The scandal of US voter suppression

“We shall be as a shining city on a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” Words of the Puritan lawyer, John Winthrop, in 1630 as he sailed to America in the Arbella on his way to becoming Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The city on a hill is not shining brightly today. Both political parties in the US have been hitting the dimmer-switch on democracy. The level of voter suppression practised by the Republicans has recently amounted to a war on the young, the poor and, especially the non-white, voter. This has included, quite apart from gerrymandering, making registration as difficult as possible, selective cancelling of voter registration, making black citizens’ access to the polls intimidating and time-consuming and finding creative ways to invalidate likely opponents’ votes. Trump is now deploying the full repertoire of voter suppression, and more, to stay in power.

Since 1870, when the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was passed, denial of the right to vote based on “race, colour or conditions of servitude” has been prohibited. But in many states the Fifteenth Amendment was honoured in an “unremitting and ingenious defiance of the constitution”. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 Voting Rights Acts, which came at the price of much African-American bloodshed and sacrifice during the civil rights movement, allowed the Federal Government to regulate electoral practises in 16 states. These were mostly in the Deep South, where less than half of the state’s ‘minority voters’ were registered to vote. Any future Jim Crow voter measures would have to pass “pre-clearance”, scrutiny by the Federal Government’s Ministry of Justice. Voting rights seemed more secure.

In 2013 and partly by way of reaction to Obama’s Presidency, the case of Shelby (a county in Alabama) v Holder (the Federal Attorney-General) reached the Supreme Court. The court found 5-4 that the protective pre-clearance clause in the 1965 Act did not apply in contemporary circumstances, opening a Pandora’s box of Republican tricks to reduce the number of African-American, young and poor voters, and of finding procedural ways not to count their votes when they did vote.

The magnitude of the voter suppression that the Republicans have tried to perpetrate is not immediately apparent.  A kind of noble patriotic omerta reigns. Defeated US politicians do not shout about the illegality or injustice of their opponents’ electoral practices. After he lost his challenge to George W. Bush, out of respect for the Supreme Court, poor Al Gore slipped into the ozone layer of public life without a peep. Condemning unlawful electoral practice is simply not done, at least not by Democrat leaders. Trump has no such scruples.

No omerta, though, for Greg Palast, a zany, trilby-hatted ferret of an investigative journalist who has been down several rabbit holes and come out with quite a rabbit. Palast’s How Trump Stole 2020, a popular-press collage of outrageous cases of electoral malpractice illustrated by Ted Rall’s cartoons, is a treasure trove of hard-won data on voter suppression from states including the key swing states of Ohio, North Carolina and Wisconsin. The Republican enemies of democracy featured are the former Governor of Ohio, Jon Husted, and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, along with the then Secretary of State for Kansas Kris Kobach.

There are two major ways of removing the most voters from electoral lists. First is to claim they have moved out of state or county and the second that they are double-registered. One of the biggest scams was invented by Kobach. He produced a list of 7.2 million potential alleged “double-voters” — people with names common among ethnic groups such as Jackson, Brown, Mohamed and Rodriguez. Hence Trump’s repeated tweets about electoral fraud. The list was used for cross-checking names, allegedly recurring in different states, and then purging them on the grounds they had moved out of county or state while remaining on their original register. There was also a list of “inactive voters” who were singled out for purging. These were people who, it was claimed, had not voted in two previous elections. This was taken as evidence that they had moved out of state or county. This contravenes the 1993 National Voting Registration Act which says failure to vote is not a reason to cancel a registered voter.

The list had ignored differences in middle names, and those purging them had failed to follow the recommended procedure of checking against social security numbers. Similar purges took place in other swing states such as North Carolina.

Palast ferreted out the voter lists used by the Governors and Secretaries of State controlling elections and then had the names and addresses individually checked using accurate and current data held by Amazon and Ebay for deliveries. He discovered that Kobach was disseminating a list that was inaccurate on an epic scale. Following an earlier purge of half a million voters, Ohio’s Husted, during the lead up to the 2016 election, purged a further 426,781 voters. In the case of Georgia, 340,134 of these “absentee voters” still lived at their home address in the state or country they were alleged to have left. Those who moved house within their own neighbourhood or country were also struck off (the poor were over four times more likely to move locally compared with the average American). Overall, this eliminated 1 in 7 African-American voters. In early 2020, Georgia purged another 120,000 voters. Wisconsin is fortunately running into legal problems attempting to remove double that number.

The 2002 the Federal Help America Vote Act created a “provisional ballot” which was available to voters whose eligibility to vote is challenged. For example in some states a gun licence is a valid ID while a student’s university ID is not. Under the Help America Act a direct-mail form has to be sent to them; the different boxes have to be filled in carefully and returned. This is exactly the sort of communication that’s likely to be binned, mislaid or accidentally spoiled. If the document actually reaches the correct recipient and is sent back correctly, there is no guarantee the provisional ballot will be counted, and you can guess in which states they aren’t.

Now Covid has increased the electoral importance of postal ballots. Voters will have to cast their ballot according to strict instructions and avoid the many possible technical errors which can cause a vote to be discounted. You can guess who will negotiate this chicane most easily and who won’t. Given that Trump won 2016 by 74 Electoral College votes while Clinton won the popular vote by 2.9 million, and given Trump’s narrow victory in swing states still subject to voter suppression, Biden has a much higher hill to climb than the opinion polls indicate. And he won’t find a shining light at the top. Rather a President determined to cling onto power at any cost.

As for the real scale of voter fraud — in 2016, throughout the entire United States, the total number of documented cases of double-voting was four.