Welcome to the Brennan Center's voting newsletter, the most comprehensive summary of all the latest developments affecting voting. Sign up for all Brennan Center newsletters here.
Representing 10 residents who do not meet the requirements to get photo ID, the Pennsylvania ACLU and other groups have filed a complaint in state court seeking to block the state’s new ID measure. Plaintiffs contend the new rule violates the state’s Constitution “by depriving citizens of their most fundamental constitutional right — the right to vote.”
“Wartime welder, civil-rights marcher, world traveler, voter — Viviette Applewhite of Philadelphia's Germantown section can boast of having been all those things,” wrote The Philadelphia Inquirer, in a profile of one of the voters. “On Tuesday, she added another title: plaintiff.”
Applewhite, who is 92 and uses a wheelchair, does not have a driver’s license. She lost the rest of her ID when her purse was stolen years ago. So far, state officials have been unable to find her birth certificate, Applewhite said.
The Connecticut Senate approved a bill to allow voters to register and cast a ballot on Election Day, a big victory for voting rights advocates. Gov. Dan Malloy said he will sign the measure, which has helped many states improve voter turnout. The bill, passed by the House last week, will also allow online registration starting in 2014 and give current voters a better opportunity to correct errors in their registration status. The Brennan Center pushed this bill for months, writing an op-ed for The Connecticut Mirror. “These new reforms are a big step forward for Connecticut's voting system,” argued Myrna Pérez and Nic Riley.
Although the wave of new suppressive voting laws is starting to meet resistance from the both the courts and the public, the best way to end the struggle is to modernize voter registration. Today’s system dates from the 19th century and is cumbersome, expensive and error-prone. Advocating for a 21st century registration system in The New York Times, Brennan Center president Michael Waldman wrote, “Voter registration modernization could unite the combatants in the ‘voting wars.’” He added: “Yes, we should repel the push to make voting harder for millions of Americans. But if lawmakers really want to protect the integrity of our elections, modernizing our registration system is the answer.” Read the Brennan Center’s modernization proposal.
State Updates
Arizona – The state is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court the Ninth Circuit’s recent ruling striking down Arizona’s proof of citizenship requirement for voter registration.
Colorado – The state Senate gave initial approval “to a bill that would require mail ballots be sent to about 135,000 inactive voters for the 2012 election.”
Connecticut – The state Senate gave final approval to an election-day registration bill. Read more here. The Connecticut Post applauded the measure, saying the state is on “the right path on voter rights.” Read the Brennan Center's op-ed supporting the measure.
Florida – The Secretary of State’s office says it is prepared to use two sets of election laws for the Aug. 14th primary. Recent changes will be in effect in all but five counties, which must get approval from the federal government before implementing the new law.
Meanwhile, Gov. Rick Scott “appeared genuinely surprised” about the implications of restrictive voting laws he signed in a meeting with The Florida Times-Union editorial board. For instance, the new law eliminates voting the Sunday before an election. The bill passed along partisan lines, with Democrats objecting that the measure would make it harder for African Americans and Hispanics to cast ballots. “I didn’t know that was an issue,” Scott said. “No one brought that issue up to me.”
The Orlando Sentinel wrote how new voter registration laws are making it harder to enlist new voters. Elections officials are also part of the fallout. “One of the biggest challenges was that most of the law went into effect upon enactment, unlike previous years when there was a delay between enactment and the effective date,” the president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections told electionline Weekly.
Indiana – Two men, including a town mayor, were charged with election law violations dealing with absentee ballots. Both say they are innocent.
Kansas – The state House passed a bill "that would institute new proof of citizenship requirements for voter registration within the next six weeks rather than next year, matching the desires of Secretary of State Kris Kobach."
Michigan – The student paper at Michigan State University reported that new voter registration restrictions “could make it significantly harder for campus organizations to register voters.”
Minnesota – In November, Minnesota voters will have a referendum on an amendment to the state Constitution to tighten voting laws. Mike Dean, executive director of Common Cause Minnesota, explained his view of “what is actually lurking” in the amendment. Among other things, he argues the measure will effectively end Election Day registration because those voters will cast provisional ballots, many of which are never counted. Read about the arduous experience of getting an appropriate photo ID for a 92-year-old voter.
Mississippi – The House passed a bill to implement the state’s voter ID law, which passed by referendum last year. It awaits the signature of Gov. Phil Bryant.
Missouri – A House committee approved a bill requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. Opponents say it “has the potential to disenfranchise naturalized citizens,” who may not have the required documents.
New Hampshire – Charles Balban, president of the New Hampshire Alliance for Retired Americans wrote an op-ed opposing a proposed voter ID law, saying it “doesn't include information about the real cost of such a radical change to our centuries-old voting traditions.” A House committee is considering the bill.
North Carolina – Pat McCrory, a candidate for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, is asking voters to bring photo IDs with them to the polls during the May 8th primary. The effort is designed to show support for a voter ID bill vetoed by Gov. Bev Perdue last year. Legislators who support the bill are trying to override the veto.
Ohio – Republicans and Democrats are close to a deal that would repeal a controversial election law and restore early voting for the three days before the election. The Cleveland Plain Dealer urged lawmakers to repeal the law to “avoid a divisive referendum question this fall” and help voters avoid confusion at the polls. U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (Illinois) held a congressional field hearing on the law.
Pennsylvania – As detailed above, the ACLU is challenging the state’s new voter ID law, representing 10 citizens who lack the documentation required to obtain a photo ID. Read more about the plaintiffs here and here, and see videos of their stories here. The Brennan Center’s Keesha Gaskins spoke to The Philadelphia Inquirer about the voter ID law, which reported that there have been no convictions for voter impersonation or voter fraud for the past five years. The Inquirer also wrote editorials praising voters who protested the law during the recent primary, and detailing how the law will penalize seniors. Read more here, here, and here.
South Carolina – Activists held a rally to protest the state’s voter ID law, now under review by a federal court. Read more on the lawsuit here and here.
Texas – The federal district court considering Texas’ voter ID law said “the law will probably not be in place by the November general election unless the state turns over requested documents by Wednesday.” Read more here. The Justice Department has asked for a delay in the trial over the law, saying the state attorney general is stalling requests for information. Read more here and here.
Virginia – Gov. Bob McDonnell is still deciding if he will sign a voter ID bill into law. The Washington Post and the Virginian-Pilot have called on the governor to veto the measure. McDonnell has three options: he can sign the bill, veto it, or let the measure become law without his signature.
Wisconsin – It’s official— there will be no voter ID for the June 5 recall election of Gov. Scott Walker. An appeals court judge said there was “no realistic possibility” the case could be decided in time.
Policy Matters Ohio has published a report estimating that a proposed voter ID requirement would cost the state $5 to $7 million annually. “Ohioans value the right to vote and they value their neighbors’ participation. If there is a problem with voting in Ohio, it is that existing barriers keep too many from exercising this basic right. Creating new, unnecessary costs and suppressing votes has no place in the Buckeye State,” the report said. Read the full report.
Media Round-Up
In an op-ed for The New York Times, Brennan Center President Michael Waldman detailed how suppressive voting laws have met resistance at the polls and in the courts, and called for bipartisan reforms to our ramshackle registration system.
Washington Post columnist Katrina vanden Heuvel made a similar push for universal voter registration. “Universal registration would truly be, as Brennan Center president Michael Waldman has said, ‘potentially the most significant improvement since the Voting Rights Act of 1965,’” she wrote.
Another Post columnist, Eugene Robinson, wrote about voter ID laws. He detailed an investigation of charges that “dead people” had voted in South Carolina. The result? “[T]he commission found no evidence of fraud. Or zombies.” He also cited the Center’s research on voting law changes.
La Opinión, the largest Spanish-language newspaper in the U.S., editorialized: “Voter ID Laws Suppress Minority Votes.” Read the Spanish version here.
At CNN.com, Roland Martin said that voter suppression is real and must be stopped.
The Brennan Center’s Myrna Pérez and Lee Rowland explained the importance of the Democracy Restoration Act, a bill that would restore voting rights to millions of people with past criminal convictions. Read more on the effort at TPM.
The Obama campaign is preparing to help voters navigate new restrictions — such as voter ID and registration rules — in key swing states such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Now that voter ID laws have passed in many states, Demos’ Tova Wang encouraged advocates to help educate voters on how to get ID.
Sometimes political operatives go too far. Opponents of Maine’s long-standing and popular same-day voter registration system killed it in the legislature this year – but they still have to face an unhappy public at the polls. Sadly, their main campaign tactic appears to be producing lists that smear the good names of Maine residents, and the integrity of the state’s elections, with unfounded insinuations of election crimes.
First there was the list of 206: 206 students living at the University of Maine, who had come to identify Maine as their new home, but paid out-of-state tuition under the University’s strict rules. Suddenly a politician holds a press conference, and their hometowns, initials, and birth dates appear on a blacklist of students that “may have committed voter fraud.” The secretary of state then folded this list into a serious criminal investigation, which proceeded in spite of the easily-discovered fact that the sole criterion used to compile it – that the 206 paid out-of-state tuition – has nothing to do with their eligibility to vote in Maine.
The secretary recently confirmed that his investigation of the list revealed no evidence of fraud, but inexplicably, even as he affirmed that students have every legal right to vote where they live, he questioned their patriotism for doing so. The ACLU of Maine and allied organizations wrote Maine Secretary of State Charles Summers today, demanding he send a new letter clarifying these voters’ rights and correcting the record.
Then came the list of 19: 19 young adults who availed themselves of Maine’s longstanding tradition of election day registration in 2004. But these voters registered from a nontraditional residence – the Holiday Inn. Rather than simply ask “why?” partisans started pounding tables in September, using this “uncovered” evidence as proof that Mainers should vote to uphold the repeal of same-day registration.
It took a simple phone call to discover that during the 2004 school year, the entire Holiday Inn was, in fact, a St. Joseph’s College dorm housing transfer students whose campus had been ravaged by Hurricane Ivan. Long after the hotel confirmed this fact to the media, the press release “revealing” these students remains on a state political party’s website, ignoring the far less scandalous truth. The only thing these 19 Mainers appear to be guilty of is having had the gall to be displaced by a natural disaster during an election year.
These are two new verses in the same old tune.
The Brennan Center for Justice has monitored and investigated claims of voter fraud for years. We have consistently found that accusations of voter fraud are amplified out of all proportion to reality, and that they frequently reach a crescendo when their appearance would assist one side in a bitter political fight over elections.
Cavalier accusations that someone “may have” committed a crime come at a real price. One Maine student from the list of 206 has written that he fears his future reputation will be tarnished by his name’s quickly-deduced association with a serious election crime. And the victims are not only the targeted students, but every Maine student who hears serious criminal accusations tossed around by politicos and thinks twice about voting in such an intimidating atmosphere. Would you risk casting a perfectly legal ballot if you thought your tuition status or dorm residence might just win you a spot on the next public blacklist?
There’s a reason that opponents of same-day registration couch their accusations with disclaimers, clear their targets of crimes but call them unpatriotic, or use words like “uncovered” without actually identifying a wrong. It’s simple: there’s no proof any of these students did a single thing wrong. Maine’s election law includes numerous safeguards to prevent fraudulent registrations on election day or any other day. The Maine Town and City Clerks Association – the front line protecting Maine’s election integrity - testified that they were concerned the repeal of same-day registration would disenfranchise voters, not protect them. For 37 years, Maine clerks have successfully registered thousands of voters on election day.
That’s why lists built on misinformation and innuendo are the best arguments that same-day registration opponents have to wield.
There is one list that is relevant to the debate over election day registration – the list of 50,000. More than 50,000 Mainers relied on same-day registration to vote in 2008 on days now eliminated under the law. Indeed, as the Bangor Daily News reported, Mainers who have taken advantage of same-day registration include nine lawmakers who voted to repeal it and Governor LePage, who signed the bill into law. Despite the claims of opponents, there’s no evidence that any of these voters did so fraudulently – just conveniently.
So when the next trumped-up accusation of fraud hits the media – and it will – watch as these claims unravel after even the most cursory investigation. Maine deserves better than election policies founded on scare tactics.
You may have heard the stories coming out of Maine – but we want you to know the truth.
In July, a politician publicized a list of 206 students paying out-of-state tuition at Maine universities, calling the fact that they voted in Maine “evidence of voter fraud.” The Maine Secretary of State investigated these claims and unsurprisingly found that these students did not commit voter fraud – out-of-state tuition status is simply not a bar to registering or voting in Maine.
In early September, a state political party publicly “uncovered” the fact that 19 students had listed a hotel address on their voter registration cards. However, at that time the hotel was operating as a dorm for students displaced by a hurricane. Under Maine law, students may register to vote using their school address, whether it’s a dormitory, apartment, or house – so long as they consider it their home. There is no evidence these students did anything other than vote where they lived.
Now the Secretary of State has sent letters to Maine students paying out-of-state tuition – yes, the same students who were cleared of all wrongdoing in his investigation – and is asking them to obtain a driver’s license or car registration in Maine if they intend to vote there even though there is no standalone requirement to get a Maine driver’s license unless you intend to drive a car in Maine. The targeted way in which this rule is being enforced against students is unwarranted.
When the initial investigation was announced, we sent Secretary Summers a letter cautioning him against publicizing information that might wrongly intimidate student voters. Today, the ACLU of Maine, along with other voting rights groups, sent a letter to the Maine Secretary of State urging him to stop this continued intimidation of student voters.
No eligible voter should be dissuaded from voting due to misinformation and innuendo. We at the Brennan Center want students to have correct and complete information about their right to participate in the political process. In order to know the truth about voting in Maine, you can refer to the Brennan Center’s Maine Student Voting Guide which provides descriptions of the latest ID, residency, voter registration, and absentee balloting requirements.
Elections in Ohio can produce controversy that is sometimes corrosive to the public's perception of the integrity of our electoral system. As long as Ohio remains a politically important and closely divided state, there will continue to be hotly contested election-related disputes. But changes to election law in Ohio can minimize the frequency and impact of some of these controversies by creating clearer and fairer laws that improve election administration, decrease burdens and costs on county election offices and put the voters first. The Ohio House Committee on Elections and Ethics is considering legislation that should make progress on all of these fronts.
In December and March, I chaired two summits on Ohio Election reform. Each involved a convening of ideologically diverse election officials, academics and voting-rights groups to reflect on ways to make Ohio elections run better. Those assembled agreed that, because of the hard work of election administrators, voting-rights groups and Ohio voters, the 2008 elections were largely a success. There was, however, consensus that more could be done.
The elections-enhancement bill sponsored by Reps. Dan Stewart and Tracy Heard, both Democrats from Columbus, takes many suggestions from the summits. It would improve laws related to early voting, provisional ballots, voter ID and ballot design -- all sources of problems in Ohio in the past.
But the current bill doesn't fully address flaws in the state's voter-registration system, which participants at both summits decried as inefficient and prone to error. Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and the bipartisan workgroup she pulled together after the summit have proposed a way to fill that gap: an automatic and online voter-registration system.
This system would make it possible to automatically forward registration information from all Ohio residents who interact with a designated government agency to election officials, who could then include such information on the state's voter rolls of eligible residents. This would vastly increase administrative efficiency and reduce the stress on election officials from the typical last-minute deluge of voter-registration forms, smoothing out the flow of registration activity across the year and freeing up resources for other critical election-administration tasks. And, it would improve both the quality and security of voter-registration information and preserve registrars' traditional function of determining eligibility.
Research by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law shows that automatic voter registration could easily be developed from statewide voter-registration databases already in place. Delaware recently implemented automatic registration from its motor-vehicles agency; the state's elections and motor-vehicles officials have expressed great satisfaction with the results. Ohio's Bureau Of Motor Vehicles already participates in automatic registration for the Selective Service, and the same technology can easily be adapted for voter registration. Many other major democracies, including Canada, automatically register eligible citizens to vote, achieving far more complete and accurate voter rolls at lower cost.
The elements needed for an online registration system are firmly in place in Ohio. The state has a secure online interface that residents can use to check their existing registration status; currently, however, the state doesn't provide a way residents can correct or amend information. And, Ohio's Motor Vehicles Bureau already has digitized the information needed to register drivers to vote; they simply need legal authority to transfer this information to election officials.
Successful models are cropping up across the country. Arizona, for example, has an online system that's generated substantial savings. Officials there say that each online registration costs just three cents to process; paper forms costs 83 cents each to process. The system has also saved Arizona election officials tens of thousands of hours in time that would have been spent manually entering data.
And citizens report substantial satisfaction with the added convenience that online registration offers. It is no surprise that eight other states -- California, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Oregon, Utah and Washington -- recently authorized online registration, or that similar bills are pending in at least four other states.
In Ohio, the resources and political will are in place. Passing a version of the election-enhancement bill that incorporates voter-registration modernization reforms could make the Buckeye State a model of electoral reform.
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