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Voting should be as easy and accessible as possible, and in many cases it is. But in recent years, more than anti-voter bills have been introduced in 48 states. These bills erect unnecessary barriers for people to register to vote, vote by mail, or vote in person. Our democracy works best when all eligible voters can participate and have their voices heard. Suppression efforts range from the seemingly unobstructive, like strict voter ID laws and cuts to early voting, to mass purges of voter rolls and systemic disenfranchisement.
These measures disproportionately impact people of color, students, the elderly, and people with disabilities. And long before election cycles even begin, legislators redraw district lines that determine the weight of your vote.
Restricting the terms and requirements of registration is one of the most common forms of voter suppression. Restrictions can include requiring documents to prove citizenship or identification, onerous obstacles for voter registration drives, or limiting the window of time in which voters can register. Politicians often use unfounded claims of voter fraud to try to justify registration restrictions.
The ACLU sued and defeated the law in The ACLU filed a federal lawsuit challenging the law and blocked it from going into effect in Some states are discouraging voter participation by imposing arbitrary requirements and harsh penalties on voters and poll workers who violate these rules. In Georgia, lawmakers have made it a crime to provide food and water to voters standing in line at the polls — lines that are notoriously long in Georgia, especially for communities of color.
In Texas, people have been arrested and given outrageous sentences for what amount at most to innocent mistakes made during the voting process. Because of racism in law enforcement and the broader criminal legal system, criminalization of the ballot box disproportionately impacts people of color, who are more likely to be penalized. This method of voter suppression aims to instill fear in communities of color and suppress their voices in the democratic process. A felony conviction can come with drastic consequences, including the loss of your right to vote.
Some states ban voting only during incarceration, or while on probation or parole. And other states and jurisdictions, like Maine, Vermont, and Washington, D. The fact that these laws vary so dramatically only adds to the overall confusion that voters face, which is a form of voter suppression in itself. Due to racial bias in the criminal justice system, felony disenfranchisement laws disproportionately affect Black and Brown people, who often face harsher sentences than white people for the same offenses.
To this day, the states with the most extreme disenfranchisement laws also have long histories of suppressing the rights of Black people. Thirty-six states have identification requirements at the polls, including seven states with strict photo ID laws. Cleaning up voter rolls can be a responsible part of election administration because many people move, die, or become ineligible to vote for other reasons.
But sometimes, states use this process as a method of mass disenfranchisement, purging eligible voters from rolls for illegitimate reasons or based on inaccurate data, and often without adequate notice to the voters. A single purge can stop up to hundreds of thousands of people from voting.
The law now extends this to all elections and all local officials. In Maryland, voters can now choose to get ballots in the mail forever without having to request an absentee ballot for every election. But some states adopted a mix of laws; some make voting easier and some make it more difficult. Take the case of Indiana, a very Republican state. Its reforms dealt primarily with how ballots were counted. Indiana laws limited the availability of voter drop boxes while at the same time making it easier to vote by mail.
In New York, a very Democratic state, the legislature required that voters get their absentee ballot applications submitted 15 days before an election instead of seven days.
So, what will be the political effect of these new laws on the upcoming elections? One way to look at this is to divide the changes into states where the laws passed are clearly restrictive, states where the laws passed are clearly expansive, and states where the laws are mixed.
Table 1 provides a quick look at the likely impact of restrictive voting laws in 11 states. Some states on this list, like Alabama for instance, are so Republican that the restrictive laws are likely to have little impact on outcomes.
But Arizona, Florida, and Georgia, where presidential election results were very close, will have Senate races and as many as seven House races that are likely to be high profile and somewhat competitive as of now. Who votes in is of critical importance to the balance of power in Congress. Table 2 charts results for states with mixed changes in their voting laws. In the presidential contest, all these states except for New Hampshire went for Trump, and in the Senate races, only New Hampshire has a competitive race so far.
Table 2: States with new mixed result voting laws. Lastly, Table 3 lists states that expanded voting through their reforms. A quick glance shows that most of these states are Democratic. There has been understandable outrage and widespread criticism of the new voting laws in Georgia — and of similar efforts in other states. These laws would likely make voting more difficult , including by reducing options for voting and making it harder to use an absentee ballot.
My research indicates, however, that such measures may not change election results much, if at all. Most U. Laws that slightly reduce the number of potential voters are unlikely to shift power in Congress and state legislatures significantly. In addition, my analysis has found that Republican-led partisan gerrymandering efforts actually work against voter suppression measures , by packing Democratic voters into relatively few districts that the party wins easily.
That means Democrats have fewer competitive seats to potentially lose, even when some of their supporters are kept from the polls.
Voting access laws have changed considerably since the end of the Jim Crow era in the midth century. The American public then was far more willing to accept overt voter suppression requirements, like poll taxes and literacy tests, which were widely used in Southern states to keep African Americans from voting.
But the civil rights movement of the s and s undermined public support for those laws. As a result, current state governments that want to reduce voter access to the polls have to find less obvious methods to do so. When they devise methods to limit voting now, state governments have to claim that such measures will protect voting integrity or save taxpayer money.
This ends up limiting the aggressiveness of voter suppression measures that states can enact, which in turn reduces their potential effectiveness. Making access harder may not, however, be enough to stop people from voting.
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