A voter walks to a booth to fill out their ballot at a school in the Brooklyn borough of New York on Nov. 3, 2020.David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Last week, I finally got around to mailing in my request for an absentee ballot to vote in the United States election as a dual citizen living in Canada. At some point, my local election officials in my former state of Oregon (sadly, not anywhere close to being a swing state) will confirm I am registered to vote and will send me a blank absentee ballot, which I can then submit by fax, e-mail, or mail.
Sounds easy, right? So why is voter turnout such a challenge in the United States?
Amid the much-hyped stakes of the 2020 election, there was a record turnout of eligible voters – of just 66 per cent. Then, with the presidency not on the line, the voter turnout for the 2022 midterm elections dropped to 46 per cent. In November, about 244 million American citizens are eligible to vote. The question is: will they?
Beyond those who are apathetic or disenfranchised (including those who are incarcerated or have been convicted of a felony, with some caveats, in every state except Maine and Vermont), the basic fact is that voting in the U.S. has been made much less accessible by the institutional roadblocks that Republicans have erected over the past decade, often under the pretenses of stamping out voter fraud.
The COVID-19 pandemic enabled more access to vote-by-mail in many states in the past presidential election. In the years since, however, state governments have added restrictions, such as reducing the number of ballot drop boxes, making earlier deadlines for requesting mail-in ballots, and limiting third-party ballot collection. In Georgia, for example, would-be voters must include a copy of their photo identification to cast a ballot by mail, and in Montana a prohibition on paid third-party ballot collection – which many Indigenous people living on remote reservations rely on to cast their votes – was passed into law, until it was struck down as unconstitutional by the state’s Supreme Court in March. Alabama even imposes misdemeanour penalties for returning someone else’s ballot application – like, say, your elderly grandmother’s.
Time limitations – and inconsistent, state-by-state rules – play a key role in these restrictions. In 15 states, voters must register 28 to 30 days in advance. In Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Nevada and Utah, early voting ends the Friday before the election. Alabama, New Hampshire and Mississippi do not allow in-person early voting at all. In Mississippi, vote-by-mail restrictions mean that for most people, even absentee voting has to be done in-person. And in Indiana and Kentucky, polls close at 6 PM on election day. These constraints disproportionately affect low-income people, people with disabilities and those with limited access to transportation.
Voters have also been intimidated through the threat of prosecution. In Florida and Texas, there have been high-profile arrests of people with felony convictions for voting, though many received a voter information card and thus believed they were eligible. The chilling effect of these efforts, executed by special “election police,” will cause people who have every right to vote to choose to avoid running afoul of these complicated rules. Election officials have also been subject to prosecutorial intimidation by Republican-controlled legislatures, with nearly a dozen states enacting criminal penalties that include potential jail time for election officials that, for instance, fail to adequately maintain voter lists.
Oh, and then there’s the blatant gerrymandering to dilute the votes of communities of colour, the near-destruction of the Voting Rights Act, census undercounts in urban centres that tend to vote Democrat, errors in voter-roll purges, and the very real possibility of another attempt to subvert the election results should former president Donald Trump lose again.
It’s not all bad news, though. Some states – notably those controlled by Democrats or with balanced state legislatures – have actually increased access to voting in recent years. Illinois made vote-by-mail permanent; New Mexico created protections for polling places on tribal lands; in Utah, a person can register and vote in person at a polling place, all on Election Day.
But the more burdensome and time-consuming the process to vote, the fewer people will attempt to exercise this right. What’s more, how challenging it is to vote depends very much on which state you live in. American federalism is extolled for allowing states to become “laboratories of democracy,” but in this case, it exacerbates deep inequalities, catalyzing the potential for yet another race to the bottom among the states.
The right to vote is the cornerstone of democracy. While voting doesn’t have to be convenient, it shouldn’t be cumbersome and confusing, either. But sadly, in an era when a 66-per-cent voter turnout is heralded as exceptional, the normalization of America’s democratic deficit is already upon us.