Voter Suppression 101: This Is How The GOP Does It (Part 1)

Voter registration is an easy target for GOP legislators to attack.

With voting rights under attack by the GOP across the country (by last count over 250 bills in over 43 states), it’s important to understand how these laws operate to suppress and disenfranchise. This is the first in a series of pieces exploring how nefarious and damaging these voter suppression laws are and what we can do about them.

Photo Credit: Michael Fleshman / cc by-SA 2.0 (Flickr)

Let’s look first at the assault on voter registration, which is the generally the first step needed to get more folks to the polls. While some states such as Oregon make voter registration very simple and straightforward by automatically registering people to vote, others have raised the bar considerably with the specific intent on keeping minority and women voters from exercising their right. Here are some examples:

For many years, Georgia had a law that required an “exact match” for voter registration, meaning the information submitted by the applicant at registration had to exactly line up with state records kept by Georgia’s Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration. Small errors, even hyphens and apostrophes, or changes to married names, could cause the system to reject the registration. As a result, a whopping 53,000 registrations were canceled. And surprise, surprise, almost 70 percent of them belonged to Black voters. It took three federal lawsuits to finally force the legislature and Governor Kemp to abandon the exact match law. 

In New Hampshire, for many years registering to vote in the state required proof of residence, such as utility bills or in-state car registrations. This had a disproportionate effect on out-of-state college students, low income residents, and homeless residents. A state judge eventually struck down the measure.

Many states have suppressed the indigenous vote by limiting registration to those with formal residential addresses, which many Native Americans living on reservations lack. Others require an official state ID and refuse to recognize tribal IDs as valid. With key swing states like Arizona now being tipped blue by a nose through a strong indigenous vote turnout, GOP efforts to suppress their votes are likely to increase in scope and urgency.

To curtail the effectiveness of voter registration drives—which are a key component to enfranchise government lower income, minority and women voters—some states even pass highly restrictive laws around who can participate in or lead such drives. In Tennessee, for example, the legislature passed a law making it a criminal offense to run a voter registration drive without the specified training or should too many incomplete forms be submitted.

Voter registration should be easy and automatic, because that ensures an even greater number of our citizens can participate in elections. Of course, this is the very thing that would sink the GOP’s electoral prospects, so it’s not surprising that Republicans attack voter registration at every turn.

So what can we do about this? A key solution is to create a national standard for voter registration. The For the People Act, now before the House, would provide same day voter registration for federal elections and allow people to make changes to their registrations right at the polls. This would eliminate a key obstacle to registration imposed by many regressive state laws. It will likely face filibuster from the GOP, and that will be the true test of whether the Democrats hold-outs on preserving the filibuster bend in any way.

At the state level, and in the absence of a federal standard, citizens can demand that their legislatures make it as easy as possible to register to vote. But it will take citizens who already enjoy the franchise, standing up for those who do not, for this to move forward.