Wednesday, December 28, 2016

By forcing voters show their ID, the UK Government has found another way to disenfranchise the poor - Independent



Renewing my passport recently, I came up against an irritatingly inconvenient side effect. Every time I tried to buy a bottle of wine in a supermarket, the cashiers seemingly refused to believe there wasn’t an outside possibility I might be a 17-year-old and turned me away. Arguments that 17-year-olds generally don’t plan wild nights around cat litter, fresh pasta, hoover bags and mid-price wine didn’t wash: the relative maturity I believed my basket contents conveyed wasn’t a watertight (or legal) indicator of age. And while many people have a driving licence to prove they’ve reached the age where they can destroy their own liver, the fact that I have epilepsy means I can’t even get a provisional licence.
Now that Eric Pickles has announced a pilot to force voters to show identification when voting, this inconvenience could mean that rather than missing out on the ability to buy a bottle of pinot noir, people in my position could end up completely disenfranchised. Explaining to friends that a passport is my only form of ID when I am shown up in a bar, it’s usually assumed I’m in a small minority: but the 2011 census shows that 24 per cent of the UK born population hold no passport at all.
Was 2016 the year the fat cats got their comeuppance?
To vote under these proposals, you’d need to show a passport, driving licence or utility bill. Three million more people hold driving licences than passport, but 10 million UK nationals still lack this form of photo ID. It’s not a stretch to assume many people who lack driving licences also lack passports, and would struggle to provide the necessary paperwork for Pickles’s pilot. Most utility companies have offered financial incentives for customers who choose to receive bills online. I haven’t received a utility bill or bank statement since I was at university in 2009. The Government’s assumption that these three forms of ID are easy to come by ignores the experience of several million potential voters.
Electoral fraud is a problem, though it is not thought to be widespread. What is widespread is voter apathy: even in last year’s general election, which had the highest turnout since Labour’s 1997 landslide, only 66 per cent of registered voters cast their ballot. At a time when a third of the country didn’t vote for any candidates, we’re now seeing a concerted effort to add several layers of difficulty to participation in democracy. For evidence of how voting ID laws disenfranchise communities, you only need to look to the United States, where states who require photo ID to vote have much lower turnout of poor, black, Latino and older voters.
For certain parties this is politically expedient: they argue that the aim is to make voting secure, and that an unexpected side effect is lower turnout amongst those in poverty, migrants and people in precarious jobs and housing. Traditional Conservative voters will have little problem, but for working-class people who are more likely to vote for Labour this will mean a significant number who could previously vote will now find themselves struggling to gather the necessary paperwork. Passports are expensive: £72.50 at the very least, while provisional driving licences cost £34. If you’re solvent, the cost will seem negligible; if you’re struggling to make your rent each month, deciding to spend £34 simply to vote will seem a hefty cost to pay if it means cutting down on your food and fuel budget for a week or two.
The message this move sends is that people can’t be trusted to vote. If you already feel as though the political system has forgotten you, and you feel voting makes little difference, planning weeks in advance to secure the ID you need to vote is unlikely to increase voter turnout. At the moment, campaigners on polling day battle to spread the message that you don’t need your polling card to vote, so that people who might otherwise not vote can drop into their polling station on the way home from work. Making voters jump through hoops is a retrograde step and assumes guilt on the part of voters. To properly combat electoral fraud, a properly funded police unit with the resources to investigate organised fraud makes far more sense.
Earlier this year, 800,000 people found they’d dropped off the electoral register. In the run up to the EU referendum, campaigners scrabbled to communicate this, and get people re-enrolled, since thousands had no idea they’d been disenfranchised quietly. Adding yet more layers of bureaucracy to the process of voting, and a requirement for a form of ID that costs voters is yet more gerrymandering, which will lead to the poorest, and most voiceless, without the prospect of a vote.

Russia's Vladimir Putin Poses Challenge to Donald Trump Administration - NBC News

 Russia's Vladimir Putin Poses Challenge to Donald Trump Administration

LONDON — Nobody is more likely to test the new administration than Russia's Vladimir Putin.
Putin has already overlapped with three other American presidents and his government's actions colored the U.S. campaign long before Trump's November win.
U.S. intelligence officials believe with "a high level of confidence" that Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere with the White House election, two senior officials told NBC News.
The CIA has assessed that Putin's government wanted to elect Trump, although the FBI and other agencies don't fully endorse that view. Few officials dispute that the Russian operation was intended to harm the candidacy of Trump's rival Hillary Clinton by leaking embarrassing emails about Democrats.
While no equivalent Republican leaks occurred during the campaign — and Trump and Putin have both spoken of each other warmly — the wind from the East has never been more chilly.
On Oct. 15, Russia's longstanding U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said Washington-Kremlin tensions the "worst since 1973."
Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev — the architect of glasnost or "openness" reform policies that hastened the end the Communist U.S.S.R. — has warned that U.S.-Russia ties were at "a dangerous point."
Related: Putin Congratulates Trump by Telegram After Win
Russia tore up a pact to get rid of plutonium that could be used in nuclear warheads, and moved nuclear weapons into Eastern Europe — which unnerved Western governments, including the U.S.
It is also venturing into regions it had neglected for decades, for example helping bomb Syria's Aleppo and holding military exercises with longtime U.S. ally Egypt.
Profound Distrust
It seems like Putin's Russia seems determined to challenge American leadership across the globe. Beneath the bold Russian moves, there is profound distrust between the two countries.
Secretary of State John Kerry's personally warm relationship with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has ensured areas of cooperation, even agreement — but this could end.
Putin won't be deterred from challenging the U.S. and with his economic woes growing at home he may be tempted to double down on risky military moves — nowhere more so than in the Middle East, where Syria is Putin's showcase for the Russian military.
The most profound challenge to the White House's new occupant would be if Moscow made a move in one of the Baltic states, which are members of NATO but are also home to substantial ethnic Russian minorities. This is seen as an extremely unlikely occurrence by experts but it cannot be completely ruled out.
Related: Three Years After U.S. Pulled Tanks From Europe, They're Back
Any incursion would challenge Trump, as NATO's biggest funder, to make a full-scale response based on the alliance's fundamental principle — that an attack against one of its members is considered an attack on all 28.
Another possible tripwire is the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which lies between Lithuania and Poland and is home to the Russian Baltic fleet. Russia has now moved nuclear capable Iskander-M missile systems there.
Image: Russian President Vladimir Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin Mikhail Svetlov / Getty Images
Their indefinite placement puts U.S. missile defense systems in Poland within range. Almost certainly, any Russian move to test America's new leader here would be small scale — the military tactic they call "maskirovka," or deception, seen most clearly in 2014 when mysterious soldiers appeared in Ukraine's Crimea. These soldiers, which Putin later admitted had been sent there by the Kremlin, hastened the eventual Russian annexation of the peninsula.
The World's Longest Border
Putin's regime has insisted it is antagonizing the United States in self-defense against what it perceives to be Washington's aggressive policies.
Russia, the country with the longest land border in the world, has historically been concerned about its neighbors' military activities.
Related: Trump Hints at New Relationship With NATO Allies
Russian leaders have for years watched with alarm as NATO expands eastward toward the country's borders. Especially alarming are plans for the U.S. missile defense elements in Eastern Europe.
Trump's own plans may prove as damaging to NATO as Russia's. As a candidate, he sent waves of alarm through Europe when he said he might not come to the aid of NATO allies if they were attacked.
So these are dangerous days.
Related: Why Obama Didn't Do More About Russian Hack
"Russia is still the only country that can destroy the United States as a functioning society in 30 minutes ... both sides maintain their nuclear forces on hair-trigger alert," Russia experts Thomas Graham and Matthew Rojansky wrote in Foreign Policy magazine in October.
There are few good options for the U.S. and all carry risks.
Tillerson's 'Vast experience'
Trump's nomination of oil giant ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state on Dec. 13 may signal the president-elect's strategy for dealing with Russia. While Tillerson has no government or diplomatic experience, he does have exceptionally close ties with Moscow and Putin.
While these links have drawn fire from both Democrats and Republicans, it is likely that Trump actually sees the connections as positive.
"The thing I like best about Rex Tillerson is that he has vast experience at dealing successfully with all types of foreign governments," Trump said via Twitter when the nomination was announced.
Whatever Tillerson's relationship with Russian officials, Putin is now positioning himself to make maximum demands on Trump.
Obama failed to follow through on his famous "red line" threat against the use of chemical weapons in Syria in 2013. With this, Russia and many other countries smelled weakness in Washington.
Related: Donald Trump's Call for 'Arms Race' Boggles Nuclear Experts
Trump has already proven bullish with his rhetoric, suggesting on Twitter last week that the U.S. should expand its nuclear capabilities and telling MSNBC: "Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all."
Putin, for his part, boasted during his annual press conference about the strength of his nuclear arsenal.
Trump's challenge is to show Moscow that America isn't withdrawing from the world, or unwilling to share the burdens of global leadership with a responsible Russia.
So after America and Europe both failed to deter Putin, perhaps the best Trump will be able to do is repeat the Cold War and ensure a balance of power through the threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction — an uncomfortable policy that nonetheless provides stability.
Editor's note: This is part 3 of a series. Donald Trump was elected to president on a platform of politics not as usual, so it is fitting he inherits a world in flux. Post-World War II rules are dying, old alliances shifting and traditional roles shed. While Trump is a giant question mark on the world stage, NBC News' Chief Global Correspondent Bill Neelylooks at major international challenges the president-elect faces upon inauguration on Jan. 20.
NBC News