Speri writes: "Instead of shelving the bill as unconstitutional, legislators
moved to change the constitution itself, making Missouri the only state in
the country that's attempting to rewrite its supreme law in order to
restrict access to the polls."
Voters at the polls. (photo: Julie Denesha/Getty)
Black Activists in Missouri Are Fighting to Preserve the Right to Vote
By Alice Speri, The Intercept
30 August 16
Before she died six years ago, Rev. Cassandra Gould's mother used to say
that "everybody marched with Dr. King" but that she had been in Selma,
Alabama, "before Dr. King got there." As a 19-year-old from a nearby town,
she would ask an older cousin to drive her to the city, where she registered
voters, joined sit-ins, and marched. For the rest of her life, she carried a
gash on her thigh, a reminder of the police officer who shot her on March 7,
1965, "Bloody Sunday," the day that perhaps more than any other precipitated
the passage of that year's Voting Rights Act.
Gould and her siblings grew up faithful to their mother's directive - "If
you don't do anything else, you vote" - but never experienced firsthand the
ferocious racism of those days. Gould moved to St. Louis, Missouri -
"Mississippi North," as she only half-jokingly calls it - and became a
reverend and activist. She quickly learned the subtle and insidious ways in
which racism had survived and adapted in the aftermath of the civil rights
era, but like many of her generation she remained relatively sheltered from
racial violence.
Then, in August 2014, a few days after an unarmed black teenager was killed
by a white police officer in nearby Ferguson, she found herself within feet
of tanks, rows of police in riot gear, and the smell of tear gas. She
wondered, "Is this what it was like for my mother?"
"Never in my life I thought I'd see something like that," she told The
Intercept during a recent interview. "That was the night that I thought, I
am now living in my mother's world, and why in the world am I living in that
world when I thought that those who fought during that time fought so I
wouldn't have to?"
Something else she never thought she'd be doing in 2016 was fighting to
preserve the right to vote. Yet that's exactly what she and dozens of other
black activists have undertaken across the country, some for the second time
in their lives, after a 2013 Supreme Court decision gutted a major provision
of the Voting Rights Act. The elimination of that provision, which required
nine states and many other localities with a history of racial
discrimination to secure federal approval before changing election laws and
procedures, sparked a series of measures across the country effectively
restricting access to the polls with a disproportionate impact, once again,
on black voters.
In Missouri, that resulted in renewed efforts to pass a voter ID law so
restrictive that in 2006 the state's supreme court found it violated the
state constitution - which, unlike the U.S. Constitution, includes an
affirmative right to vote. But instead of shelving the bill as
unconstitutional, legislators moved to change the constitution itself,
making Missouri the only state in the country that's attempting to rewrite
its supreme law in order to restrict access to the polls.
On November 8, Missourians will head to the polls to elect the president and
a host of statewide officials in a deeply divided state. But this time, they
will also be asked - in language that some have described as confusing -
whether they want to amend their constitution to open the door to stricter
voting laws. If passed, Amendment Six would give a second chance to HB 1631,
which was vetoed earlier this summer by Gov. Jay Nixon after passing both
state House and Senate. The proposed law aims to limit the forms of ID
accepted at the polls to valid Missouri or federal IDs with photos and
expiration dates - excluding currently accepted documents like college IDs,
driver's licenses from other states, expired IDs, voter registration cards,
and utility bills. Voters without the required ID could sign a sworn
statement affirming their identity and recognizing that such ID is "the law
of the land" or they could cast a provisional ballot, not valid until they
prove their identity.
There are an estimated 220,000 registered voters in Missouri without a state
ID, according to Secretary of State Jason Kander, and they are
disproportionately African-American, elderly, disabled, and poor.
While the bill includes provisions requiring the state to cover the cost of
the ID and any underlying documents necessary to get it, critics say it
would pose an unreasonable and unnecessary burden on citizens who often
don't have the access to transportation or the means and time to chase
paperwork from the DMV to the social security administration office or the
division of vital records, even assuming the necessary documents are
available. That quest can also be complicated by budget cuts and reduced
operating hours: In Alabama, for instance, shortly after passing stricter
photo ID requirements, state officials proceeded to close 30 DMV offices in
mostly black counties - though most were later re-opened for one or two days
a month.
Most commonly, obtaining a photo ID requires a certified birth certificate,
which many black and elderly voters do not possess, especially if they were
born in the South at a time when most African-Americans were not welcome in
hospitals and gave birth at home, said Denise Lieberman, a senior attorney
at the Advancement Project's Voter Registration Program, who has led
successful efforts to repeal North Carolina's voter ID law and has fought
Missouri's version of that law for years. Obtaining post-dated birth
certificates requires a half dozen other underlying documents, she noted,
and any discrepancy in spelling or names can constitute a major roadblock,
which especially affects women who changed their names through marriage or
divorce, as well as minorities, mostly Latinos, with multiple first and last
names.
Trying to obtain a photo ID without the right underlying documentation can
be an "exercise in futility," said Lieberman. "In a number of states,
including Missouri, in order to get a copy of your birth certificate - get
this - you have to present a photo ID!"
Ferguson Is Everywhere
In the summer of 2014, the Ferguson protests catapulted questions of
institutional racism and inequality back into the national spotlight with a
force not seen in decades, but as the movement reaffirming black lives
sparked by the killing of Michael Brown expanded across the country and
beyond policing issues, Missouri remained a hot spot as well as a state both
symptomatic and foreboding of racial battles to come.
The state's conservative politicians and residents responded to Ferguson by
retreating into their entrenched rhetoric, while the street protests
simmered down, leaving room for voter registration drives, packed town hall
meetings, and long-disenfranchised black communities vigorously demanding a
seat at the table in local politics. The state's next battle will be fought
at the voting booth, and this time, it will be about who will have access to
it.
"It's no coincidence," said Lieberman, calling Missouri the "poster child
for restrictive voting provisions."
"What's happening in Missouri is indicative of this struggle for racial
justice and power across the country; it's about race and it's about power,"
she said. "The reality of this country has been that we shut out communities
of color, particularly African-Americans, and it's no coincidence that just
as that particular voting bloc is starting to see a surge in their ability
to speak, you see measures precisely targeted at limiting the political
voice of those particular communities."
Missouri state Sen. Will Kraus, a Republican and one of the main proponents
of photo ID requirements, denied that stricter voting measures are tied to
black Missourians' growing political power, saying that he and others have
been trying to pass the bill for over a decade and blaming the Ferguson
protests on Gov. Nixon's "failure to lead."
"I think that it's the democratic governor's fault, the climate that we're
in right now," he told The Intercept. Kraus said the estimate that 220,000
Missourians lack photo IDs is "grossly exaggerated. . I'd be shocked if it's
10,000." He also dismissed as "talking points" the criticism from voting
rights advocates that the bill would disproportionately affect black and
poor residents and said that most people in Missouri, across party lines,
"don't understand why this is a big deal."
"How do they live in today's society without a photo ID? How do they cash a
check?" he said. "I have friends that are African-Americans, and trust me
that most of them have IDs."
Kraus, who recently lost his party's primary for secretary of state, insists
that photo IDs are necessary. "One of the most important things we can do is
protect and safeguard our election process, when there are people out there
trying to change the outcome of the election by voter registration fraud,"
he said. "Right now, all it takes to vote in Missouri is a utility bill. You
can go and say, I'm Bob Schmidt. You have to register before that, but when
you go in, you don't have to show who you are."
"We've had a couple situations," he added, citing the case of two relatives
of a state representative who admitting to illegally claiming a Kansas City
address to vote for their nephew. In 2012, he said, one woman showed up at
the polls to learn that someone had already voted for her. And he claimed
that in April 2015, 27 people registered to vote from city-owned apartments
he personally canvassed and saw were vacant.
But critics say that restricting access to the polls over fraud concerns is
a solution in search of a problem, and that claims of large-scale voter
fraud have been thoroughly debunked: It just doesn't happen anywhere near
the level proponents of voting restrictions claim. Nationwide, voter fraud
is vanishingly rare. Most election irregularities happen at the
administrative level and are due to election officials' errors - something
that won't change with stricter voter ID laws. "It's a proxy for racism and
a proxy for passing laws that target particular populations with potential
political power because you don't like what they have to say," said
Lieberman. "It's manipulating the system for political gain."
"You can certainly understand why folks who are in power and who have
benefited historically from society's disparities in power would be running
scared at the thought of a more robust and democratic electorate," she
added.
Freedom Summer '16
Fifty-two years after the original Freedom Summer voter registration
campaign in Mississippi, Gould and a number of other black activists held
their own Freedom Summer '16 campaign in Missouri, with the goal of
educating voters about the threat posed by Amendment Six.
"As a daughter of the South, realizing that the same fight that my mother
had more than 50 years ago is still my fight is sobering," said Gould. "If
we allow this to happen, then the writing is on the wall. It will only get
worse; our constitutional rights will continue to get eroded."
The challenge this summer has been to rally support against an amendment
that even in Missouri remains relatively obscure to many, and to do so at a
time when disillusion with the political system runs deep. "Many are not
excited by the presidential election, and they say they plan to sit this one
out," said Gould. "I hate to say this, but even if you don't vote for a
president, show up at the polls and say . I'm not going to allow you to take
that right."
That can be a hard sell, as many working at the grassroots level in Missouri
and beyond have learned. Jamala Rogers, an organizer with the St.
Louis-based Organization for Black Struggle, said her group is trying to
encourage people to vote as only one way to exert power, and an admittedly
limited one. "You put someone in office, and then they screw you, then you
wait four years and remove them, and the next person screws you," she told
The Intercept. "We have got to come up with some different way of doing
things."
Like Gould, Rogers's group is channeling civil rights-era organizing models,
relying on churches and door knocking to mobilize people. While she warns
against viewing the vote as a catch-all solution, she's encouraging people
to keep showing up at the polls, and this year to protect their very right
to vote. Ferguson - where at the time of Michael Brown's death black
residents "were 70 percent of the population with no elected officials that
looked like them"- made clear that voting alone would not change things,
Rogers noted. But while protest, organizing, and other ways to build
political power all matter, voting shouldn't be dismissed, especially as it
comes under threat.
"I believe many young people have a better sense of urgency than some in my
generation, yet many are apathetic about voting," said Gould. "But voting,
particularly in this election, in Missouri, is an act of resistance."
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Voters at the polls. (photo: Julie Denesha/Getty)
https://theintercept.com/2016/08/30/black-activists-in-missouri-are-fighting
-to-preserve-the-right-to-vote/https://theintercept.com/2016/08/30/black-act
ivists-in-missouri-are-fighting-to-preserve-the-right-to-vote/
Black Activists in Missouri Are Fighting to Preserve the Right to Vote
By Alice Speri, The Intercept
30 August 16
efore she died six years ago, Rev. Cassandra Gould's mother used to say
that "everybody marched with Dr. King" but that she had been in Selma,
Alabama, "before Dr. King got there." As a 19-year-old from a nearby town,
she would ask an older cousin to drive her to the city, where she registered
voters, joined sit-ins, and marched. For the rest of her life, she carried a
gash on her thigh, a reminder of the police officer who shot her on March 7,
1965, "Bloody Sunday," the day that perhaps more than any other precipitated
the passage of that year's Voting Rights Act.
Gould and her siblings grew up faithful to their mother's directive - "If
you don't do anything else, you vote" - but never experienced firsthand the
ferocious racism of those days. Gould moved to St. Louis, Missouri -
"Mississippi North," as she only half-jokingly calls it - and became a
reverend and activist. She quickly learned the subtle and insidious ways in
which racism had survived and adapted in the aftermath of the civil rights
era, but like many of her generation she remained relatively sheltered from
racial violence.
Then, in August 2014, a few days after an unarmed black teenager was killed
by a white police officer in nearby Ferguson, she found herself within feet
of tanks, rows of police in riot gear, and the smell of tear gas. She
wondered, "Is this what it was like for my mother?"
"Never in my life I thought I'd see something like that," she told The
Intercept during a recent interview. "That was the night that I thought, I
am now living in my mother's world, and why in the world am I living in that
world when I thought that those who fought during that time fought so I
wouldn't have to?"
Something else she never thought she'd be doing in 2016 was fighting to
preserve the right to vote. Yet that's exactly what she and dozens of other
black activists have undertaken across the country, some for the second time
in their lives, after a 2013 Supreme Court decision gutted a major provision
of the Voting Rights Act. The elimination of that provision, which required
nine states and many other localities with a history of racial
discrimination to secure federal approval before changing election laws and
procedures, sparked a series of measures across the country effectively
restricting access to the polls with a disproportionate impact, once again,
on black voters.
In Missouri, that resulted in renewed efforts to pass a voter ID law so
restrictive that in 2006 the state's supreme court found it violated the
state constitution - which, unlike the U.S. Constitution, includes an
affirmative right to vote. But instead of shelving the bill as
unconstitutional, legislators moved to change the constitution itself,
making Missouri the only state in the country that's attempting to rewrite
its supreme law in order to restrict access to the polls.
On November 8, Missourians will head to the polls to elect the president and
a host of statewide officials in a deeply divided state. But this time, they
will also be asked - in language that some have described as confusing -
whether they want to amend their constitution to open the door to stricter
voting laws. If passed, Amendment Six would give a second chance to HB 1631,
which was vetoed earlier this summer by Gov. Jay Nixon after passing both
state House and Senate. The proposed law aims to limit the forms of ID
accepted at the polls to valid Missouri or federal IDs with photos and
expiration dates - excluding currently accepted documents like college IDs,
driver's licenses from other states, expired IDs, voter registration cards,
and utility bills. Voters without the required ID could sign a sworn
statement affirming their identity and recognizing that such ID is "the law
of the land" or they could cast a provisional ballot, not valid until they
prove their identity.
There are an estimated 220,000 registered voters in Missouri without a state
ID, according to Secretary of State Jason Kander, and they are
disproportionately African-American, elderly, disabled, and poor.
While the bill includes provisions requiring the state to cover the cost of
the ID and any underlying documents necessary to get it, critics say it
would pose an unreasonable and unnecessary burden on citizens who often
don't have the access to transportation or the means and time to chase
paperwork from the DMV to the social security administration office or the
division of vital records, even assuming the necessary documents are
available. That quest can also be complicated by budget cuts and reduced
operating hours: In Alabama, for instance, shortly after passing stricter
photo ID requirements, state officials proceeded to close 30 DMV offices in
mostly black counties - though most were later re-opened for one or two days
a month.
Most commonly, obtaining a photo ID requires a certified birth certificate,
which many black and elderly voters do not possess, especially if they were
born in the South at a time when most African-Americans were not welcome in
hospitals and gave birth at home, said Denise Lieberman, a senior attorney
at the Advancement Project's Voter Registration Program, who has led
successful efforts to repeal North Carolina's voter ID law and has fought
Missouri's version of that law for years. Obtaining post-dated birth
certificates requires a half dozen other underlying documents, she noted,
and any discrepancy in spelling or names can constitute a major roadblock,
which especially affects women who changed their names through marriage or
divorce, as well as minorities, mostly Latinos, with multiple first and last
names.
Trying to obtain a photo ID without the right underlying documentation can
be an "exercise in futility," said Lieberman. "In a number of states,
including Missouri, in order to get a copy of your birth certificate - get
this - you have to present a photo ID!"
Ferguson Is Everywhere
In the summer of 2014, the Ferguson protests catapulted questions of
institutional racism and inequality back into the national spotlight with a
force not seen in decades, but as the movement reaffirming black lives
sparked by the killing of Michael Brown expanded across the country and
beyond policing issues, Missouri remained a hot spot as well as a state both
symptomatic and foreboding of racial battles to come.
The state's conservative politicians and residents responded to Ferguson by
retreating into their entrenched rhetoric, while the street protests
simmered down, leaving room for voter registration drives, packed town hall
meetings, and long-disenfranchised black communities vigorously demanding a
seat at the table in local politics. The state's next battle will be fought
at the voting booth, and this time, it will be about who will have access to
it.
"It's no coincidence," said Lieberman, calling Missouri the "poster child
for restrictive voting provisions."
"What's happening in Missouri is indicative of this struggle for racial
justice and power across the country; it's about race and it's about power,"
she said. "The reality of this country has been that we shut out communities
of color, particularly African-Americans, and it's no coincidence that just
as that particular voting bloc is starting to see a surge in their ability
to speak, you see measures precisely targeted at limiting the political
voice of those particular communities."
Missouri state Sen. Will Kraus, a Republican and one of the main proponents
of photo ID requirements, denied that stricter voting measures are tied to
black Missourians' growing political power, saying that he and others have
been trying to pass the bill for over a decade and blaming the Ferguson
protests on Gov. Nixon's "failure to lead."
"I think that it's the democratic governor's fault, the climate that we're
in right now," he told The Intercept. Kraus said the estimate that 220,000
Missourians lack photo IDs is "grossly exaggerated. . I'd be shocked if it's
10,000." He also dismissed as "talking points" the criticism from voting
rights advocates that the bill would disproportionately affect black and
poor residents and said that most people in Missouri, across party lines,
"don't understand why this is a big deal."
"How do they live in today's society without a photo ID? How do they cash a
check?" he said. "I have friends that are African-Americans, and trust me
that most of them have IDs."
Kraus, who recently lost his party's primary for secretary of state, insists
that photo IDs are necessary. "One of the most important things we can do is
protect and safeguard our election process, when there are people out there
trying to change the outcome of the election by voter registration fraud,"
he said. "Right now, all it takes to vote in Missouri is a utility bill. You
can go and say, I'm Bob Schmidt. You have to register before that, but when
you go in, you don't have to show who you are."
"We've had a couple situations," he added, citing the case of two relatives
of a state representative who admitting to illegally claiming a Kansas City
address to vote for their nephew. In 2012, he said, one woman showed up at
the polls to learn that someone had already voted for her. And he claimed
that in April 2015, 27 people registered to vote from city-owned apartments
he personally canvassed and saw were vacant.
But critics say that restricting access to the polls over fraud concerns is
a solution in search of a problem, and that claims of large-scale voter
fraud have been thoroughly debunked: It just doesn't happen anywhere near
the level proponents of voting restrictions claim. Nationwide, voter fraud
is vanishingly rare. Most election irregularities happen at the
administrative level and are due to election officials' errors - something
that won't change with stricter voter ID laws. "It's a proxy for racism and
a proxy for passing laws that target particular populations with potential
political power because you don't like what they have to say," said
Lieberman. "It's manipulating the system for political gain."
"You can certainly understand why folks who are in power and who have
benefited historically from society's disparities in power would be running
scared at the thought of a more robust and democratic electorate," she
added.
Freedom Summer '16
Fifty-two years after the original Freedom Summer voter registration
campaign in Mississippi, Gould and a number of other black activists held
their own Freedom Summer '16 campaign in Missouri, with the goal of
educating voters about the threat posed by Amendment Six.
"As a daughter of the South, realizing that the same fight that my mother
had more than 50 years ago is still my fight is sobering," said Gould. "If
we allow this to happen, then the writing is on the wall. It will only get
worse; our constitutional rights will continue to get eroded."
The challenge this summer has been to rally support against an amendment
that even in Missouri remains relatively obscure to many, and to do so at a
time when disillusion with the political system runs deep. "Many are not
excited by the presidential election, and they say they plan to sit this one
out," said Gould. "I hate to say this, but even if you don't vote for a
president, show up at the polls and say . I'm not going to allow you to take
that right."
That can be a hard sell, as many working at the grassroots level in Missouri
and beyond have learned. Jamala Rogers, an organizer with the St.
Louis-based Organization for Black Struggle, said her group is trying to
encourage people to vote as only one way to exert power, and an admittedly
limited one. "You put someone in office, and then they screw you, then you
wait four years and remove them, and the next person screws you," she told
The Intercept. "We have got to come up with some different way of doing
things."
Like Gould, Rogers's group is channeling civil rights-era organizing models,
relying on churches and door knocking to mobilize people. While she warns
against viewing the vote as a catch-all solution, she's encouraging people
to keep showing up at the polls, and this year to protect their very right
to vote. Ferguson - where at the time of Michael Brown's death black
residents "were 70 percent of the population with no elected officials that
looked like them"- made clear that voting alone would not change things,
Rogers noted. But while protest, organizing, and other ways to build
political power all matter, voting shouldn't be dismissed, especially as it
comes under threat.
"I believe many young people have a better sense of urgency than some in my
generation, yet many are apathetic about voting," said Gould. "But voting,
particularly in this election, in Missouri, is an act of resistance."
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