Stop Letting the GOP Deny All Our Voters

When everybody votes, Democratic candidates win.  If everyone votes, the GOP will never win another election. Anywhere.  And they know it.

The only way repugs can win elections is by election fraud: claiming that non-existent "voter fraud" is a crisis and demands strict ID laws that disenfranchise Democratic voters.

Kentucky has an all-repug state government and semi-strict voter ID laws (non-photo Social Security cards are acceptable).  Don't think bills to shrink the Democratic electorate won't come up in the legislature in January.




Shakezula at LGM:

Like a well-oiled machine that is actually well-oiled.

A new memo from Priorities USA and Civis Analytics provides evidence that voter ID laws successfully disenfranchised voters in 2016.

First, Civis and Priorities performed a simple analysis of how turnout changed in states that adopted voter ID laws between the 2012 and 2016 elections. As the table shows, states that adopted strict turnout laws (MS, VA and WI) saw their turnout drop, while states that did not saw an increase in turnout (this aligns with a similar GAO analysis of voter ID laws).

Civis and Priorities also find that these laws disproportionately harmed black voters, by examining how black turnout changed at the county level between 2012 and 2016. As the table shows, turnout out in counties with a high black population share dropped by 2.2 points in states where ID laws did not change, compared to a 5 point drop in states where a strict ID law was implemented.

I know the current vogue is to set out on quests to capture the votes of the Elucidated & Elusive Guild of Fence Sitters, Middle-Roadsters, Bern Noticers & Goldilockians. But unless the Democratic Party and affiliates are willing to defend the base with all out war against the GOP’s voter suppression efforts we’re going to have 8 years of President tRump abetted by Republican majorities in both Houses, followed by President Worse than tRump abetted by a larger majority of Republicans.

Kentucky Flunks Democracy

If democracy is government of, by and for the people.

Via Kevin Drum, the Center for American Progress ranked the 50 states and the District of Columbia on the state of democracy in each, based on how easy it is for citizens to participate in their own government.

Kentucky ranks 48th, just ahead of Tennessee, Virginia and Alabama. Worse than Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas, and Texas.  Worse even than voter suppression / election fraud centers Florida and Arizona.

Kentucky gets an F on ballot access, F on political representation in state government and D+ on influence on the political system.  

Hard to argue with that grade once you know the metrics that compose each category.

Accessibility of the ballot:

 

•Availability of preregistration

•Availability of online voter registration

•Availability of portable voter registration

•Availability of in-person early voting

•Availability of no-fault absentee voting

•Voter ID laws

•Voting wait time, 2008 and 2012

•Provisional balloting rate, 2008 and 2012

•Participation in the Interstate Crosscheck system

•Motor Voter implementation performance

Big fat zippo for Kentucky on everyone one of those.

Representation in state government

 

•Felony disenfranchisement laws

•Ballot initiative laws

•District distortion

•Female elected representation

•Communities of color elected representation

Another obese zero.

Influence in the political system

 

•Campaign contribution limits for individual donors

•Availability of public campaign financing

•Campaign disclosure laws

•Revolving door bans

•Open legislative data

•Judicial recusal laws

D+ on this only because Kentucky limits individual donations and bans corporation donations.

Wondering how to judge state senate and house candidates next year?  Ask them what they are going to do specifically to increase actual democracy in Kentucky, based on these metrics.

Voting Rights Hearing in Frankfort Tuesday

This is not only the first legislative hearing in Kentucky on restoring felon voting rights that will take the testimony of actual former felons, but apparently it will also deal with proposals to shrink voting rights in Kentucky with new voter suppression laws.

Be there, and make you voice heard.

From KFTC:

Next Tuesday the campaign to restore voting rights to former felons in Kentucky who have paid their debt to society will take an important step forward. The Interim Task Force on Elections, Constitutional Amendments, and Intergovernmental Affairs will hold a hearing in Frankfort. KFTC members and allies will be on hand to testify about the importance of restoring voting rights. Join us if you can, and wear a green KFTC shirt if you have one!

Legislative Committee Hearing on Voting Rights
Tuesday, October 22 at 1 p.m.
Room 171 of the Capitol Annex, Frankfort

Take Action
Whether or not you can make it to Frankfort, please show your support today by calling the legislators on this Task Force, along with your own legislators, to let them know you support restoring voting rights to former felons.
Call the legislative message line at 1-800-372-7181. Ask to leave a message for all members of the Interim Task Force on Elections, Constitutional Amendments, and Intergovernmental Affairs plus your own senator and representative.

Suggested message: “The right to vote is essential to a healthy democracy. Please support House Bill 70, a constitutional amendment that restores voting rights to former felons who have paid their debt to society.”

Thanks for helping to build a
Healthy Democracy in Kentucky!

Background information about restoration of voting rights

Resources For more information on restoring voting rights to former felons, visit KFTC’s webpage on the issue with links to additional resources and reading materials. We also have background documents available on voting rights and on voter identification that describe the current state of these issues in Kentucky For more information on voter ID laws: √    Article ‘Everything you ever wanted to know about voter id laws’ by ProPublica √    The Brennan Center for Justice webpage on voter id, including links to several studies and reports they have conducted on the issue.

Kentucky is one of a small handful of states (including Florida, Iowa and Virginia) that permanently bar any citizen with a felony record from voting unless he or she receives an individual pardon from the governor. As a result, a nearly quarter-million Kentuckians with felony convictions are currently barred from voting.

The loss of voting rights disproportionately affects low-income and communities of color. Kentucky has the second highest African-American disenfranchisement rate in the country. One in five voting age African-Americans cannot vote in Kentucky.
HB 70 is a proposed constitutional amendment that, once passed by voters, would restore voting rights to most former felons after they have served their full sentence. The measure has passed the Kentucky House with wide bipartisan support for seven years, but has not been given a hearing in the Senate.

More information about Tuesday’s hearing

In addition discussing restoring voting rights for former felons, the task force will hear testimony on Tuesday from the conservative Heritage Foundation and other proponents of stricter voter identification laws. While we will listen carefully to what they have to say, it is deeply concerning that legislators appear to be exploring policies that have the affect of limiting access to the ballot box.

A recent push to pass more restrictive voter ID laws in many states has created barriers to voter participation. Such policies have been shown to have a disproportionate impact on the elderly, low-income and people of color. Roughly 21 million U.S. citizens don’t have government issued photo IDs, as required by these restrictive laws, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Many cannot afford to pay for the required documentation, or they lack transportation or an original birth certificate. As such, these laws impede access to the polls and are at odds with the fundamental right to vote.

Kentucky already has a voter ID law that protects our election process while also being flexible enough to avoid unjust barriers to voting. In our state, all voters must currently produce identification or be known by a precinct officer prior to voting. Currently, several types of identification can be shown, including a driver’s license, Social Security card, credit card, any ID issued by the county, or another form of ID containing both picture and signature.

KFTC has taken a position that more restrictive voter ID laws in Kentucky would be an unnecessary and unacceptable step backwards. Kentuckians do not want to go backwards by unjustly restricting the right to vote. Rather, we must go forward together by expanding access to the ballot box. Our legislature should start by passing HB 70, a constitutional amendment restoring the right to vote to people who have served their full sentence for a felony conviction.

New Frontiers in Voter Suppression

I wish they would just admit it: the only way repugs can win elections is if the only people allowed to vote are rich, white, straight, conservative, xian men.

These two examples are from Texas, but don't think it's not happening to your precinct.

Juanita Jean:

The Texas Department of Public Safety – where you go to get an ID to vote if you don’t have a driver’s license – has a little surprise for you.

Oh goodie. So if you have a parking ticket fine you can’t afford to pay, you can’t vote?
Ain’t America grand!

Charles Pierce:

The Republican noise-making over IRS dumbassery always was a charlatan's game as far as creating a "scandal" out of the dumbassery went, but that wasn't the entire point of it anyway. The entire point of it was to paralyze -- or, at least, intimidate -- the IRS into granting tax exemptions to the people that the Republicans wanted to have them.

And that strategy has succeeded.

Billing itself as a voters' rights organization, True the Vote was involved in trying to clean up voter rolls in some states, in deterring fraud in Texas elections and in verifying signatures in the Wisconsin governor recall election. The group found out earlier this year it was part of a batch of hundreds of applications that the IRS had been delaying and subjecting to intrusive scrutiny, and it sued to force the agency to approve its application. The decision to approve the group's application does not end the matter, according to Cleta Mitchell, lead lawyer in the lawsuit. She said the IRS still needs to answer for the costs and damages that resulted from the three-year delay, and for probing for information that the IRS's own internal auditor says wasn't necessary to make a determination. "This lawsuit is about getting to the truth and we are not going to stop until we find out the answers to these and many other questions," Ms. Mitchell said.

Just thirty years ago in Kentucky, the only "voter ID" you needed to vote was your signature.  You signed the card when you registered - at which time you showed no identification at all, just wrote down your name and address - and when you arrived at the polling place on election day, all you had to do was sign next to your registration card signature.  If the signatures matched, you voted.

And no, there was no voter impersonation that any kind of voter ID would have prevented. There was plenty of election fraud through vote-buying, of course, and even ballot-stuffing, but nobody went polling place to polling place voting under somebody else's name.

You know why?  Because it's a stupid fucking way to try to steal an election.  It's expensive, complicated, time-consuming, labor-intensive and it doesn't work.

You know what does work? What's a cheap, easy, quick and effective way to steal an election?  Implement ridiculous ID requirements to intimidate your opponent's voters into not voting.  That works like a charm. Every time.

Why Isn't Alison Lundergan Grimes Pounding the Voter Suppression Issue?

Because the Democratic establishment - the ones with the big money to spend on advertising - thinks minorities and the young will vote Democratic no matter what, especially in retaliation for repugs trying to deny them the right to vote.

But what if those reliable Democratic voters find out that voter suppression is succeeding because the Democratic establishment takes them for granted and can't be bothered to educate the public about voter suppression?

When Democrats lose the Senate next year, that will be why.

Steve M:

This is where the Republicans use what I've previously called "ignorance arbitrage."

Republicans know that hardly anyone ever commits classic voter fraud -- casting a vote illegally based on fraudulent self-identification. But Republicans also know that the vast majority of voters don't know that. It sure sounds like a problem that might be widespread, and there sure seem to be a lot of government officials and TV pundits upset about the problem, so it really must be a problem, right?

States are passing these laws everywhere governments are controlled by Republicans. Fox pundits are talking about this all the time. That's a lot of GOP messaging. What do Democrats do in return? Once in a great while a few Democrats talk about combating the GOP drive to suppress votes -- but it's never explained. Maybe it's explained on MSNBC or by left-leaning magazines and Web sites, but that's preaching to the choir, because the viewers and readers already get it. Any other messaging is predicated on the assumption that the audience already knows what the problem with these laws is. Black voters, in particular, already do know, to a large extent.

But no one's explaining the problem to persuadable white voters in the middle.

Texas repugs are outright admitting that blatant gerrymandering is aimed not at minorities and young people, but directly at Democratic voters.

This should be the easiest anti-repug case to make to white voters, but dems are blowing it.

Steve M concludes:

It seems as if Democrats are counting on demographics, Republican extremism, and Hillary Clinton to ensure that the GOP never gets into a position to implement restrictive voter laws across the country. I just hope that's a safe bet, because if Republicans ever can pull that off, they'll have the public behind them. And that scares me.

 If only there were a Democratic candidate in a big Senate race, one that's getting daily national media attention, a candidate who has some actual job experience dealing with elections and voter ID, a candidate with a platform to make the anti-voter-suppression case to white voters across the country ....

Alison Lundergan Grimes: do you know where we might find such a candidate?

Voter ID Won't Stop This Fraud, Either

The only "vote fraud" that demanding special ID to vote prevents is people too poor to afford that ID from voting.

A former Ohio poll worker today was sentenced to five years in prison for voting illegally on behalf of other people, including a comatose relative.

Meanwhile, the effort to restore voting rights in this country is fast getting nowhere against obstruction from Mitch McConnell and other congressional repugs.

Ari Berman at The Nation:

The Senate Judiciary Committee held its first hearing today on the Voting Rights Act since the Supreme Court gutted the landmark civil rights law last month. The key witnesses were civil rights icon Representative John Lewis and Representative James Sensenbrenner, the former chair of the House Judiciary Committee who led the effort to overwhelmingly reauthorize the VRA in 2006.

In his testimony, Lewis described how he almost died fighting for the right to vote in 1965 and how friends of his never made it out of Mississippi alive. “I remember these problems and this struggle like it was yesterday,” Lewis said. He noted the “deliberate and systematic” attempt to make it harder for voters to participate in the last election, when nineteen states passed twenty-five new voting restrictions, saying “the Voting Rights Act is needed now like never before.”

There's an elected official in Kentucky who's in charge of setting voting rules and ensuring election integrity in the Commonwealth, and she's actually running for McConnell's U.S. Senate seat.  I wonder what she thinks about the effort to restore the Voting Rights Act and to stop voter suppression efforts nationwide.

 

Alison Lundergan Grimes? What do you say?

 

Alison?

 

Anybody home?

Does Alison Lundergan Grimes Support the Voting Rights Act?

Asking congressional repugs how they'll vote on restoring federal enforcement to the Voting Rights Act is like asking a burglar whether he prefers to operate in a town with or without a police force.

No, repugs do NOT "face tough choices on Voting Rights Act." Are you fucking kidding me, TPM?

The whole point of gutting the Voting Rights Act is to permanently remove any need for repugs to ever pander to minorities or poor people for votes.

You don't need the votes of minorities or poor people if, thanks to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, you've made it impossible for minorities or poor people to cast ballots at all.

That's what the "voter ID" movement is all about: suppressing the votes of everyone likely to vote Democratic.

It's easy.  Just piously proclaim that in order to "protect the integrity of the voting process"  and "save money" you have to:

• require people to show expensive and difficult-to-obtain forms of identification in order to register or vote. This eliminates minorities, poor people and students - all notorious Democratic voters.
• eliminate early voting and restrict voting hours to a single work day during work hours, when working people - again, notorious Democratic voters - can't take time off to get to the polls.
• drastically reduce the number of voting machines in Democratic precincts, creating lines that are hours long, thus discouraging working people who don't have the time - or the money to hire others - to wait in line.
• establish ridiculous and impossible rules for voter registration, thus eliminating registration drives in minority and poor neighborhoods.
• gerrymander election districts to scatter Democratic voters among overwhelmingly repug districts, making it impossible for any Democratic candidate to win.

In red states run by repugs, these voter suppression rules are already in place. In red states previously subject to Section Five restrictions, repugs are rushing to pass voter suppression rules previously barred by the Justice Department. Even in blue states, repugs bully and browbeat "democratic" legislators and governors into passing voter suppression to avoid accusations of (non-existent) "voter fraud."

No, the only problem repugs are going to have with efforts to restore the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act is in stopping laughing long enough to cast their "Fuck, NO!" votes.

So, Senate Candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, do you - as Kentucky Secretary of State and the elected official responsible for overseeing voting in the Commonwealth - have an opinion about restoring the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act?

Or are you just going to wait for Mitch McConnell to condemn any such effort as "voter fraud" and then bleat "Me, too!"

Election Fraud, Brought to You Exclusively By Repugs

Firedoglake :

 A 28-year-old VA man has pled guilty” to charges of voter fraud and forgery of thousands of signatures on Newt Gingrich’s campaign ballot” in the VA presidential primary.

 Again, this is NOT voter fraud.  No one walked into a polling station and attempted to cast a ballot in someone else's name.

This is a variety of election fraud called petition fraud: forging signatures on a petition to get a candidate on the ballot.

Another variety of election fraud that only repugs commit is voter suppression: preventing Democratic voters from casting ballots by demanding costly identification, restricting voting machines in Democratic precincts, limiting voting hours to times unavailable to working people, etc.

There is no such thing as voter fraud. There is only election fraud, and only repugs commit it.

More from Brad Friedman.

Even Ohio Admits "Voter Fraud" Is A Non-Issue

Attention, Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes: in considering "improvements" to Kentucky's election system, don't try to pretend stricter voter ID requirements will do anything but disenfranchise minorities, the elderly and the poor.

Even vote-suppressing Ohio knows better.


Josh Marshall at TPM:

As (Ohio Secretary of State) Husted put it, “Voter fraud does exist, but it is not an epidemic. To put this into context, … that’s 135 referrals out of more than 5.6 million votes cast.”

The numbers speak for themselves. If anything I would say Husted still somewhat exaggerates the scale of the problem. But the guy deserves credit for putting this all out there.

Two points I’d make.

The first is that what really turns elections is organized vote fraud and organized voting fraud almost always requires the involvement of election administrators. This is why voter ID is itself such a fraud in my mind because it provides zero protection against the kinds of fraud that are real dangers to elections.

Second, there are clearly people who will vote in two states or try to vote absentee and then vote on election day. No sane person has ever denied this. But there are very, very, very few of them. The issue with election policy is always balancing the costs with the benefits. There’s no free lunch.

You can take your voting list and purge everyone on the list who you can’t verify is living at exactly the same address as listed or everyone who has the same name as someone who once committed a felony. And you may upend two or three people who were going to vote in the name of some dead person. But you’ll probably knock tens of thousands of legitimate voters off the rolls. This is a documented fact. And conveniently, the great majority of those people will be poorer and minority voters who just happen to be Democrats.

Back in the early aughts it was a big, big thing for Dems talking about hacking Diebold voter machines. And there were lots of scary stories about how easily this could be done. There was also no evidence that it actually had been done. To be clear, I’m not saying it wasn’t a good idea to make these machines more secure, only that evidence trumps paranoia. Always.

If we wanted to we could have a national voter ID system, with some equivalent of a Social Security number that would make it totally clear when you moved from one state to another, would reconcile when someone died and should be removed from the voting rolls, which could ensure that everyone was issued a free voter ID card, etc. But the truth is that there is zero will to spend either the money to make this possible or to federalize the process of voting. The whole idea of a national ID would kill the approach in its tracks.

All of which brings you back to one central point: if you care about the integrity of elections and people actually being able to vote, the supposed cures for vote fraud are vastly more destructive than the problem.

All evidence suggests that vote fraud is a minuscule, minuscule problem. Voter ID and most of the other nostrums are solutions looking for a problem. The people who support these policies are either ignorant of the facts or actually want to cull a certain subsection of the population from democratic participation. There are simply no two ways about it.

 If Grimes really wants to improve Kentucky elections, she'll recommend early voting including weekends and evenings, all-county voting (any precinct), election-day registration and relaxing ID requirements; support restoring voting rights to felons who have served their time, and copy Oregon's vote-by-mail system.

Voter ID is Suppression of Democratic Voters, Exhibit No. 8.392

Remember this when the GOP Supreme Court overturns the Voting Rights Act.


Think Progress:

At a social conservatives’ conference this week, Iowa’s Secretary of State argued that Republicans need to pass voter ID in order to advance their top policy goals, including banning abortion and same-sex marriage.

SNIP

There’s a reason why Schultz couldn’t provide any evidence that people are using voter fraud at the polls to rig elections: None exists. In-person voter fraud is extraordinarily rare; a study in nearby Wisconsin found a fraud rate of 0.0002 percent, far less common than even being struck by lightning. Still, a dearth of actual voter fraud hasn’t stopped conservatives from using it as a phantom menace to gin up support for voter ID.

Schultz isn’t the only Republican official pushing voter ID as a means for enacting the Party’s policy goals. Indeed, because approximately 1 in 10 Americans — particularly young voters and minorities, groups who tend to vote Democratic — lack photo ID, a strict voter ID requirement would help Republicans win more elections. Last year, Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai famously declared that voter ID would help Mitt Romney win the state of Pennsylvania. Wisconsin State Sen. Glenn Grothman similarly argued that voter ID would help put Romney over the edge “in a close race.”