AARP: Can We Still Vote?

AARP: Many older Americans will not be allowed to vote this year.
by Marsha Mercer

The midwife at the 1949 home birth in rural South Carolina delivered a healthy baby girl but didn't file a birth certificate. Donna Jean Suggs grew up, got a Social Security card and found work as a home health aide. Try as she might, though, she couldn't get a birth certificate. That meant she couldn't get a driver's license or register to vote.

"I fought with them and fought with them," she said of the local and state officials. "I prayed and prayed." In time, said Suggs, 62, who lives in Sumter, S.C., "I gave up on things" — like voting.

Having a driver's license or photo identification card is commonplace for most Americans, but about 11 percent of adult citizens — more than 21 million people — lack a valid, government-issued photo ID, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.

Increasingly, this puts their right to vote at risk. A year ago, only Georgia and Indiana required photo ID cards to vote. Since then, 34 states have introduced voter ID laws. Five enacted them, governors in five other states vetoed them, and other states are considering them.

"What's new is the no-photo-no-vote" laws, said Jennie Bowser, a senior fellow specializing in elections at the Denver-based National Conference of State Legislatures. "The 2010 elections' big shift toward Republican control of state legislatures was certainly a piece of that."

Older voters most affected

The trend alarms voting advocates like Lawrence Norden, acting director of the Brennan Center's Democracy Program, who said photo ID laws hit older people, the poor, African Americans and students the hardest. "This is the first time in decades that we have seen a reversal in what has been a steady expansion of voting rights in the United States," Norden said. "There's no question that citizens over 65 will be particularly impacted. The older you get, the more likely you won't have an ID."

Nearly one in five citizens over 65 — about 8 million — lacks a current, government-issued photo ID, a 2006 Brennan Center study found. Most people prove their eligibility to vote with a driver's license, but people over 65 often give up their license and don't replace it with the state-issued ID that some states offer non-driving residents. People over 65 also are more likely to lack birth certificates because they were born before recording births was standard procedure.

Strict new photo ID laws could make voting this year more difficult for 3.2 million voters in Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin, if the new laws stand, according to the Brennan Center.

Voter Registration Cards On Hold Until High Courts Draw Redistricting Lines

If you are a registered voter with an expired [voter registration] card, then you will not receive a new one until the courts decide on how the Texas congressional and state house lines will be drawn. [County election officials may also have to wait until the U.S. Dept. of Justice, and possibly the federal courts rule on Texas' new voter photo ID law.]

“A lot of voters are calling because their cards are expired,” Kristi Allyn, Taylor County Elections Administrator, said. All Texas voter registration cards expired at the end of 2011.

Usually, election officials mail out new cards [in December], but this year, things are a little different. “We will be sending out new cards, we’re not sure when,” Allyn said.

Election offices across the state are on hold until the redistricting limbo is all settled. “We’re just waiting at this point to see what districts we’ll have to put on the cards,” Allyn explained.

Full Article: Voter Registration Cards On Hold Until High Courts Draw Redistricting Lines – Abilene News Story – KTXS Abilene.

Will USDOJ Approve Or Reject Texas' Voter Photo ID Law?

Within the next ten days we should know whether the U.S. Department of Justice will approve or reject Texas' new voter photo ID law.

On November 16, 2011 Christian Herren Jr., the U.S. Department of Justice (USDOJ) Civil Rights Division Voting Section Chief, informed the Texas Secretary of State’s office by letter that the state has yet to provide the voter photo ID related information the USDOJ requested at the end of September.

In the letter, Herren informed the Texas Director of Elections, Ann McGeehan, that without the requested information the USDOJ is unable to determine if the voter photo ID law will “have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.” The USDOJ must make that determination before the law may be implemented.

Texas has 60 days from the date of Herren's Nov. 16th letter to respond. If Texas does not return the requested information to the USDOJ by Jan. 16, 2012, the USDOJ will likely reject Texas application for preclearance of SB14 - Texas' voter photo ID legislation. The USDOJ will likely state roughly the same objections it stated to reject South Carolina's photo ID law on Friday, December 23, 2011. Texas, then, would likely appeal the rejection through the courts.

In early December, this blog published an article asking, "Does Texas Want the USDOJ To Reject Its Voter Photo ID Law?" Given Texas still has not replied to Herrin's letter of Nov. 16th, it is becoming ever clearer that Texas wants to the USDOJ to reject its voter photo ID law, so the state can appeal the USDOJ's rejection to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) challenging the constitutionally of the preclearance rule, included in Section 5 of the VRA. Texas and South Carolina undoubtedly will jointly take their "constitutionally" arguments to the SCOTUS.

"Now the REAL Debate Can Begin: How DOJ's SC Voter ID Objection FINALLY Brings Data to the Discussion" - by Doug Chapin, Humphrey School of Public Affair - Program for Excellence in Election Administration:

Is Section 5 On The Line Right Now?

Scotus Blog

A lively discussion that has gone on among those following the Texas redistricting cases — coming up for argument in the Supreme Court next Monday afternoon — has focused on whether the Justices might say something in those cases about the constitutionality of the key voting rights law’s provision that is centrally involved in the cases. That is Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and how it is enforced is what the three Texas cases are all about. In a new brief filed Tuesday, the state of Texas has given a very broad hint that Section 5′s validity could actually be on the line right now.

Read the full story @ Scotus Blog

Texas Primaries Await U.S. Supreme Court Ruling

Texas Tribune

If Texas is going to hold primary elections on April 3, the federal courts will have to pick up the pace. (see revised schedule)

A panel of federal judges in Washington, D.C., is deciding whether congressional and legislative district maps drawn by the Legislature last year give proper protection to minority voters under the federal Voting Rights Act. At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court is deciding whether an interim map drawn by federal judges in San Antonio is legal.

In the meanwhile, there are no maps in place for the impending Texas elections.

A panel of federal judges in San Antonio has the job of deciding whether the maps legislators drew last year properly account for population growth and representation, and that court will also finally approve maps to be used for this year's elections. But since the D.C. judges moved slowly in deciding whether the maps follow the Voting Rights Act, and the election season was almost under way, the San Antonio judges drew interim maps to be used in the meantime.

Instead of starting with the Legislature's maps, the San Antonio court started with the maps currently in use. As a result, their maps weren't as strongly Republican as the ones that lawmakers drew.

The state objected and took its case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which put everything on ice and scheduled hearings for next week.

Read the full story @ Texas Tribune

Texas Medicaid Cuts Leave Elderly And Cancer Patients Without Care

By Alex Branchabranch @ star-telegram.com

A new state Medicaid policy could leave some elderly and low-income Texans without access to certain treatments, including crucial cancer medications, critics say. Starting today, Medicaid will no longer cover the full co-payment of patients who also qualify for Medicare, a change that would affect 333,000 people known as "dual-eligible" clients.

The change is expected to save $1.1 billion over the remainder of the two-year budget cycle, about $475 million of which will be state funding, according to state health officials. However, the Texas Medical Association and state Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, say the financial ramifications for physicians could force them to limit the number of dual-eligible patients they treat because the cost of service would not be adequately covered.

In particular, providers who treat cancer patients with chemotherapy medications have raised concerns that the change could make it "difficult to impossible" for patients to receive their medications, Davis wrote in a letter last week to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. "I would like to know how the Heath and Human Services Commission evaluated the anticipated impact of these reimbursement cuts," she wrote.

Stephanie Goodman, a health and human services spokeswoman, said in an e-mail response to the Star-Telegram that the state is looking into Davis' concerns and has asked the state medical association to help identify doctors or specialists disproportionately affected. The process will reveal whether "we need to make any changes or exempt certain kinds of providers or services from the new policy," she said

Read more @ star-telegram.com

US AG Holder’s Voting Rights Gamble - The Supreme Court Voter ID Showdown

During 2011, this blog published many articles about the GOP's push to pass legislation requiring one of a very limited selection of government-issued photo IDs (like a driver’s license, passport or gun permit) to vote.

The new laws require specific identification not carried by a disproportionate portion of certain demographic groups that tend to vote Democratic. These groups include Blacks, Hispanics, the poor, seniors, and the young.

Because such laws do have a disproportionate on certain demographic groups, the U.S. Department of Justice, last Friday, blocked South Carolina's new voter photo ID law. It is widely thought the Justice Dept. will move to also block Texas' new voter photo ID law in the coming weeks.

Two of our articles looked at the pending show down down between the U.S. Department of Justice and the conservative leaning justices on the Supreme Court of the United States overt the voter photo ID laws and possibly the 1965 Voting Rights Act, itself:

• Does Texas Want the USDOJ To Reject Its Voter Photo ID Law?
• DOJ v. SCOTUS On Texas' Voter Photo ID Law

On Friday, Slate published an article that also looks at the pending USDOJ v. SCOTUS showdown:

On the Friday before Christmas Day, the Department of Justice formally objected to a new South Carolina law requiring voters to produce an approved form of photo ID in order to vote. That move already has drawn cheers from the left and jeers from the right. The DoJ said South Carolina could not show that its new law would not have an adverse impact on racial minorities, who are less likely to have acceptable forms of identification.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley denounced the DoJ decision blocking the law under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act: “It is outrageous, and we plan to look at every possible option to get this terrible, clearly political decision overturned so we can protect the integrity of our electoral process and our 10th Amendment rights.” The state’s attorney general vowed to fight the DoJ move in court, and thanks to an odd quirk in the law, the issue could get fast-tracked to the Supreme Court, which could well use it to strike down the Voting Rights Act provision as unconstitutional before the 2012 elections.

The current dispute has an eerie echo. More than 45 years ago in 1966, South Carolina also went to the Supreme Court to complain that Section 5 unconstitutionally intruded on its sovereignty. Under the 1965 Act, states with a history of racial discrimination like South Carolina could not make changes in its voting rules—from major changes like redistricting to changes as minor as moving a polling place across the street—without getting the permission of either the U.S. Department of Justice or a three-judge court in Washington, D.C. The state had to show the law was not enacted with the purpose, or effect, of making minority voters worse off than they already were.

... In its 1966 South Carolina v. Katzenbach decision, the Supreme Court said the law requiring “preclearance” of voting changes, while an extreme intrusion on states’ rights, was necessary because lesser measures—like federal government suits over each discriminatory voting practice—had not worked. ... Today, Some conservatives argue that Section 5 is no longer constitutional, because the states subject to preclearance don’t present a special danger of racial discrimination.

... If South Carolina argues in court [in 2012] that it is unconstitutional to require it to submit its voter ID law for federal approval, and the three-judge court rejects that argument, it is hard to imagine the Supreme Court conservatives refusing to hear that case.

... Why did the Obama DoJ deny preclearance, knowing it could well set up this massive confrontation and potentially lead to the downfall of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act? There are both principled and political reasons.

First of all, it was the right thing to do. As the DoJ letter explains, South Carolina presented no evidence that its law was necessary to prevent voter fraud, and the evidence was uncontested that minority voters were less likely to have ID

Second, if the Court is going to strike down Section 5, it might be politically better for this to happen before the 2012 elections, so that Obama can run against a Supreme Court, and the possibility that a President Romney could appoint a young version of Justice Scalia to take a retiring Justice Kennedy’s seat on the court, solidifying the court’s conservative majority for a generation.

It’s a gamble, both legally and politically, and no one knows for sure how it will turn out. But South Carolina may fare much better before the Roberts court this spring than it did before the Warren court in 1966.

Read the full article @ Slate.

Voter Photo ID Related Stories:

Keeping Students From the Polls

Among the findings of the latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Dec. 7-11, 2011:

"There is a sharp difference by age when it comes to the word liberal – while 61% of people under age 30 react positively, just 34% of those age 65 and older say the same. By contrast, reactions to the word conservative are almost identical across all age groups."

In 2008, enthusiasm about Obama’s message of “hope” and “change” toward more liberal (progressive) ideals drew college students and other young adults to volunteer for political groups, to register to vote and to head to the polls on Election Day. In 2008, nearly 70 percent of voters 29 and younger voted for Obama — the highest share of youth votes ever to go to any one candidate, according to exit polls. (note: for the Nov. 2012 election, those young 2008 voters will be age 34 and younger.)

In a national survey of Americans, ages 18-29, conducted by Harvard’s Institute of Politics in March 2011, 80 percent said they have a Facebook account. Among college students, 90 percent use the account. Facebook friend statuses were second only to major national newspapers in sources that young adults said they would be interested in turning to for information about the 2012 campaign.

Republican state lawmakers in seven states, including Texas, have passed strict laws requiring one of a very limited selection of government-issued photo IDs (like a driver’s license or a passport) to vote. Many college and university students carry only their student ID cards and don’t have one of the newly required voting IDs. Many of those new photo ID laws have been interpreted as prohibiting out-of-state driver’s licenses from being used for voting, which will further restrict the states' "non-resident" students for voting.

It’s all part of a widespread Republican effort to restrict the voting rights of demographic groups that tend to vote Democratic. Blacks, Hispanics, the poor and the young, who are more likely to support President Obama, are disproportionately represented in the 21 million people without government IDs. On Friday, the Justice Department, finally taking action against these abuses, blocked the new voter ID law in South Carolina.

Republicans usually don’t want to acknowledge that their purpose is to turn away voters, especially when race is involved, so they invented an explanation, claiming that stricter ID laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud. In fact, there is almost no voter fraud in America to prevent.

"I don't want everybody to vote," Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation, Moral Majority, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and other conservative organizations, said while addressing a conservative Republican audience. "Our leverage in the elections goes up as the voting populace goes down," he added after he denigrated those who seek "good government" through maximum, informed voter participation as people who suffer from the "goo goo syndrome." Weyrich was also a co-founder of the Council for National Policy, a strategy-formulating organization for social conservatives; co-publisher of the magazine Conservative Digest; and national chairman of Coalitions for America, an association of conservative activist organizations.

William O’Brien, the speaker of the New Hampshire State House, told a Tea Party group earlier this year that students are “foolish” and tend to “vote their feelings” because they lack life experience.

“Voting as a liberal,” he said, “that’s what kids do.” And that’s why, he said, he supported measures to prohibit students from voting from their college addresses and to end same-day registration.

New Hampshire Republicans even tried to pass a bill that would have kept students who previously lived elsewhere from voting in the state; fortunately, the measure failed, as did the others Mr. O’Brien favored.

Many students have taken advantage of Election Day registration laws, which is one reason Maine Republicans passed a law eliminating the practice. Voters restored it last month, but Republican lawmakers there are already trying new ways to restrict voting. The secretary of state said he was investigating students who are registered to vote in the state but pay out-of-state tuition.

Wisconsin once made it easy for students to vote, making it one of the leading states in turnout of younger voters in 2004 and 2008. When Republicans swept into power there last year, they undid all of that, imposing requirements that invalidated the use of virtually all college ID cards in voter registration. Colleges are scrambling to change their cards to add signatures and expiration dates, but it’s not clear whether the state will let them.

Imposing these restrictions to win an election will embitter a generation of students in its first encounter with the machinery of democracy.

- CHECK: REFRAMING THE WORD 'LIBERAL' http://on.fb.me/Who-Framed-Liberals

‘Progressive’ Is The Most Positively Viewed Political Label in America

Why are Republicans always calling President Obama a socialist -- everybody hates socialists, even liberals, even Occupy Wall Streeters. The socialist name calling, echoed without challenge by the main stream press, seems to be working, too. Americans perceive Barack Obama as furthest away from their own political viewpoint, according to a just released Gallup poll.

It is no accident that Republicans picked the "socialist" moniker to pin to Pres. Obama's coat tails. Socialism is a negative for most Americans with six-in-ten (60%) saying they have a negative reaction to the word. Socialism is the most politically polarizing of the most common political monikers – the reaction is almost universally negative among conservatives.

These are among the findings of the latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Dec. 7-11, 2011.

Both of the ideological descriptions used most frequently in American politics – conservative and liberal – receive more positive than negative reactions from the American public. But the positives for conservative (62%) are higher than for liberal (50%).

This conservative v. liberal gap mainly reflects the balance of what people call themselves; more people consistently call themselves conservative than liberal in public opinion polling, even though surveys consistently show a majority of Americans favor liberal (progressive) policies and programs, including, for example, Social Security, Medicare, and everyone paying their fair share to support public transportation systems and public education. Those who think of themselves as politically “moderate” give similarly positive assessments to both words.

As many Democratic strategists have argued, the term progressive receives a far more positive reaction from the American public than the term liberal (67% vs 50%), though the difference is primarily among Republicans.

Last year the Republican National Committee urged fundraisers to stoke fear by calling President Obama, and Democrats in general, "socialists."

Democrats dubbed the GOP fundraising plan, contained in a private GOP document, "RNC Fear-Gate." The document layed out a full "strategy-of-fear" and included unflattering caricatures of House minority leaded Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. A copy of the document was left at the hotel that hosted the retreat, and a source provided it to Politico.

RNC member Donna Lou Gosney of West Virginia said, "You have to identify something and label it so you can talk about it and 'socialism' is a good scare word."

More Americans consistently call themselves conservative than liberal in public opinion polling because many have been conditioned by conservative messaging, largely echoed unchallenged by the main stream media, to view the word "liberal" negatively. The main stream media also does not challenge the conservative messaging meme that Americans are predominately right of center in their political views. Fox News, for example, continually pushes the right-wing talking point that "America is a center-right country."

In fact, on issue after issue, polls are clear that Americans favor progressive policies:

Republicans Slash Public Education To Fuel Private 'For Profit' Corporate Schools

The 2011 Texas Legislature slashed the state's funding of public K-12 schools, colleges and universities. The real motivation for underfunding public education is to replace our low cost public system of education available to every citizen with a high cost private 'for profit' education system.

Huffington Post

While for-profit colleges do indeed educate more low-income and minority students than other institutions, this is in large part because support for the traditional alternative, community college, has failed to keep pace with demand.

Though no one maintains a comprehensive list of state funding for community colleges, state and local support for community colleges on a per-student basis declined by 5 percent in 2009 from a decade earlier, according to Department of Education statistics compiled by the Delta Project, a nonprofit research group that studies higher education spending. The total subsidies provided to students by community colleges, including funding from public sources and other outside support, fell by 10 percent over the last decade, on a per-student basis.

The Obama administration has significantly boosted funding for Pell Grants, which are available to low-income students. Over the last three years of the program, the federal government has more than doubled spending on Pell grants, budgeting $20 billion more this year than in the 2007-08 school year. For-profit colleges have captured an outsized share of this pool -- roughly 25 percent -- despite educating only 12 percent of college students nationwide, according to the most recent federal data.

Had the $7.5 billion that for-profit institutions received via Pell Grants during the 2009-2010 school year gone instead to fund community college systems nationwide, that money could have created capacity for an additional 629,000 community college students, The Huffington Post calculated, using available estimates for the average expenditure per student. That would represent a 20 percent increase in the number of full-time community college students currently enrolled nationwide.

At California's community colleges -- the nation's largest system of higher education, serving a quarter of community college students nationwide -- an estimated 200,000 students will be turned away from classes next school year, according to the state community college chancellor's office, following state cutbacks of nearly 20 percent across the entire system. That amounts to more than 7 percent of the entire state's community college student body, and that does not count those who gave up on plans to enroll due to the difficulties of securing classes.

After accounting for inflation, California is now spending the same amount on community colleges that it did six years ago, despite adding more than 175,000 students in that period, a nearly 20 percent increase. On a per-student basis, the state is spending less this year than it was 15 years ago.

The for-profit college programs that have been absorbing the resulting overflow of students are on average more than five times as expensive as their community college counterparts, according to a Senate report that examined such schools nationally. While only about one in five students at community colleges takes out loans to finance their tuition, four of five students at for-profit two- and four-year schools sign off on loans, according to Department of Education data.

Because of the high costs and high debt loads, students at for-profit colleges are responsible for about 45 percent of all student loan defaults.

In the eyes of public education advocates, for-profit colleges are the inevitable, opportunistic outgrowth of a society that simultaneously rewards those with greater education while it eliminates traditional support for public campuses.

"The economy is essentially telling people that you have to get some kind of post-secondary degree or credential," said Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce. "So the demand is growing very fast, and our ability to fund this function is crashing. It's not just declining, it's crashing. The public sector is basically getting out of the business, so the costs are shifting to the individual students."

Read the full article @ Huffington Post