Flying Oskar: Exposing the “Voter Fraud” bogeyman
March 9th, 2009
by Christopher George
Filed in News, Opinion
spartanburgspark.com
Rep. Mike Anthony (D-Union County) voted against the so-called Voter Fraud bill. Which is good, because there doesn't appear to be any.
Last Tuesday, the South Carolina House of Representatives took a major step in helping protect the citizens of South Carolina from the scourge of voter fraud. In a 67-to-44 vote, the House passed a measure that would require all voters in the state to present a photo ID at the polls before being allowed to vote. Spartanburg County Representatives voted 7 to 1, along party lines, in favor of the measure.
Rep. Mike Anthony, whose Union County district also includes a small portion of Spartanburg County, voted against the measure. This is a great day in the fight against voter fraud, except for one small detail; no one so far has been able to point out a single case of voter fraud involving someone impersonating another voter in the history of South Carolina.
As the saying goes, the devil is always in the details.
Ever since the Supreme Court ruled last year that Indiana’s voter ID law didn’t violate the Constitution, ID laws have become all the rage in Republican circles. Conservatives have whipped their supporters into a frenzy over invented voter fraud controversies like last year’s ACORN scandal, and now GOP lawmakers in South Carolina are seizing that opportunity to pass the greatest voter disenfranchisement bill since the old Jim Crow days.
The bill was so offensive to African-American House members that on the second reading of the bill, all 28 of them, as well as a few other House Democrats, walked out of the House Chamber rather than vote on a blatantly discriminatory piece of legislation they had no hope of stopping.
According to the House Judiciary Committee, around 700,000 of South Carolina’s registered voters do not have a state-issued photo ID. Most of these voters are poor or elderly, and many are African-American. The bill makes state-issued ID cards free, but it does nothing to alleviate the cost of obtaining the documents necessary to acquire the state ID. This amounts to a hidden poll tax, and creates a new voting deterrent for the poor.
Rep. Chris Hart (D-Richland) said of the bill; “This is a backlash against Obama. We have over two million registered voters in the state of South Carolina and 1.9 million voters voted in this last election — that’s a 75-percent turnout with not one incident of reported fraud came to the Election Commission. Not one.” It’s hard to argue with that logic, and even after spending several hours trying, I can’t find one Republican lawmaker in South Carolina disputing Rep. Hart’s assertion.
The bill itself is designed to suppress voter turnout among poor, largely African-American voters who reliably vote for Democrats, and it is a needless slap in the face to people already on the societal ladder’s bottom rung. Republican lawmakers, using a false controversy as cover, are attempting to shift the state’s electoral makeup even more in their favor. That goal is unethical, and the means being used to obtain it are despicable.
The real head-scratcher in all this is that the problem this legislation is supposed to address appears to simply not exist. In fact, no one who has studied the problem has been able to locate this particular Loch Ness Monster called voter fraud. According to a 2007 New York Times story, as of 2006 only 86 people have ever been convicted of voter fraud in the entire United States, and many of those cases involved people misunderstanding eligibility rules, hardly a vast left-wing conspiracy.
Voter Fraud is apparently so rare that according to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, you are statistically more likely to be killed by a lightning strike than you are to be convicted of voter fraud. With such convincing evidence against the existence of coordinated voter fraud, you’d think the GOP would’ve had a chance to look it over.
It’s in that informative spirit that I’d like to take a moment and ask if I could, that all my Republican readers read this next sentence out loud so that maybe it’ll actually stand a chance of sinking in. Systematic, coordinated voter fraud does not exist. Did you get that?
What this bill actually does is put up an unnecessary hurdle to be jumped in order to vote in South Carolina. At a time when we have complaints of GOP officials intimidating voters right here in Spartanburg, and when we should be reforming our laws to make voting easier by creating a viable early voting system, our lawmakers seem intent on doing the exact opposite. The disconnect between our legislature’s action and the reality of the voting situation is appallingly wide.
There is no reason for this law other than ghastly political arithmetic, and those who claim otherwise are invariably the ones coming out on the winning side of that terrible equation. In a state with a history of suppressing minority votes, doing anything with the specific intention of shrinking the voting population is repulsive, and state Republicans should have more shame than to dare to do such a thing.
Christopher George is a local blogger, you can read more of his stuff at Flying Oskar. |
