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There was good news and bad news for voting rights in the 2018 midterm elections.
The good: Florida restored voting rights to more than 1 million people with felony records, which amounts to the biggest enfranchisement since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the women’s suffrage movement. This is a big moment for voting rights — way more people now have the right to vote! — but it remains unclear how this will change the swing state in the future.
Maryland, Michigan, and Nevada also approved ballot measures that could help expand voting in different ways, such as allowing same-day voter registration or enacting automatic voter registration.
And Kris Kobach, a vociferous supporter of more voting restrictions, lost the governor’s race in Kansas.
The bad: Republican candidates that benefited from voter suppression efforts, particularly Brian Kemp in Georgia’s governor race and Kevin Cramer in North Dakota’s Senate race, are set for victories. The results may send a message that emboldens future voting restrictions, given that, at the very least, benefiting from steps that prevented voters from voting didn’t seem to hurt these candidates.
Meanwhile, Arkansas and North Carolina voters also approved ballot initiatives that require photo IDs to vote, adding more barriers to the ballot box.
It’s the bad news that I’m really concerned with here. The research suggests that the voter suppression efforts so far don’t have a huge impact on electoral outcomes. But the impact disproportionately hurts Democratic and especially minority voters. Given that elections can be so close (including Georgia’s gubernatorial race), more restrictions really could play a decisive factor.
And since, based on Tuesday night’s results, voters either don’t mind or in some cases actually favor such restrictions, Republicans may now be emboldened to do even more.
This could get really ugly for American democracy.
Voter suppression in Georgia and North Dakota
The most concerning results for voting rights advocates were in Georgia and North Dakota.
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.
