[EL] secret ballot

[Larry Levine]

Separate from the question of whether voter ID is constitutional or a tool
to disenfranchise some, I worry about the inconsistency of enforcement, not
from state to state but from polling place to polling place. Poll workers
are temporary hires. Their training isn't very deep. They bring their own
biases, interpretations and opinions of what should be to the job. They have
their own interpretations of when a provisional ballot is called for or
should be permitted. We've had poll workers decide it was getting too late
and they were getting tired, so they took the ballots home and decided they
would finish counting them in the morning. While most are conscientious and
do an excellent job, every election day there are stories of decisions made
at polling place that just make you shake your head. The more rules,
regulations, laws and complications we throw at poll workers, the more we
will be inviting their personal intervention into the process. It's not a
question of whether a state can produce an example of someone being
disenfranchised; it's a matter of why impose new hurdles to fix a problem
that may exist only on the slimmest of margins.

Larry

 

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu
[mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Dan
Johnson
Sent: Tuesday, December 27, 2011 6:42 AM
To: JBoppjr at aol.com
Cc: law-election at uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] secret ballot

 

I wish poll workers (election judges in Illinois) were required to document
incidents when citizens ask whether they may vote but are turned away due to
registration or identification barriers imposed by the government. I witness
it every election cycle when i am working a precinct for my candidates, but
there is no data collection to systematically document it. 

On Tuesday, December 27, 2011,  <JBoppjr at aol.com> wrote:
> A big lie repeated over and over again does not become true:
>  
> "we should also realize that in the U.S., the secret ballot was widely
used, as the voter identification measures currently are, to disfranchise
poor, uneducated people,
> especially African-Americans in the South."
>  
> When put to the test, the Plaintiffs in Indiana could not come up with one
person who was disenfranchised.  No not one.  Jim Bopp
>  
> In a message dated 12/26/2011 5:23:32 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
kousser at hss.caltech.edu writes:
>
>    In relation to Mark Scarberry's post, we should also realize that in
> the U.S., the secret ballot was widely used, as the voter identification
> measures currently are, to disfranchise poor, uneducated people,
> especially African-Americans in the South.  By disfranchising
> African-Americans, it also greatly diminished the vote of the party to
> which they overwhelmingly adhered at the time, the Republicans, and
> partisan and racial purposes, then as now, could not be easily
> disentangled.  As the (Democratic) Little Rock Arkansas Gazette wrote
> after the first election (1892) in which the secret ballot was used in
> that state:
>
>    The Australian ballot works like a charm:
>    It makes them think and scratch.
>    And when a negro [sic] gets a ballot,
>    He has certainly met his match.
>
>    That was two years after the longest Senate filibuster in history up
> to that time had defeated the second strongest voting rights act that
> Congress considered before 1965, the Lodge Fair Elections Bill.  (The
> strongest, in most respects, was the Enforcement Act of 1875, also
> defeated by a filibuster.)  If the Supreme Court were to strip voters of
> the protection of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County case,
> a potential South Carolina voter id case, the Kinston or Alabama or
> Arizona or even Texas cases, then future election "reforms" might more
> overtly target their racial and partisan objects, as the secret ballot
> did more than a century ago.
> Morgan
>
> --
> Prof. of History and Social Science, Caltech
> surface mail:  228-77 Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125-7700
> phone 626-395-4080, fax 626-405-9841
> home page:<  http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~kousser/Kousser.html>
>    . . . without the clarity that makes doubt productive, historians will
never be able to fulfill their highest moral responsibility, to build a
better world . . .
>                        -- from "The New Postmodern Southern Political
History"
>    Perfection . . . in any institution is a dangerous myth; there is only
the repeated correction of imperfections.  As long as there is
discrimination, there will always be more work to do.
>                         -- from "The Strange, Ironic Career of Section 5
of the Voting Rights Act"
>
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>

-- 
Dan Johnson

Attorney at Law
111 West Washington, Suite 1920
Chicago, Illinois 60602

312.867.5377 (office)
312.933.4890 (mobile)
312.794.7064 (fax)

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