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DoJ Vote Chief Argues Voter ID Laws Discriminate against Whites
By Paul Kiel - October 9, 2007, 12:48PM
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:
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