Vote Fraud Myths Meet Voting Rights Reality
Or as Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, observed in a 2004 voting rights case, "Absentee voting is to voting in person as a take-home exam is to a proctored one."
Nevertheless, the new wave of Republican pursuers of vote fraud seldom mentions absentee ballots. Maybe that's because, as a number of experts have noted, absentee ballots tend to be used more often by Republicans than Democrats.
And it's also fair to say that the negative impact of photo-ID requirements may be exaggerated, too. As Politifact reports, a 2013 report by the Census Bureau confirmed that the African-American voting rate in 2012 (66.2 percent) surpassed the white voting rate (64.1 percent), even in states that had the toughest photo-ID requirements.
Of course, it didn't hurt that President Barack Obama was on the ballot. Besides, much of the black turnout may have been spurred by backlash against widespread reports of Republican voter-suppression efforts. Some problems ironically solve themselves, but eternal vigilance is still price of voting rights, among other freedoms.
Justice Department lawsuits this summer and fall in Texas and North Carolina mark the first tests of voting rights since the Supreme Court's Shelby v. Holder decision last year gutted key provisions of the 1965 law. Those provisions required "preclearance" by the Justice Department before any changes could be made to election procedures in states that have long histories of racial discrimination.
Chief Justice John Roberts' majority opinion discarded those provisions as "based on 40 year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day." Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her dissent, compared that reasoning to "throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."
We'll see. Justice Department lawyers can now present witnesses like Rosanell Eaton to say whether the "40 year-old facts" are still relevant today. I wish they weren't, but in many ways they still are.
=======
E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
(c) 2014 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
