Is voter suppression a big issue in US politics?

@bijouxbroussard How could a former Comfederate state be permitted to run their own election!

@SW-User They have not completely changed how they feel about black voters.

@Picklebobble2 Yes. Its starting to be rather a joke to outsiders. But then, Look what gets elected.

@RodionRomanovitch I think the hyper partisanship of American politics is why its not a scandal.

Republican politicians and voters (see their responses here) don't care about elections being fair as long as they win. They just need the tiniest sliver of plausible deniability.

@Burnley123 And that goes for having help from the Russians too.

@SW-User I dunno because I read that voter fraud is a negligible problem in the US. In the UK we can register on-line or fill in a slip sent through the post. You then get a voting card posted and turn up on the day. Even if you don't have the card, they still let you do it if you answer a security question. There are never any lines either. I just think the thing in America smacks of political motivation and it should be made as easy as possible.

@Burnley123 If you go get a DMV ID card you can register there. Anyone with a legal ID card has no excuse really.

@Northwest All this proves is that their German scientists...

@Burnley123 Trump's uncle was an MIT Professor. He did not teach what Trump thinks he did, but that's how Mushroom Head got to be a stable genius.

@Burnley123 it probably depends on what you consider "disenfranchised,"
if you mean legal voters who not allowed to vote-
Or they cast a vote and it wasn't counted for some reason, that is a problem And if there is evidence of that then it should be dealt with, but all I have heard is talking heads screaming about it.

If you are talking about ballots that were cast that were not counted because the signature did not match the name on the ballot or the ID could not be verified, or they just filled out the information wrong... that is not suppression, that is just life.

2 senators per state... that's in the constitution, precisely so no one state has to much power in the Senate. that is a check against the House of Representatives, where bigger states get more representatives based on population, that is where the gerrymandering problem is most prevalent.

@krf336 "disenfranchised"...legal voters who are not allowed to vote. Indeed. In Georgia and North Dakota, for example:

[quote]In Georgia, Kemp remained in his position as Georgia’s secretary of state — the office that oversees elections in Georgia — even while running for governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams.

Kemp has carried out mass purges of the voter rolls, ostensibly to remove dead people and people who haven’t voted in recent elections from the records, but in such a sweeping way that Democrats fear it will keep voters, particularly minority voters, off the rolls.

Kemp’s office also put 53,000 voter registrations on hold, nearly 70 percent of which are for black voters, by using an error-prone “exact match” system, which stops voter registrations if there are any discrepancies, down to dropped hyphens, with other government records.

And in the days before Election Day, Kemp accused Democrats, through the secretary of state’s website and with no evidence, of attempting to hack the state’s voter registration system. As elections law expert Richard Hasen wrote in Slate, this was “perhaps the most outrageous example of election administration partisanship in the modern era.”

Other problems also popped up in Georgia throughout the day, including long voting lines and technical errors. That led to voting places extending their hours very late into the night.

In North Dakota’s Senate race, meanwhile, Republicans tried different stunts to skew the race against Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND). After Heitkamp won in 2012 with strong Native American support, Republicans began discussing new voter ID rules. That led to a new requirement that voters show they have a current residential address to vote.

The move prevented as many as thousands of Native Americans from voting since many of them live on reservations and, as a result, use PO boxes instead of residential addresses. And while Native American groups tried to get voters out to make up for any negative effect, the efforts didn’t appear to work, or at least save Heitkamp.

But were either the Georgia or North Dakota voter suppression efforts enough to flip the races in Republicans’ favor?

It’s hard to say. As I’ve written before, the research suggests that restrictions on voting, from photo IDs to early voting cuts, have a small effect — a few percentage points — on election turnout.

The key is that minority and Democratic voters are disproportionately affected. Since minority Americans are less likely to have flexible work hours or own cars, they might have a harder time affording a voter ID or getting to the right place (typically a DMV or BMV office) to obtain a voter ID.

For the same reasons, they may rely more on early voting opportunities to cast a ballot, or require a voting place they can walk to or reach by public transit. And they may have problems overcoming other hurdles, like having to appeal a voter registration or having to stay in line longer.

Based on the results so far, Cramer, the Republican, won the North Dakota Senate race by far too large of a margin — nearly 28,000 votes, or 10 percentage points — for the voter suppression efforts to explain his win. As ugly as the targeted suppression of Native Americans was, this seems like a case of a red state returning to Republican hands.

In Georgia, however, the governor’s race is close enough that Kemp’s tactics could have made a difference. With almost all precincts reporting, Kemp may have won the governor’s race by a little more than 85,000 votes, or under 3 percentage points. (But this race isn’t yet called and could go to a run-off if Kemp doesn’t get a majority of the votes.) That’s fairly close to the kind of margin in which voter suppression efforts could have won the day.

And even if the tactics weren’t the sole reason Republicans won in these two states, the new voting restrictions certainly didn’t hurt the GOP.

The Republican victories may lead to more voter suppression
Republicans, of course, argue that their measures are not about stifling voters or swinging elections, but preventing voter fraud. That’s the rationale Republicans have used time and again to enact new restrictions on voting in the past few years, particularly after a Supreme Court ruling in 2013, Shelby County v. Holder, that weakened the Voting Rights Act.

And they’ve been very successful: Since 2011, 24 states — all but five via Republican-controlled governments — have passed new voting restrictions, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy think tank.

But basically everyone knows that Republicans’ justification for these voting restrictions is bullshit.

For one, voter fraud is extremely rare. There is a lot of research backing this up, but, based on one investigation in 2012 by the News21 journalism project, there were 0.000003 alleged cases of fraud for every national general election vote cast between 2000 and part of 2012 — and as many as half of those alleged cases weren’t credible. Voter fraud is simply not a big deal in America’s electoral system.

In fact, Republicans have repeatedly admitted that their claims about voting restrictions are bullshit. As longtime North Carolina Republican consultant Carter Wrenn in 2016 told the Washington Post, “Look, if African Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, they would have kept early voting right where it was.”

So Republicans are carrying out voting restrictions to stop Democrats, and particularly minority voters who are likely to go Democrat, from voting. If the GOP concludes that the restrictions helped push Kemp to victory in Georgia and unseat Heitkamp in North Dakota, there could be a real incentive to continue making voting harder and harder across the US.
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@bijouxbroussard I live in Georgia and you are mischaracterizing the issue. Kemp is the secretary general, he was elected to that position and "overseeing" the election is his job. but all that means is certifying the results basically, he has no control over the voting precincts or the vote counts. And the "Purge" did not eliminate or suppress any votes it was simply an audit to remove outdated information, such as those that had died or left the state. But anyone with a mismatched address or ID could correct the issue at any government office prior to the election and even at a polling place, that is on the voter, not on kemp. Minorities have to follow the same process as anyone, so why would that "apply" differently to them? the arguement doesnt make any sense.

And lines... please, there are lines everywhere in every election, and even not in an election, just go to the DMV!


as far as Carter Wren's statement goes, that is one person's opinion in one place.


the other day in Florida senator Nelson and the mayor running for governor (both losing) Challenged the rejection of ballots cast by non-citizens. That is the opposite side of this- and its disgusting...

@ViciDraco here it’s labor and liberal.
Liberal is supposed to be conservative but it’s going more left then labor..

@TheOneyouwerewarnedabout Yeah. That I know

@TheOneyouwerewarnedabout The aussie liberals are not leftists. They kicked out a fiscally Conservative classic liberal because he wasn't right wing enough.

@cultofaction I think there is voter suppression but what you say could also be an issue. SHould the electoral system change?

@cultofaction [quote]Also, it is harder to register to vote than in other countries[/quote]
I also wanted to note that this is laughable. I just had to register to vote in a new state and it was incredibly easy and didn't require any proof of citizenship at all. Hell, I could have even registered under a false name, and so long as I had the last four digits of a matching social security number, I'd be able to vote with the voter registration form I get in the mail alone.

@Burnley123 If you ask me, voting is an awful way of doing things. If you ask the Constitution, then no, it should not be changed, and to do so would be treasonous, as all federal officials swear an oath to uphold it.

@Burnley123 Eh, there is an up and down to it. Either way I was just saying. SOmeof those things listed have no impact on voter turnout.

I only voted in two states. NY and California and in both states it is almost too easy. It's almost scary how easy it is to go in and just say who you are and vote. So I honestly don't know what it is like in states where so many say it is fucked up.

@MethDozer In the South they’ve closed polling places arbitrarily, removed people from voter rolls without notifying them, required several pieces of identification in [b]certain[/b] districts and even required people to take “tests” before [b]allowing[/b] them to register. I first voted in Georgia, while in college there. A [b]group[/b] of us went to register downtown and the folks were [b]not[/b] happy to see us. Girls who came in from Agnes Scott were treated very differently.

@bijouxbroussard I know it screwed up in some places. Just sayin' where I have voted it so vastly different it is hard to wrap my head around it. I just hear what people such as yourself say they had to deal with it, but being so far removed I don't have much understand of the intricacies.
It boggles the mind to someone outside of that how it can even take place or exactly how it works.