a permanent majority

In the halcyon days of George W. Bush's first term, you may remember Karl Rove's prediction that W's election (actually, his appointment by the Supreme Court) heralded the beginning of a "permanent Republican majority."  For a number of reasons, W's patent incompetence being a major one, that didn't happen.

Or rather, it didn't happen when Rove said it would.  Back then, Democrats still controlled enough statehouses and congressional districts and state legislatures to keep the worst instincts of the Republican party at bay.

Fast forward to 2010 when a huge influx of corporate money, Tea Party populism and, not insignificantly, an incredible tone deafness and political maladroitness on the part of Barack Obama and the Democratic party, left more than half the states completely red (statehouse and both houses of legislature) and the Democrats hamstrung even in blue states by sufficient numbers of Republicans in one or both houses, or by a Republican in the statehouse.

2010 was also of course the year that the Citizens United decision made possible unlimited corporate donations to political action committees and to candidates.  What that decision less famously did was sanction the creation of 501(c)(4) groups.  Ostensibly, 501(c)(4)'s are non-profit organizations designed to engage in "social welfare" advancement programs.  Not surprisingly, Rove was one of the first to recognize that "public policy" advocacy could be deemed "social welfare" promotion.  That led him to spin off an entity called Crossroads GPS from his already existing Crossroads Super Pac.  The great advantage to a 501(c)(4) of course is that such groups don't have to identify their donors.

Add to that, 2010 was a census year, meaning that all state and national congressional districts needed to be adjusted to reflect changes in population and demography.  Since, in virtually all states, legislative districts are drawn by the legislature, the opportunity for Republican legislatures to gerrymander districts into Republican strongholds was obvious.

In combination, the Republican "shellacking" of 2010 and the almost limitless supply of money from PAC's and 501(c)(4)'s, emboldened Republicans to begin the creation of that "permanent Republican majority" that Rove dreamed about 10 years earlier.  Sadly, they may very well succeed.

If you look at one of those color-coded maps of the country, the mid-west, which includes both the farm states and the old industrial Rust Belt states like Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, the deep south, including Florida, and the southwest, including Texas and Arizona, are red.  Many of them, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Texas especially, are completely red.  In all of them, right hands had scarcely been lifted from bibles on swearing in day when the gerrymandering process described above began (to be fair, it would have if Democrats had won big as well), but more importantly, Republican legislatures and governors began looking for ways to insure that voting in future elections would be as difficult as possible for segments of the population that had traditionally not supported the GOP.

State after state began pushing voter ID laws through the legislative process in order, their supporters insisted, to prevent voter fraud.  There is no question that fraudulent votes have been cast in previous
elections, nor that in a few cases (not many actually) those fraudulent votes may have tipped the outcome in a direction it would not otherwise have gone.

Virtually without exception however, those cases have involved fraudulent use of absentee ballots.  In most states, little more than a request for an absentee ballot through an on-line site is required to get one, and while there are some safeguards in place governing the actual filing of an absentee ballot, there are clear opportunities for fraud.

The two demographics most likely to use absentee voting are men and women in the military and voting age students.  It's interesting to look at the voting rights statutes that have been proposed (and passed) in the red states.  Most of them don't address absentee voting at all, but the ones that do are very specific in the demographic they target: voting age students.  In some some states, absentee voting by students is simply outlawed.  In others, the process is made so restrictive as to be effectively outlawed.

In all the states that have enacted legislation relating to absentee voting, active duty military are specifically excluded.  In other words, it's perfectly OK for a Lance Corporal from Mississippi who is stationed in, say, Texas to vote by absentee ballot.  A 19 year old student from Mississippi attending college however at, say, Notre Dame, would have to arrange a return to Mississippi on election day in order to cast a ballot.

The difference of course has nothing to do with logic or fairness.  It has to do with the fact that people in the military are much more likely to vote Republican than people in college.

You may recall the election debacle in Ohio in 2004 when insufficient staffing at polling places, faulty machines, election day chicanery by both parties and a variety of other factors resulted in literally thousands of people either just giving up and not voting or standing in line for hours to cast a ballot that would ultimately not get counted.  To insure that would not happen again, Ohio and many other states enacted "early voting" periods ranging from as few as several days prior to election day to as much as three weeks before.  Many states also instituted weekend voting.  The idea was to spread the process out over a longer period of time so that everyone who wanted to vote could find a time that was convenient for them to do so.

The people early voting especially helped were working class individuals, seniors, and students.  In 2008, all those demographics went, in varying degrees, for Obama.  Not surprisingly then, red state legislatures also are going after early voting.  Virtually all of the red states that had it in 2010 will either not have it at all in 2012, or have it in severely limited form.

Perhaps the most egregiously partisan attack on early voting has come in, of all places, Ohio.  If you live in the largely Republican suburbs of Cincinnati--Butler or Warren county--you can cast your presidential ballot beginning in October by going to a polling place in the evening or on a weekend.
If you live within the city limits of Cincinnati, which has traditionally voted Democratic, you can still vote beginning in October, but your polling places will close promptly at 5 PM and will not be open on the weekends.  The same situation exists in the urban areas of every other major Ohio city.

In Ohio, county election boards are, by law, evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats.  In counties likely to vote Democratic, the Republicans on the election board have voted against weekends and extended weekday hours.  The Republican secretary of state, Jon Husted, consistently breaks the tie in favor of the Republicans.  In counties likely to vote Republican, the Republicans naturally vote for extended hours, and Husted again breaks the tie in their favor.

What has been banished in practically every red state is Sunday voting.  It did not escape Republican notice in 2008, and again in 2010, that many churches promoted "voting Sundays," providing transportation to any who needed it after church services and encouraging everyone in the congregation to vote.

Sunday voting is gone now in virtually every red state.

What every red state attack on voting rights has included is a voter ID requirement; specifically, a requirement that each voter present an approved photo ID at the polling place before being allowed to vote.  Exactly what constitutes an approved photo ID varies some from state to state, but most of them require a valid driver's license, a passport, or a state issued ID card, all of which require documenation that many poor, minority, immigrant or senior citizens do not have and in many cases cannot get, either because of the cost involved or lack of mobility or because the document simply doesn't exist.

The Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan think tank, has estimated that, because of new voter ID laws, as many as 11% of potential voters in 2012 will be denied the right to vote.  It also estimates that nearly 80% of that group will be members of one of the demographics noted above.  Not surprisingly, all of those are demographics that have traditionally voted more Democrat than Republican.

Still, the argument goes, fraudulent voting should be curtailed as much as possible.  The fact that someone may be elected by fraudulently cast votes is a pretty good reason to safeguard against it.

The problem here of course is that none of the voter ID proponents have been able to offer any evidence that the kind of voter fraud a photo ID might prevent actually occurs in any number that could even remotely be considered significant.  A photo ID would have no effect on absentee ballots, nor would it prevent ballot box stuffing, nor would it prevent deliberately inaccurate vote counts--all of which there is evidence of.  A photo ID is only useful in preventing what is called voter impersonation, and there is virtually no evidence of that being a problem.

Early in his first term, Bush ordered his Justice Department to conduct a national investigation into voter fraud.  After 5 years and an investigation that included every state in the Union, the Bush Justice Department released a report saying that it could find less than 100 cases of voter impersonation fraud, and most of those involved immigrant voters who didn't really understand what they were doing.

Photo ID requirements have been characterized by Democrats as a solution seeking a problem.  There is a wry cheekiness to that description, but what shouldn't be lost sight of is that the result of that solution will very likely be  disenfranchisement that applies in a grotesquely disproportionate degree to minorities, poor people, immigrants and senior citizens--all demographics that generally benefit Democratic candidates.

To their credit, the Justice Department and the courts have already struck down all or significant parts of voter ID laws in several, mostly southern states.  In general, the basis for the strike down has been the Civil Rights Act requirement that those states do nothing with election laws that would unreasonably affect minorities.

What should worry every one who genuinely values American participatory democracy is that the red states in the mid-west, the rust belt and the southwest aren't subject to those requirements.  The constitutional difficulty of federal intervention into state legislative actions has just been demonstrated by the recent upholding of Pennsylvania's voter ID law, which, many will recall, was hailed by a Pennsylvania legislator as a guarantor that Mitt Romney would carry the state.

It's hard to argue that there wouldn't be so many red states if the majority of the people in those states didn't support Republican values and ambitions.  What the rest of us have to decide is whether we want to be part of a country governed by those values and ambitions.  If the answer is no, the place to start resisting is at the local level.  If Republicans remain in total control of states for much longer, Rove's permanent majority may well be a reality.