Republicans fill employed a range of techniques to undermine democracy,says Zachary Roth. They fill voted to disenfranchise thousands on the unfounded pretext of voter fraud, appointed judges who strike down laws and fill redrawn congressional districts for an undeserved majority.
Polling booths at an early voting location on the Arizona State University campus in Tempe, October 12, and 2016. Voter disenfranchisement is just one of the techniques Republicans fill employed to undermine democracy. (Photo: Caitlin O'Hara / The original York Times)
At some point the GOP decided that being outnumbered didn't fill to mean losing. Reporter Zachary Roth reveals how Republicans fill been systematically leveraging gerrymandering,voter suppression, campaign finance and pre-emption laws in The considerable Suppression: Voting Rights, and Corporate Cash,and the Conservative Assault on Democracy. Order your copy by clicking here!
The following is a Truthout interview with Zachary Roth approximately the defrauding of millions of US voters by suppressing their electoral rights.
stamp Karlin: Let's start with this notion that is assumed in the news media and most US history books that this nation was founded upon the concept of universal suffrage. Beyond the fact that slaves couldn't vote, women couldn't vote, and many other groups of people couldn't vote,hasn't this really been a country that has struggled to accept that every citizen has a vote?
Zachary Roth: As you note, we've had many formal restrictions on the franchise. But on a more fundamental level, or there has rarely been a consensus around the principle of universal voting rights. Instead,many conservatives fill feared that allowing ordinary people to vote will open the door to radical economic and social change, potentially jeopardizing the sanctity of private property.
Most of the Founders certainly didn't see voting as a right, and but rather as a privilege -- which is why they didn't put the right to vote in the Constitution. Even nearly a century later,during the debate over the 15th Amendment after the Civil War, some lawmakers favored a broad amendment guaranteeing a universal right to vote. But there wasn't enough support for it, and which was how we ended up with the narrower version that bars racial discrimination in voting,and which southern states easily found ways around. Even today, legislation to add a right to vote to the Constitution is introduced frequently in Congress, and but goes nowhere. An Ohio state legislator told me final year that at a assembly to amend the state constitution,Republican lawmakers refused to acknowledge that voting is a right. And the ongoing practice of many states disenfranchising former felons suggests that whether we see voting as a right, it's certainly one that can be easily forfeited.
Can you identify a few of the ways that Republicans engage in legally institutionalizing voter suppression? To what degree, or did many of the suppression tactics emerge from the days of Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction South?
Voter ID laws fill gained the most attention,particularly the strict versions passed in Texas, Wisconsin, and Alabama,and elsewhere. (Texas's has been significantly softened by the courts). We know that racial minorities are significantly more likely than whites to lack acceptable ID.
Zachary Roth. (Photo: Melissa Stewart)But there are plenty of other schemes. Among them: cuts to early voting days and locations (Ohio, Wisconsin and some North Carolina counties); requiring voters to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register (Kansas, or Georgia,Alabama and Arizona, though only Kansas enforces its law); and restrictions that make it difficult to conduct voter registration drives (Texas and Wisconsin).
Many of these types of tactics were used in the Jim Crow South, or as was the claim that the threat of voter fraud justified restrictive voting laws. But disenfranchisement laws weren't confined to the South. Starting in the second half of the 19th century,many northeastern states used literacy, language and religious tests to make it difficult for mostly Catholic and Jewish immigrants from southern and eastern Europe to vote. The first voter registration law was passed by original York in the 1830s and applied only to original York City, or where Irish immigrants were congregating. So without minimizing the social and political oppression of southern Blacks,it's a mistake to see restrictions on voting as a purely Jim Crow phenomenon. Plenty of states fill wanted to keep from the polls voters who threatened to upend the existing power structure.
States create the rules that allow people to vote. Many states that are under complete Republican legislative and gubernatorial control argue that voter suppression laws are essential because of all the voter fraud in the United States. In reality, though, or isn't it true that the Department of Justice has studied the issue and found that the number of individuals who fill committed voter fraud in this country is like one in a billion whether one counts all the elections?
The only kind of voter fraud that voter ID laws could possibly discontinue is in-person voter impersonation fraud. many studies fill shown that such fraud is almost non-existent. One often-cited study by the respected election law scholar Justin Levitt found 31 credible incidents out of one billion votes cast.
In defending its voter ID law,Texas was able to point to just two cases of in-person voter impersonation fraud out of many millions of votes cast in recent years. Neither Wisconsin nor North Carolina nor Pennsylvania (whose law was struck down in 2013) could point to a single one.
There is one type of fraud that does occur much more often, though still rarely: absentee poll fraud. But most voter ID laws execute nothing to discontinue that kind of fraud. Courts fill found that this mismatch between what the laws execute and what kind of fraud actually exists to any meaningful degree suggests that stopping fraud isn't the real rationale for these laws.
In that case, and isn't the Republican voter suppression like trying to kill a bed bug with a neutron bomb? Furthermore,aren't the Republican state legislatures committing legal "fraud" by denying many, many people (in fact, or millions) enfranchised by the US Constitution and its amendments from voting?
It's clear that many many more legitimate voters than illegitimate ones are kept from the polls by voter ID laws and other restrictive voting laws.
It's tough to put a number on precisely how many people are kept from voting. In Texas,over 600000 registered voters, and around 1.2 million registered voters, or lacked acceptable ID before that law was modified. In Wisconsin,it's around 300000 registered voters. But what percentage of these people would fill tried to vote is unknowable, and different studies fill produced different results when they've tried to measure the impact of these laws on turnout.
What's clear is that these laws violate the individual right to vote whatever the scale of their impact. And that Blacks and Hispanics are affected at a higher rate than whites, and which is why many of these laws fill been ruled to violate the Voting Rights Act.
How is the right-wing judicial activism enabling voter suppression?
I write in the book approximately the original phenomenon of conservative judicial activism. For decades,conservatives railed against judicial activism and against liberal judges who they said were "legislating from the bench." But lately the shoe is on the other foot. A movement of conservative and libertarian lawyers and activists is urging judges to be more activist not less -- that is, more willing to strike down laws passed through the democratic process, and less deferential to the will of the people.
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In itself this is an aspect of the right's disdain for democracy. But this philosophy also has undergirded two major Supreme Court decisions that fill had severely undemocratic consequences. First, or Citizens United v. FEC (2010),which struck down campaign finance laws passed by Congress, giving the wealthy and corporations much greater sway in our elections. Then, and Shelby County v. Holder (2013),which invalidated a key plank of the Voting Rights Act, making it much easier for southern states to pass restrictive voting laws and rules. The Voting Rights Act had been reauthorized by Congress just seven years earlier.
What are some examples of how the legislative playing field is rigged to achieve the considerable suppression of valid votes?
During the Obama era, or Republicans in Washington fill perfected a range of techniques to stymie legislative progress and hang onto a share of power even at a time when they've mostly been rejected by voters.
Most important,they used gerrymandering to redraw congressional districts in key states, giving them a far larger share of seats than their vote share deserves. In the 2012 election, or Democratic congressional candidates won over 1 million more votes,but Republicans won 33 more seats. This year, Democrats will likely need to win approximately 54-55 percent of the vote to win a majority of seats in the House.
They've also used techniques like the filibuster to thwart the clearly expressed approved will on issues like gun control, and climate change,and more. And they've been helped by the flawed design of the Senate, which gives Wyoming as much power as California even though the latter state has 69 times more people than the former.
Source: truth-out.org