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

Thu Jul 19 09:55:33 PDT 2012

Joe,

Wilola Lee, 59, was born in rural Wilkerson County, Georgia. She was raised
by her grandmother, who moved her to Philadelphia in 1957, where she has
lived ever since. Ms. Lee finished the eleventh grade, married, and raised
two children, one of whom is a former school principal and now works for the
Pennsylvania state government. Ms. Lee worked for the Philadelphia Public
Schools for many years, including work with special needs children. Her
husband passed away six years ago. Ms. Lee has been voting for decades and
worked as a poll worker in the city of Philadelphia. She has been trying for
nearly ten years to get a birth certificate that she will need to get a
photo ID to vote, but the state of Georgia has told her they have no record
of her birth. She's been voting in nearly every election for the past 30+
years, but cannot get photo ID to vote in PA this year.

She's not a stupid woman, Joe, and I'll assume you're a pretty smart guy.
Tell us how she's supposed to obtain a photo ID sufficient to comply with
Pennsylvania law.

(Similar examples here:
http://www.aclupa.org/legal/legaldocket/applewhiteetalvcommonwealt/voteridcl
ients.htm)

Adam C. Bonin
The Law Office of Adam C. Bonin
1900 Market Street, 4th Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19103
(215) 864-8002 (w)
(215) 701-2321 (f)
(267) 242-5014 (c)

adam at boninlaw.com

http://www.boninlaw.com <http://www.boninlaw.com/> 

  _____  

From: Joe La Rue <joseph.e.larue at gmail.com>
To: Dan Johnson <dan at kchrlaw.com> 
Cc: Election Law <law-election at uci.edu> 
Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2012 6:40 AM
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

 <http://djwinfo.blogspot.com/> Progressive Advocacy 

<http://fusion.google.com/add?source=atgs&feedurl=http://feeds.feedburner.co
m/blogspot/ProgressiveAdvocacy> 

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<http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/blogspot/ProgressiveAdvocacy/%7E3/oLTdrytw
JNE/madison-wi-and-washington-state-attack.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_me
dium=email> 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
<http://madison.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=1144324&GUID=D002BEF2
-80C7-4F85-97BD-5AB5E0FAE4F8>  adding the voter registration form
<http://www.cityofmadison.com/election/voter/documents/VoterRegistrationAppl
ication-English-WithArrows-Fillable.pdf>  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
<http://host.madison.com/article_e1b34b38-c8b8-11e1-a53d-0019bb2963f4.html>
.

As Alder Bridget Maniaci
<http://madison.legistar.com/PersonDetail.aspx?ID=79730&GUID=41E80667-D780-4
522-8E21-903D7DA04DEE> , 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
<http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/article.php?article=37268> :

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
<http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2018708721_apusvoterregistr
ationfacebook1stldwritethru.html>  -- 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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