by P.D. Lesko
Who doesn’t want to get a mention in Rolling Stone magazine? You, Adam Levine, Lady Gaga and Nicki effing Minaj rubbing elbows in print. What could be cooler than that? Michigan made the pages of Rolling Stone in a June 27, 2012 piece that reports on the state’s recently passed “voter fraud” legislation. A2Politico has tackled this issue more than once. In a February 2012 piece titled “Michigan GOP Undermines Voting Right While Claiming to Battle Rampant Voter Fraud,” A2P revealed that judging from the number of bills Michigan GOP members pushed through the state Senate, one could be led to believe that voter fraud in Michigan is a problem of epidemic proportions. However, nothing could be further from the truth.
In a 2004 federal court ruling, Judge David Lawson concluded that there was no evidence of voter fraud in Michigan:
Preventing election fraud and preserving the “purity of the ballot box” certainly is a legitimate State interest. However, Michigan enjoys an election history that is relatively fraud-free. In 1997, Michigan’s attorney general stated that “as the chief law enforcement official of the State of Michigan, I am not aware of any substantial voter fraud in Michigan’s elections. I have not received complaints regarding voter fraud. Moreover, the state’s chief elections official, Secretary of State Candice Miller, confirmed the fact that Michigan does not have a voter fraud problem when she stated: “We have no real evidence of voter fraud in Michigan. Michigan has historically had very clean elections.”
In 2010, the now defunct Michigan Messenger contacted county and state election officials and found none who could recall even a single incident of actual voter fraud in the state of Michigan. That includes elections officials in Oakland County, where Ruth Johnson was the clerk before being elected Secretary of State. The spokesperson for the office she currently holds told the Messenger, “If you’re talking about actual in-person voting at the polls as opposed to bad registration cards, I’d have to say no. I’m happy to say we’re a very clean state.”
A2Politico also tackled the issue here, in a piece that looks at how voter ID laws disenfranchise not only homeless voters, but students, seniors and low-income voters, as well.
That was February and now its almost July, and as Rolling Stone reports:
State legislatures may be taking off for the summer, but the GOP’s war on voting goes on.
This afternoon, the New Hampshire Legislature successfully overrode Gov. John Lynch’s veto of a voter ID law requiring voters to present driver’s licenses, state-issued non-driver’s identification cards, passports or military IDs before casting a ballot, though it doesn’t come fully into force until after the November election.
In Michigan, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder looks likely any day now to sign a bill requiring volunteers to attend state-approved training sessions before they can register voters. What’s wrong with that? The bill makes no provision for training sessions! Not only that, but volunteers have to have to sign an affidavit making them liable for registration offenses – offenses that aren’t specified! The bill is basically a copy a Florida law, parts of which a federal judge shot down in May, saying they had “no purpose other than to discourage” voting.
Should Snyder sign the legislation into law, Michigan voters will have to rely on federal courts to protect their voting rights. The Michigan Legislature is on a roll passing legislation that requires the state’s residents to seek protection from their own state government from U.S. federal courts. The New York Times editorialized on June 15, 2012 about the anti-abortion legislation passed in Michigan (with a helping hand from several Democrats), and had this bit of small comfort for the state’s women: “If Michigan’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, were to sign the measure, he would be taking part in a shameful assault on reproductive health care. It would then fall to the courts to stand up for Michigan’s women and their legal rights.” The editorial, titled, “Michigan’s Attack on Women’s Rights,” could have just as easily been titled, “Michigan’s Attack on Voter’s Rights.”
Rolling Stone first reported on the GOP’s attempts to roll back voting rights in August 2011. Writer Ari Berman summed up the ALEC-inspired, Koch Bro funded efforts to suppress the vote like this: “Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. ‘What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century,’ says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.”
All of the Dems in Michigan (and in Ann Arbor) who voted for Rick Snyder, donated to his campaign and otherwise helped bring Darth Snyder to power should read the next sentences very carefully, while kicking themselves in their own political ashcans: Michigan’s “voter fraud” legislation is part of a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party. In 2011 alone, 38 states introduced legislation designed to trip up and disqualify voters.
What have ALEC and its many politico members in state legislatures around the country achieved? This round-up comes from Rolling Stone:
All told, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting. Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Maine repealed Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973. Five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia – cut short their early voting periods. Florida and Iowa barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters. And six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures – Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots. More than 10 percent of U.S. citizens lack such identification, and the numbers are even higher among constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic – including 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African-Americans.
In a speech, Former President Bill Clinton had this to say about the GOP’s war on voting in Michigan and around the country: “One of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time. Why is all of this going on? This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate” – a reference to the dominance of the Tea Party last year, compared to the millions of students and minorities who turned out for Obama. “There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.”