Unblock the Vote

For all of our nation’s claims of being a beacon of world democracy, each election year voters discover a more troubling reality: The U.S. voting system is in fact fragile, confusing and prone to break-downs — and fails to express the political will of many citizens.

The 2008 elections were no exception. This year proved a vital testing ground for the country’s election system. The conventional wisdom holds that our nation passed the test. But across the South and country, millions of voters were again denied a voice in democracy.

Long lines, dirty tricks, voting machine failures and other problems on Election Day were eased this year by an army of election watchdogs able to expose and trouble-shoot problems — including the Voting Rights Watch project of the Institute for Southern Studies, which helped bring national attention to key voting controversies in the South.

But the need for outside groups to hold election officials accountable only highlighted systemic weaknesses in the voting system. These episodic obstacles were coupled with more fundamental problems in the election system, including battles over voter registration and denial of voting rights to citizens who have served criminal sentences.

These election glitches are more than an affront to our ideals of democracy: As 2008 reminded us, it can also tip an election. This year, the presidential race was “too close to call” in three states on election night; in North Carolina, just .32 percent — or 14,177 votes — ended up separating John McCain and Barack Obama. Three U.S. Senate races were equally close, with the Georgia seat going to a run-off.

The 2008 elections reminded us that every vote counts — but can we depend on the election system to ensure every citizen’s vote is counted? Here are five areas where we can draw on the lessons of 2008 to bring us closer to a truly modern, 21st century election system that brings us a few steps closer to true democracy.

 

1. Making the List: Voter Registration

One of the weakest links in our election system is the way citizens sign up to vote. A patchwork of conflicting and restrictive laws makes it difficult for citizens to even get on the voter rolls, much less cast their vote.

In 2008, the nonprofit Election Protection coalition declared that registration problems were the most “alarming challenge to our electoral process today.” The problem isn’t new: As the bipartisan Task Force on the Federal Election System chaired by Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford concluded in 2001, “The registration laws in force throughout the United States are among the world’s most demanding . . . [and are] one reason why voter turnout in the United States is near the bottom of the developed world.”

An October 2008 report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan public policy and law institute at New York University Law School, explains the ultimate impact:

Currently, in nearly every state, eligible voters are not placed on electoral rolls unless they first take the initiative to register and otherwise satisfy state-imposed requirements for voter registration. Even after they have registered, voters must start the process all over again virtually every time they move. . . . The result is a system where many eligible citizens are unable to vote. They fall off the rolls; they never sign up in the first place; they drift ever further away from electoral participation. Some fifty million eligible American citizens are not registered to vote.

In key Southern states, voter registration became an important battleground in 2008 — especially the issue of “vote purging.” Election officials regularly clean up or “purge” lists, but over-zealous purging put thousands of voters at risk:

• In Florida, officials reinstated a controversial “no match” law two months before the elections that removed voters if their personal information didn’t exactly match information in government databases. But the databases are notoriously plagued with errors: Florida officials found that 75 percent of about 20,000 voter registrations from a three-week period in September were mismatched due to typographical and administrative errors.

• Georgia flagged over 50,000 voters for mismatches with the national Social Security Administration database. Republican Secretary of State Karen Handel claimed she was simply complying with the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which mandates cross-checking new voter registrations. Georgia submitted 2 million names to be checked, though it chalked up many of those to a computer error. But even the 747,000 state officials intended to send was the second-highest amount in the country — and more than the actual number of new voter registrations.

• Purging can create especially serious problems in places like the Gulf Coast, where voters have been uprooted by natural disasters and aren’t easily notified by officials. In Louisiana, officials purged 21,000 voters in 2008 — including many in areas devastated by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Gustav.

One practical solution, say voting advocates, is National Voter Registration — a system used by 24 other countries. Under this system, the federal government would have the responsibility of registering citizens and ensuring they remain registered. For example, one proposal would create a registration roll modeled after the Social Security database that would assign each person a unique voter-identification number, which would remain the same regardless of where the voter moves.

National Voter Registration would be great for voters, helping them avoid the confusing maze of conflicting state-based registration rules and requirements. It would relieve local elections officials who get bogged down each election year with new voter registrations and spend precious resources to update and verify lists. It would also allay the fears of those concerned about voter fraud by eliminating the possibility of a voter casting a ballot twice in two different states as well as ensuring glitches in voter purges don’t deny eligible citizens the right to vote.

If National Voter Registration is too big of a jump, a state-based reform that proved successful in 2008 was same-day voter registration, which allows voters to register and cast votes at the same time. First implemented in Maine in 1973, same-day registration — or Election Day Registration — is also practiced in Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Wyoming. A 2007 brief by the New York-based policy group Demos found that states with same-day registration out-perform non-EDR states in election turnout by 10 percent.

In 2008, North Carolina had its first big test with a form of same-day registration passed in 2007: same-day registration and voting at early-voting centers before Election Day. Between the primaries and general election, more than 91,700 voters in North Carolina took advantage of the law, especially historically disenfranchised voters including youth and African-Americans. North Carolina’s success has prompted states like West Virginia to also consider same-day registration during early voting.

 

2. Easing Pressure at the Polls: Early Voting

Early voting is one of the major success stories of the 2008 election. Thirty-two states have some form of early voting, and nearly a third of all ballots counted on Election Day came days, weeks or even a month early in the states that allow voters to cast ballots early.

Early voting helps voters not only by giving them more options about when to cast their vote, but also by providing extra time to resolve problems such as eligibility requirements. Early voting is a valuable safeguard to protect voting rights, as The New York Times pointed out in an Oct. 29, 2008 staff editorial titled “The Success of Early Voting”:

“Early voting actually makes it harder for the forces of disenfranchisement to stop eligible voters from casting ballots. If election officials try to require voters to present ID when it is not required by law, early voting gives voters a chance to simply return the next day. Dirty tricks are also harder to pull off. If political operatives want to jam get-out-the-vote telephone lines, as they did on Election Day in New Hampshire in 2002, it would be harder to do if people voted over two weeks.”

Although many election sites were unprepared for early voting, resulting in waits of up to six hours in Florida and Georgia, overall early voting helped smooth out problems this year. States that allowed voting as early as two weeks before Election Day experienced fewer delays and problems, and lines were shorter on Election Day in battleground states with early voting. North Carolina stood out as an especially successful example.

 

3. Safeguarding Democracy: Enforcement of Voting Laws

Every election year, dirty tricks and deceptive election practices rear their head, seeking to confuse, mislead and ultimately disenfranchise voters. Such practices have an especially sordid history in the South, where underhanded strategies were used by those seeking to deny African- Americans the vote after they had gained legal access to the ballot box.

Among the tactics that surfaced in Southern states in 2008:

• In Virginia, official-looking flyers distributed in the largely African-American Hampton Roads area in October 2008 instructed voters that, due to expected heavy turnout, Democrats would vote on Wednesday, Nov. 5 instead of Nov. 4. The source of the bogus flyers was never found, and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, called in the Department of Justice. “While state officials have promised an investigation,” he said, “the violation under state law is merely a misdemeanor and does not carry the weight of federal enforcement.”

• In the North Carolina presidential primaries, the Institute for Southern Studies exposed the source of anonymous, confusing robo-calls made to tens of thousands of voters. The calls, which featured a “Lamont Williams” and encouraged the recipients to register to vote, were made by Women’s Voices Women Vote, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. Because the calls came after the registration deadline, they led many voters to fear they weren’t registered — a problem that had cropped up from the group’s activity in several other states. After the N.C. Attorney General threatened to prosecute, the group paid a $100,000 fine that was earmarked for North Carolina schools.

• At George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. someone hacked into the e-mail system and sent students a message that appeared to come from the provost telling them — falsely — that the election had been moved to Nov. 5.

As the Virginia flyer case illustrates, the enforcement of voting laws is uneven, and violators are rarely subjected to federal prosecution. In the first five years of the Bush administration, the Voting Rights Division in the Department of Justice brought suit in only three cases under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits states and municipalities from enacting voting procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color or a minority language group.

 

4. Restoring the Vote: Full Citizenship for Former Felons

More than 40 years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, policies of felony disenfranchisement — laws that prohibit voting by people with felony convictions — still hearken back to the Jim Crow era. According to a September 2008 report by The Sentencing Project, these laws bar some 5.3 million former and current felons in the United States from participating in democracy — including many who have completed the terms of their sentence.

The South has always been disproportionately impacted by felony disenfranchisement, and with the region’s legacies of voter suppression and Jim Crow, these policies have been exacerbated by racial disparities. Nationally, an estimated 13 percent of African-American men today are barred from voting due to their involvement in the criminal justice system, making black men the single most disenfranchised demographic in the United States, according to The Sentencing Project.

Since 1997, at least 19 states have amended felony disenfranchisement policies in an effort to reduce their restrictiveness and expand voter eligibility. In Florida, Republican Gov. Charlie Crist recently pushed through changes that enabled 112,000 people with felony convictions to cast ballots in 2008. In Virginia, which along with Kentucky is one of only two states that require felons to receive a reprieve from the governor to vote, Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine helped speed up approvals, enabling thousands more ex-felons to cast ballots this year.

But in Florida, only 9,000 of those who were newly enfranchised actually voted in 2008 — pointing to another problem: lack of education about the law. Vast differences between state policies and changes in state laws have confused not only voters but also election officials. According to an October 2008 study by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Brennan Center for Justice:

Across the country there is persistent confusion among election officials about their state’s felony disenfranchisement policies. Election officials receive little or no training on these laws, and there is little or no coordination or communication between election offices and the criminal justice system. These factors, coupled with complex laws and complicated registration procedures, result in the mass dissemination of inaccurate and misleading information, which in turn leads to the de facto disenfranchisement of untold hundreds of thousands of eligible would-be voters throughout the country.

Groups such as the ACLU and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People have brought lawsuits to challenge felon disenfranchisement, and others are calling on states to better inform voters about their rights.

 

5. Taking Money Out of Politics

For years, election reform advocates have proposed measures to limit the influence of big money in politics. But the 2008 elections sent an ambiguous message about campaign finance reform. President-elect Barack Obama reversed an earlier pledge to accept public financing, and his campaign went on to shatter fundraising records: Campaign reports show that Obama raised nearly $1 billion for his campaign and related election efforts, such as the White House transition.

Indeed, an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics found that most national races in 2008 were won by the candidate who spent the most. Following the pattern of previous U.S. elections, the bigger spenders won the presidency, 397 of 426 decided House races, and 30 of 32 settled Senate races.

“The 2008 election will go down in U.S. history as an election of firsts, but this was far from the first time that money was overwhelmingly victorious on Election Day,” said CRP Executive Director Sheila Krumholz. “The best-funded candidates won nine out of 10 contests, and all but a few members of Congress will be returning to Washington.”

But there are signs of hope for those concerned about the influence of money in politics. In 2002, North Carolina became the first state in the country to offer public financing — or “voter-owned elections,” as advocates put it — for candidates in judicial races. In 2008, 11 out of 12 candidates opted into the system, cutting the role of outside money.

The massive sums raised by judicial candidates — especially in states such as Alabama, Georgia and West Virginia — have always raised the specter of justice being up for sale. For example, Brent Benjamin of the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals cast the deciding vote in a 3-2 ruling that spared a coal company, Massey Energy, from paying a $50 million settlement. Massey’s chief executive, Don Blankenship, contributed $3 million to Benjamin’s campaign for the court in 2004; Blankenship’s money amounted to more than 60 percent of all Benjamin’s contributions. As James Sample, an attorney with the Brennan Center, argued: “It’s an egregious example of what is becoming . . . [the] norm, which is that massive contributors or financial supporters for judicial candidates are now appearing in litigation before the very judges that they supported.”

 

A New Moment for Reform?

What are the prospects for voting reform? The effort to expand and perfect democracy has a long and uneven history in the United States. As Harvard historian Alex Keyssar notes in his seminal book, The Right to Vote: “The history of suffrage in the United States is a history of both expansion and contraction, of inclusion and exclusion, of shifts in direction and momentum.”

At the state level, the success of early voting, same-day registration and the recent loosening of draconian laws disenfranchising ex-felon citizens give voting advocates hope that a window of opportunity has opened for expanding the franchise.

There are some hopeful signs in the transition of power in Washington as well. For example, Melody Barnes, a Virginia native tapped to lead the Obama administration’s Domestic Policy Council, is a long-time voting rights advocate, helping shepherd through Congress a 1992 amendment to the Voting Rights Act that expanded bilingual voting options — an increasingly important issue in the South.

But as the history of our country’s long struggles over voting suggest, prospects for reform ultimately depend on the electorate’s willingness and ability to demand change.