Bush Supreme Court Ready to Endorse Election Fraud
From the way the Supreme Court justices were forming their questions, it seems pretty clear that the Republican majority among them, this time including Kennedy, was biased in favor of supporting Republican attempts to disenfranchise Democratic voters.
The case in question is an Indiana law that requires voters to present a photo ID in order to cast a ballot. Supporters of such ID laws (coincidentally, they are pretty much always Republicans) argue that the measure will stem voter fraud, though they cannot produce evidence of voter fraud that they are supposedly guarding against. Nationwide, it has been an open secret that such laws are favored by conservatives because mostly Democratic voters are the ones who lack such IDs. And while in most (but not all) cases, it is possible for people to get such IDs, the fact remains that it is an additional hurdle, and every additional hurdle causes a certain number of voters to turn away from the polls.
A way of measuring this is actually pretty easy: imagine that a law is passed which requires only Republican voters to first go to their county office and pick up a “voting slip,” for free, which would then be presented at the polling place to allow the person to vote. The method is easy, it’s free (beyond transportation costs and time), and does not deny a single person the right to vote–so why object? Well, of course, because it only requires Republicans to do so, not Independents, Democrats, Libertarians, or others. All the arguments you hear the right-wing Supreme Court justices using could apply to this law as well: the process is easy and free, everyone would still be able to vote, etc.
Three problems: it is a hurdle which discourages legitimate voters, there is no genuine reason to do so, and it is a law used almost exclusively by one political party which unfairly burdens an opposing party. Such laws are nothing but watered-down, modern-day Jim Crow poll taxes. The entire matter, cast by Republicans as a law enforcement issue, is almost by definition a wholly political issue. The laws are drafted, campaigned for, and passed by Republicans over the protests of Democrats, have little or no effect on Republican voters while bearing a definite burden on Democratic voters, and in courts, the laws are upheld by Republican-appointed judges and dissented to by Democratic-appointed judges.
Naturally, such niceties slipped right past the conservative justices. Alito said, “There is nothing to quantify the extent of the problem or the extent of the burden,” but despite this, showed signs that he would uphold the Republican law. So, it’s OK to disenfranchise voters so long as you work in grey areas? I’m glad that his standards are so high; usually, where there is doubt, I would think one should lean toward protecting people’s rights instead of stripping them away, but then I’m not a Supreme Court justice like Alito is.
Roberts said, “”You cannot point to a single instance of someone who was denied the right to vote,“ despite the fact that the plaintiffs did exactly that, in the case of one Mary-Jo Criswell. Not to mention that the Republicans defending this cannot point to a single instance where this law would prevent voter fraud. And, apparently, Roberts is OK with people who are unfairly and unnecessarily burdened and discouraged from voting, so long as they are not demonstrably stripped of their voting rights.
Scalia went double-time in his conservative defense of the law; he reportedly ”wondered why the Democrats were the ones filing the lawsuit, saying it should have been filed by individual voters who may have been directly harmed by the law.“ Apparently Scalia forgot to ask why the Republicans were the ones pushing for the laws in every state; apparently, only the motives of Democrats, not Republicans, are suspect. Scalia also suggested that ”the Democrats’ claim should be thrown out because it did not rely on instances of people who were actually prevented from voting.“ Two problems: as stated above, they did show people who were prevented from voting (and could point to hurdles unfairly discouraging specific groups), and then there’s the fact that the Republicans who drafted the law did not rely on instances of people who were actually committing voter fraud. Apparently none of these ironies registered with the justice whose political party would benefit from the law.
Thomas was quiet, as always, but one can pretty easily guess as to what he was thinking.
Hopefully, the idea that Kennedy will add some caveats to the decision will come true, and we’ll see some reasonable restrictions that will not condone the full-out Republican drive to stem voter fraud that doesn’t exist in order to suppress Democratic voters.
You have done a great job at discerning the possibility that there is an imbalance in the documentation levels between Democrats and Republicans. Your whole idea is based on the assumption that Democrats are less likely to have government photo identification, and thus the ID requirement is discriminatory. It is shocking that you also fail to see the obvious, that the people who don’t have valid photo ID are the fraudulent voters – at least when they cast their extra votes. It is well documented that many dead people vote in every election in the U. S. – or that is there are people voting in the names of dead people. The “cost” imposed on people to get properly photo identified, or to swear to an affadavit, is meaningless. Except of course fraudulent voters signing affadavit’s would draw the attention of watchdogs from government, media, and losing candidates who could track down an confirm the sworn statements under penalty of perjury and jail (like Little Kim). Contrast this “cost” imposed upon people who seek to select persons with the authority to pass laws, levy taxes, and send our boys and girls to war with the “cost” placed upon us to do any of the following: Get a library card, rent a car, fly on a plane, take a train, sign up for a dating service, volunteer at a youth society, be a teacher, rent a pair of skis, make a purchase by check at a store, receive funds when cashing a money order, open a bank account, etc. It is ridiculous to claim that the most important function in our society, selecting our leaders, should be flung open to fraud and abuse when nearly every other aspect of society requires valid ID. Times have changed since 1780 and people in charge of the voting booth don’t know everybody in town by name. Wake up to reality, and acknowledge that your purported concern protects thousands of fraudulent voters for every valid voter who might be potentially “inconvenienced”.
Just some background surrounding Scalia’s comments.
In order for the Supreme Court to hear a case, for the case to have standing, there are requirements, called “Case and Controversy Requirement”.
To have standing a plaintiff has to show direct and personal injury. The injury must be one for which the court can relieve. In general, there is no third party standing – that is no third party can bring claims on behalf of another person. However there are exceptions to that requirement: Close relationship, say like a doctor-patient, or family relationship, or say the injured party is unlikely to be able to assert their own rights. Organizations may sue on behalf of members if members have standing to sue, and the interests are germane to the organization’s purpose and neither claim nor relief requires participation.
These are the little nuances that Roberts and Scalia are chipping at. If the Democratic party is bringing the case on behalf of one of its member’s it would seem germane to the purpose of the party. It seems to me that the judges are being more than coy here. I think the lawyer’s ought to have enough balls to confront the judges on their coyness and in the process question there integrity. Such action will lead them to either react favorably to the Republicans or react to overcompensate for their own partisanship and favor the Democrats (much the way the New York Times now has two Neocon columnist on its editorial page to compensate for its own perceived bias).
Super Dave:
Really? Then why are there virtually no convictions for voter fraud despite an all-out, massive campaign to find and prosecute such fraud by the Bush White House and most US Attorneys? And what voter fraud is found and successfully prosecuted is usually stuff like false registrations–fake names on voter registration cards filled in by people paid to sign up voters–which never result in actual false votes taking place.
Of course, I know the “documentation” that you’re talking about–for example, this famous case from New Jersey in 2005:
From just reading that uncritically, one would certainly be convinced that there is a lot of voter fraud going on. But the question persists: if there are literally thousands of fraudulent votes in each election in each state, how come virtually no convictions resulted, despite there being an urgent and full-fledged campaign to catch such cases and prosecute them?
The answer is, of course, that the reports of fraud themselves are fraudulent. If you read that New York Times article carefully, the first chink in the case’s armor show up in the clause immediately preceding the quote above:
Ah. Okay. Not an independent study, but a partisan political one. That proves nothing, but introduces the element of potential bias. Read further, however, and you find:
And here, you begin to see the problem with their methodology: they did not find actual cases of voter fraud, they found potential cases of voter fraud–but also potentially cases where people with similar names shared birth dates. It was with this shoddy methodology that Republican officials in Florida caused tens of thousands of legitimate Democratic voters to be removed from voter lists because they had the same names as convicted felons (now, that was an actual case of election fraud, which strangely went unprosecuted).
In other words, all that the Republicans found was that there were thousands of people in New Jersey who coincidentally had the same name and birthdate. How many “John Smith”s or “Mary Jones”s can you find in a population of 9 million people? A lot. Say there are four thousand “William Smith”s in that population; there would have to be at least a dozen of them with the same birth date–but probably a lot more.
That, in Republican terms, constitutes “voter fraud.”
A blogger at The Reality-Based Community, looked into such reports and found that none resulted in finding any actual cases of voter fraud. Although the names of many dead people appear on voter rolls, actual votes “cast” by those dead people are revealed as database mismatches or an accounting errors, often where the “dead” people are actually still alive.
This is not to say that voter fraud never happens–it does (even not counting Ann Coulter). It is, rather, to say that voter fraud is far more scarce than Republican politicians and pundits try to make it sound, rare to the point of irrelevancy. In almost every report that I could find, there were only accusations of, or evidence that there might have been voter fraud, but no actual convictions based on same. There are a lot of “may have”s and “could have been”s, else positive statements of fraud always led to bad data like the Republican “study” quoted above. Even in a case where election results were thrown out in close race where actual convictions for voter fraud were found, only a small handful of false votes were cast–not even enough to throw an election where 13 votes would make the difference. And that case (in an election for the Tennessee state senate) was one of the biggest examples of election fraud leading to convictions in recent years.
And none of this proves that there has been any voter fraud in Indiana, where the case before the Supreme Court comes from. Officials there cannot point to even a single case of confirmed voter fraud. One would think, again, that with such massive federal and state campaigns to do exactly that, and if voter fraud is as common as Republicans say it is, that they would have, after so many years, uncovered at least one such case to base their law upon.
However, to all appearances, they could not.
Tim:
I’d say that the Democratic Party has definite standing in this case, then–the party as a whole, all of its members, are most definitely injured by a law that disenfranchises their members–they lose votes, and potentially, whole elections.
Seems like they could find less onerous means to ensure that a person is who they say they are. And that often is a test in constitutional law cases.
The shocking thing here is the obvious bias of the supreme court and the fact that they are knowingly and willing to participate in the demise of the instrumentalities of democracy in this country. These are not stupid people, yet by the way they operate one could easily assume that they lack even a remedial understanding of civics. Lots of people get put on the court for their politics, but its a lifetime appointment, so that should cause them to shift their thoughts towards advancing the integrity of the system, not some partisan agenda that undermines the instrumentalities of the nation.
You don’t have to be a brain surgeon or a supreme court justice to know that concentrated wealth and power (and the wealthy and powerful using their interest to shirk paying taxes) is what undermined and lead directly to the collapse of Rome, then Byzantium and triggered a mini-dark age in medieval Japan. Similar phenomena triggered the collapse of one of the ancient Egyptian kingdoms, Hapsburg Spain, Bourbon France, Romanov Russia, and contributed to the causes of the Great Depression in Hoover/Coolidge America which contributed to the rise of Hitler which lead directly to World War II and the holocaust. In fact the creation of Islam was a response to similar conditions suddenly emerging in sixth century Mecca.
The fact is the United States is throwing itself over a cliff in a pattern that has already destroyed a dozen major civilizations in history – some were thought invincible. Maybe an idiot can’t recognize this. But Supreme Court justices ought to be able to. Here we have the absurdity of Supreme Court contributing to the obvious demise of the country. Of course they’ve done this before to notable acclaim when they ruled on the Dredd Scott case, triggering the Civil War.