God Bless Virginia

At my Scribd feed you can read something that came on the mail today: my voter registration card and an accompanying pamphlet describing the new voter ID rules.  As regular readers know, I am a big supporter of voter ID, but even I had to chuckle at the list of items allowed as acceptable ID.  Here’s the embed of the pamphlet:

Virginia Pamphlet01

And notice the fourth bullet point on acceptable forms of ID: “Concealed carry permit.”  Woo-hoo!  I knew they were good for something!

Anyway, joking aside, if you are a Virginia resident, look for this in the mail.  It’s important because it includes your voter registration card, which I am obviously not going to post to scribd.  I would guess if you don’t have this by October 1, you need to start asking about around what is going on.  Even if you are going to vote for the wrong person, I want you to be able to vote.

Of course the long time liberal talking point on this is that Voter ID laws are a violation of the right to vote, akin to a poll tax.  This is despite the Supreme Court specifically blessing such laws in Crawford v. Marion Co. Election Board, an opinion announced by that screaming judicial conservative Justice Stevens, and five other justices.  And a recent poll showed that nearly three quarters of Americans agree with such laws.

But of course the Supreme Court is filled with nine human beings and not nine gods in black robes, and they obviously could be wrong as could nearly 75% of the American people.  So it is worth taking a few moments to take down those arguments, one-by-one.

First, it is really hard to argue that black people (or any other racial minority) is less capable of getting photo ID than others, without sounding a little racist.  For instance, I had to renew my license this year.  I will never say dealing with the DMV is easy.  Indeed waiting in line for well over an hour, it occurred to me that this shared experience turned many people conservative, because this was the face of big government in many people’s minds.  But while that was a good three hours of my life I ain’t getting back, none of it is so impossible that we can’t expect everyone to be able to do this.

Second, I have been noting since December of last year the hypocrisy involved.  I mean you have to show ID in order to 1) buy alcohol, 2) drive, 3) buy cigarettes, 4) buy medications, 5) purchase Mature-rated video games, or 5) get a job, to name a few examples.  But on this, our sacred right to vote, we’re going to go on the honor system?

Of course the purpose of pointing out this hypocrisy is not an end to itself, but in order to suggest there is a certain lack of sincerity in this objection.  If Democrats thought requiring an ID amounted to racial discrimination, then why did they require it before entering their convention?  Is it that they don’t want too many minorities there?  Or do you think that maybe they are being less-than-sincere in their claims that requiring ID is discrimination.

One common counter I have heard to this argument is that voting is different.  Well, except in the law it is not.  First, it is worth noting that you do not generally have a right to vote in the Constitution.  Instead what the Constitution says in various places is that you can’t discriminate on the basis of certain traits, like sex, race, color or previous condition of servitude.  But that being said, the Supreme Court has made it clear in Bush v. Gore that when you have a right to vote, that right is fundamental.  Thus any restrictions of the right to vote is subject to the strict scrutiny test which requires that it be narrowly tailored to further a compelling government interest...

…which is the exact same test for all government-based racial discrimination.  So if it is unlawful racial discrimination to require an ID before you vote, it is equally unconstitutional to require an ID before you can buy alcohol, cigarettes, medications, or before you can get a job or drive a car.  Which means this is a slippery slope we will slide right down if that precedent is set.

“But wait, Aaron,” you might say, “isn’t that a slippery slope argument.  I mean you even said the words ‘slippery slope!’  I just saw you!”

Yes, but in fact a slippery slope argument is not fallacious when you are talking about the Anglo-American way of doing law.  There is a whole form of argument in law where one says, “having slipped this far down the slope, I suggest we go even further.”  But in law, we call it arguing from precedent.  So conversely, and this is also done all the time in law, we argue against a certain ruling or holding because of the precedent it would set.

“But its vote suppression!” is another cry.  However, fraud is voter suppression, too.  Imagine if out of 10,000 voters, Candidate A gets 5,100 votes and Candidate B gets 4,900 votes.  So then Candidate B uses voter fraud to cast an additional 201 votes for himself.  Well, if Candidate B gets away with it, in what sense have we not cancelled out the voting strength of those 5,100 votes who wanted Candidate A?  Shouldn’t liberals support rational efforts to prevent voter fraud if only to enforce the principle of “one person, one vote?”

“But no fraud exists!” it is insisted.  Well, first exactly how does one go about detecting such fraud?  It’s like trying to figure out how many people use a certain drug: it’s not like you can just ask them and expect them to answer.  And our system of anonymous voting tends to make such detection even harder.

Oh, and by the way, this was done on purpose in order to facilitate voter fraud.  In the beginning of the republic, voting was done openly—that is, with you having to tell God and the whole world who you were voting for.  That obviously created a concern for coercion and retribution for voting for the wrong side as Lincoln alluded to in his statement to Congress on July 4, 1861.  He called into question the referendums of secession held in Virginia and Tennessee because in both cases the Confederate army manned the polling stations, Lincoln saying:

It may well be questioned whether there is, today, a majority of the legally qualified voters of any State, except perhaps South Carolina, in favor of disunion. There is much reason to believe that the Union men are the majority in many, if not in every other one, of the so-called seceded States. The contrary has not been demonstrated in any one of them. It is ventured to affirm this, even of Virginia and Tennessee; for the result of an election, held in military camps, where the bayonets are all on one side of the question voted upon, can scarcely be considered as demonstrating popular sentiment. At such an election, all that large class who are, at once, for the Union, and against coercion, would be coerced to vote against the Union.

And lest you think Lincoln was being paranoid, I will remind you that Tennessee Senator Andrew Johnson refused to join secession as he believed it to be unlawful for precisely this reason, while in Virginia a large portion of the state considered the method of secession to be so rotten that they seceded from secession, and formed the state of West Virginia.  Which is sort of like the son of hippies being conservative as a form of rebellion against his parents.

(That is Michael J. Fox, on Family Ties, playing Alex P. Keaton, the West Virginia of the Keaton family.)

At any rate, while you and I see the obvious advantage of anonymous voting, as preventing coercion and the like, that is not why it was instituted in America.  No, you see, it started in the South during Reconstruction—that is, the period where the Union was reconstructed into a more perfect one.  You see, the white racist southerners had a “problem” which was that there were a lot black people and under newly enacted laws they were entitled to vote (well, the men, anyway).  I believe they were a sizeable voting block in virtually every Southern state, but in particular in Mississippi, black people accounted for about 50% of the population and thus under these new laws 50% of the vote, while in South Carolina black people accounted for about two-thirds of the population and vote (see here for more discussion of this point).  This is why, for instance, that Mississippi gave us the first black man ever seated in Congress, and South Carolina gave us the first black lieutenant governor.  These things aren’t “problems” to modern readers or to me, but to the white racists back then, this is a nightmare: a problem to be fixed.

But as I noted before, something went horribly wrong in the South and in democracy itself.  One only has to look at the fact that by 1880, the majority of the government in South Carolina was white to realize something had gone seriously amiss, given that the population was still about two-thirds black.  What happened was an organized campaign of terrorism and official discrimination designed to suppress the black vote, all across the South carried out by the Red Shirts, the Ku Klux Klan and other scattered organizations.  As I have said before, there is a case to be made that this was our first War on Terror, and the good guys lost this one.

The methods they used to suppress the black vote was multi-fold.  Sometimes it was done by retaliation: if you voted the wrong way, you were visited by men in white sheets.  Other times it was done by the crudest of violence, in one incident these terrorists firing a cannon into a group of black citizens peacefully attempting to vote.  The list goes on and on, the creativity and cruelty of their voter suppression knowing no bounds.

But among those methods was the most devious: to institute anonymous voting, and then simply throw out or alter the black votes.  Of course that meant the votes were really not anonymous to officials, but they pretended they were anonymous in order to make it difficult to detect and prove this form of fraud.

Now, eventually this caught on across the country.  You can make a reasonable argument that this is a case of an idea put forward for the worst reasons being adopted for better reasons—such as to protect people from facing retaliation due to their vote.  But it is useful to remember that it was originally instituted specifically to enable vote fraud, by making it much harder to prove.  And so when someone says that no voter fraud has been proven...  well that was kind of the point in adopting this system, wasn’t it?

But even if it was proven that there was no fraud, I would still support voter ID.  Maybe I am thinking like a lawyer, but I expect some things to just happen as a matter of due process.  You shouldn’t be allowed to vote until you can prove who you were, period.

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Incidentally, I think we now have the technology to create a compromise between the right to anonymous voting and the ability to make sure the integrity of elections are ensured.  I have proposed a simple system.  Each citizen gets a special voter ID number.  We pass laws that say that this ID number can’t be used for anything else, and no one can legally require you to reveal that information, employers can’t ask, etc., except for narrowly tailored exceptions.

When you vote, you use that voter ID number to identify you (as well as photo ID, although I think we could kill two bird with one stone and make a voter ID with your photo included).  Then the government publishes a complete list of who voted and how by voter number.  So you might be voter #654-672-165-712-645.  And you can go online and look up your ID number and it might say:

654-672-165-712-645:

Voted for:

Romeny for President.

Kaine for Senator,

Wolf for Congress,

Yes to proposition 27

No on proposition 28.

And so on.  And because you are the only one who knows who 654-672-165-712-645 is, it would allow you to make sure that the system put you down as voting for the person you actually voted for without breaching your anonymity.  And that allows me to argue that my vote is being miscounted (for instance, I am not likely to vote for Kaine), and may even reveal greater shenanigans.

With computerized voting becoming more and more common, the danger that hackers might almost literally steal an election goes up considerably.  I think my proposal balances the need for the anonymity of the voting booth to be protected, while simultaneously enabling us to more easily detect fraud.

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My wife and I have lost our jobs due to the harassment of convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin, including an attempt to get us killed and to frame me for a crime carrying a sentence of up to ten years.  I know that claim sounds fantastic, but if you read starting here, you will see absolute proof of these claims using documentary and video evidence.  If you would like to help in the fight to hold Mr. Kimberlin accountable, please hit the Blogger’s Defense Team button on the right.  And thank you.

Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

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Disclaimer:

I have accused some people, particularly Brett Kimberlin, of reprehensible conduct.  In some cases, the conduct is even criminal.  In all cases, the only justice I want is through the appropriate legal process—such as the criminal justice system.  I do not want to see vigilante violence against any person or any threat of such violence.  This kind of conduct is not only morally wrong, but it is counter-productive.

In the particular case of Brett Kimberlin, I do not want you to even contact him.  Do not call him.  Do not write him a letter.  Do not write him an email.  Do not text-message him.  Do not engage in any kind of directed communication.  I say this in part because under Maryland law, that can quickly become harassment and I don’t want that to happen to him.

And for that matter, don’t go on his property.  Don’t sneak around and try to photograph him.  Frankly try not to even be within his field of vision.  Your behavior could quickly cross the line into harassment in that way too (not to mention trespass and other concerns).

And do not contact his organizations, either.  And most of all, leave his family alone.

The only exception to all that is that if you are reporting on this, there is of course nothing wrong with contacting him for things like his official response to any stories you might report.  And even then if he tells you to stop contacting him, obey that request.  That this is a key element in making out a harassment claim under Maryland law—that a person asks you to stop and you refuse.

And let me say something else.  In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe that any person supporting me has done any of the above.  But if any of you have, stop it, and if you haven’t don’t start.