The right to vote is the fundamental right in a democracy. Democratic elections hold principal agents of the government accountable, allowing the population to exerciatse sovereignty through threats to elected officials that they'll be thrown out. Elected officials then go on to make laws, which are infused with democratic legitimacy. In theory, elected officials also control the bureaucracy and administrative agencies, meaning that these agencies are subject to attenuated popular control. Even courts, which are generally staffed by unelected judges, are constrained by jurisdictional grants within democratically made law. This is what it means to live in a democracy. Institutions are linked by some commitment to popular sovereignty which is enforced through free and fair elections. If the individual right to vote is infringed, the legitimacy of this system quickly goes out the window. Popular sovereignty, while it only nominally controls decision-making within administrative agencies, loses all normative force when elections consistently fail to express the will of the people. The logical conclusion is that voting rights are important. In fact, they're so important that voting rights should be suspended when we think that people haven't done enough to 'earn them.' You see, Ada Marijo Vik has this theory, apparently, that when rights are important--especially when they are fundamental in society--they should be highly restricted so that only the worthy enjoy them.
Why shouldn’t voting, the most important of our civil rights, be reserved for those who pay enough attention to voting to actually register in advance?
In the absence any evidence that enough voter fraud exists in America to turn any election, conservatives are pouring money into "uncovering" instances of voter fraud. Last night, I was able to attend an event with one of the foot soldiers of the voter intimidation effort in Minnesota, the blogger over at Fightin' Words, North Star Tea Party Patriots Media Relations Director Walter Hudson. In prepared remarks, he identified two goals for his tea party group this year: elect judges and stop voter fraud. He willingly acknowledged that there is no evidence of wide-spread voter fraud; so it is incumbent on the coalition of Minnesota Majority, the North Star Tea Party Patriots, and Voters Alliance to manufacture that evidence. Conservative paranoid delusion holds that the 2008 Minnesota Senate race was stolen by fraudulent Democratic votes. When pressed on exactly what the Minnesota Majority tactics would be, Mr. Hudson gave this answer: 1) His group would wear buttons asking elections officials to ID the wearer. A federal judge yesterday instructed that this counts as electioneering and could not be done in a polling place. 2) The group would be flagging any buses which delivered voters to the polls, as the conservative groups believe that buses of voters vote multiple times at multiple locations 3) Staffing a hotline to help document cases such as these. Obvious problem with point #2 (explicated at 1:58 in the video) is that there is no obvious way to tell if a bus carrying "a bunch of voters" is engaging in double-voting. The Minnesota coalition of conservatives pursuing this "voter fraud" story will clearly presume that any organized group of voters is engaging in voter fraud. After all, the warrant for believing that voter fraud was being perpetrated by ACORN despite evidence of an absence was the fact that they were registering low-income voters.
A Federal appeals court announced yesterday that states could not require proof of voters' citizenship when they register. Congress had acted in 1993 to require voters to swear that they were a citizen, meet age requirements, and prove identity. A three-judge panel that included former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced yesterday that this federal regulation is a ceiling to regulation and not a floor; states cannot build additional requirements to register vote on top of it. The ruling expunged a section of a 2004 Arizona voting law which had resulted in tens of thousands of registered voters being purged from the voter rolls.
[Plaintiff's attorney] Perales said state officials have used the law to disqualify 30,000 people who filled out federal registration forms attesting to their citizenship. She said a disproportionate number were Latinos, including naturalized citizens who were wrongly disqualified because their driver's license numbers did not reflect their citizenship.
The ruling only has effect in the 9th circuit, but the principle should guide states everywhere: the federal government has occupied the field of determining proof of identity and citizenship in order to register to vote. State laws which require more than the federal requirements will be struck down. It should be noted that because the law had been enforced via voting roll purge that many voters registered to vote, received their voter registration cards, then showed up at a polling place on election day and were not allowed to vote. Voting roll purges occur with little oversight. The constitutional action in this case takes place under the Elections clause which was designed to frustrate States' attempts to undermine federal elections. Preventing lawful voters from registering to vote for trivial reasons like them not having a passport or copy of their birth certificate about them when they register seems to me like interference. I need to write a paper so here's the opinion. Go read it.
