Elizabeth Drew, celebrating the determination of voters:
Despite their considerable efforts the Republicans were not able to buy or steal the election after all. Their defeat was of almost Biblical nature. The people, Democratic supporters of the president, whose votes they had plotted, schemed, and maneuvered—unto nearly the very last minute—to deny rose up and said they wouldn’t have it. If they had to stand in line well into the night to cast their vote they did it. The lines were the symbol of the 2012 election—at once awe-inspiring and enraging.
On election night, the Romney camp had at least four planes ready and aides had bags packed to take off as soon as a state’s result appeared narrow enough to warrant a challenge. But they ended up with nowhere to go. The Republicans’ effort to stop enough votes of Obama supporters to affect the outcome in any given state—even prevent the president’s reelection—failed. Obama’s margins, while narrow, were sufficient to render any challenge futile. So the nation was spared the nightmare of reliving Florida 2000, a fear that had gripped many until late Tuesday night.
Yet the fact that the Republicans’ voter suppression effort didn’t succeed doesn’t mean it didn’t cause a lot of damage: to individuals who had to struggle or weren’t able to exercise their right to vote; and to the soul of the democratic process. Small minded men, placing their partisan interests over those of the citizenry, had concocted schemes to subvert the natural workings of our most solemn and exhilarating exercise as a self-governing nation. By the time of the election, more than thirty states had passed laws requiring voters to present some form of identification, often a government-issued photo ID card that they didn’t possess and couldn’t obtain. The point was to make it more difficult for constituent groups of the Democratic Party—blacks, Hispanics, low-income elderly, and students—to exercise their right to vote.
I just wanted to show you what voters and democracy enthusiasts had to go through at the state and federal level to achieve the victories over voter suppression. We’ll use this handy map compiled by the Brennan Center For Justice:
There were four approaches that were employed to combat voter suppression: vetoes by governors, vetoes by voters, state court actions and federal court actions.
There was pushback from Democratic governors in Minnesota, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Montana. There was pushback from a GOP governor in Michigan. In Maine and Ohio, voters fought back. Ohio was sort of extraordinary, because we had a petition drive to put the voter suppression law to a referendum, an action that stayed the new law, and then two court cases over early voting and provisional ballots, respectively. Wisconsin and then Pennsylvania had state court actions.The DOJ sued in South Carolina, Florida and Texas, (partly) relying on the Voting Rights Act.
This map is current as of October 2, 2012, so it does not include the rejection of voter suppression efforts in Minnesota on Election Day.
There were so many and varied efforts this cycle I couldn’t keep up. Whether it was purging voter lists in Florida, targeting students in Maine, disenfranchising old people in Tennessee or limiting early voting in Ohio, it was difficult to follow state by state. This map a good overview of where we were successful in fighting back.