Iowa Republicans Want Signature Match as New Qualification to Vote

State Republican parties now backed by Donald Trump are
giddy about possibilities of voter suppression. See NYT:
"In a reality-based world, people bringing wild claims
of widespread lawbreaking should carry
the burden of proof. With voter fraud, it’s
the opposite — fact-averse Republicans have for years been
hawking the idea of large-scale voter fraud and then daring
others to do the real work of proving them wrong."

Republicans in Iowa do not want you at the polls.

Comes a report by William Petroski of the Des Moines Register on an innovative way to suppress the vote of the black and brown, disabled and young, introduced last week in the Iowa legislature, (House Study Bill 93, the "Election Integrity Act").

Iowa Republicans and only Republicans want a signature match as a condition to cast a vote.

The idea is this layer of qualification to vote will help weed out undesirables from the polls.

Iowa currently has a strong, affirmative Constitutional right to vote, (Article II - Suffrage, Iowa Constitution).

Iowa's neighbor, Wisconsin' may be looking to its neighbor to its southwest as Scott Walker and Wisconsin Republicans do not think of voter suppression ideas themselves.

Coming to Wisconsin?

From Petroski:

House Study Bill 93, labeled the 'Election Integrity Act,' has been proposed by Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican.

Pate said his plan will modernize Iowa’s elections technology by establishing electronic poll books in every Iowa precinct.  In addition, the bill calls for establishing a voter ID system with signature verification, absentee ballot verification and post-election audits.

Every registered voter who does not already own a driver’s license, non-driver’s ID, military ID, veterans ID, or passport, will receive a Voter ID card in the mail, automatically, Pate said. This will apply to newly registered voters as well.

Republicans will use any tool to keep non-Republicans from voting, all for the purported objectives of electoral integrity and defense against voter fraud.

Stop Playing Dumb on Voter Obstruction

Update: Steve Schmidt, McCain-Palin top strategist: "It’s part of the mythology now in the Republican Party that there’s widespread voter fraud all across the country. In fact, there’s not."

One of the first public reactions to the Romney-Ryan ticket getting trounced at the 2012 polls was Paul Ryan's complaint about the urban vote.

"The surprise was some of the turnout, some of the turnout especially in urban areas, which gave President Obama the big margin to win this race," Ryan told WISC-TV. (Shear, Steinhauer. NYT)

Ryan knows what that mysterious "urban vote" means.  It means black votes, and they must be stopped. Voter fraud.

In the Wisconsin voter ID trial next Monday, November 4, as predictable as cold in a Wisconsin winter, we'll be treated to uncritical false equivalence press reports of "voter fraud" v. "voter rights".

That there is no in-person voter fraud is irrelevant, the media feels an obligation to play it dumb and present Ryan and the GOP fabrications as fact.

No matter the idiocy of the GOP lie, no matter the empirical truth of 100,000s being disenfranchised by the GOP-crafted photo voter ID law, the GOP objective of disenfranchising voters will not be reported.

I work as an elections inspector (poll worker). Most of the people voting are known by one or more of the poll workers, and the registered voter has to state her address and name, verified by two poll workers just to vote.

Election protection is not the objective of voter ID, GOP protection is.

The problem for the GOP is the Wisconsin Constitution is broad in the protection of voters against temporary partisan majorities, and the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, though not as sweeping is a powerful weapon used against those imposing voting obstruction.

The GOP has been working for years to add an additional qualification to vote, a photo voter ID, in violation of the Wisconsin Constitution.

This is a nationwide project, which is why there was a flurry of state voter ID laws right after five GOP justices declared section 4 the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional.

Voting rights remain under GOP attack.

Wisconsin Circuit Court Judge David T. Flanagan issued a permanent injunction on July 17, 2012 that remains in effect, writing:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has often used the term "constitutionally qualified elector" to describe one eligible to vote in our state. That is because the Constitution, not the legislature or any law enacted by the legislature, is the source of the right to vote and unlike the United States Constitution, the Wisconsin Constitution sets forth explicitly the requirement for eligibility to vote, Art III, Sec 2 (4). The court must begin any consideration of voter eligibility legislation with the recognition of this bedrock constitutional foundation of Wisconsin voter eligibility.

The GOP is still passing legislative burdens to make voting more difficult or impossible for as many non-GOP voting citizens as the GOP can get away with.

That's the truth.

Wisconsin Voter ID Trial to Feature Mountain of Social Scientific Evidence

Update: See also Nicholas Stephanopoulos' piece on the Voting Rights Act and Section 2. "[E]ach [challenge under Section 2] failed because the plaintiffs couldn’t show that minorities were less likely than whites to possess valid IDs—proof that is now becoming more available. This means that Section 2 should be an increasingly useful weapon against the voting restrictions popping up around the country." Stephanopoulos points to a collaboration between Cal Tech and MIT by Charles Stewart III, entitled Racial Differences in Election Administration. The League of United Latin American Citizens of Wisconsin et al v. Deininger case is the first trial post- Holder v. Shelby County claiming a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

GOP War on Voting, Spotlight Moving to Wisconsin

Those with even a passing interest in voting rights will be watching Wisconsin on November 4 when a highly politicized photo voter ID trial begins.

The entire, years-long Republican Party lie, or if one prefers falsehood, of purported massive in-person voter fraud will be put to trial and is in jeopardy, as will the GOP objective of disenfranchising non-GOP voters.

The trial follows the highly publicized recantation of Judge Richard Posner, the author of a federal appellate opinion that upheld Indiana’s voter ID law, whose theory of photo voter ID was used by the US Supreme Court in the case of Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, that has been touted as justification for voter obstruction laws in states across the country.

Once in power, GOP legislatures and governors across the nation raced to enact restrictive photo voter ID law since 2011.

"Defendants (Scott Walker et al) have not put forward any compelling government interest that their stringent photo ID law actually addresses—such as a single prosecution for in-person voter impersonation fraud in all of Wisconsin history—that would justify these oppressive burdens. For all these reasons, the law as applied to these classes violates the Fourteenth and Twenty-Fourth Amendments [poll tax] to the United States Constitution," reads the PLAINTIFFS’ CIVIL L. R. 16(c) PRETRIAL REPORT in Frank v. Walker.

The witness list includes academic experts, veterans, students and civil rights workers who will establish the undue burden imposed on 100,000s of Wisconsin citizens by Wisconsin Act 23, passed in 2011 with sole GOP support and unanimous opposition from civil rights groups.

For witness list, see PLAINTIFFS’ CIVIL L. R. 16(c) PRETRIAL REPORT in Frank v. Walker, and PLAINTIFFS’ CIVIL L. R. 16(c) PRETRIAL REPORT in League of United Latin American Citizens of Wisconsin et al v. Deininger et al.


The trial is expected to last some two weeks.

League of United Latin American Citizens of Wisconsin et al v. Deininger is the first trial post- Holder v. Shelby County claiming a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Judge Lynn Adelman (1997-present) will preside in Milwaukee.

Fed Appellate Judge Recants: We Blew Voter ID Opinion

Authoring Judge of Voter ID case recants

Republican Party Voter Obstruction Project Could Be Heading for Trainwreck

Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (1981-present) is a sitting justice who writes a column for Slate Magazine and regularly intones on the abundant rightwing, judicial idiocies of our time.

In an amazing, audacious and perhaps bizarre interview featuring Posner and Mike Sacks (Host/Producer with HuffPost Live) first reported by Rick Hasen, Posner has recanted his 2007 decision in Crawford heard before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and authored by Posner, affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008.

 "The purpose of the Indiana law is to reduce voting fraud, and voting fraud impairs the right of legitimate voters to vote by diluting their votes," Judge Richard Posner wrote in his majority opinion in 2007, affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in CRAWFORD v. MARION COUNTY ELECTION BD. (Nos. 07-21 and 07-25) (2008).

Posner has now publicly recanted his opinion.

The Brad Blog reports, "This is nothing less than remarkable. The 7th circuit court judge who wrote the majority opinion in the landmark Crawford v. Marion County Election Board case, has now admitted he got it wrong! 'I think we did not have enough information," Judge Richard Posner said in remarks today. "If the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently.'"

Posner made his comments in an interview with Mike Sacks discussing jurisprudence and Posner's new book, Reflections on Judging (Harvard University Press, 2013).

Writes Hasen:

In response to Mike Sacks’s questions about whether Judge Posner and the 7th circuit got it wrong in Crawford case, the one upholding Indiana’s tough voter id law against constitutional challenge (Posner says):

'Yes. Absolutely. And the problem is that there hadn’t been that much activity with voter identification. And … maybe we should have been more imaginative… we…. weren’t really given strong indications that requiring additional voter identification would actually disfranchise people entitled to vote. There was a dissenting judge, Judge Evans, since deceased, and I think he is right. But at the time I thought what we were doing was right. It is interesting that the majority opinion was written by Justice Stevens, who is very liberal, more liberal than I was or am ... But I think we did not have enough information. And of course it illustrates the basic problem that I emphasize in book. We judges and lawyers, we don’t know enough about the subject matters that we regulate, right? And that if the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently.'

Here’s the quote from Posner’s book, which Mike Sacks flashed on the screen: 'I plead guilty to having written the majority opinion (affirmed by the Supreme Court} upholding Indiana’s requirement that prospective voters prove their identity with a photo id—a law now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than fraud prevention.'

The repercussions for protecting voter rights of Americans against the Republican and Tea Party are stunning.

The whole nationwide Republican Party project of obstructing the voting of Americans could be in dire jeopardy.

This is because Crawford is the landmark case that, for example, the Wisconsin DoJ, Scott Walker and even the historically (and formerly) non-partisan Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau (and every other GOP state hack) have hyped (erroneously) as the controlling legal case on challenges to the GOP's photo voter-obstruction statutes.

The Crawford case was challenged as unconstitutional on its face, so no evidence was presented demonstrating how voters were obstructed.

This lack of the evidence will not be a problem in Wisconsin.

In Wisconsin, two federal challenges to the state Voter ID law are set to heard on November 4: Frank v. Walker, (Case 11cv1128), (U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin) and Jones et al v. Deininger et al (Case 2:12-cv-00185), (U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin).

There is a mountain of social scientific evidence accumulated in Wisconsin Courts in state cases and by the federal plaintiffs demonstrating how voters were intended by this GOP legislation and the practice of the legislation to be obstructed from voting.

Look for a federal decision finding that Act 23, Wisconsin's Photo Voter ID law, is discriminatory and not supported by valid neutral justifications.

Mike Sacks interview with Judge Richard A. Posner: