Janine Jackson interviewed John Powers, counsel for the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, about efforts to prevent poor and minority citizens from voting for the August 31, 2018 CounterSpin. This is an edited excerpt.
John Powers: “There are jurisdictions around the country that have made it more difficult for people to vote at each and every stage of that process.”
John Powers: The voting process in the United States is a lengthy one, of course. You have to register. You have to figure out what voting precinct and polling place you’re in, assuming that your registration application is actually approved by the Board of Elections. Then you have to decide to vote, either by absentee ballot or early voting in person at a location, or on Election Day. And the sad truth is that there are jurisdictions around the country that have made it more difficult for people to vote at each and every stage of that process.
JJ: I want to draw you out on one particular aspect of this. So someone who hasn’t voted in a while, because they haven’t been moved to, or because their situation meant that they couldn’t, but now they want to vote, and they find they’ve been erased from the rolls. Can you explain purges?
JP: One thing that a lot of voters aren’t aware of, with respect to their registration status, is that it’s not necessarily permanent. If someone voted, say, for former President Obama in 2008 or 2012, and hasn’t voted since then, they may no longer be on the list, even if they haven’t moved from their house since then. The Supreme Court decided in the Ohio case, Husted, that a voter can be placed in an inactive status, and then ultimately removed, just for not having voted in the past number of election cycles. So voters have to remain vigilant to make sure that they are on the list, and may have to take additional steps, even though they haven’t done anything to take themselves off the list, if they haven’t voted in a while.
JJ: It seems anti-democratic on its face—you haven’t voted, so you can’t—but I understand that these purges are also flawed in practice.
JP: There’s a lot of problems with how these systems are set up. For example, a Board of Elections can flag someone to be purged if mail sent to them is returned as undeliverable by the Postal Service, or if the Board of Elections receives other information indicating that the voter may have moved, even though that’s not actually true. The Board of Elections will send you a little postcard that looks like a piece of junk mail. If you don’t fill out that piece of mail and return it, the Board of Elections takes that as you admitting that you no longer reside at that jurisdiction, and then you can be removed within a couple of election cycles. And most people don’t realize that notice means that, and therefore they don’t fill it out, which is why so many folks get removed improperly on the basis that they moved.
JJ: I understand that these purges are increasing lately; I think there’s new research from Brennan [Center] that suggests that. Can you explain, briefly, what things like this have to do with Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 Supreme Court decision; a lot of this is connected, one way or another, with that ruling, isn’t it?
JP: It is. In 2013, the Supreme Court rendered an extremely important opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, which lifted many jurisdictions across the country from having to submit changes to their voting practices and procedures for what was called pre-clearance, or review by the Department of Justice. And that pre-clearance process forced jurisdictions to be really careful about the voting changes they enacted and submitted for review, because they were prohibited from adopting changes that either had a discriminatory effect on minority voters, or were adopted for the purpose of making it more difficult for minority voters to cast a ballot.
And what we’ve seen since the Shelby County v. Holder decision is that jurisdictions, no longer being monitored and having to submit things for review, have said, “OK, now we’re free, we can do whatever we want,” and that places an extreme burden on local voters and nonprofits to challenge things at the local level, and if necessary bring lawsuits. Meaning that things that before could have easily been stopped in their tracks by DoJ at the outset now get through….
You could go through a laundry list of voting precinct consolidations, purges of voters, enacting very draconian exact-match registration requirements—where people get booted off the rolls for having a hyphen in their voter registration application but not on their driver’s license—as well as proof-of-citizenship requirements. There’s a number of different barriers that have been erected that make it more difficult for minority voters to have an equal say in the political process.
