An article in yesterday's Michigan Messenger reports that Michigan Republicans plan to systematically challenge voters in predominantly African American communities based on home foreclosures. This arguably may be akin to a "poll tax" which violates the U.S. Constitutional ban on conditioning the right to vote on economic status.
The Michigan Messenger article (located at http://www.michiganmessenger.com/... reports that the GOP in Macomb County, MI, a "key swing county in a key swing state" admittedly plans to "use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting" from the foreclosed addresses. This effort is "an attempt to challenge ineligible voters as not being 'true residents.'" The article quotes an attorney for the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, D.C., who explains that "a foreclosure notice is [not a] sufficient basis for a challenge, because people often remain in their homes after foreclosure begins and sometimes are able to negotiate and refinance." I would add that people whose homes have been foreclosed and who have had to move out, consigning them to the streets or to an uprooted life moving through a series of friends' and relatives' homes, also would arguably be illegitimately prevented from voting.
I want to propose that this form of vote caging violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution not only because it will likely disproportionately impact African American voters who are likely Democrats(as the article notes) but also because it would tend to cause the State to condition the fundamental right to vote on the wealth or affluence of the targeted voters, i.e., their ability to make mortgage payments in order to avoid foreclosure.
A reading of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966), seems to support this view. Below are excerpts from the decision which I think help make the case that GOP vote caging in this case amounts to "invidious discrimination" in the form of a kind of "poll tax" that violates the fundamental Constitutional right to vote:
"[A] State violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment whenever it makes the affluence of the voter or payment of any fee an electoral standard. Voter qualifications have no relation to wealth..." Harper, 383 U.S. at 666.
"Previously we had said that neither homesite nor occupation ‘affords a permissible basis for distinguishing between qualified voters within the State.’ We think the same must be true of requirements of wealth or affluence or payment of a fee." 383 U.S. at 667.
"[This Court has held that] ‘the political franchise of voting’ [i]s a ‘fundamental political right, because preservative of all rights.’" 383 U.S. at 667.
"[W]hether the citizen, otherwise qualified to vote, has $1.50 in his pocket or nothing at all, pays [a] fee or fails to pay it [that citizen has a fundamental right to cast his or her vote]. [Because] [t]he principle [of equal representation secured by the right to vote] denies the State the right to dilute a citizen's vote on account of his economic status or other such factors [it] by analogy bars a system which excludes those unable to pay a fee to vote or who fail to pay." 383 U.S. at 668.
"To introduce wealth or payment of a fee as a measure of a voter's qualifications is to introduce a capricious or irrelevant factor. The degree of the discrimination is irrelevant. In this context-that is, as a condition of obtaining a ballot-the requirement of fee paying causes an ‘invidious' discrimination that runs afoul of the Equal Protection Clause." 383 U.S. at 668.
The bottom line is that the GOP is essentially engaging in modern day Jim Crow tactics to prevent low-income and African American citizens from exercising their right to vote. Now that's a front page story if I ever saw one.