Too many of the so-called “election integrity” laws being passed and proposed by Republican-dominated state legislatures are a mere recycling of Jim Crow era voter restrictions that are intended to suppress the votes of minorities, the young, people with disabilities, women, and the poor. Some of them can become the equivalent of a poll tax, which even after the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decision in Shelby v. Holder (2013) remains explicitly outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The recent practice in many Republican states to reduce the number of voting locations in urban and minority areas creates long lines and waiting times to vote. Disproportionate attention has been placed on the Georgia prohibition of private parties to provide food or water to voters standing in line. But the larger issue is that no matter how long polls are open and even if refreshment is available to people in line during that time, if you must stand for hours in line to vote because there are fewer polling places per capita in your area, that amounts to subjecting you to a poll tax if you must take unpaid time off or risk losing your job altogether in order to stand in that line.
Several states are proposing to even take away the right to vote absentee if you have to work on election day. In Alabama, you cannot vote absentee simply because you must work during polling hours – you are expected to take time off from work to vote or do so before or after work hours. In fact, many states do not have laws that require employers to permit employees time off to vote on election day, and even those states that do often limit the amount of time that must be allowed to just an hour or two. In Georgia it is two hours, and long lines in Atlanta where the number of poll locations were reduced in recent elections often exceed that amount of time. Expanding early voting would help this situation, however the Republican state trend is to reduce rather than increase early voting hours and locations in heavily populated urban areas.
New restrictions on absentee voting combined with strict voter identification (ID) laws also make it harder for many people to vote and can turn into a poll tax for even those voters who do qualify to vote absentee. Alabama’s absentee voter law says that no excuses are valid to vote absentee other than travel, disability, or out-of-state military service. In Georgia you may still vote absentee for any reason, but you must indicate your state issued driver’s license or identification card number on both your ballot application and your ballot. If you do not have a driver’s license or ID card (which many poor, elderly, and disabled voters do not, particularly in urban areas), then you must submit a copy of some other form of photo ID with a copy of a document that provides proof of your address. Merely providing a witness signature from a registered voter is not enough. But in order to submit hard copies of a photo ID and proof of address, you must access a copier/printer because even if you take a picture of those documents with your phone you must still print hard copies to send in – twice. Once when you apply for your ballot, and then again with your actual ballot. All of these copies cost money to make, which translates to paying a poll tax in order to be able to vote. In Arizona it was even proposed that absentee ballot signatures should all be notarized – a poll tax in the form of a notary fee.
Strict Voter ID laws also turn into surprisingly large poll taxes if you do not possess certified copies of key documents like your birth certificate or social security card that allow you to obtain a state issued ID card. These documents could have been lost, stolen, burned in a house fire, or left behind after an eviction or an emergency evacuation (think disasters like a tornado, hurricane, flood, volcanic eruption, or wildfire). Duplicate certified copies must be obtained from the county where the documents were issued – for a birth certificate or certificate of naturalized citizenship, the county where you were born or obtained citizenship. If you have ever changed your name, you may also have to provide proof of your name changes – meaning that you would need to contact the state or county in which you were married, divorced, or adopted to obtain a copy of your marriage license or divorce or adoption decree. In today’s mobile society, it is common to no longer live in the county or even the state where you were born or married. Even if you can obtain these documents remotely, there are always fees required to obtain certified copies – in my current county a single certified copy of one’s birth certificate costs $26. That amounts to a poll tax if you need to pay for that copy in order to obtain a state issued ID so that you can vote in your state. That poll tax increases if you need to also obtain copies of a marriage certificate and/or a divorce or adoption decree to prove any name changes. This requirement discriminates against women, who due to marriage and divorce change their names more often than men.
Strict Voter ID also discriminates against college students who no longer consider themselves residents of their home states and wish to vote in the state where they go to college. Texas has a Voter ID law which declares that a student ID from a Texas college or even a state university is not a valid Voter ID. This means that unless a college student wishes to go through the trouble and expense (poll tax) to obtain a Texas driver’s license or other type of state photo ID card, they are not allowed to vote in Texas. Since young adults are generally not as motivated to vote in the first place, disqualifying student IDs as a valid form of Voter ID is a deliberate method of suppressing the votes of young adults, who tend to vote Democratic. This becomes even more apparent when you consider that a Texas handgun permit is considered a valid form of Voter ID, while a student ID issued by the state-owned University of Texas is not. But college students tend to vote Democratic, while gun owners tend to vote Republican – this intentional bias is reflected in Texas Voter ID laws.
All of these existing and proposed laws are deliberately designed to suppress the voting abilities of minorities, the poor, people with disabilities, young adults, women, and urban voters – especially since most of them have been passed or proposed since the federal review requirement within the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was nullified by the SCOTUS decision in Shelby v. Holder. These suppressive laws are now gaining even more traction in Republican dominated state legislatures because it was the large turnout of these Democratic-leaning voters that helped to propel Democrat Joe Biden to victory in the presidential race over Republican incumbent Donald Trump, particularly in key swing states like Georgia and Arizona.
Recycling old Southern Democratic Jim Crow tactics to disenfranchise minorities and the poor is an ironic thing to do for the Republican Party, which had its formative roots in the abolition movement of the 19th century. And some of the folks who authored these New Jim Crow Laws are not even bothering to deny that targeted voter suppression is their true intent. U.S. Representative John Kavanaugh of Arizona claimed:
“Democrats value as many people as possible voting, and they’re willing to risk fraud. Republicans are more concerned about fraud, so we don’t mind putting security measures in place that won’t let everybody vote – but everybody shouldn’t be voting. Not everybody wants to vote, and if somebody isn’t interested in voting, that probably means that they’re totally uninformed on the issues. Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.” [Emphasis is mine]
What Rep. Kavanaugh means, of course, is that “quality” votes are votes for Republicans, and so those must be maximized while minimizing the number of “non-quality” votes – those cast for Democrats. And what better way to do that than to recycle methods that worked for racist white southerners in the past? All while falsely claiming that rampant, widespread election fraud (which has been proven over and over again not to exist) makes such laws necessary?
When the Republican Party realized that it could no longer win elections within the free market of ideas, it did not change its ideas to appeal to more voters. Instead, Republicans – led by Donald Trump – chose to spread lies about fraud and “irregularities” to cause doubt about election integrity, then use that false doubt to pass voter suppression laws to disenfranchise those most likely to decide that Republican ideas are bad. The sad fact is that the current leadership of the Republican Party – once the party of Lincoln, abolition, and the expansion of voting rights – seems to no longer even believe in democracy itself.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/state-voting-bills-tracker-2021
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-96
https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/apr/07/whats-georgias-new-voting-law/
https://www.cga.ct.gov/2014/rpt/2014-R-0256.htm
https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/forms/id/poster-11×17-aw-voter.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/13/arizona-quality-votes-kavanagh/
