Jessica King’s absent ballot application was never received. She tried to vote early at her polling station near her home in Albany, Georgia – but walked away when the public made social distance impossible.
Finally, thanks to an early election day alarm and a nearly hour-long wait, King, 27, was able to vote in the state’s primary June.
The obstacles she faced in securely casting a vote several months into a pandemic were frustratingly familiar to her as a Black voter.
“As a person of color, the concern that my voice will not be counted is always there,” King, who works for a nonprofit community advocacy group in Albany, said in an interview. ‘It’s not because we do not trust the system, it’s because of the experiences we have had. History has taught us that people of color – our voice is not counted when it really matters. ”
Voting by mail is championing – rightly, experts say – the safest way to run in the 2020 election, while the nation remains threatened by the coronavirus, which has killed more than 160,000 and made millions sick, with no end in sight in sight. Many of the same experts have for years advocated for the expansion of postal voting as a proven way to increase participation in a democracy in which an estimated 43 percent of the eligible population, for one reason or another, do not vote.
But the changes that states are shaking to make by November to protect voters against COVID-19 – expanding their email and absentee voting systems while reducing the number of polling stations – risk lowering the issues of racial discrimination and disenfranchisement that Black , Hispanic and other color voters have been fighting for generations.
The cause was costly for the late Rep. John Lewis, the longtime Democratic congressman from Georgia and a leader of the civil rights movement, who was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, for marching in support of suffrage in March 1965 at a time when polling and literature tests in law were written.
Such immense discrimination in the country was finally met with the Landmark Voting Rights Act 55 years ago, which provided important federal resources to free Black voters if the states would not. Federal investigators went to the South, registering tens of thousands of Black voters when provincial officials refused. States and counties with a history of discrimination were required to prove to the Department of Justice that new election rules would not deprive voters of color.
For the next half century, civil rights leaders, suffrage advocates, and the Department of Justice fought for a fairer electoral system designed for white farmers.
And while Black voters no longer have to stockpile the jelly beans in a jar to cast a vote, inequality remains. States have instituted voter ID requirements and restrictive voting laws that disproportionately make it harder for people of color to vote, while ongoing gerrymandering thunders the power of voters.
In 2013, the Supreme Court passed the Voting Rights Act, which allows states and counties with a history of discrimination to conduct their elections without federal oversight. More than 1,600 polling stations will close between 2012 and 2018 in those areas, without federal oversight. Many states have worked to aggressively purge their electoral rolls, while other states have enacted new and restrictive laws in the name of preventing fraud, despite the lack of evidence that fraud continues in U.S. elections.
And then came the COVID-19 pandemic, destroying a poorly prepared country and crushing plans for a normal election day.
Now, lawyers are afraid that changes of vote the Black and Latino people will suffer the most in the pandemic risk losing their voting rights. Young, diverse Americans who have spent the summer mobilizing for racial justice may face the highest barriers to participation, not to mention the millions of Americans who have faced expulsions this summer, for whom voting by mail may be impossible.
“If we do not do it differently now, we will not only see dramatic racial disparities, but also just huge damages across the board,” said Wendy Weiser, vice president of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law. “There are differences in every step of the process and they will really be aggravated – they are already being aggravated – by the coronavirus.”
Both major political parties, along with advocates including the American Civil Liberties Union, the League of Women Voters, and the NAACP have launched a barrage of lawsuits over how absurd rules are used and updated. Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, are sounding the alarm about the threat of voter fraud, which is unproven, and in a hurry to defend existing laws, while Democrats, who have reliably enjoyed the support of the groups who are most at risk for disenfranchisement, say they will not save costs to empower more people.
“This is perhaps the biggest election administration challenge of our lives,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project.
As many as 64 percent of Americans are expected to vote by mail this year, according to a group of researchers at Harvard, Northeastern, and Rutgers universities, as well as Harvard Medical School. That’s an enormous increase over the 23 percent who voted by mail in 2018, according to census data.
Advocates like Ho have been pushing for years to increase access to the right to vote, but many have worried the nation has run the course: Congress has so far provided just $ 400 million in additional election funding despite estimates that states need $ 4 billion in federal funding to manage secure, mail-heavy elections. House Democrats raised $ 3.6 billion for election funding as part of a $ 3 trillion coronavirus relief package passed by the House in May, but House Republicans are opposed to providing local governments with money to help hold elections.
“We stress test all institutions of democracy at once,” said Justin Levitt, a former law department official and a professor at Loyola Law School.
Post voting works better for older, white voters
In a pandemic, the voice over the mail appears to be an obvious choice to maintain access to polls and public health at the same time. Western states like California, Oregon, and Colorado have been doing it for years, but in practice nationwide voting by mail – most often known as absentee voting – benefits certain groups of voters disproportionately.
Older, white voters were significantly more likely to vote by mail and counted those votes, according to studies, while voters of color and younger voters were significantly more likely to reject their votes.
“No one has scrutinized the honesty of the voting rules because most people did not vote by mail and most people have reasonable, alternative voting methods without risking their lives,” Weiser said.
Daniel A. Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Florida, has been researching the effects of post-election schemes this year. In April, he co-published a paper reporting that Spanish and Black voters were more than twice as likely to cast their ballots as white voters in the Florida 2018 general election. In May, he published a review of the midday election data from Georgia in 2018 which found a similar pattern of rejection for color voters. For example, in Gwinnett County, the second most populous county in Georgia, some 4 percent of the absentee ballots were rejected by white voters, while 8 percent of the absentee ballots were rejected by black voters.
“We’re in a crazy world where this trade-off is between our health and our voice. I fully understand why people want to vote by mail – it’s by far the safest way to vote. But it’s one that’s. ‘ t is not expensive, “he said.
Smith said he intends to vote in person in November. “I will donate my PPE,” he said, referring to personal protective equipment.
