Section 4: Implications
Can small-scale voter suppression affect the outcome of a presidential election?
Now that we have discussed that voter suppression exists around this country as a result of voter ID laws, let's see if small-scale voter suppression can have large-scale consequences. For this section, we will examine the results of the 2016 election trying to figure out how voter suppression could have affected the outcome.
First, I don’t think many realize how close this past presidential election really was. We know the final tally, 304 electoral votes for Trump and 227 for Clinton, but those numbers are misleading. It looks like Trump won handily, as he himself has called his victory a “landslide,” and falsely claimed it was the greatest margin of victory since Reagan. Maps like this one below broken up by county also make his victory look overwhelming.
The actual results were much closer than president Trump would like you to think, but quickly let us refresh ourselves on the system we have in place to decide our president.
Our country elects presidents through votes by a small group of electors distributed to each state essentially by population from Census data. Come Election Day, when one candidate gets the majority of votes in a given state, they get all the electoral votes. Electors almost always vote with the will of the people, so if a candidate wins a state, he gets all the allotted electoral votes. Only Nebraska and Maine have a system in place where electoral votes can go to multiple candidates in an effort to better represent the will of their voters. Candidates compete to reach the 270-vote threshold that assures them a majority of the electoral votes and makes them the President of the United States.
Like I mentioned before, Trump won with 304 votes to Hillary’s 227. While Trump won by 77 votes, the election really only came down to three states. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which accounted for 46 electoral votes that made the difference. President Trump won those states by a combined 80,000 votes, which allowed him to win the presidency. If Hillary had won those states, which trump won by margins of only .2, .7, and .8 percentage points, the results would have looked as follows.
In this scenario, Clinton would have won the Electoral College on top of the popular vote making her president. This was not what happened, so let's look at how voter suppression may have helped Trump take the White House.
Again 80,000 votes were the margin that decided the election. Out of 136 million votes cast in the election, 80,000, or .00058824 percent were the most consequential. This percentage is represented graphically below. Now let's look at the laws in place in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and see if they may have dissuaded enough voters to make up to make Trumps margins of victory.
Michigan and Pennsylvania have similar laws so we will start with them. While Michigan doesn’t require a photo ID to vote, it requires some form of identification at the polling place. If a voter posses no ID at the polls, they must sign an affidavit and vote provisionally which allows the state to make sure the person is who they say they are before the vote is counted. Pennsylvania doesn’t require any ID to vote, making it one of the easier states to cast a ballot come Election Day. That said, both Michigan and Pennsylvania could make it easier to vote in their states if they adopted one practice most states already have in place.
Neither state offers early voting. 37 states have systems in place that allow their voters the chance to vote early by mail and avoid having to make a trip to the polls. American’s enjoy voting early, as the amount of votes cast early in our presidential elections has risen from around 12 percent in 2000 to over 30 percent in 2012. This kind of voting is especially helpful for the elderly and the poor who might not be able to make it to the polls, but this popular trend has not been adopted by Pennsylvania or Michigan. This would undoubtedly increase turnout in each state, which could have affected the outcome of their respective results in 2016.
A quick look at Pennsylvania's attempt to suppress their vote:
Before we give Pennsylvania props for not making it more difficult to vote, let's acknowledge that it was not for a lack of trying. In 2012, the state passed a law requiring state-issued photo ID at the polls, but fortunately, it was struck down by the state supreme court because it put too much of a burden on lower income and disabled voters. This was a win for voting rights as the ruling judge decided correctly the law, like every voter ID law, did not make Pennsylvania’s election more “free and fair."
Most states offer some kind of early voting
The other system, which can ease the process of voting, is casting absentee ballots. Pennsylvania and Michigan however, like some other states, have strict guidelines for eligibility to vote absentee. The issue I see with these requirements is that it doesn’t afford a voter much leeway in how they could vote absentee. A voter couldn’t just be holding down two jobs and not have the time to wait in line at a polling place. To be able to vote absentee; they would have to be on business “out of the municipality” or adhere to another requirement to obtain one.
So while Michigan and Pennsylvania do not have strict voting laws compared to some other states, they both could work to make voting easier. By adopting common and favorable voting practices available in the majority of states, the turnout increase they would see would surpass the razor-thin vote differential they saw in their states in the 2016 election.
Pennsylvania's Absentee Ballot Requirements:
Wisconsin, as we have discussed and will touch on again has its issues when it comes to voter ID, but Wisconsin allows early voting. By Election Day 2016, over 800,000 votes had already been cast early in Wisconsin, which exemplifies the popularity of this type of voting. But early voters were not able to bypass the strict voter ID law, as every ballot mailed in needed to contain a photocopy of an accepted ID form for the vote to count. It was estimated 300,000 voters in Wisconsin did not possess the proper ID to vote, and the voting by mail system did not help those individuals. The image below shows the election results in the state and details the drop in democratic votes by county. While some of the change can be attributed to voters preferring one candidate over another, the 43,000 democratic vote drop in Milwaukee is a direct reflection of lower turnout. Wisconsin was only decided by around 20,000 votes, so the margin easily could have been made up if Wisconsin had less strict voter ID laws that enfranchised more of their electorate and increased turnout.
When an election is as close as the 2016 presidential one was, every factor should be taken into consideration when determining why one candidate won, and the other lost. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin decided the election, and all three states have issues with their election systems. They could actually all learn a little bit from each other. Michigan and Pennsylvania need to join Wisconsin, and 36 other states, in implementing a secure and easier system of voting by mail. The country has spoken, and clearly many enjoy this system and it allows for higher turnout in elections. Wisconsin needs to look to Michigan and Pennsylvania and see that even without voter ID laws; voter fraud is non-existent in those states. Michigan and Pennsylvania don’t have strict voter ID laws, and they don’t need them to still conduct fair and safe elections.
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If all three states took a look at each other’s systems of voting and adopted what was working elsewhere, all three states could make voting easier for their residents. They can do this without compromising the integrity of their elections. By increasing turnout, they would be giving a voice to more of their people. Their respective elections would better represent the will of the state's electorate, and isn’t that what democracy is? Isn’t that the goal here?
The 2016 election was close, and there are surely more close elections to come, but when they do, let's work to make sure every American who wants to vote gets their voices heard when electing their next leader.
