[EL] Madison (WI) new law this week requiring landlords to distribute voter reg forms

[Michael McDonald]

By the early to mid-1850s, property rights had largely given way to universal white male suffrage, largely due to the perceived injustice of city tradesmen who did not meet property thresholds. By the mid-1800s, these tradesmen where supplemented by immigrant workers coming to the US to support the nascent industrialization that was sweeping the country (by the late 1800s, the United States had the highest industrial output in the world). These workers were not affluent like the tradesmen. They came from undesirable “Popish” countries and they were aligned largely with the Democratic Party, which had strongholds in the nation’s developing large cities.

During the rise of the Know-Nothings during the 1850s, and later when Republicans controlled state governments, voter registration laws and other voting restrictions were enacted in the North. (The implementation of similar laws in the Democratic South post-Reconstruction had another purpose.) The echoes of the debates reverberate today in the voter id debates. Those that argued for these restrictions, and in the earlier period supported property requirements, claimed that the restrictions were necessary to combat fraud (some even darkly implied the Pope was trying to take over the United States) and that the barriers were a competency test. Those opposed noted how the phrase “we the people...” implied that a democratic government was inherently based on consent of the governed, which meant that voting was a universal right. Some of these laws specifically targeted Democratic supporters. For example, registration laws might only apply to large cities; even as late as pre-HAVA, Wisconsin’s voter registration applied only to larger-population localities. One of the ways by which Democratic localities responded to voter registration laws imposed by Republican state governments was to institute what today we might call universal voter registration, where the government was responsible for developing and maintaining the lists of registered voters, not the voters.

You could rewind the debate a century and a half to find the same rhetoric being used today, as aptly exemplified in Joe's post.

As an aside, it was the inability for the Founding Fathers to agree upon national voting requirements that led to the "compromise" that voting requirements for the House of Representatives were to be the same as the lower chamber of the state legislature. One of the reasons for the stalemate on national voting requirements was that not all states had property requirements. Even persons from states with property requirements were opposed to them, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, two of the most illustrious Founding Fathers.

============
Dr. Michael P. McDonald
Associate Professor, George Mason University
Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution

                             Mailing address:
(o) 703-993-4191             George Mason University
(f) 703-993-1399             Dept. of Public and International Affairs
mmcdon at gmu.edu               4400 University Drive - 3F4
http://elections.gmu.edu     Fairfax, VA 22030-4444

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Joe La Rue
Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2012 9:40 AM
To: Dan Johnson
Cc: Election Law
Subject: Re: [EL] Madison (WI) new law this week requiring landlords to distribute voter reg forms

I laugh aloud at the silly progressives, like those who issued this press release, who assert that Republicans push for voter ID is un-American and a war on voting. What rhetoric! And what complete nonsense. 

This supposes that placing sensible restrictions on who can vote is contrary to our American values. Yet we've always had such restrictions. The Founders created a system in which many states allowed only property owners to vote. Were the Founders un-American? Today, in every state and federal election, only those 18 and older may vote, and only those who live in the jurisdiction in question may vote. Are we all un-American for those requirements?


In this age in which we have some 12 million people in our country illegally and therefore ineligible to vote, Republicans are trying to institute a common sense safeguard. Requiring voter ID helps assure only citizens cast ballots. Efforts to block voter ID only frustrate that goal. Perhaps that's the true progressive end game: perhaps they want non-citizens to be able to vote. Regardless, their fight against common sense voter ID laws makes it more likely that some will.


Contrary to progressive claims, Republicans aren't trying to keep minorities from voting. Unlike progressives, we believe minority citizens are smart and capable and certainly not too stupid to figure out how to get an ID if they don't already have one. In short, we Republicans believe minority race citizens are just as capable as white people and so do not need to be coddled. Progressives, though, have such a low view of minorities that they cannot imagine them having the intelligence and capability to acquire IDs, and instead insist that ID laws will disenfranchise them. I, for one, abhor that type of prejudice.

On Jul 18, 2012, at 11:35 PM, Dan Johnson <dan at kchrlaw.com> wrote:
Innovative news on the voter registration front (the attack back in the War on Voting continues)...
From: Progressive Advocacy <dan at ProgressivePublicAffairs.com>
Date: July 18, 2012 7:14:51 PM CDT
To: dan at ProgressivePublicAffairs.com
Subject: Progressive Advocacy
Progressive Advocacy 


________________________________________
Madison WI and Washington State attack back on the war on voting 
Posted: 17 Jul 2012 10:45 PM PDT
Fantastic news.

Progressive state and local governments are attacking back on the Republican's anti-American war on voting by implementing forward-thinking laws and policies that reduce the barriers between citizens and their ballots.

Yesterday, the Madison (WI) City Council passed an ordinance adding the voter registration form to the pile of paper documents that landlords must distribute to tenants when they move in. This is now law, just in time for the August move-in for UW-Madison students. Half the housing units in Madison are rental units and a large percentage of those units turn over every year.

As Alder Bridget Maniaci, the lead sponsor of the proposal explains, providing voter registration information to citizens when they move into a new place makes sense, since that's when people are changing their address (and they are probably unaware that they must proactively tell some obscure unit of local government they have moved in order to vote months later). From the Isthmus:

The way citizens in the United States vote is based on where they live, Maniaci adds, which means it is sensible to provide them with voting information when they change addresses.
"To provide to tenants voter registration forms at the time they move in, when most individuals are in the process of changing all of their other household information, everything from Netflix to their post-office address to the DMV, that's a very natural time to do this," she says.
As a bonus, getting citizens to register to vote early is cheaper for the city clerk to process than registering people in the crunch leading up to the election, so distributing these voter registration forms will save taxpayers some money.

On the West Coast, Washington State's Secretary of State is unveiling an app that will allow users to register to vote through Facebook. Since Washington State already uses online voter registration, pulling the data from a user's Facebook account and importing it into the voter registration program will make it easier for people to register -- and people can tell their friends about how they registered to vote, creating more of a social norm of democratic self-governance through participation.

Congratulations to Washington and Madison (named after two Founding Fathers, coincidentally) for further implementing the great democratic spirit of our American Republic.




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