New State Voting Laws
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-06-21/new-state-voting-laws
With the next presidential election eighteen months away, many states, especially those in Republican hands, are making major changes to voting laws. The changes include requiring photo ID's for photos, reducing the number of early voting days, and expanding registration rules. The intent, they say, is to save money and reduce fraud,but some Democrats are cry foul. They claim the changes are intended to discourage voter turnout and to disproportionately shrink voting rates among African Americans, Latinos and young adults, groups critical to President Obama’s victory in 2008. Please join us.
Guests
E.J. Dionne Jr.
senior fellow, The Brookings Institution,
columnist, Washington Post
and author of "Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right" and of "Stand Up Fight Back."
Wendy Weiser
director, Democracy Program, Brennan Center for Justice
Kris Kobach
Secretary of State, Kansas
Hans Von Spakovsky
senior legal fellow, Heritage Foundation
Comments
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If you can scrape up the effort to vote then you can scrape up the effort to get a state I.D. If providing simple and basic identification that is required for any legal transaction is beyond your ability then quite frankly you are unqualified to vote.
Ironic that Republicans believe disenfranchising a large portion of the population is the way to win; they are saying "this is not a democracy".
The problem of election fraud - cheating through electronic voting machines or voter discouragement by insufficient voting facilities is a bigger problem than individual voter fraud ever will be.
In New Mexico in 2004, no matter how democratic the district, GW Bush won every area that had electronic voting machines. In Ohio in 2004 the voting facilities in Democratic-leaning areas were so poor that college kids stood in lines for hours. http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/2073
The incidence of voter fraud is exceedingly rare, rather difficult and has a low probability of changing election results, unlike election fraud which I beleive did flip NM and OH to Bush in 2004.
"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."
--Paul Weyrich, Dallas TX, fall1980.
That statement (and it's on video) says it all.
I am a precinct judge in North Carolina, which is also a state that is trying to implement these new "guidelines". Our state is willing to spend money to issue voter IDs to citizens but unwilling to fund our schools! There are many citizens who may not have photo IDs because they are not longer driving or traveling via air transportation. Many of the folks in Raleigh use bus as transportation, many are home bound, and lots of folks are in nursing homes or assisted living. Making them go to a Driver's License office for this photo ID is ridiculous. There is so little evidence of voter fraud in our state, this inconvenience and discrimination is awful. What are they going to do about folks who vote Absentee? The signatures of disabled voters may not match any more!
247 cases of fraud since 1997.
247 divided by 14 years equals 17 votes per year.
These laws are like using a shotgun on a housefly indoors, too much gun.
I think it was noted old dictator Joe Stalin that said, "It's not the people who vote who decide an election, it's the people who count the votes."
Diane
I don’t understand this objection. When I was in college both undergraduate and graduate school I had a photo ID.
When I was in the Army I had a military photo ID. I have spent most of my career traveling for a living. I have therefore had to carry a Passport which is a national ID system. My late mother in law didn’t drive so our local county in NC issued her a photo ID.
Voting rights are for Legal citizens only!
Robert in North Carolina.
I think voting laws should reflect expanded voting rights and procedures to be more democratic. I often wonder why voting is limited to 1 Day. If you are working a 12 hour shift you miss that window and chance to vote. In addition i always wait 20 minutes to vote and for presidential election often 1-2 hours. I often think this disenfranchises anybody who has a busy schedule.
The thinness of Mr. Kobach's reasoning is proved by his protesting to Mr. Dionne, isn't one fraudulent vote enough if yours is the one that is cancelled?
If he's so concerned with cancelled votes, why not spend his state's limited resources perfecting the ballots in his state so that the myriad errors that take place with every balloting system are limited as much as humanly possible?
One fraudulent vote is not too much, in the real world.
Is it because he believes his efforts will limit Democratic votes?
Monte, unfortunately, your argument could have been used years ago to prevent women and emancipated slaves from voting.
You need ID to buy cigarettes, lotto tickets and alcohol, I've never heard of people not being able to come up with ID when they want to. Young people look at getting their own ID as a rite of passage, whether they are poor, black, rich or white. I'm a life long liberal and this argument makes no sense to me. If people won't make the extra effort, maybe they don't deserve to vote.
The Heritage Foundation is a conservative group that of course is going to back up the need for voter i.d. It should be pointed out that this group has a horse in this race and that is to see voter i.d. to be the law of the land.
Statistics can show anything you want. The proof of the pudding is that Republicans want to restrict voting of those people as they see as supporting the 'other side'. If they thought that voting ID would not limit the votes of certain populations they wouldn't be working so hard to enact voting ID laws.
These voting rights advocates have their priorities all wrong. They should be trying to get voters to the polls. The voter turnout especially among minorities and especially in local and state elections that determine how our schools are run and money spent is pathetic.
I am surprised that there is not a huge tea party backlash for this because this sounds like more government than less to me.
It is ironic to spend so much time and resources on the small % of voters involved in so-called voter fraud. The real problem in this country is the number of people in this country that vote, and worse the number that vote intelligently. The nature of a democracy is the people get what they deserve by their voting or failure to vote.
If a study shows no significant decrease in voting after ID requirements instituted, then it demonstrates that there was no significant voter fraud.
Early voting is a great way to increase the availability to the ballot box and would reduce absentee voting. This in turn creates less paperwork for clerks to handle. In Indiana, the Indianapolis early voting sites which were wildly popular in the presidential election were defunded by the republicans currently in power. The Clerk found a way to have early voting in a limited way. There was an attempt to block this by republican activists.
Perhaps there are non partisan reasons to not have early voting, most seem to be coming from republicans.
I am outraged by the laughable rationales provided by Mr. Kobach. He mentioned that "I haven't personally met anyone that doesn't have an ID." - this goes to show how out of touch he is with a vast population living in Kansas struggling around the poverty line. He also compared the number of issued IDs to the number of voting-age population in Kansas - this is as non-scientific as one can get to prove there is a one-to-one correlation with all voting-age people and IDs. Why doesn't he show a survey of people living in urban or inner city neighborhoods and see how many don't have IDs?
Republicans can't gather enough courage to say the plain truth: if you want to care about what poor and needy people think and need, the Republican party is not the party for you.
Seems to me this is an effort to get people to the polls in a creative way.
I was fairly naive about this topic (age 68yrs) until the last presidential election when I gave a ride to a voter who had stood in line for hours only to be rejected. We went to voter reg and joined hundreds like him, all minorities, waited four more hours and found he would have been rejected again if I weren't there to speak up for him. He is an Iraq vet and had moved and re-registered but, strangely, his form never made it to the computer. I listened to so many stories like his and am now aware that voting is still easy for white, educated folks and hard for the numerous poor. It should shame us all.
The right to vote is not conferred by money and affluence, but by the U.S. Constitution ... "just not in practice", that estimated 1 in 5 legit voting Ohioans turned away from the polls in the 2004 election fiasco would remind us.
Speaking of "cost" - the cost of stolen elections have arguably been pretty steep.
Really, what law being discussed would have stopped Mitt Romney from living in California or Utah and still voting in Massachussetts claiming his son's basement as his primary residence?
Voter fraud just does not exist.
Robert, since you and I have both been to college and graduate school, you and I should have the basic skills to understand the REALITY of our society, that is, not every one has been to college or even been schooled; many people don't even travel by car (not even a plane!!!). These people can be legal citizens for sure, but life has not taken them down the same path as you and I.
I have a question for Mr. Von Spakovsky- you say that multiple studies have indicated that requiring voter ID's does not impact voter turnout. If this is true, doesn't this then negate your argument that voter ID's are necessary to decrease voter fraud?
a
voting ID is just the tip of the iceberg--wake up folks.
“To The American Media: Time To Face The Reality Of Election Rigging”
Detailed (yet concise?) argument for the ‘theft’ of recent elections—not as crazy as it sounds.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/To-The-American-Media-Tim-by-Jonathan-S...
“Was the 2004 Election Stolen?”
Very well documented account for the theft of the 2004 presidential election—focused on events in Ohio, written by RFK jr.
I copied/pasted into a Word doc and the footnotes start at the bottom of pg. 15 and run through pg. 24, in 9 point font. At 208 of them, that’s almost 14 per page. He’s not just making stuff up.
(2 links for same thing in case one doesn’t work)
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0601-34.htm
http://www.blueguitar.org/new/misc/political/rs_2004_election.pdf
Transcript of interview with RFK jr on Thom Hartmann show
http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2006/06/transcript-robert-f-kennedy-jr-...
Republicans will try anything to suppress voter turn out. No Democratic governor would ever approve these pathetic attempts by the GOP that values ignorance in their supporters.
The conservative members on today's show can deny the negative effect these laws have on the democratic process but there are numerous studies that say they are wrong.
There is one case of fraud currently in the courts in Indiana that is very interesting. It is against the Secretary of the State of Indiana. He is our top elections official yet did vote illegally in the election (in fact when he was elected). He doesn't deny that he had moved and was voting using his old address in his old precinct. He is saying that doesn't constitute voter fraud.
He is being tried in criminal court for fraud because it is alleged he didn't change his address so he wouldn't have to resign from the town council he was serving on. He also listed this as his address for loan papers and for his state office election filing.
Listening to the show this morning and I note that Kris Kobach seems quite ignorant of both the requirements to obtain ID in Kansas and other states. His own website as Secretary of State is rather deficient in this regard, underscoring how low a priority it seems to be for his office.
In Kansas, as in other states post 9/11, documentary requirements to obtain state-issued identification are quite elaborate and require documents not possessed by many individuals, most notably persons who have lost their homes or are currently homeless. I chair the main organization handling homeless programs in Birmingham, Alabama, and trying to help people obtain ID is an issue that requires multiple volunteer organizations, money to pay fees (always in short supply) and the undivided attention of a Board of community leaders.
Mr. Kobach cites the availability of "free" photo identification for persons too poor to pay. While such provisions are true in law, there appears to be no effort in the Office of Secretary of State to assure that such provisions are readily known and utilized by citizens of Kansas.
While his Secretary of State website has numerous links concerning the prevention of voter fraud it has NO indication or obvious link regarding how to obtain photo identification for free. Neither does the website of the Kansas Division of Revenue, which handles the issuing of Drivers Licenses.
The obvious point is that there is no sincere effort to prevent disenfranchisement of poor individuals. A Secretary of State could set the example here, but Mr. Kobach appears to be avoiding the obvious requirements imposed upon him by the law he helped get passed.