We learn early on that central to democracy is the right and responsibility of voting. However, a substantial portion of American citizens for one reason or another chooses not to exercise that right. Nonpartisan public interest organizations urge making voting more convenient for those whose schedules or locations make voting difficult, or prevent it entirely. Measures to make voting easier include enabling early voting and voting by mail.
The right to vote that we take for granted has been a long, continuing struggle. We tend to forget that it is only since 1920 that the 19th amendment to the constitution guaranteed American women the right to vote. Jim Crow laws in the American South have long prevented African Americans from voting. Only after a long, contentious struggle did African Americans gain the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally brought this about.
Countering efforts to increase voter turnout are efforts to make voting difficult or even preventing citizens from voting. It is fact that efforts to make voting more difficult have been led by Republican lawmakers in many states, including Wisconsin. The reason given is to “prevent voter fraud.” This is transparent disingenuousness, as outright voter fraud is extremely rare, and widespread voter fraud does not exist. The real fraud, denied by Republican politicians, is voter suppression. The thinly veiled reason for making voting difficult is to suppress votes of those most likely to vote for Democrats. In close races, suppressing only a few votes can determine outcome of an election.
There are numerous ways employed to suppress votes. These include making registration and voting difficult by requiring documents such as birth certificates to prove citizenship. Some states have no provisions for early voting. People may have work schedules making voting on Election Day inconvenient or impossible. Polling places may be limited, forcing long lines and waiting periods. Locations of polling places may be inconvenient, or changes in locations not properly announced. Voters may be automatically purged from the rolls for innocuous reasons such as not having voted in several elections.
Thirty-four states have voter ID laws. Wisconsin’s are among the strictest, modeled after recommendations by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Even confusion over such matters often prevents citizens from going through the red tape, real or perceived, to obtain the required ID.
Only four of UWs nine four-year campuses provide IDs suitable for voting. Students of the other nine campuses have to jump through hoops too numerous to summarize here to obtain the required ID. This is by design. In closed session, a legislative staffer testified that Republican legislators were ecstatic over the prospect of limiting student voting.
In some places, the ID itself produces biased results. In Texas, for example, a permit to carry firearms is accepted whereas a college ID is not.
During the 2018 midterm elections, several attempts at voter suppression were so egregious as to gain national attention. In two states, Kansas and Georgia, Secretaries of State that oversee the election process were candidates for governor. They should have recused themselves from that responsibility.
Georgia law has an “exact match” provision whereby the name on new voter applications has to match exactly the name on government data bases. That sounds reasonable, except that even if so much as a hyphen or middle initial is missing, the application is placed in “pending” status. Over 53,000 applications were stuck in this “pending” status, nearly 70 percent of which were those of African Americans. If “pending” status, is not cleared up, a cumbersome, laborious process, within 26 months, applications are rejected.
Also, in Georgia, signatures on absentee ballots, in the judgement of county election officials, must match signatures on file in election offices. Some 700 absentee ballots applications and 189 absentee ballots were rejected by county officials on these grounds.
Fortunately, both these provisions were negated by court order. But the fact that people in power would even attempt such measures illustrates the extent of voter suppression.
In North Dakota, Native Americans living on reservations do not have street addresses. The predominantly Democratic Native American vote was enough to swing the closely contested 2012 North Dakota US Senate race to Democrat Heidi Heitkamp. The Republican North Dakota legislature found a convenient way to take care of what was, for them, “a problem.” Simply require all voters to have street addresses, thereby invalidating those Native American Democratic votes.
Dodge City, Kansas, the famed Cowtown of western lore, now has a large Hispanic population. This city of over 26,000 has one polling place, and it is not in the city. Due to “construction” which has not yet occurred, the single polling place is not only out of the city, but about two miles away from the nearest public transportation terminal. Recall that the Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, charged with overseeing elections, has not recused himself from this duty.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 contained a provision that required states having a history of voter discrimination to submit any changes in voting legislation to the Department of Justice for approval. Southern states asserted that such action was no longer necessary. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. Perhaps not surprisingly, the conservative court agreed, and struck down this provision as unconstitutional.
Following that 2013 Supreme Court decision, many Republican-led states immediately imposed new voting requirements. Not surprisingly, these requirements systematically discriminate against voting groups that are statistically more likely to vote Democratic. This is no coincidence. The assertion that these requirements are designed to prevent non-existent fraud is transparent malevolence.
Rather than making voting more difficult, efforts to encourage voting for all citizens, regardless of party affiliation, should be increased. With this, and the need to reduce gerrymandering of districts by either party, it is evident that this nation still has some distance to go to achieve the ideals in which we profess to believe.
— John Waelti of Monroe, a retired professor of economics, can be reached at jjwaelti1@tds.net. His column appears Saturdays in the Monroe Times.
