WASHINGTON—A wide range of organizations, including Common Cause, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Election Protection.org, are banding together to oppose and prevent voter suppression in this fall’s election.
And they face a big task, as the radical right increasingly comes up with new methods of suppressing voters’ rights, especially the rights of voters of color, workers, and women, all of whom are skeptical or oppose the right’s oppressive pro-corporate agenda.
The right wing often dresses up its suppression efforts in legalistic or innocuous language, to deceive constituents about what they’re really planning, the American Civil Liberties Union says.
“Suppression efforts range from the seemingly unobstructive, like strict voter ID laws”—and one of every four Black Americans lack such IDs—”and cuts to early voting, to mass purges of voter rolls and systemic disenfranchisement” of people with felony convictions, ACLU says.
That group, too, is disproportionately African-American, due to racism in past state, local, and federal laws.
Still, there are moves citizens can undertake between now and election day to try to stop the vote suppressors in their tracks. They include:
- Joining Common Cause’s mobilization and training of “thousands of election volunteers” to monitor individual polling places and to blow the whistle to the toll-free number, the 866-OUR-VOTE to report voter intimidation or worse.
“State-by-state, we place trained poll monitors at polling places, especially in communities with a history of voting problems, where hotly-contested races exacerbate the chance of long lines, confusion, and other complications,” Common Cause says.
“We’ll also be in states where there may be confusion about voter ID requirements. Poll monitors will provide information, troubleshoot problems, and report bad practices to our teams to resolve them with election officials.”
- The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law will run its own field program, training attorneys to immediately respond to complaints in their states, especially in cases where election officials give voters mixed messages about their rights to vote.
- Digital outreach, including on Facebook and Twitter/X informing voters of their rights in advance on how to check on whether they’re still registered or not. The outreach—also tied into the toll-free number, which is already operating—will tell voters how they can seek provisional ballots, if they’re in a state, likely a blue state, which legalizes such voting.
Can’t stop everything
The catch is campaigners against voter suppression can’t stop everything, especially if they face uphill battles in red states. That’s led the League of Women Voters and others to sue Virginia on October 7 to stop a voter roll purge based on faulty data, for example.
In neighboring deep-red West Virginia five state Republican lawmakers, all devoted Trumpites, introduced a joint resolution saying that the state specifically will not recognize the election results if “the Democrat candidate” for president wins by what state officials determine is voter fraud elsewhere. And their resolution defines causes of fraud so broadly the state could use just about any rumor to justify that decision.
One big deadline could override all these threats. On December 11, state governors, plus D.C., must send certifications to the Capitol, containing electoral vote certificates. They’ll be opened in early January, just as they were supposed to be opened and counted on Jan. 6, 2021, before the Trumpite insurrectionists invaded and pillaged the building, resulting in deaths, injuries, and a delayed count.
This time, reports are circulating that the Trumpites, if they lose, won’t wait for January, but will strike in December. After all, they struck at vote-counters in Arizona and Michigan even before the certificates were sent four years ago. And a crowd of them descended on the front lawn of Gov. Tim Walz, DFL-Minn., the day of the insurrection. Walz, now the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, wasn’t home. His son, who was terrified, and the dog were.
In an example of “innocuous” restrictions, Ohio’s GOP-dominated legislature worsened an already restrictive voter ID law. In this election, only four IDs are acceptable and all must be current on Election Day: An Ohio driver’s license, an Ohio-issued state ID card, a U.S. or state military ID, or a U.S. passport. Ohio’s IDs do not include “Green Cards” for permanent residents who migrated here.
College IDs aren’t valid anymore in New Hampshire, Texas, and other states, the latest being Idaho. But Texas says a gun permit is a legal ID. Its college students are more progressive and Democratic and varied in racial and sexual orientation. The gun owners are almost all white Republicans.
“At least 30 states enacted 78 restrictive laws,” starting in January 2021, “at least 63 of which are set to be in effect in 29 states this fall,” the Brennan Center for Law and Justice reports. “At least 15 states passed 33 election interference laws, with at least 31 interference laws in 14 states set to be in effect for a presidential election for the first time.”
There are also county-level and federal-level decisions that will hamper voting. At the county level, notably in red states, there are restrictions or elimination of absentee ballot drop boxes.
At the federal level, state and local election administrators are protesting moves by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy—whom then-President Donald Trump imposed on the Postal Service just before the election four years ago—to slow down mail delivery, including absentee ballots and forms. More than half of Georgia’s 63 new restrictions curb voting by mail.
Some voter suppression methods haven’t been stopped, thus giving the lie to statements by good-government groups, such as Common Cause and the ACLU, that “we all want free and fair elections.”
There are horrifying examples of red state laws to suppress voter registration, in Texas, or banning aid to voters, in Georgia. With Georgia now a swing state, that suppression is especially important.
Georgia now legally criminalizes volunteers who offer food and water to people standing in its notoriously long lines to vote—especially if they’re helping voters of color, who now make up more than two-fifths of the state electorate.
It also allows any “challenger” to an unlimited number of demands that voters prove their rights to vote—and be barred if they can’t. One such “challenger,” a white deputy Georgia state GOP chair, already challenged the registrations of more than 32,400 Black voters, documentary filmmaker Greg Palast reported in Vigilantes, Inc.
Arresting volunteers in Texas
And Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has had sheriffs’ deputies and state troopers arrest volunteers who register voters for “at most to innocent mistakes during the voting process.”
There’s one other threat to voters on the horizon, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund reports: The Republican platform—its plan of action if Trump wins, also known as Project 2025.
“Project 2025 advances policies that jeopardize the United States’ multi-racial democracy, including a recommendation to transfer election-related offenses from the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to its Criminal Division. This sends a clear message of criminalizing the act of voting, which can discourage Americans from participating in elections for fear of unwarranted prosecution,” it said.
“Transferring election-related offenses from the Voting Section of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to the Criminal Division will create yet another barrier to voting for Black people and will lead to enforcement by attorneys not trained in civil rights enforcement and the unique history of obstacles to voting.
“Voting rights attorneys have experience and knowledge of voting rights laws enforced by the Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section. Moving enforcement of these laws, which offer civil remedies, to a section with experience in criminal enforcement will dilute the ability of the DOJ to defend voting rights.
“Some officials have claimed, without evidence, that voting fraud is a more significant issue than historic and persistent barriers to voting.”
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