Welcome to the latest edition in our war on voting series. This is a joint project of Joan McCarter and Meteor Blades.
It’s estimated that a third of American voters will have already cast their ballot by November 8. In a few states, they have already begun. Derek Willis at Pro-Publica writes that Electionland, a coalition of reporters focusing on access to the ballot, has already begun its work, too:
We’ve started looking for problems that prevent eligible voters from exercising their right to cast a ballot before the polls close. Using a combination of social media posts, data about web search trends, and call center records from a coalition of election lawyers, we’ll be looking at the process of voting to help make sure that nobody is shut out because of long lines, improper procedures or inadequate resources.
In a number of states where voters are already casting ballots you will be able to track absentee and early voting via the United States Elections Project, which is headed by Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political science professor. States currently voting include Iowa and Illinois, with North Carolina, Florida and Ohio starting soon.
This past weekend, our partners at the First Draft Coalition trained journalism professors from 13 universities — as well as my colleague Jessica Huseman and me — on social media detection and verification techniques, so that we can more easily find credible information about voting problems across the country. Those professors will, in turn, train about 100 journalism students who will work on Election Day.
Among the issues Electionland will be hunting for are problems familiar to get-out-the-vote activists: long lines and delays at the polls; understaffed and changed polling stations; provisional balloting; dissemination of misleading information voter ID laws that spreads confusion; deceptive advertising and mailers about where and when to vote; and ballot design problems.
• Thanks to Supreme Court ruling, the Justice Department will send fewer poll observers out this election: In 2012, the DOJ sent 780 personnel to polling places in 51 jurisdictions in 23 states. Their task? Keeping an eye out for unlawful activity to report on what they perceived as civil rights violations. But the 2013 Shelby ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act has eliminated the sending of observers to most of those jurisdictions. Officials say they will only send observers to fewer than five states this year.
“It’s a game-changer,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “Historically, the federal observer program has been a valuable and necessary tool to help prevent intimidation and harassment of minority voters.”
“Without those protections, we’re bracing for the worst,” Clarke said. “All of this unfolds at a moment when we have a presidential candidate who has called for law enforcement and untrained individuals to monitor activity at the polls.”
• A piece of the North Carolina voting law that the courts didn’t block could reduce the black vote: We had good news on July 29 when the 4th Circuit Court struck down North Carolina’s law that included a strict voter ID requirement, ended same-day registration, out-of-precinct voting, and pre-registration, all of which the ruling said were “passed with racially discriminatory intent” and “targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision.” But, Erik J. Engstrom and Jason M. Roberts report, there was one item the court left alone: the elimination of straight-ticket voting.
North Carolina had had straight-ticket voting on the books since it adopted the secret ballot in 1909. But it was dropped in 2014. More than 40 percent of those who cast ballots in 2010 voted straight-ticket, and in 2012, nearly 58 percent did. Among African Americans in some counties, the figures were as high as 70 percent.
Without the straight-ticket option, it takes longer to vote. And that means longer lines. And longer lines means some people will drift away or not queue up to vote in the first place. In 2014, the first year without straight ticket voting, North Carolina had the longest waits in line at the polls of any state, according to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts. And this year, the ballot is longer than it was two years ago. That, say Engstrom and Roberts, will contribute to even more “roll-off”—the tendency of some voters not to complete their ballots.
Just one more way the vote suppressors know will reduce the votes of groups of Americans they don’t want to cast ballots. Which is why North Carolina isn’t the only state where straight ticket voting has come under fire. In the past 20 years, 12 states have abolished it, leaving just nine still leaving it as an option.
• Florida Gov. Rick Scott refused to extend voter registration deadline because of Hurricane Matthew: You can always count on him to do the wrong thing. “I’m not going to extend it,” he said. “Everybody’s had a lot of time to register. On top of that, we have lots of opportunities to vote, early voting and absentee voting, so I don’t intend to make any changes.”
Perhaps this stonewalling has something to do with the fact that Florida Democrats have registered 488,000 new voters this year and Republicans have only registered 60,000. And the fact that Democrats have a 2-to-1 edge among Hispanics who have registered since 2012.
• Indiana Secretary of State blasted for comment about registering African Americans. Craig Varoga, president of Patriot Majority USA, says:
“Yesterday, Connie Lawson became the Katherine Harris of 2016, when she said on the record that it is racist to register African American voters. Indiana’s Republican Secretary of State is clearly determined to rig the election in her state by preventing 45,000 African Americans from voting in this year’s elections, far more law abiding citizens who will be prevented from voting, if Lawson gets her way, than even Harris disenfranchised in the 2000 Florida recount.”
• If you’re a college student, the Brennan Center’s Student Voting Guide 2016 could be useful.
• 90-year-old woman disenfranchised by Wisconsin voter ID law. Ari Berman reports:
Christine Krucki was born in Lublin, Wisconsin, in 1925. She first voted in the 1948 presidential election and has voted ever since. She’s an independent who has voted for John F. Kennedy but also Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. But after Wisconsin passed its strict voter-ID law in 2011, Krucki lost her right to vote. She made three trips to the DMV, bringing an Illinois photo ID, proof of residence in Wisconsin, a birth certificate and her marriage certificate but could not get a Wisconsin photo ID for voting.
That problem for Krucki and other Wisconsinites makes no never-mind to Gov. Scott Walker, who says the state’s process voter ID “works just fine.” The voting-rights group One Wisconsin Now has filed a brief asking a federal district judge to block the law before the November election. A hearing is scheduled for Oct. 11.
• Nevada Secretary of States extends register-to-vote-by-mail deadline after lawsuit threatened: Democrats said the original deadline for asking for a vote-by-mail ballot fell outside the federally mandated 30-day window before an election under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske subsequently announced to the press that all 17 Nevada county clerks and registrars have been ordered to accept registration forms postmarked as late as Oct. 11.