Will Tomer: A litmus test for voting rights in the 21st century
10/29/2018
Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, left, speaks as her Republican opponent Brian Kemp looks on during a debate on Oct. 23 in Atlanta.
John Bazemore/Associated Press
GEORGIA’S gubernatorial race, pitting Republican Brian Kemp against Democrat Stacey Abrams, has become a close race. But while the race for Georgia’s governorship may not seem all that important outside of the Peach State, this year’s election carries serious implications for the future of voting rights in the United States.
Mr. Kemp, who currently serves as Georgia’s secretary of state, has been fulfilling his duty to manage elections and voter registration in the state. This means executing a controversial law that has purged large numbers of previously registered voters from Georgia’s rolls and created long delays in processing voter registration applications.
According to a report by the Associated Press earlier this month, more than 53,000 voter registrations are on hold. Because Georgia uses an “exact match” verification system, a clerical error as small as a dropped hyphen could put the registration application on hold.
Georgia has also made it difficult for voters to rectify issues with their applications. The state has not notified people that their applications are on hold. A person would have to go online and check the status of his or her registration.
More than 70 percent of the affected registrations belong to black Georgians. Since Georgia’s population is approximately 32 percent black, you need not strain to see the racial disparity.
Mr. Kemp’s office has canceled more than 1.2 million voter registrations since 2012, and more than 670,000 in 2017 alone. Mr. Kemp calls this “voter roll maintenance,” done to purge the system of inactive voters. This process has also been termed “use it or lose it.” It is important to note that there is no provision in the Constitution for placing time limits on voting rights.
Laws that limit a person’s ability to cast a ballot have become popular in recent years. It started with the Supreme Court’s decision in 2013 to hear the case of Shelby County vs. Holder. The court cut down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, including one that allowed the Justice Department to automatically review changes to voting laws in states with a history of discriminatory behavior. Chief Justice John Roberts, whose judgments suggest a textualist/originalist reading of the Constitution, cited “the fundamental tradition of equal sovereignty” of the states as the reasoning behind the decision.
The main issue with Justice Roberts’ reliance on “equal sovereignty” of the states, a concept he does not clearly define in his judgment, is that it is a modern invention found nowhere in the U.S. Constitution.
Now states throughout the country have enacted strict voter ID laws and registration policies that have restricted people’s access to the ballot box. Conservative lawmakers have claimed that these laws are necessary to stop voter fraud and to preserve the integrity of our elections. But research indicates that voter fraud is not a significant problem in the United States.
Last year, the Brennan Center for Justice investigated claims of voter fraud in the 2016 election. Researchers spoke with election officials in the districts with the highest populations of noncitizen residents. What did it turn up?
Across more than 23.5 million votes, there were only “30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting,” according to the report. “In other words, improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001 percent of the 2016 votes in those jurisdictions.”
So if voting fraud is not a serious problem, why then have some lawmakers sought to limit people’s access to the voting booth? Well, as in Georgia, race has played a troubling role in the spread of voting laws over the past several years.
A 2016 study published by State Politics and Policy Quarterly found that “Democratic lawmakers representing substantial black district populations are more opposed to restrictive voter ID laws, whereas Republican legislators with substantial black district populations are more supportive.”
In 2017, the University of Chicago’s Journal of Politics published similar findings. “Strict identification laws have a differentially negative impact on the turnout of racial and ethnic minorities in primaries and general elections,” write Zoltan Hajnal, Nazita Lajevardi and Lindsay Nielson. “Voter ID laws skew democracy toward those on the political right.”
The right to vote is one of the essential rights afforded to American citizens. It is supposed to be democracy in action, an opportunity for people to let their voices and feelings be known. But the credibility of that process is eroded when weak-spirited politicians, afraid of being pushed out of office, game the system for their own benefit.
The U.S. has a long and embarrassing history of preventing minorities from voting because they may vote to upend existing power structures. For example: Once black people achieved the right to vote in 1870 via the Fifteenth Amendment, politicians conjured up legal procedures designed to block black people from exercising the right to vote. The Constitution does not say that a vote may only be cast if a voter pays a poll tax or passes a literacy test, but in an era during which the rights of the states was an issue of central importance, states regularly placed substantial limits on the ability of citizens of color, particularly African-Americans, to vote.
Sadly, voter ID laws, strict registration procedures and voter roll purges descend from these antiquated and oppressive voter suppression techniques. That the U.S. is still grappling with this speaks volumes about the ongoing problems of race and social justice.
Nowhere is this issue more pertinent, however, than Georgia. The election may become a litmus test for America’s tolerance for laws that bar inconvenient people from exercising their fundamental rights. The race between Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp will have many implications, but few will be more important than how this race influences how we define voting rights in the 21st century.
Contact Will Tomer at wtomer@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1932, or on Twitter @WillTomer.