Voting Problems Persist

HAVA = FAIL. The Help America Vote Act was passed after 2000 when we saw some of the most insane voting problems in Florida that required the US Supreme Court to decide who the President would be. So the new President decided to put forth millions of dollars to help that NEVER happen again... Guess what... it didn't help.

According to a New York Times piece the exact same number of people that had problems in 2000 matched the number of people who had problems in 2008. A whopping 4-5 million voters.

"An additional two million to four million registered voters — or 1 percent to 2 percent of the eligible electorate — were “discouraged” from voting due to administrative hassles, like long lines and voter identification requirements, the study found."

This is according to an extensive study by 150 universities lead by MIT during October and November which surveyed 33,000 eligible voters. The number one problem involved administrative errors. Not voter fraud.... not identification... not a failure to prove who the voter is or isn't.... clerical error. Oops!

This comes at an interesting time because 3 states this week are pushing the Voter ID Bill - claiming that we have to have an ID to prevent fraud. Texas, Oklahoma, and Georgia Republicans proposed legislation, leaving my mind to wonder.... is there a widespread rampant persistent itchy outbreak of voter fraud I haven't heard about going on?

The only voter fraud I heard about is Ann Coulter....

Mike posted the press release SAVE sent out yesterday talking about the problems in Texas and Oklahoma - and despite the save we made with the amendment to allow student ID's be used in Oklahoma - there are still thousands of Oklahomans that stand to be disenfranchised if Governor Brad Henry doesn't veto the bill.

One of the most amazing things was the mention for the record about the student ID portion by Rep. Joe Dorman and the profound floor speech by my buddy Rep. Ryan Kiesel. Listen live below:

In the end, however... it passed.

Texas is just as bad. In a release from the Texas Democratic Party it appears that a male member of the State Senate (Troy Fraser) decided to make sexest jokes rather than answer questions about the voter ID bill.

"I have trouble hearing women's voices," he said when fellow Senator Wendy Davis asked a question during the floor debate about SB 362.

"Sen. Fraser’s voter suppression legislation threatens to take Texas back to the days when some citizens had a voice in the election process and others, including women, were silenced,” said Texas Democratic Party Spokeswoman Kirsten Gray.  “Sen. Fraser and his fellow Texas Senate Republicans need to move past their selective hearing and listen to what this bill really is: A sad and divisive echo from the past."

The release also says that the proposed Texas Voter ID Bill would disenfranchise countless Texas women:

 

• Of all Americans without a license:
• Women are more than twice as likely as men not to have a drivers’ license.
• One of every five senior women does not have a license.
• Over 70% are women.
• There is ample anecdotal evidence that suggest factors like name changes related to marriage and divorce make it less likely a woman will have a current name and address on a photo ID that matches the name and address on the voter list.

The Times piece quotes Sen. Schumer who said that the number of people prevented from voting in 2008 actually exceeded the popular-vote margin in the previous two presidential elections - way to put it into perspective.

"Little has been done, however, to remove barriers to registration and absentee voting.

"Registration issues were for 2008 what machine problems were for the 2000 election,” said Stephen Ansolabehere, a political science professor at Harvard and the study’s lead author. . ."

The study also found that as the popularity of absentee voting had increased, so too had the challenges voters faced in getting those ballots, most often because the requested ballot arrived too late, or the information on the ballot request did not correspond to information in the voter rolls."

I think the increase of vote by mail might have something to do with the inconvenience of voting on Tuesday ... (insert shameless support for Why Tuesday here).

There is a great need for perfecting voting systems so we reduce the number of people that are disenfranchised - but the voter ID laws just cause more problems rather than solving them.