Black voters were twice as likely to be removed from the rolls
Ari Berman on why the Supreme Court ruling on Ohio’s voter suppression matters:
In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to end the disenfranchisement of black voters in the Jim Crow South. The law was remarkably successful in dismantling barriers to the ballot box like literacy tests and poll taxes, but a few decades later, Congress recognized that more still needed to be done to boost political participation. In the 1988 presidential election, for example, barely half of eligible African American voters cast a ballot.
In response to persistently low voter turnout, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to allow voters to register at Department of Motor Vehicles offices and other public agencies. President Bill Clinton called it “a sign of a new vibrancy in our democracy.” The “motor voter” law had an immediate impact: More than 30 million people registered or updated their registrations through the NVRA in its first year in effect. Roughly 16 million people per year have used it to register ever since.
That’s good; it’s a good thing; we don’t want people to have to make “a little effort” to vote when they were prevented from voting for a century after the Civil War. We want to eliminate as much need for “a little effort” as possible, because what are minor obstacles to people with cars and internet access and free time are prohibitive barriers to people with two or three badly-paid jobs and no car and children and no nearby internet access or bus route.
One of the key features of the law was to protect voters from being wrongly removed from the voter rolls. The NVRA stipulated that someone could not be removed from the rolls “by reason of the person’s failure to vote.” But in a 5-4 decision Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Ohio could remove infrequent voters from the rolls, severely weakening the power of the NVRA and opening the door to wider voter purging.
Ohio purged more than 2 million registered voters between 2011 and 2016, more than any other state. Black voters in the state’s largest counties were twice as likely as white voters to be removed from the rolls. In a dissent to Monday’s ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the court’s opinion “entirely ignores the history of voter suppression against which the NVRA was enacted and upholds a program that appears to further the very disenfranchisement of minority and low-income voters that Congress set out to eradicate.”
This is why talking about having more respect for people who make a little effort to vote is so wrongheaded.
Iowa has adopted a voter-ID law, but the state still wants (so far) those eligible to vote to do so. In January, we got letters from the Sec of State with Iowa voter IDs; they were sent because according to their records we did not yet have Iowa driver’s licenses. We had other acceptable IDs, but they didn’t know that and wanted to make sure.
I think it’s acceptable to require IDs to vote, as long as you provide those IDs for free or at subsidised cost to people who might have trouble affording them. In my experience, however, people interested in the former are hardly interested in the latter.
@Seth Why? I’m not being facetious, I’m genuinely curious. What do you think showing ID prevents?
I’m a Brit and have never had to show ID to vote. It got floated a year or two ago but I think was shot down pretty quick. Technically, you get a voter card (it’s a plain white card with some basic information on it, including the location of your local polling place) but it’s no big deal if you don’t bring it along when you go to vote. Since I moved to the US, I’ve seen voter ID pop up in various places and the usual reason given is voter fraud. But voter fraud is not and will never be a serious problem because there are much easier ways to rig an election than fraudulent voting by ineligible persons. Just ask Russa.
I’m with Claire on this one. The voter card we get simply speeds the process of finding the correct line, page and book for the polling staff to look us up (so they can cross us off the list as having voted). Nothing else. No political party here has expressed concern about voter fraud and the only convictions for voter fraud relate to one local body election. The fraud was identified during the registration process (too many voters registered to one address and too many forms downloaded from one IP address) and the perpetrator and those who assisted him were arrested prior to the election.
It probably helps that we have one electoral commission that looks after all voting nationally. It means that administrative checks against various databases and voting records makes it very hard for anyone to get away with it.
I said it was acceptable, not that I thought it was necessary, or necessarily a good idea, and it was only acceptable if IDs were not onerous to acquire. (I personally believe they should be free for everyone.)
In Canada it’s common to bring your license or provincial ID to vote, so that the polling attendants can quickly tick your name off the list; lacking that, there is a laundry list of items that can be substituted, which can be viewed here: http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&document=index&lang=e (note especially that letters of confirmation from shelters or soup kitchens count).
In principle, there is nothing wrong with being expected to furnish evidence that you are who you say you are when you vote. In practice, in America, this expectation is perverted by a desire to keep certain people from voting, and often the people most often propounding the expectation are the same ones making identification nearly impossible to acquire for people who conspicuously tend not to vote for them. Coupled with cultural memories and inflated stories of ballot-stuffing from the likes of Tamany Hall and Daley’s Chicago, along with the generic American’s background radiation of bigotry and paranoia, and the proponents of requiring voter ID while simultaneously making that ID harder to get have no trouble convincing well-heeled Americans that there is no contradiction inherent in that position.
If the proponents were consistent, they would also support universal provision of the requisite identification. But then again, nearly every conservative position has an intimately correlated one which should by rights be logically excluded (such as opposing both birth control and abortion, or opposing background checks for guns as well as automatic ID stamping of bullets fired from them).
My state tried to put in voter ID this year, but it didn’t make it out of the legislature. I have never been required to show anything, just sign my name. If someone else showed up to vote in my name, and there was a signature already in that line, I imagine they would want some sort of ID, but that’s never happened.
Of course, my district is extremely white, so very few people worry much about that. The voter ID is mostly to keep people who don’t look like me from voting. I’m sure most people assume I’m a Trump voter because I am white (but as a woman, it is almost 50% likely I am not, and if anyone saw my car in the parking lot, which is a hybrid with a Darwin fish, I’m sure they would immediately jump the other way in their assumption).
As somebody who has never voted in either the USA or Britain I always assumed the problem in the USA was that too few people had ID because requiring people to have it (as in Germany, where everybody from age 16 has an identity card) is widely seen as the first step towards the Illuminati and the UN putting everybody into reeducation camps etc., that the discussions around ID requirements at elections flow from that problem, and that the most desirable solution would really be for everybody to have ID.
So I am a bit confused: If under Claire’s and Rob’s preferred system nobody has to show ID, how do you make sure that I don’t come in and vote for David Miller, and then again six hours later and vote for John Smith? How do the people at the voting station make sure that I am voting only once and that I am actually eligible to vote?
Note also that where I come from everything is done with paper ballots and voting machines are forbidden, so I may be making some unconscious assumptions here.
AlexSL, I haven’t been involved in the process of running a polling station myself, although I do know someone who has. No system is fullproof, but there are several layers of checks.
When you go to vote the official asks who you are and where you live. They then hand you a voting form and write the number from the top of the form beside your name before ruling through your entry. All this is overseen by scrutineers who are there representing the parties. The scrutineer is not allowed to interact with the voter, touch the papers or take part in the counting of ballots. The number of scrutineers must also be less than the number of election officials. However, scrutineers can alert officials if they have reason to suspect someone has already voted (remember these are all people in your immediate neighbourhood).
During the counting process, which occurs twice – once on election night and then a second ‘meticulous count’ over the next two weeks – officials cross check the voting lists from every polling station against a master roll. This identifies plural voting. Because the voting forms are numbered, while the person counting the vote can’t tell who you are, the officials further up the chain can identify papers associated with the plural votes. The matter is then handed to the Police to investigate. In our 2014 election there were apparently about 126 people who voted twice, or appeared to do so, out of 2.4 million votes. A significant number turn out to be people who voted early by post, then changed their minds and voted again for a different candidate (not allowed). A number were cleared of having voted twice and a couple remain ‘unresolved’. Police practice is to issue a warning to those who have been careless in their thinking (forgot or changed their minds), or who are first time one off offenders. They have also apparently pre-emptively visited people referred to them by the electoral commission who stated on on social media that they were going to vote multiple times to warn them off attempting it.
As I said earlier, there are warning flags that they look for to make sure that voter registration is robust as well. Given that we have a very tightly integrated voting system under centralised control and Government departments widely share identifying data, the chances of any widespread plural voting such as voting for recently deceased people or those in rest homes etc is pretty slim.
What else can I say, whether we like the result or not, no one challenges the integrity of the system.
Rob,
Thanks, but in some ways I am now even more confused. If somebody has voted twice, but the vote is secret, how do you know what ballots to discard? Would it not be considerably easier to stop people from voting twice by ticking their name on the list when they have voted first, instead of having to clean up and prosecute afterwards?
And the main problem remains, unless I failed to understand you: If I can just waltz in and claim any name I want to without showing some form of ID, what is to keep me from voting for John Smith, and then John gets into trouble when he comes in later? When I was manning a voting station myself many years ago, some people tried to vote once for themselves and then again in place of family members. If they had been a bit more circumspect about it and did not have to show ID they would have been successful.
The assumption that you can have partisan ‘scrutineers’ who personally know everybody in their suburb does not seem very realistic in an urban setting at least, although I guess it would work in villages of less than 500 people. It also requires a large number of volunteers to spend the entire voting day in the station, making it impossible to work in shifts, because otherwise I could just come in a few hours later and nobody would be left to remember me.
Note I am not saying that voter fraud is a big issue – as far as I remember, in my home country the only significant issue I ever heard of was an election official being caught manipulating the ballot box after voting was over, and if I lived in the USA I would be more concerned about hacked voting machines. But certainly one would want to avoid making impersonation easy, because then some people may be tempted, especially in communities suffering from strong partisanship or corruption. And it feels to me as if the way some countries are trying to deal with it is very Rube Goldberg, all to avoid giving people identity documents that would be useful for a variety of other purposes anyway.
I just have a minute here so can’t respond to everything, but I will note that the actual meaning of a lot of these stats is questionable.
If we massively increase voter registration by making it very easy everyone takes that as a good thing (and it is!), but if virtually all the people who wouldn’t have registered otherwise don’t bother to vote, then what does it mean? Not much.
If masses of people are being removed from the rolls because they don’t bother to ever vote, then how much impact is that really having? A few edge cases where people suddenly decide to vote and now can’t, sure, but the overall percentage effect may not amount to much (it certainly didn’t make Trump win Ohio by 8%).
These things may even play into each other, with groups that tend not to register now basically having it happen by default when they get a driver’s license, then they never vote, and then, presto, there’s a big “disparate impact” on that group because percentagewise they get dropped in much greater numbers. But if virtually all of the group that wasn’t going to register otherwise was never going to vote either way, then the impact is almost nothing even though on the surface it looks bad.
AlexSL, when I present to vote at my polling station, there is a list of all eligible voters. I have to sign by my name when I vote (and I have an unusual name for these parts, so they always notice that my husband has already voted, as we are the only two with that last name anywhere near here; in Oklahoma, there was a news announcer with my last name, and they always got me mixed up with her).
It isn’t foolproof, but it is a control. I suppose there is nothing to prevent someone from finding out my name, where I live, and my polling place, and voting before I can using my name. Since I vote after work, that would be easy. Then when I come in to vote, my name would already be signed. I suppose that could be solved by using electronic signing, so your signature was on record. At that point, experienced forgers could sign my name if they had access to my signature to practice, but now we’re getting into the realm of the highly unlikely.
I will acknowledge it is a very trusting system. I sort of like that, but it’s more difficult when you get into larger areas where people are less likely to know who you are.
Another difference is that Canada has socialised medicine, and every citizen is mandated to be covered by law, which generally entails having a provincial health card with all of the info of a provincial ID; this makes provisioning acceptable identification much easier here, and so expecting it less of a partisan issue.
Skeletor, the principle of the thing is paramount–one person, one vote. Having one political party actively seeking to disenfranchise as many citizens as they can finagle off the rolls is bad not because it could swing elections by near-double-digits, but because every citizen deserves to get a vote simply by virtue of their citizenship. That’s kind of what democracy means, even the representative kind. And large numbers of people in the US don’t vote because the kinds of people who want them to show ID now are the kinds of people who have threatened then and their ancestors with physical violence for trying to exercise that franchise in the past, and it’s looking more and more likely that they’ll start threatening that kind of thing again in the not too distant future.
America is famed for having both incredibly low turnout and incredibly long lines, with the spectre of poll taxes and literacy tests that were explicitly engineered to disenfranchise certain classes of people. In that context, anyone who supports making voting less easy rather than more easy deserves heightened scrutiny, even if the immediate effect of their proposed policies is quite liminal.
Many citizens in the US are afraid that being required to have some form of ID is the equivalent of the mark of the beast. They may have ID by choice because they drive or use credit cards (but not all people driving have licenses, I’m afraid), but to be mandated by the government to have a government-issued ID is to sell your soul to the prince of darkness and lose all hopes of going to eternal grace. Yes, yes, yes, but…people do believe that. I have to admit, I’m not sure I want those people to vote, but I do believe they have a right to vote.
@Alex SL – People’s names are crossed off the list. And because there is a key, technically you could trace back a person’s ballot to their name and address.
As far as someone else coming in and claiming to be someone they are not, they have to also know that person’s address. I have a very common name (not Smith but nearly as common), and it’s never been a problem for me of someone claiming my name even by accident. Polling places serve a much smaller catchment area than a constituency and you are assigned a specific polling place based on your address.
If someone was determined to vote fraudulently, they could figure out how to do it. But what’s the point? In a first past the post system, only a proportion of seats are even competitive and even fewer have small enough margins that you could potentially alter the outcome. You’re talking about a crime that has virtually no consequences and no benefit for the person committing the crime. That’s not to say we shouldn’t go after people who do try to buck the system some way, as Rob has described. But in reality, people just don’t do it in significant enough numbers to worry about beyond the procedures already in place. Voting isn’t particularly fun, you might have to wait in line (and take time off work to do so) and you don’t even get a sticker at the end, unlike the US. So why bother?
BTW, the fact we have a pen and paper method of voting does produce one of my favorite parts of the British electoral system. In each constituency, the returning officer makes an announcement of the vote tallies for all the candidates and must by law also declare the number of votes rejected and reasons for rejection. Usually these are people who “spoiled” their ballot either unintentionally (writing their name on the top like they were still in primary school or making an indecipherable mark) or intentionally. Those intentional spoils can be hilarious – people make commentary on the incumbent or the incumbent’s party. They know full well that their ballot won’t be counted but if you live in a safe seat, it’s a harmless way to register your disapproval.
What Claire just said.
I wish we had the bit where the returning officer has to read the spoiled ballots.
BTW, the scrutineers are there mostly to keep the election officials honest and make sure they operate the polling place in accordance with the law and various rules set by the electoral commission, not to look for multiple voters.
Claire,
People’s names are crossed off the list. And because there is a key, technically you could trace back a person’s ballot to their name and address.
Wait, isn’t that a terrible idea? I thought voting must be secret, so that you cannot face repercussions e.g. for voting in a way your boss doesn’t approve of.
But what’s the point? In a first past the post system, only a proportion of seats are even competitive and even fewer have small enough margins that you could potentially alter the outcome.
Lots of countries do not have first past the post. Also, this sounds as if the argument is that voting usually doesn’t matter anyway…
Alex, in NZ we have MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) voting. Claire’s observations still apply. I may well be missing some critical security steps simply because I don’t know them. I suspect they are boring and mundane.
If you want to avoid all sorts of potential voting irregularities, numbered voting papers are a must. There is no perfect system that is both completely anonymous and completely free from the ability to be manipulated. Well, at least not one that applies to communities more than a few thousand people. We could vote like the ancient Athenians. Be given two coloured stones and drop one in the voting bowl and one in the discard bowl while everyone watches. Wouldn’t really suit modern life though.
@Alex SL You are correct that we don’t technically have a secret ballot. In practice, our data protection laws should prevent the wrong people from accessing that information. And it’s not like there’s a database somewhere listing the vote of each person’s ballot along with their ID. You’d have to get your hands on the physical ballot paper to be able to link a person’s identity with their vote and once the count is confirmed I believe the ballot papers are destroyed. Personally, I’m not that concerned about it but YMMV.
You make a fair point that lots of countries don’t use FPTP. Actually, the UK uses other systems in some local elections, but I’m still not aware of any major efforts to fraudulently vote en masse.
So I’m not saying voting doesn’t matter, I’m saying that there are easier ways to rig an election than by voter fraud. That’s why ballot boxes are sealed and supposed to have chain of custody, so that nobody can stuff the box with fake votes or replace the contents of a box entirely, which is much more effective if you want to try and affect the results.
However, it is true that in an FPTP system, your vote matters more in some places than others. That’s one of the downsides of FPTP. The upside is that it’s harder for the racists in UKIP or the BNP to get any traction. It’s also why the concept of tactical voting exists – sometimes you vote for the candidate with the best chance of keeping out the candidate you really don’t want.
I’ve worked polls here in California. Poll workers get two big lists with voters names and addresses.
When a person comes in to vote, their name and address are crossed off in both books.
Obviously, if anybody came in claiming a name and address that has already been crossed off, that would be a problem. The poll workers would respond the way they do whenever there’s a problem (wrong address listed, person received a vote-by-mail ballot but didn’t turn it in, person doesn’t show up on the register but insists on voting, you name it) — give the person a provisional ballot and document the problem. It would then be up to the Elections Commission people to figure out who’s who.
I have never heard of this happening.
After you’ve voted, you drop your ballot in a ballot box. Poll workers don’t know how you voted.
Nobody outside of the Elections Commission could know how you voted. And the EC people are far too busy processing hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of votes (depending on where you live) to bother. They’re certainly not going to give that information to your boss or anyone else. They’re not allowed to.
But you’d have to wear a disguise so nobody knew how you voted… :-D
I know a fair bit about the boring and mundane parts of the running of an election at least as far as the British system works because my husband used to work for a county council and volunteered to work at our local polling station. I’m certainly happy to field more questions about it if you can stand the excitement.
Back to the topic at hand – breathless flapping about voter fraud simply does not live up to the hype. Most people ineligible to vote (such as filthy foreigners like me) are quite keen not to commit stupid infractions that could damage our chance at citizenship or get us deported. Many cases are actually due to people not realizing that they are ineligible – take that dreadful case in Texas where a woman out on supervised release voted in 2016 because she thought she was allowed to and now she’s going to prison for 5 years. SMDH. What possible purpose does it serve to throw her back into the penal system for what was a simple misunderstanding?
On the other hand, considerable data exist showing that voter ID laws definitely do suppress the vote especially in poor and minority ethnic communities because that is the real purpose of the law. Don’t let them distract you from that fact with bogeymen who don’t exist.
Just to, I don’t know, diversify the image of voting in the UK, and the possibility of voter fraud: My polling station is the primary school at the bottom of my road. Less than 5 minutes walk. You know it’s polling day because the place is deserted. I have never had to wait longer than the amount of time it takes for someone to flip through a few pages to find the name and address I give them. If I look left as I leave I can see the next nearest polling station, the primary school at the bottom of the next road. It’s where my parents vote, and they live less than a mile from me.
My point is, in my city of just over 300,000 people, you can hardly throw a stone without hitting a damn polling station, and the number of people expected there fits on a very slim wodge of paper (sod off autocorrect, wodge is a word!) Theoretically, you could memorize some names and addresses, pop in every two hours wearing a different shirt and maybe a fake moustache, and try and vote again, but I doubt you’d have much success.
All this is just a long-winded way of agreeing with everyone above who says seriously, voter fraud is just not a problem.