Suppressing Democracy by Stealing the
Right to Vote Is the Ultimate Election Fraud
By Mark Karlin
Editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout
July 2012--We've seen it all before.
Passing laws to keep certain groups of people from voting, when they are entitled to in a democracy under the Constitution.
It
used to be called a "poll tax" in the South, where blacks were kept
from voting because they didn't pay sufficient taxes. It was, of course,
racist, but it also set the precedent of tying voting rights to wealth.
In
the last few decades, with a new surge in the past two years--we have
seen Republican controlled states pass a number of voter identification
laws--with additional limitations on advance voting and restrictive
residency requirements in many cases.
These new legal
requirements for voting are meant to keep minorities, students, the
disabled and the poorer elderly from voting, because these groups tend
to lean Democratic in their affiliation.
A new study by
the Brennan Center for Justice indicates that "since January 2011,
partisans in 19 states have rushed through new laws that cut back on
voting rights.
In a comprehensive study released last
October, the Brennan Center concluded these laws could make it far
harder for millions of eligible citizens to vote."
The
Department of Justice has successfully challenged a few of the new voter
suppression laws, but hardly enough.
Remember that if Jeb Bush and
Kathryn Harris had not eliminated tens of thousands of minorities from
the voting rolls in 2000, through a vetting process called caging, Al
Gore--who won the popular vote in the US by half a million votes--would
easily have carried Florida, instead of having the election stolen by
the Supreme Court.
The right of an American citizen to
vote is the fundamental ingredient that makes a democracy representative
of the will of the people, of
all US citizens.
To
intentionally keep people from exercising their right to vote, in the
absence of any significant voter fraud, is a crime against the
Constitution.
The Brennan Center concludes:
The result is plain: Voter ID laws will make it harder for hundreds of thousands of poor Americans to vote.
They place a serious burden on a core constitutional right that should be universally available to every American citizen.
This
November, restrictive voter ID states will provide 127 electoral
votes--nearly half of the 270 needed to win the presidency.
Therefore,
the ability of eligible citizens without photo ID to obtain one could
have a major influence on the outcome of the 2012 election.
The report also notes:
Ten
states now have unprecedented restrictive voter ID laws. Alabama,
Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina,
Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin all require citizens to produce specific
types of government-issued photo identification before they can cast a
vote that will count.
Legal precedent requires these states to provide free photo ID to eligible voters who do not have one.
Unfortunately, these free IDs are not equally accessible to all voters....
More
than 1 million eligible voters in these states fall below the federal
poverty line and live more than 10 miles from their nearest ID-issuing
office.
These voters may be particularly affected by the significant costs of the documentation required to obtain a photo ID.
Birth
certificates can cost between $8 and $25. Marriage licenses, required
for married women whose birth certificates include a maiden name, can
cost between $8 and $20.
By comparison, the notorious poll tax, outlawed during the civil rights era, costs $10.64 in current dollars.
Make
no mistake, stealing the most basic right in a democracy, the right to
participate in the election of a representative government, is a
thuggish form of state-sanctioned election theft.
It is election fraud that legally steals elections and replaces the rule of the majority with the rule of the entitled.
Mark Karlin
