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Changes To North Carolina Voting Laws Could Put Thousands Of 2016 Ballots At Risk

Changes To North Carolina Voting Laws Could Put Thousands Of 2016 Ballots At Risk

By Julia Harte

RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters) – On Election Day in 2014, Joetta Teal went to work at a polling station in Lumberton, North Carolina. Like all poll workers, she was required to stay untilvoting booths closed, so she decided to cast her own vote there.

That was a mistake, she later discovered. What she didn’t know was that under a 2013 state law she had to vote in the precinct where she lived. The polling station where she voted was not in her precinct, so her vote was not counted.

A Reuters review of Republican-backed changes to North Carolina’s voting rules indicates as many as 29,000 votes might not be counted in this year’s Nov. 8 presidential election if a federal appeals court upholds the 2013 law. Besides banning voters from voting outside their assigned precinct on Election Day, the law also prevents them from registering the same day they vote during the early voting period.

The U.S. Justice Department says the law was designed to disproportionately affect minority groups, who are more likely to vote out of precinct and use same-day registration. Backers of the law deny this and say it will prevent voter fraud.

The battleground state has a recent history of close races that have hinged on just a few thousand votes. Barack Obama, a Democrat, won North Carolina by just 14,177 votes in 2008. In 2012, Mitt Romney, a Republican, narrowly carried the state by a margin of just 2.04 percent.

Reuters reviewed state election board data showing the number of North Carolinians who made use of out-of-precinct voting and same-day registration in previous elections, including March’s state nominating contest, or primary, when voters nominated their preferred presidential candidate.

The Reuters analysis includes some assumptions. For 29,000 votes to go uncounted on Nov. 8, North Carolinians would need to vote in the same numbers and in the same ways they have in previous elections, including the March primary.

In that primary, after a court temporarily ordered a stay on the bans, 6,387 North Carolinians voted out of their assigned precinct and 22,501 registered the same day they voted.

The North Carolina Board of Elections did not respond to requests for comment on Reuters’ findings.

North Carolina Senator Bob Rucho, a Republican who backed the law, declined to comment specifically on the findings but disputed the notion that the law suppressed votes, saying the increased turnout between the 2010 and 2014 elections shows it has not had a disparate impact on minority voters.

“How can it show voter suppression when more black voters voted and more white voters voted, and there was more opportunity, and there are more black voters registered than there were before?”

Turnout between those elections did rise by 1.8 percentage points for black voters and by 1.1 percentage points for white voters, according to data the state election board entered as evidence in court.

Advocacy group Democracy North Carolina, however, said their poll monitors saw many people attempting to vote out of precinct in 2014 who were told by officials their ballots would not count, and as a result cast no vote. And it says 23,500 voters would have used same-day registration to vote in 2014 if it had not been banned, basing its findings on a review of election board data, hundreds of hotline calls, and the observations of more than 300 poll monitors.

North Carolina Board of Elections executive director Kim Strach said her office looked into claims of voters being turned away “but generally did not find statewide evidence of it.”

LEGAL CHALLENGES

The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is considering legal challenges to the law from the Justice Department and civil rights groups and citizens, is expected to issue a ruling in the next few weeks.

North Carolina’s Senate passed its new voting laws weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 in June 2013 to eliminate a requirement that nine states mostly in the South with a history of discrimination, including North Carolina, receive federal approval before changing election laws.

The Justice Department alleged a “race-based purpose” to the new law in a legal brief. Studies the department cited show that minority and low-income voters are more likely to use same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting because they are less likely to own a car or have flexible working hours. These voters are also more likely to vote for Democratic candidates.

“If you pick out precisely the way minority voters are engaging with the process, that’s intentionally treating minority voters differently,” Justin Levitt, the head of the Justice Department’svoting unit, said in an interview.

North Carolina state officials say the changes cut fraud by making it harder for people to cast multiple ballots or impersonate other voters.  The Justice Department said in court documents that voter fraud was “virtually non-existent” in the state.

Rucho, the state senator, said while the law banned some voting methods and cut the early votingperiod from 17 to 10 days, it extended the hours during which voters could vote.

“We opened up more locations for them to vote, more times to vote, more flexible times,” said Rucho.

FOUR-PERSON TEAM

Teal, who is African American, was one of 14 North Carolina voters Reuters contacted whose votes were invalid in 2014 because of the law.

Ten of them, including Teal, did not realize their votes were not counted until informed by Reuters. One was told his vote would not count by a voter advocacy group, and the other three were told by poll workers that their ballots likely would not count.

In all, 1,390 ballots were rejected in the 2014 election because they were cast out of the voter’s assigned precinct — up from 49 rejected for the same reason in 2010, according to the Reuters review of provisional ballots.

“If they could have just sent people letters and told them exactly where to go, that would have been helpful,” Teal said. The North Carolina Board of Elections website has a tool for residents to look up their assigned precincts, but Teal did not know about it.

This year she plans to vote early.

In other developed democracies, “the government takes a greater responsibility for ensuring that voter registration lists are kept up to date and accurate,” said Tova Wang, senior fellow at the policy research group Demos.

The election board has been trying to educate North Carolinians about the ban on out-of-precinctvoting through ads and a four-person voter outreach team that travels around the state to raise awareness about the changes, said Strach, the board’s director.

“We’re telling people, go find out where you are, make sure you’re showing up at the right precinct,” Strach said.

(Editing by Jason Szep and Ross Colvin)

Photo: An election worker checks a voter’s drivers license as North Carolina’s controversial “Voter ID” law goes into effect for the state’s presidential primary election at a polling place in Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S. on March 15, 2016. REUTERS/Chris Keane/File Photo

The Politics Of You

The Politics Of You

WASHINGTON — Whenever some new allegation threatened Bill Clinton’s presidential candidacy in 1992, he had a go-to response throughout the campaign.

“This election isn’t about me,” he’d tell voters. “It’s about you.” He said “you” with such force that it would come out as a two- or three-syllable word.

Hillary Clinton, who has picked up her husband’s locution on occasion, is going to have to run a “you” campaign, too. And last week, she insisted that the ranks of the “you”s out there should include as much of the potential electorate as possible.

From the beginning of 2015, Republicans have enjoyed enormous success in making her campaign all about her — focusing on any aspect of her life (or her husband’s) that might turn off voters otherwise open to her policies. It’s no surprise that her personal ratings have fallen.

Her champions have complained that we know far more about her speech fees and email habits than what she would do in office. Blaming the media is by no means a useless campaign tactic. Republicans do it all the time, claiming that the media are “liberal.” It’s a fatuous charge given how thoroughly reporters have covered every question raised about Clinton. But trashing reporters won’t solve Clinton’s political problems, and might even make some of them worse.

There is only one tried-and-true way for a candidate to displace a story line she doesn’t like, and that is to come up with a new story line of her own. If Clinton wants the campaign to be about how she’d govern, she will have to inundate the media with substance.

She made a good start last week by speaking forcefully about voting rights and reminding the country of how far right the Republican Party has moved over 50 years. Republicans were once at the forefront in tearing down barriers to voting. It fell to segregationist Democrats in the South to defend discriminatory voting laws. Now, it’s Republicans who are trying to shrink the electorate.

On their face, Clinton’s proposals ought to win wide assent. She endorsed “universal, automatic voter registration” under which “every young man or young woman … should be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18 — unless they actively choose to opt out.” In an era when we have made it so convenient for people to buy and sell things and stay in touch with each other, why do we maintain cumbersome bureaucratic obstacles to exercising a basic democratic right?

Drawing on last year’s bipartisan report from the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, she called for establishing the principle that no one should have to wait more than 30 minutes to vote. She also proposed a national standard of “at least 20 days of early in-person voting everywhere — including opportunities for weekend and evening voting.”

Clinton denounced the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision “eviscerating” the Voting Rights Act, and called out some of her Republican rivals (Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, and Jeb Bush) for supporting new barriers to voting. Republicans, she said, should stop “fear-mongering about a phantom epidemic of election fraud and start explaining why they’re so scared of letting citizens have their say.”

There’s a bad habit in reporting on voting rights these days. Because those kept from voting by the various new restrictions tend to lean Democratic (especially African-Americans, Latinos, and young people), the issue is typically discussed in partisan terms. And, in fact, as Clinton pointed out, some of the new laws are laughably partisan. Texas, for example, allows a concealed-weapon permit to be used as identification at the polls but not a student ID.

But the core issue here is much larger than current party alignments. It involves the same principle that motivated the sponsors of the Voting Rights Act in 1965: Are we a genuinely democratic republic in which the federal government guarantees broad participation, or will state politicians be allowed to shape the electorate to keep a particular class — i.e., themselves — in power?

The question for the future of American politics is whether Republicans will be forced to moderate and modify their current tilt to the right in response to demographic changes in the electorate, or will they manage to keep enough of the new America away from the polls that they don’t have to listen to it at all?

Clinton can win an election about big questions. She will spend the summer talking about them. And in the process, she, too, will preach the virtues of the elongated “you.”

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne. (c) 2015, Washington Post Writers Group

Photo: Penn State via Flickr

Winning Against The Oligarchs

Winning Against The Oligarchs

Last week our Supreme Court let stand Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s voter suppression law, one of a host of such laws enacted in the North from Idaho to Michigan to New Hampshire, and everywhere below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Do not be lulled into inaction by that decision. Do not accept that a rich minority will rule America and remake it to their liking. Even with faithful allies on the Supreme Court, the oligarchs win only if you let them.

The factual basis for this and other decisions upholding voter suppression laws is specious, especially for the kind of photo identification requirements at the polling booth that Walker signed into law. Rigorous research into voter impersonation, the only illegal voting technique which photo identification can stop, found just 10 cases in America from 2000 to summer 2012.

Walker is, of course, a loyal vassal of the Koch brothers and their confreres, who works diligently to impose their minority views through laws under which all of us must live.

Those rules include low taxes for oligarchs and enabling dynastic wealth; diminishing worker rights, job safety laws and reliable pensions; repealing environmental protections while tightly restricting your right to challenge polluters in court; and gutting public education at every level while converting universities from centers of inquiry into job-training programs.

All of this can be stopped. All that is required is getting just a fraction of the 94 million adults who did not vote in 2012 to start casting ballots.

Poll after survey after focus group shows little public support for Kochian ideas, especially when they are described in neutral and accurate language.

A plethora of polls shows broad support for progressive policies including higher tax rates on million-dollar-plus incomes and stopping corporate welfare. Three of four Republicans favor increasing Social Security benefits, yet congressional Republicans — and scared Democrats — are moving to cut them at the behest of the ultra-wealthy and their minions.

Making majority wishes into law will be more difficult in the near term thanks to a series of Supreme Court and lower court rulings since 2008. The courts have shown expansive tolerance for a wide variety of voter suppression laws. And the judiciary has done nothing to stop voter-roll purging so ham-handed that former congressman Lincoln Davis was among 70,000 Tennesseans barred from voting in 2012.

Two years ago, on a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court nullified a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice John Glover Roberts Jr. declared, “Our country has changed.”  We saw change immediately. Southern state legislatures changed their laws to make sure fewer black Americans voted or did so in heavily black jurisdictions.

The important lesson here is that just sitting back and accepting these rulings, behaving as if you are powerless, would be a disaster for five and possibly all six noble purposes of our nation.

Yes, the voting standards the court majority has set, often by a one-vote margin, make it easier for a shrinking minority to impose its will. But it does not mean that minority will impose its will.

The unlimited money that the Supreme Court ruled can legally be poured into election campaigns under Citizens United is a threat to democracy.

That 2010 decision expanded campaign finance loopholes so much that the ban on government contractors donating to politicians has evaporated. Oil giant Chevron was among those contractors making huge contributions to politicians loyal to them by funneling the money through affiliates called LLCs, limited liability corporations.

Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey said last October that if Republicans won 2014 gubernatorial elections, they could control “voting mechanisms.”

“Would you rather have Rick Scott in Florida overseeing the voting mechanism, or Charlie Crist? Would you rather have Scott Walker in Wisconsin overseeing the voting mechanism, or would you rather have Mary Burke? Who would you rather have in Ohio, John Kasich or Ed FitzGerald?” Christie, the president of the Republican Governors Association, told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last October.

About the only thing the courts will not abide is honesty by those who sponsor laws to rig elections by suppressing voters.

Anyone who doubts that should click on this brief 2012 video of Mike Turzai, the Pennsylvania House Republican leader. Turzai told the party faithful that his state’s voter ID law “is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”

A state judge struck down that law and savvy GOP politicians decided not to appeal. Romney then lost Pennsylvania by more than 5 percentage points, evidently because the majority was not suppressed.

The awful truth is this: So long as politicians don’t boast about their real intentions, they can enact voting laws that rig elections in favor of an influence-buying minority that cannot win any other way.

So that’s the lesson.  What are you going to do about it? Yes, you. Not somebody else. You.

You have more than enough power to make sure that we do not head back toward the rules of the late 19th century, when hunger and disease ravaged the poor, as Jacob Riis documented in How the Other Half Lives.  We need not indulge the vanity and greed of men like Henry Clay Frick, which grew so unrestrained that on a single day his pleasures cost more than 2,200 lives.

People just like you got women the right to vote, child labor laws, collective bargaining laws, and environmental laws. It took time. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton devoted their whole lives to suffrage. But in the end they and others persuaded male office holders to extend voting rights to women.

Will you do what is required to reverse our slide into the awful grip of a 21st-century oligarchy?

It’s not that hard. Really. And it does not require much money, either.

What it does require is these virtues — focus, diligence, and persistence.

There is one more crucial element: persuasion. That means winning people over by showing them a better alternative than the slickly marketed Kochian vision that sounds appealing unless you understand that it means a future in which a few gain at the expense of the many.

Making fun of the often laughable and crazy statements of Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Michele Bachmann, Mike Huckabee, and their like is counterproductive. It makes people think they are being looked down upon, including many people who do not share those laughable and crazy ideas, but are put off by the way progressives talk.

A better vision is a society where we all gain if we work, save, and act prudently, and where we all share the burden of caring for those who cannot care for themselves.

A better vision is one in which the bottom 120 million Americans own more than a third of one percentage point of all assets. A better vision is one where corporations are vehicles to encourage risk taking and wealth creation, not tools to mine the public treasury, pick consumer pockets, and stealthily prosper on the dole.

What is required to achieve a vibrant, free and broadly prosperous America is this:

  • Register millions of people to vote, paying scrupulous attention to both the registration rules and following up to make sure the names actually show up on the voting rolls.
  • Maintain contact with these new voters, which can be done at low cost with emails, neighborhood meetings and knocking on doors.
  • Get people to the polls on Election Day and, where it is still allowed, help them vote in advance.
  • Tell politicians you support to stop wasting money on television and radio ads, which are sold at the highest rates, and to invest most of their campaign dollars into getting out the vote.

Going along with the television and radio ad game is playing by the Koch brothers’ rules. That is a contest they will win because they have the money. Instead, do what the Kochs and other smart businesspeople do: Change the game. Play your own game. And don’t worry about right-wing voter registration drives, because numerous polls show that among those not voting, their appeal is narrow, while yours is broad.

It would also help to organize supporters to follow watchdog news outlets, an issue for a future column.

As a guest on call-in radio and answering audience questions after my many lectures across the country, I hear a constant refrain that nothing can be done, that the anti-democratic interests are so rich and powerful that they must win.

Wrong. That’s utter nonsense. Don’t think like a victim. Take charge.

America is still the democratic republic where the majority of people who cast ballots choose our elected leaders. Get more people to the polls on the only day that counts – Election Day – and we can change everything for the better.

All that is necessary is for you to do the work.

Photo: apalapala via Flickr

To Defeat GOP’s Restrictive Voting Laws, Debunk ‘Voter Fraud’

To Defeat GOP’s Restrictive Voting Laws, Debunk ‘Voter Fraud’

Growing up in Jim Crow Arkansas, Bill Clinton saw how the state’s dominant political and racial elite maintained power by suppressing the rights of minority voters who threatened their authority – and as a young activist worked to bring down that illegitimate power structure. So when Clinton says “There is no greater assault on our core values than the rampant efforts to restrict the right to vote” – as he does in a new video released by the Democratic National Committee – the former president knows of what he speaks.

In the segregationist South of Clinton’s youth, the enemies of the universal franchise were Democrats, but times have changed. Not just below the Mason-Dixon line but across the country, it is Republicans who have sought to limit ballot access and discourage participation by minorities, the poor, the young, and anyone else who might vote for a Democratic candidate.

No doubt that is why, at long last, the Democratic Party has launched a national organizing project, spearheaded by Clinton, to educate voters, demand reforms, and push back against restrictive laws. Returning to his role as the nation’s “explainer-in-chief,” Clinton may be able to draw public attention to the travesty of voter ID requirements and all the other tactics of suppression used by Republicans to shrink the electorate.

His first task is to debunk the claims of  “voter fraud” fabricated by Republican legislators and right-wing media outlets as the rationale for restrictive laws. Lent a spurious credibility by the legendary abuses of old-time political machines, those claims make voter suppression seem respectable and even virtuous.

Some years ago the Brennan Center for Justice, based at New York University and led by former Clinton speechwriter Michael Waldman, issued a 45-page report on voter fraud that remains definitive. “There have been a handful of substantiated cases of individual ineligible voters attempting to defraud the election system,” the report noted. “But by any measure, voter fraud is extraordinarily rare.” And because fraud is so unusual, GOP counter-measures such as voter ID do much more harm than good.

As the Brennan Center study noted, even some Republicans know that their leaders have exaggerated stories of fraud for partisan advantage. In 2007, the Houston Chronicle quoted Royal Masset, the former political director of the Texas Republican Party, who observed that among Republicans it is “an article of religious faith that voter fraud is causing us to lose elections.” Masset admitted that suspicion is false, but said he believed that requiring voters to provide photo ID could sufficiently reduce participation by legitimate Democratic voters to add three percent to Republican tallies.

More recently  one of the dimmer lights in the Pennsylvania Republican Party – the majority leader of the state House of Representatives, in fact – boasted that the voter ID statute he had rammed through the legislature would  “allow Governor Romney to win the election” in November 2012. Although Mike Turzai later insisted that “there has been a history of voter fraud in Pennsylvania,” the state government conceded in court that it could cite no evidence showing that “in-person voter fraud has in fact occurred in Pennsylvania or elsewhere.”

Clinton can also consult the President’s Commission on Election Administration, a bipartisan panel appointed by President Obama to improve the country’s voting systems. In its final report issued last January, the commission forthrightly acknowledged that true voter fraud is “rare.” It was a singular admission by a group whose co-chairs included Benjamin Ginsberg, an aggressive Republican election attorney who bears the burden of responsibility for the outcome of Bush-Gore 2000.

If he is in a bipartisan mood, as he often is, Clinton would surely find the commission’s report uplifting – especially its recommendations to make voting more modern, more efficient, and above all more accessible. For both parties to improve and expand the democratic rights of citizens would be uplifting indeed.

But Clinton is more likely to find himself feeling less kindly toward the Republicans, as they continue to promote outrageous suppression while feigning outrage over “fraud.” The Democrats may be equally motivated by partisan self-interest – but so long as they defend the rights of the intimidated and the disenfranchised, their moral force will be undiminished.