Voter Fraud

Continuing my 'deep dive' into US politics mostly via brilliant CNN coverage, I was particularly struck by something a Republican said during his recent two minute rant against Trump's impeachment in the House. 

As a long-term veteran of helping to administer Polling Stations here in the UK, my ears pricked-up at hearing an allegation of there being "200 illegal Polling Stations" in one State apparently. That's crazy I initially thought, but then I remembered two things. Firstly, elections are run by each State, so there's 50-odd different sets of procedures. Secondly, I recalled a Ch 4 scoop and investigation last year regarding a most distasteful Republican initiative called 'voter suppression'. Basically, if you can't win the political argument, just find as many ways as you can to stop your opponents from voting. This from the FT last September explains:-      

Voter suppression: America must end this shame

Decentralisation in the federal system plays a key part in preventing certain people from casting their ballots

With this year’s US presidential race entering its final leg, a formidable obstacle to the revolutionary idea of self-governance is rearing its ugly head: voter suppression. As current polls suggest a tight contest between incumbent Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden in many swing states, this shameful practice could determine the outcome of the election. 

The decentralisation inherent in the federal system plays a key part in the persistence of efforts to prevent certain people from casting their ballots. The US constitution grants states the responsibility to administer elections. Local jurisdictions take over from there to manage the nuts and bolts of executing an election. 

The scale of decentralisation has created more than 10,000 voting jurisdictions of varying sizes, shapes, and styles. If that sounds overwhelming, it’s because it is. And it’s partly why US policy leaders have, over the years, amended the 233-year-old constitution to provide a handful of federal standards on voting processes. The 15th amendment, for instance, prohibits federal and state governments from denying citizens the right to vote based on race and colour. The 19th amendment does the same thing on the basis of gender. 

But despite these attempts to foster free and fair elections, turnout at US presidential elections is low for a western democracy — 56 per cent in 2016, compared with 87 per cent in Sweden’s 2018 general election and 76 per cent in Germany in 2017. Indeed, the US political system has over time invented alternative measures — such as literacy tests and poll taxes — to disenfranchise “undesirable” (mainly non-white) voters. 

The 1965 Voting Rights Act sought to end such backdoor discrimination practices by mandating federal oversight of electoral processes in jurisdictions with a history of discriminatory voting practices. And it succeeded mightily. Between 1964 and 1969, black voter turnout rose from 6 per cent to 59 per cent in the state of Mississippi alone. 

This act was so successful that in 2013 the US Supreme Court decided it was no longer necessary to enforce it, so they gutted it. The ruling in Shelby County vs Holder, rendered the “most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever passed by Congress”, toothless. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — who died this month — described the decision as “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet”.

Her imagery was spot on. Hours after the ruling was finalised, a fresh wave of voter suppression tactics began sweeping the US. Four years after the ruling, black Americans were four times as likely as white Americans to report facing racial discrimination during the electoral process. Latinos were three times as likely and Native Americans twice as likely to report the same. 

Among the most detrimental suppression measures are voter purging, strict identification requirements, and felony disenfranchisement. Some jurisdictions remove people from voter registration lists in the name of “list hygiene”: between 2014 and 2016, more than 17m voters were deleted from registration lists because they had not voted for several years or their names did not exactly match other government records. 

Then there are strict ID requirements, enforced by 36 per cent of states. These sound reasonable to prevent voter fraud, but fail to take account of the 25 per cent of black citizens (against 8 per cent of whites) who don’t have a government-issued photo ID.

Black people also disproportionately lose their right to vote because they are more likely to be arrested and jailed, and more than 95 per cent of states restrict the right to vote for convicted felons. As a result, 7.7 per cent of black Americans against 1.8 per cent of non-blacks have lost their vote. 

While these tactics give the impression of electoral integrity, that is all they provide: a veneer of decency over a racially divided democracy. The great experiment of American democracy, once a glimmer of hope in a world of authoritarian states, is veering towards tyranny. Today, the land of the free ranks 25 out of 165 on the global Democracy Index — a ranking that feeds into a larger global trend. In 2019, the Democracy Index recorded the lowest aggregate score since its inception in 2006. 

The US is 35 days away from a historic presidential election. It has faced trials before and risen to the occasion. Now is the moment for Americans to call on their better angels to bend the arc of history towards inclusion. The world is watching.

--oo00oo--

Of course we know what happened. Turnout was at an historic high, probably due to Covid related measures being introduced that encouraged 'early' voting and postal ballots. In the case of Georgia and that State's historic 'flip' it was also a result of a long campaign of voter enrolment by the black community thus confirming nation-wide demographic changes. Essentially the Republican Party that mostly represents the white rural population is under increasing pressure from a growing and ethnically diverse urban population. If you can't win the political argument, you either find as many ways as possible to stop them voting, or de-legitimise the whole process and energise a white supremacist mob. 

As a footnote and for those who recall our own difficulties regarding the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the BBC have just concluded serialising extracts from a fascinating book 'How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future' about the history of trying to manipulate elections by using data and it goes back further than you might think. There's a long article by the author Jill Lepore published in the New Yorker last August.