End voter suppression and discrimination by modernizing our voting system

It’s no secret that our representative democracy was founded on inequality, with anyone who’s not a white, land-owning man excluded from the process. Yet, thanks to the sacrifice of many minority groups before us—such as the women’s suffrage movement in the 1920s and the civil rights movement in the 1960s—equal right to vote has become the norm. We’ve made extraordinary progress.

Unfortunately, there has been a disturbing trend in recent years to roll back this progress. Instead of pushing our democracy forward, politicians in too many states are now engaging in voter suppression in order to gain an unfair advantage in elections. Much of it has been enabled by a 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, that gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act—the most important piece of voting rights legislation of the 20th century.

Since then, states across the country have passed laws that grant unequal access to the polls, often discriminating against the most vulnerable groups in society. One of the most popular voter suppression tactics is voter ID laws—laws that require voters to present some form of identification prior to voting. Now 34 states have voter ID laws. While voter ID requirements might seem logical, they accomplish little other than depressing the turnout among the groups that are limited in their ability to fulfil those requirements.

Getting the correct ID to vote can be difficult, if not impossible to many eligible voters. In Mississippi, for example, a birth certificate is required to get a photo ID. But if you don’t have your birth certificate for whatever reason, you’d need to present a photo ID to get a copy.

Studies have shown that voters in minority groups typically have less access to photo IDs and a recent study finds that “strict photo identification laws have a differentially negative impact on the turnout of Hispanics, Blacks, and mixed-race Americans in primaries and general elections”.

These IDs are a solution to a non-existent problem: voter fraud. Study after study has shown there is no evidence of widespread in-person voter fraud, yet, the need to eradicate voter fraud is often cited as the reason to justify more voter ID laws.

Other voter suppression tactics include rolling back early voting periods, making it more difficult to register voters, and even reducing the number of polling places. In 2016, there were 868 fewer polling places in states like Arizona, Texas, and North Carolina compared to previous elections, which likely impacted hundreds of thousands of voters.

Why does every American deserve an equal freedom to vote? In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

“So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote I do not possess myself. I cannot make up my mind – it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact – I can only submit to the edict of others.”

While there are many factors affecting voter turnout rates, unequal freedom to vote certainly plays a role. And the voter turnout rates in the U.S. are particularly abysmal.

Only 60.0% of eligible voters participated in the 2016 presidential election. In the 2014 midterm elections only 35.9% did so. Turnout is even worse among younger voters; only 28% of Americans aged 18-to-29 are certain they will vote this year. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that 21.4% of eligible voters were not registered in 2014.

These numbers are even more strikingly bad when compared to turnout and registration rates of other developed countries. In the most recent elections for which data is available in the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark, the voter registration rates are 94.36%, 96.28%, and 93.54% respectively. And in each country, voter turnout was significantly higher: 81.9%, 85.81%, and 85.89%.

Charles Stewart at MIT estimated that in the 2016 elections more than 16-million Americans encountered problems voting and one million votes were lost because of voter suppression. Had only half of those voters been able to cast their votes, the election outcomes might have been very different.

Most solutions that ensure equal freedom to vote are simple and straightforward.

Equal Citizens actively supports any and all efforts to fight against voter suppression—unnecessarily stringent voter ID laws, reducing the number of polling places, reducing early voting periods, or any other attempts to roll back the Voting Rights Act.

A simple legislation that updates the preclearance requirement in Section IV of the Voting Rights Act would reverse the damage Shelby County v. Holder has done by enabling voter suppression tactics. The Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015 is a good model for such an effort.

Besides these defensive measures, there are other policies that can drastically improve access to voting:

Secure our elections against foreign attacks and hacking

For a democratic society to properly function and maintain its legitimacy, citizens must be confident that every vote gets counted and the election results are accurate. Attempts to rig elections such as vote altering or database tampering would cast doubts on the legitimacy of the elected government and are therefore dangerously destabilizing.

Yet, as a nation, we underfund and neglect election security. As a result, much like our aging transportation infrastructure, our election infrastructure is severely outdated and crumbling before our eyes. This is a troubling fact given the overwhelming evidence of foreign interference in the 2016 election.

Much of the neglect can be attributed to our current decentralized, disjointed state-based election security standards. Currently, the federal government plays a very limited role in the oversight of election security. The Election Assistance Commission and Department of Homeland Security offer optional resources and issue non-binding guidelines for best practices, and states are free to come up with their own standards as they please. Too many states set standards that are clearly inadequate for protecting our elections against foreign interference in the 21st century.

Just how obsolete and insecure are our election infrastructure?

In 2016, more than two-thirds of all counties in the U.S. used voting machines that were older than a decade. Many machines used outdated software and ran in absurdly old operating systems, such as Windows 2000. Thirteen states still use machines that are completely electronic, which makes them prone to glitches, and with no paper trails, the results cannot be audited.

Many experts have pointed out that our current machines could be hacked in a matter of minutes. Recently, a participant at DefCon breached a voting machine in 90 minutes, and was able to change the vote tally in the machine remotely, from anywhere.

Even though virtually all election security experts agree that paperless election machines are our biggest vulnerability, states have been slow to replace them. Because states are not required to spend the federal grant allocated to them, some states legislatures are even impeding the use of federal grants through a combination of delayed action and inaction. For example, Florida’s Republican-led state legislature has refused to authorize their election officials to use the grant before the 2018 election, even when the state is in desperate need for more election security funding.

Besides the machines, there are other major vulnerabilities in many states’ election security standards that would make hacking our elections a breeze. Our voter registration databases are outdated and prone to infiltration. Many states have no post-election auditing requirements at all, and those that do are often insufficient, severely undermining our ability to identify and correct an attack. So far, only two states (Colorado and Rhode Island) have taken action by requiring risk-limiting post election audits—the “gold-standard” of election auditing. The other forty-eight states are behind the curve.

The status quo is no longer acceptable. It’s time that the federal government steps in and sets strict election security standards. We cannot wait for all 50 states to individually get their acts together.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced The Protecting American Votes and Elections Act of 2018, which would set adequate election security standards that can give voters confidence that election results have not been hacked. The bill requires every state to use secure election machines with paper ballots and mandate risk-limiting post-election audits.

As Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), one of the bill’s cosponsors, puts it, “We know that Russia hacked into American voter systems to influence our election – and we know they’ll try to do it again. Our national security experts have warned us that the country’s election infrastructure is vulnerable – this bill will take important steps to help secure it.”

Read our op ed on election security →