Gaming the 2012 vote
The push to rig the 2012 presidential election is under way.
There's nothing illegal about it: Across the country, state legislatures are embroiled in partisan battles over election-law changes that, by design or effect, could play a significant role in determining the outcome of the presidency.
So far this year, there's been legislation aimed at overhauling the awarding of electoral votes, requiring that candidates present a birth certificate, not to mention a wide assortment of other voting rights and administration-related measures that could easily affect enough ballots to deliver a state to one candidate or another.
Experts say the explosion of such efforts in the run-up to 2012 is unprecedented - and can be traced back to a familiar wellspring.
"Florida in 2000 taught people that election administration really can make a difference in the outcome of an election," said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the liberal Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
Few legislators come right out and admit they're aiming to influence the 2012 presidential race. But they don't always need to.
In Nebraska's ostensibly nonpartisan unicameral legislature, a recent bill designed to undo the quirky way the state awards its electoral votes spoke for itself. One of just two states that awards its electoral votes by congressional district - rather than to the overall state winner - strongly Republican Nebraska managed to deliver one of its five votes to Barack Obama in 2008. The reason? The Obama campaign targeted and won the district that includes Omaha.
Suddenly, Republicans viewed the system, in place since 1991, as unfair, and a bill was introduced to remedy the situation. The plan fell short - as did an effort to tighten voter identification requirements - but Democrats were nevertheless outraged.
"Look who introduced the bill to eliminate the split electoral vote. Look who introduced the voter ID bill. Perhaps coincidentally, they were both Republicans," said Nebraska Sen. Brenda Council, an Omaha Democrat.
"The split electoral vote provides the Democratic Party in this state with a limited opportunity in that congressional district. Clearly, both parties try to use the process and the procedures to their advantage," she said.
Another presidential election reform, the National Popular Vote initiative, has also been viewed by some as a sour-grapes electioneering measure.
An interstate compact that seeks to end-run the electoral college by throwing the election to the winner of the most total votes, its backers insist it is nonpartisan. It's true that some GOP legislators have backed it, but the eight jurisdictions that have adopted it - seven states plus Washington D.C. - form a checklist of America's bluest states, none of which have voted Republican in a presidential election since 1988.
And the idea is rooted in the searing experience of 2000, when Democrat Al Gore lost the presidency despite winning the popular vote.
The recent spate of "birther" bills - which would require presidential candidates to show a birth certificate to appear on the ballot - are in a similar vein. These measures, one of which was recently vetoed by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, are clearly aimed at disqualifying Obama, who recently released his long-form Hawaiian birth certificate in an attempt to quiet the conspiracy theorists who question his presidential eligibility.
Election mechanics came to the fore in Arizona again earlier this year, when the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals agreed to rehear the case over the state's 2004 ballot initiative requiring would-be voters to prove they are citizens. Though they apply to elections more broadly, voter-eligibility laws also stand to bear directly on the 2012 presidential vote.
The court's decision was welcomed by the Republican secretary of state, Ken Bennett. If noncitizens are allowed to vote, "You begin to cancel out legitimate, qualified voters with votes being cast by voters that might not be legitimate," he said. "It's not often that a high-profile race is close enough that illegal or unauthorized voters would or could make a difference, but we shouldn't even have to worry about that."
President John F. Kennedy's victory over Richard Nixon in 1960, Bennett noted, was "won by less than 1 vote per precinct nationwide."
Just as Democrats are haunted by 2000, many newly minted Republican state lawmakers and secretaries of state share the view, prevalent among tea party activists, that Democrats - and Obama in particular - owe their successes to stolen elections, whether via the community organizing group ACORN and its fraudulent voter registrations, or by mobilizing ineligible populations to vote, particularly criminals and illegal immigrants.
While many of their concerns are perennial ones, the energy of the tea party and the tidal wave of Republican victories at the state level in 2010 have fueled and advanced their efforts this year in dozens of states.
Their initiatives come in many forms. The most common, requiring voters to show identification, has been proposed this year in more than 35 states; some such measures also require proof of citizenship. Other bills would restrict voting by college students or felons, limit voter registration or cut back early voting-all typically Democratic voting blocs.
The arguments are conducted in a type of code, with Democrats fretting about voter suppression and Republicans stressing the integrity of the voting process. But the party-line debates and votes over such bills indicate what they're really about: Getting more votes in the high-stakes presidential election on the horizon.
"I don't know why everybody's so puzzled by this," said Florida state Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, sponsor of a controversial election-reform law there. "Did they forget ACORN already? Did they forget that mess, the voter intimidation, the made-up data? A lot of it got caught, but what if it didn't?"
Jim Crow, Joseph Stalin and Fidel Castro have all been invoked in the furious floor debates over Baxley's bill and a similar one in the Senate. ("Lynchings are not in my bill," he noted pointedly.)
One legislator referred in passing to preventing "the Chicago method," according to the Miami Herald, but that was the closest anybody came to stating the obvious: that the bill would make it harder for Obama to prevail in the nation's largest battleground state.
The new law requires voters who give a change of address at their polling place to cast a provisional ballot and reduces the number of early voting days. It also tightens regulations on third-party voter-registration drives like those conducted by the now-defunct ACORN. The ACLU has filed a lawsuit in federal court to block the law from going into effect.
Baxley said the lax address requirement opened the door to abuse, like a city council election he heard about in which the "pro-family" candidate was favored to win until his opponent, "a homosexual activist candidate," bused in homosexuals from other parts of the state who showed up at the polls and claimed residency at an address occupied by a local Dunkin Donuts.
"Something we see over and over again in these debates is that where one side sees partisanship, the other side sees good policy," said Doug Chapin, director of election initiatives for the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States. "Whoever said, ‘Where you stand depends on where you sit,' that rings very true in the world of elections."
Sometimes the mask slips. Like when the speaker of the New Hampshire House, Republican William O'Brien, told a tea party group that allowing people to register and vote on Election Day led to "the kids coming out of the schools and basically doing what I did when I was a kid, which is voting as a liberal. That's what kids do - they don't have life experience, and they just vote their feelings."
The GOP at the time was pushing legislation, ultimately unsuccessful, to end same-day registration and prohibit most college students from voting from their school addresses.
O'Brien, in that speech taped and posted on YouTube by local Democrats, lamented that in places like Plymouth, N.H., home to Plymouth State College, liberal students voting en masse had "taken away the towns' ability to govern themselves." He went on to advocate for a photo ID requirement at the polls as well. (After his comments provoked a furor, O'Brien backtracked, saying he was only concerned about credible elections.)
The voter ID issue is being argued across the country in legislative debates that inevitably become highly charged, hyperpartisan battles. Not only are more states considering such laws, said Weiser, "the measures themselves are more restrictive" than bills introduced in the past. "Fewer forms of ID are considered acceptable for voting, and there are fewer procedural safeguards to ensure that people are able to get them or make sure they can still vote if they don't have them."
While liberals say there's scant evidence of the voter fraud these bills purport to address, proponents of the restrictive measures counter that there's also no conclusive evidence they disenfranchise would-be voters.
Many, if not most, of the laws now heading toward passage are destined to wind up in court. Though the Supreme Court approved a 2006 voter ID law in Indiana, the decision was a narrow one that left the door open to future challenges.
Nonetheless, because of the GOP tsunami in November - Republicans control 21 more state legislative chambers than they did a year ago - the measures are also enjoying more success than they used to. Meanwhile, the unshakable conviction among some Republicans that Obama's election was a terrible mistake for America lends urgency to the quest to deny him another term.
In Texas, a state representative camped out for two days in the Capitol so that her voter ID bill would be the first one filed. Gov. Rick Perry later gave a similar bill "emergency" designation so that the legislature could take it up quickly.
The new Texas law, which Perry signed in late May, exempts voters over 70 - a GOP-friendly bloc - from the ID requirement. While military IDs and concealed-weapons permits are acceptable forms of voter identification under the law-again, easing the burden on constituencies assumed to be Republican-friendly - student IDs are not.
The lawmaker who camped out, Rep. Debbie Riddle (R-Tomball), said she slept on the floor of the cold, empty Capitol lobby to make a point about how much is at stake when it comes to protecting elections.
"Voter ID has got to be one of the top priorities of the legislature this session." Riddle said on her website, noting that the legislature's previous attempts to address the issue were "stalled by politics."
"There are no more excuses left this time around," she said.