Voter suppression

Voter suppression is a term used to describe policies and tactics that place an undue limitation on the ability of citizens to cast countable ballots in an election. In recent years, there has been debate about what policies and tactics constitute voter suppression or serve to promote and preserve election integrity.

This page provides examples of how voter suppression is used as a term in three case studies:

• Georgia Election Integrity Act of 2021
• Voter identification laws
• Voter list maintenance

This page also includes an overview of the historical use of voter suppression as a term and its popularity over time.

For an article on the use of the term election integrity, click here.

Usage case studies

The Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan policy institute promoting progressive ideas, defined voter suppression as follows:

“	Widespread voter suppression—particularly against historically marginalized groups—is a reoccurring problem in the United States. Each election cycle, untold numbers of eligible Americans are prevented from voting due to barriers in the voter registration process, restrictions on casting ballots, and discriminatory and partisan-rigged district maps. Voter suppression measures can differ by state and even by individual county. And while some voter suppression measures actively seek to discriminate against certain groups, others result from innocent administrative errors and glitches. Regardless of its form or intent, however, voter suppression is relentlessly effective in preventing voting-eligible Americans from contributing to the electoral process.	”
—Center for American Progress

United to Protect Democracy, a voting rights advocacy organization, said, "Voter suppression is deeply linked to a troubling history of laws passed to disadvantage minority voters and marginalized communities. From the nation’s founding until today, whenever an emerging group of Americans have sought the right to vote, people and institutions have fiercely fought to stop them. Today, that battle centers over state-based legislative attempts to suppress minority turnout."

This section includes examples of laws and policies that have been described as voter suppression.

Click here for a discussion of these laws by officials and analysts who describe them as promoting election integrity.

Georgia Election Integrity Act of 2021

In March 2021, the Georgia State Legislature passed the Election Integrity Act of 2021, which changed the state's electoral administration procedures. In an op-ed discussing the law, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), who signed the bill into law, said, "The Election Integrity Act makes it easy to vote by expanding access to the polls and harder to cheat by ensuring the security of the ballot box."

Key provisions of the bill include the following changes to election procedure:

• The period to request absentee ballots was reduced from 180 days to 78 days prior to the election.
• Voters are required to include the number of their Georgia driver’s license or identification card to verify their identity on absentee ballots rather than a signature. Voters without an ID are required to include alternative forms of identification, including birth date and social security number.
• Absentee ballot applications are prohibited from being automatically mailed.
• Dropbox locations were limited by the number of active registered voters and advance voting locations in the county.
• Mobile voting centers were prohibited unless the governor declared there was a state of emergency and authorized their use.
• The early voting period was set to begin four weeks before an election and required access to early voting on at least two Saturdays.
• No one, other than election officials, may provide food or drink to voters within 150 feet of a polling place or 25 feet of a voter standing in line. Voters may drink from a water fountain if one is available.
• Voters may not cast a provisional ballot at an incorrect precinct before 5 p.m.
• Poll hours may only be extended for the same duration of time as voters were unable to vote.
• Absentee ballots may be opened and inspected three weeks before an election, but they may not be counted until the polls close.
• The secretary of state was removed as a voting member of the state's election board. The board will have a chairperson elected by the Georgia General Assembly.
• The state election board will have the power to suspend county election officials if they meet certain standards for negligence or malfeasance.

Opponents of the law said it made voting more difficult and disproportionately affected Black voters' access to the ballot. Stacey Abrams, a 2018 Democratic gubernatorial candidate and voting rights activist, said the bill was part of a "coordinated onslaught of voter suppression bills." She said, "These are [new] laws that respond to an increase in voting by people of color by constricting, removing or otherwise harming their ability to access these perquisites. It doesn’t say brown and Black people can’t vote. It simply says we’re going to remove things that we saw you use to your benefit; we’re going to make it harder for you to access these opportunities."

President Joe Biden (D) called the law "Jim Crow in the 21st Century." He said, "It adds rigid restrictions on casting absentee ballots that will effectively deny the right to vote to countless voters. And it makes it a crime to provide water to voters while they wait in line – lines Republican officials themselves have created by reducing the number of polling sites across the state, disproportionately in Black neighborhoods."

In an article titled "Georgia's Voter Suppression Law," Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice, said the law appeared neutral but targeted Black voters. "Mobile voting (polling sites on wheels that travel to different set locations) is also now illegal in Georgia — a practice that has only been used in Fulton County, which has the largest Black population in the state. Ballot drop boxes must now be located inside early voting sites instead of other convenient locations, and many voters who plan to vote by mail must provide a driver’s license or state ID number," he said. The Brennan Center describes itself as "an independent, nonpartisan law and policy organization that works to reform, revitalize, and when necessary, defend our country’s systems of democracy and justice."

In a Washington Post article about restrictions on Black voters in Georgia in the 19th and 20th centuries, Robert Levine, a professor at the University of Maryland, wrote, "It is this history of Black voter suppression that today’s Georgia Republicans have embraced."

Usage around voter identification laws

See also: Voter identification laws by state, Arguments for and against voter identification laws, and Election integrity and voter identification laws

Voter identification laws require voters to present a form of identification to cast a ballot. Critics of strict voter identification laws say they constitute voter suppression because they disproportionately affect low-income, minority, and disabled populations who are less likely to have a form of identification that fits state requirements.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) defined voter suppression as encompassing “measures to make it harder for Americans—particularly black people, the elderly, students, and people with disabilities—to exercise their fundamental right to cast a ballot.” According to the ACLU, voter identification laws had the effect of making these groups less likely to vote.

Theodore Johnson, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, said, "These laws require voters to present a government-issued photo ID in order to vote, and they offer no meaningful fallback options for people who do not possess one of these IDs. Like their Jim Crow predecessors, strict voter ID laws are often defended by reference to a racially neutral need to defend the 'integrity' of elections."

Usage around voter list maintenance

See also: Arguments for and against using voter inactivity as a trigger to remove names from voter lists and Election integrity and voter list maintenance

Changes to a jurisdiction’s voter rolls are processes by which names of voters are removed from a state’s list of eligible voters in a given election. This process is typically done to remove ineligible or duplicated voting records in an effort to ensure that only voters eligible in a state or district can cast a ballot in that state or district. Voter list maintenance is often done by consulting the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File or the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address Database.

Voter rolls are also routinely maintained by removing inactive voters, which critics of the policy refer to as a voter roll purge. Mother Jones said the practice was designed “to circumvent protections for voters of color, a growing part of the electorate that favored Democratic candidates.” Discussing 198,000 voters who had been improperly purged from voter rolls in Georgia in 2020, Black Votes Matter Fund co-founder LaTosha Brown said, “I think it’s quite interesting and coincidental … that many of them on that list are African American voters. This is voter suppression.

In another example, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) signed a law in May 2021 that would remove infrequent mail voters from the state's early voting list if they had not voted by mail for two consecutive election cycles and responded to a notice from election officials.

State Sen. Juan Mendez (D) criticized the bill, saying that "there is no kind of voter that is better or more deserving of access to the right to vote. Voting regularly? Seriously, you're really trying to shame voters? Are we checking if concealed-carry people still want the Second Amendment rights if they don't find enough bullets every year? ... This bill looks like nothing more than a ruse to disenfranchise voters that you don't like."

Historical usage

In the 19th and 20th centuries, voter suppression referred to the tactics implemented through Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise Black, immigrant, and low-income voters. These tactics included physical intimidation and violence, literacy tests, property tests, voter roll purges, and poll taxes.

The passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 made a number of changes to voting laws across the country, including an end to the practices of literacy tests as preconditions and poll taxes discussed below. As a result, the meaning of voting suppression has shifted.

Alexander Keyssar, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School, wrote in 2012, "'Voter suppression' differs conceptually from outright disfranchisement because it does not involve formally disqualifying entire groups of people from the polls; instead, policies or acts of 'suppression' seek to prevent, or deter, eligible citizens from exercising their right to vote. Historically, voter suppression seems to arise when organized political forces aim to restrain the political participation of particular groups but cannot, politically or constitutionally, disfranchise them outright."

The 2013 Supreme Court case, Shelby County v. Holder, precipitated changing election laws in the United States and a new dialogue around voter suppression. In Shelby, the Supreme Court declared Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 unconstitutional. The ruling focused on preclearance requirements, in which jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in elections had to get the Department of Justice’s approval for changes to election laws. These requirements were removed for all jurisdictions unless the preclearance formula of Section 4(b) was updated by Congress.

Opponents of the decision said that the ruling led to a series of policies that suppressed votes, including voter identification and voter registration laws in several states that previously required preclearance with the Department of Justice.

Supporters said that the federal government exhibited too much authority over states with preclearance requirements. The Center for Equal Opportunity, for example, said, “The Supreme Court struck down only one provision in the Voting Rights Act, and there are plenty of other voting-rights laws available to ensure that the right to vote is not violated. Those laws require people who think there is discrimination to prove it in court before they can get relief, which is only fair and which is the way that every other civil-rights law works.”

In 2020, following Shelby and an increase in the number of states changing election laws, the Brennan Center said, "The connection between race and voter suppression did not end in the 1960s. While the overtly racist voter suppression tactics of the Jim Crow past are no longer with us, voter suppression remains a mainstay of electoral politics in the United States today."

Carol Anderson, a professor at Emory University, wrote in her 2018 book, One Person, No Vote, "In the twenty-first century, the geography of voter suppression had clearly changed. It was no longer only a phenomenon of the Jim Crow South. Voter suppression had now gone nationwide as it became a Republican-fueled chimera that by 2017 had gripped thirty-three states and cast a pall over more than half the American voting-age population."

Literacy tests

See also: Literacy as a requirement for voting

Literacy tests were part of an early twentieth-century system, which included poll taxes, to limit the ability of legal citizens to vote. A literacy test was typically administered to non-white citizens but not to white citizens. In 2005, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) wrote of the effects literacy tests had on Black voters before 1965: “In Alabama, this was a sixty-eight-question survey about obscure aspects of state and federal regulation. Citizens might be asked to recite verbatim long portions of the U.S. Constitution. Some were even asked irrelevant questions such as the number of bubbles in a bar of soap. Black people with Ph.D. and M.A. degrees were routinely told they did not read well enough to pass the test.”

Poll taxes

See also: Poll tax

Poll taxes were fees levied as a precondition for casting a ballot in an election. Though poll taxes existed in the American colonies as a revenue-raising tax, the issue became linked to voter suppression after the passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870, which gave all men the right to vote. After the amendment passed, 11 southern states instituted poll taxes aimed at making it nearly impossible for Black voters to cast a ballot.

Poll taxes were outlawed as a precondition for voting in federal elections in 1964 with the passage of the 24th Amendment. In 1966, the Supreme Court ruled in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections that poll taxes violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

Background

Confidence that votes in the United States would be accurately cast and counted fluctuated between 2004 and 2020, according to a Gallup survey published in October 2020. Ninety-one percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters were very or somewhat confident in 2006 compared to 44% in 2020. The confidence of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters rose between 2004 and 2016 from 60% to 83%, before dropping to 66% in 2018 and 74% in 2020.

According to a Google Trends report, interest in the terms voter suppression and election integrity grew between 2004 and 2021, with the largest spikes taking place around the presidential election every four years.

Partisan support and opposition to different policies viewed as promoting voter suppression or election integrity also diverged around the 2020 presidential election. According to a Pew Research Center study, between October 2018 to April 2021, Republican support for removing infrequent voters from voter registration lists increased from 53% to 68%. Democratic support also increased from 24% to 27%.

Over the same time period, Republican support for automatically registering all eligible citizens to vote decreased from 49% to 38%. Democratic support increased from 78% to 82%. Republican support for no-excuse early and absentee voting decreased from 57% to 38%. Democratic support remained steady at 83% to 84%.

See also

• Voting policies in the United States
• Voting Policy
• Electoral fraud
• Arguments about voting policies
• Terms and definitions