As the Republicans gather in Tampa this week to assess how they think they can win back the White House, activists are sure to be boasting about their supposed "successes" suppressing the vote in important states like Virginia, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Ohio. Make no mistake about it: what's being done around the country with voter ID laws, changing requirements for voter registration and attempts to alter the time polls are open in certain locations are blatant attempts to suppress voter participation among eligible voters who are more likely to vote for President Obama. It is simply outrageous.
I think people run for office because they want to do the right thing. Intentionally suppressing voters is as far from that as you can get. I think the Republicans just don't get it. Or maybe they get it too well.
The act of voting is a right -- not a privilege -- in our country. American men and women have fought and died to defend and to exercise their right to vote. What Republicans are doing across the country is a blatant violation of the civil rights of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans.
Many of the state voter ID laws that have passed in recent months disproportionately target young, low-income, African American and Latino voters, in addition to senior citizens, who for a variety of economic and logistical reasons are not able to obtain the proper ID to vote. Since the Civil War Congress has enacted numerous voting rights measures and constitutional amendments to prohibit racial discrimination in access to the ballot box, including making poll taxes illegal.
These new requirements can only be described as a poll tax for eligible voters that do not have easy transportation to the nearest state ID-issuing office, or who cannot afford the fees for documents needed to obtain a government ID. Recent studies have shown that nationally about 8 percent of White voting age citizens lack a government-issued ID, and the number rises to 25 percent of African-American voting age citizens.
If we had such laws in Maryland (thankfully, we do not), consider that in Baltimore City alone, 34 percent of adults over 18 do not have a state-issued driver's license. And in Somerset County on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where more than 42 percent of the population is African American, 37 percent of adults over 18 do not have a Maryland license. These are the voters Republicans want to stay home on Election Day.
Generally, I believe that we should do everything we can to limit voter fraud, but when a Texas gun license is sufficient to vote, but a student ID from a state school is not, something is very wrong.
Why are these voter ID laws being enacted when there is little evidence of voter fraud at the polls? And why are the courts allowing such laws to proceed when there is documentation that these laws will prohibit more eligible voters from voting than stop undocumented fraud from ever happening? The answer is not pretty.
The only rational answer is that -- lacking ideas to move this country forward and stuck with a lackluster candidate -- Republicans have resorted to a sheer numbers game to lower the threshold back to power and the White House. Such disturbing actions serve only to limit democracy, not strengthen it. This is true voter fraud, and it cannot be allowed to succeed.
In a democracy, we should want as many people to vote who are eligible. For that reason, as soon as Congress reconvenes, I plan to join with Congressman John Conyers and others by introducing a Senate version of legislation to designate September as a National Month of Voter Registration.
In every state and every city and town, we need to ensure that voters have the knowledge they need to navigate the myriad of misguided laws now on the books. The resolution calls for encouraging "every voting age citizen to: register to vote, confirm their voting information is correct, confirm they have the proper documents in hand for Election Day, and confirm their polling place."
In addition, I encourage everyone to sign the petition we've launched a petition at www.defendourvote.com so that we can make our voices heard on this important issue.
I urge the Republicans in Tampa and around the country to disavow and delegitimize the individuals and groups responsible for promulgating legal obstacles to voting. Instead, they should join with us to work to guarantee that everything possible is done to break down barriers and increase valid voter participation. This is the way to win an election.
Follow Sen. Ben Cardin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/senatorcardin
Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/09/02/3497857/group-says-it-found-30000-dead.html#storylink=cpy
How do these same people who are being discrimnated against get Apply for Welfare, Food Stamps, Get on a plane, or enter the Democratic Convention.
Also, Fraudulent registration was just discovered in Florida by Democrats Obama workers entering schools and acting like they are registering for the election board. democrats were housed in house in Columbus voting across state lines (2008)m democrats were caught crossing the Wisconsin border to vote in another state, A Democrat was caught witha voting booth in the back of his car in Florida. A Democratic Precinct in St. Louis stayed open an extra hour and a half to try and elect Al Gore. Today, Voting places over seas were not opened for Military to vote, mostly republicans. and packets were not give to overseas miitary to register. I have about 2 dozen acts of fraud by the democrats, the democrats have only a claim that if you need an ID you are being discrimanated against. I am a democrat, I have been ashamed to be one since the Al Gore Demo. Convention. Democrats have stolen the Goebbel's playbook from 1930's Germany, the Republicans have been the one talking issues. Prove you can win fair and maybe I will vote for you.
If you are registered to vote and live in one of the states that tries to disenfranchise your vote and lack photo ID to vote in person, request an absentee ballot and vote through the mail.
If you are registered to vote and live in a state / county which has curtailed early voting to disenfranchise you, get your church to organize an early voting party on a weekend or day when early voting is available.
Don't let right wing politicians deny you the right to vote by making you jump through hoops!
A major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 - that was President Bush's Justice Department - failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter, which the anti-fraud laws are supposedly designed to stop. Out of the 300 million votes cast in that period, federal prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud.
86 votes out of 300 million cast, that is just a hair less than 0.00003 percent. Get real Republicans, it is about voter suppression, not voter fraud!
And it is not the Democrats who yell "fraud and cheating", that is the Republican line, even though 0.00003 percent is a non issue.
And for many elderly and poor, that "free" ID is not free. Get over it, all this whining to mandate voter ID is nothing more than a Republican ploy to curtail votes for the "good" guy!
www.defendourvote.com
But how do we establish citizenship if there is no ID? Depending on estimates, up to 10% of the people in this country are here illegally. They aren't just 'not citizens' who are here legally. They are actually illegal aliens. They are also not evenly distributed across the country. They are concentrated in certain areas where their potential impact on system would be even more magnified. This number is way beyond statistically significant when elections are won or lost depending on fractions of a percent.
I don't think any laws that may restrict voting rights should be rushed in just before election time, but there should definitely be an ID system that effectively differentiates citizens, legals, and illegals when it comes to exercising rights, privileges, and benefits that accrue to different groups. This is reasonable and normal. Trying to pretend this doesn't matter is highly suspect.
For the record, I support Obama.
Probably not.
Another red herring Senator! I couldn't get on a plane without an ID, I ouldn't buy alcohol without and IID, I couldn't come to the Capitol to see you without presenting an ID, but in your opinion, you don't have to show an ID to vote? Patently absurd!!
Go figure hey.............red herring my ass.
One state, run by the brother of the eventual winner, ruins it for the other forty nine. And the GOP can still look to Jeb Bush as a leader when he should've been dragged in front of Congress and interrogated. Didn't happen. And now it's the GOP that claims to be protecting us from voter fraud. Salvador Dali couldn't create a more fitting work of surrealism than 21st Century American democracy. Thanks so much Grotesque Old Party.
The center was at the heart of a national scandal in 2002 after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance act. The attorneys defending McCain-Feingold had reportedly based key portions of their case on research provided by the Brennan Center – research, Discover the Networks notes, that may have been “deliberately faked,” according to Weekly Standard editor David Tell.
Tell quoted Brennan Center political scientist Jonathan Krasno admitting in his funding proposal to the Pew Charitable Trusts that the purpose of his group’s proposed study on campaign finance was for partisan political reasons.
Wrote Tell: “‘Issue Advocacy: Amassing the Case for Reform,’ dated February 19, 1999, explained that `[t]he purpose of our acquiring the data set is not simply to advance knowledge for its own sake, but to fuel a continuous multi-faceted campaign to propel campaign reform forward.’ Dispassionate academic inquiry was so alien to the spirit of the thing that Brennan promised to suspend its work midstream, pre-publication, if the numbers turned out wrong. `Whether we proceed to phase two will depend on the judgment of whether the data provide a sufficiently powerful boost to the reform movement.’”
Conclusion: Brennan researchers “deliberately faked” their results.
With additional research by Brenda J. Elliott
Brennan, did not ask respondents whether they had government-issued IDs, instead asked whether respondents had “readily available or shown ‘tomorrow,’ seems to be trying to elicit a particular response: that those surveyed do not have ID”
Heritage cited numerous studies that directly contradict the Brennan report, studied not widely cited by the news media in the voter ID debate.
Such studies include:
An American University survey in Maryland, Indiana, and Mississippi found that less than one-half of 1 percent of registered voters lacked a government-issued ID. Therefore, the study correctly concluded that “a photo ID as a requirement of voting does not appear to be a serious problem in any of the states.
A 2006 survey by Brennan of more than 36,000 voters found that only “23 people in the entire sample—less than one-tenth of one percent of reported voters” were unable to vote because of an ID requirement
GroupSnoop.org, a website run by the National Center for Public Policy Research, recently posted a new profile of the Brennan Center that documents how its voter ID information is highly questionable and may be based on biased data.
In August 2011, Hans A. von Spakovsky and Alex Ingram of the Heritage Foundation critiqued the Brennan report, finding it is “both dubious in methodology and results and suspect in conclusions as biased questioning used to obtain desired result concerning minority voters – a result that is actually contradicted by footnotes buried in the Brennan report itself.
“By not following traditional scientific methods of data collection and analysis, the Brennan Center study appears to have pursued results that advance a particular political agenda rather than the truth about voter identification,”
Heritage found the Brennan survey used responses of 987 individuals to estimate number of Americans without valid documentation based on 2000 Census calculations of citizen voting-age population. Those Census figures, contained millions of U.S. residents who are ineligible to vote, thus contributing to the study’s overestimation of voters without a government-issued identification