Purging voters
Ari Berman covers the voting rights beat. Today he explains the National Voter Registration Act. In 1988 barely half of eligible voters voted in the presidential election, which was the lowest rate since the 1920s – decades before the Civil Rights movement and the Voting Rights Act.
In an effort to increase participation, Democrats in Congress—backed by a few Republicans— drafted the National Voter Registration Act, a bill that would require states to allow voters to register at Department of Motor Vehicle offices and other public agencies.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, led the opposition to the legislation. “This bill wants to turn every agency, bureau, and office of state government into a vast voter registration machine,” McConnell said in 1991. “Motor voter registration, hunting permit voter registration, marriage license voter registration, welfare voter registration—even drug rehab voter registration.” That same year, McConnell, who is now the Senate majority leader, wrote that “low voter turnout is a sign of a content democracy.”
Oh, certainly, just as it was in Mississippi in 1964, for instance.
The act passed Congress but Bush 1 vetoed it, the swine.
Congress passed it again a year later, and this time President Bill Clinton signed it into law, calling it “a sign of a new vibrancy in our democracy.” The “motor voter” law, as it became known, was an immediate success. In its first year in effect, more than 30 million people registered or updated their registrations through the NVRA. Roughly 16 million people per year have used it to register ever since.
Why are Democrats in favor and Republicans opposed? Because easy registration makes it easier for the riffraff to vote – people without cars, people who work long hours without domestic help and can’t find the time to get to a distant registration place, people who don’t have much money…people who have good reasons not to vote Republican.
[I]n recent years, Republicans have sought to gut the law. In 2013, the Supreme Court weakened a key part of the Voting Rights Act, ruling that states with long histories of voting discrimination no longer needed to clear their election changes with the federal government. After winning that fight, Republicans are now going after the NVRA in what voting rights advocates say is a thinly veiled effort to make it more difficult for Democratic-leaning constituencies to register to vote—and far easier for state officials to remove them from the voter rolls…
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear the newest challenge to the law, concerning whether Ohio can remove voters from the rolls who don’t vote over a six-year period. If a voter in Ohio misses an election, doesn’t respond to a subsequent mailing from the state, and then sits out two more elections, he or she is removed from the registration list, even if this person would otherwise be eligible to vote. Critics of this process say it turns voting into a “use it or lose it” right and will open the door to wider voter purges.
Ohio had huge success with the law between 2011 and 2016, getting 2 million voters purged, with 840,000 dumped for not voting often enough.
At least 144,000 voters in Ohio’s three largest counties, home to Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, have been purged since the 2012 election, with voters in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods twice as likely to be removed as those in Republican-leaning ones, according to a Reuters analysis.
The Republicans want fewer but classier voters, and of course Trump is down with that.
For its part, the Trump administration has come out squarely in support of voter purges. The Obama Justice Department opposed the Ohio purge program, but Trump’s DOJ abruptly switched sides in the case. “After this Court’s grant of review and the change in Administrations, the Department reconsidered the question,” the DOJ informed the Supreme Court in August. “It has now concluded that the NVRA does not prohibit a State from using nonvoting as the basis for sending a [removal] notice.”
In June 2017, the DOJ also sent a letter to 44 states informing them that it was reviewing their voter list maintenance procedures and asking how they planned to “remove the names of ineligible voters.” If Ohio wins at the Supreme Court, it will “certainly embolden” the department and GOP-controlled states to undertake aggressive voter purges, says Vanita Gupta, who headed the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under Obama.
And that would open the door to broader challenges to the NVRA. “It’s a hugely significant case,” Gupta says. “If the court comes out with a broad ruling that says inactivity in voting is sufficient proof to kick a voter off of the rolls, that could have broad implications across the country for how voters are purged off the rolls per the National Voter Registration Act.”
That’s one way to do a fascist takeover.
My personal opinion is that a child should be registered to vote at birth; it automatically activates at legal voter age (currently 18, of course), and does not deactivate until the notice of that individual’s death is official. There should be no good reason for removing a person from the voter rolls without his/her consent, other than taking citizenship in a foreign country and renouncing their US citizenship. I see no reason why conviction for a felony should prohibit you from voting. As far as I know, incarceration in a mental institution doesn’t remove your rights (and I have some experience on that in terms of work I’ve done in the past), so why should committing a felony? And, why should having a mental health issue take away your vote? If you are schizophrenic, and choose to write in your hallucination, fine. It’s your right as a US citizen. After all, a lot of people considered mentally sound tell us they vote for whomever Jesus tells them to vote for, so why should it matter if Alexander the Great is telling you who to vote for? It’s just as plausible.
I guess what I’m saying is that no one should have to register to vote. It should be a right automatically issued that follows you throughout life until you should depart the country either through becoming an expat or through death. Poverty should definitely not be a good reason to preclude someone from voting.
At that point, the only responsibility on the voter is to show up to vote. They might need to keep their address up to date, so they vote in the correct district, but that should be available online and at every public library (and every gas station, bingo parlor, fast food emporium, and grocery store) for people to be able to do. Voting should be the most available resource you have. Then if you fail to use it, well, that’s your choice, right?
Iknklast,
Interesting comments, your suggestions are similar to the system in Australia. Under Australian law both registration and voting are compulsory and there’s a national Electoral Commission. Consequently the scope for the type of electoral fraud that occurs in the US is considerably reduced. People who don’t vote are not sent to a gulag, the penalties are not severe.
Unfortunately there are still many potential voters who are not registered. Also conservatives here periodically attempt to manipulate electoral rolls, however it’s much more difficult to do so than in America.
As far as I understand the chances of compulsory voting and registration ever being adopted in the US are neglible. If, by some miracle, it was, it would probably reveal an enormous number of disenfranchised citizens.
The Athenians had a system of compulsory voting.
@iknklast
Here in Germany, every adult citizen is registered with the state (or should be) to get things like an ID card.
If your registration has an up-to-date address, you will get a letter notifying you of an election about 3 weeks in advance. You can use this letter as identification at your polling station (which is usually within a walking distance of where you live). If you cannot make it, the letter contains a form that you can fill in and put in the mail; then you will get the forms to put in a postal vote within a few days. Voter turnout is usually between 60 and 80 % hereabouts.
I’m always puzzled why the US is using such a strange and complicated system instead; probably due to
1. the reasons Ophelia states in her post (try to keep the riff-raff from voting) and
2. the strange deep mistrust US people seem to have for any administration.
In any case, I think Democrats should make changing the system a high priority and make much more clear to people how they are hampered from voting (together with then actually representing the riff-raff…)