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Voter Suppression

All of this played out against a landscape shaped by structural factors that didn’t get enough scrutiny during the campaign. Most notable is the impact of voter suppression, through restrictive laws as well as efforts to discourage and depress turnout.

An unnamed senior Trump campaign official boasted to the press in late October 2016 that “we have three major voter suppression operations underway,” aimed at white liberals, young women, and African Americans. It’s worth pausing on this for a moment and reflecting on the fact that they weren’t even trying to hide that they were suppressing the vote. Most campaigns try to win by attracting more support. Trump actively tried to discourage people from voting at all. They used some of the same tactics as the Russians, including trafficking in fake news and under-the-radar Facebook attacks. Despicable stuff. After the election, Trump even thanked African Americans for not voting.

But whatever Trump was up to was just the latest in a long-term Republican strategy to discourage and disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters.

The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts opened the floodgates by gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013. When I was in the Senate, we voted to reauthorize the law 98 to 0 and President George W. Bush signed it. But Justice Roberts essentially argued that racism was a thing of the past, and therefore the country no longer needed key protections of the Voting Rights Act. It was one of the worst decisions the court has ever made. By 2016, fourteen states had new restrictions on voting, including burdensome ID requirements aimed at weeding out students, poor people, the elderly, and people of color. Republicans in many states also limited the number and hours of polling places, curtailed early voting and same-day registration, scrapped language assistance for non-English speakers, and purged large numbers of voters from the rolls, sometimes erroneously. Ohio alone has removed up to two million voters since 2011. Much of this national effort was coordinated by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who runs a suppression initiative called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program.

Kobach is the nation’s leading voter suppression advocate and was recently fined for misleading a federal court. He is also the vice chairman of the new commission Trump has created to deal with the phantom epidemic of voting fraud. Studies have found that out of the more than a billion votes cast in the United States between 2000 and 2014, there were just 31 credible cases of voter impersonation. Yet Trump has claimed that millions of people voted illegally in 2016. A review by the Washington Post found only 4 documented instances of voter fraud out of 136 million votes cast in 2016—including an Iowa woman who voted twice for Trump. As Trump’s own lawyers asserted in a Michigan court: “All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake.” Nonetheless, Kobach and Republicans across the country continue to use false claims about fraud to justify curtailing voting rights.

Since the election, studies have documented how big an impact all this suppression had on the outcome. States with harsh new voting laws, such as Wisconsin, saw turnout dip 1.7 points, compared with a 1.3-point increase in states where the law didn’t change. And the drop was particularly acute among black voters. Turnout was down 5 points in heavily African American counties in states with strict new ID laws, but down just 2.2 points in similar counties in states without the new laws.

In Wisconsin, where I lost by just 22,748 votes, a study from Priorities USA estimated that the new voter ID law helped reduce turnout by 200,000 votes, primarily from low-income and minority areas. We know for sure that turnout in the city of Milwaukee fell by 13 percent. By contrast, in neighboring Minnesota, which has similar demographics but did not impose arduous new restrictions on voting, turnout in heavily African American counties declined much less and overall turnout was essentially flat. In Illinois, where the state put in place new measures to make it easier to vote, not harder, turnout was up more than 5 percent overall. Among African Americans, turnout was 14 points higher in Illinois than in Wisconsin. The experience living under a deeply unpopular Trumpian governor there may also have motivated people to show up and reject the even worse national version. In short, voting laws matter. A lot. Before the election, one Republican state representative in Wisconsin predicted the new law would help Trump pull off an upset in the state. It turns out he was right.

The Associated Press profiled several Wisconsinites who were turned away or did not have their votes counted because they did not have the required identification, including a Navy veteran with an out-of-state driver’s license, a recent college graduate whose student ID was disqualified because it lacked an expiration date, and a sixty-six-year old woman with chronic lung disease who lost her driver’s license just before Election Day. She provided Social Security and Medicare cards and a government-issued bus pass with a photo, but her vote was still not counted. The AP reported that these disenfranchised citizens were “not hard to find.”

Reading these stories is both eye-opening and infuriating. The right to vote is the foundation of our free society, and protecting that right is the single most important thing we can do to strengthen our democracy. Yet in state after state, Republicans are still at it. President Trump’s obsession to root out nonexistent voter fraud is just cover for further suppression. Already in 2017, more states have imposed new restrictions on voting than in 2015 and 2016 combined. Nearly a hundred bills have been introduced in thirty-one states. This is a problem that will grow only more pervasive and urgent in future elections.