Reporting voting problems

If you have a problem voting, there’s a place to report it.

VoterStory.org is trying to create a distributed capacity for reporting, and collating reports of, election-day voter problems. As part of that effort, we’ve posted the form (right column).

Here’s what VoterStory says about the project:

Once a “story” is submitted, it will automatically be referred to nonprofit, nonpartisan voter protection organizations that will be standing by to intervene or lend support, if they can. The goal is simple: VoterStory.org will increase the capacity to address the specific voter problems that may occur on Election Day by organizing the relevant stories and making sure the information is forwarded to the appropriate authorities. Voters using the system will receive an e-mail confirmation and will be registered in a database of election incidents that can be used by numerous groups to document the need for election reforms in the future.

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In case you were wondering

No, there’s no evidence that voting by ineligible voters is a significant problem. Therefore yes, the push for laws to make it harder to vote (say, by requiring picture IDs that many poor, elderly, and rural voters don’t have) will merely tend to suppress the Democratic vote, which is precisely what they are designed to do.

No, there’s no evidence that voting by ineligible voters is a significant problem. Therefore yes, laws to make it harder to vote by requiring picture IDs that many poor, elderly, and rural voters don’t have will merely tend to suppress the Democratic vote, which is precisely what they are designed to do.

A GOP vote-suppression effort fails

Bob Ehrlich can’t even collect 17,000 valid signatures on his referendum petitions. Good!

Robert Ehrlich, the reactionary Republican Governor of Maryland, has been squabbling with the Democratic-controlled legislature about whether to allow early voting. (The Republican apparat consistently opposes all efforts to improve voter turnout, as part of a broader attempt to make the United States less unpopular with those who hate us for our freedom.)

The legislature passed an early-voting bill. The Governor vetoed it, mumbling, as Republicans afraid of high turnouts usually do, about “fraud.” The Governor then ginned up a petition campaign to put the law on the ballot, thus preventing it from taking effect this year, when Erlich himself is up for re-election.

The Gov’s friends submitted 21,000 signatures by the May 30 deadline. They needed 17,000 by that date (a third of the 51,000 needed to finally put the law on the ballot). But something more than 4,000 of those signatures were invalid.

Naturally, the Governor’s buddies are claiming that the disallowance of the fraudulent signatures on their fraudulent petition to avoid purely hypothetical fraudulent voting was … fraudulent.

I hope that’s clear.

Axis of bigotry

The nativists in the House Republican Caucus join with the neo-Confederates to block extension of the Voting Rights Act.

House Republican nativists joined House Republican neo-Confederates to block extension of the Voting Rights Act. The nativists object to bilingual ballots and to polling-place interpreters for non-English-speaking citizens.

Someone ought to remind the Republicans that Abraham Lincoln bought a German-language newspaper, the Illinois Staatsanzeiger, to help rally German-immigrant votes for the Republican party.

But then someone ought to remind the Republicans of Abraham Lincoln.

Footnote The Staatsanzeiger was one of 265 German-language newspapers then published in the United States. That’s probably why so many of today’s Americans of German descent speak only German, and helps account for the strong movement for an Anschluss that would join Wisconsin to das Vaterland.

Law. v. polics, voting rights department

Once again, polical appointees overruled career staff to sustain an effort to entrench the far right in power.

In case you were wondering: The career staff of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department unanimously recommended rejection of the DeLay redistricting of Texas as a violation of the Voting Rights Act. The political management of the Department overruled the staff, just as it had in accepting Georgia’s virtual poll tax.

The good news is that a federal court has already struck down the Georgia law, and that ruling was sustained unanimously by a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit. The bad news is that the Texas law passed muster with the 5th Circuit (which apparently hadn’t seen the staff memo) and is now before the Supreme Court.

I’m sorry to be late on this one, but the capacity of the Bush Administration to execute outrages is outrunning may capacity to comment on them.

Time to speak out

Georgia purges its voter rolls of anyone without a picture ID.

The Justice Department has just given Georgia the go-ahead to disenfranchise anyone who doesn’t have a driver’s license. The law is supposedly intended to deter fraud, but no one has come up with an actual examples of voting-by-impersonation, and the law specifically exempts absentee voting.

The true purpose of the law, and its certain effect, is to reduce the number of poor, elderly, black and otherwise Democratic-leaning voters.

Georgia has 159 counties, but only 56 places to get a driver’s license, none of which is in Atlanta or in any of the six counties with the highest proportions of African-Americans in their population. Under the Clinton Administration, the Justice Department rejected a less restrictive law.

Under the Reagan Administration, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department was widely referred to as the “State’s Rights Division.” That ugly tradition seems to have been revived.

I’d like to see Congressional Democrats react to this with an appropriate degree of outrage. And I’d like to hear some complaint about it from conservatives, too: the ones who always react with shocked horror when Democrats accuse Republicans of pandering to, and wilfuly benefiting from, racial prejudice.

No, I don’t pretend the authority to dictate what other people say or write. But qui tacet, consentit. Do you consent to this, or not? If not, let’s hear about it.

Hat tip: the indispensible Progressive Blogs Digest

Tyranny advances in Georgia

Georgia’s Republicans pass a law to forbid poor people from voting.

Georgia’s Republican legislature passed, and its cartoonish Repubican governor signed, a bill to forbid voting on election day by anyone not in possession of a government-issued picture identification document.

It is no accident, comrades, that the elderly and the poor are both disproportionately likely to lack official ID and disproportionately likely to vote Democratic. While the nominal purpose of the law is to prevent fraud, no one in Georgia seems to be able to point to an actual instance of someone’s committing vote fraud by impersonating a voter. (Absentee voter fraud, a much more prevalent problem and a GOP speciality, is not covered by the law, which in fact makes it easier to vote — and to vote fraudulently — absentee.)

And of course the Diebold no-paper-trail, closed-source, eminently hackable electronic voting machines will be allowed to keep churning out “results” with no demonstrable relationship to what voters actually did in the privacy of the voting booth.

The Georgia Republicans thus carry forward developing totalitarian trend of the modern GOP. For a political system to remain republican (with a small “r”) it is necessary that the results of any given election be limited in time, thus encouraging the current losers to lose gracefully and “wait for next year.” By using the power temporarily entrusted to them by the voters to deprive opponents of the means of effective opposition, the red-state Leninists are slowly but surely blurring the distinction between election and revolution.

I’ll belive that a Giuliani or a McCain or a Patacki is actually a “moderate Republican” when one of them denounces this undemocratic trend and demands that his party stand for honest and fair elections, with honest counts and enough voting machines so that Democratic voters don’t have to stand in seven-hour lines to vote, as they did in Columbus, Ohio last November.

This is primarily a political problem, to be handled through political means. Democrats, civil-rights organizations, and the mass media ought to make a huge and continuing fuss about honest elections. So far, the means of vote-stealing the GOP has been willing to resort to aren’t enough to stop a popular-vote landslide, which — let’s not forget — would result from even a fairly modest surge in Democratic (and Democatic-leaning independent) turnout. In addition, there’s a chunk of the Republican electorate that is much less totalitarian-minded than its current leaders; if the election-rigging tendencies of the Republicans became a major topic of media attention, some of them would stay home, or even cross the aisle. Vote-rigging and corruption make a good pair of campaign bookends.

But there are also legal issues here. Georgia’s evil history of denying the right to vote to African-Americans makes it a covered state under the Voting Rights Act. Thus the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice must review the law for VRA compliance. Like any other measure targeted at poor and socially marginal people generally, the ID requirement will disproportionately disenfranchise blacks. Will the CRD do its job, or will it act, as it often does under Republican administrations, as if the name on the door were “States’ Rights Division”?

In addition to the Voting Rights Act issue, the new Georgia law might be challenged under the anti-poll-tax amendment to the Constitution. I don’t know about Georgia, but in California getting a driver’s license or non-driver’s ID from the DMV costs money. By conditioning voting on possession of a document that costs money to obtain, the Georgia Bolsheviks are, in effect, imposing a tax on voting, which is precisely what that amendment forbids. Does the Georgia law conflict with the Twenty-Fourth Amendment? Perhaps that would be a good question to ask Judge Roberts.

Update A reader supplies the text of the bill, which allows Georgians the right to take a pauper’s oath and get an ID issued for free. That probably avoids the “poll tax” issue. Of course, nothing prevents whatever state agency issues the drivers’ licenses from making the process as difficult, time-consuming, and humiliating as possible for those who can’t pay the fees.

Second update On second thought, the “pauper’s oath” provision doesn’t do a damned thing to obviate the poll-tax feature of the new law. The ban on poll taxes applies to rich and poor alike. Just because someone isn’t an absolute pauper doesn’t make it less obnoxious to charge him a fee as a condition of exercising his electoral franchise. Shame on me for being fooled by such a bogus argument.

Bush New England chair quits in phone-jamming scandal

More evidence of the willingness of the leadership of God’s Official Party to interfere with the elections process.

The Bush regional campaign chair for New England says he didn’t do anything wrong in connection with the jamming of Democrats’ phone lines in the 2002 New Hampshire Senate race narrowly won by John Sununu, but he’s quitting anyway, just for the hell of it.

Meantime, the U.S. Department of Justice has asked the New Hampshire courts to keep the Democrats from getting depositions from the people involved, because it might compromise matters now before a federal grand jury. Two Republican officials have already pleaded guilty and apparently are providing testimony in return for leniency. According to Josh Marshall, quoting his own sources and the Manchester Union-Leader, one of the co-conspirators they named is James Tobin, the man who just quit. Josh also points out that

Note that, if the Democrats were barking up the wrong tree in charging top Republican officials with complicity in the illegal jamming, there would be no basis for the DoJ motion. You can’t reveal what the Grand Jury is learning unless the Grand Jury is actually learning something about the subject of your inquiry. So the DoJ motion confirms Marshall’s story.

No doubt the indictments of Republican higher-ups, like those of the top Administration officials who revealed Valerie Plame’s identity as an undercover CIA officer, will be handed up sometime after November 2.