DOJ refuses to preclear South Carolina voter ID law

Good.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday rejected as discriminatory a South Carolina law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls. The action by the department’s civil rights division, coupled with Attorney General Eric Holder’s call 10 days earlier in Austin for more aggressive federal review of such laws, appears to increase the likelihood that the Texas version could meet a similar fate.

Texas Republicans criticized the decision, calling it improper and vowing to defend Texas’ voter ID law.

The Justice Department said the South Carolina law makes it harder for members of minority groups to cast ballots, to the point that tens of thousands of them might be turned away at the polls because they lack the required photo ID. The law requires a state-issued driver’s license or ID card, a U.S. military ID or a U.S. passport.

The Texas law, which was signed by Gov. Rick Perry in May, requires voters to show a valid government-issued photo ID, such as a Texas driver’s license, Department of Public Safety identification card, state concealed handgun license, U.S. military ID or U.S. passport.

Like the South Carolina law, the Texas law needs approval from the Justice Department under the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act. Such “pre-clearance” to ensure that minority political power is not harmed is required in states that failed to protect minority voting rights in the past.

See here for more on Holder’s speech. As Michael Li noted on Twitter, AG Greg Abbott expects Texas’ law to be similarly slam dunked. Part of the reason for that is that in South Carolina, “the state’s own statistics demonstrated that the photo identification requirement would have a much greater impact on non-white residents”. In Texas, the state has been unable to provide sufficient information to the DOJ about the effect its voter ID law would have on minorities. It’s not hard to get the impression that neither of these states, or any of the others that are going down this road, really care about it.

And that’s the point, of course, but for reasons I don’t understand, the issue continues to be portrayed by lazy media outlets as follows:

Supporters of voter ID laws say they are needed to combat voter fraud. Critics say they discriminate against minority and low-income voters, including many such voters who tend to vote Democratic.

Yes, it’s always he-said, she-said. But let’s take a look once again at that “supporters” – that is, Republicans – “say they are needed to combat voter fraud”. Like many other of those “critics”, I have repeatedly pointed out that “supporters” are unable to point to even one case of the kind of fraud that voter ID laws might be able to mitigate against actually taking place. The reason for this is that a moment’s thought clearly demonstrates how ridiculously implausible and impractical a fraud-by-impersonation scheme would be.

Suppose you’re a candidate in a race you believe will be close, and you want to pad your totals a bit to help improve your odds of victory. Let’s use the recent Thibaut-Burks runoff, a race decided by some 250 votes, as an example of the kind of race where you might want to consider cheating in this fashion. From the perspective of either candidate, if you believe the race will be sufficiently close to make cheating attractive, you first have to consider how many extra votes you need. You don’t want to make it too close, since that attracts scrutiny and you might either be off by a little and just miss or barely squeak by and risk losing after provisional votes are counted. For either candidate, I’d say a thousand votes would be the minimum amount to make the effort worthwhile. That’s about two percent of the vote total, so enough to be reasonably sure it will make a difference but not so much as to make anything stand out.

So instead of identifying a thousand legal voters who might vote for you if they dragged themselves to the polls and work on getting them to vote for you, you decide to find a thousand people who can’t vote and give them the forged credentials of a thousand people who can vote but won’t and herd them to the polls to vote for you. These are the people that voter ID laws are supposed to stop, because now in addition to their forged voter registration cards they’d also need to produce a forged driver’s license to commit their crime, and that apparently is a bridge too far for cheating candidates. You also have to choose very carefully the voters that your illegal horde will be impersonating, because if even one of them decides to vote, the existence of their duplicated ballot will be strong evidence that something untoward is going on, and would risk your entire scheme.

Now that you have a plan, you need to execute it. That first means creating all those forged voter registration cards and distributing them to your impersonators. Well, I guess technically you have to locate the impersonators and get them to agree to participate. I don’t think there’s a listing for that in the phone book or on the Internet, but let’s just wave our hands at that and assume that being the resourceful cheating candidate that you are, you can find an army of impostors. The next obstacle you face will be cost. I figure it’ll run you some ten grand to design and produce a thousand fake voter registration cards. Your fake voters need to be paid something, too. Even if they’re too unsophisticated to realize that you are asking them to commit a felony, they need to be compensated for their time. If they agree to work for ten bucks apiece, that’s another ten grand. And of course, you need someone to coordinate all of this – finding the voters, identifying the non-voters they’ll be portraying, producing and distributing the documents, and ensuring that they actually go and vote. I don’t even know how to estimate the cost of all that, but again since the person or persons involved will be risking jail time, you have to figure it starts in five digits. You’re talking a minimum of thirty grand, which would be more than enough to cover the cost of a couple of mail pieces to the voter universe for a city runoff, all without the worry that you’ll someday be carted off in handcuffs. Tell me again why this was a good idea?

Oh, and remember that this all has to be done off the books, or at least in a way that the expenditures look innocent on a campaign finance report. Either way, you’re potentially adding other fraud charges to the list of things you could be arrested for. Now stop and think about all the people who know at least a little something about your illegal activities. Again, even if you assume that none of the thousand illegal voters has any idea they’re doing anything wrong, at the very least you have your illegal vote coordinator and your campaign manager, who presumably has signed off on this even if he or she refrains from doing any of the overt activity, as well as you yourself and perhaps your spouse or significant other. How likely is it that no one involved ever talks about this? Not just to the authorities, but to bloggers and other political lowlifes who traffic in gossip and innuendo and whatnot. There’s an entire right-wing media machine out there that would desperately love (and handsomely compensate) anyone who came forward with even the flimsiest evidence of such a conspiracy to steal an election, and they would trumpet that story 24/7 until everyone involved were arrested, waterboarded, and sent to Gitmo. Yet somehow a single name has never been associated with such a scheme.

This is what those “supporters” of these laws want you to believe is happening and has happened many times in our elections, enough to justify laws that will make it not just harder but downright impossible for legal, habitual voters to do what they’ve always legally done. And the media, which can’t be bothered to think this through, is content to tell you that there are also “critics” who say that voting rights could be compromised. Hey, what’s a little dispute among partisans, right?

Now, I’m not saying there’s no such thing as vote fraud. There certainly is, and there almost certainly is a fair amount of undetected vote fraud. What I am saying is that this particular type of vote fraud, the only type of vote fraud that voter ID legislation could possibly be an effective solution for, is so ludicrously unfeasible on its face as to completely invalidate the argument for it. The proper response to this is to laugh scornfully and ask why, if the Republicans who keep pushing voter ID as a cure for election integrity care so much about safeguarding the process, there is no expressed concern about fraud by absentee ballot, or fraud by compromising electronic voting machines, which after all this time are still basically black boxes. I mean, if I wanted to steal an election, that’s the way I’d go. Figure out a way to alter the bits on the memory sticks, or attack the program that tallies the vote directly. More bang for the buck, far less exposure, and complete control over the outcome. What more could you want? When Republicans turn the conversation to protecting the integrity of our elections on these fronts, then we can talk. Until then, I will continue to call bullshit on voter ID.

Related Posts:

• Obama pledges to keep fighting for the Voting Rights Act
• Texas files suit to preclear voter ID
• SOS sends voter registration info to DOJ