Voter Suppression

Voter suppression is a strategy used to influence the outcome of an election by discouraging or preventing specific groups of people from voting. It is distinguished from political campaigning in that campaigning attempts to change likely voting behavior by changing the opinions of potential voters through persuasion and organization, activating otherwise inactive voters, or registering new supporters. Voter suppression, instead, attempts to gain an advantage by reducing the turnout of certain voters. Suppression is an anti-democratic tactic associated with authoritarianism.

The tactics of voter suppression range from changes that make voting more confusing or time-intensive, to intimidating or harming prospective voters.

Examples

Australia

Australian citizens are expected to enroll to vote, and it is their responsibility to update their enrollment when they change their address. Even so, an estimated 6% of eligible Australian voters are not enrolled or are enrolled incorrectly. They are disproportionately younger voters, many of whom might neglect to enroll when they attain voting age.

In 2006, the Howard government legislated to close the electoral roll much earlier once an election was called than before. Previously, voters had been allowed seven days of grace after an election had been called to arrange or update their enrollment, but new voters were now allowed only until 8:00 p.m. on the day that the electoral writ was issued to lodge their enrollment form, and those who needed to update their addresses were allowed three days. In Australia, the Prime Minister effectively has the right to determine the date of the election as long as constitutional rules regarding the maximum term of the parliament are adhered to. That measure was therefore likely to result in many newer voters being precluded from voting in the first election for which they were eligible because the time to arrange their enrollment once an election is called had been greatly reduced.

The measure was widely seen as an attempt at voter suppression aimed at younger voters since surveys had shown that younger voters are more likely than the general population to vote for the Australian Labor Party or the Greens than Howard's Liberal Party. The government denied that it was trying to suppress some voters and insisted that the purposes of the reform were a smoother administration of the elections and the reduction of the possibility of electoral fraud. However, the Australian Electoral Commission had requested no such reform, there had been no evidence of significant electoral fraud, and the Australian Electoral Commission had been dealing with hundreds of thousands of late enrollments without significant problems for decades.

In July 2010, the left-wing lobby group GetUp! launched a challenge to the law. The High Court of Australia expedited the hearing so that a ruling could be made in time for the 2010 federal election. The majority ruling struck down early closing of the roll and reinstated the old rule allowing voters seven days grace to arrange or update their enrollment.

Canada

Shortly before the 2011 Canadian federal election, voter suppression tactics were exercised by issuing robocalls and live calls, which falsely advised voters that their polling station had been changed. The locations offered by those messages were intentionally false, often led voters several hours from the correct stations, and often identified themselves illegally as coming from Elections Canada. In litigation brought by the Council of Canadians, a federal court found that such fraud had occurred and had probably been perpetrated by someone with access to the Conservative Party's voter database, including its information about voter preferences. The court stated that the evidence did not prove that the Conservative Party or that its successful candidates had been directly involved, but it criticized the Conservative Party for making "little effort to assist with the investigation." The court did not annul the result in any of six ridings where the fraud had occurred because it concluded that the number of votes affected had been too small to change the outcome.

France

In France, as in some other countries with Voter Registration, requirements and processes to update your address suppress voter turnout disproportionately against people who move more often, who tend to be younger, for example.

Israel

In April 2019, during Israel's general elections for the 21st Knesset, Likud activists installed hidden cameras in polling stations in Arab communities. Election observers were seen wearing such cameras. Hanan Melcer, the Head of the General Elections Committee, called the cameras illegal. The following day, the public relations agency Kaizler Inbar took credit for the operation and said it had been planned in collaboration with Likud. It claimed that voter turnout in Arab communities had fallen under 50% by the presence of the agency's observers in the polling stations, though some of this decrease is likely due to a boycott that was planned for the vote.

United Kingdom

Lutfur Rahman was the directly-elected mayor of Tower Hamlets for the British Labour Party. He was removed from office in his London borough after his conviction breaching electoral rules after his supporters had allegedly intimidated Tower Hamlets voters at polling stations.

United States

In the United States, elections are administered locally (though with many election rules set by states and the federal government), and forms of voter suppression vary among jurisdictions. When the country was founded, the right to vote in most states was limited to property-owning white males.Bret Carroll.
American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia
'. SAGE Publications; 14 October 2003. . p. 89. Over time, the right to vote was granted to racial minorities, women, and youth.Christina Rivers.
The Congressional Black Caucus, Minority Voting Rights, and the U.S. Supreme Court
'. University of Michigan Press; 17 July 2012. . pp. 146–48.Jennifer Macbain-Stephens.
Women's Suffrage: Giving the Right to Vote to All Americans
'. Rosen Classroom; January 2006. .United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments.
Lowering the voting age to 18: Hearings, Ninety-first Congress, second session
'. U.S. Govt. Print. Off. 1970.

In the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, Southern states passed Jim Crow laws to suppress poor and racial minority voters that involved poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses.Kimberley Johnson.
Reforming Jim Crow: Southern Politics and State in the Age Before Brown
'. Oxford University Press; 16 April 2010. . p. 97.Michael J. Klarman.
From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality
'. Oxford University Press; 5 February 2004. . p. 70.Walter Hazen.
The Civil War to the Jim Crow Laws: American Black History
'. Milliken Publishing Company; 1 September 2004. . p. 38. Most of those voter suppression tactics were made illegal after the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Even after the repeal of those statutes, there have been repetited incidents of racial discrimination against voters, especially in the South. For example, 87,000 people in Georgia were unable to vote in 2018 because of late registration. Many of the strictest voting regulations are in swing states and have been enacted primarily by U.S. Republican Party politicians. According to AMP Reports, many people who were predicted to be in favor of voting for the U.S. Democratic Party had their ballot dismissed. The study's analysis noted, "A disproportionate number of those potential voters were people of color or young voters, groups that typically favor Democrats." The history of the previous Jim Crow regulations in the Southern states affects the voter suppression today because minorities often have their vote dismissed by the manipulation of voting regulations.

One analysis of a Florida election in 2012 found that ~200,000 people didn't vote because of long lines.

In 2013, voter ID laws arose after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. Some argue that such laws amount to voter suppression against African-Americans.

In Texas, a voter ID law requiring a driver's license, passport, military identification, or gun permit was repeatedly found to be intentionally discriminatory. The state's election laws could be put back under the control of the U.S. Department of Justice. Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, however, the DOJ expressed support for Texas's ID law. Sessions was accused by Coretta Scott King in 1986 of trying to suppress the black vote. A similar ID law in North Dakota, which would have disenfranchised many Native Americans, was also overturned.

In Wisconsin, a federal judge found that the state's restrictive voter ID law had led to "real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities." Since there was no evidence of widespread voter impersonation in Wisconsin, it found that the law was "a cure worse than the disease." In addition to imposing strict voter ID requirements, the law reduced early voting, required people to live in a ward for at least 28 days before voting, and prohibited emailing absentee ballots to voters.

Other controversial measures include shutting down Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in minority neighborhoods, which makes it more difficult for residents to obtain voter IDs; shutting down polling places in minority neighborhoods; systematically depriving precincts in minority neighborhoods of the resources needed to operate efficiently, such as poll workers and voting machines; and purging voters from the rolls shortly before an election.

Often, voter fraud is cited as a justification for such laws even if the incidence is low. In Iowa, lawmakers passed a strict voter ID law with the potential to disenfranchise 260,000 voters. Out of 1.6 million votes cast in Iowa in 2016, there were only 10 allegations of voter fraud, none of which being cases of impersonation that a voter ID law could have prevented. Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, the architect of the bill, admitted, "We've not experienced widespread voter fraud in Iowa."

In May 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity for the purpose of preventing voter fraud. Critics have suggested its true purpose is voter suppression. The commission was led by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a staunch advocate of strict voter ID laws and a proponent of the Crosscheck system. Crosscheck is a national database, which is designed to check for voters who are registered in more than one state by comparing names and dates of birth. Researchers at Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Microsoft found that for every legitimate instance of double registration it finds, Crosscheck's algorithm returns approximately 200 false positives. Kobach has been repeatedly sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for trying to restrict voting rights in Kansas.

See also

* Electoral fraud
* Gerrymandering
* Political corruption
* Voter caging
* Voter registration
* Voter turnout

Further reading

* Rick L. Hasen. 2020. ''Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy''. Yale University Press.

References

External links

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Political campaign techniques
Political corruption
Electoral fraud
Discrimination
Injustice