“As the high-stakes ground war escalates heading into next year’s elections, Republicans have led the charge for an array of revisions to state voting rights laws, especially in key battleground states. Republican political appointees in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division have endorsed some of these measures,” Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers wrote today.
Citing the passage of state laws to prevent “voter fraud,” including Indiana’s voter ID and Florida’s 2005 measure that strips voters of their right to contest poll challenges, Gordon writes of institutionalized tactics that could suppress the votes of minority and low income voters, particularly vote caging.
Caging, which “entails sending mass mailing to certain voters and then using the undelivered letters to compile lists of voters for eligibility challenges,” became “effectively” legal in battleground state, Ohio. The state has also tightened voter ID requirements and and “’took away rights of some voters to be heard about whether or not their registration was valid,”’ according to Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.
Rice University sociology professor Chandler Davidson called the new laws “questionable” because of “virtually no evidence presented that there has been wide-scale voter fraud in the United States.” He referenced a Yale University study “showing that mail is less likely to reach residents of low-income neighborhoods, he said mass mailings of non-forwardable mail will ‘discriminate in a pretty straightforward way’ against poor people and minorities.”
While partisan states Florida and Ohio are making substative changes to voter challenge statutes, Gordon mentions Project Vote’s newly released vote caging report, which “noted that Minnesota — with bipartisan support — altered its election law in 2005. The law prohibits political parties from bringing in challengers from out of state and from using non-forwardable mail to compile challenge lists.”
