I protest.: Voting wrongs.

May 19, 2003

Civil Rights

Voting wrongs.

Welcome to the Old America. On Alternet: Jim Crow Revived in Cyberspace. This story refers to the removal in Florida of hundreds of black voters from the voter rolls before the 2000 election. These voters just happened to have names similar to the names of convicted felons somewhere in the United States. The one other commonality: They were all black.

Okay, so that was bad, but surely the problem has been fixed in the years since, right?

Um, no. Not only has the problem not been fixed, the mechanism used to conduct the purge, centralized, "computerized" voter files, is being required by every state, due to the so-called "Help America Vote" Act, passed by Congress last year. The Federal Election Commission has the details of the Act; you can find an analysis of the Act at the Public Citizen Congress Watch page and a letter from the ACLU to Congress decrying the Act on the ACLU website.

Among other things, this Act requires much tougher identification at polling places. From the ACLU letter:

Under this legislation, the voter would be required to provide a driver’s license number or, in the event they do not have one, the last four digits of their social security number. Any voter who has either number but does not provide it — even for privacy reasons — would not be registered.

When the voter provides either their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their social security number, the state must verify the accuracy of the data provided.

Emphasis theirs. This requirement is fraught with problems, as the letter points out. It is unbelievably easy to have a false mismatch in the verification process, due to any number of factors.

Also, photographic identification is now required:

As with the other methods of disenfranchisement in American history, such as literacy tests and poll taxes, the photo identification requirement would present barriers to voting and have a chilling effect on voter participation. There are voters who simply do not have identification and requiring them to purchase photo identification would be tantamount to requiring them to pay a poll tax. As a disproportionate number of racial and ethnic minority voters, the homeless, as well as voters with disabilities and certain religious objectors, do not have photo identification nor the financial means to acquire it, the burden of this requirement would fall disproportionately and unfairly upon them, perhaps even violating the Voting Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. § 1973.

Further, the limited alternatives to photo identification provided in the bill — including a government check or government document, utility bill, or bank statement that shows the name and address of the voter — place the poor in no better position.

I might point out that the poor are not the only people who stand to be disenfranchised by this requirement. College students often may not have all of these forms of identification, or, even if they do, these new requirements may well be seen as onerous, discouraging them from exercising their right to vote. These requirements also make it perilously easy to falsely deny a persons right to vote at the polling place, as happens to college students (not to mention the poor and/or ethnic minorities) with frightening regularity. (My brother tells me a hair-raising story of his experience in College Station, Texas, when he was working on his doctorate. He tried to vote and was falsely denied. Knowing his rights, he went to the voting commission headquarters and forced them to allow him to vote, but most students simply became discouraged, or, worse, believed the liars at the polling place, and just didn't vote. This happens, believe it.)

As for the centralization of voter files, as a software engineer I know just how easily such centralization can fail, either through abuse or through failures of the design or implementation of the system. All computer systems have bugs and even when there are no partisan bureaucrats trying to manipulate the system, people will be dropped from the rolls accidentally. The chances of this happening are one hundred percent. Adding people in whose interest it is to see that certain classes of people (students, minorities, software engineers, "troublemakers") are dropped and the potential for abuse becomes unmeasurably high.

Go read the analyses. Read the stories. Then tell your Representatives and your Senators that you will no longer stand idly by while they trade your rights away!

Posted by Frank at May 19, 2003 9:31 AM

Comments

I simply question the constitutionality of having the federal government tell the states how they can carry out their voting policies.

Posted by: Chris Carlin at May 20, 2003 6:46 PM

Um, yeah, very good point. Of course, when has this administration cared at all about the constitutionality of a law?

Posted by: Frank at May 20, 2003 7:27 PM

Just so you know, you kinda understated the number of voters purged in 2000 (and again in 2002.) You refered to "hundreds of black voters" being removed from the rolls, but actually, and the article says this, 94,000 innocent people were denied their right to vote and over half were black or hispanic. That's more than 47,000 minority people denied their right to vote, a far cry from "hundreds."

Posted by: madprophet at May 21, 2003 2:10 PM

Oops. For "hundreds" read "thousands." Somehow I typed the one while thinking the other, and kept reading it as "thousands" when I reviewed it.

Thanks for the correction.

Posted by: Frank Mayhar at May 21, 2003 2:59 PM