Lessons from Voting Rights Activists' Big Win in Missouri

By Art Levine, AlterNet. Posted June 10, 2008.

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.

The coalition members geared up for both a PR initiative and an organizing campaign. They had the benefit of their organizations working together against a similar proposal in 2006. Then the media and Missouri activists were galvanized by the shocking fall-out in the May 6th Indiana primary: 12 nuns, among others, were denied the right to vote at polling places because they lacked the proper photo ID. What was bad for the nuns in Indiana was a PR bonanza for Missouri progressives. "The Indiana election was huge: Once the nun thing was out there, it gave the issue a bigger, national spotlight," says AARP lobbyist Jay Hardenbrook. Nuns, it turns out, are like crosses to Dracula: they weaken GOP vote-suppressers and empower progressives.

Nuns played a leading role in a high-profile May 8th press conference featured Carnahan, Lillie Lewis,, and other victims at the League of Women Voters office. That press conference was the opening salvo in a well-organized campaign fueled by outrage over how it could affect long-time voters, especially the elderly.

The advocacy groups swung into action after the press conference. The AARP, with over 800,000 Missouri members, sent out an email alert to roughly 30,000 of its most active members the weekend before the final week of the legislative session, warning that the legislature was moving to disenfranchise voters. ACORN managed a sophisticated phone and door-to-door voter contact program in suburban and swing districts where they don't normally organize. More than 8,000 voters called their legislators, by some estimates, and Senate Republicans started to feel the heat. "They may have decided it wasn't worth another fight," says one lobbyist, citing the 2006 legislative battle.

The pro-ID case wasn't helped when one of its Senate advocates urged whiners about photo ID to "get off their duff and get an ID that's given away for free" - after coming late to a hearing where a wheelchair-bound cerebral palsy victim, Kathleen Weinschenk, had testified about the cost and difficulties of getting an ID.

But "a little luck" helped as well, one liberal lobbyist observes. This included such insider obstacles as last-minute chaos in the final week of the legislative session, feuding between state House and Senate Republicans over an unrelated zoning bill, and, strangest of all, a shrewd, socially conservative Democratic pol, Victor Callahan, who staged on his own a phony late-night filibuster on the zoning bill to thwart Senate action on other measures, including photo ID.

Yet, amid all the backroom deals and publicity and organizing, it was the real-life stories of people like Lillie Lewis that may have made the biggest difference. After the bill was defeated, she said, ""I am relieved that I will be able to vote this fall. I've been voting in every election since I can remember, but if I needed my birth certificate, that would be the end of that. I hope this is the last we hear of this nonsense." Unfortunately, it probably won't be the end of the story: Half a dozen states are still considering similar photo ID and citizenship bills this year, and the issue is sure to re-emerge when state legislatures reconvene in early 2009.

See more stories tagged with: activism, missouri, voting rights

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Politics! Sign up now »