Suppose you are the head of one of the
two major American political parties, and elections are giving you a headache.
In five of the last six presidential
elections, spanning almost a quarter century, the other party has won a
nationwide majority of popular votes. If
you add up all the votes nationally in elections for the U.S. Senate or the
House of Representatives, the other party has won a majority.
Perhaps even worse, national polls
show that your party is much less popular than the other party and has been the
second choice for several years.
To solve these problems, you come up
with two possible solutions. The first
is to develop new policies to broaden the party’s appeal among voters. The other is to find ways to reduce the
number of voters who normally support the other party. That’s called “voter suppression.”
In short, the way to make democracy
work, at least for your party, is to have less of it. Participation in voting in the United States
is well below many other countries even without suppression, so the plan would
be for an even more dismal voter turnout.
You are the head of the Republican
Party. And you have opted to find ways
to make participation harder for some traditional Democratic Party voters – the
poor and minorities.
Your policy focuses on those elections
having the greatest effect on presidential and congressional outcomes. You have discovered something the Democrats’
electoral strategy seems to have missed.
The key is not presidential or
congressional elections. The most
important elections to control who votes are for the state legislatures and
governors. If you can win control in the
states, you can impose the rules governing voting in national elections.
In some states with a pattern of
discrimination, especially against African-Americans, the Voting Rights Act
used to require them to get approval from the U.S. Department of Justice before
changing voting rules. The Supreme Court
threw out that requirement.
The GOP has stepped up its efforts to
make voting more difficult for people likely to support the Democrats, the New
York Times reports.
In the last decade, the Republicans
claimed new measures were need to prevent fraud – ineligible people
voting. The method of choice was better
voter identification.
New laws require voters to show photo
identification and increasingly a second document like a passport or birth
certificate proving American citizenship.
Many poor people, traditional Democratic supporters, do not have either
and getting them may be difficult.
When evidence showed virtually no
voting fraud, the focus shifted to simply making access to voting more
difficult. Registration and voting on
the same day, proven in Maine and elsewhere to produce higher participation, is
being eliminated in some states.
States under GOP control have reduced the
length of early voting periods. They
have made applying for an absentee ballot more difficult and cut the number of
polling places.
There are 23 states with a Republican governor
and legislature, meaning they can readily change voting laws. In 2013, eight tightened voting rules.
Discrimination against minority voters
appears to be growing again. Right after
the Supreme Court decision, some states moved to adopt plans previously denied
federal approval.
The other piece of GOP election
strategy is the redrawing of congressional district lines every ten years. Republican-controlled state legislatures pack
as many Democrats as possible into as few districts as possible to leave the
GOP the rest of the seats.
With all the talk about political
deadlock and who will run for president in 2016, most of these changes escape public
notice. When people vote for state
legislators, they almost never see the national implication of their choices.
The Republicans may be doing nothing
illegal. The Democrats seem to have been
too passive at a national level in working against the GOP effort to influence
elections by voter suppression.
Nationally, the Democrats could make it
more of a campaign issue. While
suppression has not been a problem in Maine, people in any state favoring
participation should understand their votes are devalued when other states
distort national election results by limiting voting.
There are now 14 states where the
Democrats control both the legislature and the governorship. Perhaps the GOP has already written them off,
but the Democrats there could use reverse tactics to increase participation and
draw better district boundaries.
Beyond trying to counter voter
suppression, if the Democrats fail to develop outreach programs to help the poor
and minorities register and vote, the GOP strategy could have the long-lasting
effect of protecting its hold onto power.