Category Archives: Voting Rights

Year-End Review of Voter Suppression, Voter ID Laws, from NY Times

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Today’s NY Times article “Black Turnout in Alabama Complicates Debate on Voting Laws”     reviews recent research on the effects of voter ID laws in recent elections, with a particular emphasis on the Doug Jones victory in Alabama. As the Times points out, research on voter ID laws in Texas, Wisconsin and other states has been ambiguous about how and to what extent those laws actually suppress turnout. For example Eitan Hersh, a Tufts University political scientist who contributed to the analysis of Texas’ strict voter ID law, said research indicated that voter ID laws could alter very close elections but might not be as influential as some critics claim.

“These laws are complicated to assess,” Mr. Hersh said. “Alabama was a place where there was a lot of campaigning, and when campaigns liven up, you have a lot of mobilization efforts” that could offset the effect of an ID law on turnout.

One recent study, “Voter Identification Laws and the Suppression of Minority Votes” concluded that the historic turnout gap between white and minority voters increased sharply — as much as fivefold — in states with the strictest voter ID laws, producing a “clear partisan distortion” favoring Republicans.

In Texas, where federal courts have invalidated parts of one of the nation’s toughest ID laws, a detailed analysis concluded that 3.6 percent of white registered voters in Texas lacked any legally acceptable ID — and 5.7 percent of Hispanic voters, and 7.5 percent of African-Americans. But among more likely voters who cast ballots in the 2010 and 2012 elections, only 1.4 percent lacked a valid ID. An estimated 600,000 registered voters lacked a photo ID that qualified them to vote under the law.

Still other studies in Texas and Wisconsin concluded that confusion over voter ID laws meant that more people who actually had valid IDs but believed they did not stayed home on Election Day than did voters who actually lacked identification.

Restoration of Rights: Virginia and NJ

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Restoration of voting rights has been an issue in the governor’s race in Virginia,  one of four states where a person loses the franchise entirely after they are convicted of a felony-level offense. Current governor Terry McAuliffe tried to use his pardon power to restore the rights of 200,000 Virginians in one blow. Republican lawmakers successfully challenged the en masse order in court, so the governor began signing the orders individually, totaling more than 168,000 to date. Republican candidate Ed Gillespie has started running TV ads challenging this policy. Of note is that while Gillespie challenges the “automatic” restoration of rights, he appears to endorse at least a process for restoration:

“Virginians who have paid their debt to society and are living an honest life should have their rights restored. But Ralph Northam’s policy of automatic restoration of rights for unrepentant, unreformed, violent criminals is wrong.”

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the issue of voting rights restoration is also in the public eye, witness this recent editorial in the New Jersey Star-Ledger: “Why N.J. must restore voting rights to those in prison, parole, probation”

6 Million Lost Voters

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The Sentencing Project has published a new study, “6 Million Lost Voters: State-Level Estimates of Felony Disenfranchisement, 2016” by Christopher Uggen, Ryan Larson, and Sarah Shannon. Their key findings:

  • As of 2016, an estimated 6.1 million people are disenfran-chised due to a felony conviction, a dramatic escalation from 1.17 million people disenfranchised in 1976, and 3.34 million in 1996.
  • Approximately 2.5 percent of the total U.S. voting age population – 1 of every 40 adults – is disenfranchised due to a current or previous felony conviction.
  • Individuals who have completed their sentences in the twelve states that disenfranchise people post-sentence make up over 50 percent of the entire disenfranchised population, totaling almost 3.1 million people.
  • Rates of disenfranchisement vary dramatically by state due to broad variations in voting prohibitions. In six states – Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia – more than 7 percent of the adult population is disenfranchised.
  • Florida alone accounts for more than a quarter (27 percent) of the disenfranchised population nationally, and its nearly 1.5 million individuals disenfranchised post-sentence account for nearly half (48 percent) of the national total.
  • One in 13 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised, a rate more than four times greater than that of non-African Americans. Over 7.4 percent of the adult African American population is disenfranchised compared to 1.8 percent of the non-African American population.
  • African American disenfranchisement rates also vary significantly by state. In four states – Florida (21 percent), Kentucky (26 percent), Tennessee (21 percent), and Virginia (22 percent) – more than one in five African Americans is disenfranchised.

2017: 99 Bills To Restrict Voting Access

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The Brennan Center’s “Voting Law Round-Up” for 2017 so far details 99 different bills in 31 states introduced for the purpose of limiting or restricting access to registration and voting. Five states have already implemented legislation:

  • Iowa’s governor signed a broad-based law that will require voter ID, restrict voter registration efforts, and impose new burdens on Election Day registration and early and absentee voting. Although not as restrictive as a North Carolina law that passed in 2013 (and was blocked by a federal court), Iowa’s law similarly restricts voting in a number of different ways.
  • Arkansas passed two bills to bring back voter ID to the state after a court struck down an earlier law.
  • North Dakota also enacted legislation to re-impose an identification requirement after a court blocked a strict ID law in 2016.
  • Indiana enacted a law that will implement a purge of registered voters from the rolls. The program will remove voters in a manner similar to purges in other states that have been criticized for being error-prone and inadequately protective of eligible voters.
  • Montana’s house and senate passed a bill that will prevent civic groups and individuals from helping others vote absentee by collecting and delivering their voted ballots. The bill now goes to voters as a November 2018 ballot measure.
  • Georgia’s legislature sent bill that would make voter registration more difficult to the Governor, and he signed it on May 9.