The Weekly Screed (#578)

A poll tax by any other name would smell…
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — A wave of state laws to prevent “voter fraud” with photo ID requirements marks the revival of a hoary U.S. tradition, especially in the Southern states, a region that also enlivened the nation’s history with such high-jinks as night riders, the all-redneck jury and what Billie Holiday often called “strange fruit.”

In intent, in fact and in spirit, photo ID laws are poll taxes. If they were honestly identified as poll taxes, these laws would be banned by the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, as well as specifically by the 15th and 24th Amendments. By invoking “anti-voter fraud,” and other euphemisms, the bigots who sponsor photo ID are dodging the Constitution and disenfranchising vast blocs of voters — minorities, the elderly, the disabled, students — while masking their real motives.

By contrast, the grand-daddies of the poll tax, starting in 1877 in Georgia, were honestly corrupt. They wanted to block the poor and — especially — the black from using their voting rights. In that mission, the poll tax worked fiendishly well.

Since the last state poll tax fell in Mississippi in 1966, most Americans have forgotten its impact on representative democracy. Let’s remember that, between 1877 and 1904, every Southern state, from Virginia to Texas, adopted a poll tax. No poll tax exceeded $2 a year; no one was ever punished for failing to pay. However, a typical poll tax — in Virginia, for example — had to be paid during a period of a few weeks at the beginning of the year, for three straight years, before a voter attained eligibility.

Let’s remember, too, that virtually every poll tax law exempted men (women weren’t allowed to vote) whose father or grandfather had voted in a specific election prior to the 1870 passage of the 15th Amendment. The effect of this rule was, of course, to exclude all blacks — whose male forebears were not only slaves but were not regarded, by the U.S. Constitution, as human beings. Would you let your dog vote?

Let’s remember that, during the long grim era of Jim Crow, indigent sharecroppers — black and white — did not share in the cash economy. To them, Louisana’s $1 poll tax was a fortune, especially during the fallow month of January. A voter in the 1904 Louisiana election who paid his poll-tax dollar was paying $20 in today’s money.

How effective was the poll tax? In that 1904 election, Louisiana had a total of 103,870 registered voters, of whom 1,147 were black. But only 53,908 people voted that year (a 52 percent turnout). Hence, in 1904, typical of the Jim Crow South, only 3.9 percent  — all of them male and 99 percent of them white —  of Louisiana’s 1.4 million citizens got to actually participate in the great American electoral tradition.

But let’s get back to those twenty 2012 dollars. Specifically, let’s consider Ruthelle Frank’s $20. When right-wing lawmakers in the New South state of Wisconsin last year passed a law requiring photo ID for every voter, Ruthelle Frank, 84, in the little town of Brokaw, was, well, screwed. Although Ruthelle had voted in every election since 1948, she had no photo ID and could not acquire one. Disabled since birth, she has no driver’s license. She can’t go to the DMV with her birth certificate to get a free photo ID because she was born at home and never got the proper paperwork — just her name in the family Bible. On her baptismal papers, her name was misspelled, thus disqualifying Ruthelle for the free retroactive birth certificate that’s often issued by the state in such cases.

To restore her voting rights, Ruthelle could apply for a new birth certificate. It would cost, coincidentally, $20. But that $20, since its only purpose would be to allow Ruthelle to vote, would be — in every conceivable sense — a poll tax.

Ruthelle has options, of course. She could take a bus to Madison, apply in person for a birth certificate, and ask for a waiver of the $20 fee — and she might get it. But the round-trip bus fare, $57.80 on Greyhound, would be — de facto — a poll tax.

Ruthelle, on the other hand, could just send to Madison a polite request, on scented stationery, for a waiver of the $20 birth-papers fee. It might be granted, even! But the cost of a registered letter — $10.95 — would be a poll tax.

Or, if Ruthelle up and got deadly serious about her civil rights, she might hire an attorney to fight Gov. Scott Walker’s photo-ID poll tax. But, at billable rates of $100 an hour or more for a decent lawyer, we’re looking at the Mother of All Poll Taxes.

Although photo-ID is currently suspended in Wisconsin by a judicial ruling, its passage in many states begs the question: Why photo ID? While the pretext is “voter fraud,” the real goal is to shrink the electorate — as far as possible — toward that Louisiana white-male poll-tax Shangri-La of ‘04. In repeated studies, there has emerged no evidence of fake voters sneaking into the junior-high gym, outwitting eagle-eye pollworkers and casting bogus votes. In a typical case, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott spent $1.4 million beating the mesquite for “voter fraud.” He came up empty.

Tell you why. There used to be a lot of fraudulent voting, mostly in big cities run by political “machines” — who not only recruited phony voters, usually out of bars, jails and drunk tanks, but who bribed poll officials to look the other way as flocks of imposters stuffed the ballot boxes. Real — historic — voter fraud was a two-way street, requiring not just an army of phonies but lots of corrupt pollworkers. Alas, those days are bygone. If you don’t believe it, ask Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott.

However there’s still fraud out there. It’s worse than ever. But after 1960, and the great mythical election of JFK by Dick Daley and the corpses of Cook County, fraud got efficient — because 1960 was also the year elections moved from bandstands, cabooses and the radio to the all-embracing, mind-numbing, scorched-eardrum boob tube.

Today’s frauds against the voting public are on TV — and they’re all legal. The perpetrators aren’t cigar-chewing ward heelers who slip five bucks and a free lunch to skid-row bums and crooked registrars. Nowadays, they wear thousand-dollar suits, carry smartphones and share the secrets of their success with the talking heads on cable news.

And the frauds that they fund, in millions, pass not through a few desperate characters in a City Hall toilet stall, but — lawfully and quietly — through SuperPACs, 30-second attack ads and the Supreme Court of the United States.