Voting rights advocates are\nbattling on multiple fronts this presidential election year to fend off a\nproliferation of voter suppression maneuvers that largely restrict people of\ncolor and younger Americans from casting their ballots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHeading into the 2020 election,\nvoters in half the states face more obstacles to the ballot box and will find\nit harder to vote than they did a decade ago,\u201d says Wendy Weiser, director of the\nDemocracy Program at the Brennan Center\nfor Justice<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n These new obstacles have energized a counter-campaign to restore and expand voting rights. Often the newer restrictions focus on bureaucratic details, but their intent and impact target the same populations that historically faced violence and harassment when seeking to exercise the right to vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The proliferating challenges to\nthe right to vote include requiring people to show specific government\nidentification; mandating an exact match between the name on voting\nregistration records and on approved forms of ID; reducing early voting and\nabsentee voting; preventing voter registration drives by third-party\norganizations; and aggressive purges of voters who may have moved or who failed\nto vote in previous elections. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Voter ID requirements: According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 36 states now have voter ID laws<\/a>. Millions of Americans don\u2019t have the requisite ID<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Exact match standards: Georgia enacted a strict match requirement in 2017, and 80 percent of voters whose registrations were blocked by the new law were people of color. A lawsuit forced Georgia to largely end the policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Early\/absentee voting restrictions: cutting hours or days of voting<\/a> in states such as Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Ohio has the effect of longer lines at the polls and fewer overall voters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Restrictions on voting registration drives by third-party organizations, such as those enacted in Tennessee that impose civil penalties on canvassers<\/a> that submit incomplete or inaccurate registration forms. The measure was enacted after the Tennessee Black Voter Project registered 90,000 new voters for the 2018 midterm election. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Roll Purges: States like Georgia and Wisconsin are removing hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls<\/a>, often on flimsy pretexts. A federal judge recently backed Georgia\u2019s purge of more than 100,000 voters<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to the Brennan Center For Justice, these practices disproportionately disenfranchise people of color<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat we are seeing is\nsystematic voter suppression around the country,\u201d says Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO\nof Fair Fight Action, the Georgia organization building on former gubernatorial\ncandidate Stacey Abrams\u2019 work mobilizing and protecting the rights of voters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Abrams ran against then-Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who refused to step down from his job of overseeing elections while campaigning for governor. The final vote count<\/a> gave him the race by a margin of just 55,000, after as many as 1 million voters were removed from the rolls. She has called Kemp an \u201carchitect of voter suppression,\u201d and Abrams used her now-famous non-concession speech<\/a> of Nov. 16, 2018 to launch Fair Fight Action with Groh-Wargo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019re going to have a fair\nfight in 2020 because my mission is to make certain that no one has to go\nthrough in 2020 what we went through in 2018,\u201d Abrams said in a speech<\/a>\nto a union in Las Vegas last summer when she announced an additional initiative\naimed at mobilizing\nvoters and countering voter suppression<\/a> in 20 battleground states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Georgia, Fair Fight sued in\nfederal court over voter suppression issues raised by the gubernatorial\nelection and the state\u2019s move to purge 300,000 voters under a \u201cuse it or lose\nit\u201d rule. The court so far has refused to take emergency action to stop the\nmass Georgia purge, but Groh-Wargo says the suit led to nearly 30,000 voters\ngetting restored after the state admitted to a technical glitch and after\nadvocates\u2019 outreach prompted some voters to update their own registrations.\n\u201cThe court didn\u2019t give us the ruling we had hoped for which was to completely\nrestore these use-it-or-lose-it people, but we ended up viewing it as a win,\u201d\nsays Groh-Wargo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat we are seeing is systematic voter suppression around the country.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n That rule also is at the heart of an Ohio law<\/a> that allowed purging of voters who failed to vote for six years and did not confirm their residency. An unknown number of voters, thought to number in the thousands, were removed<\/a> from the rolls in 2015, but in 2018 the Supreme Court upheld the law in a 5-4 decision<\/a>. Other states besides Ohio and Georgia with some version of use-it-or-lose-it include Pennsylvania, Oregon, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Montana.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Wisconsin<\/a>,\nwhich like Georgia is expected to be a battleground state in 2020, a purge of\n200,000 registered voters based on a computer algorithm showing they had\nchanged their residence has led to suits in federal court and has divided the\nstate Elections Commission along party lines on how to proceed. On Jan. 14, an\nappellate court put a hold on the purge, but pending litigation challenges the\nhold. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At a private event in Wisconsin\nlast fall, Justin\nClark<\/a>, an adviser to President Trump\u2019s reelection campaign, was recorded\nconfirming that \u201ctraditionally, it\u2019s always been Republicans suppressing\nvotes.\u201d Clark was quoted at a later event telling a crowd of Republican lawyers\nthat voter suppression is \u201cgoing to be a much bigger program, a much more\naggressive program.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wisconsin also is in the voting\nrights crosshairs over identification restrictions that opponents say make it\nmore difficult for students to vote. A 2011 law establishing a photo ID\nrequirement was signed by then-Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, and survived\ninitial court challenges. A federal lawsuit<\/a>\nfiled by Common Cause is still pending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That suit says that among 28\nstates with voter ID laws that allow use of student IDs, Wisconsin is the only\none that requires students also to show proof of enrollment and that the\nstudent ID can only be valid for up to two years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Carolyn DeWitt, president and\nexecutive director of Rock the Vote, a nonpartisan organization that works to\nget more young voters to the polls, says ID laws generally can be problematic\nfor young people who move frequently and may not have a driver\u2019s license or\nother requisite identification. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn Texas, student IDs from\npublic universities are not accepted for voting, but gun licenses are,\u201d says\nDeWitt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rock the Vote<\/a> also opposes residency\nlaws<\/a> like the one New Hampshire lawmakers adopted last year, which changes\nthe definition of residency to require that voters be permanent residents of\nNew Hampshire. That makes it more difficult for out-of-state college students\nto be eligible to vote where they go to school. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe are definitely seeing a\nbacklash against the wave of youth voting that we\u2019ve seen over the last couple\nof years,\u201d DeWitt says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to monitoring voter\nsuppression initiatives from Republican-controlled state legislatures, voting\nrights advocates worry about identifying and curbing stealth tactics by local\nelection officials. Administrative moves that can depress voting include shutting\ndown or moving polling places, changes in polling place hours, using new ways\nof voting that may confuse voters, and not adequately training polling place\nworkers, all of which also may contribute to long waits to cast ballots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThese types of things are hard for us to alert people of and address everywhere,\u201d says Sophia Lakin, an attorney with the ACLU\u2019s Voting Rights<\/a> project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSo many of these restrictions fall disproportionately on these communities that have been growing in strength over the last decade or so\u2014voters of color, young voters, voters with disabilities,\u201d adds Lakin. \u201cWhat\u2019s at stake for many of the state actors who are perpetrating these restrictive measures, and certainly what\u2019s motivating it, is an attempt to keep control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAs the country\u2019s electorate has changed over time becoming more diverse, that has motivated I would say a lot of efforts to make voting more difficult. Look at what we are seeing with racial gerrymandering<\/a>,\u201d she continued. \u201cYou\u2019re putting in place a situation where politicians are choosing their voters, and voters are not choosing their politicians.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Advocates cite two key triggers\nthat helped propel voting restrictions: the 2008 election of Barack Obama and a\n2013 Supreme Court ruling gutting part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lakin says the huge increase in voters of color and young voters in 2008 \u201cresulted in the election of the first African American president, and almost immediately in that aftermath we start to hear the beginnings of a suppression period that follows about 45 years of expansion of voting rights.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then in Shelby v. Holder<\/em>, the Supreme Court in 2013 removed a requirement for states and local governments with a history of discrimination to get approval from the federal government before implementing any changes to their voting laws or practices. Lakin says the ruling gave the jurisdictions formerly subject to preclearance \u201cfree rein in terms of putting into place restrictions,\u201d and since the 2013 ruling those states have had a higher rate of purges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPeople need to understand our whole country\u2019s history is a fight for voting rights and in many ways.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The Voting Rights Advancement\nAct, which passed the House in 2019 but is unlikely to get through the\nRepublican-held Senate, would restore the preclearance process voided by Shelby\nand update the Voting Rights Act to provide protections against newer forms of\nvoter discrimination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The counter-campaign to increase\nvoting access advocates measures that make it easier to vote, such as same-day\nregistration, automatic voter registration, automatic registration updates and\nvoting by mail. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At this point, 16 states and the\nDistrict of Columbia have approved automatic voter registration, but Weiser\nsays only 12 states will have it in place in time for the 2020 elections. She\nsays that 24 states will have same-day registration in place for the November\ngeneral election. <\/p>\n\n\n\n According to the National\nConference of State Legislatures<\/a>, 21 states now allow some elections to be\nconducted by mail, and four use mailed ballots for all elections: Oregon\n(2000), Washington (2011), Colorado (2013) and Hawaii (2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Groh-Wargo urges candidates and\ncampaigns to start early building voter protection infrastructure and to follow\nthe \u201cAbrams\nPlaybook\u201d <\/a>of reaching out to all voters, including those in\nunderrepresented communities and those considered unlikely to vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe can\u2019t win every court\nbattle, we can\u2019t overcome Russian interference in our elections, we can\u2019t do\nCongress\u2019 job for them,\u201d says Groh-Wargo. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to sit around and\nwait. We\u2019re going to be fighting day in and day out. So much of the right to\nvote is an exercise in organizing as much as it is an exercise in the battle in\nthe courtroom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPeople need to understand our\nwhole country\u2019s history is a fight for voting rights and in many ways, this is\nabout a new fight, and it is a fight worth having and we can be victorious,\u201d\nshe says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Advocates urge individual voters\nto help counter\nvoter suppression<\/a> by:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Checking your voter registration<\/a> early and often to make sure it\u2019s up to date. Make sure family and friends also check. Many states have easy online access to your view registration records, and vote.org also has voting data<\/a> from all 50 states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Helping counter misinformation and disinformation by knowing the credible sources for voting information and sharing it with others. Double-check the information you hear and report disinformation immediately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Volunteering to be poll workers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As the 2020 election season gets under way, activists are beginning to push back against voter disenfranchisement across the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":76755,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","categories":[4,255,270,271],"tags":[642,654,709,738,3125,3126],"article-type":[],"master-category":[467],"special-series":[],"type-of-work":[],"class_list":["post-76751","article","type-article","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-democracy","category-racial-justice","category-clean-elections","category-voter-suppression","tag-voting","tag-elections","tag-election-2020","tag-voter-suppression","tag-p25-voting","tag-progress-2025","master-category-democracy"],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Can You Do?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n