Home » Posts tagged 'voting rights litigation'
Tag Archives: voting rights litigation
Democracy in Crisis: Rick Hasen’s Editorial Is A Must-Read
“Don’t Let Our Democracy Collapse”
I’m reposting Professor Hasen’s editorial in today’s New York Times (linked through his election law blog) here for three reasons.
First, it’s a clear-eyed and thorough analysis of the present danger.
Second, it nicely coincides with a question my wife asked me this week (which I’ll paraphrase here as “So … what legal mechanisms may be employed to remove bad actors from elective public office?”)¹
And third, it’s a prompt for me to ask all of you for your thoughts.
There is cause for pessimism about voting rights in general (e.g., as the Texas House redistricting trial winds down, and in the face of institutionalized hostility towards the preservation of voting rights). But there is also cause for optimism (as civil rights advocacy groups renew their focus and energy in response to the urgency of this crisis, embedded in what I might dryly refer to as a target-rich environment for litigation).
______________________
¹With respect to my wife’s question (which was specifically about removing executive and legislative officers from the federal government), here’s the short answer – per Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, the President may be removed from office following a trial of impeachment in the Senate, based on articles of impeachment passed by the House, or he may be suspended from the duties of office based on the procedures outlined in Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Members of Congress may be expelled from office upon a two-thirds vote by their peers, per the second clause of Article I, Section 5.
Heel Turn—DOJ Files For Continuance In Texas Voter ID Case
As reported on CNN and as analyzed by Rick Hasen’s Election Blog, the U.S. Department of Justice has asked for an extension in trial court briefing deadlines in the Texas voter ID lawsuit due to a change in the federal administration.
The common-sense interpretation of this procedural move (as expressed by Professor Hasen)?:
DOJ will switch sides and join the State of Texas in arguing in favor of more restrictive voting requirements. More to come.
Ari Berman & Others on Texas Voter Registration and Jim Crow: tl;dr: Racism, Recalcitrance, Restrictions
The Nation’s Ari Berman has posted a number of must–read stories over the last few weeks regarding the 2016 election cycle.
Although Mr. Berman’s recent election stories have been been national in scope (he’s examining violations of voting rights in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Ohio, among other places) his cover story for this week’s issue specifically focuses on the State of Texas’s discriminatory voter I.D. law and our restrictive voter registration laws.
Berman’s coverage in The Nation‘s cover story, “Texas’s Voter-Registration Laws Are Straight Out of the Jim Crow Playbook” spotlights the restrictions on volunteer deputy voter registrars (or “VDRs”).
The story also looks at threats by some Texas officials to investigate voters who lack the narrow range of acceptable forms of photo I.D. required under the State’s 2011 voter I.D. law that was struck down in July of this year as racially discriminatory.
From the cover story in the October 31, 2016, issue of The Nation:
“VDRs [Volunteer Deputy Registrars] were established in 1985, but the restrictions on voter registration were significantly toughened by the Texas legislature in 2011 to require county trainings, ban non-Texans, and prohibit VDRs from being compensated based on the number of people they register. As a result, ‘Texas is the most restrictive state in the union when it comes to voter registration,’ according to the Texas Civil Rights Project.”
I’ve written about these matters here, here, here, here, and, most recently, here, so its good to see these problems getting wider national attention.
***
A bit more on selected links included in this post:
Ari Berman’s Twitter feed is a good source of links not only to Mr. Berman’s own journalism, but also to other materials relating to civil rights and voting rights issues generally: https://twitter.com/AriBerman
The Nation—launched July 1865, so it’s covered a few elections in its time—has had excellent reporting and opinion pieces on the national elections: https://www.thenation.com.
My source for the text of provisions from Chapters 63 and 13 of the Texas Election Code (relating to voter I.D. and volunteer deputy voter registrar laws respectively) is the Texas Legislature Online: http://www.capitol.state.tx.us funded by us, the people of the great state of Texas.
Texas Voter ID Troubles Continue; District Court Orders Judicial Oversight of Texas Voter Education – And the State Doubles Down By Disparaging the Motives Of Voters Who Claim Not To Have Photo I.D.
I. APPARENTLY, THE STATE CAN SCRUTINIZE VOTERS WHO SUBMIT DECLARATIONS OF REASONABLE IMPEDIMENT IN LIEU OF PHOTO ID
On September 22, 2016, the Texas House of Representatives Elections Committee conducted a routine interim hearing on various technical matters relating to election administration. For three and a half hours the committee members and witnesses discussed proposed legislative tweaks to the petition signature process, to municipal elections, to obligation bonds and taxes, and so on. You can watch the whole hearing if that’s your thing, but for my money the really interesting stuff doesn’t come up until the very end of the hearing.
As the hearing wrapped up, State Representative Celia Israel asked an official from the Texas Secretary of State’s office about a court order that had been issued two days prior to the committee hearing. In particular, Representative Israel was curious to find out what the State was doing to educate voters about I.D. requirements for the November 8, 2016, election.
In response to the questions, Director of Elections Keith Ingram explained that the State had incorporated the text of the court’s most recent directive into the website and upcoming print and media advertising; he specified that voters who “do not possess [the statutorily mandated forms of photo I.D.] and cannot reasonably obtain it,” could cast a regular ballot by completing a “Declaration of Reasonable Impediment,” if they also supplied alternate forms of documentary evidence of their identity.
Representative Mike Schofield then took the discussion in a new direction (starting at the 3 hour, 36 minute mark), after asking if the State could track information about whether the Declarations were submitted by people who actually have I.D.:
What I don’t want to see is a gross number, and everybody acts as if those people don’t have I.D…. If you pretend you don’t have it, and use one of these declarations, that’s illegal, isn’t it?
In response to the question, Mr. Ingram clarified that voters entitled to use the Declaration would be those who had either never been issued one of the six forms of photo I.D. listed under the law, or those whose previously issued I.D.s had been lost or destroyed, and who had a reasonable impediment to replacing the missing I.D.
Representative Israel raised a hypothetical situation (described starting at 3 hours 45 minutes) in which a voter’s “reasonable impediment” is that the voter is voting at a polling place on one end of town, but left her photo I.D. at home, at the other end of town.
In that circumstance, Mr. Ingram explained that assuming that the voter filled out the “Declaration” and wrote down that the reasonable impediment was “left my I.D. at home,” the election worker would have to take the declaration at face value and allow the voter to cast a ballot.
Representative Schofield seemed incredulous, asking, “Is that … is that correct? … You’re going to let them vote with a ‘Reasonable Impediment?'”
The Director of Elections responded:
The poll worker cannot challenge the ‘Reasonable Impediment’ asserted by the voter. …. But if that’s the reasonable impediment, I think the voter is at risk, because they’re not following the law. But that’s not for the poll worker to decide. [Emphasis added by me.]
Committee vice-chair Craig Goldman then asked, “But, how does that get challenged, and then how is their vote null and void?”
The Director of Elections explained:
The vote will never be null and void. It’ll get challenged in an election contest, if it’s a close election. And obviously these things [the Declarations of Reasonable Impediment] will be available for folks to give to their district attorneys to follow up on. [Emphasis added by me.]
Representative Schofield pressed the issue as the hearing entered its final minutes (at the 3 hour 46 minute mark):
I realize we’re going to have a lot of illegal votes and a lot of fraudulent votes. That’s why we have voter I.D. My concern is that there are going to be a lot of people trying to thwart the [voter I.D.] law who have valid drivers’ licenses; who have passports; and are going to assert these declarations. Their votes may count in this election, but I want to make sure that when we go back to court, we’re not saying ‘oh, there’s this huge number of people that filed these declarations.’ I want to drill down and find out which one of ’em [declarations] were bogus. [Emphasis added by me.]
The Director of Elections responded, “And I’ll think you’ll be able to tell easily.” He then went on describe how one of the Declarations of Reasonable Impediment that had already been used in an off-season tax ratification election indicated that one voter had written that the “reasonable impediment” was “fascist law.”
The committee chair said: “Fascist law? They wrote that?”
***
What’s troubling about the exchange (aside from Representative Schofield’s counterfactual and inflammatory assertion that there’s going to be a lot of “fraudulent votes” in this election), and what should be especially troubling to the plaintiffs in the voter I.D. lawsuit, is the implication—encouraged both by Representative Schofield’s assertion that “we’re going to have a lot of illegal votes,” and by the response from the Director of Elections that voters who use the Declaration can be tracked, and possibly referred to local district attorneys for prosecution for illegal voting—that voting without an approved photo I.D. is automatically suspect.
So … why is this suggestion of potential criminal prosecution troubling?
Because it is not a stretch to imagine that statements like this could have a chilling effect — dissuading eligible, qualified voters without approved photo I.D. from voting. In other words, threatening to investigate voters who file a Reasonable Impediment Declaration could end up hurting the very group of voters that the August 10, 2016, court order was intended to help.
Think I’m exaggerating about “threatening to investigate”?
On September 9, 2016, Rick Hasen, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, posted a story on his Election Law Blog about the motion for enforcement of the August 10 court order filed by the private (non-Department of Justice) plaintiffs in Veasey v. Perry. These plaintiffs were reacting to this August 26, 2016, news story (as quoted in the private plaintiff’s motion):
[Harris County Clerk Stan] Stanart says he will investigate everyone who signs that form to assure they are not lying. Whether anything happens, that’s up to the [Harris County District Attorney’s Office]. But after the votes are counted and the election ends, Stanart said his office will be checking to see whether a person who signed the sworn statement has a Texas Department of Public Safety-issued ID through the DPS database.” Meagan Flynn, Harris County Clerk Will Vet Voters Who Claim to Lack Photo ID, HOUSTON PRESS, Aug. 26, 2016.
So to recap: As of late August in a presidential election year, the chief election official in Harris County, the most heavily populated county in Texas, was quoted as intending to investigate voters who claim they lack photo I.D.s.
That threat of punitive or retributive investigation prompted the federal district court in Corpus Christi to issue on September 20 a legal order, in which the court told the State to clarify and make explicit that voters who reasonably lacked photo I.D. were legally entitled to an alternate method of qualifying for a regular ballot.
But then in the hearing on September 22, just two days after the court order, the State was still discussing the option of criminal investigations and prosecutions of voters without photo I.D.s, in order to satisfy a Republican state legislator’s concerns about the effective enforcement of the State’s photo I.D. law.
And the statements of the Director of Elections reassuring Representative Schofield that voters who vote without photo I.D. can be tracked and investigated echoed the statements made in August by Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart.
II. BACKGROUND — WHAT’S ALL THIS ABOUT “REASONABLE IMPEDIMENT”?
After the conservative Fifth Circuit appellate bench ruled that the State of Texas had enacted a discriminatory voter I.D. law, the federal district court in Corpus Christi that has been handling the photo I.D. suit (Veasey v. Perry) issued a judicial order on August 10, 2016, to remedy the immediate effects of the discriminatory law.
The plaintiffs in the ongoing lawsuit relating to voter I.D. then filed a motion informing the district court judge that the state’s officials were misrepresenting the court’s directive. (see, e.g., the Texas Tribune‘s September 7, 2016, story).
The August 10 judicial order had provided that voters who could not “reasonably” obtain an acceptable form of photo I.D. could substitute the use of some other forms of identification if they completed a “declaration of reasonable impediment.” The Elections Division at the Texas Secretary of State’s Office did not include the word “reasonably” in training materials, the agency’s website, and voter information posters, leaving the impression that the only voters who could access alternative forms of identification were those who were absolutely unable to get the photo I.D.
Omitting the word “reasonably,” which had been specifically included in the district court’s August 10 judicial directive, may seem like a minor editorial alteration. But in making that omission, the State gave the plaintiffs the impression that State officials were dragging their feet in response to the August 10 court order.
The Department of Justice summarized the problem in its September 6, 2016, motion to enforce the August 10, 2016, remedial order as follows:
The District Court responded as follows (from the September 20, 2016, court order):
Redistricting Panel Shoots Down Plaintiffs’ Request For Injunctive Relief
This isn’t breaking news — the redistricting panel’s order came out November 6, and the Texas Tribune and various editorialists have already weighed in on the implications. (See also this coverage from Texas Lawyer).
In particular, Jody Seaborn’s editorial in the Austin-American Statesman expresses everything I feel about the decision, only better. Jody also points out how the delays in the 2012 primary schedule ultimately produced Ted Cruz’s primary runoff victory over the more moderate David Dewhurst. (Disclosure: Jody and I are old friends.)
The federal judicial redistricting panel charged with reviewing the State’s 2011 redistricting plan (yes, that’s not a typo. 2011), has responded somewhat petulantly regarding an effort by a subgroup of the plaintiffs in the Perez v. Perry redistricting litigation who joined together in a motion to enjoin the State from using gerrymandered district boundary lines for the 2016 U.S. House of Representatives elections.
For a good overview and analysis of the origin, development and philosophy of this gerrymandering (cleverly described as a “Perrymander” by various wags), see this excellent article by Rosemarie Unite, The Perrymander, Polarization, and Peyote v. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, 46 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 1075 (2013) (pdf). Also available in on the web at http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/llr/vol46/iss3/7).
The subgroup of the plaintiffs that petitioned—including the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC ), the NAACP, the City of Austin, Travis County, Eddie Rodriguez Jr., Shannon Perez, the Quesada plaintiffs, et al., but excluding the Latino Redistricting Task Force, the United States Department of Justice, and the various congressional officeholder plaintiffs—had hoped to light a fire under the panel by asking for an injunction against the use of the redistricting plan that had been used in the November 2014 election (presumably hoping that the panel would either completely redraw the district maps, or at the very least prohibit the use of the bad maps).
Instead, the redistricting panel announced that the bad maps would most assuredly be used for the 2016 elections, stating that new maps at this late date would be unduly disruptive and confusing to voters and office seekers.
So sorry, petitioners.
See this statement from page five of the redistricting panel’s denial of a request for injunctive relief:
The Court has been working diligently and has made substantial progress toward resolution of the claims on the 2011 plans; however, it has not yet reached a final decision. Trial on the merits of the claims against the 2013 plans has not been scheduled, and legal challenges to the 2013 plans will not be resolved before the 2016 election cycle.
This unanimous denial could have been subtitled, “Redistricting Panels Have Feelings Too, You Know.”
The panel explicitly countered criticism that the judges have been dragging their feet on a resolution.
One can’t help but feel that there’s a little bit of passive-aggressive retribution in the decision. As in, “Oh! You think we haven’t been working fast enough to resolve your redistricting problems? Well how about this? How about we just declare that we won’t bother fixing any of this until the 2018 elections? Yeah! That’ll teach you to pressure us about coming up with some sort of consensus regarding your maps.”
This denial is frustrating on many levels. The State of Texas made no real effort to argue that its 2011 and 2013 maps weren’t discriminatory toward minority voters.The State’s argument, grounded and based solidly on a line of U.S. Supreme Court cases relating to so-called “partisan gerrymandering,” beginning with Davis v. Bandamer, 478 U.S. 109 (1986), Vieth v. Jubelirer, 541 U.S. 267 (2004), and League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, 548 U.S. 399 (2006) is, more or less, we don’t discriminate against Hispanics and African Americans because of race, but because we, the line-drawing Republican Party majority, want to crush the Democratic Party, and therefore any seemingly discriminatory line-drawing was not intentional.
You can see this argument reflected throughout the State’s proposed finding of fact and conclusions of law, as well as the State’s pre- and post-trial briefs. For example, on page 56 of the State’s proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law, finding of fact number 518 states that the chairman of the Texas House Redistricting Committee felt he could not pass a redistricting plan unless he guaranteed that three of the four new U.S. House of Representatives seats for Texas would go to Republicans. Later, on pages 100-101 of the same proposed finding of fact and conclusions of law (starting around proposed conclusion 45) the State argues for findings of fact that the Texas redistricting plan was motivated by political, rather than racial, discrimination, and was therefore not part of an invidious intentionally racially discriminatory scheme.
And the redistricting panel (which for those of you who are new to the story, consists of the three-judge panel convened in May of 2011 out of the membership of the San Antonio division of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas, as explained in this handy blog post from the wonderful (and greatly missed) Texas Redistricting and Election Law blog) has made as explicit as it possibly can that the most glaring of demographic problems with the State’s Congressional and State legislative district maps are not going to be fixed in time for the 2016 elections. That fact leaves just two federal election cycles (2018 and 2020) before the next redistricting maps get drawn.
Particularly for Hispanic voters in Texas, 2011–2021 is shaping up to be the lost decade for both U.S. House of Representatives representation, as well as for representation in the Texas Legislature, notwithstanding the fact that the population gains experienced by the State were overwhelmingly the result of increases in the population of protected classes of linguistic and racial minorities.
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.
Historical Survey of Voting Discrimination Confirms the Disastrous Short-Sightedness of the Roberts Court
We all knew that Shelby County v. Holder was wrongly decided, and now we have more data to add to the mountain of statistical evidence of why preclearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was so important.
Check out today’s editorial in the New York Times: “Voting Rights: By the Numbers.” An October 2014 statistical survey by J. Morgan Koussler (available at Social Science Research Network or SSRN) confirms that discriminatory practices relating to voting are more common in the jurisdictions covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act under the old formula, and that while voter turnout and minority participation might seem to be a fairly blunt instrument on which to base social engineering, it was a pretty good proxy for determining where actual racial exclusions from voting were being perpetrated.
Not for nothing, but I’d like to point out that just about anybody with an interest in the preservation of voting rights for minority voters should be pushing for a renewal of the preclearance process. Congress needs to legislate away the awful Shelby County v. Holder decision.
And … I’d point out with just a hint of impatience that there are lots of potential interim solutions that might serve at least as stopgap measures to limit the appalling current trespasses against our voting rights. My own suggestion is to bootstrap preclearance into the administration of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
I get why my suggestion might not be one that the Justice Department is enthusiastic about – there are budget issues to be concerned about, and the physical staffing of the Voting Rights section of the Civil Rights division is a politically charged topic; any attempt to create modest election procedure reporting requirements for U.S. jurisdictions will doubtless draw howls of protest from the very jurisdictions that most desperately need to be scrutinized.
But the damage done by the Supreme Court isn’t going to magically fix itself – if Congress can’t pass a renewed Voting Rights Act (as it clearly can’t in its current status as the least functional branch of government), the only remaining avenue for reform is through administrative rule-making and executive action.
C’mon – you have to admit that some form of recordkeeping relating to changes in election procedures is better than what we have available right now, which is just a hodgepodge of piecemeal, bespoke civil rights lawsuits that are expensive and limited in effect.
The Great Chain of Being Cranky About Disenfranchisement; or The Stupids, Continued
After the November election, a number of editorial articles came out with variations on the following theme – that the various depressing voter I.D. laws didn’t actually have much effect on elections. Because hey, the Republicans knocked the elections out of the park, right? That happened despite disproportionately good turnout among minority voters in some elections.
Such editorials are music to the ears of the extreme right (“Yeah. See, we’re not racists. If we were racists, we would have had to turn the firehoses on the swarms of minority voters that voted in the November 2014 federal elections. But we didn’t have to use firehoses or police dogs, or even fire any tear gas into the polling places. Therefore, we have conclusively demonstrated that we’re not racists. Plus, we love democracy. Democracy was very good to us.”) and to the defense attorneys representing the State of Texas in its appeal of Veasey v. Perry et al.
I mean, if an editorial by Nate Cohn in the New York Times, (that notorious hotbed of centrist legal opinions), comes out saying that voter I.D. weren’t no big deal, then the centerpiece of the plaintiffs’ evidence against the State in Veasey is undermined, and the State should walk on all charges, right?
Mr. Cohn was extending a dialog he had begun with the Brennan Center on this question with an earlier and similarly dumb editorial along the same themes.
Mr. Cohn’s argument runs like this: It must be the case that 600,000 Texas voters weren’t disenfranchised because if they had been disenfranchised, they would have been turned away from the polls. Since 600,000 people weren’t turned away from the polls, 600,000 people weren’t disenfranchised. Quod erat demonstram. Ipso facto. Res ipse loquitor. Et cetera.
And because only a fraction of all registered voters lack sufficient I.D., (say, 9 percent, or 11 percent, or something like that) it means that voter I.D. laws don’t actually change election outcomes. Right? Right? Because if the bad guy won by 20 percent, then even if all the voters without i.d. had been able to vote (and even if all of them had voted for the bad guy’s opponent), the bad guy would still have won by 11 percent, or 9 percent. Or whatever.
I’ve written about this before, but maybe if I write slower and louder, people will begin to understand.
The secret to getting people not to vote is to discourage them from attempting to vote. And because the cost of voting is so high compared to the benefit, it is very, very easy to discourage people from voting.
And when people don’t vote, they don’t make an ostentatious show of not voting. They don’t gather en masse, carrying placards and linked arm-in-arm at the polling place to not cast their ballot, in a vast silent repudiation of their civic authority. Such mass demonstrations by non-voters would be quite satisfying, if they happened, and would make for some fun political theater. But they don’t happen, because showing up at a polling place to not vote is almost as much bother as showing up at a polling place to vote.
Non-voters don’t go out of their way to proclaim their nonvoting status. They go to work or school. They run errands. They watch T.V. Some of them register to vote, but fail to register on Mr. Cohn’s radar, and so he assumes that they don’t exist. Some of them fail to register to vote, period, and so they don’t even show up in the statistics of “registered voters who lack i.d.”
The authors of the sociological studies at the heart of the plaintiffs’ case in Veasey v. Perry didn’t merely rely on the self-selecting sample of voters who actually go to vote. They called people up and asked them direct questions about their status as voters, and about their inclination to vote or not vote, based on their circumstances.
As it turns out, (as amply demonstrated by our most recent election) disenfranchisement works. It would have been embarrassing to the arch-conservative proponents and apologists for picture i.d. requirements if disenfranchisement hadn’t worked, because it’s actually kind of an administrative pain in the ass to exclude those naughty liberals from the polls, and it costs money to administer draconian voter i.d. laws. Luckily for the right, everything went swimmingly.
Let’s look at the November 2014 elections in one Texas county, and see how disenfranchisement succeeded in that county.
Harris County, Texas
Voters in Harris County had a long ballot to work on this year, in part because this very heavily populated county has an enormous county and district judiciary to handle the legal caseload generated by its roughly 4,330,000 residents. As it seems to happen every four years, the district and county courts were filled by Republican candidates, who pretty uniformly won their seats by consistent margins, just as they had even when Bill White carried Harris County in 2010.
2010 was a watershed year for the county – it was the first Federal decennial census in which Harris County had more than 4 million people. The City of Houston, meanwhile, was estimated to have just a smidge under 3 million people; there’s no doubt that Houston, like much of urban Texas, is experiencing a tremendous population boom. In fact, the county has added roughly 240,000 people or more since the 2010 Census; my guess (and the guess of the U.S. Census demographers) is that the recent population increase skews in favor of Hispanic or Latino residents.
As of the 2010 Census, slightly more than 40% of the Harris County population identified as Hispanic or Latino, while about 33% identified as non-Hispanic white, and about 18.4% identified as non-Hispanic black. As of 2013, those percentages were estimated to work out as 41% Hispanic, 19% Black, and 32% non-Hispanic white.
A lot of people under 18 live in Harris County, so let’s say that only about 72 percent of the total population are voting age. That’s about 3,117,600 voting age people in Harris County as of 2013.
So … how successful have people been at registering Harris County residents to vote? Well, out of those 3.12 million voting-age people in Harris County, only 2.06 million were registered to vote in the November 2014 election. So let’s see, um, that’s a 66% registration rate.
Hmm. Let’s see. In 2002 (a relatively slow gubernatorial election year, with anemic turnout), there were 1.9 million registered voters in Harris County.
But … Wait. What? That’s almost as many registered voters as there are now in that county.
What was the voting-age population of Harris County in 2002? Well, the estimated 2002 population in the county was 3.54 million. Of those, we’ll guess that around 71% were 18 or older (based on the 2000 census data). So that’s an estimated voting age population of 2.51 million in 2002, of whom 1.9 million were registered. That’s a 75.6% registration rate.
I’ll admit that a 75.6% voter registration rate wasn’t spectacular in 2002. But it was definitely better than a 66% registration rate in 2014. If the Harris County Voter Registrar had managed to just tread water with regard to registration between 2002 and 2014, we’d expect that there would be about 2.36 million registered voters in Harris County as of the November 2014 election.
Which works out rather nicely as a shortfall of 300,000 people in the Harris County voting-age population who should have been registered voters (based on historic trends), but who weren’t registered.
Now … from 2002 to 2014, the racial demographics in Harris County basically flipped for white and Hispanic voters. In 2002, about 42% of the voters were non-Hispanic whites, and about 32% of the voters were Hispanic.
What the Texas Republicans realized in 2011 is that they would have to find a way to discourage both voter registration and voting in Harris County, so that while the percentage of non-Hispanic registered voters would remain roughly steady (rising a very modest 8% over the course of 12 years), the percentage of Hispanic registered voters would need to go down. And it would need to go down by a big margin.
The available tools were varied, and ranged from bad-faith purges and registration challenges to outright bullying and strong-arm tactics. But none of those tools would be as effective (in terms of the percentage of potential votes suppressed) as a simple increase in the opportunity costs of voter registration and voting.
This is an area deserving of additional study, but I would hazard that by focusing solely on the suppressive effect of voter i.d. laws as applied to registered voters, studies by the Brennan Center and others have dramatically underestimated the intended and successfully achieved levels of vote suppression generally. The underestimate is the result of failing to consider the suppressive effect of harsh election laws not just on the people who are already registered to vote, but also on the people who haven’t registered yet.
If the suite of laws enacted in 2011 (not just picture i.d., but also restrictions on volunteer deputy registrars, the mealy scrutiny and comparison of error-ridden databases, etc.) managed to drop voter registration in Harris County by around 13%, and the picture i.d. requirement managed to mess up voter eligibility for around 9% to 11% of the remaining 2.06 million voters, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that (in Harris County, at least) that voter suppression succeeded in three ways, by:
(1) trimming the rolls of around 300,000 (mostly minority, poor, or elderly people) who would otherwise have registered to vote;
(2) discouraging another 180,000 to 220,000 registered voters from bothering to vote (the latter group also being disproportionately composed of minorities and the poor), and;
(3) so debasing and screwing up the election experience for everyone else that turnout was at an all-time low (around 678,000 votes cast in the big races, or around 33% of the registered voters).
It starts to look like the Republicans were running up the score in an unseemly way. I mean, if you start with 3.12 million possible voters (more or less), disenfranchise one sixth of those voters (say, around half a million), and then demoralize two thirds of the rest so badly that they don’t bother to come out and vote, well then … voila!
You get an instant Republican grand slam. A mandate for the ages, and an endorsement by our polity of the emerging πρωκτοκρατία (proctocratia, i.e., a form of government known as a proctocracy, administered by proctocrats).
Hey! You there! Candidates in Harris County who lost!
If you lost, and you lost by a margin of around 24% of the vote or less, strongly consider filing an election contest. Remember – such an action must be initiated not later than 30 days after the canvass of your election, by filing suit in district court. Your clock is ticking. Also remember (if you’re feeling a little sheepish about filing such a lawsuit) – that the November 2014 general election was an illegal election.
As for Mr.Cohn of the New York Times, here are some general tips for successfully navigating the confusing world we live in.
Sometimes bad actions are identified by absence, rather than presence. For example, if you are in a coal mine, and most of the canaries have suddenly gone silent, that isn’t proof that the remaining canaries are happy and content. That’s evidence that something is wrong.
“Well, everyone said that when the crew hit that natural gas pocket, it created a poisonous atmosphere. But I heard that at least 32% of the canaries were still singing. Therefore, the natural gas pocket could not have had any measurable effect on the health of the canaries. Q.E.D. Res ipse loquitor. Et cetera, et cetera. Say, does anyone else feel a little light-headed?”
Whither Voting Rights Litigation?
Much of the latest voting rights litigation has run full tilt into the whirling buzz-saw of hostile appellate Federal courts. By way of example, we have the U.S. Supreme Court’s reinstatement of the State of Ohio’s fairly dastardly statutory elimination of same-day voter registration, a likely U.S. Supreme Court dissolution of an injunction against North Carolina’s enforcement of various restrictions on voting, and (most outrageously), a federal court of appeals overturning of lower-court prohibitions against Wisconsin’s voter i.d. laws, thereby causing an embarrassing and clumsy disruption of the election process.
To be blunt, this state of affairs does not bode well for smooth, untroubled election administration in the foreseeable future.
Well, at least it makes for an angry electorate.
The posting is inspired by and links to Rick Hasen’s rundown of the latest pre-Election litigation headlines, at http://electionlawblog.org/?p=66287
In Ohio, A Stirring Defense of Early Voting That Leaves Everyone Unhappy
As a number of bloggers have reported, (including, separately, Professors Rick Hasen and Derek Muller) a generous pro-voter convenience decision has just come out of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. The court found that by eliminating a five-day period where voters could do same-day-registration and early voting all in one go, the State of Ohio had unjustifiably curtailed the opportunity for poor and minority voters to cast ballots.
The reason why some analysts of the decision (including legal scholars from the Left) aren’t enthusiastic about the decision is that they find their credulity strained by the argument that voting rights are badly injured when a 35-day early voting period is reduced to a 28-day early voting period.
The decision in Ohio State Conference of the NAACP v. Husted, et al. (pdf helpfully provided by Rick Hasen’s election law blog) is receiving criticism because of a perception that the court is going crazy and ruling that even the most inconsequential, incidental or de minimus injuries to voters rights are unacceptable.
As Derek Muller pointed out in his blog, Ohio didn’t even have early voting until 2005, and (from his perspective) the court is getting into a high dudgeon over a frankly inconsequential reduction. Are Ohioans walking through broken glass to vote? Are they having to cut through minefields and no-man’s land? – they’ve got a month to cast their ballots.
Luxury! Why, when I was a lad, we had to struggle uphill through towering snowdrifts to vote, and we only had voting on Election Day!
As a general principle of election law, voters are not “owed” early voting opportunities. Early voting (at least traditionally) has been regarded as a convenience that the State offers to voters more for the sake of the State’s own administrative ease and benefit than because of any inalienable right inherent in citizenship. One is not endowed with the right to cast a ballot prior to Election Day. There are a number of states that offer either no in-person early voting whatsoever, or offer much less early voting than Ohio.
And generally in the past, civil rights arguments against a lack of early voting (say, based on the 14th Amendment, the Voting Rights Act, or on other theories) go exactly nowhere, given that the States have broad authority to conduct their elections pursuant to state laws.
But critics of the decision in Ohio State Conference of the NAACP v. Husted, et al. are being a little disingenuous. To the extent that the plaintiffs got an injunction against the State’s reduction of early voting, it wasn’t because they argued about the unfairness of a slightly shorter early voting period.
It was because the State was getting rid of in-situ same-day voter registration at the polls, a legislative remedy that had been adopted in 2005 in response to, as a remedy against, and as a corrective of the gross sins committed against Ohio voters by the organs of state government prior to the November 2004 election in Ohio.
The fight isn’t a quibble over a few days in the early voting schedule.
The fight is about the loss of same-day registration, which arguably signals a retrenchment and governmental backsliding into a tacit endorsement of the unconscionable tactics used against black voters in Cleveland in 2004.
The story has been better told by others elsewhere, but here’s a quick summary:
Recall that in advance of the November 2004 presidential election, by intentionally rationing polling places and election equipment to create artificial shortages, the then-Secretary of State of Ohio deliberately engineered abysmal voting conditions in Cuyahoga County (i.e., Cleveland). This tactic was successful, resulting in the collapse of the voting infrastructure in that county. The dysfunctional polling place conditions and general chaos that resulted discouraged black voters from voting).
Same-day registration is luxurious. It’s a luxury unavailable in most jurisdictions, including Texas. But same-day registration wasn’t enacted by the Ohio Legislature to pamper Ohio voters, or to coddle them with an extravagant privilege. It was enacted as a counterweight to the illegalities and political dirty tricks that predominate in the cutthroat atmosphere of a competitive swing state.
Other states didn’t enact same-day registration and expansive early voting after the November 2004 presidential election because other states weren’t as notoriously inclined to mistreat their minority voters.
Not surprisingly, attorneys for the State immediately filed a request with the U.S. Supreme Court for an emergency stay of the appellate court order. We shall see what happens next.
But really, Professors Hasen and Muller need to go back and actually read the appellate court’s decision, rather than casting aspersions by depicting Ohio voters as pampered softies who lounge in obscene splendor. That’s insulting to people who waited in line for 7 hours to vote after suffering numerous other political dirty tricks and indignities.
For those of you using web readers, here are the links I cited:
http://electionlawblog.org/?p=65853
http://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/6th-early.pdf
http://harpers.org/archive/2005/08/none-dare-call-it-stolen/
http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/blogs/tokaji/2006/06/back-to-ohio-rolling-stone-piece.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_election_voting_controversies
Texas Election Law Blog 