(NEW YORK) MintPress – Judging from the latest public opinion polls, it is gearing up to be another very close election in which every vote really does count. But in the past couple of years, there has been a wave of laws restricting the right to vote and potentially making it harder for millions of Americans to cast a ballot.
Voter ID laws have of course been in the headlines for some time. Critics of stringent ID requirements maintain that they are enforced by Republican-controlled state governments and are aimed at disenfranchising people who tend to vote Democratic, especially African-Americans, Hispanics, low-income groups and college students.
In fact, voter fraud is quite rare. According to the Brennan Center for Political Justice at the New York University School of Law, there is no documented wave or trend of individuals voting multiple times, voting as someone else or voting despite knowing that they are ineligible.
And voter ID laws are not the only controversial changes to election rules.
Indeed, according to a recent study by the Brennan Center, 25 laws and two executive actions have been passed in 19 states since the beginning of 2011.
In many cases, voting rights advocates fought back and courts overturned or weakened restrictive measures, while the Department of Justice blocked others.
Still, according to the Brennan Center report, 16 states — Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin — have passed restrictive voting laws and executive actions that have the potential to impact the 2012 election, representing 212 electoral votes, or 78 percent of the total needed to win the presidency.
Litany of legislation
In addition to voter ID laws — which Attorney General Eric Holder and others have compared to the poll tax implemented during the Jim Crow era when Southern states imposed voting fees to discourage blacks, and even some poor whites, from going to the ballot box — such measures include proof of citizenship laws.
According to the Brennan Center, at least 17 states introduced legislation that would require proof, such as a birth certificate, to register or vote. Proof of citizenship laws have passed in the largely Republican states of Alabama, Kansas and Tennessee, although only Tennessee’s law will be in effect for 2012.
Two other states — Florida and Iowa — reversed previous executive actions that made it easier for citizens with past felony convictions to restore their voting rights, affecting hundreds of thousands of voters. Both states now permanently disenfranchise most citizens with past felony convictions. South Dakota, meanwhile, has denied voting rights to people on probation.
And at least nine states introduced bills to reduce their early voting periods —Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia succeeded in enacting them — and four tried to reduce possibilities for absentee voting.
Democrats have been strong proponents of early voting: An estimated 93,000 Ohioans voted early in 2008. A subsequent University of Akron study concluded that early voters were “more likely to be members of the Democratic party than election-day voters,” including women, the elderly and lower-income people.
Ohio used to allow in-person early voting for registered voters in the three days prior to Election Day, but last year the Ohio General Assembly narrowed the window, which opened on Oct. 2, to end at 6 p.m. the Friday before Election Day for everyone except members of the military and overseas voters.
Ohio elections officials had argued that administering early voting the weekend before Election Day for all registered voters would interfere with counties’ Election Day preparations.
In July, Obama for America, the Democratic National Committee and the Ohio Democratic Party asked a federal court to block the new rule, arguing that “tens of thousands of citizens who would have otherwise exercised their right to vote during this time period, including Plaintiffs’ members and supporters, may not be able to participate in future elections at all.”
In August, a U.S. District Judge in Ohio agreed to block the law, writing that creating two separate early voting deadlines would place more value on one person’s vote over another’s. The state is appealing, but even if it loses, county election officials will still have discretion over whether to open up early voting to all registered voters.
Fraudulent voter fraud
Iowa has gone so far as to hire a criminal agent to investigate voter fraud allegations. In July, the Associated Press reported that Iowa signed a two-year $280,000 contract with an investigator from the state Division of Criminal Investigation to handle suspected cases of voter fraud.
Iowa’s Secretary of State, Republican Matt Schultz, has identified the names of more than 1,000 potential non-citizens to investigate. The agent’s duties, according to the AP, are “subpoenaing voting records, checking their citizenship status and interviewing suspects as he builds cases.”
The first few cases, though, have not revealed massive fraud: Two Canadian citizens arrested and charged with felony election misconduct for voting in 2010 and 2011 said they mistakenly believed they could vote in non-presidential elections as legal residents. A third person arrested was a Mexico native whose U.S. citizenship was challenged by the state.
“Voter fraud is a singularly foolish way to attempt to win an election,” says the Brennan Center in its report. “Each act of voter fraud risks five years in prison and a $10,000 fine – but yields at most one incremental vote. The single vote is simply not worth the price.”
A recent analysis by News21, a national investigative reporting project, identified 10 voter impersonation cases out of 2,068 alleged election fraud cases since 2000 – or 1 out of every 15 million prospective voters.
Said UC-Irvine professor and election law specialist Rick Hasen, “When you do see election fraud, it invariably involves election officials taking steps to change election results.”