Election Reform

Indiana's Discriminatory Voter ID Law Overturned

Adam Doster — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:35:05 -0700

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. For starters, it's not likely to pass the Dem-controlled General Assembly. But even if it did squeak through, our state courts could knock it down. “The state courts are much more amenable to these kinds of lawsuits than the federal courts are,” Indiana University Law School Professor Michael Pitts told the Times, “and this is where these battles are going to be played out."

Instead, lawmakers should focus on real flaws in our electoral system. After all, four to five million Americans did not vote in the 2008 presidential election because they encountered registration problems or failed to receive absentee ballots. Unfortunately, when given the opportunity to lower the barriers to civic engagement, the GOP often sits on the sidelines.

Image used under a Creative Commons license by Flickr user Gwen's River City Images.

Without GOP Support, Quinn Signs Voter Registration Extension

Adam Doster — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:30:00 -0700

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. While the measure doesn't solve the systemic problems keeping some people from voting, election officials had no objections. And it certainly improves access for those who want a say in who governs their state and nation. And as Johnson-Weinberger asked in a blog post yesterday, "Who could oppose ending the practice of stopping citizens from voting just on principle?"

Well, the answer is the Republican Party. In the Senate, 22 nay votes (PDF) were recorded. In the House, 45 representatives (PDF) voted it down. Both roll calls were starkly divided along party lines. Weinberger described the rationale of the four Senators who voted against the bill in committee this past April. It's safe to project their justification onto the caucus more broadly:

The four Republican Senators (Dale Righter, Randy Hultgren, David Luechtefeld and Dan Rutherford) were united in opposition to the very concept that the legislature might limit the amount of time that the government denies citizens the ability to register to vote. That would lead on a very dangerous path, they said, to same-day voter registration. Besides, the idea of a herd of voters just showing up to vote that are presumably uneducated in not good government, they said.

Let's remember votes like these when Republicans whine about the need for government reform.

The Redistricting Debate Begins

Angela Caputo — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:15:52 -0700

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? One idea is to let the public submit new maps that fit a predetermined set of criteria. This alternative is being pushed by Rep. Mike Fortner (R-DeKalb) who suggests that, in the end, the General Assembly could put the three most popular maps to a vote. (For an idea of how it would work, try playing the Annenberg Center's redistricting game here.)

Morrison tells us that, at the very least, lawmakers need to acknowledge there's a problem and agree to move the remapping deliberations from behind closed doors. For years, rumors have swirled about lines being drawn to benefit specific lawmakers or take power away from certain ethnic voting blocs. "We don't know what's driving the system," Morrison says. But he also characterizes the reform debate as scattered at the moment: "There's no consensus on where we're trying to go. Instead of being like a boxing match, it's like a train station and everyone is trying to decide which train to get on. We need to get on the same train."

More concrete proposals will likely emerge during a series of hearings scheduled through the early fall. In the meantime, get up to speed on issue by checking out the Brennan Center for Justice's Citizen's Guide to Redistricting here (PDF).

Electoral Problems Remain

Adam Doster — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 07:14:38 -0700

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. A new study by the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey presents the sobering data:

Four million to five million voters did not cast a ballot in the 2008 presidential election because they encountered registration problems or failed to receive absentee ballots, which is roughly the same number of voters who encountered such problems in the 2000 election, according to an academic study to be presented to the Senate Rules Committee on Wednesday.

An additional two million to four million registered voters — or 1 percent to 2 percent of the eligible electorate — were “discouraged” from voting due to administrative hassles, like long lines and voter identification requirements, the study found.

The problems are well-known. Voter registration lists are not kept current because enough resources aren’t allocated to local election offices. Clerical errors during the registration process are common. Some election officials erect high barriers to participation, whether inadvertently or on purpose.

By and large, Republicans have little interest in addressing these problems. Instead, they like to stoke fears that left-of-center organizations are out to subvert the electoral process for partisan gain. But systemic solutions, such as same-day voter registration, are needed to extend the franchise.

Image used under a Creative Commons license by Flickr user Big Dubya.

Remember Todd Rokita?

Adam Doster — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:38:22 -0800

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:

Citing clear evidence that hundreds of thousands of low-income Indiana residents have illegally been denied the opportunity to register to vote, today the voting rights groups Project Vote and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) sent a pre-litigation notice letter to Secretary of State Todd Rokita calling on him to bring Indiana into compliance with a federal law, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), that requires public assistance agencies offer voter registration services to their clients. [...]

According to evidence cited in the notice letter, the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) is now almost completely disregarding this law. By 2005-2006, registrations through public assistance agencies in Indiana had fallen more than 90 percent, to a mere 6,000. A November 2008 Project Vote survey of a number of FSSA offices and clients in Marion and Lake counties found that none of the offices were providing voter registration applications to their clients, and nearly all had no voter registration forms on their premises. None of the benefits applications collected during the investigation included the required registration materials, and none of the clients interviewed said they had been offered an opportunity to register to vote.

Project Vote reports that Indiana’s registration rate for low-income voters (just over 50 percent) is the fourth-worst in the nation. If the group’s allegations are accurate, Rokita should take swift action to alleviate the problem. Even if it means more black folks may show up at the polls.

Missouri Voter ID Law Back On The Table?

Adam Doster — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:09:02 -0800

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.

But in late December, Republicans Stanley Cox and Bob Nance refiled the referendum. It was read in the House on both Wednesday and Thursday and is awaiting action, no doubt spurred by the recent indictment of an ACORN voter registration worker who faces two felony counts of voter registration fraud.

But as we emphasized ad nauseum during the election season, there is a world of difference between voter fraud -- which voter ID laws ostensibly protect against -- and voter registration fraud. Missouri state officials have made no indication that any actual voter fraud was perpetrated this election season, not a surprising conclusion given that it never happens.

If Missouri lawmakers really want to ensure election security, the Brennan Center provides a wealth of alternatives to ID laws that are worth pursuing. Hopefully, the voting rights community in the Show Me State will fight this initiative in 2009 just as they did when a presidential election was on the line.

Image used under a Creative Commons license by Flickr user PhosphoricX3.

Eliminating The New Poll Tax

Adam Doster — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 09:55:53 -0800

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:

It’s clear that the GOP has institutionalized tactics that suppress turnout among Democratic-leaning demographics: as Rick Perlstein wrote after the 2006 midterm elections, “by now it’s in [the GOP’s] DNA. They’re proud of it, and thus the smoking guns will keep coming.” But many of the barriers Americans face at the polls, like the one Peshkin identifies, aren’t necessarily related to partisan interference. Instead, they are caused by enduring holes in the nation’s election administration infrastructure, some of which could be closed quite easily.

One fix for the line problem would be a federally mandated ratio of voting stations to voters. It seems silly that such a law doesn’t already exist, but those decisions have been left to local registrars historically, a fact that helps explain why certain communities aren’t provided an equal amount of resources. Moving Election Day from Tuesday to the weekend and expanding early voting opportunities nationally would easy the voting glut too. According to the New York Times, “many of the states that allowed early voting this year experienced few delays on Election Day.”

Lines aren’t the only problem worth fixing. Trumped up concerns over “voter fraud” could be dispelled and the franchise could be broadened if the United States adopted a same-day voter registration system, too. Not only would we eliminate the need for well-intentioned but problematic third-party voter-registration drives, we could curtail the amount of “no match” situations, when a voter’s identification and registration are slightly different.

Now is as good a time as any for legislators to take action. If they don’t enact changes while the voting experience is still fresh in people’s minds, the inertia will fade and the same problems will bubble up in 2010 and beyond. Senator Dianne Feinstein authored a bill to expand early voting in 2007 that now faces better prospects of passage with co-sponsor Barack Obama in the White House. Hopefully, we’ll see more legislation in this vein when Congress reconvenes in 2009.

The Power Of Incumbency

Adam Doster — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 11:15:38 -0800

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.

What gives? For one, incumbents hold a dizzying array of built-in advantages. There's name recognition, party support, and most importantly, fundraising opportunities. In politics, money (both big and small) tends to follow success. That's why over 95 percent of incumbents who sought reelection were successful in the 12 biennial national elections from 1982 through 2004. Locally, Obama didn't really dig deep to help his fellow Illinois Democrats either, only cutting one radio ad for Dan Seals in the waning days of his campaign. Some moderate Obama voters may have intentionally voted for their GOP congressional incumbent in order to constrain the impending Democratic wave. It's also entirely possible that Seals, Morgenthaler, and Harper don't quite fit in their districts.

While we can't turn back the clock on these contests, there is a major structural fix that could increase parity at the congressional level: public financing of elections. While it faced a great deal of debate and scrutiny at the presidential level -- particularly after Obama eschewed it to form his own broad-based financing apparatus -- with certain reforms, it could do wonders to revitalize the nation's democratic process.

Securing The Ballot

Adam Doster — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 11:53:40 -0800

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:

The solution is to take the job of voter registration for federal elections out of the hands of third parties (and out of the hands of the counties and states) and give it to the federal government. The Constitution grants Congress wide authority over congressional elections. The next president should propose legislation to have the Census Bureau, when it conducts the 2010 census, also register all eligible voters who wish to be registered for future federal elections. High-school seniors could be signed up as well so that they would be registered to vote on their 18th birthday. When people submit change-of-address cards to the post office, election officials would also change their registration information.

This is a no-brainer solution. Not only could the federal government dramatically increase the franchise, it could take community groups out of the equation, assuaging those Republicans who are truly concerns about ballot integrity. Of course, few really are, and many might oppose such reforms, providing the unintended benefit of discrediting the conservatives' moralizing on the issue.

It's something the Democratic Congress should take up immediatly following the election, before the controversies of the past few weeks fade from the public memory.

(H/T Matt Ygleaisas)

The GOP's Provisional Ballot Gambit

Adam Doster — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:34:05 -0700

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.

But the most likely source of litigation is the state’s heavy use of provisional ballots, which are issued when a voter’s identity or registration cannot immediately be verified or when polls stay open late. Ohio has a history of requiring large numbers of voters to use these ballots, which are easy to disqualify and are not counted until after the election.

“Provisional ballots are really the Achilles’ heel of our electoral process, because in a close race that is the pressure point lawyers use to try to undo the results,” said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University who is one of the nation’s foremost experts on voting litigation. “The larger the number of provisional ballots cast in a state, the more vulnerable the Achilles’ heel, and Ohio has for a couple of elections used more of these ballots than most any other state.”

In a February op-ed, Foley and Tova Wang of the Century Foundation expound on this fear, noting that "state laws are incredibly vague and incomplete with regard to casting and counting provisional ballots." For a variety of reasons (PDF) including registration list errors, address changes, and a lack of provisional ballots at polling places -- none of which are related to "voter fraud" -- only 79.5 percent of the provisional ballots issued in 2006 were actually counted.

Ohio isn't the only state that provides broader context for the effort in Lake County. Across the country, Republican officials have tried (with limited success) to convince the courts to address vague suspicions of voter fraud by forcing greater use of provisional ballots.

- In Colorado, the Republican Secretary of State garnered a partial win after he cut a deal to add 14,000 purged voters back on the rolls on the condition they filed provisional ballots.

- A frivolous GOP lawsuit against ACORN in Pennsylvania would require the state to provide additional provisional ballots in the counties ACORN targeted.

- In Nevada, the Secretary of State denied a GOP request to require voters to cast provisional ballots if they fixed mistakes in their voting information at the polls.

Ensuring the integrity of the election process is important. But the GOP's last-minute fear-mongering about "voter fraud" -- from the Southwest to the Northeast to Illinois' own Lake County -- is clearly more about gaming the system than fixing it.

Image used under a Creative Commons license by Flickr user joebeone.