Every Vote Counts – Until They’re Not Counted
Photo by Rio Funatsu ‘25
With this 60th quadrennial election, the nation is gearing up for new leadership after President Biden. While the days of overt race-based voter suppression are over, some remnants have continued to linger into this 2024 election year.
Voter Roll Purges
Voter roll maintenance is a practice that states clear voter rolls of ineligible registrations to keep the list up-to-date and accurate. Ineligible registrations include residents who moved to different jurisdictions or are deceased.
While voter roll maintenance can be an important process of organizing votes, abuse of this comes in the form of purges. Voter roll purges are the extreme enforcement of voter roll maintenance, and are disproportionately done in areas with a population of mostly people of color. These purges often inaccurately bumps eligible voters off the registration list.
From 2014 to 2016, 16 million people were deemed ineligible, which was a 33 percent increase from 2006-2008. If they are deemed ineligible, they have to cast provisional ballots which bars a guaranteed vote, or they may not vote at all.
Voter Identification Laws
Voter photo identification laws necessitate that voters have a permissible ID to vote. While mandating voter photo IDs may seem feasible to ensure that voting impersonation fraud does not occur, this is not the full scope of the story.
The Brennan Center revealed just how rare voter impersonation frauds are. According to their seminal report, impersonations only occurred in 0.00004 percent of the votes.
In addition to its redundancy, it does more harm than good. The Brennan Center also found that 25 percent of African American adults do not carry a permissible ID compared to 8 percent of white adults. This is because IDs are more challenging to obtain than one might think. For example, getting a driver’s license comes with barriers, such as affording Driver’s Education, a car, or simply affording time to learn to drive.
The effect of these voter ID laws is that 25 percent of otherwise eligible African American voters are not able to practice their democratic right to vote simply because of their socioeconomic circumstances. When they are made to be silent, the supposedly democratic government does not truly reflect the people's will.
Shelby County v. Holder Case (2013)
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was one of American history's most successful civil rights legislation, most notably Sections 4b and 5. Section 4b of the VRA developed a formula to identify which states and jurisdictions had a history of voting discrimination. Section 5 then took those jurisdictions and required them to get approval from the federal court to implement any changes in their election procedures.
In 2013, however, Shelby County, Alabama challenged the constitutionality of Section 4b, claiming it to be an outdated formula. In a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling, Section 4b was overturned, meaning that Section 5 was unenforceable. States became permitted to make changes to voting procedures without any federal oversight.
By 2018, 5 years after Shelby, 1,173 polling places in formerly Section 4b jurisdictions were closed. In Georgia, where 31 percent of the population is African American, 214 polling places were closed. One of the counties that had the most polling place closures was Warren, with 83 percent closed. 61 percent of Warren’s population is African American.
When there are fewer polling places, voting becomes much less accessible. Not only do some people need to travel far in order to cast a vote, they may need to wait in long lines in order to do so. In a study done by Keith Chen, it was found that majority-black neighborhoods were 74 percent more likely to spend more than 30 minutes at their polling place, compared to majority-white neighborhoods.
Working to rebuild what the Voting Rights Act accomplished is the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This would remedy what the Shelby ruling broke, and specifically update the criteria to enforce Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
