Issue Paper #2: Voter Suppression

Protect our Rights:

Ensure each Citizen Has a Chance to Vote

May 15, 2014

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n equal vote for each citizen. This notion is the great equalizer of every democracy, and it serves as the cornerstone of American government. Super PACs and billionaire contributors can throw

around as much money as they would like in support of a candidate or a cause, but the fact remains they can never buy an extra vote.

The Attorney General of Florida should be the protector of this precious right.

George Sheldon will be.

The 2012 Election Debacle

Before the 2012 election, Governor Rick Scott led a concerted effort in Florida to do anything he and his allies could think of to make voting harder for anyone they suspected of voting Democratic. They purged the voting rolls. They instituted restrictions on voter registration. They reduced the hours and used a highly restrictive interpretation of the law to limit places for early voting. Professionals and wealthy people, who set their own work hours and have personal transportation and could adapt easily to these changes. The middle class and the poor, who have fixed working hours and often have to rely on public transportation, often had much more trouble adapting.

When election day came in 2012, we saw the results: more embarrassment for Florida. Reports poured in that voters across the state experienced voting lines up to six or seven hours long.1

According to some reports, at least 201,000 voters were discouraged from exercising their right to vote; they either gave up in frustration or simply left when they saw the long lines.

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"I must have seen 15 people, at least, just give up and leave off the line. I was absolutely livid. People [in line] were

saying it was some sort of conspiracy."

– A Cape Coral Voter

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Following the election-day crisis, the Palm Beach Post published an exclusive report in which former Florida GOP leaders admitted that voter suppression was at the heart of the new voting law and was at least partially responsible for the long lines and frustrated voters.3

Where was Florida’s attorney general, the chief legal officer of the state, the official who ought to be the guardian of this fundamental right of every citizen? It’s a good question. Where was Pam Bondi? She has had little public involvement in the debate except on one aspect of the issue, the restoration of the right to vote for convicts who have completed their prison sentences. On that she has been firmly for restricting voting.

Florida is one of a very few states that prohibits voting by felons who have fulfilled their sentences and are now free. That’s about 1.3 million people who cannot vote in Florida because of the policies of Pam Bondi and Rick Scott. Florida requires that a person wait five years even to apply to the clemency board (of which Scott and Bondi are a decisive two of the four votes) for an individual decision on restoration of their rights.

“After Gov. Rick Scott took office in 2011, Bondi helped him reverse changes instituted by his predecessor, former Gov. Charlie Crist, who allowed most felons to have their rights restored once they left prison,” the Orlando Sentinel reported in January 2014.4

The newspaper quoted Bondi’s office as saying that “felons must first prove their rehabilitation through the test of time.”

Expanding the Right to Vote: A History

Americans have fought and died for the right to vote. At the time of America’s independence in 1776, most states limited voting to white males at least 21 years old with enough wealth to own property. Gradually the property requirement faded away,

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state by state. By the time of the Civil War in 1861, every white male at least 21 could vote. Women won the right to vote with the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. In 1971, the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age nationally to 18. The ratification of that amendment took just over three months from its passage by Congress to ratification by the necessary 38 states (three-fourths).

The right to vote for black Americans has a much more torturous history. After the Civil War, the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave black Americans the right to vote, but many states, especially in the southern states of the Confederacy, immediately began circumventing the amendment.

Under the guise of ensuring “informed” voters, states imposed literacy tests, requiring black voters to interpret obscure passages or constitutional clauses (often while white voters were asked to spell simple words). There were poll taxes, a fee for voting that could amount of a large portion of a week’s pay for many black or poor Americans. At-large voting for local councils and commissions diluted the power of black neighborhoods and eliminated their ability to elect a local representative on councils and commissions. White employers often warned black employees not to register to vote or not to show up at the polls. Sometimes the intimidation was violent. As a result, in one Deep South state in 1964, fewer than 10 percent of blacks were registered to vote.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, tracking the wording of the 15th Amendment, prohibited state and local governments from imposing any voting law that resulted in a discriminatory effect on racial or language minorities. The resulting federal enforcement suppressed many of the longstanding methods of getting around the 15th Amendment.

George Sheldon, at the time a member of the Florida House of Representatives, was the only white politician from

the South to testify before Congress alongside Coretta Scott King in the early 1980s

in favor of extending the Voting Rights Act for 20 more years.

The Voting Rights Act extension of 1982 passed, and President Reagan signed it.

In 2013, however, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated, as outdated after nearly 50 years, special provisions in Section 5 of the law that imposed closer federal scrutiny of the states and counties that had shown the greatest hostility to minority voting, including five counties in Florida.5

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Florida Voting Reforms after the Election of 2000

As the epicenter of 37 days of uncertainty and controversy surrounding the results of the 2000 presidential election, Florida drew international attention as 24-hour news channels made much ado about “hanging chads” from old-fashioned punched-hole ballots, and Republican-sponsored uprisings of voters protesting the “stealing” of their votes.

As in 1876, when Florida’s electoral vote made the difference in the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes over Democrat Samuel Tilden, the winner in Florida in 2000 would become President of the United States. Ultimately a 5-4 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the 37-day recount and effectively awarded Florida’s crucial 27 electoral votes to Republican George W. Bush, who officially had 537 more votes than Democrat Al Gore. (Gore won the popular vote nationally by more than 500,000 votes, but the electoral-vote system determined the winner.) It has been argued that 175,000 Florida votes were declared ineligible in the election.6

Chastened by the recount debacle in 2000, Florida and other states as well as the federal government adopted a number of reforms. Most of them related to addressing the nation’s outdated polling practices and election instruments.

Florida joined in implementing the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002. The federal law provided funding to help states to purchase new equipment and encouraged states to pass reforms for several aspects of the electoral process from the use of provisional balloting to statewide voter registration databases, among other improvements.7

Republican governors Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist both increased early voting opportunities for Florida’s voters, recognizing the need to reform the electoral process in the state.

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The Cause of the 2012 Election Problems

Much of the dysfunction from the 2012 election can be traced to the rolling back of post-2000 election reforms.

In 2011, soon after taking office, Governor Scott and the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature took it upon themselves to tackle what they claimed to be a threat of voter fraud in the state.9

In all, nine states have passed measures making it harder to vote since the beginning of 2013, according to The New York Times. Voter identification laws are the most common – proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, which many poor people do not have. (It is also not a coincidence that proof of citizenship is required for most employment, so the requirements are also consistent with Republican

Party hostility towards people who are unable to get jobs.) Other laws require a picture ID to vote on Election Day.

Just as segregationists blocked minority voting in the 1950s and 1960s with rules that sounded appealing but were malicious in their intent and result, Republicans stirred up fear of “vote fraud” to justify new burdens on registering and voting.

Certainly there have been elections in American history in which phantom votes seemed to appear out of nowhere to decide the election. Most famously, fraud almost surely changed the outcome of Lyndon B. Johnson’s first election to the U.S. Senate in 1948 and again in 1960 when it possibly shifted the Illinois electoral vote to John F. Kennedy. But neither cases of fraud was perpetrated by individual voters. Instead each was a concerted effort by government officials themselves to manufacture votes en masse.

When it comes to finding a case of voter fraud, “you are more likely to walk out of your office

and get hit by a bolt of lightning.” – Ion Sancho, 24-year veteran election supervisor in Leon County.10

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What incentive is there, after all, for an isolated voter to commit vote fraud?

The penalty if caught can include fines and jail time for a single vote that rarely makes a difference in an election’s outcome. There is no financial reward, assuming there has been no bribe. And if bribes are being made, the least reliable approach is to bribe unqualified voters to show up under fake names or fake signatures on Election Day. Bribers want registered voters, first of all, and they do not want them voting in the privacy of a voting booth on Election Day. The most attractive method of buying votes is to use the absentee ballot – something that early voting in person avoids.

Nonetheless, the witch-hunt to seek out almost non-existent fraud has become a tool for harassing or intimidating thousands and thousands of people.

Urged on by Scott and Bondi and key legislators who raised the specter of non-citizen voters and other voting fraud, the Republican-dominated Legislature passed a new law in 2011.11 Among other things, the length of the early-voting period was reduced. The law was challenged in federal court as a violation of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, and early voting was expanded somewhat as a result, but that ruling applied only in five Florida counties.12

The 2011 law also required any organization signing up new voters to turn the registrations in by hand to the state board of elections within 48 hours, for example. The League of Women Voters, one of the organizations that had extensive voter-registration efforts, denounced the law as “good old-fashioned voter suppression.”

The portion of the Voting Rights Act that provided for that federal review later was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court – once again with Bondi in favor of eliminating federal oversight so that the state could do what it wished.

13 The threat of substantial fines for failing to meet one of these tight new standards led the League to suspend its voter-registration efforts for the first time in 70 years.14

A scant 55 days before the 2012 elections, Governor Scott and his appointed secretary of state, Ken Detzner, launched a statewide purge of the voter rolls. They initially came up with a list of 182,000 potential noncitizens in the voter database, but the number was soon cut to just 2,600 suspected noncitizens as people across the state were required to go to elections offices and prove their citizenship. In the end, Scott’s purge initiative found only 207 noncitizens on the voter rolls.

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Not only was Scott’s unfounded crusade fruitless in finding any significant fraud, a federal appeals court ruled it illegal as well.

16 The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals declared the last-minute purge a violation of the 1993 federal Voter Registration Act, which “explicitly bars states from removing the names of ineligible voters from official lists within 90 days of a primary or general election.17

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Governor Scott’s efforts, supposedly to ensure the integrity of Florida’s elections have been consistently met with opposition by those who know the process the best: Florida’s election supervisors. Called “anti-voter” by one supervisor, election officials have sometimes simply ignored Scott’s edicts to limit the ability of voters to drop-off their absentee ballots at neighborhood voting sites.18

"I do not understand why the secretary of state, the chief elections official for the state of Florida, would want to eliminate an option that voters have to participate by returning their ballot to the ballot drop-off locations."

– Pinellas Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark19

Groups Heavily Affected by the Early Voting Cuts

The constriction of early voting had a predictable result: long lines on Election Day.

Some of the worst of these long lines were located in Central Florida counties with high Hispanic and African-American populations.20 An analysis by the Orlando Sentinel found 25 of the state’s largest counties were still operating after 8:30 p.m. on election night.21 Even more telling, more than half of those polling centers were located in only four counties: Miami-Dade, Orange, Lee and Osceola.22

A number of sources have noted that early voting cuts and other voter suppression tactics disproportionately affect Hispanic and African American voters.

23 In Ohio, for example, African-American voters make up just 28% of voters in Cuyahoga County but account for 56% of all weekend votes cast.24 The story is much the same in Florida, where predominantly African-American churches have a strong “souls to the polls” tradition on the Sundays preceding elections.25

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The Situation Today

Through it all, the current attorney general, Pam Bondi, has stood by silently as new obstacles are thrown in the path of voters.

Florida’s Attorney General plays a major role in protecting each and every citizen’s right to vote. When Pam Bondi saw electoral supervisors resist and heard the outcry from civil rights groups, it was her duty to step in to investigate and protect Florida’s voters. Instead, the election law was passed and at least 49,000 Floridians – perhaps as many as 201,000 by one count – lost their right to participate in the democratic process. It is the responsibility of the Attorney General to address real issues in the election systems, not imagined or false fears based on partisanship.

“We have heard nothing about this from Pam Bondi. The attorney general needs to be at the forefront of protecting the democratic process and the most basic American freedom, the right to vote.”

– George Sheldon

In a time when key elections come down to margins of just 30,000 votes, it is inexcusable to allow so many potential votes to go to waste. Proponents of adding more voter restrictions say it is “partisan” to try to make it easier for voters to go to the polls. The claim is true: It is indeed the Democratic Party that wants everyone to vote, and the Republican Party that does not. It is indeed more likely that the more people who vote, the more likely it is that Democrats win. Both parties are focused on their selfish interests. The question is whose position is more consistent with the fundamental principles of American democracy.

Florida needs George Sheldon as Attorney General.

1 http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-11-13/news/os-call-for-election-reform-20121113_1_women-voters-task-force-election-day 2 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/24/florida-voting-lines-report_n_2544373.html 3 http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/state-regional-govt-politics/early-voting-curbs-called-power-play/nTFDy/

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4 Mark K. Mathews, “Despite reforms, battles over voting rules continue in Florida,” Orlando Sentinel, January 26, 2014, http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2014-01-26/news/os-voting-fight-florida-20140122_1_scott-administration-voting-rules-early-voting-days, last accessed May 10, 2014. 5 Shelby County (Alabama) v. Holder, 570 U.S. ____ (2013). 6 http://www.slideshare.net/Saina33/election-reform-in-florida-20002003 7 http://www.umsl.edu/~kimballd/kkspsa05.pdf 8 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/04/florida-early-voting_n_2073119.html 9 http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/stateroundup/appeals-court-rules-florida-voter-purge-violated-federal-law/2173054 10http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fthinkprogress.org%2Fjustice%2F2012%2F11%2F26%2F1234171%2Fflorida-republicans-admit-voter-suppression-was-the-goal-of-new-election-laws%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGKWrdUMaY3ysZK2uKcOZ_y_ZRe-w 11 “Governor Rick Scott ignores pleas and signs sweeping voter law, slashing early voting ,” http://www.abcactionnews.com/news/political/governor-rick-scott-ignores-pleas-and-signs-sweeping-voter-law-slashing-early-voting, May 20, 2011, last accessed May 10, 2014. 12 Mary Ellen Klas, “Florida advocates say 2012 proved need for Voting Rights Act,” Miami Herald, http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/27/3257775_florida-advocates-say-2012-proved.html, last accessed May 10, 2014. 13 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/florida-gop-takes-voter-supression-to-a-brazen-new-extreme-20120530#ixzz1wUFjsWFz 14 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/florida-gop-takes-voter-supression-to-a-brazen-new-extreme-20120530#ixzz1wUFjsWFz 15 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/02/rick-scott-voter-purge_n_5077075.html 16 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/02/rick-scott-voter-purge_n_5077075.html 17 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/02/rick-scott-voter-purge_n_5077075.html 18 http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/elections/steve-bousquet-gov-rick-scott-in-hot-water-with-elections-supervisors-again/2155134. See also: http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/elections/pinellas-supervisor-of-elections-says-shell-ignore-state-order-on-absentee/2155164 19 http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/elections/new-senate-bill-would-limit-pinellas-absentee-ballot-drop-sites/2168890 20 http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Farticles.orlandosentinel.com%2F2013-01-23%2Fbusiness%2Fos-voter-lines-statewide-20130118_1_long-lines-sentinel-analysis-state-ken-detzner&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHGDY5-ZzlL8NSvztH2-VVjMRtvuA 21 http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2013-01-29/business/os-voter-lines-statewide-20130118_1_long-lines-sentinel-analysis-state-ken-detzner/2 22 http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2013-01-29/business/os-voter-lines-statewide-20130118_1_long-lines-sentinel-analysis-state-ken-detzner/2 23 http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/04/18/gop-goals-restrict-voting-win-election/LV7BnifA3Jg9cg3QCoYC9N/story.html 24 http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/ohio-early-voting-cuts 25 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/rick-scott-early-voting_n_3318776.html