NY Times

September 26, 2006

Stricter Voting Laws Carve Latest Partisan Divide

By JOYCE PURNICK

MESA, Ariz. — Eva Charlene Steele, a recent transplant from Missouri, has no driver’s license or other form of state identification. So after voting all her adult life, Mrs. Steele will not be voting in November because of an Arizona law that requires proof of citizenship to register.

“I have mixed emotions,” said Mrs. Steele, 57, who uses a wheelchair and lives in a small room in an assisted-living center. “I could see where you would want to keep people who don’t belong in the country from voting, but there has to be an easier way.”

Russell K. Pearce, a leading proponent of the new requirement, offers no apologies.

“You have to show ID for almost everything — to rent a Blockbuster movie!” said Mr. Pearce, a Republican in the State House of Representatives. “Nobody has the right to cancel my vote by voting illegally. This is about political corruption.”

Mrs. Steele and Mr. Pearce are two players in a spreading partisan brawl over new and proposed voting requirements around the country. Republicans say the laws are needed to combat fraud, especially among illegal immigrants. Democrats say there is minimal fraud, if any, and accuse Republicans of suppressing the votes of those least likely to have the required documentation — minorities, the poor and the elderly — who tend to vote for Democrats.

In tight races, Democrats say, the loss of votes could matter in November.

In Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest in population, election officials said that 35 percent of new registrations were rejected for insufficient proof of citizenship last year and that 17 percent had been rejected so far this year. It is not known how many of the rejected registrants were not citizens or were unable to prove their citizenship because they had lost or could not locate birth certificates and other documents.

In Indiana, Daniel J. Parker, chairman of the state Democratic Party, said: “Close to 10 percent of registered voters here do not have driver’s licenses. Who does that impact most? Seniors and minorities.”

A law in Indiana requiring voters to have a state-issued photo ID is being challenged in the federal courts, as are the voting laws in Arizona and in many other states.

Republicans say the Democratic complaints are self-serving.

“Democrats believe they represent stupid people who are not smart enough to vote,” said Randy Pullen, a Republican national committeeman from Arizona who championed a statewide initiative on the new requirements. “I do not.”

The new measures include tighter controls over absentee balloting and stronger registration rules. The most contentious are laws in three states — Georgia, Indiana and Missouri — where people need government-issued picture ID’s to vote, and provisions here in Arizona that tightened voter ID requirements at the polls and imposed the proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration.

Several other states are considering similar measures, and the House of Representatives, voting largely along party lines, recently passed a national voter ID measure that is headed for the Senate.

The debate in Washington and the state capitals has been heated, with only one note of agreement: that voting, once burdened by poll taxes and other impediments, is as divisive an issue as ever.

“I have never seen such a sinister plot — I won’t say plot, I’ll say measure — as to target a group of people to try to make it difficult for them to vote,” said Roy E. Barnes, a Democrat and former governor of Georgia who is fighting the new identification law in his state.

Mr. Pearce, the Arizona Republican, said: “We know people are approached to register whether they are illegal or not. We know the left side’s agenda.”

Underlying the debate is the fundamental question of voter fraud and whether people who are not who they say they are — impostors — are voting. Some suggest that the problem is so widespread that the standard methods of proving identification, like a utility bill and a signature, are no longer adequate.

“I know a lot of allegations of voter fraud, especially by noncitizens, that may have been able to tip the balance in favor of one candidate,” said Representative Tom Tancredo, Republican of Colorado and an advocate of tough immigration laws.

The tighter voting rules appeal strongly to people worried about illegal immigration, Mr. Tancredo said.

There is no data, however, to show more than isolated instances of so-called impostor voting by illegal immigrants or others.

Experts in election law say most voter fraud involves absentee balloting, which is unaffected by the new photo identification laws. Few people, they say, will risk a felony charge to vote illegally at the polls, and few illegal immigrants want to interact with government officials — even people running a polling place.

Of Arizona’s 2.7 million registered voters, 238 were believed to have been noncitizens in the last 10 years; only 4 were believed to have voted; and none were impostors, plaintiffs stipulate in their lawsuit to overturn the law, statistics the state has not challenged. Nor is there evidence of impostor voting in Georgia, Indiana or Missouri.

Advocates for the new laws do not dispute the figures — just their relevance.

Thor Hearne, a lawyer for the American Center for Voting Rights, a conservative advocacy group, who was President Bush’s election law counsel in 2004, says there is little proof of impostor voting because few have looked for it.

Todd Rokita, the Indiana secretary of state, agrees. “Critics will say there is no wholesale fraud, and to that I say you don’t understand the nature of election fraud,” said Mr. Rokita, a Republican. “A lot of this goes unreported. Until you have a mechanism in place like photo ID’s, you don’t have anything to report.”

Arizona’s new rules were passed as part of Proposition 200, a referendum that denies certain state and local benefits to illegal immigrants. It got 56 percent of the vote two years ago, after Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, vetoed a Republican-backed measure passed by the Legislature.

Rooted in the state’s debates over illegal immigration, the measure is the broadest in the country, requiring a driver’s license, a state photo ID or two nonphotographic forms of identification at the polls. Lawyers for the Navajo Nation and other American Indian tribes say the provision particularly discriminates against Indians, many of whom are too poor to drive or are without electricity or telephone bills, alternative forms of identification.

Because the Arizona measures have been in place for less than two years, there is limited documentation of their impact. Lawyers fighting the rules say the measures have prevented thousands of people from registering to vote, particularly in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, a city with many Latino voters.

Supporters of the measures say elections have gone smoothly. Critics point to individual cases, like confusion at the polls in the primary elections earlier this month. They say that people without adequate documentation have been turned away or required to file “conditional provisional” ballots that are counted only if voters follow up — and that not all of them do.

Deborah Lopez, a Democratic political consultant in Phoenix, said that the once simple matter of registering voters at a rally or a fiesta now required labor-intensive door-to-door visits.

It was during a registration drive at her assisted-living center, Desert Palms, that Mrs. Steele learned she could not vote. Disabled, with a son, an Army staff sergeant, on active duty, she left Missouri recently to stay with her brother and subsequently moved into the center.

Lacking a driver’s license, she could get a new state identity card, but she said she had neither the $12 to pay for it nor, because she uses a wheelchair, the transportation to pick it up.

“It makes me a little angry because my son is fighting now in Iraq for others to have the right to vote, and I can’t,” said Mrs. Steele, who submitted an affidavit in the suit against the Arizona law.

Asked if she was a Republican or a Democrat, Mrs. Steele said she was neither: “I vote for the best person for the job.”

Or, she added, she used to.

In stunning revelations set to rock the vote from Tallahassee to Capitol Hill — and perhaps even a bit further up Pennsylvania Avenue — a Florida computer programmer has now made remarkable claims in a detailed sworn affidavit, signed this morning and obtained exclusively by The BRAD BLOG!

- Affidavit in .PDF format -

...

In 2005, we led a bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform and concluded that both parties’ concerns were legitimate — a free and fair election requires both ballot security and full access to voting. We offered a proposal to bridge the partisan divide by suggesting a uniform voter photo ID, based on the federal Real ID Act of 2005, to be phased in over five years. To help with the transition, states would provide free voter photo ID cards for eligible citizens; mobile units would be sent out to provide the IDs and register voters. (Of the 21 members of the commission, only three dissented on the requirement for an ID.)

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When Pennsylvania officials begin their defense of the state's new voter identification law in court Wednesday, they will do so after agreeing to abandon a central argument for why such laws are needed.

In a Pennsylvania court filing, the state says it has never investigated claims of in-person voter fraud and so won't argue that such fraud has occurred in the past. As a result, the state says, it has no evidence that the crime has ever been committed.

The state also says it won't present "any evidence or argument" that in-person voter fraud is likely to occur on Election Day if the voter ID law isn't enacted.

More from the filing, which also was signed by the attorney for the plaintiffs, who are Pennsylvania residents suing to overturn the law:

"There have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania; and the parties do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states...Respondents will not offer any evidence in this action that in-person voter fraud has in fact occurred in Pennsylvania or elsewhere."

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On Tuesday, hundreds of demonstrators protested the law outside the state capitol. They say the law violates the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against minorities.

The Justice Department is investigating whether minority voters are disproportionately represented among those who lack proper ID under the new law.

Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Carol Aichele told reporters after the protest that roughly 85,000 voters will need a newly created voter ID card to be issued free. She said her office is cooperating with the Justice Department and defended the law.

"The law is valid and will sustain any kind of test," she said.

The ability for someone to come in and, through fraud, dilute the voting pool is very present. I want to be able to give our government the ability to combat that, to give them the tools. It is very difficult to prove a negative. If Alan Wilson goes in and uses a fraudulent voter ID card under the name of John Smith and I vote under John Smith’s name and then leave the polling place, you cannot go back in time and prove the negative. It is impossible. It is very difficult to catch somebody in the act. But I hear countless stories of people who witnessed that.

In Wilson’s imagined scenario, a voter uses a fake ID to cast an extra vote. But his own argument rests on the idea that the requirement to show ID at the polls is necessary to combat rampant voter fraud and identity theft. By this logic, voter ID laws would do nothing to prevent this threat.

In accordance with state law, the Minnesota State Canvassing Board ordered a hand recount in the Senate race, because the margin of victory was within one half of one percent.[40]

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...ballots that were challenged by either campaign were sent to the state capital for consideration by the State Canvassing Board.

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Of the 4130 precincts in Minnesota, one had to delay reporting its totals because election officials deduced that 133 ballots, all contained in a single envelope, had gone missing during the recount process.[42] After days of searching,[43] the State Canvassing Board decided to use that precinct's election day totals, which included the missing 133 votes.[44] The 133 missing ballots contributed a net 46 votes for Franken.

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In total, Coleman had challenged 3,377 ballots and Franken had challenged 3,278. These ballots were set aside until the State Canvassing Board could meet on December 16, at which point the board began deciding on the challenged ballots. Ritchie's office, however, insisted that each campaign voluntarily withdraw some of their challenges, due to the strain a large pile of ballot challenges would place on the State Canvassing Board. On December 3, Al Franken's campaign withdrew 633 of their challenges, and said that they would withdraw more at a later date.[45] The next day, Coleman's campaign responded by withdrawing 650 challenges.[46] By the time all of the ballots that Franken's campaign challenged were examined, he had only 420 challenges left that had not been withdrawn,[47][48] while Coleman's campaign had roughly 1000.[49] The Secretary of State's website had noted that none of the withdrawn ballot challenges were reflected in the running tally of the recount.[50]

By December 19, the State Canvassing Board had largely concluded their review of ballot challenges from each campaign. Of the 1,325 ballots that were reviewed, 319 were awarded to Coleman, 758 were awarded to Franken, and 248 were labeled "other". According to the AP,[51] MPR[52] and the Star Tribune,[53] the resolution of these challenges marked the first time Franken had taken a lead in the recount. On December 30, the board finished reallocating the withdrawn challenges, completing this phase of the recount and leaving Franken with a 49 vote lead.[54][55][56][57]

One of the last—and largest—sources of uncertainty had been the absentee ballots which had been improperly rejected by election officials during the original count. Franken's campaign asked for these ballots to be tallied by each county and counted in the recount results, while Coleman's campaign said the canvassing board did not have the authority to deal with the ballots.

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On December 12, the Board voted unanimously to recommend counties sort through their rejected absentee ballots, setting aside any that were incorrectly rejected, and to resubmit their vote totals with the incorrectly rejected ballots included.[59] The Coleman campaign filed suit with the state Supreme Court to temporarily halt such counting until "a standard procedure" could be determined,[60] but the State Supreme Court ruled on December 18 that the improperly rejected absentee ballots be included in the recount.[61] The Court also prescribed that a standard procedure be established by the Secretary of State's office in conjunction with the two campaigns.

As of December 30, county officials had found about 1,350 wrongly rejected ballots. The Franken campaign agreed to count all of those ballots, while the Coleman campaign agreed to a subset, and also wanted to reconsider more than 700 other absentee ballots. On December 30 and 31, representatives of both campaigns met with officials in each county and sorted through the absentee ballots. After some ballots were rejected by one campaign or the other, 953 ballots were sent to the secretary of state's office. The "fifth pile" of wrongly rejected absentee ballots were opened, checked for identifying marks, and counted (where found eligible) on January 3, 2009. Of the 933 ballots that were found to be eligible, 481 were for Franken, 305 were for Coleman, and 147 were for other candidates, or were overvotes or undervotes.

The state canvassing board certified the recounted vote totals on January 5 with Franken ahead by 225 votes.[8] Former Minnesota Governor Arne Carlson, a Republican who did not endorse a candidate in the 2008 Senate race, called for Coleman to concede.[63]

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On January 12, 2009, Franken sent a letter to Ritchie and Pawlenty requesting an election certificate. Both declined, citing the unresolved election contest by Coleman.[68] Later that day, Franken filed suit in Federal court to force the state to issue a certificate, claiming that federal law relating to Senate elections superseded state law.[68] The next day his campaign asked the Minnesota Supreme Court to require Pawlenty and Ritchie to issue the certificate,[67] and the court held a hearing on the suit on February 5, 2009.[69]

Texas Senator John Cornyn said that GOP senators were prepared to filibuster the seating of the canvassing board's declared winner until a signed election certificate is available, as provided under Minnesota law.[66][70] On January 21, 2009, the day after the inauguration of Democratic President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that Senate Democrats are "going to try to seat Al Franken" at least provisionally until the challenge is resolved. Reid also said that there was "not a question in anyone's mind . . . that there's been any fraud or wrongdoing in this election." Senate Republican leaders countered this by insisting that Franken respect Minnesota laws and allow the completion of the legal review.[71][72]

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Coleman filed a contest of the election results in the Ramsey County District Court on January 6, 2009.[73] In it, he alleged ballot counting irregularities which, if corrected, would result in his winning the election.[74] Among other issues, he alleged that there were double-counted duplicate ballots, 654 valid absentee votes rejected as invalid by county election officials,[75][76] and problems in dealing with the lost ballots in a Minneapolis precinct.[74][77]

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On January 12, 2009, Franken filed a motion to dismiss Coleman's contest, claiming it was "an imprecise and scattershot pleading". He argued that even if the contest were to proceed, the three-judge panel should be limited to determining who would be awarded the already certified ballots and to a simple, mathematical recount to ensure the accuracy of the canvassing board's count, while no additional ballots should be reviewed.[73] On January 22, 2009, Franken's attorneys also argued that the case should not go to trial because the U.S. Senate itself, rather than the court system, has the power under the United States Constitution to judge the election of its own members.[80] Franken's motion to dismiss was denied by the panel on January 23.[81]

On January 19, 2009, Coleman attorney Fritz Knaak requested that the court open and review all rejected absentee ballots – totaling roughly 12,000 – because some of them, he contended, were improperly rejected.[82] Coleman's attorneys also proposed a multiple phase trial that would not start until February 2, in which the first phase would focus on rejected absentee ballots.[83] The panel denied these requests on January 23.[81][84]

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On February 13 the court ruled that no evidence had been presented to establish widespread problems with the counting of absentee ballots and that rejected absentee ballots from 12 of 19 disputed categories would not be counted. According to Coleman's attorney, this left approximately 3,500 ballots still open for consideration.

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On March 31, the court issued an order to count at most 400 rejected absentee ballots and denied any other relief.[90][91] On April 7, the court scrutinized these ballots and determined that 351 had been legally cast. Those votes were counted, with 111 going to Coleman, 198 to Franken, and 42 to Other, giving Franken a final margin of 312 votes.[92]

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The court dismissed Coleman's suit "with prejudice" in its final ruling on April 13, finding that his claims had no merit and ordering the Coleman camp to pay the legal costs associated with Coleman's failure to disclose information about Pamela Howell, a precinct election judge and witness in the case,[1] which was later determined to amount to $94,783.[93] In the same ruling, the court also rejected Coleman's claim to exclude 132 missing ballots from the recount total and his request to adjust the results based on Coleman's allegations of double counted ballots.[10][94]

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On April 20, Coleman filed a notice of appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court.[95] Franken's lawyers requested that the court follow an expedited schedule in hearing the case (with oral arguments scheduled mid May) to enable Minnesota to have two seated Senators.[96][97]

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On June 30, 2009, the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously rejected Coleman's challenge and stated that Franken was entitled to be certified as the winner. Coleman announced he would not appeal the result further, and congratulated Franken by phone, telling him that being senator was "the best job he would ever have."[109][110] Governor Pawlenty and Secretary of State Ritchie signed the election certificate on the same evening.[111]

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In July 2010, Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, conducted a study in which they claimed that at least 341 convicted felons in the largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul area voted illegally in the Senate race.[112] Subsequent investigations of Minnesota Majority's claims by election officials found that many of their allegations were incorrect. Some of the cases that were submitted involved mistaking a legal voter for a felon with the same name, others involved felons who had had their voting rights reinstated after serving their sentences, and others were felons who illegally registered to vote, but did not vote in 2008 election.[113][114] Columnist Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune called the idea that illegal voting by felons made a difference in the race "unbelievable" and the Minnesota Majority report "good fodder for a right-wing scare campaign."[115]

In October 2010, the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office concluded an extensive investigation into 110 allegations of fraud, which resulted in six charges being filed — two individuals were charged with the separate felonies of registering to vote while ineligible and voting while ineligible and four others were charged with voting while ineligible.[116]

“Unfortunately, the United States has a long history of voter fraud that has been documented by historians and journalists,” Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in 2008, upholding a strict Indiana voter-ID law designed to combat fraud. Justice Stevens, who personally encountered voter fraud while serving on various reform commissions in his native Chicago, spoke for a six-member majority. In a decision two years earlier clearing the way for an Arizona ID law, the Court had declared in a unanimous opinion that “confidence in the integrity of our electoral processes is essential to the functioning of our participatory democracy. Voter fraud drives honest citizens out of the democratic process and breeds distrust of our government. Voters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised.”
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Just this week in Fort Worth, Texas, a Democratic precinct chairwoman was indicted on charges of arranging an illegal vote. Hazel Woodard James has been charged with conspiring with her non-registered son to have him vote in place of his father. The only reason the crime was detected was that the father showed up later in the day to vote at the same precinct. Most fraudsters are smart enough to have their accomplices cast votes in the names of dead people on the voter rolls, who are highly unlikely to appear and complain that someone else voted in their place.
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One of the highlights of the True the Vote conference was a speech by Artur Davis, who was a Democratic congressman from Alabama until last year. Davis has been an up-and-coming black Democratic leader, having been selected to second the nomination of Barack Obama at the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver.

But in 2009 he decided to vote against Obamacare...He told me that the voter suppression he most observed in his 68 percent African-American district was rampant fraud in counties with powerful political machines. To keep themselves in power, these machines would frequently steal the votes of members of minority groups. “I know it exists, I’ve had the chance to steal votes in my favor offered to me, and the people it hurts the most are the poor and those without power,” he said.

Davis made it clear in his speech to True the Vote that much of the opposition to voter-ID and ballot-integrity laws is a sad attempt to inject racism into the discussion and intimidate supporters of anti-fraud laws. “This is not a billy club, this is not a fire hose,” he told his audience while holding up his driver’s license. “Where is this notion that if I have a right [to vote], that I don’t have to be bothered with responsibility?”

Republican Gov. Rick Perry signed the voter ID measure into law last year, but it had yet not gone into effect because the federal Voting Rights Act requires changes in Texas voting laws to be pre-cleared by the U.S. Justice Department. Attorney General Eric Holder denied the pre-clearance of the measure in March, concluding that Texas failed to show the law will not have "the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race." The three-judge panel agreed.

A new Ohio program intended to make voting easier has the potential to keep the presidential election in doubt until late November if the national outcome hinges on the state's 18 electoral votes.

Under Secretary of State Jon Husted's initiative to send absentee ballot applications to nearly 7 million registered voters across Ohio, more than 800,000 people so far have asked for but not yet completed an absentee ballot for the Nov. 6 election.

Anyone who does not return an absentee ballot, deciding instead to vote at the polls, will be required to cast a provisional ballot. That's so officials may verify that they did not vote absentee and also show up at the polls.

By state law, provisional ballots may not be counted until at least Nov. 17. That means that if Ohio's electoral votes would be decisive in the race between President Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the state could keep the nation in suspense for weeks after the election.

This time the USDA delayed its release nine days past the semi-official deadline, far past the election, and until Friday night to report August foodstamp data. One glance at the number reveals why: at 47.1 million, this was not only a new all time record, but the monthly increase of 420,947 from July was the biggest monthly increase in one year. One can see why a reported surge in foodstamps ahead of the elections is something the USDA, and the administration may not have been too keen on disclosing. ZeroHedge