OUR DEMOCRACY’S CHALLENGES ARE SERIOUS AND LONGSTANDING Part 4
Our democracy’s challenges are serious and longstanding. This post describes states’ laws and practices on voter registration and voting that create barriers to some citizens’ ability to vote. In most cases, they are Republican efforts to keep Democratic leaning voters from voting.
(Note: If you find my posts too long to read on occasion, please just skim the bolded portions. Thanks for reading my blog!)
The one person, one vote standard is a cornerstone of democracy along with the assumption that every citizen can vote. Two violations of these standards are in the Constitution in the structure of the Senate and the Electoral College. (See this previous post for more details.) The Constitution gives control of elections to the states and state laws and practices create other violations of these standards. Gerrymandering is one way that states violate the spirit of these standards without directly violating them. (See this previous post for more details.)
Some states’ laws and practices on voter registration and voting create barriers to some citizens’ ability to vote. A true commitment to democracy would mean making it easy for every citizen to vote. However, historically, states erected a variety of barriers to voting by non-white citizens, particularly former slaves and Native Americans. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 addressed these barriers and did so quite effectively. However, since 2013, the radical, right-wing Supreme Court has effectively repealed the Voting Rights Act and suppression of voting by Blacks (and others) is now very much alive in some states. [1] Most recently, the Supreme Court has basically allowed racial gerrymandering if a state claims it’s partisan (not racial) gerrymandering, which the Supreme Court has ruled the courts have no jurisdiction over.
Republicans know that their policy positions are not popular with the majority of the voting public and, therefore, that they won’t win most elections. So, they try to obfuscate their policy positions, but even more effectively, they work to suppress voting by anyone who is not one of their fervent supporters.
Perhaps the most common barriers to voting are the ID requirements some states have put in place to register or to vote. Many states require a government issued ID such as a driver’s license. Low-income and minority citizens (who disproportionately vote for Democrats) are less likely to have a license and, therefore, this is more likely to be a barrier to voting for them. Some states bar the use of a student ID, but, as in Texas, allow the use of a firearm ID.
The number and location of polling places has long been a technique states use to make it easier for some voters to vote and harder for others. Voting on remote and rural Indian Reservations has often been made difficult by requiring a long trip to get to a polling location. Polling places in densely populated, low-income, neighborhoods, often with a high proportion of Blacks or Latinos, have sometimes been sparse and under-equipped leading to long wait times.
The expansion of voting by mail that occurred during the pandemic made voting easier for many people. However, some states have made it difficult to get a mail ballot or complex to submit a valid mail vote. Some have restricted the availability of drop boxes where mail ballots could be delivered, which was a particular issue given the slowing of mail delivery by President Trump’s appointees to run the postal service.
Many states have restricted voting by those convicted of a felony crime or those in prison. Some states have prohibited a convicted felon from ever voting again. These voting restrictions disproportionately affect Blacks and in some jurisdictions were clearly put in place with this in mind. There is a partisan effect, of course, because Blacks tend to disproportionately vote for Democrats. For example, in the 2000 presidential election, which Republican George W. Bush won by winning Florida by less than 600 votes, over 100,000 felons in Florida who had completed their jail sentences were barred from voting.
Purges of registered voters from the list of eligible voters is another technique that can be used to suppress voting. This is a strategy currently being used by Republicans in the run up to the 2024 elections. A common technique is to send a mailing to a voter that requires a response or the voter will be dropped from the voting rolls. Renters or others who have less stable housing, typically low-income and minority citizens and students, are less likely to get the mail and to respond, so they get purged and prevented from voting.
Another technique is to purge voters who have not voted in an election or two. This is done in Georgia, where in July 2017, Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who was running for Governor in the 2018 election, purged 560,000 voters. It was estimated that at least 107,000 of them were eligible to vote. Then in October 2018, the month before the election, he blocked 53,000 voter registrations, 70 – 80 percent of them for people of color, based on minor discrepancies such as a missing apostrophe or hyphen in a name. Kemp, a white, male, Republican, won the Governor’s race on November 6, 2018, by less than 55,000 votes over Stacey Abrams, a black, female, Democrat.
As you can probably surmise from this summary of barriers states are erecting to voting, these barriers (and others) are almost exclusively put in place by Republicans to disproportionately keep likely Democrats from voting.
One solution to much of this voter suppression is to establish national standards for voter registration and voting for national elections. A future post will discuss this and other solutions to the problems facing democracy here in the U.S.
[1] Dayen, D., 1/29/24, “America is not a democracy,” The American Prospect (https://prospect.org/politics/2024-01-29-america-is-not-democracy/)