Midnight Book Club

Voter Supression

Summary

Voter suppression is termed as the efforts, legal and illegal, used to prevent eligible voters from exercising their right to vote. Since the passage of women’s suffrage in 1920 and the voting rights act in 1965 (for minorities), on paper every American should be entitled to an equal vote. Yet voter suppression has since evolved to be more subtle, using methods like purging voter rolls (citing irrelevant reasons), disinformation campaigns, last-minute poll closures, etc. This has historically swung the course of countless elections at all levels, most recently the 2018 midterm elections. Stacey Abrams’ book “Our Time is Now” is a great resource on this topic, exploring voter suppression through the lens of her loss in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race. More recently the attention has been on mail-in ballots for the 2020 presidential election and the laws surrounding it. I think this week it would be cool to devote some time to recapping the different forms of voter suppression, its evolution over the years, and recent elections that it has influenced.

Common forms

Key Takeaway: Voter suppression doesn’t always involve the actual execution of the above methods. Of equal or higher impact is the impending threat of the above methods being executed, which leads to lower political efficacy in our voting system, thereby discouraging eligible voters from showing up at the polls. Our government relies on low voter turnout.

Argument for fighting voter suppression

A fundamental right isn’t just doing the bare minimum to maintain the status quo. It means fighting to champion it, especially when it is under attack.

Cornerstone Cases

  1. NC Law struck down by SC targeting African American voters

“That fight began in 2013, when the state made cuts to early voting, created a photo ID requirement and eliminated same-day registration, out-of-precinct voting and preregistration of high school students.”

“More than half of all voters there use early voting, and African-Americans do so at higher rates than whites. African-Americans also tend to overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.”

  1. Photo ID:
    • Thirty-six states have identification requirements at the polls.
    • Seven states have strict photo ID laws, under which voters must present one of a limited set of forms of government-issued photo ID in order to cast a regular ballot – no exceptions.
    • Voter ID laws have been estimated by the U.S. Government Accountability Office to reduce voter turnout by 2-3 percentage points, translating to tens of thousands of votes lost in a single state.
    • Over 21 million U.S. citizens do not have government-issued photo identification.
    • College students are unfairly targeted by this – as many of them are out of state & do not have govt. issued ID despite being highly engaged & eligible voters.
  2. Voter fraud is a common reason used to justify voter suppression techniques, but numerous studies have shown that the percentage of fraudulent votes is marginal compared to the resources/media attention allocated to it.
    • On average, Black voters wait 45% longer to vote than white voters, and Latinx voters wait 46% longer.

  3. Police violence, healthcare inequality, affordable housing, and the school-to-prison pipeline are all issues that start at the local level and can be influenced by voting. Makes sense that politicians want to keep these structures in place

  4. COVID-19 is being used as an excuse to close polling places, one of the most blatant forms of suppression. During this year’s primaries, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Kentucky experienced shutdowns that led to limited access to voting and overcrowding.

  5. Unfortunately, this is still a debate because Current suppression tactics all have historic precedent.

“A poll tax now looks like a polling location closing, a literacy test is now a signature match. It’s the same desire to suppress voters of color, but they just do it in different ways.”

  1. Voter suppression is political tradition.

“From the very founding of our nation, voting has been something that is exclusive,” she said. “There has always been a very well-funded, focused effort to suppress the right to vote.”

  1. It causes a generational problem, both in terms of public sentiment of specific groups towards voting, and census which has a 10 yr effect. Trump signed that citizenship is not a valid question for 2020 census.

Archaic historic reasons

More for convenience than anything else, most states hold their general elections to sync with the federal election date of the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November. That date was set in legislation in 1845 to make sure that in an agrarian society, people could travel to vote and be back home both for Market Day and for the Sabbath. It has not been changed to conform to modern times– for 175 years!

Democrats for voter suppression

Why do Democrats and Democratic-aligned groups prefer off-cycle elections? When school boards and other municipal offices are up for election at odd times, few run-of-the-mill voters show up at the polls, but voters with a particular interest in these elections — like city workers themselves — show up in full force. The low-turnout election allows their policy goals to dominate.

Anzia shows that off-cycle elections lead to higher salaries and better health and retirement benefits for teachers and public employees. Anzia studies these effects in many different ways. The simplest way is by looking at eight states that allow local governments to set their own election dates. She compares school districts that hold school board elections on-cycle and off-cycle within the same state. Controlling for factors that might make districts different from one another — like their population size, income, racial composition, partisan leanings and how urban or rural they are — Anzia found that the maximum base teacher salary is over 4 percent higher in districts with off-cycle elections.

Only arguments for voter suppression:

A National holiday expensive. I think it’s self explanatory – arguments based solely on the economic impact

Mail-in ballots vs absentee ballots

Absentee ballot:

Mail-in:

Autonomy

Landmark Legislation - Pro

What we can do even without legislation

The Utopian Future according to Stacy Abrams

Questions