Lessons from Voting Rights Activists' Big Win in Missouri

Even as Barack Obama's campaign hopes to bring in countless new voters, they could face a variety of voter suppression measures, including photo ID requirements, designed to limit their participation. That's just one of the reasons to pay attention to the successful campaign that defeated a GOP-led photo ID law in Missouri a few weeks ago.

All the odds seemed stacked this year against a progressive coalition that had lost a legislative battle in 2006 to stop a similar bill from passing the Missouri state legislature -- before it was struck down by the Missouri Supreme Court that fall. But the Missouri branches of major advocacy organizations won anyway last month, bringing together in one coalition traditional liberal groups such as ACORN and labor unions with the League of Women Voters and AARP.

As Julie Terbrock, Missouri ACORN's legislative director, observes with some irony: "This wasn't the usual collection of 'crazy liberals.' We had an issue that reached across normal political boundaries and put individual organizations working together on an issue important to all of them."

Buoyed by a U.S. Supreme Court decision in late April supporting Indiana's photo ID law that disenfranchises nuns, the Republican-dominated Missouri House approved the bill on Thursday, May 8th on a strict party-line vote. It would have been the most stringent in the country: it asked for a state constitutional amendment requiring voters to prove they were citizens and to show government-issued photo ID in order to register and vote.

The bill seemed headed to victory in the Republican-controlled Senate, too. After all, supporters of the measure included the wily voter-fraud propagandist "Thor" Hearne and important state GOP leaders such as U.S. Senator Kit Bond and Governor Matt Blunt. Yet just about a week later, after a public outcry driven by a grass-roots coalition, the bill was dead.

Why did progressives succeed this year despite the U.S. Supreme Court decision - and how did they pull off an organizing campaign against the measure so quickly? It's a remarkable victory with lessons for progressives and Democrats who are often out-maneuvered by conservatives everywhere from the Florida 2000 recount dramatized recently on HBO to the U.S. Congress to Republican statehouses.

Ultimately, as Carnahan underscores, there was a smart messaging strategy behind the coalition's success: "We told stories about real people who wouldn't be eligible to vote. Putting a human face on the issue was more important than talking abstractly about the myth of voter fraud." Yet that latter argument is often the key talking point of progressives in their mixed record in fighting ID laws in legislatures and in courts. For instance, in the Indiana Democratic Party's failed legal challenge to the 2005 Indiana law, the lawsuit was filed before the law took effect, so there weren't any individual plaintiffs who suffered grievous harm, weakening the case on appeal before the Supreme Court.

Here are the highlights of how progressives turned the tide in Missouri, while the legislative clock ticked away towards a potential voting rights disaster:

Within a few short weeks of the Supreme Court decision, voting rights advocates had to win in the court of public opinion, and they had to move very fast to put a public spotlight on the real people who would be victimized by the proposed law. Led by two young organizers, SEIU's Laura Egerdal and Missouri ACORN's Julie Terbrock, the coalition's member organizations soon learned about such victims as Lillie Lewis, 78, a Mississippi-born African-American woman who couldn't get a Missouri ID because Mississippi had no record of her birth certificate, and "Birdie" Owen, a Hurricane Katrina refugee, who was denied a Missouri ID because her birth certificate had been lost in the storm.