Voting rights

by Jeremy Leaming

Yet another federal court has dealt a major blow to Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s dogged work to restrict voting in his state – this time it was provided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Today the justices refused to consider a federal appeals court opinion that blocked Husted’s attempt to shut down early voting days before the general election, The Plain Dealer reported.

In 2008, the state allowed early voting during the three days before Election Day. Husted has fought to close that window. The Obama campaign and Ohio groups sued Husted arguing that the measure to limit early voting would greatly hinder the right to vote of tens of thousands of people. (The campaign argued that in 2008 about 100,000 people voted in the three days preceding the general election.)

Rick Hasen, at Election Law Blog, says the action by the high court is part of “a run in the courts for those fighting Republican legislative cutbacks on voting rights in 2012.”

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit also kept in place an injunction against a provision of Ohio law that placed a large burden on voters to ensure they were casting the correct ballots at the right precinct. The injunction will allow ballots cast in the wrong precinct because of poll workers’ errors to be counted.

In an ACS Issue Brief, Loyola Law school professor Justin Levitt said attempts to curtail early voting do “not fall evenly on the population as a whole” noting that in past elections minorities overwhelmingly used the early voting windows. “In 2008, for example, African-Americans represented 13 percent of the total voters, and 22 percent of the early voters, but 31 percent of the total voters on the final Sunday,” before Election Day.

by Jeremy Leaming

The efforts by Republican controlled statehouses to create more hurdles to voting, such as limiting early voting, creating onerous voter identification requirements, and making it more difficult to conduct voter registration drives, are hardly a recent trend.

Victoria Bassetti, author of Electoral Dysfunction: A Survival Manual for American Voters, argues in numerous articles that for a country that prides itself on its form of democracy the burdens on voting do not make good public policy nor provide a solid foundation for a healthy democracy. (This month PBS will air an “Electoral Dysfunction” documentary; the book is a companion piece to the documentary.)

In a piece for The Washington Post, Bassetti says our system of voting is “mystifying” to other countries, largely because of the burdens we place on voting.

“In the United States, we put the burden on the voter,” she writes. “And in doing so, we keep company with nations such as the Bahamas, Belize and Burundi.”

While maintaining that very few would label voter registration “anti-democratic,” she notes that “many political and social scientists believe that our country’s practice of putting the registration burden on individuals, coupled with outmoded, paper-intense registration systems, are major causes of the United States’ perennially low voter turnout. One study estimated that voter registration barriers in the United States depress turnout by 5 to 10 percent.”

In an Oct. 6 column for The New York Times, Bassetti explores how low turnout “produces poor representation, which produces laws people are disinclined to obey and so undermine the process.” She also mentions a rather interesting study regarding how difficult it can be for men to vote, especially if their candidates lose. The study, produced by scientists at Duke and University of Michigan, has something to do with testosterone levels in men and people with normal serotonin levels. (Simply or crudely put, voting can be tough on men because of testosterone reactions and people with weak serotonin systems.)

Though interesting, Bassetti says such studies are not especially helpful to handling “complex issues facing our democracy.”

Some of that complexity centers on the bureaucratic mess voting has become in many states.