Editorials: Is True the Vote Shaking Down States With Nuisance Lawsuits? | The Nation

Less than a month before Election Day, the “election integrity” group True The Vote is battered, bewildered and disappointed. The upcoming election landscape will hardly resemble the “ground war” they were hoping for. Voter fraud as a thing has been exposed by civil rights watchdogs and a wide range of journalists as pure conspiracy theory. And civil rights legal advocates have at least temporarily blocked all of the most strict voter ID laws for which they fought so hard. But while True the Vote is down, they’re certainly not out. The group still hopes to make an impact in November, though they’ve downgraded their self-descriptors from “armies” prepared for “ground wars” to “grannies with clipboards.” Besides their cheering for billboards warning that voter fraud is a felony targeted in poor, black neighborhoods in Ohio, their last operative hope is to shake down states, including Ohio, that don’t comply with their purging demands with frivolous lawsuits.

Editorials: Voter ID laws disenfranchise millions | Indiana Statesman

Across the country, there has been a concerted effort by primarily Republican politicians to enforce what’s known as “Voter ID laws.” These ID laws would essentially make voting more difficult than purchasing ammunition for a firearm.  The laws call for specific state issued ID’s that millions of Americans do not have. Also, there would be restrictions on who can and cannot vote early.  Essentially, the voter ID laws disenfranchise millions of Americans by making it highly inconvenient or next to impossible to vote. However, now that we are mere breaths away from the presidential election, courts across the country are striking down the ID laws and any attempts to restrict the early voting process. The most recent case occurred on Tuesday, when the federal Supreme Court allowed early voting to take place in the crucially important swing state of Ohio. Republican leaders proposed that early voting should only be allowed for military members and their families to vote in person during the last three days before Nov. 6th. A federal appeals court  concluded that if county election polls were going to be open for early voting, the polls had to be open for all voters and thus placed a hold on the early voting restriction.

Editorials: Can Employers Tell Their Workers How to Vote? | CNBC

A flurry of emails from CEOs telling workers how to vote in November has raised a troubling question: Can a company legally tell workers how to vote? For the most part, the answer is yes. Election regulators and corporate lawyers say no federal election law specifically prevents employers from telling workers they could lose their jobs if they vote for a certain candidate. The issue has come into public view after Westgate CEO David Siegel sent an email to his 7,000 workers saying that if President Obama is elected “I will have no choice but to reduce the size of this company.” (Read more: CEO to Workers: You'll Likely Be Fired If Obama Wins) The news was followed with a missive from the Koch brothers to their 45,000 workers at Georgia Pacific that they could “suffer the consequences, including higher gasoline prices, runaway inflation, and other ills" if they voted for candidates not supported by Koch-owned companies or its political fund-raising arm. According to In These Times, the “approved” list of candidates started with Mitt Romney and didn’t include any Democrats.

Editorials: Did Republicans Just Save The Voting Rights Act? | Andrew Cohen/The Atlantic

One year ago, maybe even six months ago, conventional wisdom had it that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act was in jeopardy, susceptible to another aggressive ruling by a very conservative United States Supreme Court. The five Republican-appointed justices would rule, the theory went, that there was no longer a need for local lawmakers to "pre-clear" voting laws or gerrymanders with federal officials, because Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act had been so successful since its implementation that it was no longer necessary to protect minority rights. Justice Clarence Thomas, a black man who grew up in Georgia, one of the states "covered" by the Voting Rights Act because of its long history of racial discrimination, said so himself just a few years ago. In Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District v. Holder. a 2009 decision in which the Court uneasily upheld the Voting Rights Act, Justice Thomas declared, as the lone dissenter, that: "The extensive pattern of discrimination that led the Court to previously uphold §5 as enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment no longer exists. Covered jurisdictions are not now engaged in a systematic campaign to deny black citizens access to the ballot through intimidation and violence. And the days of "grandfather clauses, property qualifications, 'good character' tests, and the requirement that registrants 'understand' or 'interpret' certain matter," are gone. There is thus currently no concerted effort in these jurisdictions to engage in the "unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution," that served as the constitutional basis for upholding the "uncommon exercise of congressional power" embodied in §5."

Editorials: In November Elections, Cast Your Vote For…Evil? | Forbes

Boring and evil.  That’s the November election in a nutshell. The latest edition of Vanity Fair is surely revealing on this end.  They come down on the boring side of things.  In his signature front-of-the mag editor’s letter, VF’s editor Graydon Carter says President Barack Obama “has fallen short on selling himself and his achievements.”  It seems safe to say that Democrats “aren’t all that excited by Obama,” Carter writes.  In the liberal Hollywood world Vanity Fair inhabits, the red carpet left is — oh, let’s just say — ehh, about Obama. According to a round-up of major polls on Real Clear Politics, Obama is running neck and neck with ex-Massachusetts governor Mitt “RomneyCare” Romney, in an election that is going to be decided by three states.  Maybe two.  It’s back to red state versus blue state.  And while this should be a redo of Clinton versus Dole, Obama is struggling in the polls.

Editorials: Republican again nixes satellite voting sites in Marion County | The Desert Sun

For the fifth time in nearly three years, the Republican appointee on the Marion County Election Board used his veto power Friday to stop a plan to open satellite early voting sites. Early in-person balloting at the City-County Building has spiked 24 percent compared to the 2008 presidential election. Clerk Beth White, a Democrat, said the steady lines — sure to build in coming weeks — justified offering Northside and Southside sites later this month. First, Republican Patrick J. Dietrick applauded the efforts of White and her staff to handle the crowds. Then he voted no. “Satellite voting, conceptually, in our situation, is a solution in search of a problem,” Dietrick said after Friday’s meeting.

Editorials: What’s the Truth about True the Vote? | prospect.org

Two years ago, the week before Election Day, I drove to Harris County, Texas. More specifically, I drove to the Acres Homes Multi-Service Center, a polling location for early voting in one of Houston’s poor, predominantly black neighborhoods. After alleging that Harris County had a widespread problem with voter fraud, a Tea Party group called the King Street Patriots had launched a project called True the Vote, which had trained hundreds of volunteer poll watchers. As the early-voting period began, reports had begun to trickle out about white poll watchers arriving at minority precincts and intimidating voters. In Texas, poll watchers, appointed by a political party to watch the proceedings, aren’t allowed to do much; they’re barred from communicating with voters. But these poll watchers, foreign to the neighborhoods they were working in, were apparently not all observing the rules.

Editorials: Queens Voters Forced to Trek a Mile After Polling-Place Swap | DNAinfo.com

On Tuesday, 59-year-old Ditmars resident Wendy Rodriguez crossed the street with the help of a crossing guard outside of P.S. 2 on 21st Avenue. The two began chatting, and the guard asked Rodriguez, a school administrator, if she had received a letter earlier this year from the Board of Elections, explaining that the polling site at the school would be closed for November's election. The crossing guard explained that voting would now be done about a mile away, at P.S. 84, on 41st Street near 23rd Avenue. "That's ridiculous," said Rodriguez, who lives in the neighborhood. "You know what's going to happen? People aren't going to vote." Rodriguez's situation has become a familiar one. With redistricting after the 2010 census, concerns have risen across the city that new districts formed earlier this year would cause mass confusion on Election Day in November.

Editorials: Voter Fraud: The GOP Witch Hunt | Huffington Post

Recently, two large frauds within the Republican voter suppression effort this year have surfaced, which are proving far more serious than any of the alleged shenanigans which have been used to justify these measures. To cover the entirety of the vigorous voter suppression effort on the Right would require a far longer article than this, however, I will be focusing in on two very ugly details: Strategic Allied Consulting and voter suppression vigilantes like True the Vote. Republicans have ended the voter drives in Nevada, Florida, Colorado, Virginia and North Carolina. Why would they do such a thing? Because the firm they hired, Strategic Allied Consulting, the only company the Republican Party had running registration campaigns in these states, has been rocked by scandal after scandal. This election year, voter suppression law after voter suppression law rolled out, many of which have been struck down as unconstitutional by the courts, all to catch fraud; so far the only fraud that has been proven has been on their side.

Editorials: Voter ID Laws Live On | Huffington Post

Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist began his political career intimidating blacks and Hispanics waiting in line to vote in his home state of Arizona. It was 1964 and Rehnquist, a practicing lawyer at the time, demanded to see identification and conversed with Hispanics to determine if they spoke sufficient English to vote. He was working as part of "Operation Eagle Eye," a Republican plan to suppress the vote. In 2012, nearly half a century later, the Kochs and Karl Rove have fueled legislation to require stringent voter identification in states they helped pack with Republican lawmakers and governors in the 2010 Republican sweep. They turned that sweep into a below-the-national-radar campaign to suppress voter turnout in this election cycle, including in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. Like cheap paper targets at a carnival shooting gallery, the courts have at least temporarily shot down almost every onerous voter ID law that has passed in the last two years to protect Americans from "voter fraud" that doesn't appear to exist.

Editorials: Will Republicans accept if Barack Obama defeats Mitt Romney? | Slate Magazine

What if President Obama wins re-election and Republicans don’t believe it? The question isn’t far-fetched. For several weeks, we have seen Republicans challenge the veracity of a number of election-related facts, and the outcome of the presidential election may be no different. First, some Republicans claimed that public opinion polls were all skewed to show an Obama lead. As Slate reported, 71 percent of self-identified Republicans and 84 percent of Tea Partiers believe in the skew. Republicans confidently claim that the polls are oversampling Democrats, not realizing that these are self-reported party identifications, which rise and fall with candidates’ support. Distrust of the polls is not a new phenomenon, and it is not confined to Republicans. As Nate Silver pointed out, when Democrats were behind in 2004 they believed the polls were skewed toward Republicans. Fortunately, the Romney debate performance last week apparently was enough to “unskew” the latest numbers.

Editorials: Ohio’s Secretary of State Subverts Voting Rights | The Nation

Once again, political experts are predicting that the 2012 presidential election could be decided in the battleground state of Ohio, like it was in 2004. Remember what happened that year? George W. Bush won the state by a narrow 118,000 votes in an election marred by widespread electoral dysfunction. “The misallocation of voting machines led to unprecedented long lines that disenfranchised scores, if not hundreds of thousands, of predominantly minority and Democratic voters,” found a post-election report by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee. According to one survey, 174,000 Ohioans, 3 percent of the electorate, left their polling place without voting because of massive lines in urban precincts and on college campuses. Ohio’s Secretary of State that year was Ken Blackwell, co-chairman of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign.

Editorials: Raise your hand if online voting spooks you | Sherwood Park News

The City of Edmonton will embark on a online election pilot later this month and Strathcona County will no doubt be watching. Despite my generation’s apparent love affair with everything technology, online voting is one of those things that should forever remain a pie-in-the-sky lust. Sort of like flying cars. Sure, flying cars sound nice — unless you realize the safest place to live is in the basement of your home because a car flown by some inebriated driver can come crashing through your roof without warning. Likewise, an online poll can be mucked with without warning. Government rules for rewarding contracts being what they are, the best security the lowest bid can buy will most likely be protecting any online vote. While I believe any bid-winning firm has what it takes to stop most hackers from having fun with the results, not every hacker can be so easily derailed.

Editorials: End the electoral college | USA Today

Vladimir Putin had an election in Russia. This week, Hugo Chavez had one in Venezuela. Last spring, Nicholas Sarkozy lost one in France. In each case, the outcome was decided by the majority of voters in their country. Such direct democracy is a foreign concept in the USA, where we require neither direct voting nor a majority to lead our nation. The reason is an arcane institution: the Electoral College. In the U.S., presidents are not elected by the people but by 538 "electors" who award blocks of votes on a state-by-state basis. The result is that presidents can be -- and have been -- elected with fewer votes than their opponents. Indeed, various presidents have taken office with less than 50% of the vote. The question is whether a president should be elected by a majority of voters of at least one free country before he can call himself the leader of the free world. The Electoral College is a relic of a time when the Framers believed that average people could not be trusted with selecting a president, at least not entirely. This was consistent with a general view of the dangers of direct voting systems. Until 1913, U.S. senators were elected not by their constituents but by the state legislators. When we finally got rid of that provision with the 17th Amendment, we failed to change its sister provision in Article II on the indirect election of presidents.

Editorials: On Minnesota voter ID amendment, ends do not justify means | The Forest Lake Times

This country is stronger when virtually every adult is empowered with their constitutional right to vote. Few restrictions should limit this right, and a change in those limits should only be made when it’s been demonstrated that the rights of the majority are in danger. There are two principles of a free election on which all should agree.  Those who either are not citizens or who have lost their right to vote should not be voting. Every citizen regardless of economic physical condition, politics, religious belief, race, gender or age must be given an opportunity to vote. On Nov. 6, Minnesotans will vote on a significant change in voting rights – a constitutional amendment that would require a valid voter identification with a photograph of the individual voting. If passed, the amendment also says the state must issue photographic identification at no charge.  A voter unable to provide a government-issued photograph identification would be permitted to cast a provisional ballot that can be counted only after lawful identification is provided.

Editorials: Pennsylvania Voter ID hasn’t been defeated | azdailysun.com

A judge's ruling Tuesday that Pennsylvania's voter-ID law does not have to be enforced for the Nov. 6 election doesn't go far enough. The discriminatory law, like poll taxes, literacy tests, and other painful attacks on democracy, should be permanently retired. Commonwealth Court Judge Robert E. Simpson Jr.'s ruling allows anyone eligible to vote to do so on Nov. 6 without showing a photo ID. But poll workers can still demand to see an ID, which leaves the door open for voters to be harassed. Simpson's ruling was an admission that he was wrong with his prediction in an earlier ruling that no voter would be disenfranchised by the outrageous law, among the strictest in the nation. Since the state could not offer as evidence a single incident of voter impersonation, it's too bad he didn't also acknowledge that the law is an affront.

Editorials: Voter ID Laws Saw a Setback this Week, But the War Rages On | WNYC

Six weeks ago, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court issued a wrongheaded ruling upholding that state’s new voter ID law. On appeal, however, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court sent the case back for further review.  This time, the Commonwealth Court Judge Robert E. Simpson, Jr., has arrived at a slightly more rational rationale. The decision he issued last Tuesday should greatly reduce the risk of disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of registered Pennsylvania voters—those who happen not to drive, for example, or have not otherwise needed a state-issued photo identification card before this election cycle. Let’s be clear precisely which voters we are talking about: Poor voters. Elderly voters. Black and brown voters. Students. Voters who are ill or infirm. With Judge Simpson’s new ruling, these folks will not be forced to travel to state bureaucratic offices, simply to wait in line for hours, all for a card they will use only for one purpose – to exercise their right to vote.

Editorials: Pennsylvania Voter ID Judge Rescues Republicans | Francis Wilkinson/Bloomberg

Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court judge Robert Simpson yesterday did his part to save the Republican Party. Simpson, a Republican himself, essentially postponed Pennsylvania's voter ID law until after the 2012 election on the grounds that the state had made scant progress supplying IDs to prospective voters and would likely disenfranchise large numbers if the law wasn't derailed. According to recent polls, President Barack Obama is leading Republican Mitt Romney in Pennsylvania by 7 to 12 points. Obama appears likely to win the state with or without a voter ID law tamping down the youth and minority vote. That doesn't mean the state's election would be without drama. Pennsylvania is on record with an estimate that 758,000 registered voters lack the proper ID. Over the course of 2012, a few more than 10,000 of those voters obtained one. So if the courts had permitted the law to go forward, perhaps three quarters of a million registered Pennsylvania voters would have been unable to vote this November.

Editorials: Beware Electronic Voting | Bob Barr/Town Hall

To paraphrase 15th Century Dutch Philospher Erasmus’ well-known characterization of women -- "technology, can't live with it, can't live without it." Ever since the debacle that was the vote counting in Florida a dozen years ago, virtually every jurisdiction in the country has moved away from some form of manual voting machine to embrace the technology of electronic voting ("e-voting" for short). Yet, as states and local elections offices have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to institute e-voting, little attention has been paid the potential dangers inherent in this form of vote counting. Indeed, even as many Republican voters and legislators decry the possibility of voting abuse posed by suspected voter fraud and have ousted for voter ID mandates, the specter of lost votes posed by e-voting continues to go largely unnoticed or deliberately ignored. However, as noted in a recent editorial in USA Today by Philip Meyer, professor emeritus in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina, electronic voting machines have the very real “potential to steal your vote.” The problem identified by Meyer is magnified this election cycle, given the high likelihood of another exceptionally tight presidential race.

Editorials: Voter-fraud shocker?! On behalf of … the GOP? | latimes.com

Republicans' current crop of "voter security" laws are Democrats' "voter suppression" laws. For several years now, Republican-led legislatures have been loud in their concerns about what amounts to a solution in search of a problem: massive, organized voter fraud in order to steal elections. Real verified instances of organized, deliberate voter fraud can likely be counted in the scores at best, and Republicans have been ardent about using the specter of the now-disbanded ACORN group to raise a national warning. … So get a load of what’s just happened. There has emerged some potential voter fraud – possibly by a group hired by Republicans themselves, which puts me in mind of the verse in Matthew, in the Gospels, "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" which essentially means, who are you, Mr. Pot, to call the kettle black? The controversy surrounds a Republican political consulting firm whose chief operated a voter registration project that was investigated by the Justice Department and several state officials in 2004 on fraud allegations; charges were never filed, and in this 2012 instance, GOP officials, including the Republican National Committee, have been scrambling to fire the consulting firm to contain the political fallout a little over a month before the elections.

Editorials: Virginia’s archaic system for restoring voting rights | The Washington Post

Here's the good news about civil rights for former felons in Virginia: True to his word, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell is restoring voting privileges to ex-inmates faster than his predecessors did. Now the bad news: With the exception of Florida, Virginia has the nation’s worst record when it comes to disenfranchising its citizens. In this case, unfortunately, the bad news outweighs the good. Mr. McDonnell, a Republican former prosecutor and attorney general, is well aware that granting voting rights to more ex-offenders who have completed their sentences is an important step toward rebuilding their lives as responsible citizens. That’s why he made it a campaign promise and a priority of his administration, along with expanding job training, counseling and other important programs for former convicts.

Editorials: Beware Russia’s hand in elections in Georgia, Ukraine, Lithuania | CSMonitor.com

Starting today with Georgia, and followed by Ukraine and Lithuania, parliamentary elections in Europe's east are revealing the tenuous nature of democracy and sovereignty in countries once entrapped by Soviet-era Moscow. Among the top priorities that Russian President Vladimir Putin set for his third presidential term is the reintegration of former Soviet republics – based on tighter economic links and culminating in a political and security pact centered around Russia. Moscow seeks to create a new Eurasian Union that will balance the European Union in the West and China in the East.

Editorials: Should partisans be in charge of our elections? | CBS News

Imagine that the umpire in a baseball game was affiliated with one of the teams on the field. Would you trust him to call the game fairly? You most likely would not. Yet when it comes to elections, Americans trust officials from the two political parties to oversee the process in a fair way. There are 36 states in which elections are overseen by an elected, partisan secretary of state or lieutenant governor, according to the National Association of Secretaries of State. In another three states - Florida, Pennsylvania and Texas - partisan secretaries of state appointed by the governor oversee elections. These officials vow to carry out their duties in an impartial manner. The Constitution of the National Association of Secretaries of State says that members commit to "practicing fair and unbiased election administration that recognizes each eligible citizen's right to cast his or her vote, and for that vote to be counted with the highest regard to constitutional foundations."

Editorials: Protecting the right to vote – history demonstrates that any effort to deny citizens the ability to vote can’t be ignored | latimes.com

Since their historic victories in the 2010 midterm elections,Republicans across the country have passed an array of voting laws — to require photo identification, to make it more difficult to register, to reduce periods of early voting or to purge voter rolls — and they are considering others. The Justice Department, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, theAmerican Civil Liberties Union and other groups have challenged many of these laws in court. A federal court recently rejected Texas' voter ID law, and similar cases from Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Wisconsin await final judicial action. Sound-bite analogies between these new laws and the fully mature Jim Crow system have been properly condemned as simplistic and misleading. But more careful study of the experience of a century ago may offer a cautionary lesson about today's changes in election laws. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Southern Democrats used statutory and state constitutional restrictions — as well as violence, intimidation and ballot-box stuffing — to discourage and, ultimately, to disfranchise many poor whites and the vast majority of African Americans. Several popular misunderstandings about that "first disfranchisement" cloud the public's view of recent legislation.

Editorials: New Virginia voter ID laws aimed toward phantom fraud? | WJLA.com

Hard-core pornography is like widespread voting fraud. You know it when you see it. Kind of like what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart opined in a 1964 obscenity case ruling, “I know it when I see it. . .” That wasn’t the end of the sentence. This was: “. . .and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” All of which brings us to Virginia, which will have new voter ID laws in effect come the November elections. The biggest change will be no more affidavits available to sign that attest to one’s identity and then makes one eligible to vote. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s reasoning for the new voting rules are to ensure every voter “have at least one valid ID,” because, “Every qualified citizen has the right to cast one vote. Not two votes; not zero votes.” Thing is, the numbers say Virginia certainly doesn’t have widespread voter fraud or anything approaching it. Virginia state police records show approximately 400 alleged cases of potential voter fraud filed by the State Board of Elections four years ago in the presidential election and confirmed fewer than 40 violations.  That’s out of nearly 4 million votes cast.

Editorials: Voter ID backpedaling leads to umpteenth change | Philadelphia Inquirer

I have not tested this theory, but I bet officials at the Pennsylvania Department of State have never issued as many news releases touting as many substantive changes to any process as they have while attempting to explain, justify, and implement the voter ID law. It's not enough that a cynical legislature forced bureaucrats to design, on the fly, an ID-issuing system guaranteed to frustrate and discriminate. Every time well-intentioned officials issue a fix, journalists and advocates unearth more evidence of what remains broken. And the clock ticks on, with Election Day only six weeks away.

Editorials: Easing the burden of voter registration | The Washington Post

This month, Ferenc Gyurcsány, the former prime minister of Hungary, and three other members of his political party set up tents in front of the parliament building in Budapest and embarked on a week-long hunger strike. They ended it with a rally before thousands of their compatriots — all to protest a proposed law that requires Hungarians to register before voting in the upcoming election. Why so much passionate resistance to registering 15 days before the election? One ally of the protesters went so far as to say that they were doing it “to call the attention of the people to how the government is bringing down democracy.” Gyurcsány said that he believes “it is unacceptable that anyone who happens to decide two days before an election that he wants to vote cannot do so and take part in the election.”

Editorials: Voting Wrongs | Elizabeth Drew/New York Review of Books

The Republicans’ plan is that if they can’t buy the 2012 election they will steal it. The plan, long in the making and now well into its execution, is to raise great gobs of money—in newly limitless amounts—so that they and their allies could outspend the president’s forces; and they would also place obstacles in the way of large swaths of citizens who traditionally support the Democrats and want to exercise their right to vote. The plan would disproportionately affect blacks, who were guaranteed the right to vote in 1870 by the Fifteenth Amendment; but then that right was negated by southern state legislatures; and after people marched, were beaten, and died in the civil rights movement, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Now various state legislatures are coming up with new ways to try once again to nullify that right. In a close election, the Republican plan could call into question the legitimacy of the next president. An election conducted on this basis could lead to turbulence on election day and possibly an extended period of lawsuits contesting the outcome in various states. Bush v. Gore would seem to have been a pleasant summer afternoon. The fact that their party’s nominee is currently stumbling about, his candidacy widely deemed to be in crisis mode, hasn’t lessened their determination to prevent as many Democratic supporters as they can from voting in November.

Editorials: Voter ID laws and roll purges are the real defrauding of US democracy | Ana Marie Cox/guardian.co.uk

There are three inducements of support that Americans are powerless against: the promise of whiter teeth, the suggestion of no-diet weight loss and the cause of justice. Political campaigns tend to couch their appeals in terms of the last, though parts of the Romney-Ryan economic pitch could be described as the second. In today's truly divisive debates, both parties have usually engineered a rhetorical claim to the side of fairness: gay rights advocates propelled themselves forward when they began to argue for "marriage equality" against the outdated complaint of "special rights". Americans rankle at unearned privileges as much as they rally, in the main, to equality. Hence the widespread, enthusiastic support of voter ID laws (they poll with about 75% in favor) makes total sense if you see the laws exactly the way their authors and promoters talk about them – as barriers to voter fraud. After all, voter fraud is when criminals unfairly manipulate voting, the most basic expression of fairness available in a democracy.

Editorials: In-Person Voter Fraud: Not Really a Matter of Opinion | Mother Jones

After running a story about voter access laws last Sunday, the New York Times got some complaints from readers about its he-said-she-said treatment of whether voter fraud is a serious problem. Margaret Sullivan, the Times' public editor, asked the reporter and editor of the piece for their views:

The national editor, Sam Sifton, rejected the argument. “There’s a lot of reasonable disagreement on both sides,” he said. One side says there’s not significant voter fraud; the other side says there’s not significant voter suppression. “It’s not our job to litigate it in the paper,” Mr. Sifton said. “We need to state what each side says.” Mr. Bronner agreed. “Both sides have become very angry and very suspicious about the other,” he said. “The purpose of this story was to step back and look at both sides, to lay it out.” While he agreed that there was “no known evidence of in-person voter fraud,” and that could have been included in this story, “I don’t think that’s the core issue here.”

This is a pretty remarkable response.