A Temporary Victory: Looking Ahead to 2014 and Beyond

The voter suppression efforts by Republicans in the recent election sparked, thankfully, a well-organized grassroots response, as well as much critical media attention. From civil-rights, faith, and labor groups to media outlets ranging from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books to Daily Kos and The Miami Herald, the attack on democracy received significant scrutiny.

And so, the story goes, the effort failed. President Obama’s re-election proves that all is well. Indeed, the heavy turnout by minorities in states like Ohio and Florida suggests to some that suppression had the ironic effect of boosting turnout for Obama. If that were the whole story, one might think we had heard the last of this sort of attack on democracy.

Think again. Progressives will have to be even more vigilant, and even more strategic, in the coming years. The conservative motive, means, and opportunity to reduce suffrage are not changing a whit: Broad political participation hurts Republicans, they have an enhanced understanding of what works legally and politically, and the GOP retains significant federal and swing-state political power after the Democrats’ cataclysm in the 2010 midterms. Furthermore, the nature of the Republican coalition—relatively diffuse geographically and relatively powerful socioeconomically—means that it does not risk Democratic retaliation in kind.

Democracy advocates responded heroically to Republicans’ 2012 efforts, but 2012 was just another battle in a war without obvious end. What might we see in 2014, and what should the pro-democracy movement be prepared to do? Democracy advocates need to play defense on all battlefields and push affirmative measures designed both to protect suffrage and to rationalize election administration. And perhaps most importantly, progressives need to make sure that the conservative movement pays a political price for its efforts to suppress the vote.

What’s Coming in 2014

Before looking forward, it’s worth revisiting the legal victories of 2012—victories that were less permanent than they may have seemed in the run-up to the election.

Some coverage of court decisions, like the ones that blocked implementation of the Pennsylvania and Wisconsin voter-ID laws in 2012, obscured the fact that the decisions did not permanently invalidate the laws but rather merely prevented their implementation before November’s elections. For instance, the unnecessary and for many citizens onerous Pennsylvania requirement stands a strong chance of being in place for the contentious 2014 re-election of the Republican governor who signed it into law. The October court decision temporarily blocking the bill seemingly offers a roadmap to voter-ID proponents of how to receive judicial go-ahead. Essentially, if the Republican-run state government convinces a judge that the required voter IDs are sufficiently available to Pennsylvanians, the injunction against the law (based on fighting an entirely unsubstantiated fraud problem) will be lifted. The future of the Wisconsin law is less clear, as current lower state court rulings against it are under appeal, but Republican appetite for voter-ID laws and gerrymander-assisted control of the state government makes it a live risk.

Additionally, in states where voter ID and other “counterfraud” efforts have not yet been taken up, the passage of such laws may be made easier by the wide attention that has been paid to “voter fraud” in recent years. Social science research has underscored the difficulty in correcting misperceptions and the risk that debunking can actually help reinforce the original misperception. That resilience means that viral untruths about ACORN and minority voter fraud, given ample hearings on Fox News and talk radio and seeping into mainstream coverage, are likely to remain virulent for a long time.

Accordingly, the coordinated normalization and expansion of efforts to combat nonexistent voter fraud is continuing apace in 2013. From states that seem like improbable Republican suppression targets (West Virginia) to states where their efforts are likely to fail (New York), conservatives are expanding their pursuit of the voter-fraud bogeyman across the country, including to Alaska, Arkansas, Montana, Missouri, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. The unlikeliness of some of these efforts suggests that pursuing suppression is an easy ideological box for many Republicans to check. Additionally, the inclusion of predominantly white states also helps the national movement argue that proponents simply “don’t see race,” even as they fail to offer an empirical basis for their schemes.

However, the most consequential battles are likely to occur where race and partisan consequences are both in play. Consider Virginia, where Tea Party icon Ken Cuccinelli, the Commonwealth’s attorney general, told a radio host in a November interview that she was “preaching to the choir” when she complained that “[Obama] can’t win a state where photo ID is required. So clearly there’s something going on out there.” It’s not that Virginia failed to get in on the bogeyman suppression effort—the state’s 2012 voter-ID law required a voter provide an ID (not necessarily with a photo) at the polls, or within three days after casting a provisional ballot. The 2012 law proved insufficient to undermine Obama or depress African-American turnout, even if it did lead to some long lines at some polling places. It’s no surprise then that a radicalized Virginia GOP seeks to implement a photo-ID requirement before this year’s gubernatorial contest—arguably the nation’s highest profile 2013 election—between former DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe and Cuccinelli himself.

Lately, Virginia has received more national attention for several relatively novel and extremely ambitious electoral gambits. In the evenly divided state senate, where each party holds 20 seats, the GOP had brief success exploiting the absence of Democratic state senator Henry L. Marsh, a 79-year-old civil rights veteran. Marsh missed a legislative session to attend President Obama’s second inauguration, and the senate’s Republicans used their temporary majority to pass a highly suspect re-redistricting of Virginia’s state legislative maps. National scorn (and Governor Bob McDonnell’s threat of a veto) thwarted that effort.

• 1
• 2
• 3

Post a Comment

Name

Email

Comments (you may use HTML tags for style)

Verification

Note: Several minutes will pass while the system is processing and posting your comment. Do not resubmit during this time or your comment will post multiple times.