The 50th anniversary of the passage of the Voting Rights Act was last Thursday. The website Medium published an op-ed piece by President Obama in which he offered his thoughts about voting rights. (Of all the websites he could have chosen to have this published, he picked…Medium? Uh, all right. That’s the site I would go for my op-ed to be read if I was President. Sure.) After recounting the events of Selma that happened over half a century ago and the struggles people went through before the law came to be, Obama got into his perception of how the law stands today.
[W]hile the Voting Rights Act broke down many of the formal and more ridiculous barriers to voting, today — in 2015 — there are still too many barriers to the vote, and too many people trying to erect new barriers to the vote. They’re even written into the code of law in some parts of our country — provisions specifically designed to make it harder for some people to vote.
Laws that roll back early voting. Laws with restrictive photo ID requirements. Laws that lead to improper purges of voter rolls.
Let’s take these points he calls “ridiculous barriers” one at a time.
“Laws that roll back early voting.”
How much time do people need to vote? Two weeks? Three? A month? Extending the window for voting for too long a time allows for needless variables that would affect elections. Ballots could be mishandled, lost, or destroyed, either by accident or deliberately. A candidate someone voted for could suddenly be embroiled in a scandal or be caught holding a different view than everyone previously thought, or a voter could suddenly change his or her mind after finding out some new information in the days before Election Day. But once a vote is cast, there’s no changing it. It’s why I still make an effort to vote on Election Day, not before. Anything can happen before then.
“Laws with restrictive photo ID requirements.”
This is one of the most talked-about parts of our current voting rights debate. It is also the most absurd. Or to use Obama’s word, “ridiculous.”
If you want to drive, you need an ID.
If you want to use a check, you need an ID.
If you want alcohol, you need an ID.
If you want tobacco products, you may need an ID.
If you want to open a bank account, you need an ID.
If you want to travel on a plane, you need an ID.
If you want to rent or buy a house, you need an ID.
If you want a certain kind of cold medicine, you need an ID.
If you want to buy a video game that’s rated “M,” you need an ID.
If you want to go to da club, you need an ID.
If you want to take advantage of the many welfare and entitlement programs available to Americans now, you need an ID.
If you’re going to take the SATs or ACTs at a test center, you need an ID.
If you’re a member of the military, you have an ID.
If you’re a full-time college student, you have an ID.
The list goes on. Don’t hand us that “it’s restrictive” garbage.
“Laws that lead to improper purges of voter rolls.”
The afternoon of the 2008 election, I received a knock on my door. I opened it and was greeted by a 20-something dreadlocked and scruffy, bearded white guy in black-rimmed glasses, wearing a knitted Rasta hat. He told me he was from the Democratic Party and wanted to know if I had voted yet. I told him I was just about to.
Looking at a list of names on a clipboard, he asked if I was Mr. So-and-so. I told him no, that person moved away over 15 years before.
He said oh and thank you and have a nice day, something along those lines. It was only seconds later after I shut the door that I realized the significance of what just happened. I’d known that Mr. So-and-so was still registered to vote from my address. I’d seen his name above mine on the list every time I went to vote.
So guess who I saw waiting in line later as I left the polling place? That’s right. Rasta Man. This was back when all you had to do was tell the poll worker your name. I wish I had stuck around to hear whose name he was going to vote under. But seeing as I had also divulged that helpful information to the Democratic operative earlier about the former tenant’s unknown whereabouts, I obviously must not have been thinking very clear that day, or else I would have acted more vigilant. Oh, well.
But this is why it’s vital to purge names from the list of registered voters if they don’t live at addresses they once did. There’s nothing at all improper about that. What does that mean, “improper”? You mean we’re supposed to let the list of registered voters grow and grow as people move somewhere else and don’t inform election officials? How is that good for voting rights? It’s not. It leaves the door open to more election abuse.
Recently, I received a postcard from the state elections board in the mail, addressed to the long-departed former resident. It read that the state had noticed that the individual has not voted from my address in the last four years. It instructed that if that person still resided at my address, he had a month to return the notice to verify he still lived here, or else his name would be taken off the poll list of registered voters at my address.
Thank Jah!
However, I don’t believe this will take Mr. So-and-so’s name off the registered voter database in connection with this address. It only keeps his name off the list at the polling place. Mr. So-and-so will never live here again. The state should get rid any reference that connects his name and my address in a registered voter database. And what good is it to mark dead people as simply “inactive”? Purge that junk!
But that’s why we need to have photo ID, too. Just in case.
For those who say that voter fraud doesn’t exist or that it is rare, I won’t bother pointing to the many stories that disprove that idea. Instead, I would ask how anyone would know if fraud is happening or not? Rasta man is a perfect example of how Democrats can get away with fraud undetected if people aren’t paying attention. Before the new voter ID laws were passed and approved in Wisconsin, the Democrats could access the list of registered voters, find out who hasn’t voted in a while, and go vote under that name. Pretty simple. Voter ID puts an end to that.
Without my state taking actions such as tightening early voting allowances, requiring photo ID, and purging invalid names from voter rolls, anyone who has a hold of registered voter lists could go from polling place to polling place and vote for whoever they want. It’s about damn time they got around to doing it. Governor Walker and the state’s Republicans enacted these corrections, so it’s obvious that Obama’s bitter whining on those points were his attempt to dig on Wisconsin’s current leadership. He just can’t let things go and let states decide matters for themselves. That’s pretty pathetic.
Just in case one wants to argue that early voting has gotten more people to vote than in years past or that voter ID has made it harder for certain people to vote, you’d be wrong.
A quick look online shows that voter participation was highest in 1968, three years after the Voting Rights Act was passed. Voter turnout was at its lowest in 1996 when things like early voting and voter ID weren’t issues like they are now, though other factors such as voter enthusiasm likely played a role. Other research may differ from the sources I read and could claim that the percentage in recent years is higher than it was in 1968, but there is no overwhelming evidence that voter participation has risen with any significance with early voting becoming more commonplace.
Also, research by the University of Florida shows that more minorities have voted in greater percentages in the last three general elections than they have in the previous four, going back to 1988.
Individuals who really want to vote will find a way to vote. They will make an effort. There are means to help those who need it.
Getting back to Obama’s op-ed, he goes on the write:
What’s more, we’ve seen steps to weaken the Voting Rights Act itself. Two years ago, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the law, which has allowed a number of states to change their voting laws without having to comply with the important procedural protections put in place to safeguard against discrimination.
Across the country, there are people coming together around this issue [of voter discrimination]. Right now, for instance, the NAACP is mobilizing activists for a 40-day march from Selma all the way to Washington, D.C. in support of a number of issues — one of which is “uncorrupted and unfettered access to the ballot box.”
Oh, so you can march all the way from Selma to Washington, D.C., but you can’t march into your nearest DMV to get an ID? Again, the absurdity–it is beyond words.
There’s still work for us to do.
Now, as shameful as it is that laws are being designed to keep people away from the polls, here’s something just as troubling — if not worse:
Among those of us who can vote, far too many of us choose not to.
Yes, laws are being designed to keep people away from the polls. Dishonest, corrupt, fraudulent people. That’s who these laws are designed to keep from cancelling my vote. With leaders like Obama and with candidates that we get in our elections, it’s no wonder so many citizens don’t want to vote.
Obama inserts this gem into his op-ed:
If you run a business, you can make a commitment to give your workers time off to vote.
Uh, why should businesses commit to that? With absentee voting, early voting, and the polls being open from early morning to whenever, there is plenty of time to vote. If you can’t make time outside of work to vote, you haven’t made it a great enough priority. Voting is not that hard to do. And its much, much easier than it was in the not-too-distant past. But let’s guilt businesses into letting people take off work to go vote.
After that Supreme Court decision, Congressman Lewis told the country in stark terms what that vote meant to him.
“The vote is precious,” he said that day. “It is almost sacred. It’s the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democratic society, and we’ve got to use it.”
If the vote is so precious, if the vote is so sacred, there must be safeguards in place to protect it. Democrats expect voting integrity to work on the honor system, where people will all come to the polling place and tell the poll worker their actual identity–everyone…every time. Giving every citizen that type of leeway would be unheard of in other venues.
Also, how does requiring a photo ID give white Americans a leg up on minorities at the polls? Are progressives saying that white people are smart enough to take their IDs with them everywhere while minorities are too dumb to remember to not leave home without them? Don’t people of color find that pretty damn insulting? I sure as heck would.
Then there’s the other part of that quote–voting is a “nonviolent” tool. Sounds to me like the President is insinuating that if the Right doesn’t ease up on those three points he made, the people should take to violence. Now you might think I’m the one being absurd/ridiculous now. But this president has been trying to divide the people of this country since day one of his reign and was working on it before he was president, too. He’s taken a side, and he has no interest in compromise. Does anyone still consider Obama a moderate? Don’t be ridiculous.
Common sense tells us that we must have precautions to protect the votes of everyone who casts a ballot. Such precautions should not be considered barriers if, as we are often reminded, every vote indeed counts. It used to be that voting was restricted to certain individuals and others were prohibited from voting. Not anymore. By law, there are no improper prohibitions for age-appropriate, sound-minded women and minorities to vote. It is a level playing field with everyone having to adhere to the same rules.
Now progressives led by Obama have shifted the argument to making it seem as though those equal rules are unequal. Don’t fall for that claptrap. You’re all smarter than that, aren’t you?
