Tricks, traps and pretexts
by Tom Sullivan
University of Texas at Austin students inquire about voting procedures, 2018. Photo via the Pew Charitable Trusts.
“Tricks and traps,” Elizabeth Warren repeated while still a law professor at Harvard University. In writing and in speeches, Warren referred to tactics credit card companies use to “ensnare families in a cycle of high-cost debt.” Today, the phrase applies to tactics Republican lawmakers across the country use to suppress Americans’ ability to vote.
The Washington Post Editorial Board takes them to task this morning for working harder to keep Americans from voting than it does to offer them policies for improving their lives.
But first, an example from close to home.
North Carolina Republicans crowed that they’d made voting easier and more uniform in 2018 by mandating early voting locations remain open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. across the state. Why, they’d actually increased the total hours early voting would be available. Then came the but: a 20 percent decrease in the number of early voting sites across the state. Increasing the length of the day meant most counties had to cut back on the number of sites open to stay within their budgets. Some of those extra hours were essentially “non-usable hours,” when election administrators knew no voting would occur.
Tricks and traps
A backer of both the hours change and a principal behind North Carolina’s infamous gerrymandering and voter ID law, Republican state Representative David Lewis told ProPublica, “The purpose of the uniformity is to make it easier and more convenient and more accessible for the voter to participate.”
Voting officials were skeptical:
“We know our county. We know when most people go to vote early. The 12-hour, 7-a.m.-to-7-p.m. requirement just ties our hands when coming up with a catered approach that fits our county best,” said Steve Stone, the Republican chair of the Robeson County Board of Elections.
[…]
“I do not see it as an isolated event, but rather a part of a larger voter suppression effort,” said Al Daniels, a Democratic member of the Bladen County Board of Elections, of the uniform-hours law. “I see it as anti-voter, period.”
Fashions that begin in California tend to filter out to the rest of the country. But when it comes to fashions in voter suppression, look to North Carolina.
The Post this morning takes Texas to task. The approach is familiar:
MOBILE POLLING places that popped up on college campuses and other population-dense areas were “the most effective program we had,” Dana DeBeauvoir, the chief elections official in Travis County, Tex., told the New York Times. That would explain why Texas Republicans shut them down.
The Times reported last week that, as Texans head to the polls, it will be substantially harder for college students to vote. A new state law required all polling places to remain open for the state’s full 12-day early-voting period. Localities could not afford to keep the pop-up sites open that long, so colleges in Austin, Brownsville, Fort Worth and elsewhere have had to close them. That guarantees lower turnout among people whom Republicans do not want voting: Democratic-leaning students.
Pretexts aplenty
Florida Republicans have worked hard at keeping students there from voting. And minorities. And paroled felons, “even after voters overwhelmingly approved the law in a referendum” that permits them:
Republicans in New Hampshire, North Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin have made voting difficult for students in various ways; Republicans often use voter identification laws to exclude student voters, rejecting forms of ID that college students are likely to have. Typically, the pretext is the need to block in-person voter fraud — a practically nonexistent problem in the United States.
There’s always a pretext, reasonable-sounding, patriotic even, something to make an alarming soundbite on the news at six. Dead voters, voter impersonation, double voters, and other “downright goofy, if not paranoid” theories about widespread illegal voting. Republicans’ proposed remedies — even if they also hurt the Republican party’s voters — always seem to erect more voting hurdles for a broad swath of honest citizens (who tend to vote Democrat) than they would stop the few cases of improper voting uncovered. Many of those cases wind up stemming from confusion over eligibility. And those cases are so few that, whether or not voters are involved, “Voter Fraud Vigilantes” feel compelled to pad out their statistics by labeling any and every form of election irregularity voter fraud.
Clickbait headlines regularly warn that Democrats have moved “too far left.” They rarely warn Republicans they have moved too far from democracy.
