Massive Voter Suppression: Republicans' Not-So-Secret Weapon in the Midterms

Jay Michaelson of The Daily Beast recently took a deep dive into the myths and facts of GOP voter suppression. The results were worse than he imagined.

With Democrats furious over Donald Trump, and many Republicans furious over the treatment of Brett Kavanaugh, the 2018 elections are likely to see the highest turnout of midterm voters in recent history.  But those voters will be confronted by a byzantine array of voter restrictions, voter-suppression efforts, and voter discrimination standing in their way.

....at least five voter-suppression practices in active use today.  All are led by Republicans, all have disproportionate effects on non-white populations, and all are rationalized by bogus claims of voter fraud. They include:

• Closing polling places in communities of color - Over 1000 polling places closed since 2013, disproportionately in Democratic-leaning areas. Arizona & Georgia are worst offenders.
• Purging eligible voters from the rolls without their knowledge - Voter purges on the thinnest of pretexts. 53,000 voters purged in Georgia alone, a tight race where the Secretary of State is also the GOP candidate for governor.
• Barring felons from voting - 6.1 million Americans can't vote because of past felony convictions - once again, predominantly POC and Democrat-leaning.
• Voter ID laws that disproportionately affect people of color - e.g. in North Dakota, where Native Americans w/o residential addresses are required to prove residential addresses. That alone can swing the Senate.
• Eliminating early voting such as in Florida, where Governor and now Senate candidate Rick Scott tried to eliminate early voting on college campuses (where young voters lean Democrat)

Each one of these alone is troubling. In the aggregate, though, they paint an unmistakable picture of Republican efforts to hold on to power in an increasingly non-white nation by making it harder for non-white people to vote.

Here's brief details on each of the five items noted above.  Additional details can be read at the source linked at the bottom of this post.

1) The simplest way to stop people from voting is to make it harder for them to vote, and the easiest way to do that is to close polling places. And since 2013, more than 1,000 polling places have been closed in nine Republican-dominated states alone.

2) Voter rolls are supposed to be maintained to ensure accuracy, but lately the criteria for being purged, and the difficulty of getting un-purged, have amplified considerably. And as the Commission on Civil Rights report concluded, “voter roll purges often disproportionately affect African-American or Latino-American voters.”

3) One of the most impactful suppression tactics is a legacy of Jim Crow: barring felons from voting, even after their sentences are complete, as happens in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia—all former Confederate states. As a result, in those states, more than 7 percent of the total voting-age population is disenfranchised because of criminal convictions.  Today, 6.1 million Americans are denied the right to vote because of current or past felony sentences.

4) For many people, carrying photo identification is no big deal.  But that is just not true for everyone. In fact, 3 million Americans lack photo IDs, and because the most common photo ID is a driver’s license, the people least likely to have them are less affluent people in urban areas—disproportionately people of color. That’s why, for the last 40 years, polling places have matched signatures rather than photographs, enabling people to vote without an ID. But following President Obama’s two victories in 2008 and 2012, that began to change. Fifteen states enacted voter-ID laws, again with the false claim that voter fraud was a runaway problem.

5) America is one of the few democracies where Election Day takes place on a workday, which makes it very hard for parents who have to juggle work and childcare to vote. That, in itself, is a kind of voter suppression.  To compensate, most states have implemented early voting, opening the polls days before Election Day to enable people to vote. After 2008 and 2012, that trend was reversed.  Why? Take a look at the numbers. In 2012, 48 percent of North Carolina’s early voters were registered Democrats and 32 percent were registered Republicans; that means that 140,000 more early-voters were Democrats.

Claims of voter fraud and ballot integrity are totally baseless, like Santa Claus. 75% of Republicans think there is a voter fraud crisis. But there simply isn't.

...voter suppression is unique in that it directly blocks voters from voting. It is a direct affront to their citizenship. And it is all based on a lie: that voter fraud is a crisis.  In fact, there simply is no voter-fraud crisis.

An exhaustive study by a Loyola law professor found that between 2000 and 2014, there were all of 31 reported instances of in-person voter impersonation. Out of more than a billion votes cast. In other words, the odds are 1 in 32 million that a vote is fraudulent—certainly not enough to swing any election. 

[Trump] has alleged, without a scintilla of evidence, that between 3 and 5 million people voted illegally, a claim that every expert in the field has said is implausible to the point of absurdity.

As a result, three-quarters of Republicans said that voter fraud happens “somewhat” or “very often,” including 68 percent of Republicans said that millions of illegal immigrants had voted in 2016. Both completely, unequivocally false.

Source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-have-a-secret-weapon-in-the-midterms-voter-suppression