If Your Right to Vote Wasn’t Important, People Wouldn’t Be Trying So Hard to Take it Away
A look at recent voter suppression efforts and the upcoming challenges of this election season.
“We may no longer have to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar in order to cast a ballot. But even as we sit here, there are those in power are doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting – by closing polling locations, and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision, even undermining the postal service in the runup to an election that is going to be dependent on mailed-in ballots so people don’t get sick.”
Let’s talk about November.
Ah yes, November. The month that signals the wintery breeze of the holiday season, the smell of sweet potato pie, and every couple of years—an election. It just so happens that this year, 2020, could produce some of the most historic elections of all time. Per usual, all eyes are on the presidential race between Biden and Trump, yet, there are still local primaries and senate seats to be contested at the ballot box.
Keeping all of this in mind, it’s necessary to consider the effects of voter suppression.
I say “necessary” for various reasons, the most prominent simply being that voter suppression (to no surprise) disproportionately affects Black and Latinx voters. In the year 2020, almost 60 years after the Voting Rights Act, voter suppression remains rampant throughout the country, making it more difficult for minorities to vote. In one article published in The Atlantic, poll data taken from the 2016 presidential election cited how “Black and Hispanic respondents were twice as likely, or more, to have experienced those [voting] barriers as white respondents.” As much as we’d like to believe this country has progressed, the truth is that for Black people, the right to vote—a key pillar in American “democracy”—has always been under attack. But as this fight continues amidst a global pandemic, we must hold on to the right to vote for dear life.
What are the different forms of voter suppression?
The phrase “voter suppression” encompasses many actions, all with the same goal: to make voting harder. The different attempts at voter suppression vary by state, but they usually follow the same patterns. Below are just a few commonly found tactics:
Voter ID Laws
According to the ACLU, “thirty-six states have identification requirements at the polls” and “seven states have strict photo ID laws.” In other words, potential voters must present a government-issued photo ID in order to vote. The ACLU also cites that “over 21 million U.S. citizens do not have government-issued photo identification,” due to inaccessibility and the “burden on people in lower-income communities.”
Voter Purging
States are required by federal law to check voter rolls for voters who may have moved, died, or become ineligible to vote. However, there is a fine line between cleaning and purging. An episode of All Things Considered from NPR discusses how this process almost always produces “some eligible voters [removed] by mistake.” And as the ACLU says, voter purging leads to “mass disenfranchisement, purging eligible voters from rolls for illegitimate reasons or based on inaccurate data, and often without adequate notice to the voters.”
Closure of Polling Locations
According to a report from The Guardian, Texas alone has closed 750 polling places since 2012. Such closures give way to ridiculous wait times, which make it impossible for those who work or have children to manage. These closures are often strategic and target minority communities. There is no coincidence that polling closures happen in Black and Latinx communities more often than others.
It’s one thing to read about these tactics, it’s another to see them play out in real life. The report from The Guardian further discusses the specific details of Texas’s voter suppression efforts. The numbers reported are shocking, but not surprising:
The analysis finds that the 50 counties that gained the most Black and Latinx residents between 2012 and 2018 closed 542 polling sites, compared to just 34 closures in the 50 counties that have gained the fewest black and Latinx residents. This is despite the fact that the population in the former group of counties has risen by 2.5 million people, whereas in the latter category the total population has fallen by over 13,000.
Some of the most notorious forms of voter suppression took place in Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial election.
NPR reported that Georgia officials not only “closed 214 polling locations in recent years,” but also “purged almost 10% of people from its voting rolls.” Even more so, a report from the Associated Press detailed how Governor Brian Kemp kept over 53,000 voter registrations in pending status, where “nearly 70 percent of said registrants put on hold [were] black.” How coincidental that this should occur during Kemp’s race against Stacy Abrams, America’s first Black woman major-party gubernatorial nominee.
Art by Julia Waddles for Blkgirlculture.com
What role will voter suppression play in 2020?
Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, mail-in voting has become the automatic alternative for many states. But Trump, along with his right-wing constituents, has consistently attempted to end mail-in voting, claiming that mail-in voting (which is the same as absentee voting) leads to fraudulent election results. This claim is not backed by any data. In fact, according to a report from The Washington Post, there were “372 cases of potential fraud out of roughly 14.6 million ballots cast by mail in 2016 and 2018.”
So, how can voter suppression take place by mail?
It goes like this: there can be no mail-in voting if there is no mail. By attacking the postal service, Trump is able to undermine the process of a fair election. A recent article by The New York Times describes these halting efforts:
In recent weeks, at the direction of a Trump campaign megadonor who was recently named the postmaster general, the service has stopped paying mail carriers and clerks the overtime necessary to ensure that deliveries can be completed each day. That and other changes have led to reports of letters and packages being delayed by as many as several days.
And if that is not scary enough, the article also notes how the Postal Service is projected to “run out of money by Spring.” Trump’s attack on the Postal Service only highlights his greatest fear—losing. The pandemic, the protests, the never-ending list of 2020 catastrophes—they all spell out a new normal for the American voter. And if we are afforded the seemingly common-sense practice of voting from our homes, Trump knows that it could bring the end to his authoritarian reign.
That’s why it’s so important for us to vote.
No more excuses. No more being apolitical. There is no better way to exercise your democratic freedom. And frankly, there is no better time. This year and all its events have proved the consequences of underestimating the power of the vote while others understand it completely. For Black people, this kind of deliberate, determined blocking of the vote is nothing new. Perhaps then, Black people are already used to this kind of fight. But just like the calls of justice for Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, we must ask ourselves, is the rest of the world ready? Will they become tired before election day even arrives? I would like to say after this uniquely challenging year, the clear answer is “this time will be different,” because “this time” quite literally embodies the stakes of life or death. The truth is, we will have to wait and see.
