The REAL news from the McCutcheon v. FEC opinion
“There is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders.” That’s how Roberts began the opinion.
So I guess we can now assume that the Court will strike down all those voter-ID laws that so clearly impact that most basic of rights, and will do so by unanimous vote of the justices.
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UPDATE: Reader Alex Bollinger wrote this morning in a comment to this post:
Remember when the Republican SC justices (no, I will not pretend they’re apolitical) wrote an opinion in Bush v. Gore that there’s no right to vote? And that Scalia said, several times in oral arguments on that case, that no where in the plain text of the Constitution does it say that there’s a right to vote? This finding was fundamental to their argument – if there’s no right to vote, then they could discuss and bend state election law as they’d like without respect for voters’ participation in democracy.
I’m glad these folks finally found that right! Too bad rights magically disappear and reappear based on whether they further Republican Party goals.
To which I responded:
Alex, thank you so much for reminding me that Scalia said in Bush v. Gore (and elsewhere) that the Constitution provides no right to vote! No, no, they didn’t recognize a constitutional right to vote, in McCutcheon. They just said the obvious: that there is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders, because “participate in electing our political leaders” means only campaign contributions.
Democracy is a synonym for capitalism, Alex. It says so in the First Amendment.
And “hypocrisy”–bald, jaw-dropping hypocrisy–is a synonym for the Conservative Legal Movement.
So I guess we can now assume that the Court will strike down all those voter-ID laws that so clearly impact that most basic of rights, and will do so by unanimous vote of the justices.
HA!
C’mom, Jazz. We’re talking about honest folk, here!
The backlash already includes some commentary that Roberts’ pathologically calculating personality is starting to look downright scary. Two examples of several I’ve read:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/04/supreme_court_s_mccutcheon_ruling_john_roberts_opinion_wrecks_what_remains.html?wpisrc=hpsponsoredd2
and
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/04/mccutcheon_v_fec_campaign_finance_decision_justice_roberts_doesn_t_believe.html
Roberts et al. are playing with fire, and they don’t even care.
Maybe they’ll close GITMO too????
The only hope is turnout: in Presidential elections, 60% or more, in mid-terms, the high 40s like we had in the 1960s. People who are disillusioned and are refusing to participate have to be made to realize that they are digging their own graves when they don’t vote by leaving control of the political system to the billionaires. Dropping out by the great mass of voting age Americans is exactly what the billionaires want. But do we have to accept low turnout as the law of nature? We did it before, why can’t we do it again.
The Democratic Party, itself more beholden to the wealthy as turnouts have dropped, cannot be relied on to do anything more than straight get-out-the-vote efforts. Obama proved that by going native the second he arrived in D.C. and letting Rahm Emanuel level constant insults to the very people most responsible for putting them in office in the first place. Any kind of radical change in mass perception of the need for everyone to vote will have to germinate outside DC in a genuine grass roots movement. It will require a massive, cooperative campaign by the major progressive-populist organizations pooling their financial and people resources. DC-oriented Democrats will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into acting like real Democrats.
Third Party, Folks.
Remember when the Republican SC justices (no, I will not pretend they’re apolitical) wrote an opinion in Bush v. Gore that there’s no right to vote? And that Scalia said, several times in oral arguments on that case, that no where in the plain text of the Constitution does it say that there’s a right to vote? This finding was fundamental to their argument – if there’s no right to vote, then they could discuss and bend state election law as they’d like without respect for voters’ participation in democracy.
I’m glad these folks finally found that right! Too bad rights magically disappear and reappear based on whether they further Republican Party goals.
@Mike Meyer: Yes, clearly an SC decision where every single Republican-nominated justice votes one way and every single Democrat-nominated justice votes another way shows that both parties are the same and who cares, vote Green.
There may be decent reasons for voting third party, but SC nominees are pretty much the best reason to not vote third party.
Sara Mayeux
In the past two years, Chief Justice Roberts has authored two opinions for the Supreme Court in important cases concerning congressional regulation of voting and elections. The first, Shelby County v. Holder, struck down as unconstitutional a key component of theVoting Rights Act of 1965, the statute empowering the federal government to monitor states with a history of racially discriminatory voting procedures. The second, today’s McCutcheon v. FEC, struck down as unconstitutional certain congressional limits on how much money an individual political donor can contribute in any one campaign cycle.
Here are the first two lines that Chief Justice Roberts wrote in these two opinions; see if you can guess which came from which:
Which line would you guess had to do with the problem of wealthy campaign donors enjoying privileged access to elected representatives, and which line would you guess had to do with the problem of America’s long and violent history of limiting the franchise by race? Here’s the answer: the first sentence is from Shelby County, and the second is from McCutcheon.
John Roberts two paragraphs make me embarrassed to be an American.
Alex, thank you so much for reminding me that Scalia said in Bush v. Gore (and elsewhere) that the Constitution provides no right to vote! No, no, they didn’t recognize a constitutional right to vote, in McCutcheon. They just said the obvious: that there is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders, because “participate in electing our political leaders” means only campaign contributions.
Democracy is a synonym for capitalism, Alex. It says so in the First Amendment.
Alex Bollinger: We are controlled by the FEAR the other side will win. But look at what WE have. Two CORRUPT parties that got US THE SC WE HAVE TODAY. Now that’s a FACT.
I can almost guarantee should a hot new third party start today and the election was in the next morning, 99% of those new party members would vote some form of REPUBLICRAT even if ALL slots had a third party choice. The reason being, “Don’t Dare SPOIL The Election And Let The Republicans / Democrats (other side) Win”.
Some things ya just can’t fix.
Much like Dr. Frankenstein, YOU think that YOU can bring a rotting, CORRUPT corpse back to life and every thing will be just hunky dory and sunshine will fill the world.
Yes, because who needs voter id laws when voter fraud is nonexistent?
Oh wait:
http://philberger.com/news/entry/tillis-berger-issue-joint-statement-on-newly-discovered-alarming-evidence-of-voter-error-and-fraud
“Initial findings from the Board presented to the Joint Legislative Elections Oversight Committee today show:
* 765 voters with an exact match of first and last name, DOB and last four digits of SSN were registered in N.C. and another state and voted in N.C. and the other state in the 2012 general election.
* 35,750 voters with the same first and last name and DOB were registered in N.C. and another state and voted in both states in the 2012 general election.
* 155,692 voters with the same first and last name, DOB and last four digits of SSN were registered in N.C. and another state – and the latest date of registration or voter activity did not take place within N.C.
These findings only take into account data from the 28 states who participated in the 2014 Interstate Crosscheck, leaving out potential voter error and fraud in the 22 states that do not participate in the consortium.
Additionally, during an audit of death records from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Board discovered:
* 50,000 new death records that had not previously been provided to the State Board of Elections.
* 13,416 deceased voters on the voter rolls in October 2013.
* 81 deceased voters that had voter activity after they died.”
geez
Almost like an AFP ad
“But Republicans and conservative media, predictably, aren’t waiting for the results of the probe. Instead, they’re already shouting voter fraud. “N.C. Board of Elections audit finds up to 35,750 instances of ‘double voting’ (voter fraud) in the 2012 election,” tweeted Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer Wednesday. A headline at National Review made the same claim. In a statement, state Sen. Thom Tillis, the frontrunner for the GOP Senate nomination, pointed to “alarming evidence of voter error [and] fraud.”
The notion that the board found over 35,000 cases of voter fraud—or even one case—is flatly false. With the investigation not yet even underway, the board, headed by Republican Kim Strach, hasn’t come close to concluding that any specific case involved double voting. And there are very good reasons why it’s held off.
First, it helps to understand statistics. The political scientist Michael McDonald and election law scholar Justin Levitt have shown in a detailed statistical study that the number of people who share a name and birthdate is much higher than it might at first appear. (Just for fun, take the RNC’s Spicer. Though his name is less common than many, online records show 20 different Sean Spicers who were born on September 23rd, his birthday.) That statistical reality, McDonald and Levitt conclude, has big implications for how to treat potential cases of illegal voting.
“I would be very interested indeed in how many of the 35K alleged double voters are the results of mistakes or mistaken assumptions,” Levitt wrote Wednesday in an email to a group of election lawyers. “I’m going to bet on the vast majority evaporating upon closer scrutiny.”
But that still leaves those 765 cases—not as eye-popping a number as 35,000, but still significant—in which the last four digits of a voter’s Social Security number also matched that of someone who voted in another state. Statistically, the chances of a false positive are much, much smaller under this scenario.
Even here, though, there are plenty of explanations beyond deliberate fraud. Election experts point to the high frequency of data errors by poll-workers, a possibility that doubles, of course, when matching voters across two states.
Consider the recent experience of North Carolina’s southern neighbor. Last year, South Carolina’s DMV used Social Security matches to help find more than 900 people listed as dead who had voted in recent years, setting off a spate of hand-wringing about fraud. Attorney General Alan Wilson, a Republican, used the findings to argue for the state’s strict voter ID law—which was later softened after the Justice Department objected. But state law enforcement ultimately found not a single person who deliberately cast a ballot in the name of a dead person.
Nearly half the cases were the result of clerical errors by poll-workers. Others were attributed to DMV officials finding that Social Security numbers matched but not making sure that names did, among several problems. (About 45,370 people have been assigned by the Social Security Administration to each four-digit combination of numbers.)
In Iowa, Ohio, and Florida, attention-generating charges of voter fraud or non-citizen voting also have failed to live up to the hype once investigations were conducted.
“I am banking on poll-worker error for data entry on who voted for many of those,” Levitt told msnbc. “It may be that there are a handful that are actually double votes.” He estimated that number in the single digits.”
https://www.google.com/search?q=afp+ads+obamacare&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=sb
Basically this voter fraud bs is just another variation of welfare queens driving cadillacs. Sadly, it is believed and dispensed by ideologues and idiots.
http://www.aclupa.org/files/5513/9569/7881/2014-03-25_letter_to_Aichele1.pdf
BTW,
Gotta love how Georgia had 600,000 of these “potential matches”.
This thing is absolutely hilarious(and more than a little frightening).
From what I can gather from their annual report:
http://www.empowerthevotetx.org/uploads/KANSAS.pdf
They have looked at 45 million records; they have referred 7 cases for potential double voting in 2010; four individuals were indicted for voting in CO and AZ; and 6 cases of double voting were referred to the FBI in 2012.
Seriously. This thing is so worthless it can only be useful for misinformation.
It certainly does help to understand statistics: “Election experts point to the high frequency of data errors by poll-workers, a possibility that doubles, of course, when matching voters across two states.”
What your statement implies is that if there exists a 10% chance of data error in a given state for matching voters, then there’s a 20% chance of data error across 2 states, when in fact the probability drops to 1%.
It also helps to understand that there’s a huge difference between “birthday” and “DOB”, but it certainly makes for a nice bar bet.
You make no point at all, M.jed.
I would think the results of this program would show how there are an incredible amount of problems in what they report as “matches”.
How about some math.
More than 24 states; more than 100,000,000 files. Six cases referred(wonder how many were real?)
“Kobach and the state officials who have embraced his cross-check program say it has been a “success” in rooting out fraud, but there’s little evidence to support the claim. When asked in October 2013, Kobach’s office couldn’t provide any evidence of a single instance in which the Interstate Crosscheck’s data had led to an actual legal charge of voter fraud.
In another PowerPoint [pdf] by Kobach’s office boosting the Interstate Crosscheck, a slide highlights the program’s alleged “Success in Kansas.” But the data points only to 14 cases “referred for prosecution” out of millions of voter records analyzed, and doesn’t confirm any where charges where actually raised, much less a voter convicted.
Across the country, the pattern is the same: A (usually Republican-led) state joins Kobach’s program, runs a check and announces large numbers of potential voting irregularities. But when it comes to proving actual fraud, the claims are quickly undermined.
After using cross-check in Ohio, Republican Secretary of State John Husted announced, “This report demonstrates that voter fraud does exist.” But out of “hundreds” of potential instances of double-voting, as of last October the state had referred only 20 cases to law enforcement — and none had resulted in charges.”
http://www.southernstudies.org/2014/04/whos-driving-north-carolinas-latest-voter-fraud-hy.html
Its supposed to be a “secret ballot” in the first place, anonymous. Why not just dip a finger in some indelible ink like in Afghanistan?
Mike,
Proposing solutions to a non-existent problem is to legitimize other solutions to a non-existent problem.
EMichael: THE PROBLEM IS ANTI-VOTING LEGISLATION, not voter fraud. THAT is to what I am addressing.
Good point. Putting these statements together, they are basically saying that campaign contributions are a form of participation in democracy but voting isn’t. I suppose that advances their policy objectives quite well, since voting is something everyone should have access to but enormous quantities money that people can throw at politicians, not so much.
It’s so blatantly anti-democratic that it’s hard to find anything to say about it that no one hasn’t already thought of themselves.
@Mike Meyer: Doesn’t change the fact that if there were 5 SC justices nominated by Dems on the court then this decision would have gone the other way. You can call it “fear” to vote for Dems (I’m afraid of what a more conservative SCOTUS will do!), but there is a stark difference between the two parties on this issue.
Alex Bollinger: Dem or Republican BOTH are corrupt, THAT’S why SCOTUS is stacked the way it is. Vote for either party one likes it STILL pans out the same. Both parties will stack SCOTUS in favor of the rich and corporations. Conservative thinking=BIG MONEY thinking.
Conservative thinking doesn’t include conservation of the environment, of resources, of human potential, of even The Constitution, of American traditional values, of justice, or even conserving money. It just means government for the rich and BOTH PARTIES are in on it.
Dems get to vie for unlimited big money now too. Can’t get elected without the big money.