Voter ID laws could have big impact on this year’s elections

Voter ID laws, and their impact on preventing hundreds of thousands of people from voting, are a big untold story of the 2014 election.

With less than a month to go before Election Day, a check with a sample of unionists and other sources shows hundreds of thousands of people – African-Americans, Latinos, the elderly and students – will be off the voting rolls thanks to so-called Voter ID laws and their restrictions on who can register, how to prove their eligibility to vote, and when they can vote.

Unionists, by and large, are not disenfranchised. Their college-student kids and neighbors are.  

“Folks in Southwest Virginia have identified it (voter ID) as an issue,” says Phil Smith, the Mine Workers communications director.  His union is a presence in several pro-GOP areas. 

“But in Kentucky, it’s not a problem.  We have largely rural retirees there.  They have to drive everywhere, so they have licenses” and can use them to prove their right to vote in the close Bluegrass State contest between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kent., and Secretary of State Alison Lundergren Grimes (D).  McConnell leads GOP obstructionists.

People losing the right to vote around the country include former U.S. House Speaker Jim Wright, D-Texas, who is too old to drive and doesn’t have a license.  That’s the only ID the Texas law, like some other such statutes pushed through by a GOP governor and legislature, will accept.  So Wright told the Washington Post he couldn’t vote in the Texas primary earlier this year.

But hard numbers are hard to come by, except where legal groups or lawsuits disclose them.  A lawsuit against Texas disclosed the 700,000 there.  Barbara Irwine of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law identified at least 50,000 in Georgia. 

The Fair Elections Legal Network reported Wisconsin officials sent out 12,000 absentee ballots without proper ID instructions for voting, due to recent back-and-forth court rulings about Wisconsin’s law. In just the past few days, the U.S. Supreme Court put the Wisconsin voter ID law on hold.

A.J. Starling, Secretary-Treasurer of the Tennessee AFL-CIO, calculates 10,000-11,000 people – split between students and adults who lack state-issued ID – will be tossed off the rolls in Davidson County (Nashville) alone.  Starling is also a county election commissioner. 

“They’re the students, the elderly, the minorities and the people who lack financial means of getting around” who don’t have driver’s licenses, he explains.  There’s a looming problem, too, on Election Day, Starling adds: “You’ve got many people eligible who don’t know they need a photo ID” when they show up at the polls.  “And how about the blind and handicapped?” he worries.

In one sense, the voter ID laws and their impact are not new, especially for minority-group members.  In a report several years ago, the Brennan Center for Law and Justice compiled details of voter “purges.”  Almost all were misguided, many were inaccurate and all especially targeted minorities, along with women, the elderly and students.  Purges were politically motivated, racially motivated, or both.  And the Republicans initiated all of them. 

“In 2007…election officials in Louisiana removed more than 21,000 people from the voter registration rolls, the majority from areas most devastated by Hurricane Katrina.  Almost a third of those removed were from Orleans Parish (New Orleans), which has a majority African-American population,” the report said.  And that was just one example.

“While we may be past the days in which election officials are complicit with those who intentionally seek to target persons of color for removal from the voter rolls, the way in which voter registration lists are main¬tained in this country may sometimes have a similar effect.”

And a special investigation by the Institute for Southern Studies – covering the region of the country with the worst history of voting discrimination – reported the lead sponsor of North Carolina’s stringent Voter ID law is State Sen. E.S. “Buck” Newton III, R-Wilson County.  He’s a former top aide to the late Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C.  That solon’s 1980 campaign against African-American Democrat Harvey Gantt, then Charlotte’s mayor, was notorious for illegally suppressing the African-American vote and for a racist “affirmative action cost your job” ad, too.

“Newton was the primary sponsor of an omnibus elections bill that had a strict voter ID provision and disallowed the use of student IDs for voting.  It also dramatically shortened early voting and eliminated same-day registration,” the Institute says.  All the restrictions could affect the tight race between Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., and state House Speaker Thom Tillis (R).