Biden pushes for votes in Ariz., Texas, Ga.
Activists fight alleged voter suppression tactics
As the race for the White House tightens between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, voting rights activists in Texas, Georgia and Arizona are combating what they say are tactics by Republicans to suppress Black and Latino voters.
An expanding liberal base, fastgrowing Black and Latino populations and more aggressive get-out-the-vote efforts by Democrats have turned these traditionally red states won by Trump in 2016 into potential battlegrounds.
Biden’s campaign recently announced it would spend $6.2 million on TV advertising in Texas during the final weeks of the presidential campaign. And Jill Biden, the wife of Joe Biden, is set to visit the cities of El Paso, Houston and Dallas Tuesday, when early voting begins in Texas. She will host “Get Out The Vote” rallies in each city.
A Democrat has not carried Texas in a presidential election since 1976; Georgia since 1992; and Arizona since 1996.
As of Monday, Biden leads Trump by 2.7 points in Arizona, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average. Trump led Biden by 0.4 points for a polling average in Georgia. And Trump is up by 4.4 points in Texas – a slim margin by Texas standards.
Democrats in all three states have complained for years of efforts by Republican leaders to restrict voting access by creating strict voter ID laws, purging voters off the rolls, passing “exact match” voting laws, closing polling places and allowing long wait times at predominately Black precincts. These tactics disproportionately target Black and Latino voters who tend to vote Democratic and who have been hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed nearly 215,000 Americans, experts and voting rights advocates say.
Most recently, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott mandated that all counties designate just one drop-off location for absentee ballots. Democrats blasted the change as an effort to suppress votes in a tight election.
On Friday, a federal judge blocked Abbott’s order, saying it placed a burden on the voting rights of elderly and disabled Texans who are most likely to vote
with mail-in ballots. However, it was quickly appealed, and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay that put the judge’s ruling on hold.
But in a Monday ruling, the court of appeals upheld Abbott’s order, allowing the drop-off sites to be closed.
Trump has also promised to deploy campaign volunteers out to watch the polls on Election Day – a move critics say could intimidate voters.
LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Georgia-based Black Voters Matter, said Republicans are creating a “culture of fear and confusion” among people of color who are most likely to vote Democratic.
“All of their actions are connected to restricting people in a time when they need as much access as possible because of the (pandemic) conditions,” Brown said. “They have had to resort to the only way that they can stay in power, and that is to cheat. They simply do not have the numbers, they simply do not have the support.”
But Republican backers say that isn’t the case.
Allen West, chairman of the Texas GOP, said Republicans are trying to ensure a fair election and cut down on potential irregularities. “We need to make sure we have election integrity,” West said. “We need to make sure we have control of this process.”
State lawmakers have had the authority to enact new voter restrictions since 2013, when the U.S. Supreme
Court gutted a section of the Voting Rights Act requiring certain states and cities to obtain federal approval before changing voting laws or practices.
After the court struck down the law, which targeted states with a history of voter discrimination, Texas saw 750 polling locations close, Arizona lost 320 and Georgia closed 214, according to a report released last year by the Leadership Conference Education Fund. Voting rights advocates argued the court’s decision made it easier for elections officials to disenfranchise Black and Latino voters.
Elections officials in Georgia came under fire this year for issues at polling places during the June 9 primary. Some voters waited up to seven hours to cast ballots in Black and brown communities, others were turned away without being sure their provisional ballots would be counted.
The state’s gubernatorial election in November 2018 saw similar issues, but Democrats still made gains. Stacy Abrams won the most votes of any Democratic candidate in Georgia history in 2018. She lost the bitterly fought election to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp by 1.39 percentage points.
On Monday, the first day of early voting in Georgia for the Nov. 3 presidential election, voters complained of long lines at polling locations across metro Atlanta and waiting six hours to vote.
Brown said the voter suppression tactics are motivating Black and brown people across the country to fight the opposition by voting. More than 5.6 million people have voted early in the presidential election so far this year, an increase of roughly 75,000 more people compared with voter turnout at this point in the 2016 election, according to the United States Elections Project.
“People are very, very focused and determined,” Brown said.
Democrats point to favorable demographic shifts as a reason to hope for victories in Arizona, Texas and Georgia:
h In Arizona, the Latino share of the state population rose 12.8% between 1990 and 2018, while the white share of the population dropped by 17.3% in the same time period, according to economists at Arizona State University.
h From 2010 to 2018, nearly 54% of Texas’s population growth came from the Latino population, compared to just 13.6% from non-Hispanic whites, according to state demographers.
h Georgia lost 10% of its white eligible voters between 2010 and 2018 while gaining 5% more Black eligible voters in the same period, according to a report by the Pew Research Center.
Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, said Georgia could potentially turn blue this year because of these shifts – particularly a growing Black population in Atlanta – and more organizing by Democrats. “I think it’s legitimate to look at Georgia as a competitive state,” Gillespie said. “Look at the margins by what Republicans have been winning. Those margins have been narrowing over time.”
Arizona is also experiencing a change in demographics with its Latino population. Organizers say they have been aggressively working to get more Latinos registered to vote this year.
In Texas, state Democrats also point to shifting demographics – mainly burgeoning growth in and around urban centers like Houston and Dallas that tend to vote Democratic – for the push to turn Texas blue. Harris, Tarrant and Bexar counties – where Houston, Fort Worth and San Antonio are located, respectively – accounted for the biggest population growth in Texas over the past decade, adding a combined 1.2 million new residents, according to the state’s demographer office.
Much of that growth was fueled by people moving there from outside the county. The top three states sending people to Texas: Illinois, New York and California, all reliably blue states.