by Bennett McIntosh
This past spring a few friends and I, with the support of Organizing for America, organized a two-day voting registration drive at my high school in Littleton, Colorado. Our liaison with OFA expressed concern after a wildly successful first day because we had registered a large number of Republicans, but we elected to continue with the drive the next day – we could hardly renege on our promise to students who couldn’t register the first day, and we wanted to put small-d democracy above big-D Democrats. We figured success was measured in how many engaged, thinking voters we helped to participate in elections years down the road, not in their party affiliation at one specific moment in time.
Unfortunately, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler saw things differently. (Can someone explain why the man in charge of election integrity in the state is elected on a partisan basis? This is the man who, in office, “joked” that “A good election is one the Republicans win.”) After public outcry convinced him of the impropriety of sitting in a dunk tank to help county GOP officials pay off a fine that his office had levied, he nonetheless saw no issues in continuing to manipulate state elections in his party’s favor. First, he tried to prevent counties from sending mail-in ballots to those who had asked for them in 2008 but failed to vote in the 2010 midterm elections. (In a completely unsurprising twist, these voters turned out to be overwhelmingly urban, minority, and working-class.) He sent out hundreds of letters to those he believed to be illegally registered, indicating that they could be prosecuted for trying to vote – embarrassingly, the majority of the recipients were legal voters. The Denver DA and a statewide ethics commission for misappropriation of public funds are now investigating him. The reason? Misappropriating public funds to attend another GOP fundraiser.
Fortunately, Gessler’s underhanded efforts at suppression failed to turn the painfully close Colorado vote this November, nor did more concerted legislative efforts in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Florida. But now the Supreme Court is reviewing the provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which allow Justice Department review of changes to voting law in districts with a history of discrimination. According to those advocating the dismantling of these protections, “Voter turnout and registration rates now approach parity. Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels.”
Tell that to the confused Pennsylvania voters who were unsure whether they would be prosecuted for showing up to vote without an ID. Tell that to all two African-American members of the US Senate. See how that statement is received by minorities in the state of Texas, where, despite nearly 90% of population growth in the decade up to 2012 being ethnic minorities, proportion of “minority-majority” districts in the state would have actuallydecreased under the plan initially put forward by Republicans.
Texas was covered by the voting rights act, so the Justice Department could intervene. Not so for Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Colorado. Here blatantly partisan and discriminatory suppression efforts can be pushed by the whim of the legislative majority, or worse, the whim of a single man. Rather than turning back the clock on protections for this fundamental right, we need new protections which reflect the modern reality that these attacks are more geographically distributed, to ensure that no American is denied the right to vote by their own government.
