The GOP War on Voting

By Ari Berman

In a campaign supported by the Koch brothers, 
Republicans are working to prevent millions 
of Democrats from voting next year.

August 30, 2011--As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008.

Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots.

"What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century," says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.

Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls. "I don't want everybody to vote," the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980.

"As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

But since the 2010 election, thanks to a conservative advocacy group founded by Weyrich, the GOP's effort to disrupt voting rights has been more widespread and effective than ever.

In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council--and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party--38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.

All told, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting. Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering.

Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters.

Maine repealed Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973. Five states--Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia--cut short their early voting periods.

Florida and Iowa barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters.

And six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures--Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin--will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots.

More than 10 percent of U.S. citizens lack such identification, and the numbers are even higher among constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic--including 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African-Americans.

Taken together, such measures could significantly dampen the Democratic turnout next year--perhaps enough to shift the outcome in favor of the GOP.

"One of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time," Bill Clinton told a group of student activists in July.

"Why is all of this going on? This is not rocket science.

They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate"--a reference to the dominance of the Tea Party last year, compared to the millions of students and minorities who turned out for Obama. "

There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today."

To hear Republicans tell it, they are waging a virtuous campaign to crack down on rampant voter fraud--a curious position for a party that managed to seize control of the White House in 2000 despite having lost the popular vote.

After taking power, the Bush administration declared war on voter fraud, making it a "top priority" for federal prosecutors.

In 2006, the Justice Department fired two U.S. attorneys who refused to pursue trumped-up cases of voter fraud in New Mexico and Washington, and Karl Rove called illegal voting "an enormous and growing problem."

In parts of America, he told the Republican National Lawyers Association, "we are beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are colonels in mirrored sunglasses."

According to the GOP, community organizers like ACORN were actively recruiting armies of fake voters to misrepresent themselves at the polls and cast illegal ballots for the Democrats.

Even at that time, there was no evidence to back up such outlandish claims.

A major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter, which the anti-fraud laws are supposedly designed to stop.

Out of the 300 million votes cast in that period, federal prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud--and many of the cases involved immigrants and former felons who were simply unaware of their ineligibility.

A much-hyped investigation in Wisconsin, meanwhile, led to the prosecution of only .0007 percent of the local electorate for alleged voter fraud.

"Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere," joked Stephen Colbert.

A 2007 report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a leading advocate for voting rights at the New York University School of Law, quantified the problem in stark terms.

"It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning," the report calculated, "than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls."

GOP outcries over the phantom menace of voter fraud escalated after 2008, when Obama's candidacy attracted historic numbers of first-time voters.

In the 29 states that record party affiliation, roughly two-thirds of new voters registered as Democrats in 2007 and 2008--and Obama won nearly 70 percent of their votes.

In Florida alone, Democrats added more than 600,000 new voters in the run-up to the 2008 election, and those who went to the polls favored Obama over John McCain by 19 points.

"This latest flood of attacks on voting rights is a direct shot at the communities that came out in historic numbers for the first time in 2008 and put Obama over the top," says Tova Wang, an elections-reform expert at Demos, a progressive think tank.

No one has done more to stir up fears about the manufactured threat of voter fraud than Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a top adviser in the Bush Justice Department who has become a rising star in the GOP.

"We need a Kris Kobach in every state," declared Michelle Malkin, the conservative pundit.

This year, Kobach successfully fought for a law requiring every Kansan to show proof of citizenship in order to vote--even though the state prosecuted only one case of voter fraud in the past five years.

The new restriction fused anti-immigrant hysteria with voter-fraud paranoia.

"In Kansas, the illegal registration of alien voters has become pervasive," Kobach claimed, offering no substantiating evidence.

Kobach also asserted that dead people were casting ballots, singling out a deceased Kansan named Alfred K. Brewer as one such zombie voter.

There was only one problem: Brewer was still very much alive. The Wichita Eagle found him working in his front yard. "I don't think this is heaven," Brewer told the paper. "Not when I'm raking leaves."