Thursday, September 06, 2012

"Electoral Dysfunction," Mo Rocca-style: "As an American, I'm proud that I have the right to vote. Or do I?"

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"I'm Mo Rocca, American, and as an American, I'm proud that I have the right to vote. [Pause] Or do I? For answers, I consulted the Constitution."

by Ken

And, Mo reports, in the video portion of "The Right to Vote," " the first of four NYT "Op-Docs" based on the forthcoming feature film Electoral Dysfunction: "A close reading of the Constitution didn't turn up anything about the right to vote."

Electoral Dysfunction, which was screened Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at the Montreal World Film Festival and is scheduled to be shown today at the Democratic National Convention in advance of a theatrical opening (at NYC's Quad Cinema) on September 21 and PBS telecast in October, is a collaboration between Mo and documentary filmmakers Bennett Singer, David Deschamps and Leslie D. Farrell that set out to answer the big questions, like: Where is the Electoral College -- and does it have a winning football team? (You can view a two-minute trailer here.)

As Mo writes in the text portion of the "Right to Vote" op-doc:
Yes, the United States is one of only a handful of nations whose constitution does not explicitly provide the right to vote. (Singapore is another, but it doesn't even allow you to chew gum on the street.)

I imagine you're surprised. I know I was. Think of all that hard work our founding fathers put in -- the revolutionizing, the three-fifths compromising, having to write the entire Constitution with a quill -- and yet they neglected to include the right to vote. (I know, it was a long, hot summer. Hard to stay focused.) It got me thinking: What else don't I know about voting in our country? How does voting really work -- or sometimes not work -- in America?

So I did what any concerned citizen would do when trying to get to the bottom of things: I teamed up with some documentary filmmakers, took a road trip across America, and created "Electoral Dysfunction," a feature-length documentary from which this Op-Docs -- the first in a series of four -- is adapted. Along the way I met all kinds of people at the heart of our nation's elections -- voters, election workers, elected officials, even “electors” (you know, the guys and gals who end up picking the president).

Spoiler alert: The way we run elections in this country is, as kids today might say, totally busted. Because the Constitution leaves key decisions about voting to the states, what we think of as our "electoral system" is really a crazy quilt of local, state and federal systems: 13,000 different voting districts, in fact, each with its own rules and regulations.
The second of the four Op-Docs, "Voter ID Wars," appears today, and Mo begins the text portion with a shrewd observation:
If you've only got 30 seconds to make your case in the debate over photo ID laws -- which require voters to show up at the polls with a government-issued photo ID -- it's much easier to argue in favor of the laws.

"You need a photo ID to get on an airplane or rent a movie from Blockbuster. Get over it!"

While investigating voting in America for the documentary film "Electoral Dysfunction," I heard versions of this line over and over from the laws' backers. The message is clear: "If you're too lazy to get a government-issued photo ID, then you probably don't deserve to vote. And please, let's not forget 9/11." (The airplane reference is a handy conversation-stopper.)

"But voting rights are worth at least 60 seconds of our attention," Mo insists. "So here's why these laws hurt more than they help."
The only crime these laws address is voter impersonation -- someone showing up at the polls and claiming to be someone else in order to cast a fraudulent vote. (I know, sounds almost delightfully madcap.)

There are so many problems with the way we run elections in this country. Voter impersonation is not one of them. Indiana, one of the first states to pass a strict photo ID law, has never convicted anyone for it. Ditto Pennsylvania, which passed an even stricter law.

It's an extremely rare crime -- 10 cases nationwide over a 12-year period during which hundreds of millions of votes were cast -- and for good reason. The penalty is severe -- up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine -- and the perpetrator nets only one vote. If you're going to steal an election, there are far better options. (Hire a 16-year-old to hack into the computer touch-screen voting system -- the one without a paper trail -- in use in about a third of American states.)

These laws are a solution in search of a problem. Why not a law criminalizing child abduction by space aliens? Well, can you prove it isn't happening?

But even if these laws prevent only a tiny number of fraudulent votes, aren't they worthwhile? No.
(Mo proceeds to explain the nature of the hardship these laws impose on poorer voters -- and to explain why neither the airport nor the Blockbuster analogy holds.)

In the video portion of the voter-ID Op-Docs, we're reminded that the Supreme Court, in upholding Indiana's strictest-in-the-land law aimed at stopping non-existent voter fraud, underlined that no such case had been presented to it. And both the text and the video take pains to explain the real hardship posed by the voter-ID requirements. In the video, Mo asks a wrathful-looking old geezer if he's worried about election fraud,. Naturally he is. Mo asks what kind of election fraud he's worried about. It takes the fellow just a moment to come up with an answer: "Democrat."

Of course, anyone who's sufficiently informed to deserve to vote knows that this is nonsense, that the intent here isn't to safeguard the electoral process but to exclude certain classes of voters from it, and that in fact it's Republicans who have made election-stealing an increasing priority going back at least to the giddy days of their theft of the 2000 presidential election, when the final "You Stole It, You Got It" Certificate of Successful Election Theft was issued by none other than the Supreme Court of the United States.

Electoral Dysfunction, by the way, is claimed to be nonpartisan, and I have no difficulty believing that this is just another of the increasingly frequent occasions -- now that the Right is irrevocably committed to, and certified for, a policy of "all lies, all the time" -- when those damned facts are biased.
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3 Comments:

At 9:35 AM, Blogger KnaveRupe said...

It's there implicitly in the 19th Amendment, if nowhere else:

"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

I'm no lawyer, but that text acknowledges that a right of citizens of the United States to vote does, in fact, exist.

 
At 10:27 AM, Blogger toto said...

In 1892, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in McPherson v. Blacker that:
“The constitution does not provide that the appointment of electors shall be by popular vote, nor that the electors shall be voted for upon a general ticket [i.e., the ‘winner-take-all’ rule], nor that the majority of those who exercise the elective franchise can alone choose the electors.

In Bush v. Gore in 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court wrote:
“The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the Electoral College. U.S. Const., Art. II, §1.
“This is the source for the statement in McPherson v. Blacker … that the State legislature’s power to select the manner for appointing electors is plenary.

The National Popular Vote compact establishes the people’s right to vote for President in compacting states. Article II of the compact states.
“Each member state shall conduct a statewide popular election for President and Vice President of the United States.”

 
At 10:28 AM, Blogger toto said...

The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).

Every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections. No more distorting and divisive red and blue state maps. There would no longer be a handful of 'battleground' states where voters and policies are more important than those of the voters in more than 3/4ths of the states that now are just 'spectators' and ignored after the conventions.

When the bill is enacted by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes– enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538), all the electoral votes from the enacting states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC.

The bill uses the power given to each state by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution to change how they award their electoral votes for President. Historically, virtually all of the major changes in the method of electing the President, including ending the requirement that only men who owned substantial property could vote and 48 current state-by-state winner-take-all laws, have come about by state legislative action.

In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided). Support for a national popular vote is strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in virtually every state surveyed in recent polls in closely divided Battleground states: CO – 68%, FL – 78%, IA 75%, MI – 73%, MO – 70%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM– 76%, NC – 74%, OH – 70%, PA – 78%, VA – 74%, and WI – 71%; in Small states (3 to 5 electoral votes): AK – 70%, DC – 76%, DE – 75%, ID – 77%, ME – 77%, MT – 72%, NE 74%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM – 76%, OK – 81%, RI – 74%, SD – 71%, UT – 70%, VT – 75%, WV – 81%, and WY – 69%; in Southern and Border states: AR – 80%,, KY- 80%, MS – 77%, MO – 70%, NC – 74%, OK – 81%, SC – 71%, TN – 83%, VA – 74%, and WV – 81%; and in other states polled: AZ – 67%, CA – 70%, CT – 74%, MA – 73%, MN – 75%, NY – 79%, OR – 76%, and WA – 77%. Americans believe that the candidate who receives the most votes should win.

The bill has passed 31 state legislative chambers in 21 states. The bill has been enacted by 9 jurisdictions possessing 132 electoral votes - 49% of the 270 necessary to go into effect.

NationalPopularVote
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