Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an Indiana law requiring all voters to show photo ID. The decision ignored powerful Wisconsin data that would have blown a rather large hole in the majority decision.
The gist of the Supreme Court decision, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, was to balance the possible barrier for voters lacking photo ID against the need to prevent voter fraud. His argument seems pretty weak to begin with, for he writes that “the record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history.” As to those who might be discouraged from voting, Stevens accepted the lower court’s estimate that 43,000, or 1 percent, of the state’s voting-age population lacked a state-issued photo ID.
As Justice David Souter noted in his dissent, national surveys have estimated that 6 to 10 percent of voting-age Americans lack a state-issued photo ID card. Applying that percentage to Indiana would mean that at least 264,000 voting-age adults lack photo I.D.
But consider the watershed research by the UW-Milwaukee Employment & Training Institute, described by Daniel P. Tokaji in the Howard Law Review as “the most detailed state-level study of who lacks a driver’s license.” It’s also cited in other journals, as well as by Souter, a minority opinion of the Michigan Supreme Court, congressional proponents of federal election reform, and others. The study found 14 percent of Wisconsin residents – 558,000 people – lack a driver’s license or state-issued photo ID. If that percentage held true in Indiana, some 620,000 citizens would lack the requisite ID. But Stevens’ decision ignored the research.
Why is the percentage so much higher in the ETI study? The major reason, says John Pawasarat, ETI director, is that most estimates just subtract the total of state-issued driver’s licenses and photo IDs from the total voting-age population as measured by the U.S. Census to estimate how many lack an ID. But ETI found a high number of driver’s licenses for people who had moved out of the state but were still on file.
His study found that statewide, more than 45 percent of African Americans and 46 percent of Hispanics lacked photo ID, compared to just 17 percent of whites. A total of 177,399 senior citizens lacked a driver’s license or state-issued photo ID. ETI has been studying driver’s license data for 10 years, and has documented huge numbers of minorities who ultimately lose their license for failure to pay parking tickets and other fines. Add to that the many senior citizens who don’t drive (of which only a small percentage bother to get a state-issued photo ID) and you have a huge population without a photo ID.
Opponents of the Indiana law contacted ETI and asked them to duplicate their study. But Pawasarat says he was told the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles would not provide the data needed to do the study. “They could have easily done the data runs,” Pawasarat says. “They’re no brainers.” (Update, May 7, 4 p.m.: Dennis Rosebrough, communications director for the Indiana BMV, says “we are finding no records of formal records request for this data.”)
ETI also found an incredible 82 percent of 18 to 20-year-olds in college-intensive neighborhoods in Wisconsin lacked driver’s licenses issued for the ZIP code in which they lived.
Ah, but those college students have probably been issued a photo ID by their college. True, but a college ID normally doesn’t include your address, and under Indiana law, your photo ID must be for your current address. Moreover, the Indiana law allows only three kinds of photo ID to be recognized at the polls: a passport or state-issued photo ID or driver’s license. Students with photo IDs from private colleges are out of luck.
By contrast, the Florida voter ID law allows debit or credit cards, military IDs, student IDs, retirement center IDs, public assistance IDs and neighborhood center IDs to be used by voters. Indiana’s law is considered the most restrictive in the nation.
Back in 1966, the Supreme Court ruled that a $1.50 poll tax was unconstitutional because it presented a barrier for voters. In today’s dollars, that’s $8.45. But Indiana’s law presents a much more expensive barrier.
The law says those lacking photo ID can get one free if they present a birth certificate at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. But they must travel to their county seat and pay anywhere from $3 to $12 (the fee varies by county) to get a birth certificate, Souter noted, and then must travel again to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles to get their “free” photo ID. Given that 21 of Indiana’s 92 counties have no public transportation at all, and these are people without cars, this could be both difficult and costly to do.
“Poor, old and disabled voters who do not drive a car … may find the trip prohibitive,” Souter writes.
So this is the balancing the Supreme Court did. In return for preventing voter fraud for which there is no evidence in the entire history of Indiana, the court agrees to a far more daunting barrier than the much-maligned poll tax of the old South, making it far more difficult for as many as 600,000 people to exercise their right to vote.
Why Busing Won’t End
As I’ve noted in the past, the headlines and placement of stories can heavily influence how readers perceive the news. A classic case was a story that ran in the Journal Sentinel two weeks ago, headlined “MPS board slashes busing.”
The Milwaukee Public Schools board did no such thing. The board simply set a goal to cut busing without spelling out how it would be accomplished – sort of like announcing a budget cut without specifying any spending to be reduced. As reporter Alan Borsuk noted in his second graph, “what will actually result will not be clear for perhaps several years.” Borsuk, never shy about caveats, also noted that most busing is required by state law (for special education students, students attending private schools, minority students traveling to suburban schools under Chapter 220, etc.) and cannot be changed by the school board.
As for the minority of busing that MPS actually controls, the board has found it hard to cut this back because many parents (as Milwaukee Magazine has reported) choose to bus their children to remove them from neighborhoods they consider dangerous or so their child arrives home at a more convenient time – in essence using the bus for day care. As board member Jeff Spence told Borsuk, “My biggest fear is that we’ll go through this exercise and nothing will get done.”
One day after the JS news story ran, Borsuk did a take-back: an analysis piece titled “Busing change won’t be easy.” The story ended with an anecdote about how the board had recently declined to pass a proposal that would have merely cut busing for “relatively few students.”
No matter. The exaggerated “board slashes busing” headline had gotten out there, and no one bothered to read the fine print. Eugene Kane did a column titled “Black kids on buses may slip into MPS lore.” Shepherd Express columnist Joel McNally weighed in with “Ending Busing.” Readers generated a “Sunday symposium” of letters to theJS as to whether the decision to end busing was a good idea. These, it should be noted, are among the more perceptive and active readers of the JS news – all misled by single headline.
More on the Film Festival
In letters, you’ll find a protest from Shepherd Express finance manager Matthew Astbury regarding my column about the Milwaukee Film Festival. Astbury says the festival has filed all required Federal 990 tax forms. But my story said the festival hasn’t filed as needed with the State of Wisconsin, not the federal government. Any nonprofit in the state that solicits more than $5,000 in donated funds must file an annual report, yet according to Mick Daley of the Wisconsin Department of Regulations and Licensing, the festival has never filed an annual report.
Astbury says I have the wrong dates for when he served double-duty as film festival and Shepherd bookkeeper, but the date came from the 990 submitted by the festival. He says the Milwaukee Future Foundation hasn’t shut off funding for the festival, but my story said the Argosy and Herzfeld Foundations had done this. Astbury says Shepherd Express publisher Lou Fortis never demanded $250,000 in debt be repaid (something two off-the-record sources told me) but is asking for only $106,000. The true amount, as I noted, is in dispute. So, too, is the amount of ad dollars that went to the Shepherd: Was it as low as 28 percent of the ad budget, as Astbury claims (and the auditors will presumably investigate), or was it most of the ad budget, as sources close to the festival told me.
The festival, I’ve since learned, got a $39,000 grant from the state’s Department of Tourism back in 2003. Yes, the festival is a wonderful addition to this city’s cultural life. But the nagging question here is how the state of Wisconsin and local foundations (which normally demand profuse documentation from nonprofits, including the list of the board of directors) could fund a festival whose only board members were Shepherd Express staffers with an obvious conflict of interest regarding the nonprofit’s financial decisions.
And why are Brewers fans so eager to quit on the team? The Sports Nut considers.
