If your (honest) argument for voter suppression (or as True the Vote, a conservative “vote-monitoring” organization based in Texas calls it, voter protection) is that voter fraud is rampant, you are either misguided, brainwashed, or an idiot (and by idiot, I mean someone who has a functioning brain, but chooses not to use it).
With under 300 cases NATIONWIDE in the last election brought to prosecution, I believe we can all agree (again, if we are being honest, something not necessarily easy for a conservative hell-bent on denying a fundamental right to millions), this is NOT a problem for our country. If this is your argument, if this is your logic, then you must also believe that because there are 300 hungry children in, oh let’s say Des Moines, Iowa, ONE MILLION volunteers should be mobilized to fan out to the food banks in 15 other states with the hungriest of children. What?? Is hunger not quite on par with voter fraud as a matter of importance? See, your logic and your actions are colored, not by your publicly stated goal, but by your insidious one. Your end, in Machiavellian terms, is, you think, justified by your means.
Except that it is a farce…it is laughable. And it is sad.
If you really wanted voter “fraud” dealt with – and we can talk later about the idea that you fiscal conservatives, you smart business folk, really believe (or would have us believe) that mobilizing millions of dollars and bodies to stage an attack against those 300 wayward fraudulent votes is fiscally responsible – you would “true the vote” in ALL precincts, in ALL counties, in ALL states. You would put your money where your mouth is – target ALL precincts, ALL voter registration, ALL election officials.
Instead, you target minority areas in Texas, Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania, places where there are so few cases of fraud that statistics are barely kept, if kept at all. You teach your followers to take their time while voting in those precincts; a half hour standing at the poll booth isn’t too long, you instruct, because the longer the line is, the more chance that older folks will not be able to physically stand that long. Poor folks will have to get back to their jobs, their children, their responsibilities – that is some strategy you got there. Patriotism is written all over that one…
Or, how about the fact that in certain areas, not surprisingly minority or democratic almost exclusively, election office hours for registration is only open for 3-4 hours a day, in the middle of the day, but not every day of course. True story – my son, who works in downtown DC, but just moved to Arlington, Virginia one of the few areas in a very conservative state that is a democratic stronghold, had to re-register to vote. He did his best to call ahead to find the hours that his election office was opened. He had to telephone to determine their hours because they were not necessarily correct on the website (he learned after at least one failed trip, by taxi, to their office). Lo and behold, their hours were not on their voicemail, either. Any of this making sense, now? The office is not located in an urban area that could be reached from the metro – funny that. Instead, it was six miles off the metro. The only time he could get to that office without taking time off of work, was an early Saturday morning. He ended up taking a $12 cab to and from the place, armed with every document he owned that could prove who he was, where he lived, including a passport – a luxury not every has a need for.
Now, take a moment to imagine the very process my son went through, except that we’ll replace him with a disadvantage mother of three who works full time in the day as a floor worker at Macy’s after getting her kids off to school. Let’s call her “Barbara”. Barbara’s sister picks her children up after school so that Barbara can take a bus to the two homes she cleans twice a week for a little extra cash, getting home sometime around 8 pm to get her children bathed, fed, and in bed for school the next day. Between food, rent, and transportation expenses, Barbara has no money left over at the end of the month, and is often behind on rent for her small two bedroom apartment. Her children regularly go to school hungry, but grateful for the subsidized breakfasts and lunches they get once there.
Barbara has received in the mail today an official letter saying that her voter registration is being “challenged” by a “lawful citizen” – oh, you didn’t know about these kinds of letters? Oh yeah, True the Vote uses these letters as one of their main conveyances of disenfranchising minorities, a little known law almost no one has heard of and very few people have used, until now, that is. The law, in simple terms, says that any lawful citizen can challenge any other citizen’s registration if they believe some fraud has been committed – whether lying on the registration form or misplacing an initial. Doesn’t matter, and worse yet, incredibly, they DO NOT have to designate what that fraud is before filing the form. They simply have to submit it and, voila, Barbara gets a letter. Is it coincidence that our mother and all the people in her family who have the same last name get a similar letter that week. Their name, vaguely foreign-sounding is apparently what tipped off the True the Vote regiment as they combed through election rolls (which are public information).
So, smart as she is, Barbara has few choices:
1) She can use precious minutes on her pre-paid cell phone to try to call the election office to find out what this means. We already know that the phone is unlikely to be answered by a human that can help her. Furthermore, that call will set her back at least 60 minutes while she waits for an answer. She will have to make that call during her lunch break at Macy’s or on the bus ride to her house-cleaning job. If she’s lucky, she’ll get a live person to speak to, if not, she’ll get a recording telling her she must come to the election office. She has no computer or access to a computer, so emailing is not an option.
2) She can try to borrow money from her brother or sister, neither of whom is flush with cash, to take a cab to the election office on Saturday morning, calling in sick from the extra shift she picked up for extra money. She will lose the day of work and approximately $50 of wages, setting her back by nearly $75 once she adds in transportation. She doesn’t have a driver’s license, but she does have bills with her name on it. She has a Macy’s photo I.D. and she has her social security card, if she can find it. She doesn’t know if that will be enough. She will also have to find a neighbor to babysit for the four hours it will take or leave her children alone while she makes the journey.
3) She can throw the letter in the trash and deal with this some other day, some other year, when she’s making a little more money to be able to afford the red tape of exercising her right to vote.
What would you do? More importantly, why are you asking this mother to do it? Is the cost you are bleeding from her worth it? Do you justify this kind of deceit as a means to an end? Is it that you believe Mitt Romney will save babies from abortion and so disenfranchising a fellow American (actually estimates are over a million fellow Americans) is one way to ensure he gets into the White House and is the position of appointing Supreme Court justices who will hear arguments challenging Roe v. Wade? Is that your means to an end? See, that I could understand. If you say…much like those who shoot doctors who perform abortions…it’s okay, God doesn’t mind that we ignore his “thou shalt not kill” rule if we are saving lives by doing so. At least that would make (disgusting) sense…it would, in fact, be a means to an end. But, to think that we, those folks with even a small amount of brain cells, will believe that what you are doing is somehow American, is somehow patriotic – well, we do know better, I promise you. We are on to you.
And, more importantly, deep down, when no one is looking, you know better, don’t you? I just want a straight answer about how you sleep at night.
Christine Anne Scott 