Voter Suppression: Why it Matters

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The 2012 election is occurring in the midst of an ongoing economic crisis that is directly impacting TWU members. Air, transit, rail and gaming divisions alike are facing bankruptcies, layoffs, giveback demands and protracted negotiations. Naturally, TWU members are absorbed in meeting the challenges posed by these crises. However, we also face a political crisis. Well-funded conservative voter suppression efforts seek to turn the clock back to the days when workers couldn’t organize and the only people who could vote were white men who owned property.

After the Citizens United decision, which unleashed unlimited “independent” corporate political expenditures, billionaires bankrolled the Tea Party movement and let loose a flood of cash to elect over 600 new Republican legislators and governors in the 2010 mid-term elections. Political control shifted from Democrats to Republicans in states all over the country, as well as in the U.S. House. The American Legislative Exchange Council, the coordinating body for right wing legislative initiatives, developed a national voter suppression strategy based on direct attacks against the groups that made Obama’s election possible by voting in record numbers in 2008: union members, young people, people of color (especially African-Americans and Latinos) and recent immigrants. These voter suppression initiatives include direct attacks on public sector collective bargaining, right to work (without a union) laws, paycheck deception, voter i.d. laws and anti-immigrant laws.

The outcome of the 2012 elections will directly impact the economic and political crises we face now, both in our Locals and as a country.

Why focus on voter suppression?

Last year, Tea-Party inspired legislators in 34 states introduced voter ID laws that, in effect, would disenfranchise 21 million voters who don’t possess the kind of ID these laws mandate, even though years of research have shown voter impersonation to be an extremely rare, almost nonexistent problem.

The number of bills introduced in state capitals last year seeking to restrict or eliminate collective bargaining rights of public workers was staggering — 820— in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. In past years, there have rarely been more than 100 such proposals nationwide.

Anti-immigrant bills were introduced in 36 states last year, almost all of which were copycat versions of Arizona’s SB 1070, which effectively legalized racial profiling.

So why is there such a concerted effort to pass voter suppression and anti-union laws now? It’s simple: The 2008 Presidential elections saw record numbers of union members, students, people of color, recent immigrants and low income voters cast their ballots. Some 15.1 percent more African-Americans cast ballots in 2008 than in the 2004 elections. For Latinos, the increase in 2008 was 28.4 percent. These are the same communities whose votes would be blocked disproportionately if voter ID and anti-immigrant laws were passed. Similarly, weakening unions removes one of the last obstacles to total political control by billionaires and their allies.

These laws should be opposed on their merits, because they are un-American—they are designed to both keep people from exercising their hard-won right to vote and to dilute the impact of their votes if they do. In one sense, they are trying to hold back the tide of change. On the other hand, they could also have a significant, long-term impact on the kind of country we live in, and on our ability as workers to band together for a voice at work.

Voter Suppression: What’s the State of Play?

Let’s look at the potential consequences of voter suppression legislation in just three of the dozens of states that were targeted after the Tea Party sweep in the 2010 mid-term elections: Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin. Florida and Ohio have significant TWU membership, and Wisconsin was the staging ground for both the assault on workers’ rights and the fightback nationally. All are considered election battleground states that could go either way in the 2012 elections.



Anti-union legislation was proposed and passed in all 3 of those Republican-controlled battleground states in 2011. Let’s just look at the state of play in two of them, Ohio and Wisconsin:

Ohioans overwhelmingly voted in a November referendum to repeal that state’s virtual ban on collective bargaining, 61-39%. The monumental effort behind that victory put the infrastructure in place for a tremendous ground game in the November election. Now Republican leaders are panicking, with the Attorney General calling on the legislature to repeal the voter suppression initiative they passed last year, out of fear that Democrats will turn out in massive numbers in November to vote on the referendum to repeal it. At the same time, the enemies of labor have filed the paperwork to get a Right to Work (without a union) Constitutional amendment on the ballot in Ohio this November. TWU has significant membership in Ohio.

The Wisconsin recall will set the stage for the Presidential election in November. Wisconsin was one of several Midwestern states (like Ohio) that gave Barack Obama solid victories in 2008 but then, upset about continuing economic woes, elected Republicans, including Governor Scott Walker, in significant numbers in 2010.

Wisconsinites submitted over 1 million signatures to recall Scott Walker on January 17, shattering all expectations, leaving the threshold of 540,000 in the dust, and demonstrating the depth of continued public outrage over the attack on collective bargaining he unleashed last winter. And the good news doesn’t stop there. United Wisconsin also submitted hundreds of thousands of additional signatures supporting the recall of 5 Walker allies, including Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefisch.

If Walker is recalled, he will be only the third Governor in the history of the Republic to be handed that fate by angry voters. It will show that Wisconsinites, like their neighbors in Ohio, have repudiated the Tea Party agenda driven by far-right politicians who came to power during the 2010 mid-term elections with the financial help of billionaires like the Koch Brothers, taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United.


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