@SheltieDad @JonathanCohn Party of Lincoln — George Lincoln Rockwell, that is.
— billmon (@billmon1) March 30, 2014
The NYTimes notices another trend…
CINCINNATI — Pivotal swing states under Republican control are embracing significant new electoral restrictions on registering and voting that go beyond the voter identification requirements that have caused fierce partisan brawls.
The bills, laws and administrative rules — some of them tried before — shake up fundamental components of state election systems, including the days and times polls are open and the locations where people vote.
Republicans in Ohio and Wisconsin this winter pushed through measures limiting the time polls are open, in particular cutting into weekend voting favored by low-income voters and blacks, who sometimes caravan from churches to polls on the Sunday before election.
Democrats in North Carolina are scrambling to fight back against the nation’s most restrictive voting laws, passed by Republicans there last year. The measures, taken together, sharply reduce the number of early voting days and establish rules that make it more difficult for people to register to vote, cast provisional ballots or, in a few cases, vote absentee.
In all, nine states have passed measures making it harder to vote since the beginning of 2013. Most have to do with voter ID laws. Other states are considering mandating proof of citizenship, like a birth certificate or a passport, after a federal court judge recently upheld such laws passed in Arizona and Kansas. Because many poor people do not have either and because documents can take time and money to obtain, Democrats say the ruling makes it far more difficult for people to register….
The flurry of new measures is in large part a response to recent court rulings that open the door to more restrictive changes.
Last year, the Supreme Court struck down a central provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The decision allowed a number of mostly Southern states to alter their election laws without the prior approval once required from the Justice Department. A few weeks later, free of the mandate and emboldened by a Republican supermajority, North Carolina passed the country’s most sweeping restrictions on voting….
The most surprising note is that the Grey Lady didn’t wait until mid-November to share this with the rest of us, because bipartisan.
Tommy
A lot of things piss me off, but this is close to the top of the list. These folks know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it. Look if everybody voted and the folks I voted for lost I wouldn’t be happy about it, but I could live with it. Alas the Republicans can’t seem to grasp this concept.
LanceThruster
Fascist f*cks!
Jacks mom
Every time I read about this I get so goddamned pissed and depressed I can’t stand it. Does any one remember when the thing about voting you heard about the most was the lack of voter turn out.
Hopefully this will get people off their asses and into a voting booth. I hope this backfires on these fuckers and the population starts wondering why they are so bent on denying this right and making it harder to excercise it.
“Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.”
SiubhanDuinne
By no coincidence at all, I got an email a couple of hours ago from Georgia Victory 2014, which began:
I am very inclined to volunteer for this — at least to do the training and find out what it entails (they are looking for poll watchers throughout the early voting period and the primary, and I’m sure a repeat performance in the fall). I know Kay has this experience in Ohio, and probably others. Would be glad to hear your advice.
Any other Georgia Juicers who might want to volunteer and want the full info, let me know and I’ll email you the particulars: SiubhanDuinne (at) gmail (dot) com. Statewide, not just metro ATL.
EDITED to retrieve a stray close parenthesis which had unaccountably wandered off. I returned it to its place right smartish.
SiubhanDuinne
@Tommy:
It would be refreshing if the Republicans put even a fraction as much time and energy into actually crafting and presenting their ideas, philosophy, and policy proposals, as they do into looking for ways to suppress the opposition. It would make us better Democrats/liberals/progressives, too!
Lurking Buffoon
As utterly depressing as all of this is, haven’t elections in recent years shown that voter suppression efforts have a nasty habit of backfiring spectacularly (not to downplay extensive GOTV work)? Or does the fact that it’s not a presidential election this year make enough of a difference this time?
Tommy
@SiubhanDuinne: Yeah it would. I know each state and even District manage their own elections but I wish some folks from the DNC would come visit my district. We got voting down to a science. I can vote faster than I can order a Big Mac. I wish everybody had that.
rikyrah
not shocked in the least. What did you expect?
Chris
Nobody needs the Voting Rights Act anymore! Americans aren’t racist anymore and voting rights are sacred and our states would never need those oppressive Yankee/fed’ral gub’mint measures to make us do the right thing…
/wingnut
Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you “but dude, the South would TOTALLY have ended slavery all by its lonesome! It just needed a little more time!”
Shakezula
@Lurking Buffoon: Yes. It’s kind of funny, because they know they can get their guys to rush out and buy guns when they make up stories about gun swiping Demothugopanthercrats. It doesn’t occur to them that people will be just as incensed about the very real and obvious threat to their right to vote.
I’m starting to think they don’t care if the disenfranchisement efforts don’t stick. How can they fund raise once they’ve done away with the boogey of VOTER FRAUD? But they can pass the hat indefinitely if Activist Judges tell them to stick their voting regs.
EconWatcher
I particularly love how they want to fight voting fraud by restricting early voting and limiting polling hours. Just walk me through that, guys–how does that work?
shelly
Do any of the proponents of these new laws have the bald-faced gall to give a reason for them? Restricting weekend voting has nothingto do with voter fraud.
SiubhanDuinne
Crazy O/T, but this here is funny stuff with a side of awesome sauce.
Citizen_X
Use this shit as a motivating/GOTV tool: “THEY want to keep you from voting. Don’t let them get away with it!”
Good way to motivate minorities, who have dealt with all this crap before, as well as the yoots.
Chris
@Lurking Buffoon:
It might, but if you’re at the point of limiting voting hours and early voting, what can the backlash voters do? If they go and stand in line on Saturday night because that’s the only time available to them, and they’re still in line when the polls close and the guys tell them “sorry, no more voting,” then by the sound of it your voting rights have technically been upheld as far as the law’s concerned. It’s not their problem that you didn’t get to cast a vote. (Though of course, that was the point).
This country has long, long, long experience using technically “legal” measures to suppress the votes of poorer people, and especially in the South. Everything old is new again.
Captain C
@Chris:
FIFY
For certain unusually long values of “a little more time,” as in a century or more, this might actually be true.
Xecky Gilchrist
@EconWatcher: That’s what I was wondering – how do they spin this? At least, wrong as it was, there was a rationale behind voter ID stuff.
Citizen_X
@shelly:
Hint: neither does “voter fraud.”
One of these years democracy is going to come to the USA.
Captain C
@EconWatcher: I suspect that if you consider Actually Voting For A Democrat, or Voting While Black, to be prima facie voter fraud, it works just fine.
If, however, you live in the real world…
daveNYC
@Shakezula: No matter what regulations and restrictions are put in place, their base will always be willing to believe that somewhere, somehow, one of those people is getting away with something. Might as well be fake voter fraud.
Calouste
@Citizen_X:
America has been so good at “exporting democracy” over the years that there is a shortage of it at home…
AliceBlue
@Chris:
Don’t know about other states but in Georgia if you’re in line when the polls close at 7:00, you get to vote. I guess that’s the next thing that will fall by the wayside.
Shakezula
@EconWatcher: You have to first assume that it is fraud whenever minorities, younger people and women vote.
EconWatcher
@Captain C:
I do actually think this will blow up in their faces. They had a nice scam going with their whole voter ID thing, which mostly left their voters untouched, and at least had the veneer of a rationale. They should have stuck with that.
But as is their wont, they just couldn’t help themselves. They had to go all in.
But making voting less convenient for everyone by restricting times and hours is a whole ‘nother story. Some of their own voters need convenience. Some of their own supporters want at least a patina of legitimacy for any restrictions. I may be naive, but I don’t think this will end well for them.
Captain C
@EconWatcher:
I agree with you on this. Hopefully, any damage along the way will be minimal or at least contained.
? Martin
I do not understand why Obama and Senate Dems aren’t pushing a national voting right act. Not one that merely patches the parts of the 1965 law that was overturned, but one that lays out a set of rights for all voters on documentation, access to polls, polls per voter, limits on how voter registration may be used against casting ballots, and so on. It’s lunacy that we are allowed to have 50 different standards in how you vote for federal offices.
Let the GOP argue against that and defend votes to oppose what 73% of voters would consider to be sensible and already legislated.
Anne Laurie
@shelly:
“Those people” — the poors, women, not-whites — need continuous one-on-one supervision if they’re going to do dangerous stuff like voting. It’s just too burdensomely expensive for the Serious People (white men of property, preferably inherited) to take every single would-be “voter” by the hand and make sure they scrawl their Xs in the correct box. If “those people” can’t even make the effort to show up when the Lords command (and they’d better have washed their hands, too, this is not one of the gin mills where such lowly folk normally gather), why should the Law in its majesty waste more time and money cajoling them into civic participation?
The words have changed, here and there, since this template was written by Conservative exemplars in the mid-1700s, but it remains a central tenet of their philosophy.
As Kay so aptly puts it, the Conservatives believe voting is a privilege, not a right — despite the Constitution they claim to revere!
Kay
@SiubhanDuinne:
Wonderful idea!
I would start at the GA sec of state website and look for the rules on election observers. Ohio has a process where you’re “admitted” with an order that has to be signed by a judge and filed prior to election day, but it’s all state law so varies.
We do them in one big batch, where the state Party creates a form, presents to judge in one county and and then files on each observer in each county. Our voter protection gets better every year. When we began, each observer had to file the form themselves. The GA state party will know the process, but it works best if each person understands each step, because you’ll be working alone on election day.
When you get there, know the rules. Be the person that knows the rules better than the pollworkers do, and bring the rules. You’ll want to be able to point to one. Ohio has a flip-reference they give to pollworkers but anyone can get at the Bd of Elections.
We get training in who to approach and how to approach them. The rule in Ohio is never, ever speak to a voter, for any reason. So, if I see a voter who has been shunted over to the provisional table and that person appears not to understand the 4 forms, I would ask the “presiding judge” (head poll worker) to see what’s going on. A big thing with provisionals is people are ashamed that they don’t understand how they’re supposed to complete all those forms, and they have big, black box warnings about “FRAUD!” on the forms and they’re all sworn statements, so they just quietly leave rather than deal with all that. It’s nitpicky. It has to be right or it won’t be counted.
If there’s a problem and the pollworkers won’t address it or disagree with me about the rules, I go out to the parking lot and call the staff at the Bd of Elections. That way (if I’m right!) I can just walk in and hand the pollworker the phone and let the BOE staff person direct them. Voter protection orgs have lawyers, so if there’s a real issue where someone would have to file something quickly, they’ll have a “boiler room” set up where you’ll have a number to call.
I’m a pollworker this year (not an observer) because we have new rules and I haven’t worked the polls since 2006, so I want to see how they’re applying them. I took the online course and now I have to pass the live course next week.
? Martin
And more ACA, this from the Democratic workhorse state:
California is going to fucking drag this country across that 7 million mark if need be.
danielx
@SiubhanDuinne:
Yes, yes it would. It would be even more refreshing if they had any ideas or policy proposals, or yet any philosophy other than cutting taxes, shaming sluts and bombing brown people.
JPL
@? Martin: Thanks but what will the Fox graph look like, since that’s the only thing that matters.
kindness
Noah built arcs. I’m gonna start building guillotines and leaving them in suggestive places.
Roger Moore
@Tommy:
Voting quickly is more a question of resources than anything. If you have enough poll workers and voting booths, voting is going to be fast and efficient. If you have too few poll workers and/or not enough voting booths, lines will keep getting longer and longer and voting will be a pain. Having a simple process reduces the number of poll workers needed to keep the lines short, but even a complicated process is manageable if you devote enough resources to make it work. As far as I can tell, the easiest way of suppressing the vote is to deny resources to the polling places where people vote against you.
Kay
@SiubhanDuinne:
In 2012 the Obama campaign had a person who was a congressional campaign aide in Florida in Bush v Gore talk to the volunteer election protection people. He’s a lawyer now, but he was a student then.
It was very effective, I must say. Great storyteller. He talked about standing at the bar celebrating Gore’s win when the native Floridian and seasoned campaign flak standing next to him says “someone better call Nashville. Something hinky is going on with the count”.
He did a southern accent and everything.
I was imaging a squeaky ceiling fan, people in hats and seersucker suits, I had a whole movie going on :)
Roger Moore
@shelly:
Sure it does. Weekends are when Those People vote. Since Those People don’t deserve to vote, the votes they cast are fraudulent. Ending weekend voting will thus reduce fraudulent voting.
Roger Moore
@Calouste:
My impression is that most of the “democracy” we exported was dropped from 35,000 feet.
SiubhanDuinne
@danielx:
My ex-husband and his fraternity brothers put huge amounts of effort, imagination, time, and other resources into devising elaborate cheating schemes. He used to regale these stories with enormous glee, and I always just thought, “If you guys had put a fraction of that energy into studying, you all would have made 4.0s your entire college career.”
Today’s Republicans remind me of frat boys of a couple of generations ago.
SiubhanDuinne
@Kay:
That story makes me laugh and feel very sad, both.
J R in WV
@SiubhanDuinne:
My Grandma was an election poll watcher for years, as long as she could stand to do an 18 hour day. People would bring the poll workers soft drinks and hot dogs in the afternoon, when things were usually slow.
Here in rural WV I’ve been voting in the same precinct since about 1978 – and the same elderly folks for the most part have been working the polls. They know generally who I am, and look me up in the big book.
There’s no real partisan bickering, as the R and the D workers have known each other all their lives. There is occasional voter fraud, mostly based upon absentee voting now. The Feds have jailed many many pols, and now the guilty pleas always include a promise to never run for elective office, or work for a candidate, ever!
I would do it, but they really don’t need me. I’ll be doing phone bank work for the Dem candidate for Senate to take Jay Rockefeller’s seat. The other candidate is the daughter of a felonious former governor/congressman, who votes as if she were Ms Batemann.
MikeJ
The purity trolls always like to say that if voting made any difference it would be illegal. The Republicans are working on it.
Roger Moore
@danielx:
You forgot deregulating everything and slashing the social safety net.
Kay
@SiubhanDuinne:
It was so funny, because it’s the stuff of nightmares for voting rights people. It’s like scary stories around the campfire.
Bush v Gore
Rules are dull, and there are a lot of rules around elections. That certainly got their attention!
themann1086
@AliceBlue: Same here in PA, and a few other states. As long as you’re in line at “closing time”, you get to vote. I usually yell out “5 minutes to get in line!” at 7:55.
Long Tooth
The GOP’s campaign to disenfranchise voters is “un-American” in the most profound sense of that term. Yet elected democrats hesitate to invoke it, to hurl it with righteous indignation into the teeth of the republican party. That’s strikes me as very strange, although all too typical of those boneless wonders in aggregate. They are terrified of speaking in plain, honest language about the mortal threat the republican party poses to our democracy. Why that is, I can’t understand.
? Martin
@JPL: On one axis we’d have the number of uninsured under Obama’s administration, and on the other axis we’d have the number of Mexicans crossing the border and beheading our daughters since 2008. The direct correlation would be unmistakable.
SiubhanDuinne
@themann1086:
Right. It’s like going to a restaurant. If they seat you before closing time, they have to serve you. Properly.
Actually, true (or should be) of any retail establishment. My mom often got home much later than planned, because a customer had walked in five minutes before she locked the front door of our book store and then stayed on for a hour, sometimes browsing but usually buying — which, of course, made the delay worth while :-)
bemused
@MikeJ:
They’ve been working on that for decades. Paul Weyrich in his 1980 goo goo governemnt talk comes to mind.
? Martin
@SiubhanDuinne: They have ways around this, you know.
The tradition has always been to not formally deny the vote, but to make it so painful to execute that you depress turnout.
A federal law should fine districts for every voter that cannot vote within (30, 60, whatever) minutes of arriving, period, technical problems notwithstanding. There’s just no fucking excuse for this. At all. Voting cannot be the sole human endeavor that is immune to efficiency.
Botsplainer
Somebody may need to remind some chubby, pasty cheeked young Republican what tends to happen if you don’t let people depressurize by voting. As those fat little fucks giggle over their brilliance, people who have nothing and no hope may no longer find it in their interests to be obeisant to the status quo, and that includes potential acts of great political and socioeconomic violence.
I probably wouldn’t sob too much if somebody like the homeless woman in Arizona chose to take out her frustration with a shotgun on every soul working at Americans for Prosperity, or on everybody at Grover’s ATR headquarters.
Might even guffaw a few times….
kc
@Citizen_X:
Hell, yeah. Didn’t I read that actually had a bit of a galvanizing effect on some voters in 2012?
Kay
@? Martin:
It’s true. but until there’s a federal law the Democrats on the Bd of Elections in that county (even-steven, R and D, on OH Bds of Election) have a responsibility to get more voting machines.
They have recourse, Martin. An election issue in this state goes to a common pleas judge, a county judge. If they don’t have the machines they need they get an order. Each county designates the judge who handles election issues on election day. They know this. They also know exactly how many voters they had go thru that polling place in the Prez election 4 years earlier. I mean, obviously the OH sec of state isn’t going to help them. File something. The whole system anticipates emergency orders. In this county we can go to his house. We’d have to. He went home at 6 o clock.
? Martin
@Kay: You don’t find it just mind-blowingly insane that the steps you list are even necessary?
Kay
@? Martin:
No, not really, because it’s part of an elaborate process. It isn’t based on preparing for malice and suppression. It’s based on things like power outages or some horrendous error like the wrong ballot in the wrong jurisdiction that people voted and they’d have to start over.
I don’t really know how this happens, how it gets to be 4 PM and they say “we don’t have enough voting machines!”
They plan and plan and plan. They set them up that morning. No one noticed that there were fewer than in 2000?
It’s a count. All they do is count. Everything.
Keith G
@? Martin:
I find it mind-blowingly insane that so many Democrats don’t relish the chance to go to war with the GOP on this.
They are methodically ratfucking this and future elections. We are being high-minded while they are setting up a redundancy-laced infrastructure of obstruction. People like Kay are a godsend, but I doubt that there are enough of them. The other side seems to have a centralized will and command structure as well as the audacity to press on with the unfathomable. I can’t believe some of the crap they try – and then they get away with it….at least for a while. And sometimes, a while is enough.
It seems like we are spending a lot of time playing defense.
Chris T.
I’m just waiting for the poll tax: “you may vote if and only if you also write a check for $10,000”
Duane
As a resident of Knox County who also happened to be on the ballot in 2004, I can shed some light on what happened. If my memory serves at that time we had 52 precincts and 2 obsolete micro-vote(i think that was the name) electronic voting machines. There had been more in the county in the past to serve as spares but by the GE in 2004 we were down to exactly 2 machines per precinct. Gambier(Kenyon College) was by far the precinct with the most voter but it was stuck with the same amount as every other precinct because they needed to have 2 at each location in case one would break down. Of course 1 did break down….1 of the 2 in the Gambier precinct which is what made things even worse. Then as it got later in the day they boe offered paper ballots to anyone who wanted them and well being skeptical of whether those votes would be counted no one took that option. A question that has come up is how come after other polls closed why werent more machine brought in from other locations, and if I remember correctly it had to do with programming the machines for that precinct. I will add that in our county the numbers run about 65%R 35%D while Gambier runs about 90D-10R so it can look suspicious. The precincts have been changed now so there is no huge imbalance of votes in that one location.
Kay
@Duane:
Thanks. I wondered about that, because they have to have paper ballots for just that reason.
It’s a shame they didn’t trust the paper ballots. I don’t think there is a more trustworthy ballot than paper, but I remember how nasty that election was. Are they too young to remember punch cards? People trusted those, or seemed to. That’s paper.
People were nuts and paranoid, though. That was an ugly, ugly election. It was all fear and war on terror and how the “ban gay marriage amendment” had “energized” their base. Ugh. The whole thing was tense and demoralizing. I’m amazed all those young ‘uns came out at all.
This post-election crowing shouldn’t be forgotten, either. Here they are celebrating how they amended 11 state constitutions to stop certain people from getting married:
They’ll deny that happened by 2020.
I try to bring it up regularly ’round the courthouse, because it’s already a little…awkward for them :)
Kay
We’re doing this in Ohio, and if it passes (well, first it has to get on the ballot, THEN pass) I think it will spread:
The truth is, African American Democrats are “doing this”, they’re leading the whole thing. I think it’s hard for the rest of us to understand just how deep this goes among that particular group of voters, given the history.
Anyway. If it passes, it will spread to other states, so I’m sure Republicans will fight it with every ounce of strength they have :)
Duane
just to clarify it wasnt just students who refused paper ballots the permanent residents of Gambier wouldn’t take them as well. It was a cool scene, and I don’t think anyone who was in line at the end of the day left, so it didnt really cost any votes. Everyone was cordial and let people who had to go places..work, pick up kids, class, etc…. go to the front of the line so they could leave. There were a group of us standing outside the flags thanking people as they came out from voting from about 11PM till 1 AM( when the sheriff’s dept. showed up and said we would be arrested if we didn’t leave)… It was like greeting hostages as they were getting released!!! I think everyone who was in that line wheres it as a badge of honor.
Oh I should add we were all chickenshits who did leave when the deputies became nasty…..nowadays I would probably beg them to arrest me…..then well I had to work the next day.