This week in the war on voting: White New Hampshirites discover what it's like to be shut out

Daily Kos Staff

Saturday February 13, 2016 · 6:00 AM PST

2016/02/13 · 06:00

no image description available — Voters sign up to cast their ballot at First Baptist Church on primary day, February 9, 2016, in Nashua, New Hampshire.

Welcome to the return of our war on voting series, a joint project of Meteor Blades and Joan McCarter.

There's nothing like the sense of entitled frustration expressed by "first in the nation" primary voters kept away from the polls by the decisions of lawmakers.

"I am still frustrated. I don't think that it was that I wasn't able to vote today," said one voter who was turned away from a polling location in Merrimac, the only polling location in the community of 18,000. Traffic getting to the high school was the problem. One woman said that it took her 40 minutes to go two miles, and she nearly gave up, reaching the polling location just as the doors were closed. "It's wrong," said this woman. "We're in America and we're allowed to vote. It's our right."

The polling location official was all apologies. "This year the tweak that we did was just wrong," she said. "It's up to make this work, and I hate it that anyone feels like they weren't able to vote." So yeah, that will probably be fixed. This, however, probably won't, because it got the desired results—preventing college kids from voting.

PLYMOUTH, NH — Plymouth State senior Jack Swymer headed to the polls around 11:30 a.m. to cast a ballot for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). He tried to take advantage of the state's same-day registration process, but a poll worker told him that since he didn’t have a proof of his residence, he couldn't vote.
"I live off-campus, and the bills are in my roommate's name," he told ThinkProgress. "I wasn't familiar with all the voting laws, so I just did what the poll workers' advice because I figured they knew what they were doing."

It turns out, they did not. […]

"All I wanted to do is vote," he said. "It's important for everyone to vote, but especially students. We are the future, and our voice should be heard."

Swymer was supposed to have been offered the opportunity to sign an affidavit and cast a provisional ballot. After being turned away the first time, he was informed of this right by volunteers from NextGen who were looking out for precisely this kind of problem, returned to the poll and demanded his ballot. The volunteers were there because of New Hampshire's new voter ID laws, and because this kind of voter suppression was entirely predictable. It's exactly what was intended by these laws, according to then House Speaker Bill O'Brien. He told a tea party group in 2011 that the "kids [are] coming out of the schools and basically doing what I did when I was a kid, which is voting as a liberal. […] That's what kids do—they don't have life experience, and they just vote their feelings." Preventing college students from doing that is exactly what O'Brien wanted to stop.

Suburban white voters getting snarled in traffic wasn't intended, so that problem won't be repeated in New Hampshire in November. Keeping college students from voting, however, is not a bug, and it will happen again.

Below, you'll find some briefs what's happened this week in the war on voting.

The worst person in the world, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, has figured out a way around a court decision that prohibits him from imposing a requirement that people registering to vote on federal forms provide proof of U.S. citizenship. The newly appointed executive director of a federal voting commission is Brian Newby, "who previously worked under Kobach as an elections official in Kansas's largest county." Newby unilaterally approved Kobach's proof-of-citizenship requirement.
Previously, because Kobach was not able to get a court to force the federal government to change the federal voting form to require proof of citizenship, Kansas residents without the required documentation for the state law could still register with the federal form and vote in federal elections. (The previous federal form did require those registering to vote sign an affidavit under penalty of perjury affirming that they are citizens, but did not require proof of citizenship.) […]
But Newby's approval of the form did not have the support of the full commission. EAC vice chair Thomas Hicks, the lone Democratic-appointee, accused Newby of acting "unilaterally" and breaking with commission protocol for proposing any "material" changes to the federal form.

Hicks is determining whether he has any recourse on Newby's action, and the state ACLU is looking at its options for fighting the decision.
In North Carolina the state says it really messed up when it required 86-year-old Reba Bowser to prove that she is who she says she is. Despite having her birth certificate from 1929, in which she's identified as Reba Witmer Miller, and her Social Security card and her expired New Hampshire driver's license showing her married name, Reba M. Bowser, that wasn't enough for New Hampshire officials. They wanted her 1950 marriage certificate. Her family raised hell on social media where the story blew up and now the state is scrambling to make it better. DMV Commissioner Kelly J. Thomas says, "[w]e made a mistake. We're going to try to correct it on Friday." Mrs. Bowser, you won't be surprised to find out, is white.

The ACLU and League of Women Voters in Wisconsin are pushing the state legislature to come up with funding to educate voters about its new, extremely restrictive voter ID laws. There is no funding for the state elections board to advertise the voting changes, which will be in effect for the first time in this month's primary. Even Alabama, Mississippi, and Kansas came up with state funding to advertise their new voter ID laws.

Still in Wisconsin, the state Senate has passed what on the surface looks like a great bill, allowing for online voter registration. Examined more closely, however, there are some real problems with it. It eliminates so-called Special Registration Deputies, or SRDs, from state law. These SRDs are designated by elections officials to assist in voter registration drives, by providing registration forms to voter drives, helping voters fill them out, and returning the forms to local clerks. The key part of that role is helping voters who now have to provide the right kind of photo ID—or the number on that ID if they're registering online—to register. That's where not having these deputies will cause problems. "Those individuals less likely to have those forms of ID (minorities, the elderly, low-income persons, and students)—the very people most likely to be served by special registration deputies—will be left out in the cold," says Common Cause Wisconsin. This isn't about modernizing Wisconsin's elections system. It's about keeping "undesirable" voters out of the system.

West Virginia is scrambling to keep up with voter suppression. This week the House Judiciary committee passed a new voter ID bill, sending it on to the full House of Delegates, despite the complete lack of evidence of voter fraud in the state.

And in case you missed it, a study released last week has shown that voter suppression laws have done exactly what they were intended to do, "driven down minority voter turnout, and by a significant amount."
For example, the researchers found that in primary elections, "a strict ID law could be expected to depress Latino turnout by 9.3 points, Black turnout by 8.6 points, and Asian American turnout by 12.5 points."
The impact of strict voter ID was also evident in general elections, where minority turnout plummeted in relation to the white vote. "For Latinos in the general election, the predicted gap more than doubles from 4.9 points in states without strict ID laws to 13.5 points in states with strict photo ID laws," the study found. That gap increased by 2.2 points for African Americans and by 5 points for Asian Americans. The effect was even more pronounced in primary elections.

This week in the war on voting: White New Hampshirites discover what it's like to be shut out

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