Will Republicans Succeed in Limiting Voting Access?

The Republicans who could defeat Obama aren’t necessarily the ones you’d think of. If Mitt Romney carries the election by the same sort of margin that George W. Bush did in 2000, he will probably owe his victory to Republican state legislators who have been busy over the last couple of months putting stumbling blocks in the paths of traditionally Democratic voting groups.

On the eve of the national conventions that mark the beginning of the “real” campaign, the polls show that Barack Obama has a small lead. On November 6 the race will be tight; we could stay up late into the night waiting for the final tally of votes in about 10 “battleground” states, where the winner could be decided by margins of thousands, or even hundreds, of votes. We will repeat ad nauseum the old adage, “every vote counts.” Unfortunately, if it is up to Republican legislators and governors in most battleground states, many thousands of votes will not be counted, since thousands of citizens will not have been able to register to vote or will not be able to exercise their right to vote.

We’re starting to learn the chorus: Those who venture to strike the hardest blows at Barack Obama this election year do not necessarily have their names on the ballot. With weeks to go before the vote, most veteran observers expect a very close race in November, since battleground states will be won by very small margins. It is in anticipation of these close elections that Republican legislators from the most contested states have gotten down to the job of assuring their party all possible advantages at the moment of the vote. Notably, this includes the tightening of voting eligibility standards by new regulations that transparently target certain groups of voters, which vote mostly Democratic. The strategy is not difficult to comprehend. Young people, the disadvantaged, African-Americans and Hispanics largely tend to favor the Democrats, and so it is enough to make voter registration, or the proof of identity at the polling stations, more difficult for these groups, who are already less likely to vote compared with white, middle-aged voters and the well-off.

The latest episode in this enterprise to suppress the vote is a law in Pennsylvania, a state where the race is always close, that requires voters to show an official photo ID to prove their identity. The United States has no citizenship card, as there are in many other countries, nor does it have health insurance cards like we do in Canada. The large majority of Americans don’t have a passport. Of course, there is the driver’s license, but that’s the thing: most of the people who don’t have one are younger, less rich, or members of minority groups. In short, these people are, above all, Democrats. The objective of these laws is to curb voter fraud, but those who propose these laws are, in general, incapable of proving that such fraud exists. In fact, the reasons that motivate the Republicans to promote these laws are usually transparent enough: just listen to the state House Republican leader, Mike Turzai, who applauded the passage of a law “which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” The Democrats are obviously making considerable efforts to help their voters overcome this obstacle, but the task is enormous. More than 750,000 voters (9 percent of the total) didn’t have the necessary documentation at the time the law was adopted and must acquire it before November. This number exceeds Barack Obama’s margin of victory in Pennsylvania from 2008 (620,478).

Pennsylvania is not the only state where measures to restrict the vote have been adopted these last few months by Republican legislatures. In certain cases, the federal courts have been able to reverse these laws because they have been ruled to infringe upon the civil rights of certain minority groups. This is what happened earlier this year in Texas and Wisconsin, where the laws were explicitly conceived to facilitate the process for voters close to the Republican Party, to the detriment of traditionally Democratic groups. For example, a gun permit was acceptable according to these two laws, but not a student ID.

In Ohio, probably the most sought-after swing state, the most recent controversy concerns the (Republican) secretary of state responsible for the administration of elections and his decision to permit the opening of county election boards for early voting during the weekend in predominately Republican counties, completely neglecting such an extension of voting hours in Democratic counties. In face of the public outcry of an affair that grew to a national scale, the secretary of state retreated and approved uniform opening hours of early voting offices in Ohio, which will remain closed the whole weekend.

Similar efforts to restrict the vote are on course or have been completed in a dozen other states, according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice. The Republican governor of Florida also caused a huge controversy earlier this summer by implementing a “purge” of electoral lists that forced thousands of voters to take difficult steps to get back a right that no one had a solid reason to take away.

American history demonstrates that the progression of the right to vote toward the ideal of including all the country’s citizens has never been easy. The memory of setbacks that followed the period of reconstruction after the Civil War is particularly painful. But since this era, the progress of voting rights has been a one-way movement. The Republicans who could defeat Barack Obama are also those who could reverse this movement. Must the narrow path to victory really take such a detour?