Four Fights Over Voting Rights

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/us/politics/voting-rights-lawsuits.html

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When North Carolina’s Republican legislature ordered all early-voting sites to stay open 12 hours a day for 18 days this year, they called it a move to boost voting.

It’s not turning out that way.

Many poorer counties don’t have the resources to comply, and more than half — including many rural, disproportionately minority ones — have had to close some early-voting sites

Sprawling Halifax County, 700 square miles and 52 percent African-American, closed two of its three early-voting sites. Now a drive to cast a ballot is as long as 20 miles. It had cost about $6,000 to open the sites for the last week of early voting in 2014. The new policy raised that to nearly $48,000, “which didn’t include overtime,” said David Hines, the county election board chairman.

[In Tuesday’s election, the right to vote is still at issue.]

This was not the first such effort. In 2016, a federal appeals court struck down another legislative early-voting measure, saying it targeted “African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” Many counties saw no need for the latest requirement, since they had been operating more sites for fewer hours or fewer days to affordably meet the needs of their voters.

Mr. Hines said he has gotten complaints, but that early turnout had still been good.

One of the latest voting flash points is a common practice known as “ballot bundling,” in which political or civic groups collect mail-in ballots and take them directly to election offices.

In September, a divided United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld an Arizona law that makes it a felony for anyone but a family member, caregiver or postal worker to deliver ballots. The state’s Republican-controlled legislature has called the law an antifraud measure, despite lacking evidence that the practice abetted fraud.

Voting rights advocates said it made casting ballots more difficult, though not impossible, for people in rural areas, especially minorities like Native Americans who lack convenient postal services and, often, transportation. Those minorities predominantly vote Democratic.

“We registered 19,000 new voters in Arizona; now we’re trying to get them out to vote,” Eduardo Sainz, Arizona director for the Latino group Mi Familia Vota, said in an interview. “This definitely interferes.”

The group has switched to arranging rides for would-be voters, a costlier and slower way of increasing turnout.

When it comes to voting rights, few states have been as contentious as Georgia this election. That is largely because Brian Kemp, the secretary of state, has presided over an aggressive policy of voter purges that have fallen heavily on minorities. He is also the Republican candidate for governor.

But the contentious atmosphere was crystallized on Oct. 15, when about 40 older black voters in Jefferson County were told to get off a bus heading for early voting, after a county official intervened.

The county has explained that the voters were visiting a local senior center at the time and officials “felt uncomfortable with allowing Senior Center patrons to leave the facility in a bus with an unknown third party,” according to a statement provided to a local television station. Officials also said taking them to vote constituted county-sponsored political activity, which is not permitted.

LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, the group that sponsored the bus, called the incident “an intimidation tactic,” according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, adding, “These are grown people.” Mr. Kemp’s opponent, Stacey Abrams, moved quickly to rally with some of the affected voters. A few days after the incident, Black Voters Matter tweeted that “most of the seniors that were on the bus have now voted.”

On Election Day, Iowans and Michiganders will lose the option to easily vote for a single party across the board, so-called “straight-ticket voting.” Not too many years ago, straight-ticket voting was common on American ballots. But since 2011, legislatures in eight states have done away with it, arguing variously that it is unfair to third parties or that it keeps voters from scrutinizing each candidate’s qualifications. Texas is set to lose straight-ticket voting in 2020.

In most cases, analysts agree, the real reason is that straight-ticket votes are often (but hardly always) cast by Democratic Party loyalists, especially minorities. Eliminating the option lengthens polling-place queues and discourages voters from selecting individual candidates in downballot races. Seven of the eight states that eliminated straight-ticket votes are controlled by Republican legislators.

In Michigan, Republicans outlawed straight-ticket voting in 2001; voters reinstated it after a ballot initiative the next year; in 2015, the Republican-controlled legislature outlawed it again.

Now it is back on the ballot, in a state that traditionally “has either the longest, or one of the longest, ballots in the country,” according to Todd Cook, campaign director for Promote the Vote, the group pushing the amendment.