DoJ Vote Chief Argues Voter ID Laws Discriminate against Whites

When Justice Department lawyers and analysts found in 2005 that a Georgia law requiring voters to have photo ID would disproportionately discriminate against African-Americans, they were overruled by John Tanner, the chief of the Civil Rights Divisions’ voting rights section. The law was subsequently halted by a federal appeals judge, who compared it to a Jim Crow-era poll tax.

This past weekend, Tanner showcased his own analytical skills, telling an audience that voter ID requirements actually disproportionately affect whites.

Tanner explained that “primarily elderly persons” are the ones affected by such laws, but “minorities don’t become elderly the way white people do: They die first.” So anything that “disproportionately impacts the elderly, has the opposite impact on minorities,” he added. “Just the math is such as that.” Video of Tanner’s remarks were posted yesterday by The Brad Blog. We’ve supplied a transcript below.

According to former Department employees, Tanner’s comments were not only wrong, but way off, and typical of the type of decision making in the section. “In trying to defend his decision in the Georgia case, he’s saying things that are frankly ludicrous,” Joe Rich, a forty-year veteran of the Department and Tanner’s predecessor in the voting rights section, told me.

“This is the kind of analysis that the voting section has been doing: seat of the pants generalizations and suppositions instead of hard numbers and analysis,” said Toby Moore, a redistricting expert who worked as an analyst for the section until the spring of 2006. “It’s false.” Tanner’s conclusions, he added, were “always in support of what his Republican appointee bosses wanted him to say, which is why he got to where he is.”

Tanner made the remarks this past Friday during a panel on voter disenfranchisement held by the National Latino Congreso in Los Angeles.

He’d recently made similar comments when addressing the Georgia NAACP about the 2005 Georgia law last week. There, Tanner told the group that minorities were actually “slightly more likely” than non-minorities to have a photo ID,” according to the AP.

“As the person who analyzed the numbers for John,” Moore told me, “I can tell you that he’s cherry-picking the data that he wants to use.”

To buffer that statement, Tanner seemed to rely on a similar brand of anecdotal evidence in the Georgia speech, according to the AP:

He suggested that was due to the vestiges of racism that are still at work in the United States.

“You think you get asked for ID more than I do?” Tanner, who is white, asked the black audience members.

“I’ve never heard anyone talk about driving while white.”

And Tanner said it is wrong to assume that the poor lack photo IDs.

“When someone goes to a check cashing business God help them if they don’t have a photo ID,” he continued.

“People who are poor are poor. They’re not stupid. They’re not helpless.”

The House Judiciary Committee is currently seeking to have Tanner appear at a Congressional hearing, but has so far been rebuffed by the Justice Department.

A transcript of Tanner’s remark last Friday:

Tanner: It’s probably true that among those who don’t [have photo ID], it’s primarily elderly persons. And that’s a shame. You know, creating problems for elderly persons just is not good under any circumstance. Of course…that also ties in to the racial aspect, because our society is such that minorities don’t become elderly. The way white people do. They die first.

There are inequities in health care. There are a variety of inequities in this country. And so anything that disproportionately impacts the elderly, has the opposite impact on minorities – just the math is such as that. And then Georgia, the fact was and the court found that it was not racially discriminatory. That was the finding of the initial court. And that was the clear information from our analysis in the office, my analysis, that was not affected by any other person. And I think that the memorandum which was leaked, which was a breach of legal ethics, was incomplete, was not the complete staff version and ultimately you come up against a hard fact, the minorities in Georgia statistically, slightly, were more likely to have ID, are today, and Georgia — as far as ID and voter registration and voter participation go we’ve been straining at gnats and swallowing camels because there are a couple of million people in Georgia who have IDs, who went there and, repeatedly in many cases, to drivers license offices and other offices to get the ID and apparently either said they didn’t want to register to vote, which is a very high number, or were not asked as the federal law requires. And as I say we are trying to work with the NAACP there to document a violation of federal law. Federal law does not do everything you want- Yes, sir?

Off screen woman: We have a question.

Question: The panels mentioned earlier — you haven’t spoken to what is the problem, why do we need voter ID? I’ve heard Duncan Hunter on the GOP debate say one thing, you know, and we always hear, oh all these people are illegally voting, but the government did its own study and they’ve never found — there’s, you know, miniscule cases of people voter fraud so why is it that we need this voter id requirements in the first place?

And also on that, you mean all these cases that you brought, are all those cases about voter fraud, individual voter fraud, like people voting when they’re not eligible because they’re felons or whatnot? Because I don’t know anything about these cases that you’re bringing, this multitude of cases.

Tanner: Well I (camera shakes / muffled)… do policy. We do not, we cannot, use our policy judgment under section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to do what I think is right. If we did that the law would be struck down by the Supreme Court in a New York minute, and that’s not gonna happen on my watch. We follow the law, we follow the facts, we’ve always done that and you know, there’s not much else we can do without going into court and getting beaten up badly.

The, on the ID, there have been a number of ID cases, there have been a number of efforts to prove disparities in it in court – all have failed. And they largely, actually in Georgia most recently, and in Indiana, the effort to prove a disparate impact of the ID was based on the same list matching procedures that so accurately have been criticized, trying to match names on two lists, and as the court in Indiana says, garbage in, garbage out.