Concerns about voter access dominate races
Two days before vote, charges still emerging about tainted elections
The debate over voter access has erupted as a contentious issue in campaigns across the country just days before Tuesday’s elections, with candidates trading accusations about threats to ballot integrity and reports in multiple states about voting irregularities.
As Americans cast early ballots at historic rates for a nonpresidential year, voters are heading to the polls deeply suspicious about the opposing party’s commitment to fair elections, new polling shows, further polarizing the electorate.
“The environment that we’re in right now is particularly dangerous,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine who specializes in election law. “All of this ramped up since the 2000 election, when people realized that the rules of the game really matter.”
Raising the stakes are dozens of closely contested races for House, Senate and governor.
Worries about voter disenfranchisement have dominated the bitter race for governor in Georgia, where Republican Secretary of State Brian
Kemp, a leading advocate of strict voting rules, is overseeing his own race against Democrat Stacey Abrams, who is vying to become the nation’s first black female governor.
On Sunday, Kemp’s office accused the state Democratic Party of “a failed attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system” and opened an investigation after voting rights advocates reported a potential vulnerability in the state election system. Rebecca DeHart, executive director of the state Democratic Party, called the move an “abuse of power by an unethical Secretary of State.”
The controversy threatened to further rattle voters caught up in disputes about the state’s handling of voter registration applications and absentee ballots.
“I have never questioned, before now, that my vote would count, and that anybody else who made a sincere effort to vote would have their vote counted,” said Whitney McGinniss, 35, a Democrat who works in public administration in suburban Atlanta, whose absentee ballot was challenged over a signature mismatch. “My opinion of that has really changed.”
In recent years, Republicans across the country have backed restrictive voting laws — such as limits on the kinds of identification that can be used to vote or requiring signatures on registration applications and ballots to match — as they have warned, without evidence, about the potential for widespread voting fraud. Litigation over voting rules has doubled in the years since 2000, Hasen said.
“All levels of government and Law Enforcement are watching carefully for VOTER FRAUD, including during EARLY VOTING,” President Donald Trump tweeted Oct. 20. “Cheat at your own peril. Violators will be subject to maximum penalties, both civil and criminal!”
There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the United States. Voting rights activists have said the laws disproportionately affect young Americans and voters of color, who tend to vote Democratic. In Georgia, the vast majority of voter registration applications suspended this year under a strict new law have been those of African-Americans. In North Dakota, a restrictive voter ID law that requires voters to have a street address may make it harder for Native Americans, who are less likely to have the necessary identification, to cast ballots.
Voting rights advocates are monitoring several other issues across the country:
• In several battleground states, including Georgia, Nevada, Indiana and Wisconsin, hundreds of thousands of inactive voters have been removed from the rolls since 2016. Election officials have said the “list maintenance” comes after voters had not cast ballots in at least two federal elections, had moved or did not respond to information requests to verify their registrations. Voting rights activists are calling some of the activity improper voter “purges.” A federal appeals panel ruled last week that Ohio must allow thousands of voters removed from the rolls between 2011 and 2015 to vote provisionally Tuesday.
• In Texas, some voters casting their ballots early on electronic machines reported that after choosing a straight Democratic ticket, the screen switched their choice for Senate from Democrat Beto O’Rourke to Republican Ted Cruz. State election officials said they had received fewer than 20 reports of the glitch, which they blamed on old voting machines and did not expect it to influence the outcome. A small number of similar reports have emerged in North Carolina and Georgia.
• In Dodge City, Kansas, where 60 percent of residents are Latino, Ford County Clerk Deborah Cox is under fire for moving the city’s only polling location from downtown to a location outside the city limits and a mile from the nearest bus stop, citing looming construction that has not yet started. A federal judge ruled Thursday that it is too close to Election Day to reopen the original location, but he also noted that he was “troubled” by an email in which Cox wrote “LOL” after the American Civil Liberties Union asked her to help publicize their voter information hotline.
All of it has primed an already polarized political environment in which both Democratic and Republican voters are deeply suspicious of the opposing party’s commitment to fair elections.
According to a new poll from the Pew Research Center, most Americans have confidence that local poll workers will do a good job running elections Tuesday — but majorities of Democrats (64 percent) and Republicans (56 percent) say the opposing party has “little or no commitment to fair and accurate elections.”
Layered on top of those anxieties are widespread worries about whether the United States is prepared to fend off hacking efforts by foreign governments and concerns about the integrity of electronic voting systems.
According to the Pew poll, 85 percent of Americans favor requiring electronic voting machines to produce paper ballot backups. At least a dozen states do not have that system.
In Georgia, two regulations have caused worries: a new law demanding that voter information on registration applications exactly match existing government records — even down to a hyphen — and a requirement that a voter’s signature match on an absentee ballot application and the ballot itself.
Although the signature requirement is not new, a surge in absentee voting this year — and in rejected ballots — has led to scrutiny of its enforcement.
Voting rights groups sued after election officials rejected hundreds of absentee ballots and suspended more than 50,000 registration applications, the vast majority of them from African-Americans.
Two federal judges sided with the plaintiffs in both cases, ordering state and local officials to stop rejecting absentee ballots over signature mismatches and to give voters a chance to verify their identity before tossing registrations.
The atmosphere in Georgia was further inflamed Sunday, when Kemp’s office announced an investigation into the state Democratic Party, posting a headline about the case on the secretary of state’s government website — directly beneath a voter’s guide to polling locations.