Vice presidential candidate Mike Pence. (photo: Getty)
29 July 16
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Pence is the poster boy for Voter ID laws. No one has benefited more
from this legalized form of vote theft than the Republican nominee for
VP. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in
Cleveland last Wednesday, Pence said he “wants every American to succeed
and prosper.”
However, he certainly doesn’t want every American to
vote. Indeed it was thanks to Indiana’s Voter ID laws – the first of
their kind in the nation – that he squeaked into the governor’s office.
These seemingly benign laws, requiring voters to show approved photo ID,
have a sinister and very deliberate effect: they suppress black, brown,
young, old, poor – and, above all, blue votes. In this week’s Best
Democracy Money Can Buy, Election Crimes Bulletin, Flashpoint’s Dennis J
Bernstein gets the lowdown on the sleazy practice of
vote-rigging-by-ID-law from political hanky-panky expert Greg Palast.
They also discuss how these racist-by-design laws tap dance around
voting rights and discrimination protections, and could ultimately help
Pence and Trump waltz into the White House.
TRANSCRIPT (Originally broadcast on July 20, 2016)
Dennis J Bernstein: Today Mike
Pence is front and center. He’s out there on his proverbial knees to
greet the Trump helicopter. He’s getting ready to accept his party’s
nomination. But also, as you point out, he’s a vote bandit. Tell us the
joke about the nuns trying to vote.
Greg Palast: Ten nuns walk into a
voting booth. I know that Mike Pence says he’s a Christian, but he also
stopped 10 nuns from voting – and that’s very important. Mike Pence
would not be governor of Indiana if he hadn’t figured out a way to knock
out black voters, nun voters, student voters, and poor voters.
DB: You are serious about the nuns?
Palast: Yes. Here’s the story:
In 2008, 10 nuns walked into a voting station, a place where they had
been voting for decades, and they were told “Scram sisters!” because
Indiana had just passed its Voter ID law. It was the first state in the
nation that said you had to have a photo Voter ID. So the nuns proudly
showed their driver’s licenses, except that the licenses had expired
because they were all in their eighties and nineties. But they hadn’t
expired. Nevertheless, they were told they couldn’t vote because they
needed a current state ID, even though there’s no reason why. There’s no
logic for any Voter ID because in the 100 years in which records have
been kept, not one single person in a 100 year history of voting in
Indiana – not one – was found to have used someone else’s identity. In
other words, using identify theft to cast a vote. Because you are going
to the hoosegow for a very long time, at least five years under federal
law and more under state law. But, nevertheless, this was the first
Voter ID law. This is the Voter ID law that Justice Scalia provided the fifth and deadly vote
in favor of, saying that it was constitutional and okay under the
Voting Rights Act. Now, the Voting Rights Act itself has been killed by
the former Scalia court. (Get my FREE COMIC BOOK DOWNLOAD, which includes the NUNS’ TALE.)
But here’s where Mike Pence comes into the story: we
wouldn’t have a Governor Pence except for this. The NAACP Legal Defense
Fund and the ACLU hired Matt Barreto, who’s a great statistician. He
calculated that about 72,000 black people in Indiana would be barred
from voting by this ID law. Furthermore, students would be barred from
voting. You can’t use a student ID. You can use a gun ID, but not a
University of Indiana ID. Students would be barred, and obviously people
who don’t drive tend to be poor people, whether they are white or
black. Poor people tend to vote Democratic. Black people vote
Democratic. Hispanic people vote Democratic – we’re not even counting
those yet. Students vote Democratic. So if you add a few more of the
blocked voters to the 72,000 African-Americans who are blocked from
voting in Indiana, that more than accounts for Mike Pence’s very, very
slim 80,000 vote margin when he ran for governor of Indiana. So Pence
just sneaked by the Democrat, congressman John Gregg, and he sneaked by
simply by blocking voters through this racist ID law.
DB: And the lower courts found it to be a real problem. Justice Terence Evans was not all that impressed, was he?
Palast: No. His ruling was that this
was just a clear, bold attempt at partisan manipulation of voter rolls
by the Republican Party, knowing that they are knocking out their
adversaries. But Scalia, being the 5th vote, said, “I don’t care.”
Scalia famously said, “You can always get a non-voter ID.” Well, it’s
kind of a catch 22 – you need ID to get a non-voter ID. But even if you
do, it’s an average three bus, all day trip back and forth from a county
office – on average a 17 mile trip. And, as Scalia infamously said,
“Seventeen miles is 17 miles, whether you are black or white.”
But, of course, he had a black Beemer,
for which he got a speeding ticket. But whether it’s a black Beemer or a
white Beemer, 17 miles is nothing for him. But if you actually have to
take a bus, and most people who don’t have licenses have to take a bus,
it’s a major hardship. He knew that.
And while it’s racist, that’s only secondary to their
plan. It’s partisan, and the interesting thing is that the Republicans
in the court say a plan which knocks out your opponents, that’s
perfectly fine. It just can’t be clearly and overtly intended to be
racist. Now there was a glimmer of hope, because the devil needed his
advocate early and took Scalia from us. And the Texas court of appeals
is changing and the Texas ID law, which is also a nasty piece of work.
That ruling just came out yesterday.
DB: That was not thrown out. It’s
thrown back to the lower court, so that could show its ugly face again.
Now, Karl Rove thinks it’s a good idea. He thinks, if you gotta go get
groceries, they check your ID, so if you gotta go to vote, they check
your ID too.
Palast: Yeah, can you imagine Karl
Rove trying to cash a check at the grocery store?
But the difference is
that cashing a check at a grocery store is not the key to American
democracy, but we like to think of voting as part of it. By the way,
most Americans don’t realize voting is not a constitutional right. I
want to repeat that: There is nothing in the Constitution which gives
you the right to vote. That silence in the Constitution was what allowed
the Supreme Court to pick George Bush as our president in Bush v. Gore.
There is no right to vote in the Constitution. The one thing the
Constitution has is the 14th Amendment, which says if you allow the
people to vote, you can’t stop them from voting because they were once
slaves or their great-grandparents were slaves. And, of course, the 19th
Amendment said if you allow people to vote, you can’t stop them from
voting based on their genitals. That was the suffrage amendment. But you
don’t have a right to vote – that’s what makes it possible to have
these nasty laws.
DB: Mike Pence, you said, was a recipient of this kind of draconian, and I guess we can call it racist, on its face, behavior?
Palast: There’s this big back and
forth – and we see this in Texas – about whether something is racist by
intent or racist in effect. Those have two different meanings under the
law. If it’s racist by intent, then the law has to be thrown out. In
fact, in places like Wisconsin, one of the Republicans confessed that
when the Voter ID law was passed there was absolute jubilation among the
Republicans. And Charlie Crist said that in Florida. He was the
Republican governor and he said the Republican party specifically did
that to knock out black voters. When he revealed that, he was basically
tossed out of the Republican Party. But even if it’s not intended, if it
has a racial effect, the law must be modified. That’s what’s happening
in Texas. They have to modify the law to try to remove some of the overt
racial effects. I don’t know how they’re going to do that though.
DB: The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University has weighed in on this as well, haven’t they?
Palast: Yes. Here’s a breakdown from
the Brennan Center: 6 million senior citizens don’t have their legal ID,
mostly poor senior citizens.
DB: 6 million?
Palast: 6 million. 5.5 million
African-Americans, 4.5 million 18- to 24-year-olds, and 15% of voters
with household incomes under $35,000 a year – that is the poor … If
you’re on food stamps these days, what they now call SNAP, the
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, in most states you get an
official government ID card with your photo on it. Well, Texas allows
you to use your gun permit with your photo on it, but does not allow you
to use your food stamp card with your photo ID on it. That’s one thing
that the court did latch onto.
By the way, they are saying that’s not racist. And you
know what? They may be right. It’s really class war. I want to
emphasize this. In all my research, while we see that most of the
victims of election thefts are voters of color, it’s really class war by
other means. Upper-middle class, wealthy Hispanics and wealthy
African-Americans tend not to have trouble voting. They have passports.
Vernon Jordan and Andy Young had no problem at all with the Voter ID
law. They said, “That’s a good idea. People should have ID.” Well, of
course, they’ve got passports – and their chauffeurs to vouch for them!
But a lot of white people are caught up in these
things too. Elderly, poor white people who are barely getting by on
Social Security. Because 15% of the voters are under the poverty line,
and that’s white and black. Most poor people in America, remember, are
white. People tend to forget that because of the way things are
portrayed on TV. Most people who are poor are white, and they don’t
stand much of a chance if all they have to show is their food stamp
cards. It’s really class war.
DB: Broaden this out at the
national level. We’ve been talking about Mike Pence because he’s going
to accept the Republican nomination tonight and he was an offender in
Indiana. But this is a national program.
Palast: Understand the republic
lasted two centuries without photo ID. We founded the republic before
there were photographs without any problem. We haven’t had hoards of
identity thieves voting. But it’s been marvelously excellent at knocking
out literally hundreds of thousands of poor people, especially voters
of color.
We’ve gone from one state having a photo Voter ID
program in 2000 – Pence was the beneficiary. He would not be governor if
it weren’t for that law. Since Indiana, it’s gone like a virus. Once
the Supreme Court said Indiana was okay, it was both constitutional and
not violating the Voting Rights Act, 20 states adopted some type of ID
requirement. And there’s no case in which it doesn’t have a very smelly
racial aroma.
Dennis J Bernstein is the executive producer of
Flashpoints, syndicated on Pacifica Radio, and is the recipient of a
2015 Pillar Award for his work as a journalist whistleblower. He is most
recently the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom.
Greg Palast has been called the “most important
investigative reporter of our time – up there with Woodward and
Bernstein” (The Guardian). Palast has broken front-page stories for BBC
Television’s Newsnight, The Guardian, The Nation Magazine, Rolling
Stone, and Harper's Magazine. He is the author of the New York Times
bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and the highly acclaimed Vultures’ Picnic, named
Book of the Year 2012 on BBC’s Newsnight Review. His books have been
translated into two dozen languages. Palast’s investigation and
production team are currently preparing to release his new film on the
theft of the 2016 election: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits.
Palast’s film will screen in Oakland on September 7th.
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