affect elections, including both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections: voter suppression, illegal conspiracies to deprive legal voters of their right to vote or their opportunity to vote. If this is supposed to be about "increasing people's confidence in the vote," as Republicans claim, why haven't the people who've been caught bragging about voter caging not been indicted?
I don't discount what you're saying about how most vote fraud occurs. I know that's how it occurs. But one thing that makes it easy for the party machines to get away with this kind of thing is that there is absolutely no way to go back and check that individual voters are real people who were really eligible to vote who really showed up at the polls and really voted on that day in that place. That's a basic foundational record that just doesn't exist, and the fact that it doesn't makes everything else - the really serious fraud problem - easy and more or less completely unadressable. Will voter ID requirements solve that more complex and intractable fraud problem? No, they won't. But, it will begin the process of introducing accountability into the system in a simple, easy-to-implement way. From there, we can then look to the next steps in making the system honest and accountable.
I know you want to jump right in and deal with the big, intractable problem right away. But without some basic steps to the ball rolling, that will never work.
You probably also fear any system that could be used to disallow a vote, under the presumption that politicians will pervert any such system, no matter what it is, in order to skew the vote in their favor. I don't dispute that. Of course they will. But if there is a record of these things in a way that is easily checked against records that can't be easily rigged (because the politicians already have a strong incentive to keep the ID system honest...that's how they keep track of us), then the incentive for them to rig it is offset by the disincentive of being caught at it more easily. Voter ID won't stop the fraud, but it will make it easier to change the incentives that lead to the fraud in the first place.
The same way you fear that opposition politicians will use voter ID to disenfranchise your partisans, your opposition fears that the lack of accountability makes it trivially easy for your partisans to disenfranchise them. You can dismiss their fear if you like, but not without dismissing your own in turn. If you want your fear legitimized, you've got to grant theirs as well. So instead of fueling their fears by fighting them on what is really a fundamentally reasonable desire for accountability in the vote system, work with them to come up with something that satisfies both of you. 'Cause it sure doesn't exist now. The system is a sham, and everybody knows it.
What controls on a voter ID system would be necessary for you to buy into it?
Here in Missouri, we have to register to vote 60 days before the election. If either the Republicans or the Democrats on the nearest county's Election Board think that a new voter registration is fraudulent, they have at least 60 days to prove it. And because god-damned ACORN keeps paying their registrars per registrant, they usually do find some. But the burden of proof is on anyone who wants to allege that that registration is fraudulent.
On election day itself, you do have to prove that you're you. But here in Missouri (for all that Baby Blunt is threatening to try again to change this) that amounts to showing the voter registration card you were mailed by the Election Board, a state photo ID, or any of a long list of official documents that would only exist if you were who you say you are: a government benefits letter, a utility bill in your name, a bank statement in your name, whatever.
Trust me, John Danforth has spent half his life trying to find even one person who snuck through that system, and ever since she took office so has our Republican US district attorney. The reason they're not finding any is that the system works just fine as it is. Yes, the Election Board does keep finding fraudulent registrations. But only once in the last 20 years have I heard even an unproven allegation of anybody showing up to vote with a fraudulently obtained voter registration card ... and he was caught by one of the election judges, who spotted that the documentation he brought to prove his identity was fake. And if the election judge hadn't caught it? Then the vote tally would have changed by one vote. ONE VOTE.
How many thousand of people in Miami, Florida were illegally denied the right to vote in 2000? How many hundreds, maybe thousands, were illegally denied the right to vote in Cincinnati, Ohio in 2004?
I see that you're much more interested in partisanship and rhetoric than effecting change in a broken system. If you want to hide behind legal definitions of proof when it suits you, and then throw around all kinds of baseless accusations of fraud when they confirm your biases, that's fine. But don't pretend that you're interested in anything more than picking a fight with the Light Blue Party because you're a Leek Green partisan (there's an obscure historic reference for you, and a strangely appropriate one as well).
That's all nonsense as far as I'm concerned, and very destructive to our civil society and the stability of our shared societal order. I'm much more interested in being effective and making positive change to strengthen our common values than being "right" at the expense of some hated out-group. I like to read what you write because you often eloquently articulate points of view I disagree with (though we occasionally have our moments of agreement...there is always hope for common ground). But when you tear off into conspiracy-theory territory and start with the hysterical partisanship, I just can't take any of that seriously.
Either you admit the current system is flawed and take steps to correct such flaws (i.e. adding requiring proof of identification)...
or you allow the ignorance that fuels irresponsible rumor-mongering and permits credence to the kind of hyper-partisan conspiracy theories esposed by those who dislike the outcome.
Which is to say, you either support voter reform, including proof of identification, or forfeit your right to complain about the results. The idea that one can oppose voter IDs, yet whine about Florida results from 2000... makes no sense.
The fraud involved in Florida in 2000 had nothing to do with voter ID requirements. A Voter ID law would have done nothing to fix the problems there, and in fact further thrown the Florida election into question. Here are the specific irregularities in Florida that I remember:
- Voter caging: purging of thousands of legitimate African American voters from the voting rolls because their names were similar to those of convicted felons.
- Voter caging: mailings and phone calls to targeted communities to confuse people and discourage a percentage from traveling to the polls.
- Poll access: Inadequate access to polling stations, especially in poor neighborhoods.
- Ballot Design: Confusing ballots (alleged by some to be deliberately confusing) that resulted in very unlikely results, like significant votes for Pat Buchanan in elderly Jewish neighborhoods.
- Ballot Design: Punch card ballots that made it difficult for many to clearly indicate their vote.
How does Voter ID fix any of this??Many of us oppose Voter ID laws because they act like a legal form of voter caging, suppressing the poor and rural vote, because those are the people most likely to have difficulty getting official identification. Not surprisingly, Voter ID laws are often pushed by the same Republicans who have been using illegal voter caging in recent elections.
I'm puzzled. As far as I can tell, both of you agree that polling places should require some form of ID; you're arguing about how strict the standards for that ID should be. What would stricter standards prevent other than voter impersonation fraud?
The last several elections in my state, I was able to vote without anybody asking me for any proof of ID
This seems like a different problem to me. Your polling place has ID requirements that they're not enforcing. Requiring a photo ID won't help if nobody bothers to ask for it.
I also had voter reg. cards for the two previous owners of my house and one dubious personage, all mailed to me, and could have voted four times if I'd been less scrupulous.
That touches on voter impersonation fraud, of the type Brad says rarely happens in Missouri, and is a good point in favor of stricter requirements. (James Dean's card is also a problem of voter registration fraud, which I think is a separate issue from what Brad was posting about.)
Access to voting by persons unable (for reasons of economics, other resources or know-how) to get these stricter government issued IDs, the requirements for which are being tightened up by "Real ID."
Many poor people who do not drive do not have government issued photo ID. They use Social Security cards and birth certificates when they apply for jobs.
To get a photo ID nowadays, you need to write away for identity documents. This requires a safe address at which you can receive such documents. If you are in a shared living situation, you don't necessarily have this. If you are homeless, you DON'T have this. (In fact, one reason why people become homeless is that they got rolled for their wallet, lost their IDs, and now cannot replace them without an address, or get an address without them.)
To send money through the mail, you have to have a bank account or access to a place that sells money orders. The latter requires you to carry cash through what may be a very bad neighborhood.
Getting an idea on the access issue now?
Everyone with an address gets a utility bill in the mail. Such bills are hard to forge; obviously not impossible, but unlikely. Other letters (benefits, bank statements, etc.) prove the validity of your address. A voter registration card is the last ditch proof that you receive mail at that address. Why, in your opinion, is that not good enough?
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges."
Yes. In fact, my question should have been "What problems would stricter standards prevent other than voter impersonation fraud?" I am aware that requiring photo IDs would make voting much harder for some folks (although you articulated the reasons for that more clearly than I had thought them out).
Why, in your opinion, is that not good enough?
It's not good enough if it leads to widespread vote fraud. As
Voter caging is a big problem, but it's not an intractable one. We know who is doing it, many of the perpetrators have admitted it publicly, we just need to start arresting and prosecuting them for it. It's already illegal, the laws against it are presumably quite constitutional.
On the flip side, adding a security system, like Voter ID, to fix a problem that doesn't exist sounds like a boondoggle, it's security theater. Security theater is the show of security without any actual attention paid to real security issues, which makes everyone less secure in the long run.
The fact that, until this recent supreme court ruling, it's been widely considered to be an unconstitutional restriction of civil rights makes it far from the "simple and straightforward solution" you claim.
Tell that to someone who needs to choose each month between eating and paying rent.
Most people already have some form of acceptable ID anyway (like a driver license), so while some folks might have to go spend the hour-plus at the DMV to get an ID to vote, the vast majority won't.
Also, you need to factor in the ever-growing cost (in both time and money) of gathering together enough identification to even qualify for an official state ID.
Here in upstate New York, I had one friend who, the only way we could assemble enough ID to get a $10 official NYS Non-driver's ID card was to get him a US Passport first. The state ID wasn't an option without the passport, he just didn't have the paper trail connecting his name to official documents.
So, we had to travel down to Manhattan to get a new copy of his birth certificate (his old one was still in the hands of his estranged mother), and then use that plus me (and my identification), plus a DS-71 form, to get a US Passport, and the Passport then made it possible to get the State ID. Now granted, as far as even the Indiana law goes, I think we could have stopped at the passport, but still...
The process required a missed day of work, a properly identified friend, a minor act of fraud (I had to fake an additional identifying document to convince the City of New York to release the birth certificate), and a far above average knowledge of how bureaucracy works. Financially, it also cost about $130 in travel expenses, $10 in notary fees, $20 for passport photos, and I think $60 for the actual passport application fees.
Other people are far less connected to the system them my friend was, particularly poor and rural folks. I'd say cost is a real problem for some legitimate voters under a Voter ID system.
There are other barriers. I know someone who cannot vote because she's homeless and therefore has no address. She also has no money much of the time. but, in addition, her child's father, who has more money and is diabolical by nature, sued her for child support AND WON! Since she has no money or job, she can't pay the child support, and the law (it's Florida) allows him to take away her driver's license because she hasn't paid her child support, so she has no driver's license to use as an ID. (or to drive to a job, so she can't earn enough money to.....). It happens.
And there are plenty of people to whom taking a day off of work to do the whole DMV thing is just not possible.
And then there's the burden of figuring out the system, which is often designed to make things as difficult and time consuming as possible.
Indiana nuns lacking ID denied at poll by fellow sister. In addition to the nuns, it mentions a more telling case, a woman (newly married) denied the right to vote because the law couldn't handle her recent name change.