Salon's shameful six
There was Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. Here are the six states where vote suppression could cost voters their voice -- and Democrats the election -- in 2006.
By Art Levine
Read more: California, Florida, Arizona, Politics, News, Ohio, 2006 Elections
Illustration by Mignon Khargie/Salon
Aug. 15, 2006 | Eva Steele has a son in the military who is supposed to be fighting for freedom in Iraq, but sitting in a wheelchair in her room in a Mesa, Ariz., assisted-living facility, she wonders why it's so hard for her to realize a basic freedom back here in America: the right to vote.
Arriving in Arizona in January from Kansas City, weakened by four heart attacks and degenerative disk disease, Steele, 57, discovered that without a birth certificate she can't register to vote. Under a draconian new Arizona law that supposedly targets illegal immigrants, she needs proof of citizenship and a state-issued driver's license or photo I.D. to register. But her van and purse were stolen in the first few weeks after she moved to Mesa, and with her disability checks going to rent and medicine, she can't afford the $15 needed to get her birth certificate from Missouri. Her wheelchair makes it hard for her to navigate the bus routes or the bureaucratic maze required to argue with state bureaucrats. She's unable to overcome the hurdles thrown in her way -- and in the way of as many as 500,000 other Arizona residents -- by the state's Republican politicians.
"I think everybody should have the right to vote, no matter if you've got two nickels or you're a millionaire," Steele says. "I think it's a shame you have to jump through so many hoops to prove that you're the person who you say you are."
But Steele's plight has gotten relatively little notice from pundits and progressive activists confidently predicting a sweeping Democratic victory in November. Opinion polls show that a majority of the public wants a Democratic Congress, but whether potential voters -- black and Latino voters in particular -- will be able to make their voices heard on Election Day is not assured. Across the country, they will have to contend with Republican-sponsored schemes to limit voting. In a series of laws passed since the 2004 elections, Republican legislators and officials have come up with measures to suppress the turnout of traditional Democratic voting blocs. This fall the favored GOP techniques are new photo I.D. laws, the criminalizing of voter registration drives, and database purges that have disqualified up to 40 percent of newly registered voters from voting in such jurisdictions as Los Angeles County.
"States that are hostile to voting rights have -- intentionally or unintentionally -- created laws or regulations that prevent people from registering, staying on the rolls, or casting a ballot that counts," observes Michael Slater, the election administration specialist for Project Vote, a leading voter registration and voting rights group. And with roughly a quarter of the country's election districts having adopted new voting equipment in the past two years alone, there's a growing prospect that ill-informed election officials, balky machines and restrictive new voting rules could produce a "perfect storm" of fiascos in states such as Ohio, Florida, Arizona and others that have a legacy of voting rights restrictions or chaotic elections. "People with malicious intent can gum up the works and cause an Election Day meltdown," Steele says.
There is rarely hard proof of the Republicans' real agenda. One of the few public declarations of their intent came in 2004, when then state Rep. John Pappageorge of Michigan, who's now running for a state Senate seat, was quoted by the Detroit Free Press: "If we do not suppress the Detroit [read: black ] vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election cycle."
For the 2006 elections, with the control of the House and the Senate in the balance, Salon has selected six states with the most serious potential for vote suppression and the greatest potential for affecting the outcome of key races. In nearly every case, the voter-suppression techniques have been implemented since 2004 by Republican legislators or officials; only one state has a Democratic secretary of state, and only one has a Democratic-controlled legislature. The shameful six are:
ARIZONA
Thanks to a legacy that includes denying Native Americans the right to vote until 1948 and decades more of scheming to block minority voters (the state still has to submit its voting regulations to the Justice Department for approval), there's a good reason that voting reformers view the state's latest "voting integrity" weapon with skepticism. The sweeping, Republican-backed Proposition 200, passed by voters in 2004 and enacted last year, was designed to bar illegal immigrants from accessing state services and voting. It makes Arizona the only state in the country to require proof of citizenship for voter registration.
Despite right-wing fear-mongering, hordes of unwashed illegal immigrants aren't lining up at polling places to vote. In Arizona, out of 2.6 million registered voters, a handful of legal resident noncitizens who responded to voting registration drives have been charged with crimes in the last year or so. But, according to the Arizona ACLU, there hasn't been a single case in state history of an illegal immigrant charged with falsely voting.
Yet spokesmen for Arizona secretary of state Janice Brewer, a Republican, praise her for minimizing fraud while "single-handedly" working to increase voter registration. Privately, though, she may hold more disturbing views. A former Republican candidate for the state Legislature, Thom Von Hapsburg of Phoenix, told Salon that he was shocked at a fundraiser when Brewer told him she doesn't want "the wrong kind of people voting." Deputy secretary of state Kevin Tyne flatly denies she holds such views, contending, "I think her record in this area speaks for itself."
"I don't care what they say to deny it, the function of this statute is to discourage people from voting," says Joe Sparks, the veteran voting rights attorney who serves as counsel to the Intertribal Council of Arizona. "It's not about protecting our borders; it's about keeping minorities from voting," including Hispanics as well as Indians born without state-certified birth certificates. In fact, the law asks Native Americans who lack other I.D. to produce a Bureau of Indian Affairs card number or a "tribal treaty card number" -- cards and numbers that don't exist. No tribe in Arizona has them, says Sparks.
But, as Eva Steele's experience shows, you don't have to be a Native American to be denied the vote in Arizona: More than 500,000 registered voters and eligible but unregistered voters lack state-issued photo I.D.s. In the first weeks of the new law, about 70 percent of new voter-registration applicants were rejected in Maricopa County, site of Phoenix, although the rejection rate has been reduced to a still sizable 17 percent this year. Linda Brown of the Arizona Advocacy Network, a statewide progressive coalition, says, "With these I.D. and citizenship proof requirements, we've sealed the fate of the least among us: the elderly, the poor and the disabled, people who are already disenfranchised."
Key races: Republican Sen. Jon Kyl is vulnerable, as are two incumbent GOP representatives.