In February, Michelle Mackey, a 53-year-old Milwaukee resident, went to cast her ballot in a local primary for mayor and county executive. Mackey describes herself as an “avid voter” who participates regularly in state and national elections, and took part in voter registration drives in 2016. But when she arrived at her polling place at Washington High School, in the city’s Sherman Park neighborhood, which is predominantly Black, she said she was told there was no record of her registration. “I was mad as hell,” she recalled.
She feared she had been purged from the voter rolls—and with good reason. Just before Christmas, she saw on the news that Wisconsin had identified 232,000 voters it claimed had moved and had been ordered to remove them from its registration lists within 30 days if they did not respond to a mailing.
It’s not exactly clear why Mackey was told she was not registered to vote. Just in case, she’d come with her ID and electric bill. She was able to cast a ballot that day, and records show she was still in the poll book. But the whole experience left her upset. The state’s effort to remove voters, Mackey said, was “a slap in the face to minorities and people of color.”
In Milwaukee, which is home to nearly two-thirds of the state’s Black population, one in eight registered voters was at risk of being purged. African American turnout in the city had already plummeted in 2016 after Republicans passed a voter ID law .. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/voter-suppression-wisconsin-election-2016/ .. that, according to a Republican Senate aide’s sworn testimony, was aimed squarely at Milwaukee and other Democratic-leaning cities.
Between 2016 and 2018, more than 17 million names were taken off voter rolls nationwide. On average, states removed 7.6% of their voters, for various reasons. A few states went a lot further:
Massachusetts: 12.1% of voters removed, 2016-18 Local election officials in Massachusetts conduct an annual census .. https://www.eac.gov/maintenance-monday-michelle-tassinari-massachusetts .. to update voter registrations. People who don’t respond are placed on the inactive list; they can still vote, but they need to bring additional identification to the polls.
Maine: 11.2% of voters removed, 2016-18 In 2018, the Brennan Center for Justice alleged .. https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legal-work/NVRA%20Notice%20Letter_Maine.pdf .. that Maine’s list maintenance policy was violating the National Voter Registration Act by failing to provide voters with proper notice, waiting time, and opportunity to respond to notices about their registrations. —Becky Dernbach ------
The state’s bipartisan elections commission had originally planned to give voters until 2021 to confirm their addresses and registration status before removing them from the rolls. But in November 2019, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative group, sued the commission to force it to immediately purge voters who had not responded to the mailing. A month later, a Republican-appointed judge, Paul Malloy, sided with the group and approved the fast-tracked purge.
Like Wisconsin, Georgia has seen rampant voter suppression .. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/11/brian-kemps-win-in-georgia-tainted-by-voter-suppression-stacey-abrams/ .. and razor-thin elections. Abrams failed to qualify for a runoff against Republican Brian Kemp in the 2018 governor’s race by fewer than 18,000 votes, after Kemp—who as secretary of state oversaw his own gubernatorial election—instituted a number of practices that made it harder to vote. That included putting 53,000 voter registrations on hold before the election—80 percent of them from voters of color—and advising counties on how to close polling places. More than 200 precincts closed, primarily in areas with large Black populations.
“Especially in states like Georgia, where diversifying demographics have us on the precipice of transformative political change, we are seeing Republicans employ voter suppression to limit who has access to the polls,” says Abrams. “Disproportionately, under GOP secretaries of state, this process affects Democrats, particularly in communities of color.” She adds, “The clear intention is to strip people of their right to vote.”
It’s long been said that elections are decided by turnout, but in 2020 we have to ask a different question: Will tens of thousands of voters in critical battleground states find out they’re unable to cast a ballot?
Jules Julien
At the country’s founding, there was no voter registration in the United States. People simply showed up at the polls, offering credentials such as proof of property or residency as needed, and counting on officials or neighbors to recognize and vouch for them. Early registration laws, passed in the mid-1800s, when the vote was still mostly limited to white men, were largely designed to prevent rather than encourage political participation. As historian Alexander Keyssar writes in The Right to Vote, in 1840 the Whig Party in New York passed a voter registration law that applied only to New York City, clearly aimed at Irish Catholic immigrants, who voted Democratic.
Voter registration laws became a widespread tool of voter suppression in the tumultuous era after Reconstruction, as Southern states sought to disenfranchise African Americans, and Northern states sought to disenfranchise immigrants. During the Jim Crow era, literacy tests and poll taxes made it all but impossible for the majority of Black Americans to register to vote, and frequent voter purges kept many who did register from holding onto the right.
Following the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, the Louisiana legislature formed a Segregation Committee, which advocated widespread voter purges as a way to keep Black Americans from organizing politically. State Sen. Willie Rainach authored a pamphlet called “Voter Qualification Laws in Louisiana: The Key to Victory in the Segregation Struggle.” In 1959, the White Citizens Council of Washington Parish, north of New Orleans, convinced local registrars to remove 85 percent of Black registered voters for alleged defects in their registration cards, but just 0.07 percent of white voters. A federal court reversed the purge, calling it a “massively discriminatory .. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/180/10/1485112/ ” scheme to “remove almost all of the Negro voters from the rolls and leave the white voters practically untouched.”
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Even Iowa’s Republican secretary of state called assertions of voter fraud before this year’s caucus “fake news.”
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed many of these suppressive laws and tactics, and the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, known as the “motor voter” law, made voter registration far more accessible by allowing people to register at DMVs and other public agencies.
Yet purges persisted as Republicans sought new ways to circumvent protections for voters of color, a growing part of the electorate that favored Democratic candidates. During a 1981 gubernatorial election in New Jersey, the Republican National Committee used outdated registration lists to send sample ballots to largely nonwhite neighborhoods. When 45,000 mailers were returned as undeliverable, the RNC created a list of voters to challenge at the polls, stationing armed off-duty cops wearing “National Ballot Security Task Force .. https://billmoyers.com/story/donald-trump-encouraging-intimidation-racial-profiling-polls/ ” armbands at heavily Black and Latino polling sites in Newark and Trenton. The Democratic candidate, Jim Florio, lost the race to Republican Tom Kean by 1,797 votes. The RNC chair credited the tactic .. https://www.wnyc.org/story/armed-men-once-patrolled-polls-will-they-reappear-november/ .. for Kean’s victory. The Democratic National Committee won a legal settlement restricting the RNC’s future “ballot security” operations, which functioned as unofficial voter purges.
Five years later, during a US Senate race in Louisiana, the RNC sent similar mailers to majority-Black precincts and used the returned mail to generate a list of 31,000 mostly Black voters to challenge at the polls. A committee official said the effort would “keep the Black vote down considerably.” (The settlement expired in 2017, potentially opening the door to new voter challenges by Republicans in 2020.)
In 2000, a purge changed the outcome of a presidential election .. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-the-2000-election-in-florida-led-to-a-new-wave-of-voter-disenfranchisement/ .. and the course of American history. Under Republican Gov. Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris, Florida sent election supervisors a list of 58,000 people the state believed had felony records. (At the time, Florida was one of a handful of states that permanently prevented people with past felony convictions from voting.) But Florida did not stop at purging people convicted of felonies. People were added to the purge list if 70 percent of the letters in their names matched an entry in the state’s felony database. The list was both discriminatory—African Americans made up 11 percent of registered voters in the state but 44 percent of the purge list—and wildly inaccurate. After the election—and following the Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision stopping the state’s recount—an official audit found that as many as 12,000 registered voters had been mislabeled as having felony records, a number 22 times greater than George W. Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory.
Instead of backing away from voter purging, the Justice Department under Bush accelerated its use .. https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2019-08/Report_Justice_Department_Voter_Fraud_Scandal_Lessons_0.pdf , suing four states for violating a provision of the 1993 motor voter law that required states to make “a reasonable effort to remove” voters who had died or moved from the official lists. (The clause had been inserted into the bill to win GOP support.) The Bush administration interpreted the provision far more aggressively than the Clinton administration had, turning a law that was supposed to help people register to vote into a weapon to remove voters from the rolls.
Missouri was one of the states the administration sued. Like Florida, Missouri was the site of a disastrous purge .. https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/congress/article24463423.html .. in 2000. In the runup to the election, the St. Louis election commission sent postcards to all registered voters in the city and reclassified 50,000 voters as inactive after their mail was returned as undeliverable, without notifying them of the change. That led to chaos on Election Day, when thousands of voters found they were on the inactive list.
Under a legal settlement with the Justice Department, St. Louis agreed to refrain from removing voters from the rolls until after the 2004 election, and to notify any voter moved to inactive status. But in 2005, over the objections of the Republican-appointed US attorney for Western Missouri, the Justice Department sued the state to force it to conduct a purge before the 2006 midterm elections. A federal court ruled against the Justice Department, but the Bush administration had already laid the groundwork for using the motor voter law to conduct sweeping voter purges.
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“If people feel like the system is rigged… it has a pretty profound impact on whether or not they feel it is even worthwhile to participate in an election.”
After Barack Obama took office, former Bush administration lawyers joined a constellation of conservative legal groups .. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/07/these-three-lawyers-are-quietly-purging-voter-rolls-across-the-country/ .. with innocuous-sounding names, such as Judicial Watch, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, and the American Constitutional Rights Union. These groups have sent threatening letters and filed dozens of lawsuits to try to force states and counties with substantial populations of color to purge their voting rolls. “These groups are bullying and pressuring election administrators into purging,” says Myrna Pérez, director of the Brennan Center’s voting rights program.
In January, Judicial Watch sent letters to 19 large counties in California, Colorado, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—all of which voted for Clinton in 2016—warning that they would be sued unless they trimmed their voting rolls within 90 days. Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County, where Clinton won by 17 points, immediately began removing 69,000 inactive voters. Last year, Judicial Watch reached a settlement with California to reassess 1.5 million names on the voter rolls in Los Angeles County. To justify such purges, Judicial Watch has claimed there are more registered voters than adult citizens in some of these places, opening the door to widespread voter fraud.
It repeated this charge right before the 2020 Iowa caucuses, alleging that “eight Iowa counties have more voter registrations than citizens old enough to register.” In fact, only one of these counties had more registered voters than adult citizens, and voting rights experts say there’s little risk of fraud or evidence that people are exploiting out-of-date registrations to impersonate voters who have moved or died. Even Iowa’s Republican secretary of state called Judicial Watch’s assertions “fake news .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/03/conservatives-push-false-claims-voter-fraud-twitter-iowans-prepare-caucus/ .” (Echoing Judicial Watch’s unsubstantiated claims of bloated voter rolls, another conservative group, the Honest Elections Project, recently threatened to sue Colorado, Michigan, and Florida.)
“The rationale of removing voters from the rolls to protect against fraud is nonsensical,” Abrams says. “This is a pretext for blocking voices they do not want to hear.”
The Trump administration has encouraged such tactics. In June 2017, the Justice Department sent a letter to 44 states informing them that it was reviewing their voter list maintenance procedures and asking how they planned to “remove the names of ineligible voters.” Vanita Gupta, who headed the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under President Obama and is now president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, called a mass mailing of this sort “virtually unprecedented .. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/opinion/donald-trump-voting-rights-purge.html .”
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has abetted these purges every step of the way. In 2013, the court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder that states with a long history of voting discrimination no longer needed to get federal approval for changes to their election laws and voting procedures under the Voting Rights Act. Following that decision, states and counties that were now free to modify their election laws purged voters at a rate 40 percent higher .. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/voter-purge-rates-remain-high-analysis-finds .. than elsewhere in the country, according to the Brennan Center. Georgia, for example, purged twice as many voters from 2012 to 2016—a total of 1.5 million people—as it did from 2008 to 2012.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with updating registration lists to remove the names of people who have become ineligible to vote. “We want election administrators to have the tools they need to make sure that the records are clean,” says the Brennan Center’s Pérez. But recent examples show that some purges mislabel thousands of eligible voters, disproportionately Democrats and people of color.
All of this raises questions about the accuracy of the latest purge effort in Wisconsin. The League of Women Voters, which has challenged the purge in state and federal courts, argued in a brief .. https://642cf75b-6e65-4c0d-82e2-11357e0523f7.filesusr.com/ugd/85cfb4_7ff73004983e431cbe8e16f60d4d3eb9.pdf .. that the list “likely once again contains a substantial amount of unreliable and demonstrably inaccurate information.”
Wisconsin has Election Day registration, so people with registration problems can reregister at the polls. But they’ll need to provide proof of residency, which is not typically required to vote, and voting rights advocates worry that people turned away for lack of proper documentation might not come back. “People get so frustrated that they don’t even want to go through the process,” says the Rev. Greg Lewis of Souls to the Polls Milwaukee, which focuses on Black voter engagement. “That’s the major concern for us.” The spread of the coronavirus could also make it unlikely that people will use Election Day registration, and they might be unable to fix their registration problems through mail-in balloting.
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The spread of the coronavirus could also make it unlikely that people will use Election Day registration.
Like Georgia, Wisconsin has already been hit hard by voter suppression. A University of Wisconsin study .. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/a-new-study-shows-just-how-many-americans-were-blocked-from-voting-in-wisconsin-last-year/ .. found that the state’s strict voter ID law blocked or deterred as many as 23,000 residents of Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County from voting in 2016—a number larger than Trump’s margin of victory in the state. Black voters were three times as likely as white voters to cite the ID law as a reason they did not cast a ballot.
Neil Albrecht, executive director of Milwaukee’s election commission, fears that the purge could have a similar effect this year. “This will further the mistrust of election administration in Wisconsin,” he says. “That can affect voter participation. If people feel like the system is rigged, and more and more people in Milwaukee are starting to feel that way, it has a pretty profound impact on whether or not they feel it is even worthwhile to participate in an election.”
After Judge Malloy ordered the purge in December, the Wisconsin Elections Commission voted on whether to remove names from the rolls while the case was being appealed. The commission, which consists of three Democrats and three Republicans, split along party lines, and the vote to remove the names failed. A month later, Malloy angrily instructed the commission to begin removing voters immediately and took the unprecedented step of holding the commission and its three Democratic appointees in contempt of court .. https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2020/01/13/judge-contempt-court-order-wisconsin-voter-rolls-case/2804070001/ , fining each commissioner $250 a day until they started the purge. It was Malloy’s orders that the appeals court blocked and that the state Supreme Court could reinstate.
Mackey, a third grade teacher’s assistant and the vice president of a branch of her local teachers union, lives in a majority-Black neighborhood on the north side of Milwaukee where voter turnout decreased by more than 20 percent from 2012 to 2016. She had been canvassing the area before the spread of coronavirus and urging people at risk of being purged to confirm their registrations so they don’t get any unpleasant surprises like she did. “A lot of people are planning to reregister due to the situation on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” she told me.
When I asked Mackey why voting was so important to her, she said that her grandfather had grown up in segregated Mississippi, fought in World War II as a Tuskegee Airman, and marched in Selma for the Voting Rights Act. “My ancestors fought for this right,” she said. “They fought in wars for our freedom, for the right to vote. This is our God-given right, and it should not be taken away from us.”
Census Count Can Be Cut Short, Supreme Court Rules
"Trump Can’t Postpone The Election, But He Can Delegitimize The Results."
After extending the deadline to count every person in America, a process complicated by the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration reversed course. Critics saw a political motive.
Census workers planning routes in New York in March. A Supreme Court order on Tuesday was a victory for the Trump administration, which argued that it needed to shut down census field work to meet a statutory deadline. Brittainy Newman/The New York Times
By Adam Liptak and Michael Wines
Oct. 13, 2020Updated 8:48 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration .. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20a62_n7ip.pdf .. to halt the 2020 census count ahead of schedule, effectively shutting down what has been the most contentious and litigated census in memory and setting the stage for a bitter fight over how to use its numbers for the apportionment of the next Congress.
The brief unsigned order formally only pauses the population count while the administration and a host of groups advocating a more accurate census battle in a federal appeals court over whether the count could be stopped early.
As a practical matter, however, it almost certainly ensures an early end because the census — one of the largest government activities, involving hundreds of thousands of workers — cannot be easily restarted and little time remains before its current deadline at the end of this month. In fact, some census workers say, the bureau had already begun shutting down some parts of its count despite a court order to continue it.
The census has been buffeted both by the coronavirus pandemic and the involvement of the Trump administration in what has traditionally been a rigorously nonpartisan, data-driven exercise. Its early end could mean that White House officials, rather than Census Bureau experts, may use the population numbers to determine representation in the House of Representatives and in state and local governments.
President Trump has insisted those numbers should not include undocumented immigrants living in the United States. That conflicts with the mandate of the Constitution that the census count all residents of the country and would almost certainly give more representation to Republicans.
The court’s order gave no reasons, which is typical when the court acts on emergency applications. It said the count could stop while appeals moved forward.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, saying that “the harms associated with an inaccurate census are avoidable and intolerable.”
The Supreme Court’s decision on Tuesday effectively halted what has been the most contentious and litigated census count in memory. Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times
The order was a major victory for the Trump administration, which had been rebuffed by both district and appeals courts in its effort to end the count early. It was a bitter defeat for state and local governments and advocacy groups that had sued to keep the population count going despite the administration’s determination to shut it down.
“The court’s action will cause irreversible damage to efforts to achieve a fair and accurate census,” said Kristen Clarke, the president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which represents many of the parties that sued. “It’s incredibly disappointing.”
Terri Ann Lowenthal, a longtime census expert and consultant to several groups pressing for an accurate tally, charged that the disarray caused by the administration’s handling of the count “inevitably will undermine whatever public confidence remains in the census results.”
The administration “could do the right thing, and allow those operations to wind down in an organized way over the next two weeks, or it could continue to push for rushed results, accuracy and quality be damned,” she said. “The commerce secretary’s next steps will tell us everything we need to know.”
The justices’ decision is but the latest turnabout in a saga that has seen the deadline for completing the population count — originally set for August, after a decade of preparation — shifted to Oct. 31, then abruptly changed to Sept. 30, then restored by courts to Oct. 31.
The legal battle has focused on whether the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, had followed federal law when it set the Sept. 30 deadline. But the subtext has always been whether a curtailed count would be accurate enough to set the baseline for allotting political power and trillions of dollars over the next decade — and whether Mr. Trump was seeking to take control of the count for political advantage.
Most experts said a shortened census would only worsen existing undercounts of the people who have always been hardest for census workers to reach — minorities who are suspicious of the government, and the poor and young people, who move frequently and are more difficult to track down.
The deadline for completing the count was originally moved from August to Oct. 31 after the pandemic all but shuttered many census operations last spring. Because of that delay, the Census Bureau said it would move the dates for delivering population figures used by the House and states for reapportionment and redistricting to next April and beyond.
But in August, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross ordered the Oct. 31 deadline moved up a month to Sept. 30, saying the extra time was needed to deliver preliminary population totals to Mr. Trump by the statutory deadline of Dec. 31.
Mr. Ross’s action came over the objection of career census experts who argued that it would undermine, perhaps fatally, the accuracy of the count. It forced the bureau to abandon on short notice some of the counting safeguards it was using to make the tally reliable. And it quickly triggered a lawsuit seeking to keep the tally going.
While the order formally only pauses the census, it likely ensures an early end. The count cannot be easily restarted and little time remains before its current deadline at the end of this month. Christian Monterrosa for The New York Times
The two developments appear related. The old deadlines would have allowed the winner of the presidential election to transmit the population totals next spring. Readopting the December deadline would ensure that Mr. Trump controls that process, even if he loses the November election.
The National Urban League, the League of Women Voters, other groups and local governments sued .. https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/Complaint_8.18.20.pdf , saying the rushed schedule would undermine the accuracy of the census and “facilitate another illegal act: suppressing the political power of communities of color by excluding undocumented people from the final apportionment count.”
Judge Lucy H. Koh, of the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, ordered the bureau to keep working .. https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2020-09/Opinion%20on%20PI.pdf .. through the Oct. 31 deadline. “Because the decennial census is at issue here, an inaccurate count would not be remedied for another decade,” she wrote. She also suspended the Dec. 31 statutory deadline for submitting the results.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, turned down a request .. https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2020-10/Order_10.7.20.pdf .. from the Trump administration to stay Judge Koh’s order and allow it to stop counting before the end of the month. But the panel said it would not bar the administration from trying to comply with the Dec. 31 reporting deadline.
The administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene, saying that only by shutting down field work now could the bureau meet the Dec. 31 deadline, which is set by statute. “The district court’s order constitutes an unprecedented intrusion into the executive’s ability to conduct the census according to Congress’s direction,” Jeffrey B. Wall, the acting solicitor general, told the justices in a brief filed on Wednesday .. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20A62/157121/20201007185144716_National%20Urban%20League%20v.%20Ross%20Stay%20App.pdf .
“As the law stands,” Mr. Wall wrote, “assessing any trade-off between speed and accuracy is a job for Congress, which set the Dec. 31 deadline and has not extended it, and the agencies, which acted reasonably in complying with that deadline.”
Governments with huge financial and political stakes in a full count of their jurisdictions were especially critical of the court’s ruling. The director of New York City’s efforts to increase census turnout, Julie Menin, said the count had “been stolen by the Trump administration, which has interfered at every step of the way.”
Ditas Katague, who has led a nearly $200 million campaign by California to encourage a complete tally, said the decision “could have grave consequences for the next decade” and said the state would continue to fight in court for fair representation during the apportionment of House seats.
While the court’s ruling effectively stops the census, it does not end the legal battle over it. Lawyers for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit said they would turn to making sure that the Census Bureau was not forced to make further cuts in accuracy checks during the monthslong period in which population data is processed and verified.
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002. @adamliptak • Facebook
Michael Wines writes about voting and other election-related issues. Since joining The Times in 1988, he has covered the Justice Department, the White House, Congress, Russia, southern Africa, China and various other topics. @miwine
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