GOP Upping Its Voter Suppression Efforts As Elections Draw Nearer

One of the more remarkable features of our current Trumpian environment is that there is one party that is engaging in a broad and massive effort to suppress the voters of their opposition party and the media treats basically shrugs it off as simply another partisan controversy. The fact that American citizens are being denied the right to vote should be a source of daily outrage to all, but it is just accepted as the natural state of affairs, simply another political tactic to win an election.

The other day, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that allows North Dakota to require certain forms of identification that include a residential address in order to vote. This will disenfranchise Native American voters who often have P.O. boxes rather than a residential address primarily because of the lack of rural mail service. Worse, a lower court injunction against this policy was in place for the primaries earlier this year and the Secretary of State's office has been telling voters that the residential address requirement will not be in place for the upcoming election. Now, with just days to go before the election, the rules are being changed dramatically and there will be precious little time for the voters who are even aware of this change to obtain the required documents. Most notable, however, is that Heidi Heitkamp basically won election by the slimmest of margins in 2012 largely provided by the Native American community.

In Georgia, the current Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, who is responsible for overseeing elections, is running for governor. Not only did he purge the rolls of around 670,000 voters in 2017, he is now apparently "freezing" the registration of 53,000 voters under the state's "exact match" requirements. Nearly three-quarters of those registrations are from African Americans. Those voters will still be able to cast provisional ballots but those ballots will not be counted if their registration problem is not corrected. What's the likelihood of Kemp allowing that happening? Kemp had already used this "freezing" tactic before, purging voters who did not correct their "exact match" problems within 40 days, until a lawsuit forced him to discontinue the practice in 2016. In 2017, the state passed a law that allowed voters to be purged if their "exact match" registration problem is not corrected with 26 months. Of course, this still leaves those 53,000 voters out in the cold, although an emergency lawsuit has been filed to resolve this. In an additional effort to restrict voters, over the last five years or so, the state has closed 8% of its polling stations, primarily in poorer communities. Kemp is currently in a neck-and-neck race with Stacey Abrams where every vote will count, yet Kemp is the one overseeing who exactly gets to vote.

Other GOP efforts at voter suppression are also being challenged. In Missouri, another state with a tight Senate race between Claire McCaskill and Josh Hawley, a judge just blocked part of the state's voter ID law. Under the law, voters without a proper photo ID were still allowed to vote "if they show one of several non-photo forms of identification and sign sworn statements saying they don’t possess personal identification, understand they can get an ID for free from the state and acknowledge that personal identification is required to vote". The judge ruled the current affidavit that these voters are required to sign is "contradictory and misleading". This leaves people without an ID the option of casting a provisional ballot that my be counted if their signatures match those on files or they subsequently produce a photo ID. Again, it will be up to the Secretary of State to determine which of these provisional ballots will count.

Even when the Republican efforts at voter suppression are allowed by the courts, we see just how flagrantly they have been breaking the law. In Ohio, a federal judge just upheld the state's voter purges, a ruling in line with the recent Supreme Court case. At the same time, however, the judge ruled that the state's confirmation forms, which the Secretary of State sends out and must be returned in order not to be purged, are in violation of the National Voter Registration Act, and have been for years, in that they do not instruct voters who have moved on how to remain eligible to vote.

Another method of voter suppression featured by the GOP is to make sure certain Americans are not counted in the census which we will determine reapportionment. One of the options for the 2020 census is to add a question about citizenship which every independent expert concludes will reduce the number of responses and skew the results to the detriment of minorities. The Commerce Department is in charge of the census and Wilbur Ross was specifically asked in a Congressional hearing whether the White House had contacted him about adding the citizenship question for 2020. Ross replied, "I am not aware of any such". Recent documents indicate that that response was an outright lie. It appears Steve Bannon talked to Ross about contacting Kris Kobach regarding adding the citizenship question. Of course, this isn't the first time Ross has lied and it won't be the last. He is currently fighting against being deposed about how the citizenship question came to be added to the census questionnaire.

The fact that all of this is considered "normal" for a functioning democracy is baffling. Yes, the founders had no faith in the "people" and subsequently did not enshrine the right to vote in the Constitution. But we are nearly 250 years on and it seems ludicrous that the fight for universal suffrage still must go on in this country. Today's voter suppression tactics are just more sophisticated versions of the poll tax and the literacy test. Rather than discrimination based on race, these days it's discrimination based on party. Everyone knows it and yet it's accepted as simply another partisan battle. It is not. It's a farce and an outrage for a country that depicts itself as a beacon of democracy and freedom.