Progress Illinois

In a surprise decision yesterday, an Indiana state appellate court overturned a controversial law that requires voters to show photo identification at the polls, claiming it violated the Indiana Constitution. Specifically, the three-judge panel unanimously ruled that by exempting mail-in absentee voters and residents of state-licensed care facilities from the requirement, the law violated the state's equal protection clause because it was not applied in a "uniform and impartial" manner.

Critics like Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels have slammed the decision as politically-motivated and have said they expect the Indiana Supreme Court to reverse it. But what Daniels and supporters of the law seem to ignore, and which the court ostensibly recognizes, is that the law itself is politically-motivated. Voter fraud is not a problem in Indiana, just as it is not a problem anywhere else in the country. After devoting substantial resources to combating this purported scourge, the Justice Department under President Bush failed to turn up any substantive evidence that widespread "fraud" exists. Before the election last year, conservative officials in Indiana -- aided and abetted by a deeply uninformed media -- raised concerns about potential voter fraud. Yet again, no evidence turned up of any coordinated effort to steal the election there. Indeed, Indiana's voter ID law is a solution to a problem that simply doesn't exist. All it does is place an extra burden on certain voters (many of them Democrat-leaning). From the New York Times' article today:

But Daniel P. Tokaji, an associate professor at Moritz College of Law, at Ohio State University, said the Indiana Constitution “does indeed provide broader protection for voting rights” than the federal Constitution. Professor Tokaji suggested that the judges did not believe that the law, adopted by a Republican-controlled legislature, was really intended to reduce voter fraud.

The ruling should also serve as a warning to any Illinois Republicans who, like last year, may be pondering a voter ID law of their own.

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The GOP loves to moralize about securing the sanctity of the electoral process. In Illinois, for example, Republicans in Lake County and in Springfield fought last year to protect against the scourge that is (non-existent) voter fraud. But when given the opportunity to extend voting rights, especially to communities largely excluded from the political process, they often stand in the way or simply sit on the sideline. A new bill Gov. Pat Quinn signed into law on Friday provides a great example.

Currently, state law requires that all registration applications be filed 29 days before Election Day. For the last five years, however, Illinois has offered potential voters a two-week grace period, during which someone who wants to participate but missed the original deadline can still sign up in person at the office of an election authority, usually the county clerk. HB 267 (now Public Act 96-0441), sponsored by Rep. Will Davis and Sen. James Meeks, extends that grace period one additional week, leaving only seven days between the final deadline and the opening of the polls.

Dan Johnson-Weinberger, who helped write the bill, originally thought it would have broad support.

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The General Assembly's long list of failures this session -- a weak ethics bill, no school funding reform, and the passage a of an irresponsible, unbalanced budget -- proves that Illinois is in desperate need of  representatives who will put the public good ahead of their political preservation. What's the best hope for new blood? The Illinois Campaign for Political Reform's David Morrison points to the scheduled redrawing of the legislative map. And yesterday a Senate redistricting panel began hearings on how to remove politics from the process when it comes up in 2011.

First, a little historical context on how the remapping has been hijacked by politics over the past three decades. In 1981, 1991, and 2001 lawmakers tried to tackle redistricting as whole, but each time failed to find consensus. Instead, the legislative leaders appointed four members from both parties to an eight-member commission who then met behind closed doors to tweak the district boundaries. Not surprisingly, those negotiations came to a halt as well, with both sides proposing a map that benefited their party.  This gridlock prompted what Roosevelt University political science professor Paul Green dubs "the big mistake" -- a tie-breaker policy in which a ninth member of the commission is selected by lottery (as WBEZ's Sam Hudzik put it, "the secretary of state pull[s] a name out of a hat, box or whatever"). The party affiliation of that additional member essentially "sets the stage for who runs the legislature for the next 10 years," Green says.

The obvious solution would be to take the process out of the hands of the lawmakers.  After all, their conflicts of interest are obvious.

Who then would propose new boundaries? 

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Throughout the fall, Republicans claimed that nation’s election process was being compromised by coordinated, large-scale voter registration fraud campaigns. In Lake County, Illinois, the story of Princess the Goldfish prompted Republican County Clerk Willard Helander to file a lawsuit asking for 5,000 early voting ballots to go through background checks because of a mishap by D.C.-based group attempting to boost voter registration. At one point, she even suggested that the county might institute a de facto voter ID law in certain precincts. North Shore Rep. Mark joined the chorus, claiming that “massive voter fraud” would occur on Election Day.

Across the border, a Republican member of the Lake County, Indiana Board of Elections raised similar concerns, identifying errors in 5,000 registrations submitted by individual canvassers for the community organizing group ACORN. In both cases, misinformed media reports elevated the critiques. The furor was capped off when John McCain called ACORN “a threat to our democracy” during one of the presidential debates.

As it turns out, absolutely no voter fraud was detected in either county. That’s because voter fraud is a largely nonexistent issue. The real problem isn’t that ineligible individuals are making it into the voting booth—it’s that too many perfectly legitimate voters still face roadblocks to actually casting a ballot.

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Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita really wants Hoosiers to believe he cares deeply about the integrity of the voting process. In October, just days before the 2008 election, the Republican sent a letter to federal, state, and local authorities asking for a criminal investigation into over 1,400 suspicious voter registration forms submitted by the group ACORN in Lake County. Despite convincing evidence to the contrary, he claimed (PDF) that ACORN was undertaking a massive voter fraud campaign that would “dilute the voice of honest voters and render an inaccurate tally on Election Day.”

Maybe Rokita should have spent less time demonizing community groups and more time ensuring all Indiana residents have access to the polls. In the run-up to the election, we thoroughly documented how Rokita stood idly by while a legitimate voter suppression battle developed in Lake County. Now the voting rights group Project Vote has accused him of failing to guarantee that Indiana is in compliance with the national Motor Voter law:

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What is going on in Missouri? First, we get word that anti-labor forces are launching a campaign to amend the state constitution so that all union elections must be conducted by what they call “secret ballot.” Now it appears that two Republicans in the state legislature are reigniting a failed effort to institute a constitutionally-mandated, highly-restrictive voter ID law.

Project Vote has the scoop. As you may recall, lawmakers proposed a change to Missouri’s constitution in May requiring citizens to provide both citizenship and government-issued photo IDs to vote. Such a move would have been even tougher than the Indiana statute upheld by the Supreme Court last year and would have disenfranchised an estimated 240,000 citizens. Thanks to the work of a broad coalition of groups and voters across the state who educated citizens about the negative impact of such policy changes and lobbied legislators to ignore the bill, Missouri officials left the year’s legislative session without voting on the law.

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Two days before Americans went to vote this year, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow described Election Day lines as “a poll tax.” Considering the opportunity costs of waiting around to cast a ballot on a work day, the description seems apt. It’s possible that the historical parallel -- a poll tax was originally intended to price out prospective African-American voters -- is appropriate as well.

Northwestern University engineering professor Michael Peshkin argues that long lines this year disproportionately affected black voters. Analyzing a rough tally of Election Day news reports containing the phrase “long lines” (there is no actual survey of polling place delays), he found a high correlation between states with the largest African-American populations and those with the longest delays. Check out his graph:

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If one thing became clear in Illinois last night, it's that incumbency is a powerful force in congressional politics.  For months, we anticipated that the U.S. House races throughout Northern Illinois would be tight and a strong showing by Barack Obama could tip the scales in the Democratic candidates' favor. Well, Obama held up his end of the bargain. The president-elect won by a substantial margin not only in Cook (75.4-23.6 percent with 93 percent reporting) but in every single collar county: 55.9-42.9 percent in Lake, 54.7-44 percent in DuPage, 55.8-43 percent in Will, 54.9-43.8 percent in Kane, and 51.9-46.9 percent in McHenry. Yet at the end of the evening, Reps. Mark Kirk, Judy Biggert, and Mark Roskam all cruised to sizeable wins.

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The simple act of registering to vote was complicated in two Lake counties this election cycle -- the one in Illinois and the one in Indiana. After independent voter registrations organizations turned in allegedly fraudulent registrations, the each county clerk -- both of them Republicans -- raised the specter of widespread "voter fraud," following the lead of their party's presidential nominee. What followed was a stream of misleading news reports, court battles, and threats of countywide voter ID laws and excessive provisional balloting.

How could this mess have been avoided? Certainly, the third-party groups like ACORN should have increased the training and oversight of their canvassers. But the incentives for the low-paid employees to game the system -- not to steal the election -- would still exist. Taking the incentives out of the equation is key, and it's something the federal government can do fairly easily. Writing at Slate's Election Law Blog, Richard Hasen explains:

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By filing a lawsuit alleging systemic voter registration fraud, Republicans in north suburban Lake County are hoping to exclude thousands of new voters from the Election Day count. The GOP is asking the circuit court to isolate 5,000 allegedly "compromised" registrations submitted by an employee of SEIU Illinois (which sponsors this website). Under their plan, individuals in this batch of forms would be issued provisional ballots, which are only counted after the clerk has verified that the underlying registrations are valid. If that sounds like an adequate compromise, Ohio's experience with provisional ballots should give you pause.

In an article yesterday, The New York Times' Ian Urbina reported how Ohio was one of a small minority of states that increased the percentage of provisional ballots issued to voters in 2004 and 2006. That total is expected to jump again Tuesday, because "many newly registered voters may bring the wrong form of identification to the polls, failing to comply with the state’s new voter law that requires all voters to show government-issued identification or an approved document with a voter’s name and address." If the presidential race is close in the state, problems will inevitably ensue.

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