Reclaiming voting rights, one painstaking ID at a time
Reclaiming voting rights, one painstaking ID at a time
And a huge week coming up in Florida
Welcome to a big Sunday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
The assaults on democracy, decency, and human rights continue apace both in the United States and abroad, making reading the news a seemingly infinite scroll of terror and despair. I’m not here to tell you that all this madness will soon pass or that there are easy and obvious solutions to the myriad problems we face, but the main story in this week’s newsletter will make you feel a bit more optimistic about the future.
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It’s a catch-22 that is often almost impossible to solve: It’s hard to do much of anything in the United States without some kind of official, state-sanctioned photo ID, including completing the many steps required to obtain an official, state-sanctioned photo ID.
Millions of Americans are stuck in this nightmare loop of outdated laws and weaponized bureaucracy, and most of them don’t have the resources to break the cycle. Without an official photo ID, they’re largely unable to get a job, open a bank account, obtain medical care, or even nab a bed at most homeless shelters. And as lawmakers continue to install reactionary voter suppression laws, the arduous and expensive process of acquiring a state ID is becoming a de facto poll tax.
“These new suppressive laws have made it more difficult for people who already didn’t have IDs to vote, because now there are states like Georgia, Alabama, and many others where… you could vote absentee without ID, but now they’ve made that impossible,” says Kat Calvin, the founder of Spread the Vote and Project ID. “So those who don’t have IDs, including lots of people who have disabilities and lots of seniors, they're totally out in the wild, there's nothing they can do.”
There are now 36 states that require ID to vote in-person, 17 of which require official photo IDs or bust. As Calvin notes, nearly a dozen of those states now require photo ID to vote absentee, too, including a batch of new states who have used Trump’s Big Lie and voter fraud conspiracies as cover to enact those new laws. For example, in Florida, where Ron DeSantis is pushing to create a his own election law gestapo, legislation could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of people who do not have proper ID information on file.
It’s no coincidence that Republican legislatures are closing off democracy to the sizable percentage of Americans who would benefit from a responsive government more than anyone else, but convoluted voting laws and ID acquisition processes are not limited to red states. After the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, Congress created new requirements for the issuance of state drivers’ licenses and other IDs, which made things more difficult across the nation.
Obtaining the elements necessary to apply for an ID is often arduous even for those who have the time to track down documents and the money to pay inflated administrative fees. For those without those resources, it’s next to impossible.
Spread the Vote and Project ID are the only organizations to focus specifically on helping people without those resources work through the thicket of requirements. Their clients are overwhelmingly poor, while many don’t have access to a car or can’t otherwise leave home.
Some are young, with parents who don’t understand the process and schools that do little to help. Others are former foster kids who are kicked to the curb at 18 with nothing and expected to navigate adulthood. There are others that are unhoused or otherwise living a transient existence focused on survival, which is not conducive to toting around birth certificates, financial records, and other necessary items. Naturalized immigrants, people born abroad to American parents, and anyone that’s moved a few times also face significant hurdles to acquiring proper ID.
“I have a client right now who is unhoused and living in a tent, but she's also deaf, so everything is really difficult for her,” Calvin explains. “We need her birth certificate, but everything she has was stolen so she didn't have any sort of documentation or proof of anything at all. In the state where she needs to get her birth certificate from, the only thing that they'll let us do is provide two pieces of mail with her address on it.”
Determined not to give up on the woman, Calvin tapped into her knack for creative intervention and endless reserves of patience to break what could be a vicious cycle.
“There are shelters and organizations that will let you use their address, so we had to yesterday walk her over to a shelter, help explain the situation to them — she communicates through a notebook — and set her up with an address,” Calvin adds. “And now I’ll send two official pieces of mail to her there so she can get the birth certificate.”
Calvin is also in the process of becoming a notary due to the number of official documents she has to get notarized, and that, combined with the reopening of Social Security offices reopening nationwide after two years of being shuttered due to Covid, should help Spread the Vote and Project ID increase the number of people it serves per year.
Right now, it can take anywhere between a few days or a few months to secure an ID card, and later this year, the organizations should hit 10,000 IDs acquired since their founding. Right now the organization has staffers, volunteers, and partners spread out across 17 states.
Spread the Vote and Project ID are also now moving into the legislative realm, pushing to create policy that would over time make it so easy to get an identification card that it would put the organizations out of business. They’re starting with a campaign to get free, valid government IDs for veterans, as VA cards do not count for voting or most other official business, though it does entitle vets to a discount at Red Robin.
It’s a fundamentally absurd situation, as the government has a massive trove of identifying information about every veteran that would make it easy to issue them IDs, though the same can be said for anyone whose fingerprints are in a state database.
“Every political party claims that they care about veterans, so if there’s one [demographic] we can get political actors on both sides of the aisle to really rally around and pass the law for, it’s veterans,” Calvin says. “So we start with that, and then we can work our way up to every other demographic.”
There is one week left in a Florida legislative session that could wind up one of the most regressive and vicious in modern history.
On Friday, the state just passed a bill to ban abortion after 15 weeks, without exceptions for rape and incest. The maniacal policy is on its way to Gov. Ron DeSantis’s desk despite its overwhelming unpopularity. Voter suppression and gerrymandering will do that.
Two other horrible bills are one step away from DeSantis’s signature, as well.
On Monday, the Florida State Senate will debate and vote on HB 1557, otherwise known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. A noxious piece of legislation, it would ban schools from discussing “sexual orientation or gender identity” with students between kindergarten and third grade and allow aggrieved bigots to sue a school system should they deem that blank ban violated.
Kids with same-sex parents would not be able to discuss their families, LGBTQ teachers would be forbidden from talking about their partners, and stories with queer protagonists would presumably be off-limits.
If only it were being represented that way.
The bill, which passed the State House on Friday, has been presented instead by Republicans as a moratorium of sex education for K-3 students, a transparent lie that they’ve repeated over and over again. But that façade has fallen over the past few days, as GOP leaders have been unable to contain their true intentions, Gov. Ron DeSantis included.
“How many parents want their kids to have transgenderism or something injected into classroom instruction?" DeSantis told reporters on Friday. “I think clearly right now, we see a focus on transgenderism, telling kids they may be able to pick genders and all of that.”
On Sunday, DeSantis's own press secretary lifted the veil entirely with a series of vile tweets that equated LGBTQ people with pedophiles.
This is nothing but unvarnished homophobia, as lawmakers and critics were quick to point out on Sunday.
“Accusations of pedophilia are the most dangerous anti-gay tropes that exist. DeSantis' own spokesperson unapologetically using [Don’t Say Gay] to smear LGBTQ Floridians is disgusting and reckless,” state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith told me. “If DeSantis doesn't fire her, he’s embraced these attacks.”
As we reported last week, Republicans have over the past half-decade shifted the crosshairs of their homophobia to focus on transgender people. The bathroom bills failed, but through a mix of disinformation and the fight for “parental rights,” they’ve been increasingly able to inject fringe theocratic beliefs about the nature of gender and evolution itself into public education. In short, they’re laundering right-wing bigotry into policy governing tens of millions of people.
“There have long been anti-LGBTQ bills in some form in state legislatures,” says Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. “Now it’s an exponential increase in bills that squarely go after transgender youth. It is certainly not organically rising up because there really is some problem with trans youth in schools. It is a conscious play by ideologically anti-LGBTQ organizations.”
The bill passed the House on Friday after Republicans rejected amendment after amendment to mitigate the damage it would cause to children and families. They also rejected an amendment that would turn the bill into what they’re actually selling the public, a ban on sex-ed before the fourth grade.
Students have risen up against the bill (and DeSantis’s bullying more generally), tomorrow, the Capitol will play host to an intense, pivotal, and likely distressing battle.
Knives are out for labor unions, too
At the same time that they target LGBTQ Floridians and their families, Republicans are also trying to sneak through an unprecedented attack on organized labor and working families.
Every year, some Chamber of Commerce of tool introduces a bill to disable and gut public-sector unions, only to see it go ignored or voted down. This year, however, Republicans, slathered in more corporate donations than ever, have developed the hubris to move the bill forward, with a realistic chance of it passing this week before the legislative session ends.
HB 1197 would devastate public unions, which provide the only real effective outside advocacy for workers and working families in Florida, a right-to-work state that has long been exceedingly unfriendly to organized labor.
Among other things, the bill would force unions to obtain re-authorization from members every single year, include anti-union language in annual membership forms that encourage members to leave the union, and obliterate bargaining committees if 50% of workers decide to opt out of paying dues.
The bill carves out exceptions for police, firefighters, and corrections officers, all of which are Republican pet constituencies. This is an absurdly limited exception; the AFSCME, one of the major public-sector unions, represents all kinds of workers who work alongside police, fire and correction officers who wouldn’t have their collective bargaining and representations rights be dangled above an open flame each year.
AFSCME alone represents 911 dispatchers, community service officers, nurses, forensic officers, firefighter technicians, Juvenile Detention Officers and workers in state hospitals, all of whom are at risk of state-enforced servitude. Teachers’ unions would also be on the chopping block should this legislation pass.
The bill would also impact the essential workers that lawmakers rushed to praise (but not reward) during the worst of the pandemic. Nurses, bus drivers, janitorial staff, food workers, and other hard-working, selfless professionals would be subjected to losing their only advocates, all to enrich corporate vendors and break the will of the people that push back on the state’s unprecedented corporate giveaways.
The bill will be debated in the State Senate this week, likely on Wednesday. Expect labor unions to go all out to raise awareness and kill what is to them an existential threat.
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