End Voter Caging

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of the War on Voting"

The Republican War against your right to vote. Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

End Voter Caging

In the lead-up to the 2018 midterms, the Economist ran an article that clearly laid out how the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the preclearance provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and how states took that to mean that it was open season to purge state voter rolls.

The article quotes research from the Brennan Center for Justice that found that “nearly 16 million voters were removed from the rolls between 2014 and 2016. That is almost 4 million more than were purged between 2006 and 2008. The increased purging far exceeds population growth or the growing number of registered voters.”13

This is a system failure that automatic voter registration would not necessarily fix. Theoretically, a voter could be registered nationally but purged from the rolls for local and state elections. Since local and state elections are where most of the decisions that affect people are made, this represents a potentially serious failure of democracy.

Voter caging is just one form of voter suppression, but as the Brennan Center’s figures show, it is also very effective. Here’s how it works: State officials claim that they are simply seeking out people who may have died or moved out of state, so that they can be removed from the rolls for accuracy’s sake.

Under the pretense of rooting out those ineligible folks, election officials send out mass nonforwardable direct mailings — typically a postcard that looks like junk mail — to registered voters in areas where they suspect voter fraud (in other words, Black or student neighborhoods). If any mail is returned because a voter moved (even if he or she just moved down the street), election officials use that as a reason to formally challenge the person’s right to vote.

The For The People Act of 2019 would have outright banned the practice unless the challenger gives an oath that he or she has a “good faith factual basis to believe the person is ineligible to vote or register to vote,” but it died under a Republican filibuster in the Senate.14

Voter caging puts the burden of proof on the citizen to prove that he or she has a right to vote. This provision in H.R. 1, combined with automatic voter registration, flips the script and puts the burden of proof on state officials to prove that a citizen should lose his or her right to vote.

With just these two provisions (ending voter caging and implementing automatic voter registration), millions of Americans would gain the right to vote, and that right to vote would be protected from frivolous attempts to take it away. But it doesn’t guarantee that voters would have the time or means to make it to the polls on Election Day.

Next Sunday: Make voting day a national holiday!