SAJU: Voter suppression, fraud, mail-in ballots
Column: Pride, Not Prejudice
One man, 51-year-old Daniel Jenkins (a longtime resident of Sherman, Texas) has voted in “pretty much every election since (1986).”
But, when new voting restrictions were introduced in the 2014 elections, Jenkins realized he would need a new photo identification (ID) to vote in the midterms. His driver’s license had recently expired, so he went to the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) to obtain a free election ID card.
He was told that because he was eligible for a license (with liability insurance and a three-year payment of $260 a year to the State of Texas), he was ineligible for a free voter ID.
Even though the Texas DPS website stated that an expired license allowed him to be eligible for a free election ID card, Jenkins ended up paying for his ID card in order to be able to vote in the midterm election. Although he insists that the fee was not an issue for him personally, Jenkins worries that this fee will be a hassle for low-income voters.
Voter ID laws are seemingly enacted with the goal of preventing voter fraud in elections, but voter fraud is rarer than being struck by lightning. “Most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices … incident rates (for voter fraud are) between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent,” according to the seminal report conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice.
"If policymakers distinguished real voter fraud from the more common election irregularities erroneously labeled as voter fraud, it would become apparent that the limited benefits of laws like photo ID requirements are simply not worth the cost,” according to another Brennan Center for Justice report.
Statistics concerning voter fraud are even more optimistic for the vote-by-mail system. Over the past 20 years, more than 250 million ballots have been cast nationwide, but there have only been 143 criminal convictions for election fraud related to mail ballots.
This amounts to a fraud rate of 0.00006 percent (about one case per state every six or seven years). Allegations of widespread voter fraud often prove greatly exaggerated and often worsen the existing inequalities in America’s voting system.
Although less than one percent of returned absentee ballots were rejected across the country for the 2016 election, Black and Latinx voters in Florida were more than two times as likely to have their mail-in ballots rejected than white voters, according to a study from the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.
Limiting access to voting is rooted deeply in American history: This idea began with the founding fathers, was challenged during the civil rights movement (resulting in the Voting Rights Act of 1965) and continues to impact voters today.
Restrictive election laws appear to be racially neutral, giving them the appearance of legitimacy, but the outcomes of these policies make voting more difficult for people of color.
A poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic revealed important information about the formal and informal roadblocks that contribute to voter suppression in America.
Nine percent of Black respondents and nine percent of Hispanic respondents indicated that they, or someone in their household, were told that they lacked the proper identification to vote in the 2016 election. Only three percent of white voters said the same.
There are also more subtle barriers to the ballot box: “Black and Hispanic respondents were twice as likely as white respondents to have been unable to get time off work for voting.” Furthermore, the persistent misinformation surrounding voter fraud by non-citizens is based more on anti-immigrant sentiment than any data or other evidence.
In 2016, approximately 1 in 10 Hispanic respondents stated that they or a household member were bothered at the polls when they went to cast a ballot. The idea of a stolen election unfortunately fits neatly in the perceived cultural threat of outsiders taking something away from people already there.
Whether stricter voter identification efforts are intended to discriminate, these laws discriminate in effect and have yielded no evidence of their ability to advert fraud. These laws do, though, create Republican advantages. As David W. Blight said, “There is no Republican majority in America, except on Election Days.”
Neha Saju is a School of Arts and Sciences junior majoring in political science and history and minoring in English. Her column, "Pride, Not Prejudice," runs on alternate Mondays.
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