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Everyone Pretty Much Agrees – The 2016 Texas Primary Schedule Is Going To Be A Mess
Ah, Texas, sweet Texas. Badly-redistricted, voter-hostile Texas. Because the 2011 redistricting lawsuits still aren’t resolved, there is a general sense among election officials that one of two things will happen in the next two months:
- Either the Western District of Texas, San Antonio Division redistricting panel will be compelled to issue a new and more equitable redistricting plan for the State sometime prior to the candidate filing period, or
- Having failed to hold time in a bottle, the court will reluctantly apply the map used in the 2014 elections once again for 2016, notwithstanding the increasingly problematic and widening gap between that map and the actual state demographics.
The Republicans have a rather handy ace up their sleeve to shoot down the remedial application of any corrective court-ordered redistricting plan, and that ace is their faith in the misapplication of a little U.S. Supreme Court case called Purcell v. Gonzalez, 549 U.S. 1 (2006). The position of both the 5th Circuit and the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court appears to be that because Purcell called for caution in the application of last-minute court orders that might affect election schedules, it therefore follows that court orders protecting voting rights must not be enforced if an election is right around the corner. And an election is always, always just around the corner.
Of course, that’s just stupid, as Justice Ginsberg more than adequately explained in her dissent in Veasey v. Perry on the eve of the November 2014 election. When actual harm is being done to voters through actual violations of the law, the violator should not be able to say, “Oh well. Sorry about breaking the law, but it’s so close to the election. We just don’t have time not to break the law.”
If the judicial redistricting panel is going to fix Texas districts, it needs to do so by no later than November of this year – owing to increasingly early candidate filing deadlines to accommodate the Texas primary elections, district boundaries need to be known by no later than … well … now, if you want to be precise about it. The first day to file for party precinct chair elections is Tuesday, September 15th. Yes, as in September 15th, 2015. As in two weeks. The first day for candidates to file is one month later, on November 14th. The deadline to file is December 14th. Yes, as in this year.
The Texas Tribune has a nice background piece on the looming problem. (Election Managers Partying Like It’s 2012). If I were king, I wouldn’t care whether the parties got to have primaries or not – primaries are private elections conducted by social clubs (i.e., political parties). Primaries are beauty pageants for candidate nominations, and there are all sorts of alternatives in place for picking party candidates – caucuses, nominating committees, etc. Could a court order disrupt the primaries? Well, such are the wages of sin; nobody asked the Legislature to do an illegal job of redistricting back in 2011.
On a related note, Rick Hasen nicely excoriates our fair state in this recent analysis for Slate Magazine. (Texas Two-Steps All Over Voting Rights).
On the 50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act – A New Study from Rice University Corroborates the Damage Caused By the Photo I.D. Law
Not that anyone should be surprised, but there’s this:
One nice thing about this study is the timing, given the work that now needs to be done to judicially reform Texas voting laws. With this study, the plaintiffs in Veasey v. Perry should be able to help the Federal district court judge get over the hurdle placed by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. This evidence helps reinforce the trial court’s previous ruling holding that the State intentionally discriminated against minority voters.
The Fifth Circuit Decision in Veasey v. Perry Bends Over Backwards to Help the State
As other commenters have pointed out, today’s decision upholding the determination that Texas violated the Voting Rights Act is a painfully contorted partial affirmance and remand to the trial court for a remedy. (The link is to the copy of the opinion provided on Rick Hasen’s blog).
The appellate court in effect has said, “Well, Texas doesn’t always charge for birth certificates now (thanks to a mildly remedial law passed in the 2015 legislative session), so we think the picture ID requirement isn’t a poll tax. And … we think the trial court relied too much on an historical record of racial discrimination in Texas. That’s just mean. So … we’re remanding the decision to see if the trial court can find any more evidence of current racial discrimination. We grudgingly admit that the Texas picture ID law is illegal, but we’ll leave it to the trial court to figure out a way to carefully invalidate only those portions of the law that are bad. Which might not be the whole law.”
It’s really a terrible decision in a lot of ways; a sort-of wishy-washy agonized small-voiced acknowledgment that Texas broke the law, mixed in with page after page of carefully-worded dismissal of the mountains of factual evidence of intentional racial discrimination that prompted the law’s development in the first place.
Gosh. All that historical stuff just leaves the Court woozy and afraid that maybe the trial court was too hard on poor old Texas.
Story of A Disenfranchised Voter
I saw on Rick Hasen’s blog that he had already posted this link to a Guardian story about Texas voters – the story is as good an illustration of the profound wrongness of Texas voter I.D. law as any I’ve seen.
Taking Advantage of the Ebola Scare By Taking Advantage of the Ebola Scare
On Friday, the Austin-American Statesman ran one of those dreadful space-filling stories that the media seem drawn to like moths to a flame. Staff reporter Jonathan Tilove’s page A1, above the fold story entitled “Why Ebola is a perfect storm for Texas Democrats,” is the print journalism equivalent of the kind of click-bait faux-think pieces that infest websites like Buzzfeed, and that are so nicely satirized by The Onion’s “Clickhole.”
The story, (mostly behind the Stateman’s paywall) is an airy editorial that carries itself aloft on the reductionist B.S. argument that the current Ebola panic is “bad for Democrats” in Texas, all because a patient happened to die of Ebola in Dallas.
This is an example of what happens when reporters who are at a loss to make stories out of the actual news decide to manufacture some news in order to fill column inches. One can easily imagine a journalist spit-balling story ideas in a bull session with a few colleagues. “Oh, if only I could figure out how to squeeze the word ‘Ebola’ into this story of the November 4, 2014 general election. Because Ebola. And Ebola.”
There may well be internal “metrics” that show newspapers with the word “Ebola” on the front page show an X% spike in same-day sales, or that news websites with the word “Ebola” see an increase in page views. Or whatever.
To summarize, Mr. Tilove’s story is built on the general observations of various experts in the until-now invisible academic field of election epidemiology. The article is based most prominently on a gross generalization of findings by John Alford of Rice University, John Hibbing and Kevin Smith of the Political Physiology Lab at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and Christopher Frederico at the University of Minnesota’s Center For the Study of Political Psychology.
As has been noted in other sources, people who self-identify as conservative are arguably or potentially more likely to be emotionally activated by basal endocrine responses to fear and disgust than are people who self-identify as liberal. To the extent that one can draw conclusions from statistical variations in human responses to stress, conservatives could be said to be slightly less capable of logical reasoning in the face of fear than the general population, and could arguably be appealed to more effectively by fearmongering.
But I suspect that Drs. Alford, Hibbing, Smith, Frederico, and others would be the first to caution against extrapolating from general observations about fine-grade statistical variants in intellectual capacity among voters to any sort of specific predictions about outcomes in particular elections, and for all I know, the people studying the field of political physiology might be unhappy about the way that their research is being portrayed in this news story.
Let’s accept for the sake of argument that conservatives are more prone to being “spooked,” and are, as a group, less capable of rational thought than liberals (As a liberal, nothing makes me happier than being able to cite sociological studies that show liberals really are smarter, more intellectually evolved, and more competent than conservatives, so of course, all this statistical analysis is wonderfully affirming).
Does it follow from this premise that Texas Democrats are in trouble because a West African visitor to Dallas was unlucky enough to have Ebola, and was further unlucky enough to experience the dispiriting crappy health care offered by a Texas hospital? Couldn’t the narrative just as easily been “Texas Democrats Poised to Benefit from Mismanagement of Ebola By Conservative Policymakers?”
An accumulation of unrelated circumstances and facts (even when all these circumstances occur at roughly the same time) does not mean that these circumstances and facts are causally related to each other. An irrational fear of Ebola does not translate into political support for specific Republican candidates in the 2014 election in Texas.
The only reason why Mr. Tilove’s story is a narrative about the “poor hapless Democrats,” is because Mr. Tilove decided to slant the story as a narrative about the “poor hapless Democrats.” The story wears its political assumptions and subjective bias on its sleeve. I could just as easily write a story subtitled, “Fear of spiders, gas station restrooms, and clowns among stupid voters could create backlash against Democrats within blocs of stupid voting groups, experts say.”
In fact, as a useful corrective to Mr. Tilove’s embarrassingly awful feature story, let me redraft it as follows:
CONSERVATIVE VOTERS INFLUENCED BY GAS STATION RESTROOMS
“Disgusting” bathrooms in Dallas, elsewhere, could create backlash against rational voting, expert says
Filthy gas station restrooms are causing particularly dull-witted voters to side with the Republican Party, just weeks before the statewide election.
The tendency among the managers of independently-owned local gas stations to neglect routine maintenance and cleaning is helping feed doubts among particularly obtuse voters about Democratic chances.
The political problem that filthy gas station restrooms pose for Democrats in Texas, and in midterm elections nationally, could be even more fundamental. The story of experiencing a particularly rank bathroom, in which a desperate driver stops at a “mom-n-pop” convenience store, only to be repulsed by the conditions in the rattrap semi-detached shed behind the air pumps, is the quintessential issue more likely to provoke a gut reaction from conservatives than liberals, and draw them to the polls, according to Rice University political scientist John Alford, a cutting edge researcher on the physiology of ideology.
Republican Voters Swayed By Vomit, Diarrhea
“There are two things that conservatives are attuned to more and react to more — signals of threat and signals of disgust — so [filthy gas station restrooms are] a gift to the Republicans in this election that you’ve got exactly those two things dominating the national news,” Alford said. “Every time someone in the news is talking about projectile vomiting and diarrhea, I think, `The Republican vote just went up another half percent.’”
Boo to the Statesman for running an Abbott campaign ad in the guise of a news story.
Sub-Rosa Approval of Veterans Health Cards As Voter I.D. In Texas
A reader (Frank Provasek) has provided extremely valuable and eye-opening information in his comment on my post about Veasey v. Perry and the State’s selective, politically motivated treatment of veterans’ I.D.s. Without any public announcement or acknowledgment, the Secretary of State now accepts veteran’s health I.D. cards as voter I.D.s in the polling place, encouraging further cherry-picking, ad hoc after-the-fact administrative legislating, and pandering to specific conservative voters.
Although you may have seen Mr. Provasek’s comment already, I wanted to highlight it for those of you who may not regularly check subsequent developments on my posts. I’m reproducing Mr. Provasek’s comment in full:
Texas DPS defines military ID as a primary form of ID, and defines Veterans cards not as a primary or even secondary form of ID, but merely “a supporting document” like an electric bill with your name on it. . The Veterans cards are pictured in a PDF file here http://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/forms/id/acceptable-forms-of-ID.pdf
The VA created a NEW card called Veterans HEALTH Identification Card (VHIC) to go alongside the Veterans Identificatiion Card (VIC) The new card rolled out in Summer of 2014, so even AFTER the regular Veterans ID cards were somehow added in 2013, an additional card was added in 2014, while the Veasey v Perry lawsuit was underway.
You wouldn’t know these veterans cards are accepted by a text search on the SOS website (or any state website). They are only shown as images in powerpoint or pdf files — and do not show up in a Google search. They are not mentioned in the law, the election code, nor on the state voter portal here http://votetexas.gov/register-to-vote/need-id/ or on the posters displayed at the polling places http://votetexas.gov/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/poster-8.5×14-aw.pdf
(Emphasis added).
Veasey v. Perry – Commentary and Fallout After the Supreme Court Order
There have been a number of news stories and editorial commentaries regarding the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to allow Texas to conduct an illegal election; here are a few of particular interest –
Scott Lemieux at The Week asks why the Supreme Court allowed Texas to hold an unconstitutional election (his answer, more or less, is that the conservative justices are more loyal to the Republican Party than they are to the preservation of their own legal principles – http://theweek.com/article/index/270228/why-the-supreme-court-is-allowing-texas-to-hold-an-unconstitutional-election
In a witty, angry piece, Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine describes the GOP strategy to simultaneously attract and disenfranchise minority voters – http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/gop-trying-to-woo-suppress-minority-vote.html
Rick Hasen describes the importance of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s canary-in-a-coalmine dissent from the Supreme Court’s order, in Slate – http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/10/ginsburg_s_dissent_in_texas_voter_id_law_supreme_court_order.html
Professor Hasen also tracks down a minor factual error in Justice Ginsburg’s dissent – http://electionlawblog.org/?p=67193
The Dallas Morning News (that hotbed of liberalism) takes the time to excoriate the Supreme Court for its terrible decision – http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/20141020-editorial-in-voter-id-ruling-justices-side-with-more-obstacles-at-the-polls.ece
Michael Waldman at Politico explains how the Supreme Court has made a mess out of our elections – http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/supreme-court-voting-rights-112026.html#.VEbSuhZ0akI
Ari Berman at The Nation unsparingly points out that the Supreme Court has eviscerated the Voting Rights Act – http://www.thenation.com/blog/183561/supreme-court-eviscerates-voting-rights-act-texas-voter-id-decision
Mr Berman goes on to describe how across the country, the Republican Party is manipulating voting laws to its advantage – http://www.thenation.com/article/182233/gop-winning-war-voting#
Bob Bauer at More Soft Money Hard Money points out the errors in judicial judgment that opened the floodgates on state voter id laws – http://www.moresoftmoneyhardlaw.com/2014/10/crawford-politics-voter-id/
The Wall Street Journal notes the longer-term legal questions that must now be resolved – http://online.wsj.com/articles/voter-id-actions-push-fight-past-november-1413760050
If you don’t have time to read all these pieces, let me summarize the general consensus emerging across the country – in allowing Texas to conduct an illegal election, the U.S. Supreme Court did something monumentally wrong, further tarnishing its already discredited reputation, and eroding what remains of the public’s trust in the rule of law.
As I mentioned in my critique before the Court ruled to uphold the 5th Circuit’s stay of the trial court’s injunction, the Supreme Court has laid out a banquet at which every losing candidate can feast, thanks to the synergistic effects of the trial court decision and the state laws allowing for election contests (in particular, I would direct your attention to Title 14 of the Texas Election Code, and especially to chapters 221, 231, 232, 241, and 242 of that title). The contests of the statewide executive offices and the state and federal legislative seats will be a little trickier, because of the role played by the Texas Legislature as the tribunal before which such complaints are filed.
But for local races, the contests just need to be filed in state district court. That’s not to trivialize the procedural details, which require familiarity with the local rules of court, the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure, and the unusual modifications to discovery schedules, pleadings, and hearing schedules that are peculiar to election contests. But for any litigators, the single most daunting element of an election contest (namely, collecting evidence showing that an irregularity in the conduct of the election had a material effect on the outcome of that election) just got so, so much easier.
What’s good news for losing candidates is bad news for the winners, which could make for some strange bedfellows among civil rights advocates and affected candidates who are upset with the natural consequences of the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Well, At Least Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagen Spoke Up
This is shameful. The U.S. Supreme Court (usually such a pro-law and order institution) has ruled that the risk of “voter confusion”justifies breaking the law.
State of Texas Comes Out Swinging, With Its Eyes Clenched Shut and Its Arms Windmilling Frantically
As you likely know, the U.S. Supreme Court had asked the State of Texas to file a response brief in answer to the Department of Justice’s appeal in Veasey v. Perry by no later than 4:00 p.m. today (Central Time). (To recap the action so far – the trial court issued extensive findings of fact and determined that the State’s photo I.D. law was unconstitutional, ordering the immediate suspension of the illegal statute. The State applied to the 5th Circuit for an emergency stay so that it could continue to disenfranchise minority voters … violate the Fourteenth Amendment, … er … avoid voter confusion for the upcoming election. The 5th Circuit, agreed that it was much more important to avoid voter confusion than to actually protect voters, and ruled that the State was indeed entitled to continue breaking the law. The Department of Justice and other plaintiffs in the voter I.D. suit then appealed the 5th Circuit’s emergency stay of the trial court decision to the U.S. Supreme Court).
The State did indeed submit its argument by the deadline; here is a version omitting the appendix material.
In reviewing the brief, I’ve found one odd factual error that is likely to go missed by readers who are not “in the biz” of elections.
Contrary to the assertion on page 12 of the brief (page 15 in the .pdf file pagination), the State’s 254 counties don’t order “election kits” from the Secretary of State, – they get their election forms from private vendors, or they print them out themselves. The assertion is made in order to bolster the argument that the trial court’s order created “chaos” (and yes, the brief does actually venture into hyperbole on this point) because the poor State of Texas simply doesn’t know what to do.
Adopting the “kitchen sink” approach to appellate briefing, the State solicitor has filed a rambling 74-page brief, which I will endeavor to summarize.
And let me warn you right now. I am being mean, and flip, and sarcastic. But the brief filed by the State of Texas is embarrassing – it deserves every bit of the scorn I’m about to heap on it. And if you think that I’m misrepresenting the State’s argument, well, then, feel free to slog through the brief and do your own summary. Because while I’m being flip, and sarcastic, and mean, I’m also describing more or less exactly what the brief argues.
So heap your outrage upon me. I have read as much of the brief as I can stomach, and here’s what I was able to digest. And I’ll warn you – my summary may be long, but it pales in comparison to the numbing repetition of the actual brief:
1. We Totally Didn’t Expect the Trial Court to Issue A Ruling So Soon
Nobody told us that we were about to get dinged. Did I mention that the election is just around the corner? As the Supreme Court made clear with respect to both Wisconsin and North Carolina, by citing the principles expressed in Purcell v. Gonzalez, 541 U.S. 1, at 4-5 (2006), courts really shouldn’t take actions that affect the conduct of an election just around the corner, because it might confuse the voters. And that theory applies here, because we were sucker-punched. It’s like the trial court judge had it in for us.
2. It’s the Plaintiffs’ Fault that the Timing is So Bad
The plaintiffs could have given us a heads-up that they didn’t want us to apply the voter I.D. requirements for the November 2014 election, but they didn’t say anything! They waited until our guard was down, and then, boom! They totally pressed for some kind of injunction. How could we have known? We barely had time to cut and paste all the arguments out of our earlier briefs. (I mean we had no warning, aside from the months of legal maneuvering, two-week trial and parade of expert witnesses all attesting to the fact that we were breaking the law. Which we totally weren’t).
3. Also, They Made Up All That Stuff About Disenfranchised Voters
Where are these 600,000 disenfranchised minorities? I’ve never seen them. The plaintiff just made them up. There aren’t any facts – this is all just preposterous. They took our badly organized, barely coherent voter registration records, and just read whatever into them. We can’t be racists if we can’t find the minorities that we supposedly discriminated against, now can we? I mean, normally it’s not the appropriate role for an appellate court to substitute new findings of fact, given that the weighing of evidence from dozens of respected academic researchers and legal scholars was the role of the trial court, but we would certainly appreciate it if you would just go ahead and agree that there aren’t actually any disenfranchised voters. Because obviously, if there were so many disenfranchised voters, why haven’t I ever seen them vote?
4. You Know Why the 5th Circuit Didn’t Need To Say That the Plaintiffs Were Unlikely To Prevail On the Merits? Because Duh, It’s Obvious That This Whole Lawsuit Is Stupid
Okay, so first of all, we’re not racists. Plus, we didn’t do anything wrong. Lots of states put up little roadblocks to voting – that’s just the nature of red tape and bureaucracy. All perfectly legal.
It’s not the height of the obstacles that matters, it’s whether it’s okay to have procedures. Well, it is okay, and all picture I.D. is, is just a procedure. Just an innocent procedure. Nothing to see here. You said it was okay for other states to have procedures. Ergo, quod erat demonstram, it is therefore proven that the State of Texas can have procedures for voting. Which is all this photo I.D. stuff is, just a procedure.
5. Statement of the Case – Here’s What Happened
Okay, so the People of Texas wanted us to impose photo I.D. requirements. Well, we aim to please, right? So we innocently enacted these photo I.D. requirements. Which, by the way, everybody loves. Did I mention that people are absolutely gaga over picture I.D.
And here’s the thing. I don’t see anybody complaining. We’ve had a couple off-year elections, and none of these minority voters showed up trying to get picture I.D.s. Why? Because everybody’s happy. That’s why. So just to make it clear, the People of Texas asked us to make a totally non-racist law, which we did. And it worked! Nobody complained. I mean, except for the plaintiffs and some other people. But the important thing is that none of those disenfranchised voters complained. Why? Because they were happy with the new law too. And, … um …
But then, incredibly, this Federal Judge issues an “opinion” (if you can call it that) that actually refers to our procedures (which, as you recall, I mentioned are innocent) as a “poll tax.” Well, that’s just insulting, choosing a loaded term like that. And probably racist. Oh right, just because we’re a State that fought to preserve human bondage and enforced laws for a century that were intended to explicitly deny the vote to blacks and Hispanics, suddenly we’re the bad guys. We can’t reform? Whatever happened to “innocent until vindicated by a more levelheaded appellate court.” Amirite?
So anyway, the trial court just hauls off and issues this order, and I mean we tried. We really tried to understand what we were supposed to do, but it’s just impossible. Did I mention this all just happened last week?
We would have been willing to sit down like adults and discuss all this through the avenue of ponderous, months-long briefing schedules, interim hearings, en banc reviews, revisions, motions for rehearings, hearings on motions for rehearings, and so on. You know, using the civilized mechanisms of proper appellate court procedure.
But I mean, that judge left us no choice! How can we possibly be expected to drop everything in order to drop everything at the drop of a hat? Laws just don’t stop enforcing themselves – someone actually has to set the manual handbrake on the grinding, rusty gears of government in order to stop enforcing a law. We can’t stop on a dime, you know – there’s institutional momentum. Plus, consider the poor voters.
Heck, you can see that we made a hash of things just in that last two days – canceling voter I.D. issuance, restarting voter I.D. issuance, canceling mobile voter I.D. stations. Our hopelessly inept bureaucracy just can’t take this kind of whipsaw action.
6. Okay, Obviously The 5th Circuit Wasn’t Demonstrably Wrong To Stay the Injunction.
A. The Trial Court Deliberately Caused Mass Panic And Confusion, With Mere Days to Go Before the Election! Outrage!
Well, for one thing, we never did anything wrong in the first place, so there’s that. But furthermore and more immediately, the 5th Circuit was just doing what it’s seen the Supreme Court do in exactly this sort of circumstance.
The trial court hauled off and issued an off-the-cuff, “gotcha” order that mucked up election procedures on the very eve (the eve I tell you!) of an election, creating sheer chaos, and the 5th Circuit had to step in and put things to right. So really, all the 5th Circuit was doing was just what you would have done in their place.
I mean, we’re going to have to un-issue a bunch of forms. Like, at least eight forms. We already threw out the old ones, and nobody knows how to work our office copier.
It’s all just so unfair and disruptive, and the court didn’t even ask us if it would be hard to go back to the old way of doing things. Which, if they had asked, we would have said, “Yes. I’m paralyzed by the very thought of having to conduct elections without asking for photo i.d. I mean, how would that even work. A voter would come in, and I would say, “May I seeyourmm…thingie.” See? Impossible.
B. We are So Totally Going To be Vindicated
Plus, as I mentioned previously, as soon as real appellate judges take one look at this lawsuit, they are so going to totally vindicate the State of Texas. We’re the victims, here. Just minding our own business, enacting harmless, neutral election procedures, when suddenly these, these … groups. These partisan groups, with their filthy motives. They come in, and they make up a bunch of stuff. and then they call us the racists. Us! We’re colorblind! We don’t even ask people what race they are when they vote, and you know why – because we don’t see “race.” We see hardworking, easily distracted citizens who just want to show their picture I.D.s and do what’s right for democracy. We don’t even bother tracking them!
Plus, and more damning, all the so-called “injured parties” they paraded before the court weren’t even injured. All 17 of those minority voters managed to find the hustle and energy to get their picture I.D.s eventually – they can all vote! We didn’t harm anybody! Like I said. Totally innocent of all wrongdoing. You can bet we’re going to be thinking about sanctions. If we’re guilty of any crime, we’re guilty of the crime of caring too much. And if that’s a crime, then I don’t want to not be a criminal.
C. The Trial Court Acted Like Crawford isn’t even a Thing
As you’ll recall, the brilliant Justice Scalia noted in his incisive and illuminating concurrence to Crawford v. Marion Cty. Election Board, 553 U.S. 181, 198, (2008), going down to the DPS office to get a drivers license is as easy and painless as falling off a log. No one who jumps through bureaucratic hurdles to get a picture I.D. has anything to complain about – heck, they’ve got it too easy. Make ’em walk barefoot through broken glass and then they can come crying to me about how it’s “so hard” to vote.
And, as the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has so recently observed in Frank v. Walker, voting is always a little bit of a hassle. So what? Get a bus schedule and figure it out. We’re not here to wipe the milk off your chin. You think this is a hardship? Wait’ll I show you a real hardship.
And one more thing – the trial court made a big deal about how there’s almost no in-person voting fraud. Well, there isn’t much bank robbery either, so I guess we should just dump all the cash out in the street and hope for the best. So what if nobody is actually stealing elections by impersonating voters? Now that we’ve given people the idea, we have to be vigilant. But I guess the trial court doesn’t care if people just go around committing crimes.
D. Nobody Ever Managed to Find A Real, Live Disenfranchised Minority
Groups like LULAC, MALC, NAACP, and the Department of Justice went all over the State trying to find people victimized by our voter I.D. law. And you know what, these groups (which, I’ll have you note, are associated with minorities) weren’t able to find any actual victims. All they found were a bunch of eggheads looking for an easy buck, testifying about “charts” and “demographics” and “math.” As if any of that is real.
Has any officer of the State personally gone into a polling place and pistol-whipped a minority voter? Not that I know of, and even if they have, I bet they haven’t been doing it systematically. Plus, we wouldn’t allow that sort of thing. So where’s the victim?
Just ask yourself that – if you can’t find the victim, then it follows (Q.E.D.) that nobody did anything wrong. Because that’s exactly right.
The State of Texas has bent over backwards trying to help poor people. We told them that if they’re over age 65, just vote by mail. We told them how to get picture I.D.s. We put helpful information on our website. We set up some folding tables and tried to help people get I.D.s, and nobody took us up on it. It was a waste of time.
Here’s the thing, Mostly, people can get drivers’ licenses. I mean, think about it. Who do you know who doesn’t have a driver’s license, besides some old people, who if they would just spend a little time organizing their lives could plan to go down to the post office and mail in their ballot like, whenever.
We don’t judge those who can’t get I.D.s – we don’t even know if those people are minorities or not. Maybe they’re just not at that place in their life where they want to get an I.D.
Or maybe they are the kind of people who shouldn’t get an I.D. I’m not saying that I know that for sure. I’m just throwing it out there. And we’re not going to force anyone to get a picture I.D. That’s presumptuous, and probably racist. And patronizing. Let people not get I.D.s if they don’t want to. It’s a free country.
Anyway, voter I.D. just isn’t that big a deal. Even the expert for the DOJ said back in 2009 that “voter I.D. doesn’t appear to present a significant barrier to voting.” That’s from Stephen Andsolabehere’s article in Vol. 42 of PS: Poli. Sci. and Pol., at page 129.
Yeah, I know, “Professor” Andsolabehere then qualified that statement by basically clarifying that he was referring to voter I.D. as an idea in the abstract, and not to the fiendishly punitive form of picture I.D. laws adopted by the State of Texas. So what?
E. Not to Beat A Dead Horse, But I’ve got Another 30 Pages To Fill
Look, let’s just get down to brass tacks. We all know how this is supposed to play out. I’m going to express about 5,000 more words of outrage. I’m confident that you guys are going to do the right thing. Because, c’mon. Why would minorities get so exercised about voting rights anyway? – they’re on the losing side.
See you on the back nine.
Texas Election Law Blog 