Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One
January 25th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Today’s special meeting of the House Elections Committee has been a real walk down memory lane for this old Lege intern, from the rehashed debates about rampant voter fraud, to the slippery steps at the Capitol in the rain. But one line this afternoon took me right back to a few magical days in May 2007, when anything seemed possible if you had a gavel in your hand. The hush in the room was familiar too, when Chairman Leo Berman cut off a colleague to say, “Representative, I’m not going to recognize you. You argued with the chair… you’re not recognized.”
Rep. Marc Veasey, who isn’t on the Elections Committee, was the target of Berman’s best Tom Craddick routine. Veasey had permission to sit in on the meeting as a matter of courtesy, but when the questions for Republican Party of Texas Chairman Tina Benkiser got too tough, Berman’s generosity was spent.
While Veasey got the hint and left, Democratic Rep. Lon Burnam took the opportunity to complain about how Berman has run the Elections Committee, before grilling Benkiser some more for her efforts to drum up voters’ fears about election fraud. “Don’t answer that question, Ms. Benkiser,” Berman said at one point. “Ms. Benkiser is not on trial here.”
“I experienced your controlled information flow all through the last session,” Burnam jumped in. “It’s one thing for you to deny a colleague [the right] to ask a question. It’s another thing for you to instruct a witness not to answer.”
The hot tempers from the end of the last legislative session were just below the surface through most of today’s hearing, and it only took eight hours to draw them out. Benkiser finished her testimony with an emotional plea: “At the end of the day, whether you want to believe it or not, there is rampant voter fraud. I do get passionate about this issue, and I should, and every voter should.”
A few emotional exchanges have sprung up today as committee members try to keep witnesses from scoring too many points for the other side. As the meeting winds down now, the argument has cooled back off. Plenty of voter fraud cases have been aired most apparently having little to do with a photo ID requirement. The argument is more of the same, and even Rep. Rafael Anchia has grown tired of asking witnesses to see their photo ID or birth certificate.
Rep. Leo Berman has warmed to the suggestion of a voter ID bill with an option for signature verification instead of a photo ID, but otherwise it looks like next session, voter ID will be more of the same — only the outcome remains the big question.
Mary Finch from the League of Women Voters just made an emotional appeal to match Benkiser’s, saying what she’s ashamed of is Texas’ low voter turnout. “Every day we get a little smarter about this, but we still have not seen enough evidence that it’s such a serious problem that we need to restrict the franchise.”
To which Berman quoted a Washington Times poll saying two-thirds of people support a photo ID at the polls, driving home his point by saying, “And they’re not a bastion of conservatism, I can tell you.”
January 26th, 2008 at 10:09 am
There are good reasons and powerful arguments for the State of Texas to deploy tamper-proof means of citizen authentication that would, among other things, secure universal suffrage as set forth very clearly in Art. VI of the Texas constitution.
Sadly, our cartoonish, cornpone, cringing liberal tradition in Texas is (i) leaving the Jim Crow Texas Election Code intact, (ii) appealing to the federal government for trickle-down, lawyer-mediated “civil rights”, and (iii) simply ignoring our stridently anti-Federalist state constitution with its integral Bill of Rights and full-bore provision for universal suffrage.
The Jim Crow system we still have has been improved a little in brief spurts since 1874 by returning military veterans of various races or by even more militent women mostly, seldom both acting at the same time, sadly.
Otherwise, the Jim Crow system proved advantageous for segregationist or simply comfortably incumbent Democratic politicians up until 2002. Now, that system of election law, logistics and technology is a fine trap that a propertied minority can use to govern as, in Rove’s words, a “permanent majority”.
Today, the GOP proposal for presentation of “voter ID” — actually a stalking horse for “Real ID” — seems to be “a solution in search of a problem”, namely, non-existent “in-person voter impersonation”.
Actually, it is another important link in a chain of measures for identifying and mobilizing “well qualified” voters while “disqualifying” all the rest. It is market-tested — a good sell — and GOP candidates will campaign on it, defeating Democrats who try to beat something with nothing but tedious evasion and equivocation.
House Democrats can see voter ID as a trivial anti-fraud measure that would not attenuate actual fraud associated with harvesting absentee ballots. Indeed, Representative ANCHIA even understands that the GOP proposal could have “unintended consequences”. Yes, hard to imagine but actually catastrophic ones and not just for Blazing Saddles incumbent office-squatters.
In fact, the underlying “panoptical database” technology, of which “TEAM”, “TDEx”, and “Real ID” are component parts or manifestations, has nightmarish implications and vast consequences barely glimpsed by the technologically illiterate Texas Legislature.
Still, the outstanding and very old problem in Texas is the lowest rate of political participation in the nation: That is the combined effect of biased and low registration of eligible voters as well as of biased and low “turn-out” of those eligible and registered to vote. Voters are systematically misdirected and discouraged by the legal-technical officialdom or demoralized by an actual party of, now, mostly GOP incumbents and mercenary consultants fixated on “likely voters” or, in some instances, fictitious absentee voters. None of this is accidental. It is the design of the system we have.
Sill, do mostly incumbent Texas Legislators from both parties have a problem dealing with widespread absentee-ballot voter fraud mostly paid for by other incumbent Texas politicians? Uh, yeah, they nearly all go mumbly over that.
Thus, the GOP Chairwoman’s arguments on behalf of “voter ID” were weak and thorougly savaged by Rafael ANCHIA on the Committee, much to the consternation of the Committee Chairman. But, her arguments were confident and demogogically effective nonetheless, (a) as she has virtually everything going for them except the almost forgotten Texas constitution and (b) as her Democratic counterpart, Boyd RICHIE, argues pathetically at the periphery, from the margin, and without any alternative at all.
Texas Democrats do not lack for complaints or lawyers to press them in courts.
What they lack are popular principles — no, not focus-group “values” but, rather, fundamental principles of republican democracy — and practical alternatives.
We lack fundamental principles from which to operate outside of courtrooms and committeerooms. Texas Democrats ignore or actually despise their own constitution, yet, whine about all those “Federalist Society” guys on the federal bench. They pick-and-choose, slice-and-dice, or just ignore the state and federal Bill of Rights. Lawyers mostly, the party establishment just cannot warm to the idea that the people are sovereign: principals not clients.
It does not bother our clerical elite that the least likely voters in Texas are the most heavily taxed workers and the most likely to die in combat or childbirth “securing the blessings of liberly for ourselves and our posterity.”
No Texas lawyers are taught in school to laugh at constitutions and make a living off of rights-mongery. “Inalienable” rights of citizens are not a source of professional income and the “inherent powers” of the Democratic Party are either forfeited to government or farmed-out to fee-men.
So, we come to have nothing to offer in competition with “voter ID” or “Real ID”, nothing in the “marketplace of ideas” that the GOP talks about, nothing even to break-up the brand-name monopoly on election supplies — Hart InterCivic — that the party of incumbents has created, the GOP literally owns, but Democratic officials defer to, protect, and promote.
Curiously there is an alternative:
That would be tamper-proof citizen-authentication based on strong, trusted cryptography, conforming with international conventions — “The Laws of Identity” — and implementing non-proprietary standards for “federated identity” in the digital era.
This is, in fact, the only practical way to deal with the “panoptical database” fallacies, fantasies, and vulnerabilities exploited by thieves, pirates, and the enemies, domestic and foreign, of republican democracy.
It is time for the Democratic Party of Texas to stop following the now mostly GOP party of incumbents, scooping up and bagging elephant and donkey-shit, trying to restore a bi-partisan system of incumbent-protection and concession-tending that the GOP exiteed in 1994.
They are the Federalist/Whig party again. That leaves us where we started: The Republican-Democratic Party, the only party that can take full responsibility for “a republic, if you can keep it”.
Such a party should proceed to replace an electronic tally-vote with a secret ballot, as provided for in the state constitution, and offer the electorate uniform means of citizen-authentication based “arms” –a secure cryptographic authentication device — they “keep and bear” for a wide range of personal privacy and collective security purposes.
Instead of rationing the right to vote through what is still essentially a Poll Tax Receipt and huge lists managed by a “public/private partnership” of police and financial, insurance, and real-estate intermediaries, the right-to-vote would be tied again, as originally in any Swiss or Roman-style republic, to at least a vestige of the “well regulated militia”.
For Democrats, that is a matter of not just “making work” for lawyers, but winning elections based on …
Our popular, constitutional heritage, …
Powerful but “lightweight” technology, and …
Practical solutions …
Not just our long, Jim Crow, baggage-train.