Voter suppression is the real fraud

You might recall Chattanooga's own Dorothy Cooper, who at 96 in 2011 became the cause célèbre of voter suppression. She was the kind of real female, minority, Democratic-leaning voter Republicans so feared that they claimed voter IDs were needed in order to combat virtually non-existent voter fraud in Tennessee during the run-up to Barack Obama's 2012 re-election bid.

Cooper, who had outlived two husbands and voted some 70 times in her long life, sparked a national firestorm in October that year when she was denied a photo ID at a local Driver Service Center - a photo ID that she and 500,000 other Tennesseans did not have.

The new Tennessee law required residents to show a photo ID to vote. Cooper, who never learned to drive and had no driver's license, was applying for that photo ID card, and followed the directions she was given: bring her birth certificate, her voter registration card and two pieces of ID. She took a rent receipt and a copy of her lease. But she was denied the ID because the name on her birth certificate did not match the married name on the other documents. She did not have a copy of her marriage license to prove she was the same Dorothy Alexander from her 1915 birth certificate.

Cooper's story made national news, and the Tennessee Democratic Party used her story as a rallying cry against the new law. Democratic Party leaders have claimed the law suppresses poor and elderly voters, while Republicans argued it's just a safeguard against voter fraud.

This week, a Government Accountability Office report put the proof in the pudding. The GAO found that strict voter identification laws passed in Tennessee and Kansas had resulted in steeper drops in election turnout - especially among black and young voters - than Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware and Maine, which did not have such laws between the 2008 and 2012 elections.

In Tennessee in 2012, the GAO said turnout dropped 2.2 percentage points or about 88,000 fewer votes.

That's 88,000 Tennesseans who didn't get to exercise their right to vote because of a law that accepts only a photo ID from a driver's license, U.S. passport, Department of Safety photo ID, US. military photo ID, photo ID issued by the federal or state government or a gun permit with photo. (Too bad the all-powerful NRA isn't a Democratic organization!)

It was a photo ID issued by a state government that Cooper was finally able to obtain after special trips and calls to courthouses to obtain copies of marriage licenses and a second visit to the driver's license center several weeks later. But even after producing five types of identification, it took a telephone call by none other than Republican Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey to the driver's license center to get her voter photo-ID cleared. And it probably helped that a videographer team was taping the entire encounter. Not every elderly voter who can't drive has all the help and attention that Dorothy Cooper eventually received after several news stories about her ordeal.

Many who refuse to acknowledge the nefarious potential of the state's new voter photo-identification requirement need look no further than Dorothy Cooper. Yet since 2011, more than two dozen GOP-controlled states played politics with voter rights and democracy by passing similar strict new voter ID laws.

Today those laws are making it harder - sometimes impossible - for more than 20 million Americans to vote. Most are women and minority. A good number are among our most elderly or our youngest voters. And most vote Democrat.

Cooper said that even during the years of Jim Crow, she'd not ever before had trouble voting.

What about state voter fraud? State Election Coordinator Mark Goins told the Chattanooga Times Free Press in 2011 that he could point to only one, possibly two, cases that resulted in convictions of impersonating someone else trying to vote. One or two out of more than 6 million votes tallied in the three previous statewide elections.

Even Richard Posner, the Reagan-appointed federal judge whose 2007 ruling helped implement one of the country's first voter ID laws in Indiana, has made an about-face on the issue. On a similar law in Wisconsin, Posner wrote: "Some of the 'evidence' of voter-impersonation fraud is downright goofy, if not paranoid, such as the nonexistent buses that according to the 'True the Vote' movement transport foreigners and reservation Indians to polling places."

Now the GAO is finding the same. The new report states: "GAO identified various challenges in information available for estimating the incidence of in-person voter fraud that make it difficult to determine a complete picture of such fraud."

Every other effort, in Tennessee or nationally, to demonstrate widespread fraud at the ballot box has failed to produce evidence that such fraud exists. Still the GOP pushes this agenda of making it harder to vote in the name of voter fraud.

The only fraud here is this pathetic, shameful partisan Republican subterfuge.

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