Voter Suppression Won in 2024
Since at least 2004, I have participated in countless phone banks as one of those obnoxious people who call you at home at dinnertime or when you are tying to put the kids to bed about a progressive candidate or ballot measure, urging you to make a vote plan and tell all your friends. I tell you where your polling place is or how to mail in your ballot. Sometimes the candidates win or the ballot measure passes and then I go back to doing laundry and washing dishes until the next election.
In 2020, I learned about efforts to protect the vote in which a small band of attorneys and organizers reached out to voters who had been forced to vote “provisionally” or whose ballots had been challenged. So, after the polls closed, I started calling voters, telling them how to fix their ballot and ensure it was counted. And then I went back to paying the bills and just trying to live my life in a pandemic.
Meanwhile, the attacks on voting rights have continued apace and been unrelenting. Literacy tests of the Jim Crow era have given way to targeted purges of voting rolls and strict voter ID laws, laws that may seem sensible in theory, but that in practice are unfair by design and discriminatory in implementation.
In 2024, these attacks suppressed millions of votes. According to data obtained by Greg Palast from the US Elections Assistance Commission, at least:
4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls because they did not return what is called a “poison postcard” that looked like junk mail to verify their address even though they hadn’t moved
1,216,000 “provisional” ballots were not counted (i.e., because they had not brought required ID or the address on their ID did not match the ID on their registration)
3.24 million new registrations were rejected or not entered by Election Day
2,121,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g. postage due)
317,886 voters were challenged by self-proclaimed “vigilante” voter-fraud hunters, with 200,000 voters in Georgia alone
If the targeted voters were random, that would be one thing and still a problem. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of voters whose registrations are not purged or who are not forced to vote provisionally are easily identified as white. Those whose registrations are purged or whose votes are rejected are overwhelmingly Black, Hispanic, or Asian-American. According to Palast, the registrations for primarily 166,433 Black voters and students in Wisconsin were successfully targeted for purges and Kamala Harris lost that state by 29,397 votes.
Ahead of the 2024 election, I discovered the work of Vote Riders and their work is an essential piece of the puzzle. They provide non-partisan education and assistance to ensure that no eligible voter is prevented from casting a ballot that counts due to voter ID laws. Training is online and campaigns are ongoing. If you can’t make it to a training, you can access their DIY guide.
Their current campaign targets Wisconsin which has one of the strictest voter ID laws in the nation. On April 1, Wisconsin voters will elect a supreme court judge and decide whether to enshrine voter ID laws into the constitution.
In between cleaning the cat box and working two jobs, I plan to send out my first batch this week—after I contact my senators and representative, of course.