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Voting Rights & Elections
By Lianna Reagan – 02/09/12
This week, Chile’s President Sebastián Piñera signed a bill into law that automatically registers its citizens to vote, which is expected to add 4.5 million people to Chile’s registration rolls. In doing so, the country joins many other democratic nations, including Australia, Canada, and France, that already have some form of automatic registration in place.
Unfortunately, the United States, where 35 percent of citizens — about 73.5 million — who are eligible to vote are not registered, does not have this policy in place. With such low registration rates, it is hard to imagine that in the last few years multiple laws have been approved across the country to restrict the ability of people to vote. In many states, there are even new burdens being placed specifically on the ability of community groups to register voters. One of the most onerous laws that passed was in Florida, and those restrictions are so severe that the League of Women Voters and Rock the Vote had to suspend their voter registration drives.
Voting is not only a right, but a fundamental part of building an engaged citizenry and the foundation for civic participation. The Brennan Center advocates for a number of ways to modernize our country’s voter registration process that would be helpful to states to facilitate widespread registration. These provisions of voter registration modernization include automated registration (or automatically registering eligible citizens based on lists from other governmental agencies), online registration and access (being able to register to vote; or check, and edit one’s registration online), and permanent state registration (a voter’s registration record is moved as needed among jurisdictions within the state, but the voter is kept on the voter rolls as long as she resides in the state). All of these measures would effectively and efficiently improve voter registration, and enable more Americans to vote.
In addition to making our democracy more inclusive, voter registration modernization could make voting rolls more clean and accurate. The key is in sharing and comparing information between government agencies while moving away from the antiquated paper-based system on which most states rely. In too many states, a form has to get mailed to the county election office where it is hard-entered into the state voter registration database. This paper based systems is not only labor intensive, but also error prone, and can lead to numerous problems in the electoral process. These systems are also incredibly costly at a time when money is particularly tight in the states. Moving to a paperless system can save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. In Maricopa County, Arizona, they saved $450,000 by switching to online registration and partial automation, and in Delaware, they saved $200,000 just on personnel costs. Voter registration modernization has also gained bipartisan support around the country, as it is an area in which both parties can come together in the common goal of efficiency and cost reduction.
By following in the footsteps of many of the world’s developed democracies, Chile took an essential step toward modernizing its voter registration system. As a first-rate democracy the United States should do no less.
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter Registration Drives, Voter Registration Modernization
By Nic Riley & Molly Alarcon – 01/20/12
This Monday, as the Republican presidential field convened for a debate before the South Carolina primary, the candidates sparred over a variety of familiar debate topics, each one touting his past political achievements, electability, and virtuous campaign tactics. But, amid these familiar talking points, the candidates also broached a topic that had yet to surface in previous debates: namely, the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
On the day named in Dr. King’s honor, the GOP candidates struggled to reconcile some of their controversial stances on voting rights policy with Dr. King’s celebrated struggle to expand the franchise. Former Sen. Rick Santorum invoked Dr. King’s memory by challenging the veracity of an attack ad run by a pro-Romney Super PAC, which falsely painted Santorum as supporting voting rights for incarcerated prisoners. Santorum used the opportunity to clarify that while he did support legislation, named in honor of Dr. King, to restore voting rights to people who completed their sentences, he never advocated letting current prisoners vote. Former Gov. Mitt Romney responded by taking a harder line, arguing that a person who has committed a violent crime should never be allowed to vote, regardless of how long ago the crime was committed and irrespective of whether criminal justice officials in the state have deemed the individual fit to re-enter society. This position — permanent disenfranchisement — is so extreme that only a handful of states have actually adopted the policy.
Santorum also highlighted another problem with Romney’s position: “This is Martin Luther King Day. This is a huge deal in the African-American community, because we have very high rates of incarceration — disproportionately high rates, particularly with drug crimes — in the African-American community.”
Santorum is right to highlight the link between the mass incarceration of African Americans and the racial disparities in voting that criminal disenfranchisement laws cause. But disenfranchising people with criminal convictions is more than just a “huge deal” for the African-American community — it is an issue of fairness for all our communities. More than 4 million Americans who currently live, work, and pay taxes in our communities are disenfranchised by state laws that bar individuals with criminal convictions from voting even after they’ve been released from prison. Dr. King’s struggle for equal access to the ballot box cannot be reconciled with state policies like these that disenfranchise free citizens — something Coretta Scott King noted shortly before her death.
Dr. King’s legacy surfaced again in Monday’s debate when Texas Gov. Rick Perry, responded harshly to a question about the enduring legacy of the Voting Rights Act. Moderator Juan Williams asked Mr. Perry, “Are you suggesting on this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day that the federal government has no business scrutinizing the voting laws of states where minorities were once denied the right to vote?”
Rather than acknowledging the evidence of continuing racial discrimination in voting — evidence that led to the bipartisan, nearly unanimous reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act in 2006 — Perry instead replied that Texas was “under assault by the federal government” and that “South Carolina is at war with this federal government,” referring to the Justice Department’s recent objections to voting changes in those states under the Voting Rights Act. Perry’s response to Williams’ question represents a very different view of the VRA than that of two of our recent presidents from Texas and of Dr. King himself. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the original VRA in Dr. King’s presence and, in 2006, President George W. Bush reauthorized the law, which was re-named in honor of Dr. King’s wife. It’s ironic that Texas’s latest presidential candidate would describe this seminal piece of civil rights legislation in such militaristic terms on the same day that the nation remembers a man who famously helped bring the law into being through nonviolent activism.
Shortly after the Civil War, with the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, our country made a pledge that no state would be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race when it comes to voting. A century later, our national government reaffirmed that pledge by enacting the Voting Rights Act. There should be little doubt that Dr. King would expect the federal government, as he did during his time, to ensure that states cannot backslide on the promises this country has made to prohibit racial discrimination in voting, or to provide equal opportunity for all its citizens, including those who have paid their debts to society.
Tags: Democracy, Voting After Criminal Conviction, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter ID
By Keesha Gaskins – 12/21/11
I read a blog this morning about the pre-Christmas hysteria suffered by children fueled by unrestrained anticipation, constant media-driven red and green stimulation and naked greed. This year, I can relate. All I want for Christmas is for the Department of Justice to deny preclearance for South Carolina’s discriminatory voter ID law.
Every day I wake I wait for my Google Alert to tell me that the Department of Justice has denied preclearance for the no-photo, no-vote Voter ID law passed by South Carolina. The Brennan Center for Justice, along with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the League of Women Voters of South Carolina led by the ACLU Voting Rights Project submitted two comment letters urging the Department of Justice to deny preclearance to South Carolina for this blatantly retrogressive law. During his speech at the LBJ Library, Attorney General Eric Holder implied that there might be something good in my proverbial stocking if our letter was very, very good and South Carolina’s law proves to be more naughty than nice. Like every child that wants to believe in Santa but is starting to suspect that the legend is too good to be true, I operate with a level of hopeful cynicism. anta Holder has not demonstrated a zeal for pushing back on efforts to undermine individual voting rights — will this Christmas be different?
The good people of Mississippi could represent the Grinch that may steal my Christmas. In November 2011, Mississippi voters passed a no-photo, no-vote constitutional amendment. I worry that this administration, for good reason, may not have the political will to refuse to preclear a state constitutional amendment that was passed by popular vote. But if they deny preclearance to South Carolina and Texas and reject their new laws, there is no clear, principled reason not to deny preclearance to Mississippi’s constitutional amendment — but a strong political talking point in the fact that Mississippi’s amendment was approved by a direct popular vote. Will this political problem make it harder to deny preclearance to these disenfranchising laws in other states and ruin my Christmas?
But I hope that the elves at the Department of Justice can see that there’s a clear political difference between a law passed by popular vote and one passed by a partisan legislature. Even if they are inclined to preclear Mississippi’s no-photo, no-vote voter ID law, it need not affect the determination that both Texas’ and South Carolina’s voter ID laws are retrogressive and discriminatory.
Every day my fear of proverbial coal in my stocking grows. Please, Santa Holder, make it a very Merry Christmas season.
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter ID
By Keesha Gaskins – 12/13/11
Crossposted at Huffington Post.
Last week, Paul Schurick, the campaign manager for former Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich, was convicted of two counts of conspiracy to violate election laws and two counts of election fraud for orchestrating a scheme of robo-calls intended to deter 100,000 Democratic African-American voters from voting in the City of Baltimore and Prince George's County Maryland.
The robo-calls, delivered in a woman's voice, assured Democratic voters that the Democratic Governor Martin O'Malley had already won the election as of 6:00 p.m. on Election Day 2010.
"Our goals have been met. The polls are correct and we took it back. We're OK. Relax. Everything's fine. The only thing left is to watch it on TV tonight."
At trial, Schurick argued his intention was to anger voters sympathetic to his candidate in order to motivate them to vote. A jury rejected his argument and found Schurick's intent was to mislead and discourage Democratic African‑American voters from going to the polls.
Schurick's conviction comes in the midst of a robust national debate about the importance of ballot security and how to protect American elections. Since January 2011, 15 states passed laws — with more legislation currently pending in Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Virginia, among others — that burden individual voters by making it harder for citizens to register and to vote. These efforts range from eliminating early voting on Sunday, to making it more difficult for citizens to register, to requiring a specific kind of government-issued photo ID to vote. In almost all cases these laws are justified as a means to prevent voter fraud. This justification fails.
Simply put: these laws do nothing to prevent voter fraud, while putting up unnecessary barriers to the ballot for millions. Making it all but impossible for the League of Women Voters to register citizens in Florida — as a new law does — will not prevent someone who wants to submit a false registration form from doing so, but it could keep thousands from ever getting on the voter rolls. Eliminating days available for early voting will not keep supposed "fraudsters" from the polls, but it will affect the 1-2 million voters who used those early-voting days to vote in the 2008 elections. Requiring a driver's license, gun permit, military ID or passport to vote (while not allowing student IDs or public benefit cards) will not improve the security of our elections, but it may prevent the 3.2 million citizens without the right kind of photo ID from voting. All total, up to 5 million American citizens may be affected by these laws, with no evidence that any voter fraud will be prevented.
These new laws raise concerns for the 2012 presidential election. Five million votes is greater than the margin of victory in 2 of the last 3 presidential elections. Moreover, there are a total of 175 electoral votes controlled by the states that enacted laws imposing new restrictions on voting and voter registration for the 2012 election — equaling 65 percent of the 270 electoral votes needed to elect the next President.
Conversely, the "voter fraud" evangelicals ignore the very real problems created by voter deception. In a case before him in 2009, federal Judge Dickinson Debevoise found that voter intimidation tactics present an ongoing threat to participation in the political process" and continue to pose a far greater danger to the integrity of the process than the unproven and undemonstrated threat of voter impersonation and improper voter registration.
The distribution of misinformation about elections and voter eligibility undermines public confidence and discourages citizens from participating in the electoral process. Examples of voter deception include:
- In 2002 in Louisiana, flyers in an African American neighborhood inaccurately told voters they would be able to vote three days after the election.
- In 2004 in Ohio, flyers in Franklin County told voters that due to heavy voter registration, Republicans should vote on Tuesday and Democrats should vote on Wednesday.
- In 2006 in Virginia, voters living in areas with large minority populations received calls incorrectly reporting that their polling places had changed.
- In 2008 in Philadelphia, fliers posted near Drexel University incorrectly warned that police officers would be at polling places looking for individuals with outstanding arrest warrants or parking tickets.
- In the 2006 midterm election, 14,000 Latino voters in Orange County, California received mailings from the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, warning them in Spanish that "if you are an immigrant, voting in a federal election is a crime that can result in incarceration" without reference to the fact that a naturalized immigrant may legally vote.
Other types of suppressive voter activity by political operatives or private citizens are:
Voter caging: efforts to identify and disenfranchise registered voters solely on the basis of an undeliverable mailing;
Voter intimidation: conduct that intimidates or threatens voters into voting a certain way or refraining from voting; and
Discriminatory or intimidating voter challenges: formal challenges to the eligibility of persons presenting themselves to vote either at the polls or prior to Election Day in a way intended to intimidate voters or in an intentionally discriminatory pattern.
Paul Schurick's conviction evidences the type of activity that is well-documented and clearly demonstrated to be a real problem.
Niomi Rosenberg, one of jurors from the Schurick trial said it best: "Suppression of the vote is a very big problem. Our country is founded on the right to vote."
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Challenges, Caging & Vote Suppression
By Keesha Gaskins – 12/12/11
Last week, New Mexico Secretary of State Diana Duran released a November 16, 2011 “interim progress report” summarizing previous findings by her office raising issues with New Mexico’s voter registration database. Like her earlier testimony last March, in which she refused to release the underlying data for her claims, this interim report by Secretary Duran is vague on details and methodology, and it lacks citations. As a result, confirming or investigating the claims and conclusions of the report is nearly impossible. But based upon the findings of the interim report, problems with New Mexico’s voter registration systems appear to be a result of how the Secretary of State manages the voter registration lists and identifies errors. The report doesn’t demonstrate any clear evidence of intent to commit fraud.
In March 2011, Duran appeared at a hearing on “no-photo, no-vote” voter ID legislation claiming, among other things, that her office matched 117 voter registrations to people who had used foreign-national credentials to obtain driver’s licenses. In the newly-released interim report, Secretary Duran focused on the 117 people that her office found on both lists. The report identifies 85 individuals without any voting history and 13 individuals that lacked sufficient identifying information for her office to determine whether they were the same person that appeared on both lists. That leaves 19 people with the same name who appeared on both lists and who voted at some point following their registration.
Of the 19 voters who appeared on both the voter registration list and the foreign-national credentialed driver’s license list, Secretary Duran’s office identified nine people who voted prior to applying for a driver’s license using foreign national documentation. Secretary Duran does not, however, provide information on how she matched those nine persons between the lists. Given a large enough pool, a matching name and birthdate are not enough to ensure that it is the same person on both lists – at least not without using unique identifying numbers on both lists, which she did not do. Moreover, even an address check cannot avoid problems with duplication of name, missing suffixes or prefixes, or even errors in the pollbooks. For the remaining 10 voters who Secretary Duran identified as registered to vote and who voted sometime after obtaining a driver’s license with foreign-national credentials, it is important to note that in the initial review of the voter file, Secretary Duran compared voting records between 2003 and 2010. During that same period 13,205 New Mexico residents became U.S. citizens.The potential for overlap here is not accounted for in her allegations.
From the analysis the Secretary of State has presented, there have been a number of problems at the different levels of administration that handle voter registration forms. One of the complaints from the Secretary is the use of “dummy” social security numbers, as their system will not accept an application without a social security number and so some officials used other numbers and added zeros to override that feature. Correcting this problem would be a clear first step towards preventing further confusion in the state’s voting rolls. The Secretary blames provisions of the NVRA for encouraging non-citizens to register to vote by offering them a registration form at the DMV and when applying for public benefits. Both requirements have proven to be highly successful measures that have increased access to voter registration among eligible American citizens. If New Mexico can devise and follow more effective protocols for registering new voters, then people registering who are not eligible will not be an issue.
There are many ways that the processing of voter registrations can be improved, including modernizing voter registration to limit clerical and data errors that are common and allowing more shared information between state and election offices. By allowing less opportunity for administrative error, making voter registration rules and procedures clearer, implementing safeguards, and properly adding voters to the voter file, the types of problems identified by Secretary Duran’s interim report will be minimized. Secretary Duran has self-identified a number of areas where her office can help tighten up procedures, make forms and signage more clear for citizens and non-citizens alike, and eliminate problems with list maintenance. The practice of holding up unrelated allegations of voter fraud, vilifying non-citizens, and creating unnecessary work for law enforcement is not responsible policy-making – it’s rabble-rousing and it’s bad governance.
Secretary Duran has clearly identified multiple areas where her office can implement new policies, procedures and practices that would vastly improve the administration of New Mexico’s elections without imposing any new, unnecessary burdens on voters.
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Allegations of Voter Fraud, Other Voter List Issues
By Yanick Saila-Ngita – 12/08/11
I can clearly recall the image sprawled across the cover of my local newspaper back in 2005: a photograph of a group of Iraqi women, dressed in niqabs, proudly waving their purple inked thumbs shortly after casting their ballots in the first election following the fall of the Hussein regime. Seventy-five percent of eligible voters cast their ballots. This momentous occasion came on the heels of a presidential election convened in Afghanistan. American politicians who had supported the invasion and subsequent wars viewed this as an example of the United States transporting its values of freedom and democracy across the globe. But one must ask if these values are truly being protected and promoted within our own borders.
We often talk about voter suppression laws, as running afoul of the basic American right to vote. However, these measures also contradict our obligations as a country under international agreements. Felon disenfranchisement laws, limits on early voting—especially Sunday voting—and voter ID laws disproportionately affect minorities. This exacerbates our failure to uphold a UN convention to eliminate racial discrimination, adding yet another reason to reject these suppressive measures.
This year we have seen states impose strict voter ID laws under the guise of ensuring that the voting process is secure. These laws disproportionately impact the right to vote for communities of color, as the Brennan Center has documented. The United States is a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which requires nations, including our own, to "pursue by all appropriate means and without delay a policy of eliminating racial discrimination in all its forms.” In 2001, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination called into question the “political disenfranchisement of a large segment of the ethnic minority population [in the United States] who are denied the right to vote by disenfranchising laws and practices.” They urged the United States to take necessary steps to ensure that all of its citizens are able to access the vote without any form of discrimination.
We are moving backwards from this goal. Currently, numerous state laws prohibit inmates and the formerly incarcerated from participating in the vote. The result? 8 percent of African Americans are disenfranchised, three times the national average. Allowing these individuals to vote would be one way to decrease disparity and comply with human rights law.
Photo ID requirements to vote disproportionately impact minority citizens who, for a variety of potential reasons, are more likely to lack required identification documents. The NAACP is presenting evidence of these suppressive measures this week to the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights. In March, the organization will send a delegation to Geneva to gather support from the UN Human Rights Council.
Even though many of our nation’s political leaders point to the United States as a superior model of participatory democracy, other countries far outmatch the U.S. in eliminating discriminatory voting practices. The Constitutional Court of South Africa has struck down measures that disenfranchise prisoners, remarking, “The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood.”
The same cannot be said for judges here in the U.S., and the Brennan Center estimates that more than 5 million Americans are ineligible to vote due to a criminal conviction. Only two states allow prisoners to vote. However, in the case of Sauvé v. Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that laws that sought to eliminate prisoners’ ability to vote failed to further any reasonable state aim.
The U.S. must take bigger steps to comply with the obligations it has agreed to and promoted internationally by enacting measures that improve minority access to the ballot box. There exists a troubling contradiction when so many of our resources continue to be invested in making sure people abroad are able to vote and our own citizens find it difficult to do so in their own neighborhoods. As Congressman Emanuel Cleaver passionately expressed in a recent House hearing on voter suppression laws, “we're trying to get folks around the world to vote and stopping it at home."
Tags: Democracy, Voting After Criminal Conviction, Post-Incarceration Restoration of Voting Rights, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter ID
By John Travis – 12/07/11
Cross-posted at Reform NY.
The Brennan Center released a report this week detailing the tens of thousands of votes that were lost in New York because voting machines read their choices as “overvotes” – the invalid selections of more than the allowable number of candidates. Instead of returning the ballot, as is done in many other jurisdictions, the ballots were retained and the machine displayed a screen message using complex election jargon that gave voters misleading cues about their options. In the 2010 election, this confusing message led to as many as 20,000 lost votes in the governor’s contest alone and as many as 60,000 lost votes across all contests. The New York Times, Daily News, WNYC, and Politico have all done a great job covering the story.
The Brennan Center and others warned state election officialsabout the potential problems that would arise due to this confusing message. Represented by the Brennan Center, the NAACP New York State Conference, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, and several individual plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the New York State and New York City Boards of Elections in June of 2010 over the discriminatory impact on minority voters.
Our new study confirms that people of color were disproportionately likely to lose their vote. One percent of black and Hispanic voters in New York City did not have their votes for governor counted. In two predominantly Hispanic election districts in the South Bronx, nearly 40% of all votes were not counted in 2010; despite our repeated requests for an investigation into the overvotes in the South Bronx, we are not aware that one has been conducted. Our report also details problems with ballot design, finding that voters were more likely to cast an overvote in a race where candidates for the same office were displayed across two rows of the ballot (such as in the governor’s contest and in Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s U.S. Senate contest).We estimate that if no revisions are made to the overvote message, over 100,000 votes in New York could be lost in the 2012 election, when turnout will be much higher.
Fortunately, as detailed in the report, the State Board of Elections has agreed to adopt a better overvote warning in time for the 2012 election. But more steps can and should be taken to prevent lost votes. Election officials should make election results available by precinct; those results should report the number of overvotes in each contest on the ballot. When problems are discovered, election officials should be empowered required to investigate the reasons for high overvote rates. Ballots should be treated as public records to allow members of the public and voting experts to determine if ballots were in fact overvoted or simply recorded as overvotes because of a machine error. And states should reexamine their ballot design requirements and provide election administration officials with the guidance and flexibility they need to create voter-friendly ballots.
The recommendations are not specific to New York and can serve as models for jurisdictions across the nation to ensure that votes are counted as they were intended to be cast. The new report is available through the Brennan Center’s website.
Tags: Democracy, NY Reform, Voting Rights & Elections, Ballot & Election Material Design, Voting Technology
By Sundeep Iyer – 11/16/11
On May 27, 2011, Texas Governor Rick Perry signed into law Senate Bill 14, which requires that voters show government-issued photo identification at the polls in order to cast a ballot. Because Texas is a “covered” jurisdiction under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Justice must “preclear” Senate Bill 14 before the law can take effect. In other words, Texas must demonstrate that the law has neither a discriminatory purpose nor a retrogressive effect on minority voters. After Texas’s initial submission urging the Department of Justice to preclear Senate Bill 14, the Justice Department requested more information from the state, including data – broken down by race - detailing the number of registered voters without ID. The data that Texas provided in response to the Department of Justice’s request clearly demonstrates that Senate Bill 14 has a harmful and discriminatory impact on Latino voters.
Texas sent the Justice Department a spreadsheet detailing the number of registered voters statewide who neither had an ID issued by the state’s Department of Public Safety (DPS) nor matched an ID record in the DPS database. The State also provided the number of Spanish surname registered voters who didn’t have ID and who didn’t match any record in the DPS database. Because the State doesn’t collect data on the race or ethnicity of registered voters, Spanish surnames serve as the best available proxy for Hispanic or Latino origin. Absent data on the race of registered voters, however, the State was unable to estimate the number of black and Asian voters who didn’t have a DPS-issued ID.
Texas’s data shows that there are currently 174,866 registered Latino voters who do not have a DPS-issued ID and who do not match an ID record in the DPS database; this is 6.28% of all registered Latino voters. By comparison, just 4.29% of the state’s non-Latino registered voters did not have a DPS ID and did not match an ID record the DPS database. This strongly suggests that Texas’s Latino voters would be adversely impacted by Senate Bill 14.
Because the State does not report rates of ID possession among non-Latino registered voters of different races, there is no way of knowing exactly what the rate of ID possession is among white voters. Therefore, at first glance, it might seem impossible to definitively prove that Senate Bill 14 has a discriminatory impact on Hispanic voters. But despite the obvious limitations associated with the information Texas provided to the Justice Department, the discriminatory impact of voter ID laws on the state’s Latino population is unmistakable.
Using data from the November 2010 Current Population Survey (CPS) Voting and Registration Supplement, we calculate the percentage of non-Latino registered voters in Texas who are white. We found that 77.8% are white.[1] Applying that estimated percentage to the data provided by the State, we estimate that there were 7.8 million white registered voters in Texas.[2] As noted above, 6.28% of registered Latino voters did not have a DPS-issued ID and did not match an ID record in the DPS database. For the percentage of registered white voters without DPS-issued ID to be equal to the percentage of registered Latino voters without DPS-issued ID, about 490,000 white registered voters must not have a DPS-issued ID.[3] But as Texas’s own data demonstrates, there were only 429,026 non-Hispanic registered voters without DPS-issued ID in Texas!
In other words, it is impossible for white voters to lack ID at the same rates that Latino voters lack ID. Even if every non-Latino person of color had a DPS-issued ID, the percentage of white registered voters without ID would still be lower than the percentage of Latino registered voters without ID: just 5.5% of white registered voters would not have ID, compared to 6.3% of Hispanic voters.[4] Given that several national studies have found that African-American voters are significantly less likely to possess a state-issued photo ID than white voters, this disparity is almost certainly much larger in reality.
When Texas filed its preclearance submission with the Department of Justice, the state ostensibly wanted to show that Senate Bill 14 would not have a discriminatory impact on people of color. But the State’s own data demonstrates exactly the opposite.
[1] The 95% confidence interval for the estimate ranges from 76.0% to 79.7%.
[2] The 95% confidence interval for this estimate ranges from 7.61 million to 7.99 million.
[3] The 95% confidence interval for this estimate ranges from about 478,000 to 501,000.
[4] The 95% confidence interval for the estimated percentage of white voters ranges from 5.37% to 5.63%.
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter ID
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