Democracy Undone: The Texas Placebo Ballot Plot

They must go to court to take away your gun, but they can take away your vote without even informing you...

Image by Jackie Ramirez from Pixabay

The song that was inspired by this article is available here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is available here.

Last week I documented how in Georgia both Governor and former Secretary of State Brian Kemp and current Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger have been actively purging millions of Georgians, particularly Black voters, from voter rolls for years. How Kemp purged over 100,000 Georgia voters and then “beat” Stacey Abrams by about 50,000.

A similar scheme has been underway in Ohio ever since Republicans took over that state, and also operates in most other Red states that have large Blue cities.

The purges that started in a big way under Republicans in Ohio gained both notoriety and lawsuits, one going all the way to the Supreme Court.

They did, however, produce a significant blowback: people got pissed off when they showed up to vote and were told that they’d been removed from the voting rolls by the Republican administration of their state.

So, Republicans in Texas have come up with a new twist that’s designed to avoid directly confronting and angering voters. You could call it “passive aggressive vote suppression.”

Instead of purging people off the rolls entirely, they’re putting voters they consider suspicious on what they call a “suspense” list.

As of last week, according to The Dallas Morning News, “Nearly 12% of Texas’ roughly 18 million voters are on the suspense list.”

If you’re running a state and want to hang onto your office, even if your policies are not popular and you’re so incompetent you can’t even keep the power on, the easiest way to stay in office — to “win” elections — is to pre-rig them by making sure some people’s ballots are simply never counted.

The Texas GOP has turned this into an art form; in a state where elections at the statewide level are often won by a single point or two, muting the votes of 12% of the state’s voters can give you a real edge. Here’s how it works:

Being on the suspense list means that when you show up to vote, you’ll be given a “provisional ballot.”

What’s a provisional ballot?

Former BBC and Guardian reporter Greg Palast calls them “placebo ballots,” and with good reason. You mark the ballot with your voting choices, hand it in, and walk away feeling like you actually voted. You tell exit pollsters and your friends that you voted. You believe that you voted, and that your vote will be counted.

But, because it’s a provisional ballot, it goes into a separate box and is not counted on election day. Many provisional ballots are never counted, in fact, because for a provisional ballot to be counted in most states (including Texas) the voter must, within 6 days of the election, present themselves at the Secretary of State’s office with ID and proof of citizenship and residence.

If you don’t take the day off work to do this, your ballot is not counted. And often people don’t even realize what’s happened to their vote.

Provisional “placebo” ballots came about in 2002 as a result of The Help America Vote Act that was signed into law that year by George W. Bush.

That legislation, written in large part by former Representative Bob Ney, R-Ohio, contains a provision requiring people who show up to vote — even if they’ve been purged from the voting lists — to be given something new called a “provisional ballot.”

“The main reason we did that,” the former congressman told me, “was because, particularly across the Deep South, people were simply being turned away at the polls. In most cases it was because they were Black, but in many cases it was also being done in districts where the opposition party controlled most of the election apparatus, typically Republicans turning away people in Democratic districts.

“We wanted to make sure,” he added, “that every eligible voter had both a chance to vote and some level of certainty that his or her vote would be counted after they went to all the trouble of voting.”

The parable about the road to hell being paved with good intentions is worthy of citing here. The HAVA law was passed on a bipartisan basis, after the hanging-chad disaster in Florida in the 2000 election.

But the giant loophole it created for GOP vote suppressors was based in the simple reality that provisional ballots are often not counted.

Rules vary from state to state, but usually if voters are given a provisional ballot, they must then, within a few days of the election, present themselves in person at a state or county office to prove that they are who they say they are and that they were legally registered to vote and were purged incorrectly.

The HAVA law requires that voters getting provisional ballots be told that they can “cure” their ballots, but in actual practice in Republican-controlled states this is almost never the case. (Although, even when it is, the percentage of people who’d be willing or able to take time off work to jump through all these hoops is tiny.)

Independent investigative reporter Greg Palast, found this to be very much the case (and worse) when he accompanied Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 92-year-old cousin, Christine Jordan, to the polls in Georgia, and poll workers repeatedly refused to give her even a provisional ballot until Palast intervened.

After voting for half a century in the same place, she’d been purged from the rolls by Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp in the run-up to his contest with Stacey Abrams. Eventually, after multiple tries with Palast threatening lawsuits and making a scene on camera at the polling place, Jordan got a provisional ballot, although it almost certainly was never counted.

In Texas, to have the provisional ballot of a person on the suspense list counted, the state’s website explains:

“[I]n order to have the provisional ballot counted, the voter will be required to visit the voter registrar’s office within six calendar days of the date of the election to either present one of the acceptable forms of photo ID OR submit one of the temporary affidavits (e.g., religious objection or natural disaster) in the presence of the county voter registrar OR submit the required paperwork and sign the required statement to qualify for a permanent disability exemption in the presence of the county voter registrar, in order for the provisional ballot to count.” (emphasis added)

Fully twelve percent of Texas’ voters are now on the suspense list, although — as far as I can tell with a pretty thorough web search — the state doesn’t disclose who they all are, where they live, how they previously voted, or even how they got on the list.

In America, five Republicans on the Supreme Court have ruled repeatedly that you have a right to own a gun and carry it pretty much wherever you want. If a state government wants to take your gun away, because the Supreme Court has defined gun ownership as a “right” rather than a privilege, they must go to court and prove their case before a judge.

On the other hand, the Republicans on the Supreme Court have repeatedly ruled, none of us have a “right” to vote. Even though the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (sometimes called the Motor Voter Act) explicitly says, repeatedly, that “voting is a right” in America, Republicans on the Supreme Court have blocked our access to that right.

In 2001, in the case where five Republicans on the Court stopped the Florida recount and handed the election to its loser, George W. Bush, Chief Justice Rehnquist was explicit, writing for the majority, “The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States…”

They must go to court to take away your gun, but Republicans can — and routinely do — take away our votes without even informing us.

And then they make you take a day off work and drive a hundred miles to the Secretary of State’s office to prove that you’re still who you’d already proved you were when you first registered, before you’d been bounced onto the suspense list.

That’s just wrong. And America is the only country in the developed world other than Hungary where this is the case. The rest of the democratic world looks at us like we’re some kind of freaks.

First poor white men (1790s), then African Americans and other minorities (1860s), and finally women (1920) fought, went to jail, and even died for the right to vote for more than two centuries.

And yet still there is no universal right for American citizens to vote, which is why Texas, Georgia, Florida, and other Red states can play these games with our votes.

In her Philadelphia speech yesterday, Vice President Harris referenced this bizarre situation, saying that when she’s president the first bill she wants to sign is the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which will make the right to vote explicit in a way Republicans on the Supreme Court can’t ignore.

It’s about damn time.