By Nathan Henderson-James

Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters.

Today the Dallas Morning News editorialized on the recent attempts by the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbot, to find any evidence of widespread voter impersonation fraud or illegal voting by non-citizens. Project Vote reported on his failure to find any evidence of organized or widespread fraud earlier this week.

The purpose of this $1.5 million fishing expedition was to find reasons to back-up an expected renewed effort in the Texas legislature to impost voter ID requirements on eligible voters in the Lone Star State. But, as the editorial notes, the threats of voter impersonation and massive fraud from undocumented immigrants are mostly effervescent.

Were those threats real, Mr. Abbott most certainly would have provided proof, helping Republican state lawmakers make their case for new laws requiring a photo ID at the polls to go along with the traditional Texas voter registration card.

He didn't.

In the absence of that proof, GOP legislators appear indifferent to the fact that thousands of registered Texas voters – 150,000 to 400,000, by one estimate – have no photo ID and would face some level of expense to obtain one. Research shows that these voters tend to be elderly, female and poor. They also tend to be Democrats, leaving Republicans to answer to a charge of partisanship.

The editorial also offers a test for any voter ID law, one that echoes a test Project Vote put forth two years ago.

There is a simple test for any legitimate voter ID law: It should not shift new, undue burdens onto registered Texas voters and obstruct their constitutionally guaranteed access to the ballot box.

Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns

The battle  to protect the voting rights of low income and minority citizens was marked by several victories last week. In addition to the "three key battles" on voting rights outlined by Steven Rosenfeld last Friday - Missouri's controversial voter ID defeat, Arizona's agreement to comply with federal voter registration law, and voter ID crusader, Hans von Spakovsky's withdrawal from his Federal Election Commission nomination– on Monday Kansas governor, Kathleen Sebelius vetoed a voter ID bill citing "I cannot support creating any roadblock to prevent our citizens from adding their voices to the democratic discourse that makes our nation great," she said.

A Close Call for Voting Rights

Two onerous bills requiring both proof of citizenship to register to vote and government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot narrowly missed enactment this past week.

High profile Missouri bill, HJR 48, estimated to disenfranchise up to 240,000 registered voters who would be unable to prove their citizenship, failed to pass the Senate before the state legislature adjourned on Friday. The bill failed "in part because of pressure by the secretary of state and grass-roots groups," reported Saturday’s New York Times.

"You rarely see pressure move this fast or this effectively," said Project Vote deputy director, Michael Slater in the Times, referring to the numerous opinion pieces in papers across the country expressing public outrage against voter ID. Voters and election activists from across the state also voiced their opinions through 4,200 calls to lawmakers, "urging them to not consider this legislation," according to the Missourians for Fair Elections.

"It’s a victory for voters’ rights," Carnahan told the Times after the bill was defeated. "This debate has been about ensuring fair elections, and elections cannot be fair if eligible voters are not allowed to make their voice heard on Election Day."

While much attention was focused on Missouri's HJR 48, a little known bill proposing similar a proof of citizenship and voter ID requirement  made it to the governor's desk in neighboring state, Kansas. On Monday, Gov. Sebelius vetoed the bill, reinforcing a point that advocates have been making for years: "HB 2019 seeks to solve a problem of voter fraud which does not exist in our state due to the tireless efforts of our local election officials," according to the Kansas City Star.

Currently, 10 states have pending voter ID bills and eight are considering proof of citizenship. Some of these bills may be monitored at Project Vote's election bill tracking Web site, www.ElectionLegislation.org (registration required).

Arizona's Compliance with the National Voter Registration Act

Arizona – the only state to require proof of citizenship from voter applicants – has rejected 37,000 new applications since the law was implemented in 2004.  

As Rosenfeld wrote: "This past January, Project Vote and Demos, two voter advocacy groups, sent a letter to Arizona Secretary of State Jan Brewer notifying her that Arizona was not in compliance with the public agency provisions of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). The letter said voter registration at the state's welfare had declined 70 percent over the past 12 years."

Late last week, Arizona and the U.S. Justice Department agreed to comply with federal law by offering voter registration at public assistance agencies.

"This agreement ends the need for litigation and means Arizona will bring voter registration to the state's low-income communities," said Slater in a statement last Friday. "Project Vote applauds the Justice Department and Arizona's Department of Economic Security for working together for the benefit of all Arizonans."

Withdrawal of Controversial FEC Nominee

And in another victory for voting rights, "President Bush's contentious nominee for the Federal Election Commission removed his name from consideration," the Associated Press reported Friday. His withdrawal is expected to end "a lengthy stalemate that had paralyzed the work of the agency."

During his tenure at the Bush Justice Department, von Spakovsky played a leading role in politicizing the DOJ, misdirecting the power of the Civil Rights Division to suppress – not protect -- African American and Latino voters. His time with the Justice Department was marked by controversy, most vehemently over his approval of the Georgia voter ID law, approval of Tom Delay's Texas redistricting plans, and the exodus of career staff. Project Vote helped Congress and the media uncover von Spakovsky's role as the leading architect of voter suppression at DOJ and then worked to keep the Senate unified against his nomination to the FEC. His withdrawal after a year-long standoff represents a major step towards preserving the integrity of the electoral process.

Quick Links:

Restrictive Voter Identification Requirements. Project Vote. December 2006.

NVRA Implementation Project

ElectionLegislation.org

In Other News:

Texas attorney general's two-year effort fails to unravel large-scale voter-fraud schemes - Denton Record Chronicle
AUSTIN - More than two years ago, Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott pledged to root out what he called an epidemic of voter fraud in Texas.

Voting rights elusive for ex-felons: Virginia joins Kentucky with harsh reinstatement laws - C-Ville
In the coming summer months, when Virginia Organizing Project (VOP) organizer Harold Folley knocks on doors and talks to folks about the 2008 elections, inevitably some will tell him that they aren't able to vote. And just maybe, Folley will lean in and pry a bit, stick his nose in their business, and discover that a felony conviction, even decades old, has taken away someone's civil rights.

OPINION: Same-day democracy - Adrian Walker; Boston Globe
Diane Jeffery is president of the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, but she remembers perfectly well the day she was not allowed to vote.

Erin Ferns is a Research and Policy Analyst with Project Vote’s Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD).

By Nathan Henderson-James

Reports out of Texas over the past month show a pattern familiar to voting rights groups: top law enforcement officials engaged in deeply politicized efforts to push prosecutions and policies that disenfranchise low-income and minority voters. Steve Rosenfeld, writing in the Texas Observer, lays out the the whole story in detail, but the general gist feels a lot like the politicization scandal the US Department of Justice brought to light over the course of 2007.

Citing "reports from over a hundred years of voter fraud in South Texas" the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbot, set up a special task force in 2006 called the Special Investigations Unit with a $1.5 million grant and used it to search for instances of widespread voter fraud. Ideally such cases would be used to justify the pursuit of voter suppression policies like voter identification. Abbot is on record supporting such a policy, which was defeated in the 2006 Texas legislative session when a sick senator hooked up to an IV made his way onto the Senate floor to sustain the blockage of the bill.

Over the course of Abbot's investigations he has managed to bring a total of 26 cases, as Wayne Slater, writing in the Dallas Morning News reports today. Of those 26, two involved actual voters casting illegal ballots. Six appear to have been voter registration fraud and the remaining 18 were technical violations of mail-in ballot rules, specifically having a 3rd party mail the filled-in ballot without placing the 3rd party's name and address on the return label.

Here's what the AG's office had to say about that,

"These guilty pleas demonstrate precisely why it is so important to uphold the integrity of our election process in the state," Abbott said, speaking of Ray’s and Johnson’s convictions in a press release. "We will visit justice upon any who ignore the fact that we have election laws in Texas and they apply to everyone."

But as is often the case, other people had other views,

Lisa Turner, of the Lone Star Project, said Abbott’s goal was not merely to prosecute little old ladies. Rather, Turner said, it was to send a message to Texas’ minority communities, which lean Democratic, by sowing fear among the elderly about voting by mail. The Lone Star Project is a political action committee that first exposed Abbott’s prosecutions, issued reports on it, and maintains a staff to fight voter suppression in the state.

"It’s the equivalent of when a gang moves into a neighborhood and spray-paints their graffiti or their marker; it’s not to deface one building. It is to send a message," Turner said. "You have agents of the attorney general walking through a neighborhood, walking past three crack houses, to go talk to a voter. Think about that. What does that say their priorities are? It’s about holding on to the levers of power."

All of these cases involve low-income voters and all involve minorities. But none show any kind of widespread problem with voter fraud, the kind that partisans rail to frequently against as a rising threat to the integrity of the American electoral system. Because, frankly, such a threat simply does not exist. As Josh Marshal, writing at Talking Points Memo puts it,

No one denies there are isolated cases of vote fraud. The question is how organized and widespread it is, whether it's affecting the outcomes of any actual elections, and whether (depending on the answers to those questions) whether the extent of the problem justifies measures which also have the effect of making it either more difficult or more perilous for eligible voters to exercise their rights at the ballot box. The fact that these politicized and morally corrupt prosecutors offices can't come up with more than a trivial number of actual cases makes the answer to the question pretty straightforward.

Remember the larger context too. In the case of the US Attorney firings, most of the dismissals targeted prosecutors who refused to use the power of their office to advance the interests of the Republican party by engaging in these kinds of witch hunts.

Not surprisingly, Abbot is also pushing for a new law in Texas to require photo IDs to be allowed to vote -- the latest gambit to try to shave a few percentage points off voter participation among the targeted groups.

The recent fight in Missouri revolved aorund the same issues and Project Vote expect this and other tactics related to the suppression of already-marginalized voting groups to continue to crop up, especially as the national election in November steadily approaches. But, as we've seen from 2007 onwards, partisans seeking to shape the electorate to gain power, rather than by winning the votes of a majority of eligible voters, rarely rest and often engage in long-term efforts to lock out large segments of citizens from the foundational right of American democracy.

Project Vote tracks legal efforts to disenfranchise voters through its ElectionLegislation.orgwebsite and has provides technical assistance to state-based advocates working to defend voting rights. For more information you can visit our website and sign-up for our monthly newsletter, Democracy Matters.

Nathan Henderson-James is the director of Project Vote's Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD).