BRIAN CHILSON
OPINION
Vote suppression’s new form: the I.D.
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rkansas has a long, sordid history of crooked elections and also of voter apathy, and it’s impossible to know if one follows the other or if both just go with the geography and the culture. So the Republican movement to suppress voting in the guise of election reform, which will be coming to the Capitol when the legislature convenes in January, might find an attentive audience — or not. Obviously, most people do not care since they do not bother to vote. But if people did care very much they would be hostile to the idea. Arkansas already has about the lowest level of voting of all the states — Texas has the lowest. Unless it is to race Texas to the bottom, why would we want to discourage more people from voting? I helped the late Justice Tom Glaze, a lifetime scourge of election fraud, write a book last year recounting his battles in the 1960s and 1970s to stop the perennial ballot thievery in a dozen or so counties and his efforts in the attorney general’s office and the Supreme Court to perfect the laws that are supposed to guarantee an honest vote. I did a few appearances around the state to promote his book, Justice Glaze being
too ill, and there were questions about whether Glaze’s experiences ought to fortify the Republican campaign to require ERNEST DUMAS voters to have an official photo identification — typically a current passport or photo driver’s license — before they can get a ballot. If Glaze’s suits in Conway and Searcy counties and elsewhere and the election code he wrote, which was partially enacted by the legislature in 1969, did not curb the abuses, a Republican legislator asked me, wouldn’t requiring voters to have a photo ID stop a lot of illegal votes? The bill he described, which failed in 2011, will be introduced in January with a Republican majority in both houses. In my humble and nonprofessional opinion, the legislature cannot constitutionally impose more requirements for voting beyond those in Amendment 51, which is that people meet the qualifications in the amendment and that they register. A voter’s registration and right to vote can never be taken away unless she or he is convicted, dies, moves or fails
The swings swung
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hose of us who teach Arkansas politics have to rewrite some lecture notes after Election 2012. No matter the ultimately hairsbreadth GOP margin in the state House of Representatives, the key region in determining the outcome of statewide elections in Arkansas appears to have finally swung in a markedly Republican direction. This outcome has decisive implications for the future of electoral politics in the state. This small state is composed of five distinct regions when it comes to its electoral politics. Two of those regions are now reliably Republican in their voting patterns — the historically Republican Northwest Arkansas region where GOP sentiments going back to the Civil War era have been emphatically reinforced by the monstrous growth in the contemporary era, and the donut of counties surrounding Pulaski County where a combination of “white flight” and white collar arrivals have created a second fast-growing Republican region. Together, these areas now account for about 40 percent of the Arkansas vote. A combination of African-American voters and white progressives makes Pulaski County a third distinctive “region”
that skews Democratic in its voting patterns. Joining it on the Democratic side is the swath of counJAY ties to the southBARTH east covering the Arkansas Delta where white voters are typically overwhelmed by reliably Democratic African-American voters to create a second Democratic-leaning “region.” These two groups of counties compose about one-third of the state’s electorate. Because neither set of regions achieves a majority of the state’s electorate, modern state elections have been decided in the 25 or so predominantly white, sparsely populated, culturally conservative “rural swing” counties running diagonally from the southwest corner of the state to the northeast corner skipping over the Little Rock metropolitan area. Their role in close state-level contests has been decisive, often delivering wins to Democratic and Republican candidates in the same year as they did for Mark Pryor and Mike Huckabee in 2002. They are counties where Mike Beebe’s populist message (pro-min-
persistently to vote. But the legislature can pass any law it wants and let the courts decide if it is legal. The better answer to the question from a journalist whose legal opinion was worth nothing but who had followed elections at close hand for 50 years was that the photo ID would stop no voting fraud — none. A photo ID might stop someone from casting a vote for another registered voter who happened not to go to the polls that day but there is no history of that happening, at least on any scale that should worry us. There has never been even a serious suspicion that sizable numbers of people were pretending to be someone else — someone who had registered to vote but who would not be at the polls that day. All the election fraud in the state’s history — the casting of illegal ballots or the failure to count legal ones — was committed by election officials, not individual voters pretending to be someone else. It is committed by people who are in charge of the voting, counting and custody of ballots and, of course, the people who appoint or supervise them. But throwing up new barriers to voting is not merely an empty gesture. It is baneful to democracy. The sponsors of such legislation sometimes are merely naïve, but the purpose is malevolent. It is to make it harder for certain people to vote. They are minorities, the poor, the disabled and elderly, those who are not
apt to have a passport or even a driver’s license. In this instance, “those people” tend to vote more often for Democrats than Republicans, although elderly voters in Arkansas and the rest of the South have shifted sharply to Republicans the past four years. Courts blocked parts of Republican vote-suppression laws this fall in a few Southern states and elsewhere because they violated the Voting Rights Act by being aimed at restricting voting of certain groups, a violation of equal protection. The Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court next year is apt to finally invalidate the provision of the Voting Rights Act that requires changes in voting laws to be pre-cleared by the Justice Department. It will say that states covered by the act — Arkansas is not among them — no longer discriminate. By abolishing the poll tax and opening its primaries to black voters Arkansas had stopped official suppression shortly before the Voting Rights Act passed. Although unlike other Southern states Arkansas did not erect barriers like literacy tests, some of our work was just as ugly. After Reconstruction, we used beatings, threats and even murder to discourage voting by newly franchised blacks. A photo ID card and shorter voting hours would demonstrate progress in the fight to suppress votes. We have found a more civilized way to do it.
imum wage laws yet pro-gun) led to overwhelming margins in both 2006 and 2010. In presidential elections, these counties swung hard for the “states’ rights” campaign of George Wallace in 1968, against George McGovern in 1972, and back again for Jimmy Carter in 1976. They swung wildly again for Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1984 and George Bush in 1988, back again to Arkansas’s own Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and back the other direction for George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004. In 2008, of course, it is these counties that so fervently rejected Barack Obama as “not one of them” culturally or racially. The first four groups of counties remained generally stable between 2008 and 2012. But, the “rural swings,” having already swung emphatically against Obama in 2008, took their rejection of the president to a new level in 2012. Indeed, many of these counties outpaced more cosmopolitan areas in the suburbs around Little Rock and those in Northwest Arkansas in their support for GOP nominee Mitt Romney. For instance, Pike County — the Southwest Arkansas county home to Arkansas’s diamond mine and a classic rural swing county (“dry,” over 90 percent white, and with no town larger than 2,000) — went for Romney by greater than three to one, besting by
nearly 20 points George W. Bush’s margin there in 2000. This year’s battle for control of the General Assembly was also fought out in counties like this. In these elections, state Democrats clearly outperformed Obama, but the GOP success in tying Democrats to the president decided control of the legislature. For instance, the House district in Northeast Arkansas where the recount occurred that determined control of that body cut across a swath of rural swing counties that would have traditionally favored any Democrat until the last two election cycles. The decisiveness of the Republican gains in these counties in 2012 suggests that they may have swung so hard that, combined with the other two GOP-leaning regions, there is now a comfortable Republican advantage in all statewide elections. The statewide elections in 2014 will test this hypothesis. Probable Democratic gubernatorial nominee Dustin McDaniel may be able to bring some of the rural swing counties in the northeast part of the state back into play for his party, but the Obama-era gains up and down this spine of rural counties suggests that they have left behind their populism of the past and may well quash Arkansas Democratic hopes in the future. www.arktimes.com
NOVEMBER 21, 2012
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