Make Sure You Have Valid Photo ID!

[Jackal]

Different states, different laws in regard to felonies.

[Prospero]

For those who want to see quite the full implications of this trickery... this is an excellent essay by a professor of law at Florida State University, Diane Robert.

IT'S FLORIDA, STUPID

As the great baseball player and master tautologist
Yogi Berra remarked, “it’s like déja vu all over
again.” This year’s presidential contest between
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney threatens to
become a replay of Florida’s inglorious election
imbroglio of 2000, those heady five weeks when the state counted
and recounted votes, chased butterfly ballots, and examined
pregnant chads to figure out who had actually won: George W
Bush or Al Gore. It was not an edifying spectacle. Jimmy Carter,
the former president whose Atlanta-based Carter Center sends
election observers to the likes of Paraguay, Nicaragua and East
Timor, declared that the “basic international requirements for a
fair election are missing in Florida.” Fidel Castro called Florida
a “banana republic.” The rest of the world began to refer to
the state as “FloriDUH.” The result of this year’s presidential
election could come down to Florida once more and the way it is
arrived at could be just as unsatisfactory as in 2000.
Thanks to improved voting technology, Florida no longer
has chads to dimple, dangle or otherwise, and happily, the butterfly
ballot is extinct. But Florida has not become the model
of democracy all parties promised post-2000. Both Democrats
and Republicans anticipate trouble on 6th November, election
day, and perhaps beyond. Bill Daley, the former White House
has warned the Obama campaign team they’d betwho worked for George W Bush during the last recount battle,
says Republicans will “have enough lawyers to handle all situations”
in Florida. Republicans raise the spectre of voter fraud,
with felons and foreigners illicitly swinging the election in favour
of Democrats and Barack Obama. Democrats say the real problem
is voter suppression, pointing to neo-Jim Crow restrictions
imposed by Republicans. All this takes place against the backdrop
of Florida’s swelling Latino population—in pursuing “illegal”
voters, Republicans risk alienating a crucial constituency.
In 2000, 12,000 Floridians were wrongly disenfranchised. The
private company hired to “clean up” the state’s electoral rolls,
striking off people who were dead or felons or otherwise ineligible,
made a mess of the job. Not that the candidate’s brother Governor
Jeb Bush or Secretary of State Katherine Harris seemed
overly concerned. The database was so slipshod that Floridians
with the same birthdate as criminals incarcerated in another
state were turned away from polling places. One Johnny Jackson,
Jr, an upstanding Florida citizen by all accounts, got confused
with one John Fitzgerald Jackson, who was serving time in
a Texas prison. Violating the space-time continuum, several hundred
people were listed as convicted of felonies some years in the
future. Harris, at the time both Florida’s chief elections officer
and co-chair of George W Bush’s Florida presidential campaign,
was not only nonchalant about these “false positives,” she let it
be known that she wanted more names to purge, not fewer. While
African Americans made up 11 per cent of Florida’s electorate,
according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University,
they comprised nearly half of those removed from the voter
lists. Since African Americans favoured Gore over Bush by 85 to
15 per cent, it’s a safe bet that if even a quarter of the disenfranchised
had voted, the election would have had a different result.
As it was, the United States Supreme Court declared Bush the
winner in Florida by a total of 537 votes.
These days, Katherine Harris is a private citizen, and Jeb
Bush is rumoured to be plotting a political future beyond 2012
when his surname may be a bit less toxic. Yet Florida is at it
again. Charlie Crist, the moderate Republican (recently turned
independent) who replaced Jeb Bush as governor in 2007, had
relaxed Florida’s restrictions on voting by former felons, arguing
that when they had paid their debt to society they should regain
the rights of citizens. When hardliner Rick Scott took office in
2011, he overturned Crist’s more liberal policy—clearly too many
of the wrong sort had been allowed to cast ballots in 2008, giving
Florida to Barack Obama by 200,000 votes.
Scott and the Republican-controlled legislature pushed
through new laws making it difficult for non-profit non-partisan
groups such as the League of Women Voters and the Boy
Scouts to sign people up to vote. Completed registration forms
had to be presented at the county election supervisor’s office not
one minute more than 48 hours from when they were signed, on
pain of prosecution. In Okaloosa County, Florida, the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People tried to register
new voters during January’s Martin Luther King Day weekend,
only to be threatened with a thousand dollars in fines and
a possible third-degree felony—they failed to deliver their forms
within 48 hours because the county offices were closed on Monday
in observance of the federal holiday. The NAACP was soon
contacted by the state elections chief: “We appreciate you going
out and registering voters,” the letter read. “However, if you’re
late anymore we’re going to turn this over to the Florida Department
of Justice for prosecution.”
As soon as the law was implemented in May, new voter registration
plummeted. While Florida’s population went up in
the past four years, the number of people signing up for a voter
card, without which they cannot cast a ballot, has gone down by
81,000. Several advocacy groups sued. An exasperated-sounding
federal judge overturned much of the law, saying, “If the goal is
to discourage voter registration drives and thus also to make it
harder for new voters to register, this may work. Otherwise there
is little reason for such a requirement.”
Unfortunately, the part of the law the judge didn’t throw
out allows the state to restrict early voting. Formerly,
citizens could cast a vote at the county courthouse
up to two weeks before the day of the election. This
period has now been reduced to eight days. Florida’s Republican
masters claim it’s a money-saving measure and anyway, there
are still eight early voting days. Democrats, however, charge that
Republicans want to depress turn-out by their voters, especially
students, the elderly, hourly-wage workers who can’t afford to
be off work for three or more hours standing in an election-day
queue, and African Americans. In 2008, 54 per cent of early voters
were black. The Sunday before election day when churches
mobilise “Souls to the Polls” efforts was especially popular. This
year, voting is also not allowed on the Sunday before election day.
Ion Sancho, who is the elections supervisor of Leon County, Florida,
predicts that, on election day, voters will have to wait several
hours and that precinct workers will be overwhelmed, saying he
fears Florida’s polling locations won’t be able to accommodate
the 8m voters projected to turn out in the general election.
Republicans have not been sympathetic. Mike Bennett, state
senator, argued that in Africa “the people in the desert literally
walk two- and three-hundred miles so they can have the opportunity
to do what we do, and we want to make it more convenient?”
However blatant these attempts to discourage the Democratic
vote, watchdog groups say that they’re small beer compared to
Republicans’ renewed attempts to purge the voter rolls. Last
year, Rick Scott, the governor of Florida, ordered his secretary
of state to scour the rolls for ineligible voters. He says he merely
wants to make sure that everyone who casts a ballot is a genuine
citizen of the US and not some border-jumping Mexican or smuggled
Salvadoran, a dead person or perhaps a cartoon character
(one “Mickey Mouse” did once attempt to register in Orlando,
but failed). A preliminary cull of 182,000 names was dispatched
to the state’s 67 county elections supervisors for verification. It
did not take long before they noticed that the list was curiously
light on white people and Republicans and heavy on African
Americans, Latinos, and those registered as either independents
or Democrats. Nevertheless, the supervisors did their jobs and
while they failed to scare up any members of the Choir Invisible
or denizens of Disney World, they did uncover a preponderance
of dodgy characters such as: Maureen Russo and Manoly Castro-
Williamson, two middle-aged ladies born in the exotic land
of Ohio; some second world war veterans including a 91-year-old
fellow named Bill Internicola who won the Bronze Star at the
Battle of the Bulge; and a great many recently naturalised citizens
eagerly looking forward to casting their first vote as Americans
and rather taken aback to be ordered either to produce their
papers or face jail time.
The problem with voter fraud (as practised by individual voters,
at least) is that it barely exists. The Brennan Center hasanalysed instances of “voter fraud” over the last four election
cycles and concludes that instances of it are rarer than being
struck by lightning or attacked by a shark. In an attempt to disprove
such studies, the Republican National Lawyers Association
prepared its own finding, a whopping 311 cases of alleged
voter fraud in the US over the past 15 years. Many of those cases
were thrown out of court, others involved mistakes (registering
twice, failing to report a change of address), a very few were
actually prosecuted. An investigation by the Tampa Bay Times,
Florida’s largest newspaper, revealed that of the state’s 11menrolled voters, 86 non-citizens have been unmasked and 46 of
those may have voted illegally at some point over the past couple
of decades. No prosecutions have been brought. Not exactly
an orgy of criminal behaviour at the ballot box. The Brennan
Center concludes: “The voter fraud phantom drives policy that
disenfranchises actual legitimate voters without a corresponding
actual benefit.”
Nevertheless, Republicans remain convinced that the only
way Democrats can win elections is by getting illegal aliens to
vote. One Wisconsin state senator recently praised his state’s
stringent new ID standards saying, “we believe the people who
cheat are more likely to vote against us.” Many Republicans still
believe Barack Obama won Florida in 2008 by “cheating” with
the help of groups such as the now-defunct Association of Community
Organisations for Reform Now (ACOR N), which focused
on registering the poor and members of ethnic minorities—and,
according to bitter Republicans, illegal immigrant voters. Never
mind the total lack of evidence; never mind that illegal immigrants
usually prefer to keep a low profile and try to avoid doing
things that would get them deported or sent to jail.
Legal immigrants, however, are another matter, and, in Florida
especially, a legitimate source of Republican worry. The
Democrats can count on the African-American vote, the women’s
vote and a substantial amount of votes from Jews and pensioners.
The Republicans know they’ll get most of the vote from
white people (or, as Romney’s advisor would have it, “Anglo Saxons”),
the affluent, anti-government Tea Party types and Christian
evangelicals. Latino voters will decide who wins Florida.
In 2000, Cubans made up the largest group by far of Latinos
in Florida. In 2012 there are almost as many Puerto Ricans (who
are American citizens) as Cubans. The “I-4 Corridor” (so-called
for the motorway which runs across the middle of Florida) has
seen its population increase by nearly half a million in the last
decade, of which 250,000 are Puerto Rican. Most of them lean
Democratic.
It used to be that Democrats would barely bother trying to get
Cuban votes: Cubans were militantly Republican, revering Ronald
Reagan for standing up to Fidel Castro. But lately Democrats
are making progress: in 2008, Barack Obama won 47 per cent of
the Cuban-American vote in Florida. He got more than 60 per
cent of the Puerto Rican vote. Recent polls indicate that Latinos
in Florida—and nationally—favour Obama by about two to one.
Republicans claim that’s only because Obama has pandered to them, appointing Sonia Sotomayor, a Puerto-Rican American,
to the Supreme Court and declaring that he would not deport
those who were brought to the US illegally as children. Though
Republicans point to some of their prominent Cuban-American
politicians, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Senator
Marco Rubio to name two from Florida, the party has done
itself no favours with its refusal to help with the passage of the
DRE AM Act, which would allow young undocumented people
to join the US military or go to university as legal residents. Nor
have Republican-run states such as Alabama and Arizona, with
their unabashedly xenophobic new immigration laws, helped.
Arizona’s notorious sheriff Joe Arpaio, who described Mexicans
as “dirty” and who spent taxpayer money sending his “posse” to
Hawaii to “prove” that Barack Obama’s birth certificate was a
“fraud,” is currently on trial for detaining Latinos—or people he
thinks look sort of like Latinos—without probable cause. Even if,
despite the fond dreams of Democrats, the home state of Senator
John McCain will not be in play during this election, the publicity
surrounding Arpaio, the “your papers, please” legislation, and
the ban on teaching the history of Latinos in Arizona schools, has
helped drive Latinos firmly into the arms of Democrats.
This is frustrating to Republicans who realise their party cannot
survive if it remains an angry old white men’s club. After all,
the US is projected to become a “majority minority” nation by
2060, by which time Latinos will form the single largest ethnic
group. Jeb Bush, recast by default as a “moderate” (he’s also a
fluent Spanish speaker married to a Mexican American), suggested
that Mitt Romney needs to ditch the Tea Party rhetoric:
“Don’t just talk about Hispanics and say immediately we must
have controlled borders. It’s kind of insulting.”
The general election is just two months away and what happens
in Florida may depend on what happens in the courts. Voting
rights groups are suing over access to the polls before election
day; the governor is urging supervisors of elections to keep purging
their lists, though federal law forbids that within 90 days of
an election. Because of Florida’s Old South segregationist past—
its unconstitutional disenfranchisement of former slaves in 1877,
its implementation of poll taxes and literacy tests, its long, hateful
history of denying people of colour the vote—the Department
of Justice, under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, will have the final
say over the way in which Florida votes. No matter what happens,
just about everybody believes that the election will come down to
whoever gets their voters out—and which votes get counted

[Erika1487]

To the OP of this thread....
If your not smart enough to bring your ID with you on election day maybe you should not go to the polls.....
Btw I am in support all voter ID laws

[Faldur]

Kind of funny.. you can't get into the democratic convention without a valid photo id.

[Prospero]

But you could carry your concealed weapon into the Republican convention....

[Prospero]

Well you WOULD be Ericka - as a diehard and (by your own admission) unquestioning Republican. They're designed to exlude Democrat voters - especially from Ethnic minorities. Read the piece by the professor from Florida.

[Erika1487]

Kind of funny.. you can't get into the democratic convention without a valid photo id.

Faldur for the win

[Erika1487]

Well you WOULD be Ericka - as a diehard and (by your own admission) unquestioning Republican. They're designed to exlude Democrat voters - especially from Ethnic minorities. Read the piece by the professor from Florida.

Why is it soooooooo difficult to understand that Voter ID laws curb VOTER FRAUD! :

[Ecstatic]

I thought this was going to be a cautionary post to models who forget to bring their valid photo IDs to a shoot.....

[GroobySteven]

I thought this was going to be a cautionary post to models who forget to bring their valid photo IDs to a shoot.....

Models wouldn't do that would they?