Of the two jeopardies to our voting rights in this country, fraud and suppression, the first is virtually non-existent, while the other has a very long and inglorious history. The modern resurgence in the partisan effort to suppress votes began with taking down Acorn. A set of surreptitiously obtained ambush videos were used to paint a negative portrait of this community service group, whose efforts were directed towards registering non-enfranchised citizens to vote and facilitating home ownership.
This attack on Acorn was extremely partisan and deceitful. Despite a smattering of fraudulent registrations committed by a small percentage of lazy low paid signature takers, Acorn management themselves caught most of these frauds, and marked them as likely counterfeits, as required by law. Acorn did not try to hide them, and most of those responsible for them were held accountable in a court of law. Mind you that this was NOT voter fraud. This was Mickey Mouse and Mickey Mantle registration fraud. No cartoon character, nor deceased baseball star ever showed up to affect an election outcome. Despite this, the attack on Acorn was hailed as the salvation of the sanctity of our election process.
And when the banks submarined the world market with toxic paper hidden inside collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps in 2008, Acorn attackers claimed that the victims of subprime loans were responsible, not the banks that did their best to entice unsuspecting targets into their web of deceit. Most banks got bailed out. Most honest victims of their scams did not. They lost their homes. Acorn did attempt to facilitate home loans for many that the banks had historically red-lined, but only in those cases that the loans were NOT subprime bait for suckers. Indeed, their efforts were to afford potential borrowers good counsel, while now it is clear that the motive of the banks was pure greed.
In the end, of course, Acorn was sabotaged, and the voter suppression efforts branched out into state legislation.
On June 25, 2013, the SCOTUS struck down Section 4(b) of the 1965 Voting Rights Act as unconstitutional.
The Court reasoned that the coverage formula violates the constitutional principles of "equal sovereignty of the states" and federalism because its disparate treatment of the states is "based on 40 year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day", which makes the formula unresponsive to current needs.
Good grief, Charlie Brown. If it looks like a crow, talks like a crow, and acts like a crow, I would call it- Jim.
