As early ballots arrive in mailboxes this week, Golden State voters will arrive at a symbolic and substantial demographic landmark: a so-called majority-minority electorate. 

“For the first time, non-Latino whites will fall below 50 percent of the state’s eligible voters,” as the California Civic Engagement Project predicted in 2014. “From 1980 to 2014, the state’s Latino and Asian American populations grew by 230 percent and 331 percent, respectively, while the white population fell about 6 percent,” the Orange County Register noted, citing a January report from the Civic Engagement Project. 

Despite a clear trend since the 1990s toward political dominance by Democrats, the longer term implications of the demographic shift have remained shrouded in mystery. On the one hand, in-state Republicans have weathered a period of fracture likely to end eventually in a new but familiar rough equilibrium between the two major parties. On the other hand, nonwhite voting patterns, especially in recent immigrant families, have in some respects had a limited impact on California politics. Many nonwhite residents, according to the Register, “are too young to vote or otherwise not registered. So far, the voter rolls haven’t made the minority-majority jump. A Field Poll found that 59 percent of California’s registered voters are white, down from 83 percent in 1978.” 

Low enthusiasm

Another complicating factor involves voter enthusiasm and turnout. Voter rolls have swelled tremendously, with a surge of new registrations pushing the current total to over 18 million. “The new data show California now has more registered voters than the population of 46 states,” the Los Angeles Times reported. Yet registered voters have not coalesced around a consensus political agenda. “Republicans trailed Democrats in registration by more than 18 percentage points,” the Times continued, but decline-to-state voters, “known in California as those who have ‘no party preference,’ were a close third and made up more than 23 percent of the statewide registration.” 

For Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters alike, showing up at the polls has not always been an easy sell — despite consistent measures from Sacramento designed to make voting as easy and popular as possible. (“In California, no law requires voters to show ID. They soon will be registered to vote automatically. Their vote will be counted even if it shows up three days after the election,” as the Sacramento Bee noted.) Many Democrats have rested easy in the knowledge that their party will prevail even with low turnout. Although Loretta Sanchez would be the first Latina U.S. Senator if elected to replace Barbara Boxer, for instance, her candidacy has not ratcheted up projected turnout in November. Republicans, traditionally more likely to vote, have faced sharp intraparty conflicts in recent years, sometimes leaving state and local elections effectively uncontested. Voters who have soured on both parties, meanwhile, have not always had an opportunity to make a decisive difference in election day outcomes. 

Wedge issues

Nevertheless, the determined push by California officials for de facto amnesty for unlawful and undocumented immigrants has only sharpened as an electoral wedge issue. In Santa Ana, as the New York Times recently observed, transformative changes around immigration have raised political questions even as Latino political power has increased only modestly. “Immigrants living illegally in California are entitled to driver’s licenses. Their children can receive state-funded health insurance. Local law enforcement officials generally do not provide information to federal immigration authorities, as they do in many other parts of the country. On a smaller, if no less symbolic, level, the first thing the Santa Ana City Council did when it went all-Latino in 2006 was pass a law requiring simultaneous translation of all of its meetings to Spanish,” the Times reported. 

“The power and presence of Latinos in this community in Orange County — itself once a bastion of Republicanism — is echoed up and down the California coast. Latinos now make up just under 40 percent of the state’s population, projected to increase to 47 percent by 2050. The leaders of both houses of the Legislature are Latino, as is the secretary of state, the current mayor of Los Angeles and the previous mayor.”

By Katy Grimes

Poll watchers in America are currently people who are also legally registered to vote. But a new bill would change that in California.

If Assembly Bill 817 is passed, non-citizens, also known as legal resident aliens, who are not eligible to vote in American elections, and who may have limited English language skills, would be allowed to work as poll workers at California’s polling stations.

By Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Alameda, the bill passed the state Senate on July 8 on a 22-10 party line vote. It currently is being considered in the Assembly.

There is a problem with this bill. Anyone legally registered to vote must be a citizen or a naturalized citizen. In order to become a naturalized citizen, immigrants are required to pass a reading and writing English test.

But not all members of the Legislature agree with Bonta’s AB 817. Some who are opposed to this bill feel it is part of a deliberate process to blur the lines between legal and illegal in California.

Why is this bill needed?

“Would you have someone who had never driven a car teach you how to drive?” Assemblyman Dan Logue, R-Linda, asked me.  Logue is on the Assembly Elections and Redistricting Committee, and voted against this bill. “It’s always been the law of the land that whoever is overseeing poll watchers are people who are also registered to vote, who have a stake in the system, who have basically pledged their allegiance to the Constitution of the United States.”

Bonta claims there is a shortage of bilingual poll workers as well as a need to increase civic engagement by residents who are not eligible to vote because they are not yet citizens.

Other lawmakers agree, including Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, who recently said the bill is important for those who legally want to become Americans. “People who have legal status, and are on their way to becoming citizens, are a full part of our democracy,” Steinberg said, according to a KFBK report.

But Logue questioned the need for additional bilingual workers, and noted that when a person passes the immigration test, they’ve already passed a proficiency test in the English language.

AB 817 would allow poll workers who may not actually be proficient enough in English to help voters, Logue said. “We are the only state in the country doing this,” he added.

Creating a need

AB 817 would allow up to five non-citizens to serve at a particular polling site. Those poll workers must be permanent U.S. residents who legally entered the country. But language skills are not a requirement.

However, according to Linda Chavez, former Staff Director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and current Chair of the Center for Equal Opportunity, there are exceedingly few persons who are actually eligible to vote who cannot understand English, which is why so many are asking what the need for this bill is.

English skills

Democratic Sen. Norma Torres of Pomona says the workers could provide much-needed help to voters who have limited English skills. She says 2.6 million eligible California voters are not fully proficient in English. But why would naturalized citizens who already passed a written and verbal English test need any voting assistance from non-English-speaking non-citizens?

AB 817 repeals the existing requirement that a person must be a registered voter in order to serve as a precinct board member. As such, the bill also effectively repeals a long-standing principle that poll workers should be similarly situated to the voters whom they serve — citizens registered to vote in the same county.

According to Bonta, more than 2.6 million eligible voters in California are not yet fully proficient in English, and without language assistance, these citizens face challenges in asserting their right to vote and casting an informed ballot. “As the diversity of the state increases, new tools are needed to ensure that language assistance is available 
at the polling place and in the voter registration process,” Bonta said on his Website. “AB 817 addresses this need by expanding the pool of available bilingual speakers to serve
as poll workers and other election volunteers. AB 817 seeks to replicate the successful high school student poll worker program which a number of counties have used to bolster their poll worker recruitment. AB 817 does not impose any mandates on counties.”

“AB 817 will strengthen our democracy by promoting greater availability of bilingual assistance.”

Logue’s response is, “This is about the credibility and integrity of our voting systems.”

Personally, I don’t think there should be any mandatory government ID cards. Roads should be privatized, allowing the private owners to decide what ID, if any, is needed to use them. Minors buying booze should be determined by parents, not government.

But it is reasonable to ask for a government ID in a government election of a government politician for a government office.

Yet U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder now is suing Texas for requiring a government ID in a government election of a government politician for a government office. Supposedly, the right to vote of minorities is being infringed. But how hard is it for minorities — or anyone — to get either a state driver’s license, or (for non-drivers) a state ID card? Not hard at all.

OK, if Texas’ DMV is as slow and incompetent as California’s, maybe he could sue them for long lines. But that’s it.

Question: When Holder’s employees come to work at the U.S. Justice Department, do they have to show a government ID card?

Answer: Of course they do. So maybe he should sue himself.

Approval of voter ID is settled case law. As recently as 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed them in 6-3 vote involving Indiana’s voter ID law. The majority opinion was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, one of the most liberal ever on the court. He wrote, “The state interests identified as justifications for [the law] are both neutral and sufficiently strong to require us to reject” the lawsuit.

Of course, what’s really going on here is a desire to spread massive voter fraud from President Obama’s base in Chicago, where the dead notoriously vote again and again, to the whole country, thus assuring the president’s re-election. As the old Chicagoland saying has it, “Voter early and vote often.”

The country already has had enough questionable elections. Vote fraud still hangs over the Florida “hanging chads” in the 2000 election of Republican President George Bush, and the Ohio vote counting in his 2004 re-election.

Holder and his boss must know that they won’t win these cases. But the can cause enough confusion until Obama’s November re-election possibly to give them an edge.

Democracy depends on honest elections. What we’re getting is a slide into Third World corruption.

March 15, 2012