An attack on democracy

The US has just gone through its presidential election where Obama won a thumping victory over the Republican party. But lost in all the festivities is the emergence of a particularly vicious strain of political thinking and strategy that reared its head during the campaign. It was the systemmatic and well financed campaign to nullify the  basic tenets of a democratic government- the right of its citizens to vote.

In a book recently released, Jonathen Alter lays out the framework and the plans of this campaign funded not only by the republican party but also a few well healed individuals seeking personal gain in the defeat of Obama. This attack is sinister and has profound long term implications for the country.

Voter suppression is a strategy to influence the outcome of an election by discouraging or preventing people from exercising their right to vote. It is distinguished from political campaigning in that campaigning attempts to change likely voting behavior by changing the opinions of potential voters through persuasion and organization. Voter suppression instead attempts to reduce the number of voters who might vote against the candidate or proposition advocated by the suppressors.

The tactics of voter suppression can range from minor "dirty tricks" that make voting inconvenient, up to blatantly illegal activities that physically intimidate prospective voters to prevent them from casting ballots. Voter suppression could be particularly effective if a significant amount of voters are intimidated individually because the voter might not consider his or her single vote important.

In the 2012 election, republicans orchestrated a country wide campaign using all these tactics.

Laws or administrative practices in 41 states of which 16 actually passed the legislation made it more difficult for people to register to vote. ALEC circulated a model bill to the states urging them to adopt restrictive voting practices.

Florida imposed a short deadline for the submission of voter registration forms in 2011, with stiff penalties for late filing. The bill led to the end of voter registration work by one organization, the League of Women Voters, whose spokesperson said, "Despite the fact that the League of Women Voters is one of the nation’s most respected civic organizations, with a 91-year history of registering and educating voters, we will be unable to comply with the egregious provisions contained in [this bill]."

Pennsylvania passed a photo ID law requiring voters to present a government-approved photo ID before they may cast their ballots. But  photo ID requirements disproportionately affect minority, handicapped and elderly voters who don't normally maintain driver's licenses, and therefore that requiring such groups to obtain and keep track of photo IDs that are otherwise unneeded is a suppression tactic aimed at those groups.

In Wisconsin voters were given false information about when and how to vote, leading them to fail to cast valid ballots. In 2011, Americans for Prosperity (a conservative organization that was supporting Republican candidates) sent many Democratic voters a mailing that gave an incorrect deadline for absentee ballots. Voters who relied on the deadline in the mailing would have sent in their ballots too late for them to be counted.

Florida reduced voting days from 14 to 8. Michigan required training before any registration drives, Ohio reduced voting on sundays and Colarado sent letters to Latinos challenging their citizenship status.

The full-scale assault on voting rights that followed the 2010 midterm elections many movement veterans off-guard. More than a dozen states, including critical battlegrounds like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, adopted new laws to restrict access to the ballot—all of which disproportionately affected communities of color. “I was naïve to think voting rights were untouchable,” says Bond, former chair of the NAACP. “I didn’t dream that Republicans would be as bold and as racist as they are.”  Lewis saw the restrictions as an obvious ploy to suppress the power of the young and minority voters who formed the core of Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” in 2008. “It was a deliberate, well-greased and organized attempt to stop this progress,” he says. “They saw all these people getting registered as a threat to power.” 

“Voting rights are under attack in America,” said Lewis and “There’s a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.” He called voter-ID laws a poll tax and recalled how blacks who attempted to register in the South were required to guess the number of bubbles in a bar of soap or the number of jellybeans in a jar. “We must not step backward to another dark period in our history,” Lewis warned. “The vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democratic society.”

Lewis had it right- this full scale assault is not only a threat to voting rights but indeed to democracy and it needs to be fought by all citizens.