The Song – by one of my favorites – The Who
Arming Bears
I hear my “Second Amendment” friends demanding that we can’t register guns, and we can’t check backgrounds. Why, I ask; is it any different than a car or a house? We regulate, register, tax and control all of those purchases – why are guns so very different? Their answer is always simple: The Second Amendment. As Justice Scalia wrote in the majority opinion of the Heller Supreme Court decision (wrongly ruled in my judgment): the two clauses of the Second Amendment are independent of each other. So “…A well-regulated militia being necessary for the security of the free state” clause, has no bearing or modification of the “…the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” clause.
They claim an absolute right to “keep and bear arms”. Any regulation has to be weighed completely against that right. Anything governmental action that “infringes” on it: registration, background check, licensing; cuts into it.
Now I don’t agree with the original premise of the Heller decision, that the two clauses are independent of each other. In fact, I’m surprised that a Constitutional originalist like Scalia made that argument. Madison wrote carefully and precisely. It’s unlikely he wanted to leave room for interpretation here, when in so many other instances he was crystal clear in his meaning. And to claim that the “well-regulated militia clause” is extraneous seems unlikely to me. But that’s what Scalia said, and a majority of the Court agreed with him.
Fundamentals of the Constitution
But this essay isn’t about the Second Amendment. It’s about an even more fundamental issue of the Constitution, a foundational determination: the right to vote. And oddly enough many of the same people who demand that governmental regulation of weapons is unconstitutional are perfectly willing to make “other” folks jump through paperwork hoops to vote.
The right to vote is even more soundly grounded in the Constitution than the right to bear arms. At the very beginning: Article 1, Section II; where the document outlines the qualification to vote for Members of the House of Representatives: “…electors in each state shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature”.
Electors are voters – and who gets the right to vote is outlined in a series of Amendments: the 15th, the 19th, the 23rdand the 26th. And how that right is applied is determined by the fateful language of the 14th Amendment:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
It seems clear that the right of a citizen to bear arms, and the right of a citizen to vote have, at the least, equal weight in the Constitution.
Down at the Polls
When Americans began voting, there was little regulation of the voting process. Citizens voted in precincts, close to their home. Their “poll workers” were their friends and neighbors. Essentially everyone knew everyone, paper identification wasn’t required. And everybody knew who was “eligible” and who was not. So there was no need for advanced identification mechanisms.
Even up into the last half of the twentieth century, voting was mostly a neighborhood deal. Here in Pataskala, the poll workers were the retired people in town. They either knew you already, or they knew you after the first time. But just in case, they asked you to sign your name, then matched it to the “big book” of signatures.
When you registered to vote with the Board of Elections, they got a signature for comparison purposes. Then when you voted, they matched you current signature to that original. All of the voter qualification requirements: citizenship, residency, age and questions of legal status were determined upon registration. After that – it was just about going and casting a ballot, with your signature as your “bond”. If there was a question about the signature, or about you, there was (and is) a process for challenging that. And it’s worked for over a century.
The Big Lie
In the past twenty years, there has been an outbreak of voter fraud. Millions of voters cast their ballots illegally, and while Court action has been brought and hundreds of thousands of cases, it’s been incredibly difficult to stem the rising tide of false votes. And, amazingly, almost all of the false votes have been for Democratic candidates, so much so, that Republican legislatures all across the nation have instituted more restrictive identification processes. It’s all necessary to protect the “sacred” right to vote.
Except for one thing. None of the above paragraph is true. The Brennan Center at the New York University Law School has done a comprehensive study of voter fraud in the United States over the past twenty years. Here’s what they found: in studies of US elections, the voter fraud rate is less than .0025%. So what does that number mean? Out of a million votes cast, there is at most an average of 2.5 inaccurate votes, perhaps voter fraud. As the Study states: a voter has a better chance of being struck by lightning, than committing voter fraud (Brennan).
In Search of a Solution
In spite of the lack of a problem, Republican legislatures demanded higher levels of identification for voting. And for many suburban white Americans, the solutions don’t seem to be “a big deal”. Asking voters to show their driver’s license to vote just isn’t “onerous”. And for them, it isn’t. But in Texas and in Georgia is several other states, demanding driver’s license or other official state ID is actually a means of restricting minority voting. Here’s how.
Many states “cut costs” by shutting down local “BMV’s” (Bureaus of Motor Vehicles) where driver’s licenses and other forms of state ID’s are issued. This was done as a cost saving measure, and particularly impacts small, isolated, rural towns. The functions of the local BMV’s are consolidated in larger, more efficient regional offices.
Onerous
But the problem is those regional offices are in bigger towns, forty, fifty, or in Texas’s case one hundred miles away. For folks who are unable to afford personal vehicles, that means they have to find some kind of public transportation to get to the “big town”, get an ID, and get home. It’s a big trip, a full day trip really, a day where they will not be earning wages. If they have to get someone else to drive, they have to pay for gas. If they take public transportation, they have to pay the ticket. And for some of the ID’s they have to pay a fee for that as well.
So what seems like no big deal here in Pataskala, where the BMV office is located in the center of town; in other states becomes a time consuming and expensive effort to get an ID. If you have to “pay” to get the paperwork to vote, it’s a form of poll tax. And that, my friends, is unconstitutional, violating the Twenty-Fourth Amendment:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.
Who Can’t Vote
And since in many of those states many of those poor rural voters are minorities, the voter ID laws keep them from voting. By the way, it’s the same way with cost-saving consolidation of polls. Here in Pataskala, what used to be the local polling place in the center of town has been moved. The “new” polling place consolidates several different old polling places in one building. It’s one “efficient” voting process: but for the elderly or “car-less” who used to walk to the poll in town, it places a burden on them.
If you look at the lines to vote in Atlanta – you get the point. The polls have been consolidated. Not only do folks have to pay for transportation, buses most likely, to get to the polls, but then they have to wait hours in line to vote. In those hours, they aren’t working, and they aren’t taking care of their kids. Someone else is. And now, thanks to the “good” folks in the Georgia State Legislature, they can’t be handed a cookie or a bottle of water as they wait in line. It’s illegal.
So what for the suburban citizens in Pataskala, or even outside of Atlanta, doesn’t seem like a big deal, is just one more step to make sure it’s hard for poor, minority voters to cast their ballots.
Mail It In
With COVID, voting by mail became a more important option. States made it easy to cast your ballot from the kitchen, instead of getting to the poll and waiting in line. The ballot was sent to the residence of the voter, assuring that the voter lived there. The ballot was returned with a signature (sometimes several) allowing for the signature “check”.
But now several states are requiring greater ID requirements. Copies of driver’s licenses (here we go again) are required. But that requires access to copiers, or scanners. Again, no big deal to the middle class suburban voter. Not so easy to those who don’t have the electronic equipment we all take for granted.
And, of course, it’s not about keeping Democrats from voting – it’s about “ballot security”.
As the Parkland kids would say: I call BS.
