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Move Over Machiavelli: WI GOP Kills Public Financing to Pay for Voter Suppression
You are a new Governor pursuing a radical, budget slashing agenda. In your spare time, you work to pass the most restrictive Voter ID law in the nation, which turns out to be quite costly. What to do? Here is an idea. To pay for your voter suppression efforts, why not rob public financing for elections, a system designed to encourage a diversity of candidates and a flourishing of democracy?
That is exactly what Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the WI GOP did this week when they raided the money set aside for the public financing of campaigns to pay for “the most radical Voter ID bill in the nation” according to Wisconsin Common Cause.
The move would kill a 34 year tradition of public financing for elections in Wisconsin. All public financing for state political races would end. Instead the fund would be used to implement AB7 a “Voter ID” bill originally spawned by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Committee (ALEC).
Republicans insist the Voter ID bill is needed to prevent fraud, but no one appears to be able to put their finger on a real problem in Wisconsin.
“Wisconsin Attorney General JB Van Hollen undertook an investigation after the 2008 presidential race and found only 20 questionable votes in an election of 2,983,417. Half of those folks were formerly convicted felons who did not know they were not allowed to vote,” said Jay Heck of Wisconsin Common Cause. “Fraud has never been a problem in Wisconsin, we have an open system and people have a great deal of respect for it. The fraud issue is merely a front to prevent democratic groupings from turning out and everyone knows it,” said Heck.
The legislation would allow a narrow list of IDs for voting, including drivers licenses and state issued ID cards. According to a 2005 UW-Milwaukee study, about 177,000 Wisconsinites aged 65 and older do not have state-issued IDs. Statewide, the percent of Wisconsin residents with a valid drivers license is 80 percent for males and 81 percent for females. For African-Americans, only 45 percent of males and 51 percent of females have a valid drivers license.
The bill makes it particularly burdensome for college students to vote, a group who overwhelmingly supported Obama in 2008. Student IDs have to be issued from an accredited public or private college, include a student's signature and have a two-year expiration date. The 182,000 thousand students in the UW system and 300,000 in state technical colleges currently do not meet this requirement.
Many analysts think the bill was implemented in a rush in order to have an impact on the Wisconsin Senate recall elections scheduled for July 12th. “Many voters will understandably be confused and will think that they cannot vote in the recall elections without the photo voter ID -- which is likely the intent of the bill's proponents,” says Heck.
Wisconsin has provided some degree of public financing for campaigns since 1977. The idea was to foster a debate over ideas, not a race for the money. As a consequence, many candidates were able to run that otherwise would never have been able to and candidates of both political parties regularly took public financing. This year, a little-known candidate named Joanne Kloppenburg was able to run for Supreme Court because of a public finance system for judicial races implemented two years ago. Kloppenburg came from behind to almost knock off a ten-year incumbent conservative Supreme Court Justice.
Perhaps this is exactly the type of democracy that the WI GOP is worried about. The money raided from the public financing system -- $1.8 million -- is insufficient to pay for the Voter ID bill, which is anticipated to cost $6 million over the next two years.
To Heck the tragedy is the destruction of another important Wisconsin tradition. “We were one of the first states in the nation to provide public financing for campaigns. We were held up as a model for the nation, passing public financing, open meetings laws, open records laws and the establishment of a state elections board and state ethics board after the Watergate scandal.”
“What the Walker administration has done in just four months, has been to unravel decades of good government and progressive reform designed to inspire citizen confidence in state government. The whole post-Watergate reform effort has been swept away in just a few months. It’s astonishing,” says Heck.
But enough to make Richard Nixon proud.
27 Comments so far
Show AllOh! to return to our roots when only white landholding men could vote to determine the course of this greatest nation in the history of the universe.
Rotten mf'rs to the core.
Okay, America, LOOK AT IT. Look this fascism right in the face and spit in it's eye. If there is ANY justice in this country, and certainly in Wisconsin, Walker will be removed the INSTANT he can be, the republicans who are being recalled will lose MASSIVELY and the republican party will lose every seat it's running for in the next 200 elections.
What more do you need to see? These traitors are trying to take away your right to do ANYTHING but PAY for rich people to steal you blind. If I were ANY of them, I would be afraid to walk the streets alone. Do they REALLY think that thins kind of thing will be met with silence and obedience? Not likely. Walker should start watching his back. You can't go around robbing people of everything they hold dear and sacred and expect to be loved. There is going to be serious trouble for these guys. I'm not advocating it, but someone, and I'm willing to bet it will be a rightie, They have the guns, they are the mad as hell crowd, and they have proven that they don't mind shooting people.
but the republicans can now "magically" "find" votes
Hello WJM,
Unfortunately history will prove you wrong in the short run but correct over the long haul. The horizon will be more than a generation of serfdom/peonage/debt slavery before any uprising. Whether the first or many uprisings occur before it is successful.is a question that my crystal ball is unwilling to answer. The country at that time will be on its last go round and the surviving rats will leave for new areas to exploit.
Well If the Thugs in WI can changed Legislation, then I think it's time for a Proactive volunteer action to seek out folks and get them ID's. These Govt Criminals have closed the democracy door in Wisconsin. The State had the Slogan for years as "Your Among Friends" Now it should say the same with "Except Republican Thugs"
Walker and his junta have turned Wisconsin into a petri dish for American fascism. If these bastards aren't all recalled and booted out, the whole state will be owned outright by the Koch brothers, as it very nearly is already. I anticipate the July recall elections to be totally corrupted by Repug vote riggers, just as the recent one for the state supreme court seat was. This is routine now for Repugs, nationally and at the state level. Will we all sit still for this forever? Try to vote them out and witness our votes being flipped for them, and sit by mute and powerless? By all means, let's keep babbling idiotically about "our democracy"!
OK, so two questions: Where is support for the people of Wisconsin from Washington Democrats and Obama? And, why haven't the people of Wisconsin adopted stronger tactics to stop the theft of their democracy?
Everyone around the country who can, should go there and help the people who're fighting these sick, ignorant, twisted people (to steal a good description from Bloviator88) and help them help the disenfranchised voters get whatever is needed to be able to vote before the recall election in July.
"help the disenfranchised voters get whatever is needed to be able to vote"
"help the disenfranchised voters get whatever is needed to be able to vote"
"help the disenfranchised voters get whatever is needed to be able to vote"
According tyo gnken1, The State had the Slogan for years as "Your Among Friends"
I believe it.
The conservative brain works like this:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/05/liberal-and-conservative-brains/
Off topic, but I wish CD would publish this article by Cynthia Mckinney:
Dispatch From Tripoli
NATO's Feast of Blood
http://www.counterpunch.org/mckinney05242011.html
(btw, Juan Cole has blood on his hands.)
The voters of WI elected these wierdos. Now, let's see how much cake they can eat before they can remove these thugs, if that is even possible. Whatever you do, WI, keep your creepy pols in your part of the country. The rest of us don't want them ....
It's doubtful that the wackos were elected without the usual sort of tricks of the wholly anti-democratic right. And as everyone has reported, none of these guys talked about what they were really intending to do during the election -- they only positioned themselves as wanting to bring jobs to Wisconsin, which was the reverse of their intention. . .
I'll have nothing to do with the people of Wisconsin until they rectify their error
with tar and feathers.
They've done all but that in the last couple of months -- the people of Wisconsin have used all the means available to peaceful protest, but it's probable that the Money Kings have to be driven out as kings have to be driven out . . .
There is no interest in enacting legislation to deal with election fraud which causes thousands to not have their votes counted or not counted correctly. But voters don't have the power to commit that kind of fraud which can only be done by politicians
right, the real election fraud is eligible people not getting their votes counted , not ineligible people voting
and it is done with the computer now..
Who are these people?
I feel as though I'm living in the movie, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"!
The Pod People are taking over...a well-orchestrated agenda real humans seem unable to defeat (unlike "War of the Worlds," where microbes killed the aliens).
Then there is "Dances with Wolves," in which Dunbar wants to be reassigned to the American West, before it is destroyed and the Indians are driven from their last lands.
Perhaps we need to reinstate the collective tradition of "shunning," based on opprobrium. If you encounter what David Michael Green on CD calls a "regressive," look past him (more rarely her), and into the future.
Many here may recall the years-long struggle to enfranchise the 18-year-old vote. Today, as djb notes above, "the real election fraud is eligible people not getting their votes counted , not ineligible people voting
and it is done with the computer now."
My county has about 11,000 total population. Why do we need our Diebold election machines? When I used to play in duplicate bridge tournaments, scores were kept on note pads that anybody could see, by pencil. Every round was scored by consensus. Bidding was done using "conventions," which could get very subtle, while the other team usually had a fair idea why you made a certain bid. The proof became the pudding, the hand played out.
The Pod People aren't playing fair. In fact, they have thrown over the card table! They've gutted the Treasury. They created more long-term unemployment than just about anyone can remember. They have turned what were expected to be assets (home ownership; mortgage) into an underwater liability. They have ravaged the rights of public employees to bargain for wages, hours, and working conditions. And now they seek to disenfranchise voters selectively, "done with the computer now," using sophisticated demographic algorithms.
The Pod People obviously have a Central Planning Committee. Else it would be MOST UNLIKELY that a bunch of state legislatures and governors would pursue nearly identical goals with nearly identical political rhetoric, using the same subliminal calls to the most selfish instincts within us, when the opposite is required.
God bless the son. Son bless the god... (don't know why I wrote that but I'll keep it for now!) What goes around comes around. Back-scratching is one step removed from back-biting. Meanwhile, where is "The Over-the-Hill Gang" these days? (Looks like the last one standing in Wisconsin is MAYOR Soglin!)
My anger is growing increasingly lucid. I will not permit the Pod People to defeat humans (after all, if they are victorious they will have no sentience left to try to copy). And Pod People don't make love; they just fuck people. The replication was defective, certain human genes are missing from them, perhaps replaced by some DNA/RNA string manufactured by Monsanto. Yet they replicate, each generation more corrupt than the last. "These are the hollow men" that "try men's souls."
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In Michigan they are called the Am-pods and are disenfranchising entire cities. The Central Planning Committee agenda is operating via ALEC and entire states are being steam-rolled. Make no mistake about it, this is a blitzkrieg, like people think they are going to have an announcement or something???
The Obama White House's silence on this matter reveals their tacit approval.
Everyone needs to read Machiavelli. His two most accessible books, "The Discourses" and "The Prince" are extremely insightful books, enlightening to read, and should be on everyone's list of "must read" books, and soon.
He illustrates how political power works, what techniques it uses.
As for the vote, in fact, it is the problem of having your vote counted, having it applied to the candidate that you intended, that is the real problem. If your state does not have the ballots classified as being "public records" so that anyone can check to see that they have been properly reported, then chances are that they are not. Change your state laws of public access to ballots.
(see here: http://7d.blogs.com/blurt/2011/04/supreme-court-ballots-are-public-records.html )
Thank God we've got the Democrats! (joke)
To timothy price---
While I have no objection to reading Machiavelli, and his explanations of the Avarice of Humankind, what most people do not remember is that the United States WERE created to control Avarice. A manic-depressive Napoleon COULD sacrifice France to seek to conquer Russia. (Ditto Hitler at Stalingrad, although much later, as though Europe had never learned.)
Wisconsin is at the center of what used to be recognized as the Northern Tier States. Heavily influenced by Scandinavian ideas of the Social Order.
Wisconsin is central to American politics due to the La Follette Progressive Revolution of the early 1900s, following the late 1800s recognition that the Industrial Revolution demanded Worker Organization, thus the birth of unions not long after the writings of Marx, but also a host of Domestic Economists.
In the semi-early 1900s, highly conservative social economists such as Sumner Schlicter wrote that unions were good for business because the inchoate demands of the workers were made comprehensible.
Wisconsin probably has the most precise explanation of Radical State's Rights in the work of Charles McCarthy, "The Wisconsin Idea." It was the template for representative democracy. This of course also goes back to the Farmer-Labor Party and the grass roots migrations of The Great Depression, when wind storms in Oklahoma clouded the skies and laid down that dust on Wall Street. One cannot comprehend poverty unless one has experienced it. Yet even then, comprehension may not explain it.
It was not easy for white people to take over Wisconsin and the other Northern Tier States. (The creation of the States came upon literally centuries of Treaties with the Indians.) The weather can be brutal. The suppression of Wisconsin history has also been brutal. Joseph McCarthy came out of Shawano County, near the Indian Reservation also known as Menominee County. Shawano County white people regularly raided the Menominee territory to cut down the largest stand of hardwood trees remaining in Wisconsin.
In post WWII America, Joe McCarthy defeated LaFollette in Wisconsin essentially because the latter was so busy trying to implement the Marshall Plan to reconstitute Europe that he failed to campaign for re-election. The result was a La Follette suicide (?) in a Washington hotel. Historically, Wisconsin may have an inordinately high suicide rate. Some time in the late 1960s, some Jewish kid attending UW Madison published a folio paperback picturebook entitled "Wisconsin Death Trip." Shortly after, he did suicide. If you can find a copy of that book, I would be happy to pay a good price for it.
Witness to Wisconsin. Historically a bastion of contradictions. Dickens comes to mind... For me, Madison was the best of times and the worst of times, It was the Sixties. To my recollection, in all that incredible turmoil, only one person died as a result, when many of us then worried about corpses. August 1970, Army Math Research Center on a UW campus. The bombers use a fertilizer bomb in a van parked near the AMRC and phone that facility to warn them. Fassnacht, a math/computer grad student. is working late in the night amidst the loud hum of mainframe computers (I know that hum) in the AMRC building and does not hear the phone call. He dies. The Left Radical Movement had prided itself on not killing people. Later convicted would be the Armstrong Brothers. College students.
Later would come the Oklahoma City bombing using precisely the same explosives. A 55-gallon drum of nitrogen fertilizer soaked in fuel oil with something like a dynamite trigger.
Wisconsin has been for generations an Enigma. It produced some of the most important "liberals" in recent Senate history (Proxmire and Nelson) yet also the most regressive (Joe McCarthy and now Paul Ryan in the House).
It is said that Joe McCarthy was a serious alcoholic. This would not surprise me given the times. Churchill was a serious alcoholic. Hitler and Stalin were on amphetamines. FDR? Very careful. I suspect that Paul Ryan avoids drink.
But the absence of imbibing in SIN does not assure Sanity.
Ryan presents in the Media as a competent Economist. In Reality, he is insane. His credence relies on the genuine ignorance (I say this to avoid being termed a paranoid who claims that all this is "intentional"!) of the MainStream Media.
Daily, I witness the lies on television.
Governor Walker:
"I've never fucked anybody." Just trying to retain Wisconsin's economic competitiveness by making the working people poorer.
This really does go to physics, the price of oil, and how Humanity comes to terms with Entropy.
The Governor of Wisconsin is obviously not well read.
The politics of these people is a patina of evening parties of socialites who regularly use toilet paper but have no idea how it is produced.
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