One thing that’s missing this time around: Apathy
WASHINGTON— Yesterday I wrote about how the hyper-politicized ongoing Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett look — to a Canadian unused to seeing the court as a venue for open partisan power-grasping — like a symptom of a broken democracy. Some of the reports and images of how U.S. citizens vote only underline that impression.
Witness, for example, the long lineups at early voting sites in many states. On Monday in Georgia, some people reported waiting in lines for as long as 11 hours in order to vote. On Tuesday in Houston, people began lining up at 5 a.m. to vote in polls that didn’t open until 7 a.m.
Such lines have become a familiar sight at American polling places. Many experts say they’re an obvious sign of voter suppression — possibly in intent, certainly in effect. The Brennan Center for Justice estimated in a 2018 report that lines in Florida in 2012 discouraged 200,000 people from voting.
The Brennan Center noted, as others do, that these long lines disproportionately occur in African-American and Hispanic areas.
In Texas, fights this week about the governor’s attempts at limiting the number of ballot locations were drawing comparisons to racist Jim Crow-era voter suppression tactics.
Democrats in Georgia sued the state this summer over long voting lines during the primary elections, in a state long accused of suppressing the votes of people of colour.
Black political scientists and community leaders in Georgia told me this year that long lines in African-American areas are a persistent problem there. Hasan Crockett, a political science professor at St. Augustine’s University, said the same kinds of problems persistently pop up in AfricanAmerican areas in some states — too few polling stations, for example, or voting machines that didn’t work.
“Georgia is a good example of suppressing the vote, particularly the Black vote,” Crockett said, calling it “a micro-study of what happens around the country.”
Daniel Nichanian, editor of the Political Report at the Appeal website, which tracks voting rights issues, noted recently that there were hourslong lines for voting in Georgia counties near Atlanta in 2016, during the 2018 midterms and in the 2020 primaries, making hollow any argument that this week’s problems are an unforeseen anomaly. “It’s important to place the long lines, where they happened, in the context of the repeat similar history, cycle after cycle, in that same location,” he wrote on Twitter.
And of course, to most Canadians, the idea of waiting in line for eight hours to vote seems absurd. I once complained to polling staff when I had to wait for 15 minutes. A CTV story from the 2015 federal election only emphasizes the contrast with this year’s American experience: “We’ve been standing there waiting for 10 minutes,” a woman said. “It’s ridiculous.” Her husband added, “I’ve never, ever seen it this bad. You get fed up.”
I was exasperated to wait a quarter of an hour, I also registered to vote on the spot because I wasn’t on the voters list, which is another thing many Americans cannot do. In Canada, all voters can register on election day, and there’s a long list of acceptable forms of ID to do so.
A reminder that this isn’t the case in much of the U.S. came on Tuesday. Virginians panicked when a cut cable caused the entire voter registration system to go down on the last day of registration. (As a result, a court there extended the deadline.) That freak occurrence highlighted the perennial obsession in the U.S. with registration. The need to register in advance in many states and the sometimes stringent identification requirements for voting and registering are another element of U.S. democracy that keep masses of people from voting.
This year, the American Civil Liberties Union specifically listed stringent registration and identification rules as “rampant methods of voter suppression” that are common in the U.S. today. It estimated that in 2016, 90,000 voters in New York state alone were disenfranchised when they missed the deadline to register.
There are long lists of other criticisms flung at the American system about obstacles to effective democracy: corporate money, gerrymandering, centralization of power. But an unwillingness or inability to ensure that people who are eligible to vote are able to do so seems to be a particularly glaring deficiency.
There may be a silver lining for U.S. democracy in what the long lines symbolize: a lot of people going to great lengths to vote. A record 14 million Americans have already cast ballots, according to the University of Florida’s U.S. elections project — on Sunday, the project’s analysis said the number of early votes cast to that point was more than 6.5 times as many as at a similar point in 2016. Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report estimates the country may be on track for a “recordshattering” turnout, possibly seeing 20 million more votes cast than in 2016.
American democracy may have its problems. But this year at least, apathy doesn’t appear to be among them.
“Georgia is a good example of suppressing the vote, particularly the Black vote.” HASAN CROCKETT POLITICAL SCIENCE PROFESSOR, ST. AUGUSTINE’S UNIVERSITY