Blurring the voting lines
by Tom Sullivan
Some of the sitting president’s supporters believe Puerto Rican victims of Hurricane Maria got what they deserved. Puerto Ricans’ “lack of responsibility is not an emergency on my part,” retired NASA electrical engineer David Hogg told the Washington Post. Still picking up the pieces in his flooded Houston neighborhood, Hogg had strong opinions about disaster relief for Puerto Rico:
“I object. I object. They should stay where they are and fix their own country up,” Hogg responded softly, shaking his head, wrongly referring to the U.S. territory as a separate nation.
Well, it’s not, as the banner I once observed in San Juan’s Luis Muñoz Marín Airport cheerfully declared: “Welcome to the United States of America.” Puerto Ricans are free to travel and to relocate to any other part of the United States they wish. Hogg may wish he’d been more charitable. Without sufficient and timely rebuilding support, Puerto Ricans may leave the devastated island for the mainland (where they can vote) in droves:
Cities popular with Puerto Ricans, such as Orlando, Hartford, Conn., and Springfield Mass., are bracing for more students, many of whom come from families living below the poverty level.
Politicians, meanwhile, are weighing the potentially significant electoral consequences of a wave of migrants expected to lean Democratic — especially in Florida. The swing state already boasts half a million Puerto Rican-born residents, and more are expected in Maria’s aftermath.
Millions more may join them, Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló cautioned last week. Laura Clawson writes at Daily Kos that a mass exodus could be in the offing. The following sentence she quotes from the Washington Post seems to have been removed from the online edition:
Those leaving are most likely to end up in Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania, which have been the most popular destinations for Puerto Ricans in recent years.
Perhaps it made Mr. Hogg and his friends nervous. Clawson writes, “You’d think that electoral concern might shake loose some Republican votes for more significant government aid, but apparently contempt for Puerto Ricans (and possibly confidence in voter suppression tactics) is winning the day.”
Ari Berman definitely concurs with the latter. His report in Mother Jones details just how effectively Wisconsin Republicans’ efforts to deploy photo ID laws functioned as a vote suppression tactic:
A post-election study by Priorities USA, a Democratic super-PAC that supported Clinton, found that in 2016, turnout decreased by 1.7 percent in the three states that adopted stricter voter ID laws but increased by 1.3 percent in states where ID laws did not change. Wisconsin’s turnout dropped 3.3 percent. If Wisconsin had seen the same turnout increase as states whose laws stayed the same, “we estimate that over 200,000 more voters would have voted in Wisconsin in 2016,” the study said. These “lost voters”—those who voted in 2012 and 2014 but not 2016—”skewed more African American and more Democrat” than the overall voting population. Some academics criticized the study’s methodology, but its conclusions were consistent with a report from the Government Accountability Office, which found that strict voter ID laws in Kansas and Tennessee had decreased turnout by roughly 2 to 3 percent, with the largest drops among black, young, and new voters.
According to a comprehensive study by MIT political scientist Charles Stewart, an estimated 16 million people—12 percent of all voters—encountered at least one problem voting in 2016. There were more than 1 million lost votes, Stewart estimates, because people ran into things like ID laws, long lines at the polls, and difficulty registering. Trump won the election by a total of 78,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Activists believe legal challenges are insufficient to stem the New Jim Crow:
Jason Kander—the former Missouri secretary of state and Afghanistan veteran known for his 2016 Senate campaign ad in which he assembled a rifle while blindfolded—agrees that the case against voting restrictions can’t just be made in court. “The approach in the past has been nearly exclusively a legal strategy,” says Kander, who founded Let America Vote, a voting rights nonprofit, after the election. “Now with Jeff Sessions in charge of the Justice Department and Trump appointing judges, it means there’s an urgency to engage in a political argument. We need to expand our argument beyond the court of law into the court of public opinion. It has been a politically consequence-free exercise for vote suppressors. That has to change.”
Let America Vote plans to open field offices in Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Tennessee in 2018 and to focus on electing pro-voting-rights candidates for state legislature, secretary of state, and governor. The group has signed up more than 65,000 volunteers and placed more than 100 interns and staffers in Virginia, which has a strict voter ID law, for the 2017 gubernatorial and legislative elections, with a goal of contacting half a million voters. “We’re saying, ‘If you’re going to make it harder to vote, we’re going to make it a lot harder for you to get reelected,’” Kander says.
Works for me.
* * * * * * * *
Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.