The North Star Catholic / READER SUBMISSION: Voting roadblocks & vote control are morally wrong

By GEOFF KENNEDY

You’ve heard of gun control. What about “vote control?” Below are some disturbing examples.

Reporter Greg Palast estimates 27 states are campaigning to cut rolls by 2.1 million mostly black and Latino voters. He found officials disqualified voters who had the same first and last names as felons in other states, and people who had already voted — while ignoring obvious differences in middle names and social security numbers. Palast says Florida removed 57,700 alleged “ex-felons” from voter lists before the 2000 presidential election. George W. Bush officially won by just 537 votes.
Researcher Richard Hayes Phillips found in the 2004 presidential election Ohio wrongly reduced John Kerry’s vote totals by up to 89,000 and failed to count 107,000 ballots, most of them from Democrat-leaning areas.
The Washington Post in 2004 reported “In Youngstown, 25 election machines transferred an unknown number (of votes for Kerry) to the Bush column.” In Columbus, Cincinnati, and Toledo and on college campuses, Ohio reportedly ran short of ballots in predominantly black precincts where people waited in the rain up to 10 hours in vain in order to vote. “Some longtime voters discovered their registrations had been purged.”
In 2003, the president and CEO of the Diebold voting machine company, Walden O’Dell, said he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes next year” for Bush.
Michael Parenti says in 2004, Floridians complained of “vote flipping” in the presidential election. They repeatedly pressed the Kerry button on their electronic voting screens and saw “Bush” light up as many as five or six times. Parenti says local police blocked roads to two predominantly black precincts at 7 a.m. on election day despite no record of any accident, crime or construction in the area.
Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wisc.) admitted, “Now we have photo ID, and I think photo ID is going to make a little bit of difference” in helping Wisconsin vote Republican in November.
The photo identification push has gained ground in states since 2004, allegedly to prevent “voter fraud.” Yet Amy Bingham of ABC News reported that of an estimated 197 million voters in federal elections from 2002 through 2005, only 26 people — a little over six a year — were convicted of voting illegally.

University of California San Diego researchers estimated that picture IDs would diminish Democratic voter turnout by 8.8 percent and Republican turnout by 3.6 percent. Joseph Lowery, the former head of the Southern Christian Leadership Council, complained that forcing blacks to obtain picture IDs — like the old poll taxes — makes voting harder. “It’s Jim Crow all over again,” he says.

In many states, including Alaska, picture IDs cost $15 each. For poor people that is an extra burden. The effect is that poor people have to pay $15 to vote.

Over the years, I have served in about a dozen city and state elections. Alaska’s election rules work fine. In order to cast your ballot, you need to register in that precinct and show identification, which does not have to be a photo ID. The issue is not whether voters should identify themselves. The issue is whether they should be forced to pay $15 to vote. No one has ever been convicted in Alaska of voter fraud. Do we really need another law to protect us from something that does not exist?

Wisconsin, by the way, offers picture IDs for free.

Let me be clear, state officials have the authority to devise election rules, but they don’t have the right to abuse that authority.

The instances cited above convince me that politicians are far more fraudulent than voters. I believe it’s morally wrong to use the .000013 percent of Americans known to abuse the system to justify stealing the voting rights of thousands of innocent Americans. My conscience requires me to defend the rights of some of the poorest of my neighbors as much as my own.