Posts on Voting

One of the Right’s standard reasons for opposing gay marriage is that it somehow harms “traditional” marriage, as if gay couples making a commitment to one another de-legitimizes the commitment that straight couples have made to one another.

Now, via Rick Scarborough, it seems as if that sort of tortured logic is working it way into all of their arguments … or at least the ones concerning ACORN and “voter fraud”:

Every American should be demanding that full disclosure be made of the methods and tactics used by ACORN. Record numbers of registrations have been recorded by ACORN, and American’s have a right to be assured that their vote not be canceled out by an ineligible voter … Every corrupted record is a cancellation of one vote of a legitimate voter who played by the rules.

Scarborough never bothers to explain how an illegitimate voter registration manages to “cancel out” someone else’s vote, but the Right seems committed to screaming “voter fraud” at every opportunity, so that is what they are going to do.

Of course, as Chris Hayes points out, none of this is true anyway:

Just to get this out of the way: in the real world, there is no such thing as voter fraud. There will be roughly as many fraudulent votes cast in this election as there were stockpiles of biological weapons in Iraq. That is to say, none. (See Dahlia Lithwick for more on this). But what about all those duplicate and obviously fake voter registration cards submitted by ACORN? you ask. They were required by law to submit them. (See Rick Hertzberg for more on this). In order to prevent tampering, state law in many places requires groups like ACORN to submit all the forms they collect, whether obviously erroneous or not.

Considering that Republicans are up in arms over allegations of “voter fraud” or, more accurately “voter registration fraud,” we assume that they’ll soon be turning the attention to Virginia where, as we last month, Jerry Falwell Jr. set out to register the entire student body at Liberty University, in hopes of being the “college that elected a president."

It turns out that Liberty registered some 4,000+ new voters, but that a lot of the new registrations were illegible, incomplete, or otherwise ineligible:

Disappointment, however, could await an estimated 200 to 300 people whose handwriting on their voter applications was so illegible or incomplete that registrar’s office personnel couldn’t find them to fix their information … Board member John Falcone said workers who processed the flood of applications told him many of the illegible forms came from Liberty University students, however [Patricia Bower, Lynchburg’s registrar] said there’s no way to tell whether those forms came from Liberty, because they show addresses in California or several other states.

Of course it’s impossible to tell if they came from Liberty since all the addresses are from other states.That’s exactly the problem. But unless there was another organization conducting a massive voter registration drive in Lynchburg to get out-of-state students to register in Virginia, it’s probably safe to assume that these forms came from Liberty.

The Supreme Court’s decision upholding Indiana’s partisan voter-ID law, like other recent cases with conservative outcomes, received generous praise from the Right. “This victory continues conservatives’ good run of Supreme Court decisions dating back to last term,” wrote Human Events columnist Sean Trende, who called the case evidence that John Roberts’s appointment as Chief Justice “mark[ed] a sea change” in pulling the court “rightward.”

Paul Weyrich praised the Court and called objections to the law—which closes access to the ballot box for many otherwise eligible voters, primarily minorities and the elderly, in pursuit of the phantom threat of voter fraud—“overblown and sensational,” adding, “We do not compel people to vote.” (As Weyrich said in 1980, “I don't want everybody to vote. … [O]ur leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”)

And Gary Bauer boldly asserted that “all citizens have photo I.D.s, and the only people who don’t are illegal aliens, who are, by definition, not allowed to vote. The only ones disenfranchised by the photo I.D. requirement are those who should not be voting anyway.”

Of course, by the time Bauer sent that remarkable claim out to his e-mail list, the AP was already reporting on some of these people he said “should not be voting”:

About 12 Indiana nuns were turned away Tuesday from a polling place by a fellow sister because they didn't have state or federal identification bearing a photograph. …

The nuns, all in their 80s or 90s, didn't get one but came to the precinct anyway.

"One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, 'I don't want to go do that,'" Sister McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drives.

They weren't given provisional ballots because it would be impossible to get them to a motor vehicle branch and back within the 10 days allotted by the law, Sister McGuire said. "You have to remember that some of these ladies don't walk well. They're in wheelchairs or on walkers or electric carts."

After the high-stakes interrupted recount in the 2000 presidential election and the computer error that may have thrown a congressional race in 2006, the state of Florida has become synonymous with electoral snafus. Now election officials are reporting problems with machines counting signatures for petitions, but this time the confusion may stymie efforts to place an anti-gay marriage amendment on the ballot in November.

Last month, the Religious Right was boasting that it had gathered more than enough signatures to put the measure on the ballot—in contrast to 2006, when an anti-gay petition fell short. But the campaign, Florida4Marriage.org, was apparently using faulty numbers, as it turns out that machines in at least one county had submitted duplicate signature reports. Now the effort is at least 22,000 signatures short, with just two weeks to go.

“We are in a state of constitutional emergency,” declared John Stemberger, who is leading the campaign. Backers of the anti-gay campaign called on pastors to mobilize their congregations in a last-minute push:

“Right now we are called as men and women of faith are often called to first pray and depend on our faith and then to come together and absolutely take this emergency sitiuation seriously,” [Bill Bunkley of the Florida Baptist Convention] said. He suggested those who support the amendment spend the next 7-10 days armed with petitions and share them at church, at school and anywhere they travel in the state, asking two questions: “Are you a registered voter? and “Have you signed the Florida Marriage Protection Amendment?”

Bunkley predicts that within the next seven days “if the sanctity of marriage is truly a top priority for men and women of faith” this state-wide deficit should be able to be made up.

“I call on all Florida Baptist pastors at their Wednesday night and Sunday services to have petitions available for anyone in attendance who would like to sign the Florida Marriage Amendment but who has not yet had an opportunity to do so,” Bunkley said. …

Mathew D. Staver, president and general counsel for Orlando-based Liberty Counsel said he believes pastors and churches should be actively involved in the urgent movement to get signed petitions in.

"There is no restriction on pastors and churches, Staver told Baptist Press. What I would encourage pastors to do is to distribute a marriage petition to every single member in the congregation and set aside a few minutes to walk them through how to fill it out, and then have the ushers collect those and get them to Florida4Marriage.org by Federal Express. I would not simply have a table in the back, because you could have a several-thousand-member church and only obtain a few hundred signatures that way. We don't have time to do that anymore.

A congressional staffer has taken to the pages of the right-wing Human Events to assert that voter fraud is a “Stunning Reality” in the U.S., and that therefore, the Supreme Court should uphold an Indiana voter-ID law. Published under the “pen name” of “Wright Talley,” this “long-time congressional employee” claims that voter fraud is “very real,” citing “numerous cases” that have been “reported by the media.”

Your right to vote will be at stake when the Supreme Court decides this case next year. It is now endangered unless there are adequate safeguards against voter fraud such as Indiana’s voter ID law.

“Talley” isn’t the first to make an anonymous pitch for voter ID laws.  Remember Hans von Spakovsky? He’s the controversial Bush nominee to the FEC who secretly published an article advocating a voter ID law in Georgia while serving as a senior appointee in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Spakovsky later approved the law over the objections of career civil rights attorneys.

“Talley” offers as proof of fraud the result of “a casual look at news reports over the last 10 years.” This “casual look” provides him with a few examples of allegations of fraud, but a closer look—without too much effort—shows that most of those allegations simply didn’t pan out.

For example, “Talley” cites “a probe by U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic and Milwaukee County District Attorney E. Michael McCann that found clear evidence of fraud in the election, including more than 200 felons who voted illegally and another 100-plus people who voted under bad addresses or false names or who voted twice.” Biskupic made national news recently as one of the U.S. attorneys controversially targeted for dismissal by the Justice Department, “after complaints from Rove that he was not doing enough about voter fraud.”

In fact, Biskupic aggressively pursued allegations of voter fraud; he just didn’t find any evidence of it. While Biskupic originally alleged hundreds of instances of fraud, what “Talley” fails to mention is that he only prosecuted 14. Only five people were convicted. Scraping the barrel, Biskupic managed to put a grandmother in prison who voted while on probation.

Ms. Prude said she believed that she was permitted to vote because she was not in jail or on parole, she testified in court. Told by her probation officer that she could not vote, she said she immediately called City Hall to rescind her vote, a step she was told was not necessary.

“Talley” also cites Washington’s narrow 2004 election. Republican candidate for governor Dino Rossi filed a lawsuit alleging thousands of fraudulent votes were cast; the court ended up taking away four of his own votes. In the end there was one conviction for double voting.

Between 2002, when the Bush Administration made tackling voter fraud a top priority, and 2005, there were 24 convictions of individuals casting votes while ineligible, out of hundreds of millions of votes cast, making it more likely a voter will be struck by lightning than commit fraud.

Edward Blum has long been a vocal opponent of affirmative action, having worked for anti-affirmative action groups such as the Center for Equal Opportunity, the American Civil Rights Institute, and his own Campaign for a Color-Blind America (now vanished). In recent years, however, Blum has expanded his purview to another area involving opportunities for minorities: the basic right to vote.

Last week, the Senate voted to confirm controversial appeals-court nominee Leslie Southwick, whose disturbing record led civil rights groups such as PFAW and the NAACP to oppose him. Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu was among the majority of Democratic senators to vote against Southwick, and conservative columnist Robert Novak claims that this proves her “reliance” on black voters—“even though” many black voters have not returned since Hurricane Katrina and the stalled rebuilding of New Orleans.

Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, the only incumbent Democrat considered vulnerable in 2008, showed this week she continues to rely on African-American voters even though well over 100,000 of them left her state in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Landrieu not only voted Wednesday against confirming former Mississippi Court of Appeals Judge Leslie Southwick as a U.S. Appeals Court judge but also opposed bringing his nomination to a floor vote. Civil rights groups lobbied against Southwick's confirmation. He was confirmed, 59 to 38.

Landrieu and other Louisiana Democrats long have counted on a 100,000-vote margin or more out of Orleans Parish (New Orleans). But because of the heavy black emigration, its total vote was around 75,000 last Saturday and was carried by Republican U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal in his election as governor.

As Eric Rauchway noted in the New Republic Online this week, the Right’s myth of rampant voter fraud persists in spite of the facts of its near-nonexistence:

The divergence of rhetoric from reality resembles that of a hundred years ago, when reformers first supported registration laws. Although the reformers talked about "corruption," they didn't really mean vote-buying or repeat voting. They meant the wrong kind of people voting: "Universal suffrage," one reformer noted in 1903, meant "'tramp' suffrage"; it meant "licensed mobocracy."

Characterizing the modern right-wing campaign to place restrictions on voting -- to counter mythical “fraud” -- as simply a cynically veiled attempt to disenfranchise citizens seems unfair. Nevertheless, this view was more or less plainly articulated by Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the conservative movement, in 1980:

Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome -- good government. They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of 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.

Weyrich was addressing one of the seminal events in the creation of the New Right, the Religious Roundtable’s National Affairs Briefing in Dallas. At this gathering of 15,000-20,000 ministers and activists just a few months before the election, Ronald Reagan joined speakers including Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Phyllis Schlafly, and many more. Reagan famously declared, “I know you can’t endorse me, but I endorse you” – cementing the alliance between the Religious Right and the Republican Party that continues to this day.

Since Congress passed the REAL ID Act in 2005, which (among other things) mandates that all states require drivers prove their legal immigration status in order to get a license, several states have balked at the cost and myriad civil liberties issues stemming from the bill. Maine and Idaho have passed laws rejecting the new guidelines, and a number of other state legislatures are considering joining them, including Maryland. This week, however, the Maryland Senate debated a competing bill that would implement at least one part of the REAL ID rules – the proof of immigration status requirement. And although REAL ID was passed as part of emergency funding for the War on Terror, some are trying to refocus the debate away from civil liberties and on to anti-immigrant “quality of life” complaints. From The Washington Times:

Bill supporters told the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee they were concerned about public safety and potential terrorist attacks because one of the September 11 hijackers obtained a Maryland driver's license.

"I live in Gaithersburg, Maryland, which has been in [newspapers] quite recently, and is really on its way to becoming the first authentic barrio in the county," said Susan Payne of Citizens Above Party. "The poison that's coming out of this state, known as the Maryland driver's license, has to be stopped because it's infecting the entire country."

Payne was also quoted in the Annapolis Capital, warning “You are driving people like me out of our home state.” She co-founded Citizens Above Party in response to the building of a day-laborer center in Gaithersburg, a prosperous D.C. suburb known for its New Urbanist planned communities.

The other founder of the anti-day-laborer group was Demos Chrissos, a veteran producer of Republican political ads who, like Susan Payne, is frequently quoted in the local media. Chrissos is also a professional anti-immigration activist on a national scale: He produced a TV ad for WeNeedAFence.com that included a shot of the World Trade Center being hit, and more recently produced ads around a campaign to pardon border agents convicted in a shooting. According to the online bio from his video marketing firm, Chrissos co-founded Citizens Above Party to “investigat[e] the suspected link between illegal immigration and widespread voter fraud across the nation.”

Of course, there’s no sign of “widespread voter fraud” by illegal immigrants anywhere except in the press releases of anti-immigrant groups and the politicians who court them, or of a link between suburban day laborers and anti-American terrorists. But press coverage of Payne’s rhetoric does demonstrate how easily the anti-immigrant movement can “infect” the REAL ID debate in Maryland and elsewhere. And while Payne comes off in the media as a typical concerned citizen, her partner’s work as a professional media consultant suggests that this confusion is part of their strategy.

Writing in The National Review, Byron York has penned an article entitled “The Loser Who Won’t Concede” in which he dismisses the massive undervote of more than 18,000 ballots in Florida’s 13th Congressional District during the November election [CNN ran a segment about it yesterday.] 

The People For the American Way Foundation has been very active in seeking a remedy for this disenfranchisement of thousands of voters, and thus knows a bit more about it than York seems to. For instance, York claims:

[T]here was no evidence anything had gone wrong with the machines. As the wrangling went on, a group of three political scientists — James Honaker and Jeffrey Lewis of UCLA and Michael Herron of Dartmouth — began to look into the matter. They found no evidence of machine malfunction, either, and instead argued that the problem was most likely a confusing ballot design in Sarasota County’s machines.

This is actually not the case. In the report that Herron et al. published, they explicitly state that "we cannot directly address engineering issues here" and "we cannot definitively rule out the possibility that there was some voting machine malfunction in the sense that Sarasota County's touchscreen machines failed to record and tabulate actual screen touches ... because this paper presents a statistical analysis of vote patterns and not a physical examination of voting machines, we cannot completely rule out voting machine malfunction as a source of the Sarasota undervote." 

Herron et al. stated that they believed that the ballot format design was to blame, but York's writing is irresponsible in suggesting that they "found no evidence" of machine malfunction.  For one thing, Herron is not a computer scientist and didn’t examine the machines for error since he was engaged in a purely statistical analysis of the undervotes.  Indeed, when he testified recently as an expert for the voting machine vendor (Election Systems and Software) at an evidentiary hearing in the Florida lawsuits brought by voters and one of the candidates to contest the election, he specifically acknowledged that he had no expertise in the computer software programming for the voting machines used in Sarasota County.

Despite York’s assertion that there was “no evidence of machine malfunction,” PFAWF found many potentially disenfranchised voters who claim otherwise.  

With the 110th Congress now in session and the “winner” of the 13th Congressional District race being provisionally sworn-in, it is imperative that a full investigation be conducted in order to ensure that voters of Florida’s 13th Congressional District are represented by the candidate they intended to elect.  

Automated campaign calls from “FreeEats” were paid for by Tom DeLay, Minutemen, FRC, and more.

In a post on his ghostwritten (but apparently not fact checked) blog, former somebody Tom Delay took aim at People For the American Way Foundation and the ACLU, who along with Voter Action and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are representing Sarasota County voters suing for a revote in Florida's 13th congressional district race in which more than 18,000 voters were disenfranchised in a contest decided by fewer than 400 votes.

[Democratic Congressional Candidate Christine] Jennings, for her part, is filing an official election challenge with the House Administration Committee, and she and leftwing advocacy groups such as People for the American Way and the ACLU have already launched a lawsuit in Florida, asking Leon County (Tallahassee) Circuit Judge William Gary to negate the November 7th results and order a new election. The suit was filed in Tallahasse, hundreds of miles from the 13th district, in hopes of getting a more liberal judge and jury pool instead of Sarasota County where the election actually occurred and the voting machines in question are located.

Of course, had Delay paid attention to the law, he would have known state law requires that an election contest like this, where the election encompassed more than one county, must be filed in state court in Leon County (Tallahassee). Oh, and it’s not a jury trial either.

It’s nice to nice to see Tom Delay is maintaining the high standards of honesty and integrity that gave him the opportunity to be a blogger rather than a member of Congress.

Calls on candidate to “accept the election results like an adult.” More information on Sarasota.

Editorial demands Pelosi tell Democratic candidate to take dubious machine results “like an adult.” More on voting in Sarasota.

Even though agreeing that machines cannot be secured or audited.