PJ Tatler: NAACP Petitions Thugs at UN to Stop Voter ID

 Rule of Law: Bring in the Blue Helmets to Crush Voter ID!

 UK Guardian.    “The organisation will this week present evidence to the UN high commissioner on human rights of what it contends is a conscious attempt to “block the vote” on the part of state legislatures across the US. Next March the NAACP will send a delegation of legal experts to Geneva to enlist the support of the UN human rights council.”

 Story here.  But is anybody buying that changing early voting or voter ID is the return of Jim Crow?  The NAACP plans on protesting the Koch Brothers offices in New York.  Their portfolio is changing.

In Wisconsin, the state is going the extra mile to educate the public and minimize any inconvenience to voters.  Rest assured, it will never be enough for those who slime their political opponents by comparing voter ID to “Jim Crow” laws and other evil racist suppression plots.

State officials are preparing to put all voter ID questions to rest. The Government Accountability Board is currently preparing a major statewide public information and outreach campaign. The Board’s Reid Magney says the effort, required by law, aims to eliminate confusion by walking people through the voting process. Ads will be on TV and everywhere else. “Radio, Internet, billboards, print, transit, the works.”

Magney says commercials begin airing in January. “Probably for more than 26 weeks next year … clustered around the four major elections.” Those elections are the spring primary, February 21; spring election, April 3; partisan primary, August 14; and the general election, November 6.

Most people have the IDs they need to vote, says Magney, including a Wisconsin driver’s license, state ID card, passport, some student IDs, military IDs, and tribal IDs. “So our message is that most people have the IDs or there are exceptions. And if they don’t, there are ways to get a free state ID … We’re here to help them.” Magney says GAB members try to provide information people need to vote. He says “it’s (their) mission.”

Magney says the GAB invested a significant amount of money in this educational effort … roughly $500,000.

full story here.

During the debate last week on termination of the EAC (here is the YouTube link), there were some notable quotes, particularly from Representative Todd Rokita, that didn’t quite make it into the newspaper headlines. 

EAC bureaucrats do not make elections fair; in fact, EAC makes it less fair by producing biased inaccurate reports on the state of elections in our nation and offering recommendations based on these junk studies.

EAC bureaucrats do not enfranchise voters.  States and individuals do that, as our federal constitution dictates.

….giving unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats in Washington more power over elections does not lead to more just election outcomes, if anything it interferes with a just outcome because these bureaucrats, many with ideological axe to grind, face little or no accountability for their actions, and they know it… 

Here is a bit from the press release on the House floor vote.

While serving as Indiana Secretary of State, I served as President of the National Association of Secretaries of State and co-authored a successful resolution advocating for the elimination of the EAC. We recognized, on a bipartisan basis, that the EAC cannot be justified on the grounds of fairness, justice, opportunity or necessity.

Voting is fundamental to our system and the legitimacy of our government. Ensuring qualified American citizens have an opportunity to vote is essential. The Constitution tasks the states with execution and maintenance of elections, not federal bureaucrats. I believe states do an excellent job of fairly and justly administering elections, and by managing elections closest to the voters, at the state and local level, we stand the best chance of ensuring opportunity for all and correcting injustice in the voting process,” Rokita said.

Here. The article at the link is an example of the media offensive the civil rights group push to coincide with decision points within the Department of Justice.  The groups carefully time their push with their media allies to parallel this direct lobbying of the Civil Rights Division at DOJ.  In this case, the NAACP is furiously lobbying the Perez Civil Rights Division to formally object to the South Carolina voter ID law and halt its use in the January 21, Republican presidential preference primary.

As ELC pointed out here,  Perez is going to Austin, Texas with a bit of media fanfare and civil rights groups expect to hear from him that the Voting Section will continue to dutifully ignore the Supreme Court and object to any photo ID law that comes across their desk.  South Carolina and Texas better dust off the AG offices in preparation for litigation throughout 2012.   

The Holder-Perez Civil Rights Division has not yet seen a voter ID law that would pass muster with its new holistic review and ever-evolving discrimination standards.  This despite the Supreme Court endorsing photo identification as not a burden and non-discriminatory toward voters.  Remember, Perez has told states there is no magic numeric formula to preclearance; it is simply a feeling that shifts as the winds shift.

DOJ has already delayed the process by requesting more information from South Carolina, and stand poised to object so deep into the election cycle that South Carolina won’t be able to obtain relief with the federal courts until after the 2012 Presidential Election. 

 A strange case out of Maryland is covered at NPR. 

A little-noticed trial in Maryland could affect how many dirty tricks voters will see in the upcoming elections — things like anonymous fliers or phone calls telling people to vote on the wrong day, or in the wrong precinct, or that they can’t vote at all if they have an outstanding parking ticket. . . .

Two hours later, Schurick gave Henson the go-ahead to start making robocalls to about 110,000 registered Democrats in and around Baltimore. An unidentified female caller essentially said the election was over.

At PolitiFact, DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s multiple screeds on voter ID and Jim Crow now officially ranks as one of the 10 biggest lies of the year.  

Because of more restrictive voting laws, Republicans “want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws.” — U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., in an interview with Roland Martin on June 5, 2011.

While discussing a slew of new voting laws advocated by Republicans this year with Roland Martin, an African American political commentator, Wasserman Schultz — the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee — compared the proposed restrictions to the Jim Crow laws that impeded African Americans’ ability to vote in the early 20th century.

“You have the Republicans, who want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally — and very transparently — block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates than Republican candidates. And it’s nothing short of that blatant,” Wasserman Schultz said, adding that the DNC considers the photo ID laws proposed by states to be “very similar to a poll tax.”

Several states — such as Kansas, Rhode Island, Alabama, South Carolina, Texas, Tennessee and Wisconsin — will require voters to show a photo ID before they cast their ballots for the 2012 elections. Democrats have largely opposed these requirements, mainly because some minorities do not possess a single photo ID — for instance, one 2006 report from the Brennan Center for Justice as New York University found that 25 percent of voting-age African Americans do not have a government-issued photo ID.

Republicans pounced on Wasserman Schultlz for her comparison to Jim Crow Laws and she later apologized for using that analogy. Although she retracted her statement, PolitiFact still rated it as false, concluding that while several media outlets used the same comparison, the Jim Crow laws originated from a sense of collective racism that is not similar to the voting ID law requirements.

Holder is speaking next week.  MSNBC is on the case, and perhaps offering a clue for what Texas and/or South Carolina has in store for Voter ID laws.  A coordinated objection with an AG speech would really ramp up the politics of the issue. 

“Advocates of broader voting rights are looking forward to a speech on voting next week by Attorney General Eric Holder. “We’ve been pushing him hard to do that because we think it is a national crisis,” said Laura Murphy, the director of the Washington Legislative Office of the American Civil Liberties Union. “The big question is what will the Justice Department do – and that’s why we’re so excited about the attorney general’s upcoming speech.”