Suppressing the Vote with Provisional Ballots

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.

Suppressing the Vote with Provisional Ballots

The Help America Vote Act may provide another answer to the puzzling mystery of American red shift (where exit polls show Democrats won but Republicans got the most recorded votes).

That legislation, written in large part by 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 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 was the main excuse given the media for that state’s substantial red shift. But the giant loophole it created for GOP vote suppressors was that provisional ballots are almost never 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 this, 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, whose work is published by the BBC, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, and Salon, found this to be very much the case (and worse) when he accompanied 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.109

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’s policies and people. 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 the years immediately preceding the election, Kemp had purged well over a million voters from Georgia’s rolls and prevented the registration of around 50,000 mostly African American voters from being processed. In all probability, large numbers of these people turned out and voted anyway, with provisional ballots. And, not realizing that their provisional ballot vote would never actually be counted, if they encountered an exit-poll taker outside the polling place, they probably would have registered their vote with the pollster.

Thus, one simple explanation for all that red shift in Republican-controlled swing states is that the voters reporting their Democratic votes to exit pollsters simply didn’t know that their vote would never be counted, and neither did the pollsters.

None of these issues are part of the mainstream of public debate in America, although they’ve been hot topics in other countries, from Australia to Ireland to Canada. Perhaps if enough of us speak out, one day soon our election exit polls will again agree with our vote tabulations.