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Voting Rights

Voter Suppression Has Haunted The United States Since It Was Founded

August 23, 2020 Amy McKeever, National Geographic. , , ,
In 1787, the Founding Fathers wrestled over how to address suffrage in the U.S. Constitution. At the time, voting was restricted to wealthy white landowners. The framers debated whether it should be extended to commoners who had joined arms with them in the American Revolution, but who might overrule their interests. Ultimately, the question was punted to the states in Article I, Section 4, of the Constitution, which declares: “The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.” By not giving U.S. citizens an explicit constitutional right to vote, the Founding Fathers effectively decoupled voting rights from citizenship and denied those whom states barred from voting any recourse through the federal government.

A Poll Tax By any Other Name

August 5, 2020 Dana Sweeney, Facing South. , , ,
Robert Peoples remembers when African Americans won the right to vote in Alabama back in 1965. Though he was only 13 years old at the time, he had grown up in Mobile with a front-row seat to history as it was forged by a generation of ordinary Alabamians who won extraordinary political changes during the Civil Rights Movement. He knows how much was sacrificed and how much was gained, but that was another day. Today, more than 50 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Robert Peoples cannot vote in the state of Alabama.

Supreme Court Stopped One Million Floridians From Voting In November

July 17, 2020 By Mark Joseph Stern, Slate. , , ,
The Supreme Court all but guaranteed that nearly 1 million Floridians will be unable to vote in the 2020 election because of unpaid court debts in a shattering order handed down on Thursday. Its decision will throw Florida’s voter registration into chaos, placing a huge number of would-be voters in legal limbo and even opening them up to prosecution for casting a ballot. The justices have effectively permitted Florida Republicans to impose a poll tax in November. Florida’s ex-felons have a right to vote under both the state and federal constitutions. In 2018, a supermajority of residents approved a constitutional amendment that abolished a Jim Crow-era law permanently disenfranchising convicted felons. GOP lawmakers promptly sabotaged this amendment by passing a law that compelled formerly incarcerated people to pay all fines and fees associated with their sentence. Florida imposes a mind-boggling array of fees on defendants to fund its criminal justice system, and the new law would disenfranchise almost a million of the roughly 1.4 million voters who were poised to regain their voting rights.

Federal Court Restores Voting Rights To Hundreds Of Thousands Of Florida Prisoners

May 25, 2020 By ACLU. , , ,
A federal court on May 24, 2020 ruled that a Florida law that created wealth-based hurdles to voting is unconstitutional. The decision restores voting rights to hundreds of thousands of people with past criminal convictions. U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle found that conditioning voting on payment of legal financial obligations a person is unable to pay violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by discriminating on the basis of wealth. The court's decision implements Amendment 4, which restored voting rights to more than a million people who had completed the terms of their sentence including parole or probation.

Court Upholds Poll Tax For Convicted Felons In Florida To Vote

January 18, 2020 Staff, Aclufl.org , ,
TALLAHASSEE, FL — The Florida Supreme Court’s advisory opinion does not — indeed, cannot — alter what the U.S. Constitution requires. A federal court has already held that the state cannot deny people the right to vote because of their inability to pay financial obligations. The U.S. Constitution also prohibits making voting rights contingent on the payment of taxes, and it requires Florida to provide due process to citizens before taking their voting rights away.

Fighting Voter Purges Across The South

November 12, 2019 By Benjamin Barber, Facingsouth.org , ,
Despite research documenting the serious problems they present for voting rights, aggressive purges of the voting rolls continue to be proposed in advance of the 2020 elections, with some of them considered for Southern states. According to a recent analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, at least 17 million people were purged from voting rolls nationwide between 2016 and 2018, with racial minorities hit hardest. While states have a legitimate interest in keeping their voting rolls updated, doing so through wholesale purges close to elections risks barring qualified voters from casting ballots.

Advancing Rights Restoration: Where Should Civil Rights Stop?

September 14, 2019 Sawari Amani, Sawari Mi. , , ,
This week was called by Jailhouse Lawyers Speak (JLS) to be Unchain the Vote Week focused on bringing attention to the unconstitutional, dehumanizing act of felony disenfranchisement that plagues 48 of the 50 United States. During this week outside organizers hosted and attended events in solidarity with inside organizers’ call. One of the events I attended was the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Symposium, The Road to Re-Enfranchisement: Advancing Rights Restoration. The event was a closed invite only collaboration between New York and New Jersey attended by aligned organizations across the country including grassroots organizers like Initiate Justice, Emancipation Initiative and Millions for Prisoners (all of which are apart of the Right2Vote Campaign) as well as larger organizations like Demos, the Vera Institute and Common Cause.

Court Upholds North Dakota Law Stripping Voting Rights From Native Americans

August 10, 2019 Imani Gandy, Truthout.org , ,
The case is as much about local infrastructure and lack of regard for North Dakota’s indigenous population as it is about voter suppression and a state forcing voters to comply with a requirement that the state itself has made impossible to follow. Thousands of Native Americans who do not have residential addresses through no fault of their own have been affected by the law, HB 1369. What’s worse is that these Native voters may be disenfranchised permanently should HB 1369 remain in place—something the three-judge panel that ruled on the lawsuit challenging the law seems OK with.

Civil Rights And Voter Suppression In The US

November 4, 2018 By Meghan Tinsley, Open Democracy , , ,
Voter suppression as one component of the state’s wide-ranging efforts to prevent people of color from claiming their rights as citizens. Those efforts, in turn, stem from the state’s fear that people of color would ‘step out of line’, rejecting the authority of a system that relegates them to second-class status. With this in mind, Grinter’s assessment would not have been out of place in 1963, when Hartman Turnbow, the first African-American to register to vote in Mississippi, was arrested after his house was firebombed by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

With First Potential Black Female Governor, Georgia Closing Seven Black Population Polling Districts

August 19, 2018 Sam Levine, Huffington Post. , ,
Election officials in a rural southwest Georgia county are defending a plan to suddenly close seven of the county’s nine polling places against allegations of racial discrimination, saying the ones it wants to close are not sufficiently accessible to people with disabilities. Randolph County, the site of the proposed changes, is more than 60 percent black, with a little over 30 percent of residents in poverty ― more than double the national level. The Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to the election board earlier this week warning of a lawsuit because the proposed closures discriminated against black voters.

How Alabama’s ‘New Poll Tax’ Bars Thousands Of People From Voting

October 14, 2017 Connor Sheets, www.al.com , , ,
By Connor Sheets for AL - Randi Lynn Williams assumes she will never be able to afford to vote again. The 38-year-old Dothan resident lost her right to vote in 2008, when she was convicted of fraudulent use of a credit card. She was on probation for over two years, then served a few months behind bars ending in early 2011, at which point she would have been eligible to vote in most states. In Maine and Vermont, she would have never lost that right in the first place. But in Alabama and eight other states from Nevada to Tennessee, anyone who has lost the franchise cannot regain it until they pay off any outstanding court fines, legal fees and victim restitution. In Alabama, that requirement has fostered an underclass of thousands of people who are unable to vote because they do not have enough money. For folks like Williams, who said she regularly voted prior to her conviction in 2008, poverty is the only remaining obstacle to participation in the electoral process. "When all this started, the county told me I lost my right to vote and I don't get my vote back until I pay all my fines and costs and get off probation and all that," she said. Alabama's felon disenfranchisement policies are likely unconstitutional, and they have disparate impacts on felons who are poor, black, or both, according to experts.

Calling Out The Kobach Commission For What It Is

September 29, 2017 Emma Olson Sharky, www.billmoyers.com , ,
By Emma Olson Sharky for Moyers and Company - In the coverage that followed the recent meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Voter Integrity, the media focused on the testimony of John Lott Jr., a gun researcher who argued that the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco’s background check system should be used to check voter eligibility. And while Lott’s testimony was worthy of the coverage — if not just for its ridiculousness, but also for its inaccuracy — this focus diverted attention from Kris Kobach’s continued underlying goal: to use this commission as a tool to restrict voting across the entire country. From the very start of this commission, Kris Kobach — Kansas’ Republican Secretary of State and vice chair of the commission — has made voter restriction his main objective. On June 28, as one of the panel’s very first actions, Kobach sent letters to the secretaries of state in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, asking them to compile and send extensive data on their voters. He requested not just names and addresses, but also other deeply personal information, such as dates of birth, Social Security numbers, political party affiliation and every election voted dating back to 2006.

1 In 4 Voters Live In States With Automatic Voter Registration

August 29, 2017 Staff, www.brennancenter.org , ,
By Staff of Brennan Center for Justice - Chicago, IL – Today, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner signed a bill to bring automatic voter registration to the state, which could help sign up more than 1 million eligible voters. The legislation had passed by a unanimous vote in both chambers earlier this summer. Rauner’s signature means that 80 million Americans — 1 in 4 — now live in a state where automatic voter registration has been approved. The plan would help sign up Illinoisans currently not on the voter rolls by automatically registering them when they interact with the DMV and other state agencies, unless they decline. It is an approach that not only increases voter participation, but also saves states money and increases accuracy of voter rolls. Illinois’ legislation is notable for having the potential to bring the reform to a broad range of state agencies, as opposed to other efforts around the country that focus largely on driver’s license–issuing offices. The bill, which passed 55-0 in the state Senate and 115-0 in the House, was sponsored by Sen. Andy Manar (D) and other legislators. The Just Democracy Coalition advocated strongly for the legislation, which also had the support of several local election officials including Cook County Clerk David Orr, along with the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.

The Latest Challenges To The South’s Felony Disenfranchisement Laws

July 20, 2017 Olivia Paschal, www.facingsouth.org , ,
By Olivia Paschal for Facing South - While all Southern states have laws disenfranchising people while they are incarcerated and on probation or parole, Florida stands out with one of the nation's most restrictive felony disenfranchisement laws — one of only four states that impose a lifetime ban on voting for anyone convicted of a felony. The others are Virginia, Kentucky and Iowa. Because of the law, there are currently nearly 1.7 million Floridians — the highest number in any state — that have permanently lost the right to vote, according to a 2016 report by The Sentencing Project. Florida accounts for 27 percent of the national population of people disenfranchised due to felony convictions, and the 1.5 million Floridians who have completed their sentences but remain without voting rights make up 48 percent of the national total. But they could get that right back thanks to a ballot initiative now underway to amend the state constitution and allow people with felony convictions to vote once they complete their sentences, including probation or parole. This spring, the Florida Supreme Court approved the language for the initiative, which was drafted by Floridians for a Fair Democracy, a coalition of nonpartisan civic and faith organizations. But for the amendment to appear on the ballot next November, its supporters need to collect and submit over 700,000 signatures to county elections supervisors, who will need to verify them by Feb. 1.

Mathematicians Want To Save Democracy

June 11, 2017 Carrie Arnold, www.nature.com , , ,
By Carrie Arnold for Nature. Leaning back in his chair, Jonathan Mattingly swings his legs up onto his desk, presses a key on his laptop and changes the results of the 2012 elections in North Carolina. On the screen, flickering lines and dots outline a map of the state’s 13 congressional districts, each of which chooses one person to send to the US House of Representatives. By tweaking the borders of those election districts, but not changing a single vote, Mattingly’s maps show candidates from the Democratic Party winning six, seven or even eight seats in the race. In reality, they won only four — despite earning a majority of votes overall. Mattingly’s election simulations can’t rewrite history, but he hopes they will help to support democracy in the future — in his state and the nation as a whole.
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