“EXTREME” MAKEOVER
Voter ID Edition
“I always use the word extreme.”
—Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
It was spring 2011, and Republicans and Democrats were already jockeying for position ahead of a bruising budget battle that would eventually culminate in the Kafkaesque “Budget Control Act”—which formed the failed “Supercommittee,” which, in turn, triggered sequestration.1 In advance of a conference call with reporters, Senate Democrats’ messaging quarterback, Charles Schumer of New York, offered his colleagues a refresher on their talking points. When all else fails, he reminded them, just label the opposition as radicals. “I always use the word ‘extreme,’ ” Schumer explained. “That is what the caucus instructed me to use this week.” As it turns out, and unbeknownst to the assembled senators, several reporters were already dialed in for Schumer’s tutorial. They heard everything, and subsequently reported on it. Awk-ward! When the call officially went live, all five Democrats on the line carried out their marching orders with great aplomb. Schumer laid the “extreme” on thick, with Senators Barbara Boxer (DCA), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Tom Carper (D-DE), and Richard Blumenthal2 (D-isgraced) dutifully following suit.
What Republicans were seeking at the time was to take a small bite out of the ever-expanding federal spending pie. In 2011, the U.S. government spent $1.3 trillion more than it took in.3 The “extremists” ultimately secured $21 billion in spending reductions, out of $3.54 trillion in total FY 2012 outlays. That’s a fraction of a drop in the bucket. And thus ends our insipid budget rant.
The larger point is that the word extreme is routinely used as a means to marginalize opposing viewpoints. Much like the cultural flop, pounding the table about “extremism” is also a tactic to work the refs and shape Beltway conventional wisdom, even when—or especially when—the characterization does not actually apply. They keep calling this extreme, lazy journalists with liberal-leaning instincts think to themselves, so there must be something to it. It can be maddeningly effective and can even start to insidiously cloud the judgment of conservatives.
Senator Rand Paul, a Tea Party favorite and presidential hopeful, spoke with the New York Times in May 2014 and expressed his conviction that Republicans need to “lay off” voter ID laws because the issue is “offending people.” Many on the left nodded vigorously, having spent years casting the issue as an extreeeeeeeeme attempt by racist Republicans to “suppress” minority voters. The hyperpolitical Obama Justice Department has filed lawsuits to block such legislative efforts, which Attorney General Eric Holder has likened to a modern-day poll tax. Literally all of that is unsupportable nonsense, yet Paul seemed to be taken in by the Outrage Circus’s kabuki theater.
The Supreme Court rejected the “poll tax” analogy in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, a 2008 decision that upheld Indiana’s strict voter ID law 6–3, with liberal justice John Paul Stevens authoring the decision. “Voter ID laws = voter suppression!” hasn’t panned out either. To wit, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that since Georgia’s ID measure went into effect (despite hysterical protests from opponents and a slew of failed legal challenges), minority turnout markedly increased in successive election cycles—including the 2010 midterm elections: “Turnout among black and Hispanic voters increased from 2006 to 2010, dramatically outpacing population growth for those groups over the same period,” the story explained.
The standard narrative is that voter ID laws are the sole province of Republicans and their shadowy Kochtopus/ALEC/Voldemort overlords. But they’re not. Rhode Island’s heavily Democratic legislature passed a robust voter identification law in 2011; its lead sponsor was Senator Harold Metts, a black Democrat. Another key supporter was Representative Anastasia Williams (also a black Democrat, for the identity politics scorekeepers at home), who testified in hearings that someone had voted under her name in 2006, and that she’d once personally witnessed a man vote twice at her polling place. They had good reason to advocate for the bill. A 2014 Providence Journal investigation found 180,000 potentially problematic voter registrations in the state. Twenty of thirty-nine Rhode Island municipalities boasted more people registered than voting-age people who lived in them, prompting the editorial board to back voter ID laws as “reasonable precautions to make sure that voting is on the level.” Did the Koch brothers get to these African American liberal Democrats in this one-party state, too? My God, they’re everywhere!
Last but not least, voter ID laws are not, in fact, “offending people”—professionally aggrieved interest groups notwithstanding. A 2012 Washington Post poll posed this straightforward question to a representative sample of American adults: “In your view, should voters in the United States be required to show official, government-issued photo identification—such as a driver’s license—when they cast ballots on Election Day, or shouldn’t they have to do this?” Seventy-four percent of respondents said yes, including 67 percent of nonwhites. The results of a 2013 McClatchy/Marist survey were even more lopsided, with 83 percent of respondents supporting voter ID laws. Seventy-two percent of Democrats and 83 percent of nonwhite voters joined the overwhelming national majority in favor of these commonsense laws. That’s a rather unlikely coalition of pro–vote suppression “extremists.” And yet a bright and well-meaning conservative like Rand Paul managed to be browbeaten into a defensive posture on a 75/25 issue. The “extreme” criers are relentless and effective.
Our editor recommended that we end this minichapter here, as venturing further into the weeds on voter integrity policy is slightly beyond the scope of our thesis. We replied to this (accurate and astute) note by paraphrasing Boon from Animal House: Forget it, we’re rolling. Two more points on voter ID laws, then we’re done. We promise.
First, opponents of these measures often warn that certain eligible voters may not be able to procure proper identification and could therefore be disenfranchised. There’s a solution to this objection that doesn’t involve compromising the integrity of the American electoral system: providing IDs to all eligible citizens who want one, at taxpayer expense. This is a proper government function if there ever was one. Ironically, those who are most likely to reject this proposal as infeasible also happen to be the same people who support the full nationalization of our health-care system. In their minds, the government’s sphere of influence is boundless…except when it comes to the rudimentary task of figuring out which of its citizens need IDs to vote. Strange, isn’t it?
Second, we’ve grown accustomed to the tired refrain that voter ID laws are “a solution in search of a problem.” If voter fraud is a figment of the Far Right’s imagination, it would follow that any suggested remedy to a nonexistent problem must be rooted in some dark ulterior motive. We don’t subscribe to the conspiratorial view that voter fraud is a widespread and systemic crisis that regularly infects elections and poisons outcomes. But the facts demonstrate that it isn’t a made-up problem, either. Voter ID laws and robust efforts to clean up and synchronize voter rolls across jurisdictions are both popular and appropriate. Five recent examples help illustrate our point, four of which come from swing states:
Florida: A 2012 investigative report from WBBH-TV in Ft. Myers identified dozens of local residents who were both (a) noncitizens and (b) registered to vote. Correspondent Andy Pierrotti took it upon himself to painstakingly cross-reference a list of people who’d checked a box on a government form declining to serve on a jury because they weren’t citizens with the state’s voter rolls. When he tracked a number of these individuals down, they openly admitted to having voted in recent elections. “I vote every year!” one woman boasted. In his own backyard, using this extremely narrow method, he found 94 illegal voters. That may not seem like a significant number at first blush, but keep in mind that those are only the people he personally located through this very limited procedure. Even so, if you extrapolate Lee County’s dozens of ineligible voters across the state’s 67 counties, the sum comes to nearly 6,300 potential illegal voters.4 In 2000, the presidency of the United States was decided by a margin of 537 Florida votes. How many illegal votes are anti-ID crusaders willing to accept? They should have to answer that question.
North Carolina: WNCN-TV reported in 2014 (emphasis ours):
“State election officials are looking into thousands of cases where registered voters may have voted in two states or after their reported death. A report presented Wednesday by Elections Director Kim Strach to the Joint Legislative Elections Oversight Committee said 81 voters have a voter history later than the date of their death. The audit further identified 13,416 deceased voters on voter rolls in Oct. 2013. The audit showed 155,692 registered North Carolina voters whose first and last names, dates of birth and last four digits of their Social Security number match those of voters registered in other states, but who most recently registered or voted elsewhere. A total of 35,750 voters with matching first and last names and date of birth were registered in North Carolina and another state, and voted in both states in the 2012 general election. Another 765 voters with an exact match of first and last name, date of birth and last four digits of their Social Security number were registered and voted in the 2012 general election in North Carolina and another state…A total of 28 states participated in the crosscheck, leaving data missing from 22 other states.”
Close to 36,000 potential double votes in one state, and that’s without cross-check data from 44 percent of U.S. states. Voter fraud deniers contend that there could be innocent explanations for some of these disparities, such as people with common names who happened to be born on the same day in the same year, as well as clerical errors. Let’s be generous and chalk up half of the apparent double votes to aboveboard mistakes. That leaves 17,875 questionable Tar Heel State ballots cast in the most recent presidential election. Barack Obama carried North Carolina by fewer than 15,000 tallies in 2008. Again we ask, how much voter fraud is “acceptable”?
Virginia: The Washington Post reported in late 2014: “Tens of thousands of voters were registered to cast ballots in both Virginia and Maryland during the 2012 presidential election—and more than 150 appear to have voted twice…Seventeen of those alleged instances were in Fairfax County, where election officials found the evidence so compelling that they have turned the information over to law enforcement.” Democrats dismissed these concerns, denouncing a Republican “witch hunt.” We do not think they know what that term means.
California: Democratic state senator Roderick Wright was convicted of eight felonies in early 2014, including five counts of fraudulent voting for illegally casting ballots in a district where he didn’t reside.5 We now present an excerpt from a Los Angeles Times article: “Asked why he didn’t decide to voluntarily forgo pay during his [post-conviction] leave of absence, Wright said: ‘Why would I do that? If I were a police officer and I shot someone, I wouldn’t be asked to do that. There are no other state employees that would be asked to do that. Why should I be treated differently than someone who works at the highway patrol or the DMV?’ ” Public. Servant. By the way, in September 2014, a Democratic state representative from Connecticut was arrested on nineteen charges of voter fraud, including fabricating evidence.
Ohio: At a Cincinnati rally against voter ID laws in 2014 keynoted by (who else?) Al Sharpton and cosponsored by the Ohio Democratic Party, a very special guest was honored onstage. That guest was Melowese Richardson, a local woman who beamed and waved to the crowd as she was greeted by an ovation and embraced by Sharpton. What had Ms. Richardson, a former Ohio poll worker, done to earn such adulation? She’d gotten herself convicted on four counts of illegal voting in 2012, that’s what. Just before the event, her jail sentence had been reduced to probation, so she was there to bask in the glory of a martyr’s welcome from her fellow fraud enthusiasts. The Cincinnati Enquirer recapitulated some of this charmer’s greatest hits in their story about her controversial appearance at the rally: “Richardson was previously convicted of threatening to kill a witness in a criminal case against her brother; of stealing; of drunken driving; and of beating someone in a bar fight.” And then she became an elections worker. That inspires confidence. State Democrats murmured a few notes of disapproval of this spectacle (translation: not helping, guys), then hastily moved on.
Pro tip: If you’re holding an indignant political rally in opposition to “racist” laws designed to address the “myth” of voter fraud, don’t openly celebrate someone who was, you know, convicted of engaging in the exact sort of criminal activity you’re claiming doesn’t exist.
1 This word soup of dysfunction is best filed under “reasons why normal people hate politics.”
2 Blumenthal, it should be noted whenever possible, spent his entire adult life brazenly lying about having served in Vietnam. He did not. This fact came to light during the 2010 campaign, when Blumenthal was seeking an open Senate seat. The people of Connecticut learned this information, then proceeded to elect him by a double-digit margin. He was assigned to both the Senate Veterans’ Affairs and Armed Services Committees. Really.
3 That annual shortfall receded to “only” half a trillion in 2014 but is projected by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to track upward again, topping $1 trillion by the end of the current budget window, absent reform.
4 Lee County is Florida’s eighth most populous jurisdiction, so our back-of-the-envelope extrapolation may be slightly inflated. After adjusting for that factor, however, the total is still in the thousands.
5 The month after his eight felony convictions, California Democrats heroically blocked a Republican attempt to expel Wright from the Senate.