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A Shocking Voter Purge Crisis Is Underway
An increasingly desperate GOP is doing this because they know their policies are unpopular: racism, pollution, privatizing Medicare, ending Social Security, criminalizing abortion, etc.
Aug 11, 2023
If you live in the Blue part of a Red state, Republicans don’t want you to vote. And their latest strategy is their most brute-force method: simply remove you from the voting rolls.
A shocking new study from Demos lays out the dimensions of this voter purge crisis of democracy brought to us by an increasingly desperate GOP.
Republicans are doing this because they know that their policies are unpopular: most Americans aren’t fans of tax cuts for billionaires, more pollution, deregulation, high-priced drugs, privatizing Medicare, ending Social Security, criminalizing abortion and birth control, student debt, hating on Black and queer people, and the GOP’s war on unions and working people.
So, the GOP does everything it can to make voting difficult or even impossible, particularly for people in heavily Democratic neighborhoods (which are usually college towns, big cities, and Black neighborhoods).
When Republicans run elections in such areas (typically Blue cities in Red states), they’ll close or change polling places at the last minute to sow confusion and cause people to give up when they show up at their normal polling place and find it closed.
For example, in this week’s election in Ohio the state changed polling places for mostly Black voters in Cuyahoga and Summit counties just five days before the election, as Newsweek noted in an article titled:
“Ohio GOP Changing Polling Locations Days Before Election Raises Questions”
Ohio voters were outraged, and that outrage spread across X (formerly Twitter) with comments like this:
“The Ohio GOP is playing ‘Your polling place has moved’ with 47,000 voters in the largest African American voting county in Ohio—just five days before the election. Making it harder to vote—in the crucial August 8th special election (deciding if a majority of voters still can amend Ohio's state constitution)—is wrong.”
Another X user noted:
“Ohio Republicans are so damn shady! … This stinks to high heaven. At the last minute, before Ohio’s special election, polling locations were changed in Cuyahoga and Summit counties. More than 47,000 voters are affected by changes to 50 voting precincts.”
The fact that this little trick in Ohio this week got virtually no national press coverage guarantees Red states will be doing more of it in the upcoming 2023 and 2024 elections.
But that’s just the beginning.
Knowing that working-class people are less likely to vote Republican than white upper-class suburbanites, Republicans also engineer polling situations so people paid by the hour will have to wait for hours in line just to vote, losing out on income.
Every year, we’re treated to pictures and videos of hours-long lines to vote in Blue cities in Red states, while lines in white suburbs typically run less than 10 to 15 minutes.
Similarly, many Red states have imposed draconian penalties on people conducting voter registration drives for making even the smallest mistakes, or for failing to “properly register” themselves with the state. This has shut down many voter registration programs, including some from long-term organizations like the League of Women’s Voters.
As The Kansas Reflector newspaper noted, the penalty for even a minor, inadvertent error is now 17 months in the state prison and a $100,000 fine:
“The League of Women Voters of Kansas and other nonprofits are suspending voter registration drives for fear of criminal prosecution under a new state law.”
The League has sued Florida, Tennessee, and Texas for their criminalization of voter registration drives as well.
But purging voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — is where the GOP finds their best result. As the Demos report notes:
“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”
Additionally, seventeen million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.
Given that the most radical purges took place among Black and youth voters in Republican-controlled Red states, those 8.5 percent and 10 percent “national averages” could well be twice or three times that percentage in the states where these purges are concentrated.
They added, most of the purge activity was taking place in former Confederate Red states that — before five Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby County decision — had to have purges pre-cleared by the federal government:
“The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.”
More than a quarter of those purged during this period from 2016-2022 were removed from the rolls either because they failed to vote in the previous election or because they failed to return a postcard mailed out by a Republican secretary of state (that is usually designed to look like junk mail).
This is called “caging” and used to be illegal, but Sam Alito broke the tie and wrote the 5-4 decision in their 2018 Husted v A Phillip Randolph Institute when the five Republicans on the Court ruled that Ohio Republican Secretary of State Husted could continue his practice of mailing the postcards into Ohio cities with the largest Black populations.
In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that only around 4 percent of Americans move out of their county every year. Yet, he wrote:
“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because [Husted said that] they changed their residences.”
The Brennan Center found that just between 2014 and 2016, in the two years leading up to the Hillary/Trump presidential election, over 14 million people were purged from voter rolls, largely in Republican-controlled states. Then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged over a million in Georgia alone leading up to his 50,000 vote 2018 election win against Stacey Abrams.
Calling the findings “disturbing,” the Brennan Center noted, “Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 [just after the Supreme Court legalized large-scale no-oversight voter purges in 2013] than between 2006 and 2008. This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent—far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).”
Another strategy that the GOP has rolled out in a big way to suppress the vote in Blue areas of Red states is “strict signature matching.” They primarily use this against voters who’ve succeeded in obtaining vote-by-mail ballots, which are authenticated by comparing the signature on the envelope with the voter’s registration card.
Because signatures change over time and often vary a lot when people are in a hurry, this is low-hanging fruit for the GOP. Last year they started a program to field an “army” of 50,000 “poll watchers,” including interviewing candidates from among white supremacist militia groups, for the 2024 election.
While some of these poll watchers will be on hand to try to intimidate or challenge Black and young voters (a practice that’s legal in most Red states), many will be overseeing the counting of mail-in ballots, which are generally more Democratic than Republican.
All they have to do is claim that, in their opinion, a signature doesn’t match and the ballot goes into the “provisional” pile and won’t be counted until or unless the voter shows up in person at the county elections office. Most people never even know their ballot was challenged and not counted.
Meanwhile, the GOP in Texas is quietly recruiting 10,000 white volunteers “courageous” enough to go into Black and Hispanic polling places and confront people trying to vote.
As Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams:
“Common Cause Texas on Thursday shared a leaked video of a Harris County GOP official discussing plans to ‘build an army’ of 10,000 election workers and poll watchers, including some who ‘will have the confidence and courage’ to go into Black and Brown communities to address alleged voter fraud that analyses show does not actually exist.”
Voting in Red states has become difficult, and registering voters is now treacherous since five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized all these little tricks and strategies to purge or discourage Democratic voters.
If you live in a Blue area of a Red state, get ready: the GOP plans to pull out all the stops for the 2024 election.
Double-check your voter registration every month or two, and be sure to double-check it in the weeks just before the deadline for registration, as Republican Secretaries of State prefer to purge people in this window so by the time people discovered they’re purged it’s too late to re-register.
Forewarned is forearmed. Pass it on to your friends in Red states.
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Report Warns State Voter Purges Are a Growing Threat to Democracy
"We are facing an unprecedented assault on voting rights in this country, and purges that erroneously target eligible voters for removal are part of the problem," said one campaigner.
Aug 10, 2023
States removed more than 19 million people—or about 8.5% of the registered U.S. electorate—from voter rolls between the 2020 and 2022 electoral cycles, often via flawed practices that prevent many eligible persons from exercising their right to vote, a report released Thursday revealed.
The report—Protecting Voter Registration: An Assessment of Voter Purge Policies in 10 States—from the liberal think tank Dēmos, examines how voters are removed from electoral rolls in Arizona, California, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin.
"An inclusive democracy requires free and fair ballot access. But too many states are limiting this fundamental right."
"Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls," the report notes. "This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election."
"Of course, some removals are necessary for the proper maintenance of voter rolls, such as for persons who have died or have moved away from their voting jurisdiction," the authors acknowledged. "One of the most frequent reasons for purging, however, was 'inactivity,' or failure to respond to a confirmation notice and not voting in at least two consecutive federal general elections. This reason accounted for more than a quarter of all removals while 26.8% and 25.6% were for address change or death of the registrant, respectively."
The report continues:
Flawed voter purge practices—such as removals for inactivity or based on inaccurate identification of felony status or citizenship status—often disproportionately target voters of color, naturalized citizens, and other communities, and can prevent many eligible persons from exercising their right to vote. In addition, too many states lack readily available data on voter purges, which prevents advocates, organizers, and voters from stopping improper purges before they happen or correcting an erroneous purge in time for an election. As a result, tens of thousands of eligible voters who have taken all the necessary steps to exercise their right to vote are wrongly prevented from making their voices heard in our democracy.
"Protecting voting rights and fair elections includes equitable election administration and voter roll maintenance," Dēmos president Taifa Smith Butler said in a statement. "We are facing an unprecedented assault on voting rights in this country, and purges that erroneously target eligible voters for removal are part of the problem."
"The Supreme Court has spent the last decade systematically weakening the protections in the Voting Rights Act," she continued. "Extremist state legislatures are passing laws that disproportionately target Black and Brown voters. Voter suppression efforts are a direct threat to the basic rights of Black and Brown people, families, and communities, as well as young and rural voters. This analysis makes it clear that we must pass comprehensive, federal voting rights legislation.”
The 10 states in the report were selected "because their voter removal laws and safeguards, as well as the accessibility and transparency of their registration data, provide representative examples of the spectrum of laws and practices across the United States."
"Additionally, many of these state legislatures are either considering bills or have recently enacted laws that impact how voters are removed from the voter rolls," the report notes. "In the 2022 legislative session, state lawmakers introduced at least 43 bills that would allow or require problematic voter purges, and in 2023, as of the writing of this report, states are considering at least 28 additional bills."
Dēmos graded the states on a percentage-point scale in four categories: voter removal practices, safeguards against erroneous removal, data accessibility, and data transparency. In the removal practices category, Indiana received the highest score, earning a 76% rating, while Ohio, which scored 24%, ranking last. For safeguards, Wisconsin received a 90% rating, while six states tied for last with a 20% score. North Carolina and Ohio got perfect 100% scores for data accessibility, while Indiana received a 0% rating. North Carolina and Georgia received perfect scores for data transparency; Indiana got another 0% mark.
"All 10 states must modernize their removal practices to ensure that only ineligible voters are removed from the rolls, and all need better systems to ensure that erroneously removed eligible voters can re-register and vote in the current election," the report asserts.
"We know from work with partners in other states that the problems identified here are not confined to these 10 states."
"Additionally, almost all these states need improved policies to ensure that they collect and publish voter registration data in an accessible and transparent format," the publication adds. "While we examine only a subset of states, we know from work with partners in other states that the problems identified here are not confined to these 10 states but are likely representative of issues across the entire United States."
"Bottom line: Every examined state must improve its laws and practices to guard against improper voter registration purges," the authors stressed.
The report offers a lengthy list of recommendations for federal and state lawmakers, election officials, and advocates to improve the voter removal process and ensure a more inclusive democracy. At the federal level, the Freedom to Vote Act was reintroduced last month after narrowly failing to pass during the 117th Congress. However, the measure has little chance of making it to President Joe Biden's desk given Republican control of the House of Representatives.
The Dēmos report comes amid ongoing efforts by GOP-controlled state legislatures to restrict voting rights. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive public policy institute, at least 322 restrictive bills have been introduced in 45 states this year, with 13 laws enacted. The center said six of the introduced bills "would increase the risk of faulty voter purges."
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'End the Absurdity': Experts Say Biden Must Not Let GOP Force 'Catastrophic' Default
"This default would be a crisis for our economy and our democracy, and it threatens to devastate communities across the country."
May 09, 2023
Ahead of congressional leaders' Tuesday meeting at the White House, economists and other experts have renewed warnings about what the GOP's threatened first-ever U.S. default—or even coming precariously close to it—could mean for the country.
"Any time would be a bad time to default, but right now, in particular, would be pretty catastrophic," said Mike Konczal, director of macroeconomic analysis at the Roosevelt Institute, during a Monday press conference. "The conservative agenda right now is to try to reduce the standard of living for many people without having to have their fingerprints on it."
Openly backed by most Senate Republicans, the House GOP—led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)—is pushing for sizable cuts to federal spending, as made clear in the so-called Limit, Save, Grow Act they passed last month. The bill, which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has called "dead on arrival," would raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion or until March 31, 2024, either way with severe austerity and on the backs of working people.
After months of zero progress on increasing the debt limit and amid estimates from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and others that the U.S. government could run out of money to pay its bills as soon as June 1, President Joe Biden is set to host McCarthy, Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) at 4:00 pm ET.
"We cannot allow extremists in the House to make devastating ransom demands in exchange for not cratering our economy."
"President Biden will discuss the urgency of preventing default and stress that Congress must take action to avoid default without conditions," Michael Kikukawa, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement to The Washington Post early Tuesday. "He will discuss how to initiate a separate process to address the budget and FY2024 appropriations."
Despite similar votes under GOP presidents, House Republicans keep refusing to pass a clean bill raising the nation's arbitrary borrowing limit—and the budget blueprint Biden unveiled in March, featuring major social investments paid for with tax hikes targeting rich individuals and corporations, differs dramatically from GOP priorities, leaving few optimistic about the meeting.
Still, Claire Guzdar, a spokesperson for the ProsperUS coalition—which is made up of over 85 progressive groups—declared Tuesday that "Congress and the White House must move quickly to pass a clean debt limit bill before it's too late. We cannot allow extremists in the House to make devastating ransom demands in exchange for not cratering our economy—period."
"The Republican House majority's shameful default bill is completely unworkable. Their plan is full of wildly unpopular and damaging cuts to healthcare, food assistance, clean energy jobs, and more," said Guzdar. "This bill would be devastating for workers and the economy while doing nothing to make corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share. Negotiating on the debt limit should be a nonstarter at any time and rejected immediately as an egregious attempt to push our economy into crisis."
\u201cWH press sec Karine Jean-Pierre asked if Biden will offer McCarthy on the debt limit:\n\n\u201cThe exit strategy is very clear: do your job.\u201d\n\n\u201cPrevent a default.\u201d\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s what he\u2019s expecting from Congress.\u201d\n\n\u201cCongress has to do their job. Super, super simple.\u201d\u201d— S.V. D\u00e1te (@S.V. D\u00e1te) 1683654158
Experts warn that "we can't afford to undo the extraordinary economic progress we've made in the last two years," as Groundwork Collaborative executive director Lindsay Owens said during the Monday media briefing with other economists.
"President Biden should not agree to negotiate a deal on the debt ceiling that increases unemployment or slows growth—not when there [is] a myriad of easier and softer ways to avoid default," she argued. "We're at a 53-year record low in unemployment. It would be an incredible tragedy to undermine the gains that we're finally seeing in the labor market, particularly for marginalized workers."
Similarly stressing that "the labor market is actually starting to produce gains for workers who tend to be the last hired and first fired," Demos chief of programs Angela Hanks said that "the dangerous brinkmanship over the debt ceiling and the extremist position that Speaker McCarthy has staked out really poses a deep threat to that progress and threatens to trigger a recession."
Republicans' proposed spending cuts "will be borne by people who are already marginalized… who cannot afford to have another economic crisis triggered by our politics," Hanks warned. "This default would be a crisis for our economy and our democracy, and it threatens to devastate communities across the country."
"The dangerous brinkmanship over the debt ceiling and the extremist position that Speaker McCarthy has staked out really poses a deep threat to that progress and threatens to trigger a recession."
The high stakes have led some to urge the White House to take unilateral action if GOP lawmakers continue to hold the global economy hostage. Options include minting a platinum coin worth $1 trillion and invoking a section of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that states the validity of the national debt "shall not be questioned."
Proponents and opponents of the 14th Amendment route have suggested that Biden invoking it could lead to a consequential decision by the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court. Such a ruling could already be in the works, thanks to a federal lawsuit filed Monday by the National Association of Government Employees, which aims to have the debt limit law declared unconstitutional.
Robert Hockett, a Cornell University law professor of law and Westwood Capital senior counsel who previously worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the International Monetary Fund, told the Post Monday that "I don't think the Supreme Court is prepared to bring on global financial calamity by finding in favor of the congressional Republicans."
"I think the Supreme Court would expedite review very quickly on this, and for that reason, I don't think we'd see terrible turmoil in the markets," he said. "I think we'd have more turmoil if we have to wait to see if McCarthy and Biden will come to an accommodation."
\u201cBrilliant piece by \u2066@rch371\u2069 that the President should pay the debts that Congress itself has mandated. If it goes to court, let us resolve this issue once and for all so the nation\u2019s finances can\u2019t continually be held hostage. https://t.co/o5O1FLXenE\u201d— Ro Khanna (@Ro Khanna) 1683631098
In a Tuesday opinion piece for The New York Times, Hockett wrote that if the U.S. defaults, "we would see a great tottering—if not worse—of U.S. banking, U.S. financial markets, and the world's capital markets."
Hockett continued:
For one thing, U.S. Treasury securities, valued at over $24 trillion (by far, the largest asset market in the world), are the primary safe asset held in banking, pension fund, mutual fund, and other business portfolios. Our present regional bank crisis involving Silicon Valley Bank and others is occurring in response to a relatively slight, temporary drop in the value of low-yield Treasuries largely because of the Fed's interest rate hikes. An outright default would leave us nostalgic for the comparable placidity of this troubled moment.
We would also probably see a rapid plunge in the value of the dollar worldwide as a global reserve asset. Our currency's value in relation to others' is rooted primarily in global demand for dollar-denominated financial assets, since we have relinquished our primacy as a goods exporter to China. Since Treasury securities are by far the most voluminous asset, their slide would be the dollar’s slide. This would quickly render imports, on which we continue to rely, far more expensive. Inflation could look more like that of Argentina or Russia 20 years ago than that of the present or even the 1970s.
This is to say nothing of our subsequent incapacity to maintain our military bases and other assets abroad and pay thousands of U.S. military personnel.
"Even the serious prospect of U.S. default would quickly raise debt-servicing costs, rendering our deficit larger than it currently is—a consequence dramatically at odds with Republicans' professed concerns about tying the debt ceiling hike to massive budget cuts," he added, advocating an end to the debt limit, which comes from a 1917 law. "Let us now end the absurdity."'
After outlining the impacts of a default—including cuts to Inflation Reduction Act climate provisions that "would be literally catastrophic"—Economic Policy Institute experts Josh Bivens and Samantha Sanders also asserted Tuesday that "all of this clearly calls for abolishing the debt limit to keep irresponsible congressional majorities from holding the nation's economy hostage to its policy preferences in the future."
"But what makes today's debt limit showdown so bad is how normalized it has become—often with the encouragement of too many in D.C. policymaking circles who should know better," the pair added. "If this drive to normalize debt limit brinkmanship does not spark an economic meltdown this time, we all know where it leads next time."
This post has been updated with comment from the Economic Policy Institute.
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