I decided to read this library book because I'm interested in a book on voter suppression that was written by New York Times staff. I subscribe to this newspaper and I respect it a great deal.
I have a great deal of interest in voting and have always voted ever since I became eligible to vote. I understand when people have challenging work schedules and can't manage to vote. Yet if they have relatively easy circumstances for voting in their precincts, I really don't understand why they absent themselves from the polls on Election Day.
I was amazed to learn that a national Election Day was established in 1845 in order to prevent fraud. According to political science professor Michael McDonald, a single election day was considered to be needed so that people couldn't vote multiple times at more than one location. The U.S. has been obsessed with election fraud for almost two centuries. Consider how hard political organizations have to work to get people to vote at all, yet our leaders think that people would vote multiple times in the same election if they didn't actively prevent fraud. Election fraud is actually so rare that it's nearly non-existent. Yet I predict that there will never be national elections held online because of the fear of fraud.
In 2002 the Help America Vote Act passed both houses of Congress. HAVA required all states to have electronic voting machines. This doesn't mean that an individual precinct will have an electronic voting machine. A precinct may be hand counting ballots.
I discovered that my impression that persons who had ever been convicted of a felony weren't allowed to vote in my state was completely wrong. They are allowed to vote after serving their time. I looked it up online. This is the case in most U.S. states. Though Republicans in Virginia and other states are trying to keep people with convictions from voting permanently.
The case of a woman who was released from prison in Florida was mentioned. She was suing the state because she was charged $1000 in court fees that she considered a poll tax. I imagine that she was considering it a poll tax because she needed to pay it in order to vote. That is a considerable barrier to voting for a newly released prisoner who will probably have difficulty finding employment.
I learned about voter suppression of Native Americans in states where you must have a residential address. Many Native Americans don't have residential addresses if they live on reservations. Those Native Americans who are allowed to vote and register to vote, usually vote for Democrats.
Then I read in this book about Maine Republicans ending voter registration on Election Day claiming it will stop voter fraud. Maine has had only two cases of voter fraud in 38 years. The Republican governor of Wisconsin predicted that his state's voter ID law would cost Hillary Clinton votes. In 2012 he claimed that the voter ID law would lower Obama's voter tally because Democrats cheat more often. One of the few instances of voter fraud in Wisconsin was a vote for this same Republican governor. Later in 2015 a staff aide to a Republican state legislator resigned because the Republican caucus was discussing voter ID bills as a means of suppressing the votes of college students and minorities.
Photo ID laws mandating that voters must display their photo IDs when they vote tend to suppress the votes of the elderly and minority groups because an ID costs money. The author of this article does consider requiring IDs to vote a kind of poll tax. In Missouri, as of the publication of this book, the Missouri State Legislature had voted to approve a referendum in which Missouri voters will decide whether there should be a constitutional amendment requiring that voters show a photo ID when they vote.
In an article on early voting, I discovered that a 1977 flood control proposition that was on the ballot in Monterey, California was the first modern American election decided by people who voted early. The author of this article predicts that in the future campaigns may be starting up to six weeks before Election Day. He must have meant local elections, not elections involving candidates for state or national office which start a great deal earlier.
I was astonished to learn that in 1978 California was the first state to allow anyone to cast absentee ballots. I would have thought that absentee ballots began earlier than that to allow soldiers who are serving outside their districts to vote.
There is an article in this book with the title "The Student Vote is Surging, So Are Efforts to Suppress It" by Michael Wines. In 2018 there was a poll taken at Harvard University. 45% of students aged 18-24 identified as Democrats, 24% considered themselves Republicans and 29% called themselves Independents. Students became an important voting bloc in the 2020 election. The Speaker of the Republican majority state legislature in New Hampshire promised to "clamp down" on students voting. He said that students should be discouraged from voting because they have no life experience, but I encountered students who were working part time at a lower level in their professions while I was in graduate school. They also did all the practical things that people who may have been high school dropouts have needed to master such as shopping for groceries, doing laundry and paying the rent.
Disenfranchisement, as the New Hampshire Speaker of the State Legislature demonstrated, is an actual issue. Voters recognize this. 3/4 of Americans say that the country is going in the wrong direction. Gerrymandered districts cause certain voters to be favored over others. So does the campaign finance system that gives corporations and the wealthy greater power.
Another issue is that in most elections voters don't see any candidate that understands their problems. So they end up voting against a candidate who they believe will make things worse rather than for one who will make their situations better.
Almost every state allows ordinary citizens to challenge a voter's eligibility on or before Election Day. I challenged a voter's eligibility once. I was an election officer in several elections. During one election, I did see someone enter the precinct a second time and stand in line to vote. I informed the other election workers in case they hadn't noticed that this individual had already voted. The voter's signature on the rolls would have stopped this person, but I thought that the individual should have been escorted off the premises.
I spent some time poring over my notes on The New York Times articles in this volume because I care so much about this topic. I want my readers to stay informed and please find the time to vote!
No comments:
Post a Comment