Thomas Paine called voting "the beating heart of democracy." So why have Republican state legislatures passed laws to suppress it?
Paul Weyrich, founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a nonprofit organization of conservative state legislators and private-sector representatives, said it best in 1980: "Our leverage in the elections … goes up as the voting populace goes down." Mike Turzai, the Republican leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, was more explicit in 2012 when he claimed the state's then-new voter ID law would "allow Mitt Romney to win."
Republicans have laid down a smokescreen about the scourge of voter fraud to justify their various suppression measures, from demanding voter IDs to abolishing early voting, Election Day registration, weekend voting and programs that encourage high-schoolers to register when they turn 18 years old. Yet a 2014 study by former Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt found that in-person voter fraud is nearly nonexistent; he discovered just 31 instances in more than 1 billion ballots cast between 2000 and 2014. Fact-checking website PolitiFact.com claims you are 100 times more likely to get struck by lightning than to experience voter fraud.
This hasn't stopped conservative foundation Judicial Watch from publishing a booklet, "8 Things You Can Do Now to STOP Voter Fraud." The group makes a great deal about uncovering scores of registered voters in 12 states who were ineligible to vote. My wife and I might have been among them.
We moved from New Jersey to Maryland in the spring of 2008. We never told the Garden State that we had changed our residence to Maryland. I am sure this happens with most people who move. That means at least for a few years our names were probably on the voter rolls of two states. That doesn't mean we made a 6-hour round-trip drive to central Jersey to cast additional votes for president that year. Authorities catch inaccuracies like this when voter rolls are purged every few years to correctly reflect the active list of drivers' licenses and the loss of registered voters through relocation and death. No fraud here.
The Judicial Watch booklet also cites the number of noncitizens who voted in the 2012 presidential election in selected states: 17 in Ohio, 19 in Philadelphia alone, a Bosnian citizen in Iowa (gasp!), and 10 in Michigan — as in 10 out of the 4,679,825 votes cast in the Wolverine State. This measly number is like a drop in the ocean and made no difference at all in Michigan's presidential race in which Barack Obama received 54.21 percent of the vote and Romney 44.71 percent. The next paragraph in the alarmist booklet begins with, "Does that sound like a problem that 'hardly exists?'" Well, yeah.
You might think that something as important as the right to vote would be enshrined in the Bill of Rights right next to free speech. But the last thing that the southern framers of the amendments wanted was to open the door to voting by slaves. Their true intentions were revealed again during Reconstruction when the defeated states of the Confederacy installed literacy tests, poll taxes, and other onerous requirements to dampen the votes of blacks and poor whites.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 removed these millstones from the neck of democracy. Furthermore, it required states with a history of discrimination against minority voters to get federal permission before changing their voting laws. In 2013, the right-leaning Supreme Court voted 5-4 to gut this provision, thinking the targeted states were well beyond their Jim Crow hijinks. Well, they should have thought again. Texas immediately implemented a voter ID law, soon followed by restrictions in Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi and Florida. Can you hear the strains of "Dixie" yet? It became baldly apparent that their collective intention was to suppress the black vote that strongly trends Democratic.
In July, a federal appeals court blocked North Carolina's restrictive measures regarding photo IDs, early voting and voter registration for high-school kids. It ruled that the measures targeted "African-Americans with almost surgical precision." And on Aug. 31, the Supreme Court effectively upheld this ruling by deadlocking 4-4 on the appeal. These decisions promise to send a shiver through other discriminatory state legislatures and ensure that the "beating heart of democracy" won't be stopped this November.
Frank Batavick writes from Westminster. His column appears Fridays. Email him at fjbatavick@gmail.com.
