Andersen, Cloos and O'Donnell report: "Photo ID laws and other new voting restrictions in a number of Southern states raise questions about impact on minorities."
Danita Agee, 53, secures a banner at a voter registration drive she helped organize in Pratt City, Alabama. (photo: Khara Persad/News21)
Voting Rights Battles Re-Emerge in the South
18 August 12
aymond Rutherford has voted for decades. But this year, he doesn't know if he'll be able to cast a ballot.
The Sumter, S.C., resident, 59, has never had a government-issued photo ID because a midwife's error listed him as Ramon Croskey on his birth certificate. It's wrong on his Social Security card, too.
Rutherford has tried to find the time and money to correct his birth certificate as he waits to see if the photo voter ID law is upheld by a three-judge U.S. District Court panel, scheduled to convene in Washington, D.C., in late September.
In June, South Carolina officials indicated in federal court filings that they will quickly implement the law before the November election if it is upheld. Voters without photo ID by November would be able to sign an affidavit explaining why they could not get an ID in time.
South Carolina's photo voter ID law is similar to a series of restrictive election measures passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures in states of the former Confederacy, including Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Tennessee and Virginia. North Carolina's General Assembly failed to override Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue's veto of a photo voter ID bill.
Thirty-seven states have considered photo voter ID laws since 2010. In November, five states - Georgia, Indiana, Tennessee, Kansas and Pennsylvania - will vote under new strict photo voter ID laws. A judge soon could decide whether the Pennsylvania law violates the state constitution, as voting rights advocates claim.
Supporters argue the laws are important protections against in-person voter impersonation fraud, but civil rights organizations and election historians see evidence of a more sinister legacy. Obtaining certificates of birth, marriage and divorce needed to get a proper photo ID can be an obstacle for otherwise eligible and longtime voters like Rutherford.
"Today, there are more laws restricting access to polls since those that were against the initial passage of the Voting Rights Act," said J. Morgan Kousser, professor of history and social science at the California Institute of Technology and author of two books on race and voting rights in the South.
The Voting Rights Act requires local governments with a history of voting rights discrimination to get U.S. Department of Justice approval for changes to their election laws. The federal law faces a sustained legal challenge. Voting-rights supporters call those challenges an uncomfortable reminder of the poll taxes and literacy tests that prompted the law in the days of Jim Crow.
States such as Georgia and Indiana point to increased turnouts across all demographic categories in the 2008 election compared to elections immediately before the states passed photo voter ID laws.
Kousser said such comparisons are moot because of the unprecedented enthusiasm that Barack Obama generated among young and minority voters. A July 2012 National Urban League study showed that black voters tipped the election for Obama in North Carolina, Indiana, Virginia and Florida.
"People died for the right to vote - friends of mine, colleagues of mine," Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., said in a May 9 House floor speech on an amendment to cut federal spending for Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The amendment was withdrawn.
Lewis was a pivotal figure in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. He was beaten severely on March 7, 1965, called Bloody Sunday for the attack by Alabama state troopers on about 600 voting rights marchers after they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on the way to Montgomery. The attack on the nonviolent protesters was so brutal that historians credit the day with swaying votes in favor of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The fight today is in federal court. The state of Texas and the Department of Justice clashed over that state's photo voter ID in U.S. District Court and it could go to the Supreme Court. In another case, an Alabama county attorney said he would take his legal challenge of the Voting Rights Act to the highest court possible.
A July report from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, a public policy group that opposed many of the voting rule changes nationally, estimated that more than 10 million eligible voters nationwide live more than 10 miles from a state center that issues IDs.
Seven of the 10 states with photo voter ID are among the lowest-ranked states for public transportation funding. ID centers in many Southern states have limited or reduced hours in rural counties with high concentrations of minority residents.
"I reckon it's like back during the days when they were slaves and couldn't do nothing unless their masters signed for it," Rutherford said. "They didn't have proof what their name was, they took whatever name their masters gave them. It seems to me they're trying to send us years back where they can control who we vote for."
The tide of Southern election changes began in Georgia in 2005. Former state Rep. Sue Burmeister, a Republican, introduced a photo voter ID bill that quickly became the target of Democratic attacks and lawsuits.
"It was never my intent to try to make it harder for people to vote," Burmeister said in an interview. She had heard stories of fraud in the state from members of both political parties, she said.
"I just grew up believing that it was very important that all people voted," she said. "Yet, I didn't want people voting two or three times to take away the votes."
Gov. Sonny Perdue signed the bill into law in January 2006. Georgia, which falls under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, adopted changes to the law intended to avoid getting blocked by the Justice Department. Free voter identification cards and an expansive voter education program were among the changes Georgia lawmakers used to win the approval called preclearance. The state increased election education funds from $50,000 to $500,000 in 2008, when the law first took effect, according to the secretary of state's budget.
The Georgia law was cleared by President George W. Bush's Justice Department.
South Carolina's 2011 photo voter ID law became the first election law to be blocked in nearly 20 years. The Texas law also was blocked by President Barack Obama's Justice Department. Hans von Spakovsky, the former Bush Justice Department lawyer who approved Georgia's law, has become a leading advocate for photo voter ID laws.
"These are laws to protect voters," said Matt Carrothers, media relations director for the Georgia secretary of state. And voters largely agree. A March 2012 Elon University poll of 534 people showed that nearly 75 percent of North Carolina residents supported the state's photo voter ID bill.
North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Pat McCrory has campaigned on photo voter ID. He pledged to enact the failed legislation as a part of his administration.
"The polling is so strong on that issue that it's easy to build some support when you note that in a long list of issues," said John Dinan, a political scientist at Wake Forest University. "If you're in support of voting rights and upset that your party has blocked it, you might look at McCrory."
Sid Bedingfield, a journalism professor at the University of South Carolina, said the South's changing demographics tell a different story.
"There is certainly something to be gained from those in power now, especially in states with Republican legislatures, in trying to limit turnout from certain demographic groups," Bedingfield said.
Most of the states in the South have been sure Republican bets in presidential races since President Richard Nixon's ‘Southern Strategy' in the 1972 election. State and local races have been more mixed. The 2010 election placed North Carolina and Alabama legislatures under Republican control for the first time since Reconstruction. Political party caucus shifts moved Louisiana's House of Representatives to Republican control.
Bedingfield said photo voter ID laws are an attempt to solidify that power shift for years to come in view of an increase in black and Hispanic voters who traditionally vote for the Democratic Party.
"In the long-term, it's a dead-end strategy that will only cement Democratic Party support among these new groups and create a winning coalition," Bedingfield said.
Republicans are painting themselves as anti-minority through photo ID laws and demands for citizenship proof to vote, Bedingfield said. That will push even more minorities into the Democratic Party.
Minority voters in the South face additional hurdles this election year.
An extensive purge of suspected ineligible voters that disproportionately targeted minorities in Florida was halted by the Justice Department in June, and a nonpartisan investigator will be appointed to determine why thousands of voters were removed from voting rolls in Tennessee earlier this year.
Florida cut its early voting hours almost in half to save money, state officials said. The state also eliminated early voting on the Sunday before Election Day in November, what had become known as "Souls to the Polls" for the large number of black voters who went straight from church services to vote.
In North Carolina, the Republican-controlled General Assembly used the 2010 congressional and state legislative redistricting process to create controversial minority-majority districts that concentrate black voting power in a reduced number of legislative seats.
"They stacked and packed and bleached black voters out of districts for strictly partisan reasons," said the Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Courts have intervened 24 times in the last 30 years to alter North Carolina redistricting plans, and new lines this year divided hundreds of voting precincts into different districts. This means that neighbors voting in the same precinct may have different people running on their ballots for state and federal races. In some precincts, there were 30 or more different ballots offered during the May 8 primary.
"One precinct in Wake County has more than 17 different kinds of ballots," said Carol Hazard, a precinct judge in Orange County, N.C., which includes Chapel Hill.
Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp and his office have worked to show opponents that targeted demographic suppression is more talk than reality. According to state records, the 2008 election saw Hispanic turnout increase by 140 percent and black voter turnout up 42 percent over 2004.
"These claims that our law is ‘akin to Jim Crow,' that there is not voter fraud - these are disgustingly racist claims," said Carrothers, Kemp's spokesman.
Kemp has promoted the bill to other Southern states. Carrothers is in regular contact with the secretary of state's office in Tennessee, he said, where a similar photo voter ID law took effect in January.
Tennessee, which is not subject to Section 5 preclearance, has followed a different path to photo voter ID.
Tennessee state Rep. JoAnne Favors already has heard from several voters who don't have photo ID. The two-term Chattanooga Democrat, who is black, strongly opposed the bill, which could prevent residents - including Favors' elderly mother - from voting because they lack a birth certificate or government-issued photo ID.
"Most of the people who began to call me when the law was first enacted were elderly white women," Favors said. "I think that might cause concern for some of the people who did support that bill. They might not realize what they've done."
A report from the Durham, N.C.-based Institute for Southern Studies - a nonprofit research group for activists, scholars and policy makers - estimates that more than 380,000 Tennessee residents lack the photo ID required in the law. Many of them are elderly voters who have opted for an older, separate state law allowing residents older than 60 to get driver's licenses without photos.
Legislators passed that law out of concern for "frail" elderly voters unable to easily renew their driver's licenses. But the photo voter ID law, which permitted "no questions asked" absentee ballots for voters aged 65 and older, left Tennessee voters between 60 and 65 disadvantaged. The "no question" absentee age was lowered to 60 after the state's March 6 presidential primary.
"What I'm really concerned about are those folks that don't ask or don't call and you don't know where they are," said Madeleine C. Taylor, executive director of the NAACP in Memphis. "They just say, ‘Well, hey, I'm not going to all the trouble. I'm not going to vote.'"
Unless Favors and other Democratic activists in Tennessee can prove that voters are facing insurmountable difficulties at the ballot box in November, the state's law will go unchallenged. This frustrates lawyers such as George Barrett of Nashville. He has worked with the American Civil Liberties Union on civil rights cases. Identifying plaintiffs has been nearly impossible, he said.
"It's more difficult if you're not under the Voting Rights Act," Barrett said. "You've almost got a prima facie case if you're under the Voting Rights Act."
Hedy Weinberg, executive director of the Tennessee ACLU, said this difficulty stems from the photo ID law's "chilling effect." Many people shy away from voting or trying to get an ID because they presume they do not have the correct documents.
"Just because we can't present the individual to you, doesn't mean there isn't a pretty serious problem taking place," Weinberg said.
Opponents of photo ID warn of potentially hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised voters. Supporters allege there's a great potential for voter impersonation.
Both Carrothers and Kemp in Georgia said that they were surprised to see so few free photo voter ID card applications - 26,506 as of February.
"When the bill passed, opponents said there were hundreds of thousands of citizens who would be unable to vote," Carrothers said. "Opponents of photo ID keep changing the way they oppose the law, and now they know they can't oppose the law in Georgia by claiming ‘disenfranchisement.'"
Those legal and public challenges to voter ID laws might be less frequent very soon if lawsuits against the Voting Rights Act in Alabama and Texas go to the Supreme Court.
Frank Ellis Jr., attorney for Shelby County, outside of Birmingham, Ala., has said that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is outdated and unconstitutional. Although local demographics in many of the municipalities named in the Voting Rights Act have changed in the nearly 50 years since the law passed, few adjustments have been made to Section 5 preclearance.
"To require governments to spend tens of millions of dollars - local governments that need that money for other purposes, for education, for police protection, for facilities and infrastructure - it's archaic and out of date," Ellis said.
Brenda Williams, a physician and civil rights activist in Sumter, S.C., has spent thousands of dollars helping more than 100 local voters prepare for the photo ID law.
For the majority of voters who do not have photo ID, applying means they must pay for required personal documents.
Donna Dubose, 63, was delivered at home by a midwife who recorded her name as Baby Girl Kennedy. She attended college for three years, aided by federal grants. Although financial strains prevented her from graduating, Dubose was trained as a nurse's aide and retired about a decade ago.
"My life wasn't a pleasant road," Dubose said. "But in my mind all I wanted to do was take care of people."
With the help of Williams and attorney Murrell Smith, a Republican state representative who voted in favor of photo voter ID, Dubose obtained a corrected birth certificate and a government-issued photo ID.
Williams is now helping Dubose's husband, James, who lost his personal documents when his childhood home burned. James Dubose, a former railroad worker who is illiterate, has voted for the majority of his life and said he has never been asked to show a photo ID at the polls.
"It makes me really frustrated to not be able to vote all of a sudden," James Dubose, 75, said.
Williams has been registering voters with her husband, Joe, for the 30 years she has owned the Excelsior Medical Clinic. Many elderly, rural voters in and around Sumter do not have access to photo ID, Williams said. The majority of these voters were born at a time when hospitals refused black patients and babies were delivered at home, and their births were not recorded accurately.
"I know scores of people who have never had government-issued photo identification," Williams said. "They're not criminals, never broken any laws, never been incarcerated. They don't have photo ID because of rules made years, decades ago."
Williams carries an NAACP membership card issued for $2 to her father, Frederick Chapman, in 1961. A message printed on the back, part of the association's mission, is particularly close to her heart: "To secure a free ballot for every qualified American citizen."
Half a century later, Williams said she is still willing to fight for that right.
"It's so frustrating trying to help poor people, people who are indigent, people who have low self-esteem, people who have a low sense of self-worth," she said. "The majority of our society and nation couldn't care less about poor folk."
Raymond Rutherford, a Sumter, S.C., said he has let checks go uncashed because he didn't have a photo ID. With Williams' help, the Sumter, S.C., Walmart store employee, isn't waiting for courts and legislatures to agree on the legality of photo voter ID.
"As a citizen, I think everyone should vote," Rutherford said. "If you don't get out there and vote, who's going to talk for you? We can't talk for ourselves because nobody is going to listen, so we have to put someone there to help us."
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Comments
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At the beginning of the U.S. only white male landowners were allowed to vote. Perhaps "voter i.d." then was a deed to property. Now, with contemporary voter i.d. laws, one must have their official government issued photo i.d.. For those with a stable socio-economic position in life, no problemo. For those whose life has not been so fortunate and stable, obtaining a government photo i.d. is not so easy. What to do?
Have we come to universal identification codes tattooed at birth?
What price democracy? What price equality?
Something tells me there just might be future requirements to vote, as in owning land, as you mentioned.
The only possible people, not knowing who the president is, would be some poor white voters in some out of the way place, for ALL black people know who the president is.
Which is of course the reason for the photo ID
Still, with SO MANY people being illegally disenfanchised, I am close to despair when I think of how little my single vote may count in this war on voters.
WHERE THE HECK IS HOLDER?!? THESE 'VOTER I.D.' LAWS ARE SO BLATANTLY ILLEGAL THAT IT SHOULD BE SIMPLE TO ACT AGAINST THEM AND GET THEM REPEALED. (And yes, I'm shouting.)
Every one of California's problems are a result of a stupid law passed a few decades ago making it nearly impossible to raise taxes and setting them ridiculously low. California has it's faults, but it also has the largest supply of super intelligent people in the country and is the world's 5th largest economy. So, as you should be able to see, once again, the problems and lack of a solution are the work of conservatives.
Also, CA is now down to about the 8th largest economy not the 5th. That decrease can be attributed to the lib run legislature who wants to tax everything whether it moves or not.
2. How is 9.3% tax rate being misintrepreted and slanted? Same goes for the sales tax?
Are you for people who have been in their homes for over 30 years being forced to sell or lose their house because they can't afford the high property taxes? I thought libs were for the elderly and middle class? Why do you want people to lose their homes because of high property taxes? Please answer so that I can be enlightened.
3. I guess you don't know (what a surprise to me) that the democrats have controlled the state legislature since 1970 except for 1995 and 1996. Reagan was not governor then and neither was Arnold. So I guess you are kind of clueless regarding you posts.
Aug. 2010-National Poll by Pew Research-18% say Obama is a Muslim.
Aug, 2010-46% of GOP think Obama is a Muslim.
April 2011-27% of Tea Party think Obama is a "Practicing Muslim.
April 2011-NYTimes/CB S Poll-45% of Republican adults believe Obama was not born in America.
May 2011-Poll says that 16% of all voters and 30% of Republicans believe Obama not born in USA.
1999-Gallup Poll found that 6% of Americans surveyed doubted that man landed on the moon.
My point being that posting 'facts' doesn't prove anything, unless you want to prove that a good percentage of the 'voting' public are stupid and delusional. How would you answer these Polls?
Numbers lie all the time. Bush II said that the 'average' American would get $1728.00 with his tax cut. Are you average? Did you get $1728.00? The 'average' of $2.00 & $10,000.00 is $5,001.00. Even with his MBA from Harvard, Bush is not smart enough to come up with that canard. Cheney told him what to say.
The same games are played with taxes. Is the 'average' a result of a combination of Federal, State, Local, Property, Sales, Excise and Inheritance? You can get any # you want if you play the right numbers; it's called creative accounting.
The banks claim a loss is not a loss because it was at first a loan from a third party swap arrangement when the moon was full!
I was not playing with numbers I was posting facts. There is no "average" CA tax rate that I posted. The "top" rate is 9.3% which IS one of the highest in the nation. I jumped into this tread because bingers made a statement that is false and I corrected him/her.
Where in my posts did I use "average"? I also countered gentry cooper on his 3 attempted counters to my comments. His comments were blantantly wrong.
Now to you. What do the polls you posted have to do with this thread? Nothing. Now I do agree that we can "play" with numbers by using stats like you did. BTW, I did notice that in the polls you listed ALL of them so a minority opinion, so what are you trying to prove? I also don't need polls to know that a good percentage of voters are stupid. Look at all the people who voted for Obama and anyone who thinks that Biden is prepared to take over as president if necessary. Of course, you can counter with those who voted for Bush. So what, many (most?) voters are ignorant of facts. I think that people should have to pass a basic test to be able to vote but that would never fly. tough quesitons like name the president, name for first 10 amendments, name the supreme law, name the 3 branchs of govt, name your 2 senators etc. Nothing too hard just basic.
Just curious, instead of the average you used what is the median tax cut in your example?
Finally, we were talking about income taxes.
Right on. Schwarzenegger was so indignant that gov Grey raised the vehicle license fee a few dollars. He insisted that he would stop that.
The FOOL DID and the result was that we ended up with a 4 BILLION $ shortfall that got worse every year. Then he raided the funds for education, and promised to return the money the following year. He DIDN'T. He also made the mistake to call nurses A SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP
He may be a smart business man,but he was an incompetent, stupid governor.
Now another business man want to be president!! NO Thank You. We can't afford it. Business men think, they can say JUMP and we all say HOW HIGH??
That was what Schwarzenegger thought in California. It sure did not work. The politicians did not kiss his ring, as he expected, because he was THE TERMINATOR.
I feel like shouting too. Holder IS working on it, BUT there are so MANY cases and he has a FEW other things besides the voting scams. I also live in California, and like you I wish I could do more.
And don't forget, that these are "god fearing CHRISTIAN people, who are doing all these disgusting things???
also these hypocrites will send people to other countries to make sure that elections are conducted fairly and honestly???? REALLY??
That SURELY tops it all. THE INCREDIBLE NERVE OF OUR COUNTRY. Who the hell do we think we are??? Democracy is being destroyed HERE. TRAMPLED ON. and we think we can teach democracy to OTHER countries???
Remember, if the Democratic party thought voting could change things Obama would sign an executive order to outlaw it. Will someone please explain to Raymond Rutherford what that means as I doubt he can read either. I am happy to see people like this that are products of inbreeding to be disenfranchised as it gives me hope for the future.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with all the roadblocks put up to make it as hard as possible to get the required documents? A Republican lawyers group did an exhaustive study to find evidence of voter fraud and they found that nearly all of it was a result of things like your voting place being changed and you going to the former one. They found that illegal voting constituted .03 votes per 150,000 votes. And Obama cannot reverse this with an executive order. That does NOT fall under the things he can legally do.
Next, In the 2008 election there were about 130 million votes cast for president. Math time again class: 130,000,000 times .03 equals 3,900,000 illegal votes according to what you posted. So I guess you think the almost 4 MILLION illegal votes is ok?
I won't get into what Obama has done with executive orders that are illegal. that would be another entire post.
Regardless, we do know that there is voter fraud because there was just a conviction in MN.
Just curious, how much voter fraud is OK with you? Please provide a number.
You get an F for math. .03 votes per 150,000 votes does not mean .03 x 150,000. It means that if there are 150,000,000 voters, there will be 30 illegal ones.
How you can say that 4500 per 150k = .03 per 150k is something way beyond me.
.03 per 150k
.03 x 1000 = 30
150k x 1000 = 150 Million
30 per 150 Million.
150,000 times .03 equals 4500. Maybe your calculator shows something different? But assuming you are right then your number of 30 is obviously wrong because we know for a fact that 177 people were just convicted of voter fraud in MN which has less than 150 million people and 177 is about 6 times greater than 30 (do you agree that 30 times 6 equals 180 which is close to 177?)
The numbers given say you'll have 0.03 voter frauds per 150,000 votes. That means you'll have 0.06 fraudulent votes per 300,000 votes, 0.6 fraudulent votes per 3,000,000 votes or 1 fraudulent vote for 5,000,000 votes. If, as you say, 130,000,000 people voted in the last election, then 130,000,000 divided by 5,000,000 equals 26 fraudulent votes during that election.
A new story out shows that there have been 10 count 'em, 10 cases of in-person voter impersonation fraud since 2000. http://votingrights.news21.com/
Here's another article.
http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/storiesView/sid/52883/
Mea culpa!!!! After I posted my reply it dawned on me that I was wrong. What! someone actually admitting they were wrong!! OMG what next, cats and dogs living together. I just had not had time to come back on a post my mea culpa until now. I was also going to say GIGO which you are completely correct.
Having admitted to my error, I do however, do not admit that there is not voter fraud. I also, do not agree that the level is insignificant.
Note that the .03/150,000 figure came from 'an exhaustive study' by Republican lawyers. How convenient for them. Didn't realize that Republican lawyers had such statistical analysis skills along with their law degrees.
I did a quick check of the Internet; you know that thing that Gore invented, and here's what I found:
"Indeed, evidence from the microscopically scrutinized 2004 gubernatorial election in Washington State actually reveals just the opposite: though voter fraud does happen, it happens approximately 0.0009% of the time. The similarly closely-analyze d 2004 election in Ohio revealed a voter fraud rate of 0.00004%. National Weather Service data shows that Americans are struck and killed by lightning about as often."
Let's do some new math with these new numbers. 150,000 x .0009%=1.35!
150,000 x .00004%=.06!!
If we could only train lightning to target these 'criminals' we could get rid of the voter fraud problem, at least in the states of Washington and Ohio.
Obviously, the Republican lawyers figure was more like .03% not .03, and the % sign was somehow left out. So 4500 now becomes 45. But even that compared to Washington and Ohio is way off by an average magnitude of 64.28.
I can also prove to you that all triangles are isosceles, and a right angle has more than 90 degrees.
Your move, and don't be late for class.
First note that the numbers I have used were not mine and I never said they were correct. I was using the numbers provided by Bingers and I also thought he or someone left off the percent sign on the .03 but it was not my post.
Back to the issue of voter fraud. Does it exist? Yes. The recent conviction in MN shows that. However, using actual convictions is NOT an indication of actual voter fraud. You see, to get a voter fraud conviction one has to prove that the person knew what they were doing was illegal and not just an accident. Thus any felon who lost their right to vote but votes anyway as long as they state they thought they got the vote back after serving their time then they are convicted of voter fraud. So using actual convictions does not show the true degree of fraud.
In my debates with libs it usually goes along the lines of "there is no voter fraud" to "well, it is very small". Same for this thread.
Finally, how much voter fraud are you willing to accept?
Also, I reject your claim that a photo ID would only have prevented some 10 cases.
Do you understand that it is easier for a Mexican to vote illegally in the US than it is for them to vote in Mexico? Now something is just plain wrong about that.
You are spitting hate and bile on people you don't even know. I give you some for yourself: Stay in your house and just shut up. Forever! You are the rotten core of this society.
typical progressive thought. Agree with me or else I will kill you or put you in prison. You must have studied under Lenin or Mao.
TAKE A DEEP BREATH.......I do agree with most of what you FEEL, but it is not helpful to Yell it all out loud. Name calling, does not solve problems.
You need to get out FACTS, which I bet you have,... having lived in New Orleans, where we saw clearly the incompetence and complete lack of caring about poor and black people by the republicans.
Republicans are great at campaigning.
It's governing they absolutely stink at.
You need to govern ALL THE PEOPLE, not just the 2 percent...the wealthiest.
THAT IS THE REASON THAT WE CAN NOT LET THEM GET INTO THE OVAL OFFICE.
Also in the next presidential term maybe 3, at least 2 supreme court judges will retire. Robert Bork Is Romney's adviser? Do we want MORE Roberts, Alito Thomas???? I think NOT
BTW, my daughter was at LSU during Katrina and I was born in Calcasieu Parish so I know a bit about LA.
I am fully aware of the utter incompetence of the mayor. I remember all the school buses parked in a low area, (which was flooded) when it was clear, that a hurricane was coming, and they might be needed. And the governor sure did not cover herself in glory either.
BUT Bush and the administration was HORRIBLE. For DAYS... we saw on CNN the terrible situation and the condition of the poor inhabitants of that city.
Bush and Co did WHAT??? NOTHING. Condi went shoe shopping, and Bush was at a party,
flew over the city at 30.000 feet and just looked out the window.
And THEN he topped it, when he uttered the now infamous words: "You are doing a great job Brownie"
YES INDEED.
I am curious as to what landing in NO would have done to help the situation? Do you understand all of the problems a presidential visit has on a location? So li ited resources (security) would be pulled from helping people to provide protection for the president. Having been in a couple of presidential declared disaster areas in my life, quite frankly, the last person I want to see until the situation is secure is ANY president.
So Citizen United was passed so that rich doners and corporations could have free speech but can secretly
give as much as they want as our govt has the right to spy on every email, phone call, bank tranaction and credit card charge. But people like Romney have the right not to tell us what he paid in taxes and he wants to be OUR so called president as he protects those who are trying to steal the election? How fked are we? Let me count the ways.
Voter suppression and election rigging, the GOP strategy for the 2012 election because they know they cnnot win otherwise.
I am sure none of us want ANYBODY to vote, who is not entitled to do so.
I'll turn the tables. Does it not disturb you, that republican politicians admit that this is designed to ensure a win for Romney???
Our democracy has become a very bad, very sad joke. We should hang our heads in shame.
It is a fact that there are people who are registered to vote in CA that are illegal aliens. Now do I know for a fact that they have voted? No but someone did vote using that registered voter.
And what risk is there of being found? I keep being told here how the voter fraud rate is almost non-existant so where is the risk. If I am an illegal, it is worth the risk to vote for someone who will grant me immunity? I think that if I was an illegal and someone or some party was promising me that I could stay here legally and gain all sorts of benefits I think I would take the VERY SMALL risk of voting. Besides, even if I was found and deported I would just come back in through our very phorous border. Also, I would just claim that I did not understand that I could not vote because my English is not so good and I didn't understand the part on the registration about not being able to vote. THus since I had no intent to vote illegally then that is not voter fraud.
I'm not a citizen and therefore don't get to vote (but I DO get to pay taxes for the death culture and war machine) so I'd be happy to volunteer my time and considerable mediation and administrative skills to assist in this worthy cause.
I'm grateful, like "SundownLF" in a similar context, to live in Oregon, which also have these concerns (one can register and vote from home here, which tends to favor the elderly and minorities) and many people volunteer to take people to polling stations, whatever their age or ethnicity.
Yet I can also comprehend "MidwestTom's" observation on the ignorance quotient of small, white towns, even in areas of a fairly progressive state who may actually know the president's name but are deeply racist and derogatory every time they are forced to say something about him.
I've lived and worked in the South and Midwest so I've seen a fair amount of skullduggery and nepotistic politics so this is no surprise.
And don't expect much by way of a balanced view nor decision from THIS so-called supreme court! Hell's McBells, they are part and parcel of the whole "selective voters" scheme to move the nation ever closer to a medieval slavery-based corporate state with a tiny minority dictating the fates of the many without recourse.
Once again, please excuse idiot-level typing skills. I meant of course "Which does NOT have these concerns---!
South Carolina does require that voters present ID at the polls. Any one of three IDs is accepted: a Voter Registration Card ssued by the county elections office, a driver's license or a DMV-issued photo ID. The question is not whether or not to require ID. It is a question of requiring an ID that a large number of poor and/or minority citizens do not have.
The problem is the difficulty of citizens who do not drive getting to their county office in a state with almost no public transportation. This requirement targets the poor and minorities.
The law did not have to be this way. The law could have provided funds to enable the county elections offices to send a mobile van out to provide the photo to citizens already registered to vote. The law did not make any effort to help qualified voters get the required ID.
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