Welcome to the return of our war on voting series, a joint project of Meteor Blades and Joan McCarter.
Another primary, another demonstration of how new voting procedures and laws can and do suppress the vote. First it was New Hampshire, where budget cutting and polling place consolidation led to long waits, traffic jams, and some really incensed white people, who weren't used to having to go through what voters of color normally do just to exercise their franchise. We saw long lines and frustrated voters in Arizona, a state that used be covered under the Voting Rights Act. Had that law not been gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013, chances are the kinds of snafus Arizonans experienced wouldn't have happened.
Wisconsin, though, it's different. Because we now know what the intent of the new laws they put into place in 2011—though held up in court until this year, making this primary the first election under the most stringent ID laws in the country. Laws Republicans have admitted were enacted to suppress the vote of young people, of people of color—of anybody likely to vote Democratic. Says coffee shop owner and former chief of staff for state Sen. Dale Schultz (R), Todd Allbaugh:
"It just really incensed me that they started talking about this particular bill, and one of the senators got up and said, 'We really need to think about the ramifications on certain neighborhoods in Milwaukee and on our college campuses and what this could do for us,'" Allbaugh said. "The phrase 'voter suppression' was never used, but it was certainly clear what was meant." […]
"It left a pit in my stomach to think that a party that I had worked for for years and years and years was literally talking and plotting to deny someone, a fellow citizen, their constitutional right," Allbaugh said.
It worked for them in this primary, and caused major problems for many voters, particularly college students. Here's the bad news for Republicans, though—Wisconsin voters now have a dry run. Voting advocates now know where the holdups and problems are going to be. They can fight back in November.
Before getting to the briefs, congratulations to our own Chris Reeves, who uncovered one of the sneakiest voter suppression tactics we’ve seen from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach: Spanish language voting guides with incorrect information on how to register. Kobach now has no alternative but to fix it, now that Reeves has brought the traditional media’s attention to it.
Below, you'll find some briefs about what's happened this week in the war on voting.
- Want to help fight voter suppression? Election Protection, a coalition of advocacy organizations, is where to start. Go to their website, ourvote.org to find out what's happening in your state, to volunteer for election protection, or to donate to their efforts.
- The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating voter suppression claims from the Arizona primary fiasco.
Democratic lawmakers and activists say there were no polling places in some working-class and Latino neighborhoods.
Voters in Maricopa—the state's largest county—complained they waited hours to vote in the March 22nd primary.
- West Virginia has a Kim Davis problem. It did something very progressive, opening up voter registration online. And, as in Kentucky with marriage equality, rogue county clerks have reared their ugly heads. "Two county clerks in West Virginia are refusing to accept online-only voter registrations, saying their state's process is not secure enough because it doesn't require would-be voters to provide signatures."
The Charleston Gazette-Mail's David Gutman reported on Monday that both Kanawha County Clerk Vera McCormick and Cabell County Clerk Karen Cole are requiring potential voters to mail in paper affidavits in order to complete their online registrations.
Each time McCormick and Cole receive a new online voter registration, they mail a pre-stamped envelope to the voter and tell them to send it back with their signature. West Virginia Secretary of State Natalie Tennant told the Gazette-Mail that about 1,300 would-be voters in Cabell County have been denied online-only registration. McCormick told the Gazette-Mail that she's sent forms to 30 to 40 people every day for the last six months, and that the "vast majority" of people have returned their forms.
- Ohio Secretary of State John Husted, a founding member of the voter suppression hall of fame, is facing a lawsuit from the ACLU of Ohio and Demos for the state's practice of automatically dropping voters from the rolls if they do not vote in three consecutive federal elections.
In 2015, that meant that roughly 40,000 people living in Ohio's largest county — largely low-income and minority voters — were disenfranchised. Over the last five years, roughly two million people have been removed from the rolls. […]
"We have spoken to purged voters from around the state of Ohio who tried to vote in the November 2015 local election and were turned away," Freda Levenson, legal director for the ACLU of Ohio, said in a statement. "The already widespread disenfranchisement that has resulted from this process is likely to be much worse in a presidential election year."
-
