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Vote Suppression Guru: I Win I Win I Win!
In this morning's writeup of Supreme Court's decision on Indiana's voter ID law, The New York Times quoted someone familiar to TPM readers:
"This decision not only confirms the validity of photo ID laws, but it completely vindicates the Bush Justice Department and refutes those critics who claimed that the department somehow acted improperly when it approved Georgia's photo ID law in 2005," said Hans A. von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission and a former Justice Department official.
It's a reaction laden with a number of distortions. But the key one has to do with a crucial difference between Georgia's 2005 law and Indiana's law, as Joe Rich, the former chief of the voting section in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, told me. Rich, who last year opposed Spakovsky' nomination to the FEC along with a group of other former voting section professionals, called Spakovsky's contention that yesterday's ruling vindicated his actions "disingenuous."
"The Georgia law reviewed by the Justice Department required voters seeking the required voter ID to pay a fee that a federal court found created an unconstitutional poll tax," Rich said. "But in Indiana the Supreme Court explicitly noted that photo identification cards 'issued by Indiana's [Bureau of Motor Vehicles] are . . . free' and thus there was no issue of creating an unconstitutional poll tax."
Spakovsky and other political appointees overruled staff attorneys who'd recommended against approving Georgia's voter ID law, because of concerns that the law would discriminate against poor and minority voters. It was just a part of Spakovsky's legacy of ignoring and intimidating section employees, and generally doing what he could to effect policies that would disenfranchise voters.
Under the Voting Rights Act, parts of the country with a history of discrimination must demonstrate to the Justice Department that new legislation does not discriminate against minority voters. In the case of Georgia's law, supporters of the law didn't do much of anything to demonstrate that the law wouldn't discriminate against African-Americans.
In fact, quite the opposite. Georgia state Rep. Sue Burmeister, the sponsor of the bill, told voting section staff that "if there are fewer black voters because of this bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud," and that "when black voters in her black precincts are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls."
Indiana's law had not required review by the Justice Department, Rich said. "Therefore, there was no issue in review of the Indiana law concerning whether the state could meet its burden of demonstrating that the law did not hurt minority voters, as is required by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. That was the only issue before Justice Department in its review of the Georgia law and career attorneys, in an in-depth memo, found that the law did hurt minority voters and accordingly recommended an objection to the law."
So I think it's fair to say that Spakovsky has yet to be "completely vindicated."
Josh
Zachary
The Supremes decision is fairly clear, and does vindicate Justice.
CRAWFORD ET AL. v. MARION COUNTY ELECTION
BOARD ET AL. No. 07–21.
JUSTICE SCALIA, joined by JUSTICE THOMAS and JUSTICE ALITO, was of the view that petitioners’ premise that the voter-identification lawmight have imposed a special burden on some voters is irrelevant. The law should be upheld because its overall burden is minimal and justified. A law respecting the right to vote should be evaluated under the approach in Burdick v. Takushi, 504 U. S. 428, which calls for application of a deferential, “important regulatory interests” standard for nonsevere, nondiscriminatory restrictions, reserving strict scrutiny for laws that severely restrict the right to vote, id., at 433–434. The different ways in which Indiana’s law affects different voters are no more than different impacts of the single burden that the law uniformly imposes on all voters: To vote in person, everyone must have and present a photo identification that can be obtained for free. This is a generally applicable, nondiscriminatory voting regulation. The law’s universally applicable requirements are eminently reasonable
because the burden of acquiring, possessing, and showing a free photo identification is not a significant increase over the usual voting burdens, and the State’s stated interests are sufficient to sustain that minimal burden.
p. 63 By way of contrast, two other States—Florida and Georgia—have put into practice photo ID requirements significantly less restrictive than Indiana’s...
Georgia restricts voters to a more limited list of acceptable photo IDs than does Florida, but accepts in additionto proof of voter registration a broader range of underlying documentation than does Indiana. See Ga. Code Ann. §21–2–417 (Supp. 2007); Ga. Comp. Rules & Regs., Rule 183–1–20.01 (2008) (permissible underlying documentsinclude a paycheck stub, Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid statement, school transcript, or federal affidavitof birth, as long as the document includes the voter’s full name and date of birth). Moreover, a Federal District Court found that Georgia “has undertaken a serious,concerted effort to notify voters who may lack Photo ID cards of the Photo ID requirement, to inform those votersof the availability of free [State-issued] Photo ID cards or free Voter ID cards, to instruct the voters concerning how to obtain the cards, and to advise the voters that they can vote absentee by mail without a Photo ID.” Common Cause/Georgia v. Billups, 504 F. Supp. 2d 1333, 1380 (ND Ga. 2007). While Indiana allows only certain groups suchas the elderly and disabled to vote by absentee ballot, in Georgia any voter may vote absentee without providingany excuse, and (except where required by federal law) need not present a photo ID in order to do so.
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-21.pdf
April 29, 2008 8:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Supremes decision is fairly clear, and does vindicate Justice.
Not so fast. As Rich points out, DOJ had to determine whether Georgia's law met the burdens imposed by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The answer to this question has nothing whatsoever to do with the separate question of whether Georgia "put into practice photo ID requirements significantly less restrictive than Indiana’s." Even if Georgia's requirements are "less restrictive" in some narrowly technical sense that tells us nothing about whether the law would, in fact, tend to disenfranchise minority voters. God bless the Peachtree state, but federal law is federal law, regardless of how inconvenient it may seem to anonymous marginal players.
April 29, 2008 9:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
In the 2004 presidential election in Washington (State), several precincts in King County had several hundred more votes cast than there were live registered voters. After two recounts of those precincts all votes were counted as no one could tell who the deceased voters had voted for. While NOT disenfranchising legitimate voters is very important, protection from diluting their votes so as to make them irrelevant is also important.
Certainly we can make laws that protect people's right to vote as well as protect the value of the votes they cast.
April 30, 2008 1:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
This ruling definitely DID NOT vindicate Spakovsky and the DoJ over the Georgia voter ID law.
If you follow this link frpm the main post, you will see that the law the DoJ approve DID have fees for the state photo ID. In that article, it gives the exact same list of documentation that Scalia lists as those that applied before that law was passed.
Since that law was overturned by a federal judge and that decision has not been reviewed by the Supreme Court, the list of acceptable documentation given in Scalia's opinion is correct.
However, it is at best confusing and at worst deliberately misleading for Scalia to have chosen that example.
April 30, 2008 4:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Has anyone considered that a completely impotent Federal Elections Commission is just what the Republicans and the Bush Administration want?
This way they can pull all kinds of voter suppression and vote dilution without having to worry about review by the FEC.
Welcome to the USA's version of democracy in action.
April 30, 2008 7:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Shorter Supreme Court decision:
The 14th Amendment covers only George W. Bush and no one else.
April 30, 2008 8:18 AM | Reply | Permalink