IN THIS YEAR'S midterm elections, hundreds of thousands of Americans will have a much more difficult time casting their ballots than they did two years ago. And it won’t be because of rain, or early winter snows, or other acts of God.
It will be because powerful people don’t want them to vote.
Why? They stand to gain politically if the “wrong” people can be kept away from the polls. It’s the opposite of a “get out the vote” campaign—“keep out the vote” describes it better.
The tradition of keeping particular sectors of the population from taking part in the franchise goes back to the founding fathers. John Adams, for instance, believed that only rich, successful, smart people should vote—and only people of a certain race and gender, of course.
“Such is the frailty of the human heart,” Adams wrote in May 1776, “that very few men who have no property have any judgment of their own.” At the time, politicians in Massachusetts wanted to allow men who didn’t own property to vote. Adams thought that was a bad idea. For him, no property meant no vote.
Adams felt that young people, the poor and illiterate, and many other ordinary citizens lacked the basic judgment needed to cast wise ballots. Most of them, he felt, knew just enough about public policy to be dangerous. If the ballot box was opened to “every man who has not a farthing,” he wrote, then all sorts of other unworthy souls would soon demand the right to vote as well.
Most of the other founding fathers agreed. In 1790, 10 out of the 13 original colonies allowed only property owners to vote. But by 1850, only three of the then-31 states had such property-owner restrictions. Since then, the other efforts to limit access to voting—from a $2 poll tax in Mississippi to literacy tests—were fought and eventually eliminated.
In fact, in recent decades, there’s been a rush to open the ballot box to as many people as possible. Early voting, no-questions-asked absentee ballots, motor-voter laws that allow people to register when they get their driver’s license, massive voter registration, and get out the vote campaigns have sought to open up access to the voting booth. In places such as Oregon, Washington, and Colorado, people don’t even have to show up at the polls. Instead they vote by mail—with turnout rates that regularly top 60 percent, among the highest rates in the country.
Some, however, feel it’s time to give up on the idea that everybody should vote. Fox News commentator John Stossel put it this way: “Why do we have these campaigns saying we have to get all these young people to vote?” he told Bill O’Reilly. “Young people often don’t know anything! I’m not saying there should be a test, but let’s stop saying everyone should vote.”
In the past, those seeking to restrict voting rights resorted to repressive laws, threats, and even violence to keep people from voting. Today the methods used to keep people away from the polls are more subtle and sophisticated. Sometimes it’s as mundane as making voting just enough of a hassle that people stay home.
Recent efforts to suppress voting, however, aren’t simply attempts to randomly reduce the numbers. They’ve been, in large part, instituted by Republican legislatures and activists across the country, and the people they affect in the greatest numbers—young voters, people of color—have tended to be groups that have historically supported Democrats.
It turns out that efforts touted as intended to protect the sanctity of the ballot tend to have much more partisan results, if not motives.
WHAT DOES THIS voter suppression strategy look like in its various manifestations across the country? Here are some of the key tactics that have been attempted—or enacted—that have the result of making it more difficult for some people to exercise their right to vote.
1. Exploit the Myth of Voter Fraud.
Want to scare people away from the ballot box? Talk about voter fraud.
Almost half of Americans (48 percent) think that voter fraud is a “major problem,” according to a 2012 Washington Postpoll. And another 33 percent think it’s a minor problem. And three-quarter of Americans (74 percent) say that voters should be forced to show ID at the polls. Requiring an ID, the thinking goes, will prevent voter fraud from happening.
Never mind the fact that voter fraud almost never happens. As the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law pointed out in its 2007 report “The Truth about Voter Fraud,” a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than to vote under a false name.
Real voter fraud is almost nonexistent, as Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola University and author of the Brennan Center report, pointed out in a recent Washington Post editorial. Levitt has tracked allegations of voter fraud since the 2007 report came out. He’s found 31 credible cases of fraud—out of more than 1 billion votes cast in the time period he studied. Levitt’s investigation revealed that most so-called voter fraud turns out to be simple clerical errors—“a problem with matching people from one big computer list to another, or a data entry error, or confusion between two different people with the same name, or someone signing in on the wrong line of a pollbook”—and not fraud after all.
For example, a 2013 investigation by Newsday reported that more than 6,100 dead people in Nassau County, N.Y., were still registered to vote. Among them was Evelyn E. Burwell, who voted in the 2012 general election, according to county records—despite being dead since 1997. Burwell was one of about 270 dead people to vote in Nassau County, according to Newsday. A clear sign of voter fraud, right? No, according to officials interviewed by Newsday. It turned out that, instead of voter fraud, clerical errors and sloppy record keeping were to blame.
In 2014, North Carolina election officials claimed to have found “hundreds of cases” of potential voter fraud in the last presidential election. State elections director Kim Strach told legislators that about 765 voters—out of the state’s 6.5 million registered voters—were thought to be suspicious after a “cross-check” of voter records that was mandated by the state legislature. The names and some details were found to be similar to some voters in other states. “Could it be voter fraud? Sure, it could be voter fraud,” Strach told the legislators. She also admitted that clerical mistakes could be at fault: “Could it be an error on the part of a precinct person choosing the wrong person’s name in the first place? It could be.” Even a Fox News report on the case admitted that “other states using the cross-check system have yielded relatively few criminal prosecutions for voter fraud once the cases were thoroughly investigated.”
Bob Hall, executive director of the voting rights group Democracy North Carolina, commented on the case: “It’s unfortunate that some zealots are using the fear of fraud in a way that can hurt innocent people.” As comedian Stephen Colbert put it, in his own “truthy” way, voter fraud doesn’t mean that the wrong person voted. “The most insidious form of fraud is people voting wrong,” he told his television audience.
2. Promote Solutions that Don’t Work.
One of the most popular, and potentially effective, ways to discourage voters is to pass voter photo ID laws. On the surface, such laws sound perfectly reasonable. After all, you need to show ID to start work at a new job, get on an airplane, or sign up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
The reality, however, is that many Americans don’t have the kind of government-issued photo ID they’d need to vote under these new laws. Among the folks who often don’t have the correct IDs are college students, the elderly, anyone who has moved recently, and women who’ve gotten married and changed their names but haven’t updated their ID yet.
All told, about 11 percent of Americans of voting age—21 million people—don’t have the proper ID to vote under these laws, according to the Brennan Center, which notes that the percentage is even higher for seniors, people of color, people with disabilities, low-income voters, and students. (A 2012 report from the center noted, “People of color are more likely to be disenfranchised by these laws since they are less likely to have photo ID than the general population.”) Let’s do the math. In North Carolina, there are 6.5 million registered voters. That means as many as 715,000 voters would be turned away at the polls under the new laws. Even if all 765 of those cases turned out to merit prosecution—a very unlikely scenario—the result would be one case of alleged fraud for every 935 people denied the right to vote under the ID law.
Despite the minuscule risk of voter fraud, and the harm that voter ID laws could cause, at least 34 states have passed laws requiring voters to show IDs. Some of those laws—including the one in North Carolina—are on hold due to court challenges. In Virginia, according to The Washington Post, some 300,000 voters lack the proper ID to vote under new restrictions recently put in place by the state’s board of elections.
The myth of voter fraud is a particularly effective way to get people to do the wrong thing, at precisely the wrong time, with a great sense of urgency. It’s a technique that British author C.S. Lewis described in his book The Screwtape Letters: “The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under.”
3. Make People Think They Can’t Vote.
Another issue with these new laws is that few people read the fine print. For example, people can still vote early in North Carolina and many other states, albeit in a tighter time period, despite the widespread perception that early voting has been eliminated. And even people who lack an ID can vote under a new photo ID law in Virginia. If they forget their ID, election workers will give voters a provisional ballot to use on Election Day.
All a voter has to do is come back to the election board with a valid ID, and their vote will be counted. And if they don’t have an ID, workers at the election board will take their picture and make them an official voter ID card on the spot, free of charge. The problem, of course, is that it’s often hard enough getting people to come out to vote once, especially in non-presidential-election years. Getting them to come back a second time to get their vote to count can be a bridge too far.
Rosanne Scott of Alexandria, Va., is convinced the new law will prevent people without ID from voting. Her 89-year-old father, a WWII vet and registered Republican, no longer has a driver’s license. “Thanks to the Republicans, my father, who served this country well and who is as mentally sharp as anyone I know, no longer can vote in Virginia,” she told The Washington Post in a letter to the editor.
Don Yelton, a GOP activist and precinct captain in Buncome County, N.C., isn’t worried that voter participation will drop in certain demographics. “I can’t believe we’ve got that many stupid people in North Carolina, people that don’t know how to follow directions to go down there and get a photo ID for free at the DMV,” he told The Daily Show. “Do you want those people picking your president? ... If it hurts a bunch of college kids that’s too lazy to get off their bohunkas and get a photo ID, so be it.”
4. Put Up Small Roadblocks to Voting.
Americans don’t like overt attempts to stop people from voting. One way around those fears is to enact relatively small inconveniences that make it just a little bit harder to vote. It’s the difference between putting up a roadblock and speed bumps. Voter ID laws are one such speed bump.
Cutting the number of early voting days is another. In North Carolina, the legislature recently passed a law that, among other things, reduced early voting from 17 days down to 10 days. A federal court recently ruled that the law was constitutional. The court decided the reduced number of days was enough, said UCLA law professor and blogger Rick Hasen in an August blog post. “The court held that there were still ample opportunities to vote under even the truncated dates,” he wrote. The reduced early voting period doesn’t affect every constituency equally; for example, 70 percent of African-American voters used early voting in 2012.
That same law also added other restrictions. Voters are no longer allowed to register on Election Day. Teenagers—specifically 16- and 17-year-olds—are no longer allowed to register early. And groups that organize voter registration drives can no longer pay workers incentives for registering more voters. And if someone votes in the wrong precinct—even if a poll worker is to blame—his or her vote won’t count.
The new rules will likely prevail in court because they don’t actually prevent people from voting. They just discourage people from taking part in the process.
AFRICAN AMERICANS, women, people who are poor, and others had to fight hard for the right to vote. They won that right with blood, sweat, and tears. Some even paid with their lives.
Voting rights aren’t to be taken for granted, and people across the country—and across the political spectrum—have expressed their concern about efforts to curtail those rights. For instance, a Washington Post poll in 2012 found that 73 percent of Americans worried that “voter suppression”—attempts to prevent citizens from registering to vote or from casting ballots—is a problem, and 41 percent named it as a “major” problem.
But the sad reality is that if voting is made more difficult for African Americans and other minorities, many white Americans won’t hear about it because of the “resegregation” of U.S. society. As authors Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing describe in their book The Big Sort, most Americans socialize with “people who live, think, and vote like we do.” We hardly ever talk or hang out with people who are different than us. And the social networks of white Americans are especially segregated. According to a poll by the Washington, D.C.-based Public Religion Research Institute, “the social networks of whites are a remarkable 93 percent white.”
If voting rights are to be protected in this country, people will have to cross boundaries of race and class and reach out beyond their usual networks, social and otherwise. Those who are trying to make it more difficult to vote are organized and active. Countering their efforts will take at least the same level of commitment from those who think it’s important to keep the voting booth open to all.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!