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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Robert Schlesinger
Well over a year before the 2012 presidential election, there's a battle going on over next year's ballots -- how they'll count and who will get to cast them. At stake is an attempt to distort the voters' will by twisting the rule of law.
Most recently, Pennsylvania has been the focus of this battle. Dominic
Pileggi, the state
So while Barack Obama's 55 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania in 2008
netted him all 21 of its electoral votes, the Pileggi plan would have shaved that figure to 11 electors.
(Nationwide, Obama won 242 congressional districts while John McCain got 193.) The change
would be even sharper as Pennsylvania's new congressional map is expected to have 12
of the state's 18 seats drawn to favor the
The politics here aren't obscure:
Every Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992 has won Pennsylvania. This is a naked attempt to undercut Democratic nominees. (And while Pennsylvania would join Nebraska and Maine with such a law, Nebraska Republicans are trying to return to the unit rule after Obama won a single elector there in 2008.) But the Pennsylvania gerrymander gambit is only one aspect of a broader push to rig the game.
The 2010 elections marked a huge shift in control of state legislatures from Democrats to Republicans. The result, according to Tova Wang, a Senior Democracy Fellow at the progressive think tank Demos, has been "an attack on voting rights in this country like we haven't seen in years and years."
So far this year, bills have been introduced in at least 38 state legislatures designed to make it harder
for Americans to exercise their right to vote. Fourteen have actually enacted such laws, according to a
report released
this week by the
Perhaps the
At first glance this may seem reasonable. Who doesn't have a valid photo ID? The answer may surprise you.
A 2006 study by the Brennan Center found that 11 percent of U.S. citizens lack one, a figure in line with a
2005 report by an election reform federal commission which suggested 12 percent of U.S. citizens lack driver's
licenses. Drilling down, the Brennan Center found that the groups worst off in this regard tend to be core
Democratic constituencies: 25 percent of voting age African-Americans and 15 percent of voting age citizens
who make less than
In Ohio, where such a law is pending, roughly 940,000 citizens lack valid IDs,
according to a study by a nonpartisan voters group. Or take Wisconsin: Less than half
of Milwaukee County African-Americans and Hispanics have driver's licenses, according to a study from
the
And these laws are a solution searching for a problem.
Conservatives have long bemoaned the menace of voter impersonation, but the evidence for this threat is nonexistent. George W. Bush's
Knock away the spurious reasons for the push to restrict voting and you're left with bare-knuckled partisanship. "There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today," former President Bill Clinton told a group of young political activists over the summer. He's right, and it must be fought at every level.
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