Protecting ballot access, vote ‘no’ on Amendment 6
State Senator Dan Hegeman in his October 26th column advocating passage of Constitutional Amendment 6, to make lawful the unlawful actions of his party, omits crucial facts voters should know. The right to vote is fundamental because it is protective of all our other rights.
In Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 553 U.S. 181 (2008), the Supreme Court in a plurality opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens, held that an Indiana law requiring voters to provide photo IDs, upon which the Missouri ID law is modeled, did not violate the Federal Constitution. That opinion upheld the decision of Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Posner is one of our most distinguished Appellate Court judges. Both Judge Posner and Justice Stevens now agree that they erred in their respective decisions, blaming an inadequate record before the court.
The evidence of the improper purpose of voter ID laws, and the malign effect on voter rights, is now overwhelming. Study after study has shown that voter impersonation is a myth. A Loyala Law School study, for instance, of one billion ballots cast between 2000 and 2014 found approximately 241 fraudulent ballots (145 of those in Michigan alone.) Of those, only 31 involved possible incidents of voter impersonation.
Senator Hegeman claims such voter ID laws enhance “faith in the integrity and fairness of our elections.” But other Republicans freely admit that stoking false fears of electoral fraud is part of their political strategy. The Pennsylvania Senate Republican leader declared in 2012 that its voter ID bill “would ensure Governor Romney will carry the state.” (The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled the measure unconstitutional.) The Republican Speaker of the New Hampshire House said its voter ID law would deter younger voters, who “foolishly” vote “liberal.” And Jim Greer, the former Florida Republican Party chairman, admitted that voter ID laws and cutbacks in early voting are done solely to suppress Democratic turnout—no one “[told] me we had a fraud issue. It’s all a marketing ploy.” The ploy works well. During the 2012 election, voter ID laws in Kansas and Tennessee reduced turnout by 2 percent, or about 122,000 votes, according to a 2014 analysis by the Government Accountability Office. Turnout fell the most among young people, African-Americans, and newly registered voters. Another study of elections from 2006 through 2014 in states with voter ID laws found that the decrease in voter turnout by minority groups was 2 to 3 times greater than that for other voting classes.
Notwithstanding the decision in Crawford, this past summer the Appellate Courts have struck down as unconstitutional the Republican enacted voter ID laws in six states. In his concurring opinion in Crawford, the last Justice Antonin Scalia argued that Federal courts should defer to the states on election codes “unless [the law] imposes a severe and unjustified overall burden upon the right to vote, or is intended to disadvantage a particular class.”
That’s exactly why the Missouri Supreme Court in 2006 struck down the previous Republican enacted voter ID law, ruling it amounted to a “heavy and substantial burden on Missourians’ free exercise of the right of suffrage.”
What is particularly despicable about this phony voter fraud claim is that it actually undermines citizens’ confidence in their electoral process. Last September a Washington Post-ABC News Poll found that nearly one-half of American voters believe voter fraud frequently occurs. Again, study after study has shown there is virtually no voter fraud anywhere in the country. What is also despicable, and deeply cynical, is that Republican voter ID laws also harm some of their voters, but that’s OK with them so long as it harms more likely Democratic voters.
The attempts by the Republican Party to suppress opposition votes is long and sordid. Most citizens know the ugly history of Southern Democrats, who for 100 years disenfranchised black, and poor white, citizens through poll taxes, fake literacy tests and outright intimidation. What few know, however, is that in 1944, fearful that most American servicemen would vote for the reelection of their commander-in-chief, Franklin Roosevelt, the Republican Party joined with those Democrats. Together they enacted by a veto-proof majority legislation that denied the right of those servicemen to cast absentee ballots in their home districts. Estimates are that as many as nine million servicemen were disenfranchised. One was my father, who was serving in the Army Air Corps in the India-China-Burma Theatre.
– Robert Ritterbusch
Maryville
