198 search results for ""election integrity""

You don’t get points for that
by Tom Sullivan

Google “mass hysteria wiki” and you’ll get a long list of mass hysterias, some of which are surprisingly contemporary. The list does not include other popular delusions such as the tulip mania of 1637 or moral panics such as the ritual satanic abuse panic of the 1980s. Belief in widespread, undetected voter fraud should be among them. Unlike the others, this one did not develop organically. It had help.

This month that help is coming from the GOP’s candidate for president and his campaign. Spreading wild rumors of stolen elections via dog whistles at county party Republican dinners or at T-party rallies and websites (or even Washington salons) is one thing. The Republican standard bearer broadcasting conspiracy theories from a national platform is making even conservative pundits nervous:

Such incendiary talk is an affront to elementary democratic decency and a breach of the boundaries of American political discourse. In democracies, the electoral process is a subtle and elaborate substitute for combat, the age-old way of settling struggles for power. But that sublimation works only if there is mutual agreement to accept both the legitimacy of the result (which Trump keeps undermining with charges that the very process is “rigged”) and the boundaries of the contest.

For Donald Trump, this conspiracy theory is not new. But the size of his audience is.

Glad people are circulating this. I hadn't seen it. It's Trump's reaction to election night 2012. Note how unhinged it is! He's totally nuts pic.twitter.com/yb1TZkLEhs— Elliott Lusztig (@ezlusztig) October 16, 2016

The New York Times Editorial Board weighs in:

It may be too late for the Republican Party to save itself from the rolling disaster of Donald Trump, but the party’s top leaders still have the duty to speak out and help save the country from his reckless rhetoric. The most frightening example is Mr. Trump’s frenzied claim that the presidential election is being “rigged” against him — a claim he has ramped up as his chances of winning the presidency have gone down.

Instead of disavowing this absurdity outright, Republican leaders sit by in spineless silence. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, are the two most powerful Republicans in the country and should be willing to put the national interest above their own. Both know full well that there is no “rigging,” and yet between them they have managed one tepid response to Mr. Trump’s outrageous accusations: “Our democracy relies on confidence in election results,” Mr. Ryan’s spokeswoman said, “and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity.”

This is like standing back while an arsonist pours gasoline all over your house, then expressing confidence that the fire department will get there in time.

The Times also calls out Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani for feeding the fires.

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern details the recent sordid history of the fraud myth that dates back decades. Stern spoke with The Nation’s Ari Berman:

“Trump just poured gasoline on a fire that was already burning,” Berman told me. “For nearly two decades, Republicans have been insisting—without any evidence—that Democrats are stealing elections. The idea has always been to gain an electoral advantage by preventing the fastest growing Democratic demographics from voting.”

Would Berman give any credit for the conflagration to Republicans like Husted, who are now arguing against Trump’s stolen election conspiracy theories?

“These Republicans are criticizing Trump for the ‘rigged election’ talk, sure,” he said, “but they aren’t backing off their own party’s efforts to make it harder to vote. Denouncing Trump’s rhetoric without taking responsibility for your own party’s voter suppression is total BS.”

Republicans have been stoking voter fraud hysteria among their base for decades — studiously keeping the coals hot — to build support for the kinds of “election integrity” laws federal courts across the country are lately overthrowing as discriminatory and unconstitutional. Now that the Republican standard bearer and his acolytes are fanning the coals into a roaring fire, loudly and publicly broadcasting the conspiracy, a few Republicans are shocked, shocked.

Yet another Frankenstein monster of their own creation (to mix metaphors) has broken loose of its chains and a few Republicans are belatedly pushing back. But as President Obama said of Republicans who revoked their support for Trump in the wake of the “Access Hollywood” tapes, “You don’t get points for that.”

Locking down the gullible vote
by Tom Sullivan

On Sunday, CNN’s “Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter criticized Donald Trump for declaring the fall elections “rigged,” and the press for letting him do so “without a shred of evidence.” Suggesting an American election is rigged is “third-world, dictatorship stuff,” Stelter said.

Essay: Trump is sowing doubt about the legitimacy of the election. It's dangerous. Press has a duty to challenge him https://t.co/V6CCyZIfdF— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) August 7, 2016

Professor Rick Hasen (University of California at Irvine) supplemented Stelter’s tweet with his own, noting that where minimal fraud exists, it is in absentee, not in-person voting:

Here's a nice comparison of absentee ballot fraud to impersonation fraud etc https://t.co/ZWWIISBMUS pic.twitter.com/ZuuYwltesT— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) August 7, 2016

The stolen election meme is one of those zombie lies that simply will not die. Reporters are complicit in perpetuating it, Stelter argues, by failing to press those making wild claims to provide evidence. Ari Berman wrote last week that stealing an election for anything above a local race is nigh on impossible:

In North Carolina, for example, the watchdog group Democracy North Carolina documented more than 2,300 cases of voters whose ballots were rejected in 2014 because of the state’s elimination of same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting. That was 1,150 times greater than the two cases of voter impersonation committed in North Carolina from 2002 to 2012, out of 35 million votes cast.

In the end, it’s much easier to lose your rightful vote than to gain an extra one.

Berman cites Lorraine Minnite, a political scientist from Rutgers University at Camden, writing, “Minnite has called the GOP’s fixation with voter fraud ‘a new Southern strategy’ that has energized the Republican base by ‘tarring … Democrats as cheaters.’” On top of that, voter fraud, the bogie man behind passage of photo ID laws, makes no sense.

Fraud hucksters are — and/or they think the rest of us are — gullible enough to believe that, unlike Us, each Election Day hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people (you know, Them) go to the polls, not to do their patriotic and civic duty like “real Americans,” no, but to commit felonies punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense, “plus additional state penalties,” Berman adds. All so they can a single extra vote to their preferred candidate’s total.

The Skeptics Society has a handy aphorism it applies to such claims, as well as to dowsing, pyramid power, conspiracy theories, and to belief in Bigfoot and the lost city of Atlantis: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Ask Trump for evidence and he’ll likely swear he saw Muslims celebrating stolen elections in New Jersey.

And speaking of New Jersey … this is not a new fixation for Republicans. Let’s review a post from March 9, 2012:

During the 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race, the Democratic National Committee and the New Jersey Democratic State Committee filed suit against the Republican National Committee and New Jersey Republican State Committee for alleged intimidation of minority voters in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. The RNC allegedly created voter caging lists in minority precincts and, allegedly, hired off-duty law enforcement officers to stand outside minority precincts wearing “National Ballot Security Task Force” armbands, some bearing firearms. The settlement the RNC signed with the DNC — applicable nationwide — limited the RNC, its agents’ and employees’ ability to engage in voter fraud prevention efforts without prior court approval. There were successful enforcement actions against the RNC in 1987 in Louisiana and in 1990 in North Carolina. Wikipedia has a list of references to alleged RNC voter suppression actions that never made it to court.

In 2008, the RNC sued to have the 1982 Consent Decree voided, only to lose in New Jersey district court and in the U.S. Court of Appeals. Of course, Hans Von Spakovsky was on their legal team. Gotta say, I never expected a court opinion to be this humorous.

First the headlines [original Reuters link has gone dead]:

March 8 (Reuters) – The Republican National Committee on Thursday lost a bid to dissolve a decades-old legal agreement with the Democratic National Committee over the GOP’s use of improper election tactics.

[…]

The party argued that the risk of voter fraud had increased, justifying stronger prevention measures. They argued that the political landscape had shifted, with more minority-voter turnout and African Americans serving as president, attorney general and chair of the Republican National Committee. Moreover, the suit claimed the decree violated the Republican Party’s free speech rights.

Those stronger measures would be to prevent the phantasmal voter fraud the RNC has obsessed over for for 30 years. As to free speech, the appeals court held that the RNC knowingly waived some of its rights when its counsel signed settlement agreements in 1982 and 1987, and “may not now seek to withdraw from performing its obligations and from discharging its burdens …” The African Americans in office argument, said the court, “hardly requires a serious response.”

Now on to highlights from the court opinion written by Judge Joseph Greenaway (emphasis mine):

The RNC argues that the NVRA [Motor Voter Law] renders the Decree antiquated because it has led to significant increases in minority voter registration and turnout. The RNC also asserts that the NVRA creates an increased risk of voter fraud. This argument, that the enactment of a law that expands voter registration opportunities renders inequitable a Decree that aims to prevent voter intimidation and suppression, is unpersuasive. The District Court correctly notes that any increase in minority voter registration or voter turnout caused by the Motor Voter Law is irrelevant to the Decree because “the Consent Decree was not designed to encourage minority voter registration, but rather to prevent voter suppression.”

[…]

The RNC argues that the BCRA’s [Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, McCain–Feingold Act] prohibition on the spending of soft money by state parties for voter registration and get-out-the-vote activity has heightened the risk of voter fraud because it is difficult to track the voter registration efforts of the increased number of groups registering voters. As the District Court mentions, the Decree does not prevent the RNC from collaborating with non-party organizations to register voters and the RNC has not demonstrated that any ineligible voter registered by a non-party organization has ever actually cast a vote.

[…]

The District Court rejected the RNC’s argument that the Decree must be vacated or modified because the risk of voter fraud outweighs the risk of voter suppression and intimidation. As the District Court correctly points out, the Decree only requires preclearance for programs involving the prevention of in-person voter fraud. Furthermore, the District Court has never prevented the RNC from implementing a voter fraud prevention program that the RNC has submitted for preclearance, at least in part, because the RNC has never submitted any voter fraud prevention program for preclearance.

[…]

If the RNC does not hope to engage in conduct that would violate the Decree, it is puzzling that the RNC is pursuing vacatur so vigorously …

The evidence Berman cites above from North Carolina would seem to support the District court’s skepticism about relative risk higher of vote suppression vs. thst of voter fraud. Not that that will keep GOP operatives from flogging the supposed threat to election integrity for all they’re worth. Plus, we know what Republican legislators think of preclearance programs, and just what they do when oversight is removed, now don’t we?

Four years later, federal courts are no more tolerant of false piety and artiface about election integrity.

“You know that we can hear you, right?” revisited
by Tom Sullivan

Court of Federal Appeals (Lewis F. Powell Courthouse), Richmond, VA.
By Acroterion (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons.

On Friday, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond unanimously struck down North Carolina’s Voter Information Verification Act (VIVA), one of the most sweeping voting “reform” laws in the country, a voter ID law that was about far more than photo IDs. Perhaps the Charlotte Observer Editorial Board put it best:

We knew. Deep down, most of us knew.

We knew that North Carolina’s 2013 voter ID law, like similar laws across the country, was not truly about voter fraud, but voter suppression.

We knew Republicans were less interested in the integrity of elections than in building obstacles for their opponents’ supporters.

We knew. Some Republicans even admitted it. And last week, in North Carolina, they got called on it.

This, as I keep saying, is their M.O.: Find the line. Step over it. Dare someone to push them back.

The federal court did. Judges found that North Carolina’s law targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision.” Plaintiffs included the League of Women Voters, individual plaintiffs, and the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, led by Rev. William J. Barber II, whose address wowed the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia Thursday night.

It was the third such defeat in the courts this month for Republican voting legislation. On July 19, U.S. District Court Judge James Peterson struck down multiple provisions of Wisconsin’s voting law. In particular:

The law limiting early voting “intentionally discriminates on the basis of race,” Peterson wrote. “I reach this conclusion because I am persuaded that this law was specifically targeted to curtail voting in Milwaukee without any other legitimate purpose.

“The Legislature’s immediate goal was to achieve a partisan objective, but the means of achieving that objective was to suppress the reliably Democratic vote of Milwaukee’s African-Americans.”

On July 20, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Texas “voter fraud” prevention law for having a “discriminatory effect on minorities’ voting rights.”

Contra hands-over-hearts protestations from Republican lawmakers across the country that their only concern in passing such laws is preventing in-person “voter fraud,” the courts confirmed what the Charlotte Observer Editorial Board and the rest of us already knew. These laws are about voter suppression. By design. Researchers have found reports of voter impersonation are “nearly identical with the proportion of the population reporting abduction by extraterrestrials.”

The 4th Circuit found that North Carolina’s law was the product of research. The Washington Post reports:

In particular, the court found that North Carolina lawmakers requested data on racial differences in voting behaviors in the state. “This data showed that African Americans disproportionately lacked the most common kind of photo ID, those issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV),” the judges wrote.

So the law eliminated forms of acceptable IDs to those most likely to be held by whites. As in Wisconsin, limiting early voting as a means of disenfranchising black voters was also a factor.

The data also showed that black voters were more likely to make use of early voting — particularly the first seven days out of North Carolina’s 17-day voting period. So lawmakers eliminated these seven days of voting. “After receipt of this racial data, the General Assembly amended the bill to eliminate the first week of early voting, shortening the total early voting period from seventeen to ten days,” the court found.

Most strikingly, the judges point to a “smoking gun” in North Carolina’s justification for the law, proving discriminatory intent. The state argued in court that “counties with Sunday voting in 2014 were disproportionately black” and “disproportionately Democratic,” and said it did away with Sunday voting as a result.

Judge Diana Diana Gribbon Motz writes:

[I]n what comes as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times, the State’s very justification for a challenged statute hinges explicitly on race — specifically its concern that African Americans, who had overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, had too much access to the franchise.

In finding that North Carolina’s voter ID law was discriminatory by design, the 4th Circuit cited the testimony of a former county Republican official to the Daily Show‘s Aasif Mandvi. In a footnote, the ruling says:

7 Some of the statements by those supporting the legislation included a Republican precinct chairman who testified before the House Rules Committee that the photo ID requirement would “disenfranchise some of [Democrats’] special voting blocks [sic],” and that “that within itself is the reason for the photo voter ID, period, end of discussion.” See J.A. 1313-14; Yelton testimony, Transcript of Public Hearing of the North Carolina General Assembly, House Elections Committee (Apr. 10, 2013) at 51. Responding to the outcry over the law after its enactment, the same witness later said publicly: “If [SL 2013-381] hurts the whites so be it. If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.” See J.A. 1313-14; Joe Coscarelli, Don Yelton, GOP Precinct Chair, Delivers Most Baldly Racist Daily Show Interview of All Time, New York Magazine, Oct. 24, 2013. These statements do not prove that any member of the General Assembly necessarily acted with discriminatory intent. But the sheer outrageousness of these public statements by a party leader does provide some evidence of the racial and partisan political environment in which the General Assembly enacted the law.

Full disclosure: I know that guy.

The real purpose of these voting reforms was obvious. Republican lawmakers again stepped over the line and dared America to push them back. What is most amazing is the bald-faced, transparent mendacity with which these lawmakers across the country look constituents in the eye and swear they are passing voter suppression laws in the name of election integrity. As if they think constituents are such fools that by their publicly saying so the public will not see what they are plainly doing in full view of the public. Amazing, yes, but hardly unprecedented.

Just weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Texas abortion clinic law in Hellerstedt. The women on the court, in particular, were not buying the state’s argument that the law was passed out of an abundance of legislative concern for women’s health. In her concurring opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed that many other medical procedures are far more risky than abortions, including childbirth, tonsillectomy, colonoscopy, and in-office dental surgery. She agreed with the brief from the American Civil Liberties Union, writing: “[I]t is beyond rational belief that H. B. 2 could genuinely protect the health of women, and certain that the law ‘would simply make it more difficult for them to obtain abortions.'”

Anyone but those fooling themselves knew that was Republican legislators’ intent from the get-go. They are not even being particularly artful about it anymore. They are winking into TV cameras and speaking into live mics about it.

As Aasif Mandvi said in response to Yelton’s “bunch of lazy blacks” comment, “You know that we can hear you, right?”

Who do you think you’re fooling?
by Tom Sullivan

Not that long ago, campaigns here fretted that black voters did not take advantage of early voting. With the exception of Sunday voting (souls to the polls), seeing neighbors at the polls on Election Day was a kind of communal celebration. Responding in the New York Times to Monday’s federal court ruling upholding North Carolina’s 2013 voting restrictions, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, president of the North Carolina N.A.A.C.P., notes how dramatically that changed:

The law eliminated voting rules that had enabled North Carolina to have the fourth best per capita voter turnout in the country. In 2012, 70 percent of black voters used early voting — and cast ballots at a slightly higher percentage than whites. Although black voters made up about 20 percent of the electorate, they made up 41 percent of voters who used same-day registration.

The North Carolina Legislature set out to change those figures and suppress minority votes. Its many impediments to voting all disproportionately affect African-American and Latino voters. None of their attacks would have survived pre-clearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. A Republican official defended the law this way: “If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.”

Passed in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Shelby decision, the North Carolina “voter ID” law did all of that and more, Barber writes. The bill also “reduces the early voting period and eliminates same-day registration. It expands the ability to challenge voters at the polls. It eliminates a successful preregistration program for high school students.”

Election “integrity”? Who do you think you’re fooling?

As Barber argues, there was never evidence for voter impersonation to justify the ID requirement. In a 2013 post on North Carolina’s Voter Intergrity Project (an offshoot of True the Vote), I wrote about a friend investigated for double voting:

As it happens, I know someone to whom that happened last fall, one of VIP-NC’s double-voters. After he voted, Herbert (not his real name) was informed that his vote was contested because records showed he had voted twice. It might be voter fraud.

Here’s what happened. Herbert’s son, Herbert Jr. (same address), voted earlier at a different Early Voting site, signed the log, and the elections clerk mistakenly crossed off Herbert’s name in the voting register. Because this was the Early Voting period, Herbert had time to clear up the mess with the Board of Elections before Election Day. His old ballot was voided and Herbert got to re-vote.

ID cards would have prevented the clerk’s error how?

Herbert is black. Early voting protected his vote. The GOP-led legislature slashed the early voting period by a week.

Barber continues:

Since the Shelby decision, many states have been emboldened to implement laws like North Carolina’s. Republican-controlled election boards have greatly reduced the number of polling places. Wisconsin recently passed a bill creating major hurdles to voter registration campaigns. Alabama closed driver’s license offices in several counties with high percentages of black voters. But after an outcry, it sent part-time license examiners to those counties.

Who do you think you’re fooling?

Two years ago, I wrote this after registration challenges in my county:

Their panic over alleged double voting, suspected voter impersonation (as elusive as space aliens), dead voters and messy voter rolls is because demographic trends show that the numerical edge to which many white Americans feel entitled will evaporate by 2043. They avoided looking at that fact square on for years.

No longer. Our half-black president embodies the trend Time and National Geographic predict will literally change the face of the nation, reducing white America to just another minority in this melting-pot country.

The fear behind the allegations is not about election integrity or race, but power. Who has it and who fears sharing it. (Hint: not Millennials. ) The GOP base knows how minorities are treated in America. For centuries, our European forebears did most of the treating.

Republican supporters and the Voter Integrity Project could register voters and invest more in get-out-the-vote efforts. But with weak faith in their own ideas, they throw smoke bombs into newsrooms and yell “Voter fraud!” loudly and often to create the perception that where there are smoke bombs there must be fire.

Who do you think you’re fooling?

Can you feel the integrity?
by Tom Sullivan

Can you feel the election integrity? By now, you’ve heard of the mess in Arizona during primary voting this week. Or rather specifically, in Maricopa County. The Arizona Republic diagnosed the problem succinctly:

Polling sites were overwhelmed for Tuesday’s Presidential Preference Election after county officials reduced the number sites to save money.

Most counties surveyed by The Arizona Republic had enough polling places to average 2,500 or fewer eligible voters per polling site. Maricopa County had only one site per every 21,000 voters.

Lines out the doors for Arizona primary voting. Media reports officials having a hard time keeping up with crowds. pic.twitter.com/1tXEOyrdMr— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) March 22, 2016

Ari Berman blames the Supreme Court’s gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013 for allowing Arizona free rein to make these kinds of voting changes in a county with a 40 percent minority population. The decision has certainly fueled a certain, shall we say, attitude about certain kinds of people exercising the franchise. Paul Waldman assembled for the Washington Post a short list of the hurdles erected in Republican-controlled states to voting since the court ruling:

In that 2013 decision, the Supreme Court conservatives said that key parts of the Voting Rights Act are no longer needed because discrimination in voting is a thing of the past. As soon as the decision came down, Republican state legislatures moved swiftly to pass new voting hurdles that previously would have required Justice Department approval before. Here’s a summary of the Republican voting program:

1. Impose voter ID requirements
2. Shorten early voting periods
3. Eliminate early voting on Sundays, when many African-American churches organize “souls to the polls” voting drives after services
4. Eliminate same-day registration
5. Restrict the ability of citizen groups to conduct voter registration drives
6. Reduce the number of polling places

To Waldman’s short list throw in surgical (and illegal) gerrymandering, voting roll purges, registration challenges, eliminating out-of-precinct voting, and the kitchen sink. A map of the states that have added restrictions since 2010 is here.

I wrote in 2014:

Gaming election results through precision gerrymandering and repressive voting laws aimed at the poor and minorities is political Viagra® for the flagging demographic potency of the Republican base. Voter data matching exercises are not meant to uncover crimes, punish criminals, or even amass credible evidence. They are the pretext for a party suffering a lack of electoral confidence to throw smoke bombs into newsrooms and yell, “Voter fraud!” By the time the smoke clears and no evidence is found — again — of a “massive” problem, all viewers remember is that they saw smoke and heard cries of fraud. And where there’s smoke there must be a fire, right?

All this to combat the “existential threat” of “massive” fraud that for all the hue and cry remains all but immeasurable. All this to restore integrity to a voting system the designers of these voting hurdles have spent decades undermining. To paraphrase Matt Hooper from Jaws, this was not a voting accident.

While thousands stood in line in Maricopa County this week, election officials in North Carolina were still grappling with how many of the over 40,000 provisional ballots cast in its March 15 primary would count. That is nearly twice the 23,000 cast in the 2012 primary. Voters stood in lines until 11 p.m. in Durham County which, like Maricopa, also has a 40 percent minority population, just a different mix.

How many of the elusive fraudsters would wait in line for five hours to commit a felony that adds a single extra vote to their candidate’s tally? How many uncounted provisional ballots cast by minorities and students to restore white America’s confidence? Whose definition of integrity is at work here?

So many states, so many votes to suppress
by Tom Sullivan

The Iowa caucuses are over. The pollsters are licking their wounds. Donald Trump met his Waterloo, writes Joan Walsh, bested by Ted Cruz. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are in a tie so close that several precincts resorted to a coin toss, “one of many oddities of the Iowa caucuses.”

What that means is upcoming primaries and the even general election could feel the impact of new voter ID laws in place for their first presidential election. A recent study begins to support that despite assurances to the contrary that they do indeed have a discriminatory effect. More on that in a minute.

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio thinks voter purges, long lines at the polls, and voter ID laws are no big deal. Ari Berman writes that the GOP is now the party of Ted Cruz, who championed Texas’ strict voter ID law and, as Texas’ solicitor general, filed a brief in support of Indiana’s ID law that argued “there is no right to be free from any inconvenience or burden in voting.” The GOP has erected hurdles to voting in state after state as though democracy is a track and field event.

Berman observes,

It was only a decade ago that George W. Bush signed a 25-year reauthorization of the VRA—which had been approved 390–33 in the House and 98–0 in the Senate—but it feels like a century has passed. Today, critics of the VRA, who used to be a minority in the GOP, are now the vocal majority.

Former RNC chair Michael Steele called it “a slap in the face of those Republicans who fought for the law and those Republicans who fought for civil rights since Reconstruction.”

Throughout the expansion in these laws, proponents look into cameras and tell the public they are about “election integrity” or “ballot security.” Or about restoring confidence in an election system they have spent years systematically undermining, crying voter fraud to build public support for new voting restrictions. And it’s no, nay, never, are these new “common sense” rules meant to discriminate against American citizens who tend to vote for Democrats.

North Carolina’s voter ID law is still in the courts, but will be in force for the March 15 primary. Writing in the Raleigh news and Observer on Sunday, Ned Barnett argued:

Republican legislators say they passed the photo ID requirement to prevent people from representing themselves as someone else at the polls. They’ve shown no evidence that this is a problem, but they love the ease of defending their solution – it’s common sense. Cue the checks, planes and medications.

Behind that seemingly harmless rationale is a subtle and unspoken Republican motive: A surprisingly high number of people don’t have a driver’s license or an acceptable alternative photo ID. And many of them are low-income and minority voters who tend to vote Democratic.

Barnett suggests it is because North Carolina Republican leaders are really afraid of American voters. “How do we know? It’s common sense.”

A study from the University of California, San Diego offers support for Barnett’s common sense. Using a 50,000 person validated vote in the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, the authors eliminate the skew from self-reporting of voting. “Self-reported turnout averages about 25 percent higher than actual turnout,” they write. They looked for differential effects of ID laws on voting among different groups, beyond simple aggregate numbers of votes. The authors find that “strict voter identification laws do, in fact, substantially alter the makeup of who votes and ultimately do skew democracy in favor of whites and those on the political right.”

All of this has major political consequences. As Figure 2 illustrates the rate at which Republicans and conservatives outvote Democrats and liberals is much higher when strict photo laws are in place. All else equal, Republicans and conservatives tend to vote at slightly higherrates than Democrats and liberals but that gaps grows considerably in strict photo ID states. In particular, in general elections, the model predicts that the turnout gap between Republicans and Democrats doubles from 2.3 points to 5.6 points when strict photo ID laws are instituted. Likewise the predicted gap between conservatives and liberals more than doubles from 4.7 to12.6 points. In primaries, the gains associated with stricter voter ID laws are even moredramatic. The turnout advantage of those on the right is three to five times larger in strict photo identification states, all else equal. These results suggest that by instituting strict photo ID laws, states could minimize the influence of voters on the left and could dramatically alter the political leaning of the electorate

Furthermore,

The analysis suggests that strict ID laws of any sort do impact the racial balance of the electorate. Working through the effects of the significant interactions, we find that the gap in turnout between Latinos and whites is estimated to grow by 13.3 points in strict non-photo ID states. Likewise the gap between Blacks and whites is 7.4 points higher in strict non-photo ID states all else equal. The pattern of estimated effects for primary elections is nearly identical. Inprimaries with strict non-photo laws, Latinos fall a further 14.2 points behind whites and Blacksend up 11.4 points further behind whites, according to the model. Requiring identification of anysort appears to have a real effect on who votes and who does not. These laws hurt the minority community and help to give whites an outsized voice in American democracy.

New study finds that voter ID laws increase turnout gaps between Republicans and Democrats. https://t.co/00WbeCXKny pic.twitter.com/ISjjMLK359— sean (@SeanMcElwee) January 30, 2016

The effects of voter ID laws are concerning in isolation. But they are perhaps even more alarming when viewed across the longer arc of American history. The effects of voter ID lawsthat we see here are eerily similar to the impact of measures like poll taxes, literacy tests,residency requirements, and at-large elections which were used by the white majority decadesand centuries ago to help deny blacks many basic rights (Keyssar 2009, Kousser 1999, Parker1990, Filer, Kenny and Morton 1991). The measures of old and current voter ID laws todayremain eerily similar: they were both instituted by advocates who claimed they would help toensure the integrity and legitimacy of democracy. Both sets of measures – new and old – alsoserve to distort democracy and reduce the influence of racial minorities. The racially biased measures of old have since been condemned and revoked but they were allowed to stand for long periods of American electoral history.

Count me as agreeing with Michael Steele on this one.

(h/t Sean McElwee)

A confederacy of lunatics
by Tom Sullivan

I’m sitting in upstate South Carolina processing the Charleston mass shooting. I’m watching clips from politicians — conservative politicians — doing their damnedest not to say anything on camera that would alienate their political base. Or replaying talking points for their base that reinforce the toxic world view that produces people such as the alleged shooter, Dylann Roof.

Sen. John McCain was at least enough of a leader in 2008 to publicly disagree with the woman who said she was afraid if Barack Obama, “an Arab,” got elected. The crowd of supporters booed McCain when he said Obama was a good and decent man:

“Come on, John!” one audience member yelled out as the Republican crowd expressed dismay at their nominee. Others yelled “liar,” and “terrorist,” referring to Obama.

At Crooks and Liars, Susie Madrak yesterday posted footage of former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) speaking in South Carolina in March failing to do the same, using the word “tyrant” and having the chutzpah to talk about Obama’s “complete lack of leadership.” Madrak writes:

And just watch this video. This woman is a South Carolina teacher, and she’s plain batshit crazy. Listen to her! Straight out of InfoWars. And does Santorum talk to the woman, try to calm her down? Hell, no.

Instead, he validates her concern (while artfully avoiding actually leaving a record of anything that could be used against him later) and even whips it up!

Santorum yesterday acknowledged that hate might have been a factor in the Charleston mass shooting, but immediately pivoted to a right-wing talking point, characterizing it as part of a broader assault on “religious liberty.”

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham appearing on The View downplayed race as a factor in the shooting and chose Santorum’s spin. Asked if it was a hate crime or just someone mentally disturbed:

“Probably both,” he replied. “There are real people out there that are organized to kill people in religion and based on race. This guy is just whacked out.”

“But it’s 2015, there are people out there looking for Christians to kill them,” Graham added. “This is a mean time we live in.”

He said, showing more concern not to upset his base than for the victims.

Do Santorum and Graham believe Roof drove two hours from Eastover to Charleston just to find Christians to kill … in South Carolina? That he entered a city filled with Christian churches — and Graham knows just how many — and shot up this particular church for no particular reason?

Former South Carolina governor, Congressman Mark Sanford appeared on All In with Chris Hayes last night and danced around the fact that Roof wore a jacket with white supremacist symbols and displayed a confederate flag on his car. Hayes asked if there wasn’t a connection between the confederate flag on the car and the one flying on the state capitol grounds, and not a half staff, Hayes noted. Sanford replied carefully [Timestamp 2:00], “To another population in this state, it’s a symbol of heritage, it’s a symbol of states’ rights, it’s a symbol of ‘my great-great grandfather died’ in some battle in Manassas or Bull Run or who knows where.”

More pandering to local mythology. The Civil War was about states’ rights the way Voter ID is about election integrity.

Challenged about the association of the alleged shooter with symbols of white supremacy and the local resistance that’s “keeping that flag rooted in that soil,” Sanford answered, “This devilish creature was an outlier.”

As Sanford well knows, there are places in South Carolina where you can find the stars and bars flying on poles right beside the road. As a warning about who is not welcome? Perhaps that is another reason why black Americans now see race relations as one of the nation’s most pressing problems. Something we really need to talk about, as Charlie Pierce wrote yesterday:

We should speak of it as an assault on the idea of a political commonwealth, which is what it was. And we should speak of it as one more example of all of these, another link in a bloody chain of events that reaches all the way back to African wharves and Southern docks. It is not an isolated incident, not if you consider history as something alive that can live and breathe and bleed. We should speak of all these things. What happened in that church was a lot of things, but unspeakable is not one of them.

These massacres are not madness. Madness is a dodge. Unless it is the madness of a culture built on violence and obsessed with it. President Obama put the madness argument to rest in a clip Rachel Maddow played last night from an earlier massacre. Addressing the argument that these shootings are not a gun problem, but a mental health problem, he said [Timestamp 8:10]:

“The United States does not have a monopoly on crazy people … And yet we kill each other in these mass shootings at rates that are exponentially higher than anyplace else.”

Yesterday, conservative politicians again went out of their way to assure us that the perpetrators of such atrocities are lunatics, even as the would-be leaders tiptoed carefully and visibly in the press so as not to upset the very confederacy of lunatics they have found so politically useful, have carefully cultivated as their political base, and now themselves fear to confront.

If we cannot talk about race hatred and violence in this country, maybe we can talk about that.

Everybody’s wise to Eddie except Eddie
by Tom Sullivan

For those growing up in the 1960s, Eddie Haskell from the sitcom “Leave It to Beaver” was our archetype for the conniving, two-faced schemer. Superficially polite — over-polite — when parents were present, he dropped the facade and became his true, devious self whenever the adults left the room. IIRC, at the end of one episode, Eddie gets his comeuppance. As he is led away, he is still working his Mr. Innocent routine, mystified that it seems not to be sparing him punishment. Wally Cleaver turns to his little brother and observes, “Everybody’s wise to Eddie except Eddie.”

It’s not a new observation that conservative politics often exhibits the same public/private, two-faced quality. This week’s sideshow in Indiana over its Religious Freedom Restoration Act bought Eddie to mind again. Protestations that the bill meant to protect religious practice rather than license discrimination were just as transparent.

In the sitcom, Ward and June Cleaver always play along with Eddie’s innocent act, never confronting him about being a fraud, and tacitly encouraging him to keep lying. In real life, don’t our Wards and Junes of the press do the same?

A radio newscast last night reported that RFRA supporters in Indiana complained that the changes made to the law yesterday under national pressure had stripped the law of its religious protections. That is, the right of business owners to use their religious belief to discriminate against customers.

Gov. Mike Pence’s public efforts over the weekend to deny it were damned near comedic, even as more privately, RFRA supporters revealed their true intentions:

But even this week, as Pence called for a fix to clarify that “this law does not give businesses a right to deny services to anyone,” conservative groups stuck to the message of same-sex marriage opposition to rally supporters.

A website post Monday by Advance America, led by Eric Miller, sought to set the record straight on “misinformation” about the law by listing purported examples of how Indiana’s RFRA could be used.

“Christian bakers, florists and photographers should not be forced by the government to participate in a homosexual wedding,” the post said. “Pastors should not be forced by the government to conduct a homosexual wedding at the church.”

And Wednesday, as lawmakers hashed out language to expressly prohibit using RFRA to discriminate, Micah Clark sent out a message to supporters to urge lawmakers to reject any changes.

Ed Kilgore reminds us that faced with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, conservatives across the country — “not all of them southerners” and certainly many of them Democrats — “executed a strategic retreat, accepting the demolition of de jure segregation but defending de facto segregation via private action.” That is, defending the notion that private business owners should be free in public accommodations to select whom they wish to serve. Kilgore quotes Barry Goldwater at length on the matter, concluding:

Like southern “Christian” segregationists in the recent past, today’s politicized conservative Christians are executing a strategic retreat into an allegedly private sphere where they are on stronger ground in resisting anti-discrimination policies. They intensely dislike the parallels on the grounds that hostility to gay rights and/or same-sex marriage in deeply entrenched in their faith, or in the case of conservative evangelicals, in the Bible.

That is exactly what the segregationists said as well, of course. It is not hard to foresee a day when the tortured efforts of religious leaders to stitch together a few culture-bound passages into an eternal condemnation of homosexuality (or for that matter, abortion, which is virtually invisible in Scripture) will look just as absurd and embarrassing as yesterday’s thundering sermons on black people being consigned to submission by the Curse of Ham. And then maybe the strategic retreat into efforts to hang onto discrimination via protestations of “religious liberty” will look less sympathetic as well.

But it is that Haskellish relflex on the right to deny the truth of what everyone can else see that’s more infuriating, as well as being more broadly applied than on just religious matters. It is as if they believe that by smiling broadly and speaking earnestly enough, observers will be duped as to their real intentions.

I’m talking about photo ID laws peddled as “election integrity” measures. Or the changes being made in the GOP-controlled North Carolina legislature to how cities and counties elect local leaders, rigging the game in their favor. Expanding some panels and shrinking others by legislative fiat, always claiming the effort is meant to improve representation and, wouldn’t you know, always tilting the playing field towards Republicans. As if no one is wise to what they’re really up to.

UPDATE: Thomas Mills at PoliticsNC blog this morning reinforces my point. Watch your backs, people:

Now, the flood gates have opened. Republicans all over the state want to assert their authority over the peons who hold local offices. As the state grows and becomes more urban and liberal, the GOP wants to ensure minority rule by rigging the system.

Treachery with a smile on its face
by Tom Sullivan

The Bush administration’s infamous torture memos were not the first legal documents to use the color of law to whitewash moral obscenities. Jim Crow had etched that tradition deep into the national culture over a century earlier.

Jim Crow may be gone, but the tradition persists in the branding of legal initiatives that purport to do one thing but in fact do the opposite. And in laws advertised as defending one American principle while violating others. And in using the color of law, as Bush and Cheney did, to justify the illegal and the immoral. Whether it is “election integrity” measures meant to limit ballot access or “religious freedom” as justification for discrimination, treachery with a smile on its face has become standard operating procedure where many of this country’s laws are made.

Like a wicked, little boy who stomps a cat’s tail then smiles sweetly — Who, me? — lawmakers figure you can fool some of the people some of the time with such legislation. Then they dare us to stop them.

Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act isn’t the first of the new, flag-draped attempts at putting “those people,” however defined, back in their places. But it is egregious enough that prominent people are calling bullshit.

“There’s something very dangerous happening in states across the country,” writes Apple CEO Tim Cook in today’s Washington Post. Cook condemns “a wave of legislation” designed to sanction discrimination under color of law:

These bills rationalize injustice by pretending to defend something many of us hold dear. They go against the very principles our nation was founded on, and they have the potential to undo decades of progress toward greater equality.

America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business. At Apple, we are in business to empower and enrich our customers’ lives. We strive to do business in a way that is just and fair. That’s why, on behalf of Apple, I’m standing up to oppose this new wave of legislation — wherever it emerges. I’m writing in the hopes that many more will join this movement. From North Carolina to Nevada, these bills under consideration truly will hurt jobs, growth and the economic vibrancy of parts of the country where a 21st-century economy was once welcomed with open arms.

Cook concludes, “This isn’t a political issue. It isn’t a religious issue.” That’s putting it mildly. And far too politely. It is a moral issue.

My only real complaint with Cook’s op-ed is that he argues discrimination is bad for business. That may be. But completely beside the point. These efforts to resurrect and slap a smiley face on Jim Crow are evil.

You can’t say poll tax

by Tom Sullivan

The 1981 recording of Lee Atwater explaining the Southern Strategy finally made it onto the Net a couple of years ago. You know the one. It’s the interview where he says:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni**er”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. … “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni**er, ni**er.”

It’s the decades-old racial strategy that RNC chief Ken Mehlman apologized for to the NAACP in 2005. For what that was worth.

Jeffrey Toobin muses this morning in the New Yorker about recent court rulings on photo ID laws and what voting rights activists might do to counteract them. He includes quotes from federal district court Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos’ opinion — struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court — that the Texas photo ID statute, SB 14, “constitutes an unconstitutional poll tax” with an “impermissible discriminatory effect against Hispanics and African-Americans.” But reading the words this time recalled the Atwater quote.

Maybe it was the photos Dante Atkins shared from a naturalization ceremony at the L.A. Convention Center last week. Afterwards, newly minted citizens crowded the Democrats’ voter registration tent. At the Republican table nearby? Crickets.

Just as in the heyday of “forced busing” debates, Republicans have gone abstract. The dog whistles are pitched so high, many among their base don’t recognize them for what they are. They insist that photo ID laws are not discriminatory (as Ramos ruled), and they get quite testy if you suggest it. If photo ID laws hurt “a bunch of college kids” or “a bunch of lazy blacks” more than older, white Republicans, “so be it.” That is, as Atwater said, a byproduct.

So poll taxes are back, targeted not just at blacks and Hispanics, but at other groups that tend to vote for Democrats. Only in 2014 you can’t say “poll tax.” That backfires. So now it’s “election integrity,” “ballot security,” “restoring confidence,” etc. A hell of a lot more abstract than “poll tax.”