Section 2: Voting in America Today
Is it easy to vote in America?
Like many things in America, voting is a matter of personal responsibility. Unlike other westernized democracies such as Belgium and France where citizens are automatically registered to vote by their governments, America puts the responsibility on the individual to get themselves registered. This is likely one of the reasons our turnout is so low with over 50 million eligible voters not registered.
The problem with requiring people to register themselves is that it provides an opportunity for a state to make voting difficult. Some states like Oregon and Vermont make voting easy by not requiring ID, allowing early voting by mail, and allowing absentee voting. The steps these states have taken encourage participation in their elections as they try and make voting as convenient and accessible as possible. Both states mentioned were rewarded with these actions as they saw turnout above the national average in the 2016 election. Other states like Wisconsin and Texas have intentionally made it more difficult to vote by restricting early voting, requiring photo ID and limiting the time citizens can register to vote.
Wisconsin’s turnout in 2016 remained above the US average, but it was the states lowest turnout since 2000, and the turnout in Texas was far below average. Let’s look into how the voting laws in Wisconsin could have dissuaded people from coming to the polls.
In an effort to prevent voter fraud, Wisconsin has implemented some of the strictest voters ID laws in the country. While many states require a valid photo ID upon registration, Wisconsin requires one be presented at the polling place. So if someone had used an ID to register to vote, but lost that ID the day before Election Day, that person would not be able to vote. One voter who faced this issue was Gladys Harris.
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When she lost her ID right before Election Day, she knew of the new law and brought her Social Security and Medicare cards, as well as a country bus pass that had her photo and you can see on the right. Keep in mind, she had already used a valid state ID to register to vote. Nonetheless, her numerous sources of ID did not suffice and she was forced to cast a provisional ballot that ended up not counting. In order to make her provisional ballot count, Gladys would have had to return to an election office within next days and prove her identity with a new state-issued ID. Requiring Gladys to obtain a new ID makes her experience voting more time consuming and expensive.This example displays the barriers to voting that voter ID laws create. They make it harder to cast a ballot, so people do not end up getting their voice heard like Gladys.
That is a specific example, but let’s look more broadly at the difficulty that can come when trying to obtain valid ID in Wisconsin.
With the law requiring state ID to vote, Wisconsin began to offer free ID so its citizens could vote without having to pay for a new ID. In theory, this sounds good, but in implementation, it had its flaws. While the ID itself was free, obtaining the documents required to prove one's identity could be costly. Many people don’t have a passport or copies of their birth certificate or social security cards. To get these documents people have to pay, so while the ID itself might be free, getting the ID requires money and time. According to federal court records, over 300,000 eligible voters, or nine percent of the electorate, in Wisconsin lacked proper photo ID to vote before the 2016 election. For these people, it is not easy to vote. The implementation of this photo ID law undoubtedly turned away voters as Wisconsin saw its turnout fall by over three percent, which represents hundreds of thousands of votes. To put that into perspective, states that didn’t change their voting laws between the 2012 and 2016 elections, saw turnout rise 1.2 percent. While it is impossible to figure out the exact number of people that were turned away from the polls because of the ID laws, in a state that was decided by 20,000 votes, voting laws were crucial to the outcome.
Another way it seems voting laws kept people at home on Election Day in Wisconsin was the confusion they created. Voter ID laws often present a chance for confusion amongst the electorate because after they are implemented, they are usually challenged in court. This happened in Wisconsin, with the law reaching the states Supreme Court, and more recently in states like North Carolina and Texas. The main argument against voter ID laws is that they discriminate on the basis of race and/or class. Different races and social classes have different rates of ID’s leaving some groups better equipped to adhere to the new law, and making it more difficult for others. While a law is going back and forth in legal limbo, voters are often unaware of what law is currently in effect. This can dissuade voters from going to the polls because they don’t think they have the proper ID. One political scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison conducted a survey of nonvoting registrants in two urban counties in Wisconsin. He found 11.2 percent of the populations in those counties were deterred from voting because of the voter ID law. This was on top of the 6% of voters just prevented by the law.
These numbers are even more alarming when race and income are taken into account.
This study consisted of respondents who didn’t go to the polls because they thought they did not have the required ID and voters who went to the polls and were turned away. Essentially, Wisconsin made it more difficult to vote by making it more time consuming and expensive. They added more checks on ID to offer more chances to turn voters away, and they put a cloud of confusion over the whole process. This process led to less African American's voting, and less poor people voting. These are the groups that seemed to be most targeted or impacted by voter ID laws. Later we will explore how these marginalized voting groups vote, but for now, the important take away is that certain groups in this country struggle to exercise their right to vote due to voter ID laws.
For many people in Wisconsin this past election, it was not easy to vote. It was more difficult than it had been in any previous year, so fewer people voted. It makes sense.
The experiences of voters like Gladys Harris and other in Wisconsin who struggled to cast their vote varied drastically from what I encountered last November. It was easy for me to vote, but it was clearly not that simple for everyone, and unfortunately, in a place like Wisconsin, voices were silenced by the strict voting laws.
But is this the way it always was?
The short answer is no, It was not always this way. Let's look at when it got decidedly harder to vote in America.
Before the year 2000, only 14 states had voter ID laws which all fell in the category of “non-strict”. These states asked for ID, photo in some and non-photo in others, but still allowed people to vote if they did not have the proper ID. The other 36 states had no voter ID laws. The 2000 presidential election seemed to be a turning point in the voter ID debate.
A quick refresher, in 2000, George Bush squeaked by Al Gore in the closest presidential election ever.
Bush won Florida by less than 1,000 votes, which propelled him into the White House. An outcome that close automatically triggered a recount, but the Supreme Court ended the recount before it was completed. Their reasoning was that each county could count votes differently. The concern was that some counties might count questionable ballots ( hanging chads, ballots where it is not clear who was voted for) differently. A quick note, it is curious that they could declare the recount unconstitutional for that reason when that same issue of disputed ballots occurred during the actual tally of votes that gave Bush the victory. But that isn't what we are hashing out here.
The issue with the way the recount was handled was that it lowered public trust in elections. Essentially, the Supreme Court appointed Bush president by not allowing for a recount. Bush could very well still have been America’s choice, but not allowing for the recount to proceed looked shady in the eyes of many Americans.
To strengthen the nation’s trust in our elections, we passed the Help America Vote Act. With it, steps were taken to modernize the voting process like the implementation of electronic voting machines to resolve the disputed ballot issue. Another aspect of the Help America Vote Act was leaving it up to the states to implement minimum election administration standards that included some type of verification for first-time voters. This was the most consequential portion of the act, as it allowed states to interpret the law in their own way. Some states could require just a proof of residency by providing a utility bill, but others could require a form of ID to register that thousands of their electorate don’t have. This was the birth of voter ID laws in the United States that would go on to suppress many votes.
In the years that followed, states started making it more difficult to vote. The number states that used some sort of voter ID jumped from 14 to 20 by 2004. From there, it rose steadily up to 26 by 2010. That year, Republicans won control of many state legislatures in the midterm election and both the number of states requiring voter ID, and the level of strictness of the laws rose again. By 2016, 32 states had some sort of voter ID laws with 7 having strict voter ID laws where if a potential voter does not have the specified ID, they cannot vote.
What all of this tells us is that since 2000, it has become much harder to vote in our country. That year was the turning point where our supposed fix to wavering confidence in our elections, the Help America Vote Act, would go on to make our elections less democratic.
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But are these ID laws that are silencing voices actually preventing voter fraud and keeping our elections fair?
