Tag Archives: voter ID

business news

No photo ID needed … usually

I am 68 years of age. I look my age. I’ve got the gray in my hair to prove it.

I don’t usually have to produce photo identification when I go to the grocery store to purchase, um, some lettuce, a loaf of bread or even something to drink.

Now, if it’s an adult beverage, which I enjoy now and then, I will put the beverage in my shopping cart and roll it to the checkout stand.

Then I might — I repeat, might — ask the checker, “Do you want to see my ID” to prove I am of age to buy the adult beverage? Most of the time, they laugh and say, “No, uh, that’s all right.”

But occasionally, they play along. “Sure thing,” he or she might say. I gleefully pull out my driver’s license to show that I am, indeed, old enough to purchase the beverage. Then I boast about “being carded.”

Unlike what the president of the United States asserted Tuesday at that Florida campaign rally, that’s the only time I’ve ever had to show ID at the grocery store.

So there.

national news

ID to buy groceries?

Donald John Trump needs to get out more.

Yeah, I know he’s a mega-rich guy. He’s now the president of the United States. He’s the most powerful human being on Earth. Therefore, I doubt seriously he’s had to stand in a grocery line for, oh, a very long time.

However, he also campaigned for the presidency as a “man of the people.” He’s a “populist.”

Trump made the “ID for food” assertion while campaigning in Florida, where he was making a pitch for stronger voter ID laws.

Populists need to know that you do not need identification to buy groceries, man! Maybe a can of Skoal, or a pack of smokes, or six-pack of beer.

Trump blurted out the ID issue while making yet another idiotic assertion.

Oh, my. To think this man is our president.

political news, State news

Voter ID law: an overreach … perhaps?

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Texas legislators were so convinced that voter fraud had reached epidemic proportions in the state that they enacted a law requiring everyone to show photo identification when they registered to vote … and then voted.

Is it the problem, the crisis, the scourge that lawmakers feared?

Apparently not.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/08/22/texas-prosecuted-15-illegal-voting-cases-none-invo/?mc_cid=97b9db7408&mc_eid=c01508274f

According to the Texas Tribune, the state prosecuted a total of 15 cases of voter fraud from 2012 until the 2016 state primary.

Fifteen! That’s it.

Most of the cases actually prosecuted involved something called “illegal assistance” of voters, which would be banned by the voter ID approved by the 2011 Texas Legislature.

It’s been said of some legislative remedies that they are “solutions in search of a problem.” This one seems to fit that description.

The Tribune reports: “Texas’ contested law, passed in 2011, requires voters to present one of seven approved forms of government-issued ID at the polls. In July, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled the law violates parts of the Voting Rights Act. For the November election, people without ID will be allowed to vote if they sign a sworn statement. A spokesman for the Texas attorney general said ‘this case is not over’ and the agency is considering an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

I am not vehemently opposed to requiring individuals to prove they are who they say they are. We ask people to produce ID when they cash a check, check in for flights at airports or make withdrawals from bank accounts.

Yes, voting is important. It’s crucial that we protect the integrity of this fundamental right.

But the study reported by the Tribune suggests to me that the rush to approve voter ID requirements was an overheated response to an equally overblown problem in Texas.

national news, political news, State news

‘Rampant’ voter fraud in Texas? Not even close

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott describes the instances of voter fraud in this state as “rampant.”

The state, he said, has sought to curb the epidemic of voter fraud by requiring voters to produce photo ID — driver’s licenses, passports, etc. — when they go to the polling place.

The Texas Tribune’s Ross Ramsey, though, has shot down the governor’s assertion with an interesting analysis of Abbott’s challenge to a President Obama’s critique of Texas’ historically poor voter turnout.

The evidence of fraud is “scant,” according to Ramsey.

Here’s part of what Ramsey writes: “A study done by News21, an investigative journalism project at Arizona State University, looked at open records from Texas and other states for the years 2000-2011 and found 104 cases of voter fraud had been alleged in Texas over that decade.

“Chew on this: If you only count the Texans who voted in November general elections — skipping Democratic and Republican primaries and also special and constitutional elections — 35.8 million people voted during the period covered by the ASU study.

“They found 104 cases of voter fraud among 35.8 million votes cast. That’s fewer than three glitches per 1 million votes.”

Does that fit the description of “rampant” voter fraud?

Not exactly.

Obama made the point at a fundraiser the other evening that Texas remains one of the nation’s poorest-turnout states. I am not going to blame the voter ID push for driving down the turnout. Suffice to say, though, that Texas can — and should — do more to promote greater turnout.

I’ve lived in Texas for 32 years. I have been watching, reporting and commenting on the political process here for that entire time. I have no recollection ever of the state — from the governor’s office on down — launching a concerted effort to drive up voter participation.

There has seemed over all that time to be a sense of complacency, that the state puts little emphasis on greater turnout.

“The folks who are governing the good state of Texas aren’t interested in having more people participate,” the president told The Texas Tribune’s Evan Smith at South by Southwest Interactive.

Abbott’s response? He trotted out the allegation of “rampant” voter fraud. The numbers don’t add up.

 

legal news, political news, State news

No surprise: High Court upholds Texas voter ID law

Early voting in Texas begins Monday and everyone who votes in this mid-term election will be required to produce identification that proves they are who they say they are.

This comes courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court, which today ruled that the Texas voter ID law is valid and that, by golly, it does not amount to an unconstitutional “poll tax.”

Interesting.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/221166-supreme-court-rules-texas-can-enforce-voter-id-law

A federal judge in Texas had struck down the law, saying it discriminated against low-income Americans — notably African-Americans and Hispanics — who might be unable to afford such identification. The judge, a Barack Obama appointee, is a Latina jurist.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals then reversed the judge’s ruling. The case then went to the highest court in the land, which today ruled 6-3 to reinstate the Texas voter ID law.

The three dissenters: Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg (a Bill Clinton appointee), and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan (Barack Obama appointees).

Ginsburg said this in her dissent: “The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.”

Those who support these laws contend that they prevent “voter fraud” and keep illegal immigrants from voting. That, too, is interesting, given that there is so little evidence of such fraud existing in Texas or anywhere else.

The reinstatement of this law is now more than likely going to stand for the foreseeable future.

We’ll see how many American citizens will be turned away from polling places across Texas. Let’s also take a look at their ethnicity, shall we?

political news, State news

Voter ID = poll tax

A federal judge has stuck it to Texas’s desire to require photo identification for everyone wanting to vote.

She did so with unflinching language. This fight is going to get interesting.

http://www.texastribune.org/2014/10/09/federal-judge-rules-texas-voter-id-law-unconstitut/

The Texas Tribune reports: “’The Court holds that SB 14 creates an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote, has an impermissible discriminatory effect against Hispanics and African-Americans, and was imposed with an unconstitutional discriminatory purpose,’ U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos of Corpus Christi wrote in a 147-page opinion. ‘The Court further holds that SB 14 constitutes an unconstitutional poll tax.’”

Oh yes. Ramos was appointed to the federal bench by President Barack Obama.

Now what? The state has vowed to file an immediate appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Fifth Circuit needs to decide quickly if this matter is to be settled in time for the Nov. 4 mid-term election.

I have to hand it to Judge Ramos. She stood tall against voter suppression, which is what voter ID appears to be — to me, at least.

The Texas voter ID law requires voters to produce some form of photo identification when they go to the polls. Opponents of the law enacted in 2011 contend that it discriminates against minority voters who might not have, say, a driver’s license, a passport, a concealed firearm permit or any other valid form of photo ID.

To obtain such identification requires significant expense in some cases, voter ID foes argue, and that comprises what they contend is an unconstitutional “poll tax.”

Across the country where voter ID laws have been in force, the laws are the result of Republican-controlled state governments. That’s not unusual by itself. However, the politics of these laws requires one to wonder out loud: Is this done to suppress the vote among residents who might tend to vote, umm, Democratic?

The alleged bogeyman in this is voter fraud. According to the Texas Tribune: “The state maintains the law ensures the security of the ballots cast by voters and prevents voter fraud. Attorneys for the state argued that there is no evidence the law will keep legitimate voters from voting. Attorneys challenging the law said there is little evidence of the kind of in-person voter fraud the law is intended to prevent.”

Another question: Is voter fraud such a huge matter in Texas that it requires a law such as this?

Instances of voter fraud over the course of many election cycles comprise a minuscule amount.

I’ll leave it to state Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, to put this matter in what I believe is its proper perspective:

“Texas has a long and sad history of making it difficult for people to vote. Elected officials repeatedly used the law to keep people out of the voting booth. Decades later, history rightly judges those men and women in a harsh light. As the court ruled, the voter ID law is essentially a modern day poll tax and has the same effect as other laws used in decades past to keep scores of lawful, legal Americans from voting. It was wrong then, it is wrong now, and I’m pleased the court stood up to protect the right to vote for all Texans.”

The fight isn’t over. Not by a long shot.

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Proof of citizenship to vote? Oh, please

My friend and former colleague Jon Talton calls it the Kookocracy that’s run amok in Arizona.

I think he’s on to something.

The Arizona — and now Kansas — kooks have been handed a court victory by a judge who says that, yep, it’s OK for those states to demand voters prove their citizenship if they intend to vote.

http://www.roguecolumnist.com/rogue_columnist/2014/03/keep-out-the-vote.html

I’ve been voting in every presidential election since 1972, starting in my home state of Oregon and — since 1984 — in Texas. Not one time has an election judge asked me to produce either a birth certificate or a passport to prove I’m a citizen of the U.S. of A. Never has any elections official looked sideways at me — at least none that I’ve ever noticed — and wondered whether I’m a red-blooded American male.

For the record, I am.

Now, though, the fight to make it more difficult for people to vote is heading down a curious path.

The courts — or shall I say those courts presided over by Republican-appointed federal judges — are notching up victories for the GOP-led effort to curb what they call an epidemic of voter fraud by illegal immigrants.

Of course, no such epidemic exists, except in the fanciful minds of those who want to suppress voter participation by those who might be inclined to vote for those nasty Democrats.

As Talton notes in his blog: “Real instances of serious voter fraud are almost nonexistent, and the few recent scandals have involved Republicans. On the other hand, minority and poor citizens are less likely to be able to produce a passport or birth certificate in order to exercise the franchise.”

I want to be clear about one thing. I join my fellow Americans in upholding the sanctity of the vote. We shouldn’t allow non-U.S. citizens to cast ballots in a rite that is reserved only for those who either swear allegiance to the Constitution or those who earned their citizenship by birthright.

These efforts to make it harder for people to vote, though, simply are un-American.