Voting Rights Watch

What Is Alabama's Problem With the Voting Rights Act?

Voting Rights Watch on February 26, 2013 - 12:20 PM ET

The Voting Rights Act has been a tool for the federal government to protect minority voters. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke.)

History will repeat itself in the chambers of the Supreme Court this week. The very state where the fight for voting rights reached its critical peak nearly 50 years ago is once again at the center of the dispute over democracy in America. But oddly, the political and legal odds may now be tilting away from civil rights and back toward an era in which the federal government had limited power to protect voters of color in the South from the machinations of local leaders.

Virginia Legislators Approve Voter ID Law, May Kill Chances for Federal Bailout

Voting Rights Watch on February 22, 2013 - 2:34 PM ET

Earlier this week, the Virginia House of Delegates passed a photo voter ID law that narrows the list of identification voters are required to show on Election Day to vote. The bill, which now sits before Gov. Bob McDonnell to sign or veto, would allow only a driver’s license or US passport to vote. Without either of those, a voter would have to file a provisional ballot, and then bring the required photo ID to the election board by the Friday after Election Day.

If McDonnell signs it, it wouldn’t go into effect until 2014—when the midterm congressional elections are held—but it would have to be approved by the federal government first. Since Virginia is a covered jurisdiction under the Voting Rights Act’s Section 5, any election law they make has to be pre-cleared by the US Justice Department or the US District Court in Washington, DC.

Virginia passed a voter ID bill last year that was pre-cleared by the Justice Department. But that law allowed for non-photo ID forms to be used, like a paycheck or utility bill. Also, Governor McDonnell pledged to send a state-issued voter ID card to everyone in the state who needed one.

Despite Longest Lines in the Nation, Florida State Secretary Calls Elections 'Fair'

Voting Rights Watch on February 6, 2013 - 4:41 PM ET

People wait in line on the fourth day of early voting in North Miami in 2012. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz.)

Yesterday, Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner released his long-awaited report on how the state’s elections system can be improved. He spent a month on a fact-finding mission, talking with county elections supervisors and other concerned constituents to produce this list of recommendations on “increased accessibility & efficiency in Florida elections.” But the only thing Detzner seemed to learn from the supervisors was how to throw them under the bus. The state secretary focuses mostly on the problem of long lines—Florida voters waited an average of forty-five minutes, the longest time of any state—and he goes out of his way to blame this on the county election officials.

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Voter Registration Has an Ugly History, and Some Want to Revive It

Voting Rights Watch and Brentin Mock on February 4, 2013 - 12:36 PM ET

Voters stand in line in California. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes.)

Despite the clear fail of voter suppression efforts and the strong resolve of voters last year, right-wing forces are still determined to make voting harder. And despite the clear need for modernizing voter registration, conservative election officials are zeroing in on the registration process as a place to achieve their goals, by requiring proof of citizenship and adding unnecessary criteria for who can be registered and when.

Virginia Republicans' Bizarre Notion of 'Fair' Voting

Brentin Mock on January 30, 2013 - 10:53 AM ET

Voters stand in line in Florida in 2012. Virginia was finally called for Barack Obama hours after polls closed because voters in Obama-leaning counties had to wait in long lines to cast their ballot. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz.)

Republicans have been busy since Election Day—working to make sure voters of color don’t have another opportunity to impact state politics as dramatically as they have in recent elections. But yesterday, one of the more notorious efforts was finally blocked, as a bill died that would have fudged the state’s electoral college math to water down the influence of black voters.

From Arizona to Montana, Native Voters Struggle for Democracy

Voting Rights Watch and Aura Bogado on January 28, 2013 - 12:32 PM ET

The Navajo Election Administration in the Chinle Agency. (Aura Bogado)

Leonard Gorman is a man of maps. He heads the Navajo Nation’s Human Rights Commission, which among other responsibilities, is charged with protecting and promoting Navajo voters’ rights to choose candidates who will reasonably represent their interests. He and his team all work out of their trailer office in Window Rick, Arizona—the Navajo Nation’s capitol—where they chart data that they’ve collected on the potential impacts of redistricting on the Navajo Nation.

Virginia Governor Says Restore Voting Rights for Nonviolent Felon Offenders

Voting Rights Watch on January 10, 2013 - 3:17 PM ET

AP Photo/Matt Rourke.)

Yesterday, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell announced in his 2013 State of the Commonwealth speech that he supports Republican-sponsored bills to automatically restore civil rights—including voting rights—for nonviolent felony offenders. Virginia is one of four states that permanently bar felony offenders from voting or running for office even after they’ve already served time in prison and any probation/parole sentence. The governor alone can restore those rights and only after a cumbersome process that includes a two-year wait for nonviolent offenders or a five-year wait for violent offenders. There are roughly 350,000 Virginians, most of then African-Americans, disenfranchised because of this law.

McDonnell is now saying the wait is over for nonviolent offenders—or at least that it should be. Automatic rights restoration will only happen with an amendment to the state’s constitution, which can be done only by the state legislature. According to The Washington Post, Republicans in that legislature gave McDonnell’s appeal a lukewarm response, and those who head the committees responsible for creating such legislation oppose automatic rights restoration.

Senate Hearing Recounts the Many Election Season Mishaps of 2012

Brentin Mock and Voting Rights Watch on December 20, 2012 - 1:02 PM ET

Yesterday was a day of reckoning, or the start of a reckoning in the US Senate for the many election season mishaps of 2012. Elections administrators gathered for a hearing on “The State of the Right to Vote After the 2012 Election” before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary to unpack some of the shenanigans from last month. Testimony was divided along partisan lines, with Republicans defending “election integrity” measures such as photo voter ID laws, early-voting hours reductions, voter registration restrictions and mandating proof of citizenship for new voters. Meanwhile, Democrats castigated such measures as frivolous and built upon false pretenses of voter fraud.

Committee chairman Senator Patrick Leahy opened the hearing testifying that since earlier in the year he was worried that some states were erecting barriers to voting and that November’s election confirmed “that we were right to be concerned,” citing the long lines and mass voter confusion reported around the nation. Ranking member of the committee Senator Chuck Grassley went the opposite way, saying that people have been tossing around terms like “voter suppression” and “disenfranchisement” too “cavalierly” and that voter fraud—the pretense for the wave of new voter laws—is “a fact of life and it will get worse.”

It should be noted that the term “disenfranchisement” has been used not just by voting rights advocates but also by a state judge. In Pennsylvania, Judge Robert Simpson, who has no liberal reputation, found that his state’s photo voter ID law did qualify as disenfranchisement if just one voter would be denied the franchise because they didn’t have proper ID. In terms of voter suppression, it’s been quite noted among academics that photo voter ID laws and reduced early voting hours have a suppressive effect mainly on Democrat voters, and that they also help swing elections to Republicans. But speaking of cavalier use of the term, Senator Grassley needed only to hear from his fellow Republican Matt Schultz, Iowa’s secretary of state, one of five witnesses at the hearing, who testified, “Some believe their votes do not matter and that belief is a true cause of voter suppression across this country.”

Figuring Out Why 93 Million People Didn’t Vote

Aura Bogado and Voting Rights Watch on December 19, 2012 - 4:22 PM ET

Forty percent of voters didn’t cast their ballots on Election Day—and a new report explains some of the reasons why. The Medill School of Journalism conducted an online survey of voters and nonvoters that resulted in a study named “Nonvoters in America 2012.” It divides nonvoters in six distinct categories, and recommends ways to encourage voters to participate in future elections.

Some 126 million people cast ballots last month, but 93 million people did not. According to the survey, when added up together, nonvoters tended to be young, less educated and poor. But that can obscure the different categories of nonvoters that can be broken up into distinct groups.

Take the group called the Pessimists. They’re less educated, less-income-earning middle-aged and retired men who lean conservative, like small government, and dislike President Obama. They’re named because of their pessimistic outlook on the future of the economy. At 27 percent, they made up the single biggest group of nonvoters.

A Constitutional Case Against Felony Disenfranchisement Laws

Brentin Mock on December 14, 2012 - 12:01 PM ET

In the movie "Lincoln", there's a scene where "Radical" Republicans are debating Democrats in congressional chambers over whether to abolish slavery with a new constitutional amendment. A speaker from the Democratic Party, arguing against abolition, delivers a rousing speech about how Negroes shouldn't be emancipated because of the slippery slope of freedom. Once Negroes have freedom, he argued, then they'll want the right to vote--the prospect of which caused a riotous but bipartisan chorus of disagreement from most of Congress. The bellowing response was only outdone by an even more clamorous round of disapproving shouts when the speaker mentioned giving women the franchise.

Not far from the D.C. setting of that congressional debate was the Confederate Army and government, set up in Richmond, Va., where there was no disagreement about whether black people should have freedom or the right to vote. They, of course, ultimately lost the war and their cause, and were eventually allowed into what we now call the United States. Re-entry into society for Virginia and the Southern states meant adopting new constitutions ridden of any slavery talk, but they were clear back then about not giving black people any political power. And here's where it gets hairy.

As Virginia tried to patch together new versions of its state constitution from 1867 into the new century, it undoubtedly added amendments that robbed African Americans of their voting rights. One notable amendment, from 1876, added petty larceny to the list of felony offenses that would prevent someone from voting, because it was a crime most attributed to black people, according to scholars. It was Virginia's way of disenfranchising black people without stating it explicitly in the law.