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Minority-Targeted Voter Suppression Remains a Problem in American Elections |
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This season's neck-and-neck primaries remind us that tight elections rarely come down to how people vote, but rather, which people vote. Yet sadly, amid the historic popularity of the nation's first serious black presidential candidate, observers are already reporting instances of minority-targeted voter suppression throughout the country.
Last month, the NY Times reported that Indiana's strict voter identification law, requiring state-issued photo ID in order to vote, is being challenged at the Supreme Court:
Opponents of the law, most of them Democrats, view voter identification requirements as a deterrent that disproportionately affects poor, minority and elderly voters, who more often than other people lack the required forms of identification and who also tend to back Democrats.
A 2007 study found that 13% of registered voters in Indiana lacked sufficient ID under the state's law, highlighting what voter advocates have known for years: strict ID requirements deter voters, and voter suppression is an infinitely bigger problem than voter impersonation, the problem the laws claim to solve.
Nevertheless, over half the states in the country have proposed legislation to tighten ID requirements so they look more like Indiana's. These efforts, nearly universally spearheaded by Republicans, are fervently backed by the Bush administration, which has also filed a brief with the Supreme Court encouraging it to uphold Indiana's law.
Though they seem to be the highest profile means of disenfranchising specific groups this election season, ID laws are just one way votes have been suppressed in recent elections.
For instance, language remains a means by which minority voters, especially newly-naturalized citizens, are at risk for voter suppression. In the 2000 presidential election, Spanish-speaking voters reported being denied bilingual voting assistance in districts where it is required by law in central Florida. In 2006, in a disturbing throwback to Jim Crow, Congressman John Carter (R-TX) suggested that voters pass literacy and English tests in order to vote.
However, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 specifically outlaws any voting laws that create discrimination, especially on the basis of race, language, or disability, a provision that also requires polls to provide qualified staff assistance for language-minorities and people with disabilities. Voter advocates say Section 2 is frequently ignored.
In another twist on voter suppression, blacks face disenfranchisement in the form of ex-felon voting laws. Florida is one of several states that prohibit ex-felons — individuals who have been convicted of a felony but have fully served their sentence — from voting for the rest of their lives, a law that has repeatedly been shown to disproportionately disenfranchise black males. Ten years ago, Human Rights Watch reported that 13% of the American black male population is currently disenfranchised due to ex-felon voting bans, and the number is closer to 20% in states like Florida.
Given current rates of incarceration, three in ten of the next generation of black men will be disenfranchised at some point in their lifetime. In states with the most restrictive voting laws, 40 percent of African American men are likely to be permanently disenfranchised.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, seven former offenders filed suit on behalf of the estimated 600,000 predominately black ex-felons in Florida who cannot vote, claiming they were entitled to have their voting rights reinstated under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. (Note: Blacks in Florida overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and Democratic nominee Al Gore lost Florida by approximately 500 votes that year.)
The lawsuit failed, and the ban was upheld both in 2002 and again in 2005, in rulings that drew public praise from Florida's Republican governor at the time, Jeb Bush. The ACLU of Florida, which has been at the forefront of the movement to get ex-felon's voting rights reinstated, reports that the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear the ex-felons' case.
Further exacerbating Florida's heinous record of voter suppression and manipulation is the story of the notorious "Purge." In the build-up to the 2004 presidential election, the state attempted to clean up its voting registry by "purging" it of all the ex-felons who weren't supposed to be there. However, the list of approximately 48,000 registered ex-felons included a mere 61 Hispanics and over 22,000 black felons, figures that did not reflect reality.
As a result of a flawed means of identifying felons, Hispanics were kept almost entirely off the "to be purged" list, a move that raised eyebrows around the country because Hispanics in Florida traditionally vote Republican. Moreover, in 2000 Florida had attempted a similar purge, but that list was found highly problematic as well because it included many people who turned out not to be ex-felons.
All of this is to say nothing of the myriad of cases of registration and voting shenanigans that have come out of the past decade's presidential elections. Reports from all over the country (though perhaps most blatantly in Florida, as shown in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election) indicate widespread minority disenfranchisement at the hands of campaigns and election officials — from collecting but never filing registration forms from African Americans, to understaffing polls in black and low-income neighborhoods, to blatantly turning minorities away from the polls.
The "good news" in all of this is that minority-targeted voter suppression seems to be less motivated by racism and more by pure partisan politics. But the bad news, obviously, is that partisan politics stifles racial equality at all in America.
Black and Hispanic voters join low-income and elderly voters as easy victims of disenfranchisement and manipulation, because they are least likely to mobilize in their own defense against unfair voting practices. They fight an ongoing battle with the legislators, judges, and election officials who are meant to protect their right to vote, but who instead seek to legally obstruct them from voting through such insidious practices as strict ID laws, purge lists, and discriminatory resource allocation.
Fortunately for those at risk of disenfranchisement, voter advocacy and election integrity is an increasingly-well organized and funded movement, endowed with considerable legal power. But despite the admirable efforts of organizations like the ACLU and NYU's Brennan Center for Justice, voter suppression remains among the easiest, stealthiest, and most prolific means of undermining our democracy.
With the 2008 presidential race so heated, you can be sure it will be happening in a district near you.
This is definitely still an issue. Hopefully I'll get the chance with some others to monitor elections this season.