Draft:Voter suppression

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Voter suppression refers to various anti-democratic forms of voter manipulation that allow unpopular parties, including authoritarian regimes, to force a lower election turnout by preventing certain groups from voting. The tactics can vary in legality, and minorities and otherwise oppressed groups are usually targeted. Most developed democracies see this as a problem limited to dictatorships and their show elections, something more "enlightened" nations left behind years ago (or maybe not...)

United States

!!!We need information on other countries!!!

The United States, based on the Constitution, being founded by well-off slave-owners, always had problems with protecting particular minorities, especially African Americans but other minorities that historically didn't get the vote were poorer peoole and women. The idea that voting rights should be minimalist in the Constitution, with the rest of rights are reserved to the states, resulting from a Founding Father distrust in popular rule, have led to a patchwork of voting rights among states that likely contradict with the spirit of the Constitution, but it's a good and historically common excuse for racists to try to bar the right to vote. History has shown that if you don't specifically put protections in federal law or get court rulings that protect minorities, states can and will try to suppress minorities. (Note: isn't there some sort of expiration of provisions of the Voting Rights Act or another Civil Rights era law during the 2010s that eventually led free reign to Republican-lead states to remove polling areas and curb voter registration?) As a consequence, in the modern USA, voter suppression is commonly linked with the Republican Party (historically the Democratic Party before the Southern Strategy switch), who cater to shrinking demographics and thus have trouble winning fair elections.

Voter ID laws

See the main article on this topic: Voting Rights Act

REAL ID Act is bad.

In 2016, a law, passed by the GOP (this is going to be a common theme here), requiring photo ID in Wisconsin has led to longer lines.

Gerrymandering

See the main article on this topic: Gerrymander

Gerrymandering, while technically legal, can be abused to be a form of voter suppression. Those that manipulate the vote draw squiggly district lines to fracture districts or try to cast a convoluted rope over a small parcel of a district to maximize the representation to fragment an otherwise sizeable group to minorities. Gerrymandering in of itself is not always voter suppression; African American civil rights groups have attempted to increase black representation, though it is ruled in Shaw v. Reno that district lines cannot be based on race. The first past the post system makes gerrymandering particularly effective as whoever wins districts are calculated in a winner-takes-all, which, cumulatively, contributes to a winner-takes-all of the state. In the electoral college, voting against your state (more specifically, the elector that's supposed to represent your state's votes) generally means exactly zero representation.

Closing of polling places

One visible imagery of voter suppression in contemporary U.S. is shown in the 2020 elections. Fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic downturn that followed, and the fascist-leaning tendencies of Donald Trump, voter turnout for the election was high as ever. Beforehand, however, Republicans were involved in closing dozens of polling areas, thus contributing to voter suppression by both extending commute times and increasing waiting in line. While long lines had been present and still a big problem in past elections, such as voters waiting for up to seven hours to vote in the 2012 elections, the 2020 elections made the issue even more visible.

Early voting polling stations and voting on Sundays, a method blacks historically relied on to vote, were removed in some locations.

Direct disenfranchisement of minority groups

Felony disenfranchisement

See the main article on this topic: Felony disenfranchisement

Preventing convicted felons may sound a good idea at a glance, though it is problematic if you give a little more pause. Even if the felony conviction is applied fairly (which is not), felony crimes seem irrelevant to whatever candidates convicted felons support. Several countries including, but not limited to France, Germany, Japan, Israel, Zimbabwe, Norway, Kenya, and Peru seem to agree by allowing felons to vote, unless the felons are convicted of a crime directly related to the elections (such as accepting bribery from dictators to influence elections). Nevertheless, definitions of a felony are already very hairy to navigate and easy to manipulate, and application of felony convictions tend to skew against minority groups including blacks and Latinos. For instance, the War on Drugs campaign as well as other drug criminalization laws loosened the bar for felony convictions by defining possession of particular drugs a felony, thus leading to more felony convictions and thus leading to more people that cannot vote.

In three states, Iowa, Kentucky, and Virginia, felons are permanently disenfranchised and require an official pardon from the governor, while only two states, Maine and Vermont, allow every criminal to vote. Overall, nearly six million people with felony convictions cannot vote, with Alabama sharing one of the highest amount of people with felony convictions that cannot vote, 7.2% of Alabama's citizens. Florida, however, was regarded as the felon disenfranchisement leader, having 1.5 million Americans being unable to vote. Later in 2018, however, Florida later restored voting rights to ex-felons via passage of Amendment 4.

Electoral college

See the main article on this topic: Electoral college

The mechanisms of the electoral college, combined with gerrymandering and first past the post, can aid in voter suppression. While in theory, larger states represented by a big population should get more electoral college votes (amount of votes in the electoral college is determined by house of representatives and senate count, and the minimum electoral votes a state can get is three), the electoral votes are not distributed proportionally to the population. In other words, voters in California and Texas have less power than voters in Wyoming. Elections are not determined directly by popular vote; instead, people vote for electors in the state that vote for presidents. And given the results of first past the post, you can effectively have zero impact on the election results should your vote for your elector be unsuccessful. If a state is considered "red" or "blue", being the opposite color means no representation and campaigners usually don't try to spend too much energy on those states and rather focus energy on the "swing" states. These swing states tend to have lower population counts as well, so campaigners are focusing more energy on a feasible path to victory over actually appealing to a majority of people. Due to the electoral college, thousands of Republican voters in California and thousands of Democratic voters in Texas have effectively no clout in presidential elections. Republicans benefit more from the electoral college than Democrats in spite of being an overall less popular party, and their presidents have won a few elections (2000 and 2016 notably) without winning the popular votes, though only very narrowly in the electoral college while significantly trailing in the popular vote by millions. Consider this-without the electoral college, the last time the GOP would have won a presidential election was 1988. George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, through benefit of incumbency, strong economy, and the enthusiasm the average American initially displayed for the so-called counter-terrorism efforts in the Iraq War in response to 9/11, though he lost the popular vote in 2000.

Jim Crow laws

See the main article on this topic: Jim Crow laws

Although black people receiving the right to vote was guaranteed by the Constitution per the 15th amendment, and the 14th amendment (Equal Protection clause) decreed that states cannot deprive citizens equal rights based on race, the Jim Crow laws were an attempt to skirt it through segregation. This was later supported by the second-worst Supreme Court decision in history, Plessy v. Ferguson.

Examples

In the 2018 governor election, Georgia's secretary of state Brian Kemp has been overseeing voter registration documents and put 53,000 voter registrations on hold, though Kemp was also responsible for rejecting 1.4 million voter registrations since 2012, with around 670,000 voter registrations being canceled in 2017. Around 70% of the voters put on hold were black. This may have partially to do with Georgia's questionable "exact match" laws, which information on voter registration forms must be consistent with the information in the Georgia Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration; most omitted forms had minor inconsistencies such as hyphens. Kemp, however, fervently denied he took part in voter suppression and instead blamed the New Georgia Project, as it handled mainly paper forms, had a tendency to fail other registration methods predominantly used by blacks.

After the high voter turn-out from the presidential election in 2020's resulting in losses for the Republican Party across the nation, GOP lawmakers in Georgia in March 2021 have passed a bill including many provisions civil rights groups have denounced as voter suppression. These include a photo ID requirement when voting absentee by mail, reducing the window a voter can request an absentee ballot, limiting the amount of ballot drop-boxes, and shuffleling out county election officials that are deemed as "underperforming", whatever that means but it is viewed as a means to target the Fulton County, which is a key Democratic area. It's no coincidence that the Democratic voters in Georgia heavily relied on these to narrowly win the senate runoffs (in spite of the long lines which were, of course, a product of design) in the 2020 elections. The bill also bars outside groups from providing resources including food and water to those waiting for hours in line, because of course. That proposal to bar food and water from being served during the wait is also repeated by the GOP in Florida.