The voter ID laws that have been passed in Republican states
- and the Democratic opposition to them - are revealing a lot more than either
the Democrats or Republicans think they are revealing, in my mind.
But there are some interesting facts that undermine the
Democratic Party voter-suppression narrative. One is that voter ID laws were passed in
Indiana and Georgia prior to the 2008 election.
Was Democratic turnout suppressed?
No. Liberal Lou Cannon writes:
“Democratic turnout surged in both states. Democrats say this reflected
enthusiasm for Barack Obama, which is true but beside the point. The argument
against strict photo-ID laws is that significant numbers of people who want to
vote can’t obtain the required identification. If that were so, the Democratic
vote should have increased less in Indiana and Georgia than in states without
such laws. In fact, it was comparable.”
Republicans cry foul.
The issue to them is not who has been caught, but how many scores of
thousands of votes get cast with no way of catching them, especially in the
Democrat controlled cities.
They claim that systemic fraud by the big city Democratic
machines has inflated Democratic Party turnout and vote count for decades. And they cite “walking around money” to pay
people on Election Day who otherwise wouldn’t vote if they hadn’t been accosted
by party machine get-out-the-vote operatives and taken to the polls. They point to voter registration records that
are bloated with deceased and otherwise non-eligible names. Republicans claim they are righting a wrong
that has been going on as long as one party controlled the voting mechanisms of
the big cities, all of which today are very heavily registered and voted as
Democrats. Decades ago, the city
machines were Republican, now they are Democrat, and both parties did the same
things when they were in control.
OK, but what about the notion that the elderly, blacks, and
the young can’t afford to pay the money to get the free voter ID cards. (The cards are free, but Dems say that you may
have to have to pay to get a birth certificate to get the free card). Well, that really doesn't seem to hold up all
that well either. Pennsylvania seems to me to be very
accommodating in making it easy for voters without voter IDs to have their
votes counted. Conservative John Fund
writes:
“As Judge Simpson noted, anyone who cannot obtain a photo ID is allowed
to cast a provisional ballot. Provisional ballots will be counted if the voter
can provide officials with a copy of acceptable ID within six days by mail,
fax, or e-mail. If a voter is indigent and cannot afford the fee for a copy of
his birth certificate, he simply needs to affirm this and his provisional
ballot will be counted. “I am not convinced any qualified elector need be
disfranchised” by the voter-ID law, Judge Simpson concluded. He also found no
problem with the law’s provision that absentee voters must provide the last
four digits of their Social Security number or driver’s license, a useful
protection against fraud”.
But, Democrats say that the real proof of Republican voter suppression is Jim Greer, former Republican Party Chair who confessed that Republicans were suppressing votes:
“Greer mentioned a December 2009 meeting with party officials. “I was
upset because the political consultants and staff were talking about voter
suppression and keeping blacks from voting,” he said, according to the Tampa Bay
Times. He also said party officials discussed how
“minority outreach programs were not fit for the Republican Party,”
Looks pretty bad.
What do Republicans have to say? Well, they point out that a Democratic Party
operative claimed that Democrats were inflating votes:
“Artur Davis, the former Democratic congressman from
Alabama who nominated Barack Obama for president at the 2008 Democratic
convention, agrees. “A big thing that drove me to leave the Democratic party
and support photo ID was the realization that the real victims of voter fraud
are minority and poor people who live in places where machines block reform
efforts by stealing votes,” he told me. He wrote in an op-ed in the Montgomery
Advertiser last year that “voting in the names of the dead, and the nonexistent,
and the too-mentally impaired to function cancels out the votes of citizens who
are exercising their rights — that’s suppression by any light. If you doubt it
exists, I don’t; I’ve heard the peddlers of those ballots brag about it, I’ve
been asked to provide the funds for it, and I am confident it has changed at
least a few close local election results.”
So, one way to interpret this is that neither party is
really interested in democracy, especially not interested in fair
elections. They are really only
interested in winning, and cheating is all part of the corrupt, disgusting
game.
Another way of interpreting this is that none of this really amounts to a hill of beans. The huge voter inflation by Democrats suspected by Republicans is refuted by finding only 10 cases of fraud, and the fear of voter suppression by voter ID laws is refuted by the lack of evidence of lower Democrat voter turnout in the only two states that actually have voter ID laws – Georgia and Indiana.
Another way of interpreting this is that none of this really amounts to a hill of beans. The huge voter inflation by Democrats suspected by Republicans is refuted by finding only 10 cases of fraud, and the fear of voter suppression by voter ID laws is refuted by the lack of evidence of lower Democrat voter turnout in the only two states that actually have voter ID laws – Georgia and Indiana.
I go for answer number two.
I think this is a tempest in a teapot.
I think that party activists get paid a lot of money to tilt the playing
field for their party, and they take a lot of credit for doing so, and don’t
really accomplish much at all.
I think the real reason for the brouhaha is to get the party
faithful riled up and out to the polls.
The people that MSNBC and Moveon.org are trying to get to the polls are
the dedicated party faithful in their audience, not the indigent blacks or
elderly that don’t really know what is going on. And the people that the National Review and
Fox News want to get to the polls are the dedicated party faithful as well. Inflame, demonize, scream with indignation,
appeal to your tribe to go out and destroy the other tribe, who are presented
as inhuman monsters out to Destroy America As We Know It.
In other words, my hope is that we all calm down, and don't let the ideologues play us like a drum just to make sure we go out and vote out of fear. Vote our convictions, you bet, be partisan, you bet, but resist the demonization and fear mongering of the ideologues.