Author Archives: J Christian Adams

Voter ID Opponents: Assuming Facts Not In Evidence



Regardless of where one stands on the merits of voter ID laws, I hope all would agree that the issue is too important, the stakes too high to merit more than shoddy arguments. Opponents of voter ID laws often start their arguments with a problematic and hidden presumption: they assume the very worst about proponents of the laws.  They presume a sinister partisan motive to make it more difficult for legitimate voters aligned with the Democrats to cast legitimate votes for Democratic candidates.




Judge Evans in his dissent in Crawford provides a great example of these fundamental assumptions.   




“Let’s not beat around the bush, . . . The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.”  Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 472 F.3d 949, 954 (2007) (Evans, J., dissenting).




So does Tova Wang in her new book:




“Over the last fifty years however, Republicans have most frequently and deftly employed election law and procedures to help their party win elections…. Contemporary Republicans have made it a central part of the their election strategy to enact laws that call for practices that will reduce turnout among those who tend to vote Democratic, at least at the margins—where elections can often be won or lost.”  Tova Wang The Politics of Voter Suppression, Preface xiv. 




Do not get me wrong.  Republicans have partisan motives for passing the laws (Rhode Island notwithstanding). Republicans do believe that these laws will help them win elections. But those ideas do not discord with genuine belief that voter fraud occurs in many forms, and when it does occur, it benefits Democrats.   What I challenge is any automatic translation of that legitimate partisan motive as one to suppress legitimate votes.




Despite the fact that experts uniformly agree that our election system is broken, and that a significant majority of Americans are convinced that voter fraud and other voter shenanigans exist, ID opponents cannot wrap their minds around the possibility that Republican lawmakers were acting in good faith. Politicians are bad at many things; failing to embrace popular opinion is usually not one of them.




What about the supposed lack of evidence of voter-impersonation fraud? Doesn’t that prove that proponents could not possibly have good reasons to support the laws? We can debate the evidence issues another day. But even a total absence of evidence does not excuse the opponent’s assumptions. If the vast majority of people believe something to be true, why would lawmakers be any different? On the flip-side, I have no doubt that many opponents truly believe that voter ID laws suppress votes despite the total lack of credible evidence to sustain those convictions.




DOES IT MATTER?




If voter ID laws suppress legitimate votes, though, does it matter whether the critics simply assume that lawmakers acted in bad faith? Yes. A tainted analysis is a poor analysis. 




Imagine the law’s backers beginning their inquiry of the opposition’s arguments by assuming that opponents really just want to keep vote fraud alive. Surely some people do believe that, but not in respectable circles. Even voter ID’s strongest and most vocal proponents don’t think so little of their ideological adversaries.  




Some Republicans also believe that efforts to restrict military voting are attempts by Democrats to suppress Republican votes.  But I don’t think it sound to begin any analysis of military-voting issues by assuming nefarious, partisan voter suppression.




Consider another unrelated example: some people think that the President Obama and Democrats in Congress pushed the Affordable Care Act to destroy health care as we know it, so they could then usher in a single-payer national health system. Yet it would be silly for serious critics or judges to begin any serious critique of the law with that premise as a foundation.




Nevertheless, voter ID opponents make similar rhetorical errors.  They assume the worst about the motives behind voter ID and allow such assumptions to drive their conclusions. Furthermore, these arguments have become legal arguments too; they lie at the heart of the claim that lawmakers engaged in intentional discrimination when passing ID laws. Fortunately, the DC Circuit just rejected this argument in the Texas ID case.




I agree with Professor Hasen’s observation: “Objectivity is a [constant struggle] when analyz[ing] disputes in the voting wars.” Voting Wars, page 109. True enough. And the current critiques of voter ID provide a good example of subjective and loaded analysis. 

What Crawford Does and Does Not Do

Until today, folks thought that Crawford either would control the outcome of voter ID in a Section 5 context, or thought that it had nothing to do with it.  I took the position that Crawford does not provide a blanket safe harbor in a Section 5 context, and provides some help in frustrating efforts to establish discriminatory intent by a lack of in-person voter fraud.   Some mischaracterize Crawford entirely, claiming it upholds voter ID per se.  That’s flat wrong.

The court’s opinion today was largely consistent with mine.  First, it rejected the DOJ’s attempt to establish discriminatory intent by the lack on in-person voter fraud.  This is significant because DOJ is doing the same thing to South Carolina.  No more.  The DCDC isn’t going to look at the lack of in-person voter fraud to establish a racist conspiracy to enact voter ID.  Kiss that argument goodbye.

Second, the court made clear that the posture of the Indiana case (a 14th Amendment attack) bears no resemblance to a Section 5 case.  The burdens are reversed, etc.  So Crawford does not provide a safe harbor to voter ID laws in a Section 5 context, a position I’ve advocated against sometime mighty headwinds.

Third – and here is the new part pointed out to me by a contributor to this blog – the court also rejected evidence like that presented by Victoria Rose Rodriguez.  Rodriguez was a student who couldn’t get a ride to get voter ID, or so she said.  A preposterous part of the Texas trial featured Rodriguez griping that she didn’t have time to get ID, but managed to fly to Washington D.C. to testify.  The court squarely rejected such nonsense using Crawford. 

Point #3 makes it clear the folly of submitting plans to DOJ for preclearance.  It took a federal court to reject the nonsense being served up by Holder’s lawyers.  In an administrative submission – the saga of Victoria Rodriguez would have played a weighty role.

But these are small victories.  Point #2 above remains the most significant one.  Crawford does not entitle voter ID to preclearance, but only limits some of the more outlandish evidentiary fables by creative DOJ lawyers.

Lowry on the Race Canard

 Politico.

“Silly season is over. Racist season is here.


Silly season is when nothing is going on in the presidential campaign and the debate focuses on trivialities. Racist season is when the presidential campaign begins in earnest and President Barack Obama looks vulnerable. Then, liberal commentators pull out all the stops to deem practically any criticism of the president racist.”

Another Voter ID Rant Worth Reading

Another dispatch from the far fringes - this time Voter ID is a “coup d’etat,”  an effort to illegally overthrow the government. 

Wilmer J. Leon III says “They are not using the military; it is a bloodless coup. A small, but critical, segment of the state apparatus is attempting to effect regime change by corrupting the American democratic process.”  No rant would be complete without citation to the phony Brennan Center study on Voter ID.

The paranoia is both comic and strategically damaging to voter ID opponents.  Eighty percent of Americans support Voter ID.  Near 100 percent have some form of photo ID.  Use of photo ID is a common experience to nearly all adults.  Raging about coup d’etats in the context of using photo ID will only hurt the cause.  Once upon a time, it might have made sense to whip up the paranoid base into a frenzy with such over the top nuttiness when nobody else was paying attention.   But the debate has broken containment.  Regular Americans are paying attention and are perplexed by the paranoia.

CNN: “Military absentee voting looks weak this year”

Military requests for absentee ballots are remarkably low this year,
according to a recent report from a military voting advocacy group that
faults the Defense Department with not providing mandated voter
assistance to service members.

“The absentee ballot data for 2012 paints a bleak picture for
military voters,” a report from the Military Voting Participation
Project says.

In Virginia, North Carolina,
and Ohio less than 2% of all active-duty military members and their
spouses have requested absentee ballots for the November election. And
between 5% and 8% of military voters in Illinois, Colorado, Nevada and
Alaska have made the request.

CNN reports:

Lose the battle, win the war?

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is aiming straight for the Supreme Court on the Texas redistricting case.

“Today’s decision extends the Voting Rights Act beyond the limits intended by Congress and beyond the boundaries imposed by the Constitution. The Attorney General’s Office will continue defending the maps enacted by the Texas Legislature and will immediately take steps to appeal this flawed decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

h/t to MS.

“Radical” Brennan Center Data Exposed

 Link:

“A radical group funded by billionaire George Soros that has a history of biased research is primarily behind a national campaign to paint voter ID laws as racist.


The voter ID data collected by the group, the Brennan Center for Justice, has been called into question by experts and has been contradicted by other credible studies. Yet the center’s information is cited widely by news media and even members of the Obama administration.


Besides receiving a reported $7.4 million from Soros’ Open Society Institute since 2000, the Brennan Center was also the recipient of grants from the Joyce Foundation from 2000 to 2003.

. . .


According to the Heritage Foundation report, the Brennan Center used biased questioning to obtain their desired result concerning minority voters – a result that is actually contradicted by footnotes buried in the Brennan report itself.


“By eschewing many of the traditional scientific methods of data collection and analysis, the authors of the Brennan Center study appear to have pursued results that advance a particular political agenda rather than the truth about voter identification,” write Von Spakovsky and Ingram.


Heritage points out that the Brennan Center’s report was based entirely on one survey of only 987 “voting age American citizens.” However the report contained no information on how the survey determined whether a respondent was actually an American citizen.


Heritage found the Brennan survey used the responses of the 987 individuals to estimate the number of Americans without valid documentation based on the 2000 Census calculations of citizen voting-age population. Those Census figures, noted Heritage, “contain millions of U.S. residents who are ineligible to vote, thus contributing to the study’s overestimation of voters without a government-issued identification.”


. . .


The Brennan study is undermined by some of its own footnotes.


One footnote states that “[t]he survey did not yield statistically significant results for differential rates of possession of citizenship documents by race, age, or other identified demographic factors.” That footnote appears to contradict the very premise of the Brennan report.”

Full story.