My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

It wasn’t until fairly recently that Republicans forswore the spirit of Lincoln in civil rights matters, including at the ballot box.

As President Lyndon Johnson stated in his Congressional address promoting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, “Our fathers believed that if this noble view of the rights of man was to flourish, it must be rooted in democracy. The most basic right of all was the right to choose your leaders. The history of this country, in large measure, is the history of the expansion of that right to all of our people.”

One hundred years after the 15th Amendment extended the right to vote to black men, an accumulation of poll taxes, literacy tests and intimidation had effectively prevented them from exercising their right to vote in the South. It was a national disgrace.

The VRA’s solution for this problem had broad bipartisan support. In fact, Republicans supported the VRA in greater proportion than did the Democrats in both the House and Senate. Republicans had also been more supportive than Democrats were of women gaining the right to vote 35 years earlier.

Sen. Everett Dirksen, a Republican co-author of the legislation, declared, “There has to be a real remedy. There has to be something durable and worthwhile. This cannot go on forever, this denial of the right to vote by ruses and devices and tests and whatever the mind can contrive to either make it very difficult or to make it impossible to vote.”

Thanks to the passage of the VRA, I grew up during a period when there was general consensus that every eligible citizen should be able to vote. Voter fraud was a non-issue.

That’s reasonable, since evidence of voter fraud is extremely rare. Of nearly 650 million ballots cast in general elections nationwide between 2002 and 2010, officials have confirmed 13 cases of in-person voter impersonation.

But after the 2010 election, it became a priority in many Republican-controlled state legislatures to stop this barely-documented problem. Seventeen states will have new voting restrictions in place by this fall’s election, including nine states with new photo ID laws.

In 2013, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to gut the VRA in its Shelby County v. Holder decision. In a blistering dissent, Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, “Throwing out preclearance (of states’ proposed changes in voting laws) when it worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Texas passed a new ID law shortly after this decision, and a federal court estimates that 608,000 voters will need to obtain a new ID in order to vote this fall. Most infamously, a University of Texas ID card is no longer an acceptable form of ID, but a concealed carry gun permit is.

Some states, though, are making it easier to vote with measures such as automatic voter registration and changing felony disenfranchisement laws. A citizen’s ease or dis-ease of voting can depend a lot on the state in which they live.

People within states are not impacted equally either. Of the 11 percent of people without a valid ID, 25 percent are black and 8 percent are white. Based on evidence, it would be fair to assume that new voter ID laws are less about voter fraud than they are about contriving once again to disenfranchise black voters. It also creates hurdles for other minorities and young people of all races. These populations all favor Democrats.

Some Republicans have let the truth slip out. In Wisconsin, Congressman Glenn Grothman candidly stated his hope that the Republican presidential candidate will win his state for the first time in a generation due partly to the new voter ID law.

That same day a former Republican staffer, Todd Allbaugh, revealed that a number of Republican state senators in Wisconsin had been “giddy” about suppressing student and minority votes with new voter ID laws during a closed session.

He left the party last year in disillusionment. On Facebook he reflected, “The GOP was born out of greater opportunity and equality. Wisconsin, yes the Wisconsin Republican Party, under the leadership of Republican Gov. Robert M. ‘Fighting Bob’ La Follette lead the country in creating greater voting access to its citizens. The WI GOP was seen as a shining example of equality. That was the party I joined in the ’80s and fought for. That party no longer exists.”

Putting a damper on democracy instead of relying on popular support is not how a robust party wins elections. The GOP lost its Lincoln-esque bearing long before a blustering, off-the-cuff real estate heir with a tenuous grasp of both policy and propriety threatened to become its standard bearer in Cleveland this summer.

 

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.