771 search results for ""voter fraud""

Thursday, June 08, 2006 

The Theme

by digby 

As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections. I can’t find an exact transcript of his talk, but it exists on C-SPAN for 30 bucks if anyone wants to watch it. Raw Story caught a few excerpts although not the ones I recall about about the dirty elections in the “state of Washington and around the country.”

I want to thank you for your work on clean elections,” Rove said. “I know a lot of you spent time in the 2004 election, the 2002, election, the 2000 election in your communities or in strange counties in Florida, helping make it certain that we had the fair and legitimate outcome of the election.”

Rove then suggested that some elections in America were similar to third world dictatorships.

“We have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today,” Rove said. “We are, in some parts of the country, I’m afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where they guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses. I mean, it’s a real problem, and I appreciate that all that you’re doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the ballot — the integrity of the ballot is protected, because it’s important to our democracy.”

Nobody can ever accuse these Republicans of not having balls. It’s really breathtaking sometimes. This is not an isolated remark. Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s Chris Matthews show:

MATTHEWS: … What did you make—we just showed the tape, David Shuster just showed that tape of a woman candidate in the United States openly advising people in this country illegally to vote illegally.

MEHLMAN: It sounds like she may have been an adviser to that Washington state candidate for governor or some other places around the country where this has happened in other cases with Democrats.

That is almost verbatim what Rove said at that lawyers conference. He also singled out one very special “voting rights” Republican lawyer named Thor Hearne, about whom Brad Friedman did a great deal of investigation last year. (Links here.):

Karl Rove spoke to Republican lawyers this weekend (carried on C-SPAN) and thanked them for their work ensuring “clean elections” in 2000 and 2004.

He singled out Mark F. “Thor” Hearne by name. Hearne was the National General Counsel for Bush/Cheney ’04 Inc. who, along with RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke, created the so-called non-partisan “American Center for Voting Rights” (ACVR) just three days before being called to testify before Rep. Bob Ney’s (R-OH) U.S. House Administrative Committee hearing in March of 2005 on the Ohio Election. The front group, which declared tax-exempt 501(c)3 status, has still failed, to our knowledge, to disclose any information of it’s funders or proof of their 501(c)3 non-profit, non-partisan status. They operate out of a PO Box in Houston, TX, though neither of their founders live in Texas.

ACVR was the only “Voting Rights” group called by Ney to testify at the hearings, and identified himself only as a “longtime advocate of voter rights” in his testimony. He failed to mention his connections to Bush/Cheney ’04 Inc.

Hearne and ACVR have done little more since they opened shop beyond creating propaganda reports to suggest that their is an epidemic of Democratic voter fraud in the country to encourage state legislatures around the country to implement Democratic voter disenfranchising “Photo ID requirements” at the polls. Their charges of a voter fraud epidemic has been roundly disproven in various court cases around the country. (Though it does appear that at least one voter, Ann Coulter, seems to have engaged in voter fraud lately.)

They have been gearing up for this for some time. However, Rove had wanted to use this against African Americans, not Hispanics. He knows that alienating the Latino vote is the kiss of death for the party long term. But it’s out of his hands now. Immigration has a life of its own and I suspect it will be quite easy to adjust the plan and the machinery to try to 1) get out the base, 2) suppress the Latino vote which is now heavily leaning democratic and 3) serve as a rallying cry and cause when they lose seats and possibly their majority. This will be immediately played for 08 with a whole bunch of “voter integrity” legislation. They will be screaming to high heaven. Lou Dobbs will have his aneurysm removed on live television.

The Democrats could have innoculated against this when the Republicans stole the 2000 election, but they didn’t. Had they been screaming bloody murder for six solid years about Republican vote fraud, it would be much more difficult for the GOP to suddenly glom onto this issue. Instead, it was a mere underground drumbeat that was heard, but only in the vaguest way. Now the CW about stolen elections is going to be turned on us — and we will be on the defensive fighting both the charge of electoral fraud and being soft on criminal Mexicans because we need illegal aliens to stuff the ballot boxes for us. 

If we allow the Republicans to define this next election as they usually do, it will be about immigration and voter fraud. If I were in Vegas I’d be placing a bet on it. And it won’t take a gaffe like Busby’s. They will attempt to create a national story, which will be exploited in the last days of the campaign in various individual ways through their media infrastructure. If they lose it will be blamed on dishonest vote stealing Democrats and illegal aliens. If they win it will be be because they fought back against the dishonest vote stealing Democrats and illegal aliens. 

I dredge this moldy old post up because of this new “study” being ballyhooed all over the right wing media that supposedly proves that illegal immigrants are voting by the millions.

If you go to that link you’ll see the study is flawed, to say the least.  But that won’t stop them.

Also too, this:

Polls show that the Republicans have an advantage in the fight for control of the Senate. They lead in enough states to win control, and they have additional opportunities in North Carolina and New Hampshire to make up for potential upsets. As Election Day nears, Democratic hopes increasingly hinge on the possibility that the polls will simply prove wrong.

But that possibility is not far-fetched. The polls have generally underestimated Democrats in recent years, and there are reasons to think it could happen again.

In 2010, the polls underestimated the Democrats in every competitive Senate race by an average of 3.1 percentage points, based on data from The Huffington Post’s Pollster model. In 2012, pre-election polls underestimated President Obama in nine of the 10 battleground states by an average of 2 percentage points.

I think it’s fairly predictable what they will say if close elections don’t go their way these days.

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Hypothetical support for a hypothetical
by Tom Sullivan

The headline from the Colorado Independent caught my attention more than the story (which I already knew): O’Keefe uncovers hypothetical support for hypothetical voter fraud.

The story itself is a week old. The Project Veritas filmmaker (no longer on probation), baited staffers from lefty organizations in Colorado with hypotheticals about committing voter fraud. The object? To get them to say something embarrassing enough on video to prove … something about voter fraud:

Left out of the reel are the many accounts reported by Mother Jones of campaign folks shutting down O’Keefe’s hypothetical voting-fraud schemes or even calling the police when his team refused to disengage. Ultimately, in fact, nearly all of the fraud in the video is hypothetical.

All of it, in fact, except for O’Keefe.

The object of these propaganda efforts is to lead viewers to infer that in-person voter fraud is being committed undetected somewhere, anywhere, everywhere. The same way Bush-Cheney spokesmen repeatedly juxtaposed Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda in public statements until over two-thirds of Americans falsely believed Saddam was connected to the 9/11 attacks.

One of O’Keefe’s most celebrated cases of hypothetical voter fraud took place at a Washington, D.C. polling place on Primary Day in 2012. A Veritas operative presented himself as Eric Holder, the U.S. Attorney General, but ran out of the place before signing the roll book. That is, he walked right up to the line — put his toes on the line, figuratively — but for reasons unknown would not demonstrate how easy it is for anyone to get away with committing an actual felony punishable by up to five years in jail and a $10,000 fine.

Go figure.

Getting out the vote is stealing elections

by digby

Everyone understands that all Democratic close election wins are going to be attributed to vote fraud, right? They already think anyone for whom they don’t vote cannot possibly be legitimate. Now they have a ready explanation as to why:

Speaker @ Waukesha GOP rally: “We’ve gotta get past the margin of fraud. They’re dragging people to the polls offering them BBQ and smokes.”
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) October 25, 2014

I don’t know why offering people bar-b-que and smokes should be considered voter fraud. Unless this person believes that only Democrats eat bar-b-que and smoke cigarettes. (Yes, we know who he was talking about…) Voting is voting and people vote for all kinds of reasons. It’s not like they will be writing in “bar-b-que and smokes” for governor. They’ll still be voting.  And plenty of them could be white people who like bar-b-que and smokes — and Ted Nugent, amirite?

State Sen. Paul Farrow tells Waukesha Co crowd that Ds are trying to “steal the election” by giving special parking to Milwaukee GOTV vans
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) October 25, 2014

I think you can see where we’re going here. Any effort for Democrats to get out the vote is, by definition, stealing the election.

Here’s what they want. They want to ban absentee ballots and early voting. They want to initiate onerous registration, (in person, at the registrars office with several forms of ID and a witness statement, notarized, attesting to your eligibility.) They want you to be forced to walk or drive only yourself to the polling place, present these various forms of ID to several different people and then submit your ballot to partisan poll watchers who will determine if your signature looks kosher to them. Only then will your ballot be counted.

None of this will be applicable to elderly white people who will be allowed to vote anywhere they choose as long as they can name the evening line-up of Fox News (or stipulate they love to watch that nice Irish boy who looks just like their grandson …)

When I was a kid I remember that the small town I lived in for a while used to have a picnic on election day. You could bring in your proof of voting and get free hot dogs and potato salad for the whole family. I guess the whole town was stealing elections in those days. Silly small town Americans … they thought they were encouraging civic involvement and being patriotic.

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What’s a plutocrat to do?
by Tom Sullivan

“We’re not a democracy, we’re a republic,” friends on the right will cheerfully correct when a Democrat refers to this country as a democracy. It’s true — a true fact, if you hew to the right — but that’s not why they’re so adamant about it. For some reason, Republicans just like the sound of republic better.

But they also don’t really like the idea of democracy itself. It’s a plutocrat thing, Paul Krugman writes, quoting Leung Chun-ying, the leader of Hong Kong, on why full democracy there would be a bad idea: “You would be talking to half of the people in Hong Kong who earn less than $1,800 a month. Then you would end up with that kind of politics and policies.” Plutocrats worldwide (and their sycophants) really hate the idea of having to share power with people they consider inferiors. Recall Mitt Romney’s 47% and the makers-takers narrative? Krugman does too:

For the political right has always been uncomfortable with democracy. No matter how well conservatives do in elections, no matter how thoroughly free-market ideology dominates discourse, there is always an undercurrent of fear that the great unwashed will vote in left-wingers who will tax the rich, hand out largess to the poor, and destroy the economy.

In fact, the very success of the conservative agenda only intensifies this fear. Many on the right — and I’m not just talking about people listening to Rush Limbaugh; I’m talking about members of the political elite — live, at least part of the time, in an alternative universe in which America has spent the past few decades marching rapidly down the road to serfdom. Never mind the new Gilded Age that tax cuts and financial deregulation have created; they’re reading books with titles like “A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic,” asserting that the big problem we have is runaway redistribution.

“So what’s a plutocrat to do?” Krugman asks. Since they can’t come straight out and say only the wealthy should have the franchise, they resort to propaganda about voter fraud, etc.

As I wrote at my home blog, they find the whole notion of government of, by, and for the people very, very inefficient.

At the end of the Revolutionary War, there were an estimated half million Tories in this country. Royalists by temperament, loyal to the King and England, predisposed to government by hereditary royalty and landed nobility, men dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal.

After the Treaty of Paris, you know where they went? Nowhere. A few moved back to England, or to Florida or to Canada. But most stayed right here.

Take a look around. Their progeny are still with us among the one percent and their vassals. Spouting adolescent tripe from Ayn Rand, kissing up, kicking down, chasing their masters’ carriages or haughtily looking down their noses at people they consider inferiors.

Have you heard of “ballot harvesting”? You will.

by digby

My piece at Salon this morning is about another hysterical “vote fraud” pseudo-scandal, this time from Arizona. I recount some of Arizona’s Greatest Vote Suppression hits first and then:

Operation Eagle Eye may have faded but the vote suppression activities continue in Arizona just as they continue all over the nation. And like everywhere else, the modern approach is to hysterically accuse Democrats of committing “voter fraud” and creating an illusion that perfectly legal election practices constitute corruption of our electoral system. As everyone undoubtedly knows by now, this specious misdirection has led to onerous Voter ID laws throughout the nation which are making it very difficult for some people to vote.

But now that they’ve achieved this victory, it’s time to move on to the next step. And if the hysterical reaction from the conservative press is any example, a ridiculous story out of Arizona this week may clue us in to one of the next steps.

Back in 2013, the Republican-dominated Arizona Legislature passed a draconian vote suppression law which, among other things, would have made it illegal for anyone to collect an early voting ballot from another person and deliver it to the registrar’s office. This had been considered a crucial method of getting out the vote in the recall of resident kook Russell Pearce and was understood to be a threat to Republicans in the state. As it happened there was enough of an outcry that the Legislature repealed the measure this past February.

Nevertheless, in the muddled minds of Republicans this is now understood to be a method of “ballot box stuffing,” which is how they characterized an incident that was reported from Maricopa County.

Read on for the details. You won’t believe it.

Make a note of the term “ballot harvesting.” I have a feeling this isn’t the last time we’ll hear of it.

Vote suppression is in their DNA

by digby

Keep in mind that there is zero evidence of any systematic voter fraud in this country and zero evidence that any election has been illegitimately won on the basis of voters pretending to be someone they are not:

In a small one-story house filled with knickknacks and stuffed animals, Joy Dunn sat at her dining room table going over her absentee ballot. Turning the pages with long fingernails painted fire engine red, she said she wanted to make sure she had everything in order, as the vote she cast in March’s special election was never counted.

“I got a letter saying my vote wasn’t counted because I didn’t have ID. But I’ve been voting in this state since 1954 and I never had to have ID,” she told ThinkProgress. “I didn’t know I was supposed to send in an ID this time. Nobody told me.”

Dunn, who just turned 79, has several forms of valid ID, but says she was never notified that she had to include a copy of it with her absentee ballot. Arkansas is one of a tiny handful of state to require copies of ID from absentee voters, and the only state in the nation to make those over age 65 do. The only exceptions to this rule are for active duty service members and their spouses and residents of long-term care or residential care facilities.

This time, Joy is aware of the requirement, but it hasn’t been easy for her to meet it. Because of a foot injury that left her unable to drive, she had to ask a neighbor to take her drivers’ license to the library and bring her back a photocopy to include with her ballot. “I had to depend on somebody to go do it for me and that’s a hardship on me,” she said. “And most people don’t even have that kind of help! I think it’s unfair for a lot of us older people.”

She said this hardship reminded her of the very first time she cast a ballot, in Little Rock in 1954. She was forced to pay a $2 poll tax, which she said was “not much more” than people made working a full day’s shift. “It was a little white slip, looked like a rent receipt,” she said. “You had to have that slip to vote.”

The idea then was the same as the idea now: to keep African Americans and Latinos from voting. And when one roadblock falls they figure out a way to put up another one. It’s so obvious that I cannot believe they can deny it with a straight face. But they do — and then they start screaming something unintelligible about black panthers.

Believe me when I say that voter ID isn’t the end of it. Even if every voter in the country gets bar-coded the conservative party will find another way to suppress the vote of their opponents. It’s in their DNA at this point.

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SCOTUS: Weird with a beard
by Tom Sullivan

We’re going to discuss photo IDs and vote suppression in just a minute.

But first, God and beards were before the Supreme Court on Tuesday in the case of Holt v. Hobbs. At issue: Whether a Muslim prisoner in Arkansas should be allowed to wear a beard in accordance with his religious faith. Per federal statute, prisons should allow such accomodation. As a compromise, the plaintiff, Holt, had agreed that a half-inch beard would satisfy his obligation to God.

University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock testified for the plaintiff.

Inside the court chamber, Laycock told the justices that 40 prison systems allow beards of any length, yet Arkansas still will not allow a short, half-inch beard. That policy, he argued, is “seeking absolute deference to anything they say, just because they say it.”

Admitting that they have no similar policy restricting hair on the head, Arkansas Deputy Attorney General David Curran argued that facial hair is a different matter. Why, a prisoner might be able to shave his beard to change his appearance before an escape or before sneaking into another barracks to assault another prisoner.

Chief Justice Roberts interrupted, “You have no examples of that ever happening.”

Well, he might hide contraband in his beard, Curran offered. (This was not going well.) Justice Breyer jumped in:

“Would you say it’s an exaggerated fear that people would hide something in their beards when, in a country of a very high prison population, not one example has ever been found of anybody hiding anything in his beard?” Breyer asked.

Would such exaggerated fears justify allowing the state to interfere with the prisoner’s free exercise of religion?

Curren replied, “Just because we haven’t found the example doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”

Justice Alito fired back:

“Why can’t the prison just give the inmate a comb . . . and if there’s anything in there, if there’s a SIM card in there or a revolver — or anything else you think can be hidden in a 1/2-inch beard, a tiny revolver — it’ll fall out,” Alito said.

Just such exaggerated fears such are at the heart of the voter fraud frauds’ relentless campaign to require photo IDs for voting. We need to restore confidence in the election process, they argue, after having spent decades undermining it.

They Might Be Giants

See, not requiring photo IDs might pose a threat of voter impersonation. Dead or relocated people still on registration rolls might be used by criminals to vote multiple times. People registered in two states might vote in both. GIS, USPS, and local address systems don’t always agree — people with odd-looking addresses might be registered fraudulently. Somebody might be running off fake utility bills as ID for the homeless dead from housing projects.

What voter fraud sleuths never seem to produce are living, breathing perpetrators of in-person voter fraud as lively as their imaginations.

“Just because we haven’t found the example doesn’t mean they aren’t there.” Hans von Spakovsky, True the Vote, and the Voter Integrity Project believe the same thing, and just as firmly.

Come to think of it, underneath their rubber skin, True the Vote members might be Red Lectroids from Planet 10. You know, there could be thousands of them Lectroids on our planet, in our country, and voting illegally in our elections, and we would ever know, would we? Because WE’RE NOT LOOKING. So, DNA tests for every voter, right? I mean, you wouldn’t want Red Lectroids corrupting the integrity of our elections.

Just because they say it, are exaggerated fears about might-be fraud sufficient to justify states erecting obstacles to voting that disenfranchise Americans young and old, poor and minority? Because a new report by the Government Accountability Office suggests that that is just what photo ID laws do. And lo and behold, “declines were greater among younger and African-American voters, when compared to turnout in other states.”

In deciding the 2008 Crawford v. Marion County Election Board photo ID case in Indiana, it’s a shame that the nine Supreme Court justices had not heard this hairy one from Arkansas first. As SCOTUS now mulls over the “horrendous” ruling this week upholding Scott Walker’s photo ID law in Wisconsin, perhaps now the court will bring the same degree of skepticism to protecting Americans’ voting rights as it showed in protecting religious ones.

Then again, don’t hold your breath.

”I don’t want to have any voting registration happening on this campus”
by Tom Sullivan

During a recount here in November 2012, I was at the local Board of Elections when a T-party member flashed a handwritten sign at a young woman from Warren Wilson College: “You are a law breaker.” A redistricting error by the GOP-controlled legislature — a precinct line drawn down the middle of the campus — allowed a handful of students’ votes to decide control of the county commission in Buncombe County, North Carolina. Democrats held the majority by 17 votes.

So it was no real surprise to see this the other day:

The head of the College Republicans at one North Carolina college is determined to stop voter registration drives on her campus, whether they’re being sponsored by conservative or liberal groups.

According to MSNBC, Chairwoman Leigh Thomas of the High Point University College Republicans was caught on camera on Wednesday telling a conservative group that it could not register voters on campus because she wasn’t comfortable with it.

[…]

“I don’t approve of it whatsoever—on a campus like High Point University,” she said. ”I don’t want to have any voting registration happening on this campus, with students.”

During the 2012 recount, T-party members argued that students legally registered at their school should not have their votes counted. It didn’t matter what the law said. (The Board chair quoted it to them.) The T-party charged voter fraud (naturally) and argued, essentially, that the law should be what what they wanted it to be. Ironically, they would lose because the GOP’s high-paid mapmakers failed to safely sequester all of the campus in the liberal ghetto created for the city of Asheville, a.k.a. The Cesspool of Sin.

As the High Point University incident this week demonstrates, Republicans don’t want people voting. Paul Weyrich admitted as much in 1980: “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” What they want to ensure is that only the right people vote.

So North Carolina holds its breath this weekend as the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether or not to enforce a stay on implementing two key provisions of North Carolina’s restrictive, new voting law.

In North Carolina, the Oct. 1 decision by a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals restores same-day registration for early voters and out-of-precinct voting in the upcoming election. The panel overturned a U.S. District Court decision that found implementing the controversial 2013 law would not cause “irreparable harm” to voters. Voting rights advocates requested a preliminary injunction blocking the law for this year’s election as the broader lawsuit on the constitutionality of North Carolina’s law will be tried next July.

In his job as N.C. Attorney General, Democrat Roy Cooper has asked the Supreme Court to block the ruling. Chief Justice John Roberts oversees the Fourth Circuit and could rule any day.

The vote fraud fraud continues

by digby

And they’re getting slipper and more violent.  My piece in Salon this morning takes up the story of vote suppression and voter intimidation in Wisconsin.  A three judge panel of the 7th District Court just ok’d the Wisconsin voter ID bill, leaving almost no time for official or unofficial outreach to let voters know how to obtain ID necessary for voting this November. An estimated 300,000 eligible voters don’t have ID.  (Scott Walker’s election is likely to be a lot closer than that.)

So, now everyone can relax, knowing that there is no way that the thus far nonexistent voter fraud could ever happen in the future, right? Well, not exactly. It would appear that vote suppression may not entirely get the job done. Just because you have an ID doesn’t mean you should be voting and even if True the Vote is patting itself on the back for its success, there are still some good Americans out there who are willing to make sure that you don’t. This time they are going for full-blown voter intimidation.

A local Wisconsin activist named Meg Gorski captured a screen shot of some tweets by a group calling itself the Wisconsin Poll Watcher Militia:

It fairly clear what they mean by “look.” According to this account, the Facebook page (now removed) left little doubt what they were talking about:

A visit to the group’s Facebook page features makes it clear exactly who they are targeting. All of the pictures on the page feature African-Americans. The group is trying to get African-Americans who may have outstanding warrants arrested in order to keep them from voting. The group wants people to report those they suspect of having warrants out on them to the police on election day, “Do the community a favor and keep an eye out for people wanted on warrants and report them to the police on election day.” 

The “poll watchers” also plan on harassing and following people who they suspect of being wanted on warrants to their homes. The plan seems to be to use the police to intimidate African-Americans into not voting in November’s election.

There are more threats at the link. They have, of course, abandoned their web site with the information about “training” as well as invitations to go to the shooting range. It’s lovely.

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No perps, just the same old smoke and fears

by Tom Sullivan

“It’s just sad when a political party has so lost faith in its ideas that it’s pouring all of its energy into election mechanics. I am not willing to defend them anymore.” – retiring Wisconsin state Senator Dale Schultz, the sole Senate Republican to oppose early voting limits

The New York Times editorial page the other day turned it’s ire on the voter fraud squad. Specifically, on Texas where the Justice Department and other groups are in court challenging its absurdly restrictive 2011 identity card law. (Almost as absurd as North Carolina’s.) The Times states the obvious: These laws are about erecting obstacles to Democratic-leaning voters voting.

The laws’ backers rely on a 2008 Supreme Court ruling upholding an Indiana voter-ID law, but at least two of the judges in that case have since admitted they were wrong. Richard Posner, a federal appeals court judge who approved the law, said last fall that voter-ID laws were “now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention.” And former Justice John Paul Stevens, who voted with the majority, said that in retrospect the dissent was “dead right.”
Rather than find a way to appeal to a wider swath of voters, Republican lawmakers rig the game with pointless obstacles to voting. The courts are finally catching on, but in the meantime, many of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens are shut out of the democratic process.

Oh, you have to give the voter fraud squads their due for dedication. Whatever else, they are persistent. The “evidence” they produce to support their claims of rampant fraud are voluminous. What they lack in quality they make up for in quantity. Fraud theorists have never produced actual wrongdoers in numbers to justify claims of widespread fraud. But statistical analyses? They produce those in bulk.

They’ve got nothing. But we are to be impressed by the sheer volume of the nothing. So much so that we will agree to requiring every American to present a photo identity card before voting. Because nothing says freedom like a government official asking to see your papers.

Striking down Pennsylvania’s voter ID law in January, its state court found “no evidence of the existence of in-person voter fraud in the state.” Plus, the state failed to establish any connection between photo identity cards and the integrity of elections. Courts in Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas ruled similarly.

Wisconsin federal district court Judge Lynn Adelman in April struck down that state’s voter ID law for violating the Fourteenth Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Adelman found about 9 percent of registered voters –
about 300,000 – lacked the government-issued ID required for casting a ballot under the Wisconsin law, enough to change election results.

He wrote, “The evidence adduced at trial demonstrates that this unique burden disproportionately impacts Black and Latino voters.” Wisconsin’s African American voters were “1.7 times as likely as white voters to lack a matching driver’s license or state ID and that Latino voters in Wisconsin were 2.6 times as likely as white voters to lack these forms of identification.”

Shirley Brown, for example. An African-American woman in her 70s, Brown was born at home in Louisiana and never had a birth certificate. Or the veteran who testified that he banks using his veteran’s ID, but cannot use it to vote.

“The defendants could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin at any time in the recent past…” wrote Adelman, ruling that Wisconsin’s ID law would prevent more legitimate votes than fraudulent ones.

The voter fraud squad’s repeated declarations of a widespread crime wave are long on anecdotes and short on perpetrators. All smoke, no fire. Their spreading unsubstantiated “wild stories” helps generate support for erecting obstacles to honest citizens sharing in responsibility for governing America.

That is utterly wrongheaded.

Former Colorado Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon (D-Denver) expressed a perspective more in keeping with traditional American optimism when he said,

“We think that voting actually is not just a private vote for the person who gets the vote, but a public good, and that the more people who vote, the more legitimate the elected officials are, and that they represent the actual values of the electorate.”

Isn’t that what we all want?