And don’t care who knows it
“I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, a father of movement conservatism and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, told a religious right group in Dallas during the 1980 campaign. Plenty more where he came from still hold that belief and work every election to limit access to the ballot to the right people.
Pro Publica examines one method for suppressing turnout among left-leaning voters that gets little attention: limiting the ability of people with reading difficulties from obtaining assistance in voting:
Conservative politicians have long used harsh tactics against voters who can’t read — poor, often Black and Latino Americans who have been failed by the U.S. education system and who conservatives feared would vote for liberal candidates. Some states have required voters who needed help to sign an affidavit explaining why they need assistance; some have prevented voters who couldn’t read from bringing sample ballots to the polls and limited the number of voters that a volunteer could help read a ballot. Time and again, federal courts have struck down such restrictions as illegal and unconstitutional. Inevitably, states just create more.
Over the last two years, the myth of election fraud, supercharged by former President Donald Trump in the wake of his 2020 loss, has fueled a barrage of new restrictions. While they do not all target voters who struggle to read, they make it especially challenging for voters with low literacy skills to get help casting ballots.
Last year, Georgia passed a law limiting who can return or even touch a completed absentee ballot. Florida expanded the radius around election locations in which volunteers are prohibited from asking people if they need help. Texas passed a law prohibiting voters’ assistants from answering questions or paraphrasing complicated language on the ballot; a federal judge struck down several sections of the law in June. But the court left other provisions in place, including ones that increase penalties for helping voters who don’t qualify and require people who assist voters to fill out more paperwork. Texas did not appeal the decision.
Recent narrowly decided elections reinforce how efforts to reduce voter turnout even marginally can change outcomes. Incentives for devising multiple suppression tactics are high. A few votes not cast here and there can make the difference.
Congress amended the Voting Rights Act in 1982 to affirm that voters who need help due to an “inability to read” could bring someone, other than their employer or union representative, to assist them in the voting booth. A string of subsequent lawsuits shows this federal action again failed to eradicate the discrimination.
In a 2001 case, the federal justice department claimed that white poll managers in Charleston County, South Carolina, were intimidating Black voters who requested assistance. According to testimony given in the case, the poll workers launched a barrage of questions at these voters, such as, “Can’t you read and write? And didn’t you just sign in? And you know how to spell your name, why can’t you just vote by yourself? And do you really need voter assistance?”
A federal judge found that there was “significant evidence of intimidation and harassment,” but said evidence of the mistreatment was too “anecdotal” to take direct action.
Pro Publica profiles Olivia Coley-Pearson’s efforts to get out her neighbors’ votes in Coffee County, Ga. Yes, that Coffee County. She sometimes assists voters who cannot read. She was investigated for doing so in 2016.
The state election board chose not to recommend her case for criminal prosecution, but a local district attorney’s office prosecuted her anyway, which made national headlines in BuzzFeed. It charged her with two felonies for improperly assisting a voter and for signing a form that gave a false reason for why a voter needed assistance. The trial ended with a hung jury. One of two Black people on the jury told a local reporter that she was the only holdout; everyone else voted to find Coley-Pearson guilty. She was tried again in a nearby county and, after about 20 minutes of deliberations, the new jury acquitted her of all charges. The district attorney’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions.
So it goes.
“Around here, to me, they target the leaders, the people that are standing up for the rights of the minority,” said James Curtis Hicks, another charged volunteer who took a plea deal rather than risk jail time and fines. “To shut me and Ms. Pearson down, it would stop a whole lot of people going to the polls.”
It is impossible to say precisely what role literacy plays in voter turnout. There are many other factors that contribute to lower participation, including some closely intertwined with literacy, such as income and education level. But to put the importance of reading ability in perspective, ProPublica analyzed data on turnout from the three most recent national elections and compared it to average estimated literacy levels for over 3,000 counties. (Read more about our analysis, and the data used, in our methodology.) Our analysis found that if low-literacy counties had turnout similar to high-literacy counties, they could have added up to about 7 million votes to the national total for each of those three elections.
I’ve been engaged in voter turnout operations for many cycles now and am aware that assisting voters who request help completing their ballots is permitted. But this report from ProPublica quantifies the scope of the problem in a way I’ve not seen before.
What’s more, as Pro Publica confirms, calling out Ohio Republicans for targeting poor, nonwhite and low-literacy voters, is how flagrantly conservative legislatures erect obstacles to voting, including tossing out absentee ballots over minor errors while limiting aid from assistants. Even knowing some provisions are likely to be struck down in court is no disincentive to adding layer upon layer of them. If the right one don’t get you | Then the left one will, sang Tennessee Ernie Ford (of his fists).
Data submitted as evidence shows that thousands of forms were tossed in the 2014 and 2015 general elections for simple problems such as incomplete addresses and birthdays. Poll workers refused one form because the street name “Cuthbert” was misspelled as “Cuthberth.” Several others were rejected because birth dates were listed as the current date, an indicator that voters may not have understood the instructions.
In 2016, a federal judge struck down the measures, concluding they disproportionately harmed Black voters. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that state rules requiring perfect completion of absentee ballot forms posed an undue burden to voters. But the panel said the other measures were minimally disruptive and left in place regulations that limited the assistance voters could get from poll workers and the amount of time voters were given to correct errors on absentee and provisional ballots.
“What the case demonstrates is the indifference of officials from one political party, and of unfortunately many federal judges, to voting rights and to the need to make voting not only secure, but relatively unburdensome,” said Subodh Chandra, an attorney for the plaintiffs.
And also in Brian Kemp’s Georgia, no surprise, where Coley-Pearson faces continued harrassment.
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