Making Every Voter Count

Taking stock of citizen involvement in democratic government

More than 120 million Americans exercised one of the most important responsibilities of citizenship on Nov. 4 when voting stations opened across the country. Early analysis suggested that the vote engaged more citizens than any U.S. election in more than four decades.

Yet there's another side to the story. Nearly 30 percent of eligible adults are not registered to vote, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And although nearly nine out of 10 of those registered in the 2004 presidential elections actually cast ballots, participation in voting drops steeply in non-presidential elections. In 2002, only 46 percent of adults voted for their congressional representatives. In 2006, considered a "good" year, turnout was just 48 percent. The numbers are even worse in state and local elections.

"Pretty significant offices are determined by fractions of the population, 20 percent, 17 percent, sometimes 8 percent," says Sushma Sheth, director of programs for the Miami Workers Center, a community group.

The presidential season brought many new voters into the system, a wide array of hurdles to citizen involvement in government remain. Ford Reports takes stock of the challenges that limit participation, explores the remedies being tried, and looks at some of the organizations working to ensure that all citizens play an active role in the decisions that affect their lives.

Variations by State
Each election season Americans are reminded that an explicit right to vote is not set forth in the U.S. Constitution, and that there is no national system for managing elections. While many other democracies automatically register citizens to vote, Americans must opt into the process themselves. The United States continues to yield a lower voter participation average than almost any other functioning democracy.

Although the 26th Amendment, enacted in 1971, standardized the voting age at 18, individual states have tremendous leeway in establishing voting systems and laws. Registration rules vary; most states, for example, suspend registration several weeks before an election, while others have opted to continue registration up to and including Election Day.

This diverse and decentralized system—under which states determine their own electoral laws—means "it's very hard to create uniformity across the country," says Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law professor at American University and a recently elected state senator in Maryland. More significantly, "It's up to the individual states to define the electorate: who has suffrage rights and who doesn't."

The result of this patchwork approach is an open, user-friendly system in some states but a flawed, exclusionary system in others. Vast differences exist across the country, from state to state and even from community to community. The 2008 campaign season raised questions anew over how Americans are empowered—or disempowered—in our democracy.

Who Actually Votes
A fundamental underpinning of democracy is the simple idea that everyone has an equal voice at the ballot box. Yet practice has fallen short of the principle from the earliest years of the republic, when voting was denied to most Americans. Over the decades, major battles were waged to extend the franchise. This work continues into our own era.

Today, the splintered electoral system has led to a process in which state and local governments determine who gets to participate and who does not. Perhaps not surprisingly, registration statistics show that the poorest and least educated among us are consistently left out. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, among those eligible to vote:

• In the 2004 general election, fewer than half earning less than $20,000 voted; by contrast, 77.9 percent earning $75,000 to $99,000 voted.
• In the 2004 general election, 60 percent without high school diplomas did not vote.
• Wide gaps in voting rates persist between those with a college degree and those without one. In the 2006 mid-term election, for example, those with bachelor's degrees cast ballots at twice the rate as those who hadn't completed high school.

For voting rights activists such as Anita Earls, director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice based in Durham, N.C., these statistics represent a modern twist in a voter-suppression saga long associated with placing obstacles in the way of African-American political participation in the South. "The legacy of Jim Crow is still present," says Earls.

Deterrent Practices
State-by-state policy shifts in recent years have created real barriers to participation, especially for racial minorities, immigrants and low-income people. These policies range from the introduction of voter identification laws requiring photo identification, to laws in 16 states prohibiting the distribution of election materials in languages other than English.

Robocalls. Many voters are subject to "robocalls"—recorded, election-related phone calls. Some portion of these calls are misinformation campaigns that provide misleading or erroneous information that may keep people from going to the polls. Some calls, for example, warn that voting is not allowed if citizens have unpaid parking tickets. Others provide incorrect information on whether naturalized citizens can vote. Such calls create a general nervousness among the electorate that hinders the spirit of participation.

Caging. This practice involves political parties and their affiliates sending out mailings and then challenging the voting status of anyone whose mail was returned as undeliverable. Proponents of the practice say that sending letters is a reliable test of whether a person really resides where he or she claims to live. Opponents argue that it is not reliable, since letters sometimes get delivered to the wrong address, and further, the practice overwhelmingly targets low-income and minority voters. Moreover, aggressive challenges of voters at polling places on Election Day have slowed down the voting process. Since elections in the United States are held during the work week, many people are discouraged by long lines, especially in lower-income communities where voters may face less flexibility at work or with child care. Congress has considered legislation to bar caging and its spinoff voter challenges, but no such law has been passed.

Lax enforcement. Voter participation is also deterred when existing laws are not enforced. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (known popularly as the Motor Voter Law) increased the number of locations at which voter registration forms were made available, mandating them not just at Department of Motor Vehicle offices but also at all offices connected with public assistance programs. Immediately following the law's passage, states began providing voter registration forms in public assistance offices. But the federal government didn't monitor compliance, and many states quietly stopped. Nationwide, the number of voter registration forms filled out in public assistance offices declined 79 percent in the decade following initial response to the Motor Voter Law.

Felon disenfranchisement. Provisions that deny the right to vote to those with felony convictions have been magnified over the past three decades by increasingly restrictive federal and state criminal justice sentencing policies, particularly related to illicit drug usage and dealing. As a result, the number of people, especially low-income, African-American and Latino citizens, accruing felony records and spending time behind bars or on probation, has dramatically increased: Upwards of 5 million Americans are not permitted to vote because of a previous felony conviction.

The majority of the disenfranchisement is concentrated in Florida, Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi and a handful of other Southern states that enacted felon disenfranchisement as a part of Jim Crow laws. In these states, approximately 1 in 4 African-American men has permanently lost the right to vote.

Identification Required
The changes with the most direct impact on broad political access have been legislative. Several states have moved toward mandating that prospective voters present government-issued photo identification when registering. Advocates say these laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud, saying that without photo ID, there is no way to prevent voter impersonation. Critics say that there is no evidence such fraud is widespread—the Justice Department has not prosecuted anyone for impersonating a registered voter in recent years—and that the risk of disenfranchising large numbers of legitimate voters far outweighs the presumed benefit.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University estimates that 12 percent of U.S. citizens do not possess government-issued photo identification and would find it hard to register under laws requiring photo ID. An even higher percentage of seniors, students, people of color, people with disabilities, and low-income voters lack such ID.

Identification requirement laws are on the books in Indiana, Arizona, Michigan and Georgia. In Georgia, the secretary of state estimates 290,000 registered voters lack such IDs and could be unable to re-register should they move. In Mississippi, there was a campaign to introduce a photo ID law, but the effort stalled in the legislature.

In all the states that have enacted voter-ID requirements, voters can nonetheless take part by absentee ballot without presenting identification. In Georgia, whose initial photo-ID law was struck down by the courts because a $20 fee the state was charging to issue the identity card was seen as a poll tax, the state now issues an identification card for free.

Critics say the Georgia law is intended to make it more cumbersome and time-consuming for people to register, rather than a genuine attempt to weed out voter fraud. "It's just a little extra burden that'll shave off 1 or 2 percent of the vote," says Neil Bradley, associate director of the Voting Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. "The ID laws address only one type of potential fraud—voter impersonation, and there is virtually no evidence people do this. It's too high risk. You're very likely to get caught, and you can't steal many votes that way."

Federal data support this interpretation. From 2002 to 2005, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted fewer than 100 people nationwide for voter fraud. Not a single case involved voter impersonation. And while the courts have been reluctant to strike down state voter-ID laws, Bradley believes that the negative publicity such acts have generated will probably prevent other states from heading down similar paths.

Proving Your Citizenship
The next wave of voter restriction laws, so-called proof-of-citizenship legislation, may prove more challenging. Such laws sound reasonable: Since one must be a citizen to vote, surely one should have to prove citizenship status in order to register to vote.

Not surprisingly, however, many low-income people, the elderly and members of racial minority groups do not have such proof easily at hand. They often lack birth certificates—a situation especially likely to be the case if they were born at home, as many poor people in the South were into the 1960s; if they have never applied for a passport (only a quarter of Americans have passports); or, if they are naturalized citizens, and lack ready access to the paperwork demonstrating their status. A 2006 survey by the Brennan Center found that an estimated 13 million Americans do not have ready access to citizenship documents.

In the 18 months after Arizona enacted its Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, better known as Proposition 200, requiring that would-be voters produce proof of citizenship when registering, more than 30,000 voter registration applications were turned down. In the summer of 2008, opponents of the act presented evidence in Gonzalez v. Arizona that indicated thousands of citizens were being wrongly excluded from the political process. These included members of the Navajo nation, Arizona's largest Native American tribe and one whose members are not issued identification. "Many people do not have state-issued photo ID," says attorney Linda Brown, of the Arizona Advocacy Network Foundation. In late August, a federal judge rejected the challenge to Arizona's statute; an appeal is pending.

Beyond limiting who can register to vote, some states have tried to restrict voter registration drives. Florida's legislators made groups sponsoring independent voter registration drives liable, with severe financial penalties attached, if they failed to get voter registration forms filed within a few hours of receiving them. The wording of the law was so unforgiving that it would have mandated fines even if delivery of the forms was delayed because of a hurricane. As a result, groups such as the League of Women Voters and the Florida AFL-CIO put a temporary hold on registration drives in the state. They later resumed. In Ohio, a law was enacted mandating that voter registration volunteers personally deliver the filled-in forms to the county Board of Elections, rather than allowing the volunteers to turn them in at a central office and have one person deliver them all. Ohio's law was struck down by the courts. Florida's, however, was upheld.

Toward a Culture of Participation
Many of the diverse citizen groups that work on voter registration issues take an expansive view of their work, seeking to deepen people's involvement in democratic government throughout the year, not just at election time.

"We need to create a culture of permanent civic participation in low-income communities of color," says Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Community Change (CCC). "It means creating organizations that involve low-income people in shaping decisions that affect their lives at every level."

• In Florida, the Miami Workers Center has organized tenants in the low-income community known as Liberty City to successfully challenge an urban cleanup program that would have removed thousands of low-income residents from their homes. In the process, the center has stressed long-term political involvement, bringing people together to work for policy changes in their communities. "We're excited about voter work," says the center's Sushma Sheth, "but we're particularly excited about building community activists and folding them into the day-after [election day] work."
• In the tiny community of Mexico, Mo., a group called Grass Roots Organizing worked with lower-income African-American families in trailer parks, public housing and assisted-living facilities to register to vote as a way of giving voice to their concerns about health care issues.
• The Washington-based Advancement Project, which works in a number of key states; Southern Echo based in Jackson, Miss.; Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education (SCOPE) in Los Angeles; the Pushback Network, an alliance of voter protection and community rights groups in eight states; and a variety of other organizations have made similar efforts to increase political participation.

"We identify the groups on the ground conducting voter registration campaigns," says Edward Hailes, director of the power and democracy program at the Advancement Project. The organization worked with African-American churches around the country that had contact with people who had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina and provided absentee ballot information in such cities as Atlanta, Houston and Chicago. "We're building efforts to raise political participation in communities of color where we see 50 percent or less of the citizens of voting age registering to vote and participating," he says.

Embracing the Young and New
One of the most remarkable developments has been the mobilization of young people, especially minority youth. The increased voter participation rates in 2004 and the large primary and general election turnouts in 2008 were at least in part due to the number of young people who decided to take part.

Forty percent of African-Americans of voting age are in the 18-to-35 age bracket, says Melanie Campbell, executive director of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation. In Milwaukee, for example, where political organizers launched a Vote 4 da Hood campaign in 2006, voter turnout in some precincts rose by up to 30 percent.

These groups have empowered not only African-American voters but also new citizens:

• The CCC helped create a coalition of immigrant-rights groups in Illinois that has encouraged naturalized immigrants to register to vote, to discuss immigration issues with elected officials and to cast ballots come Election Day. At least in part because of the pressure brought by new immigrant voters, in 2005 Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich supported the New Americans Initiative, providing state funding to help immigrants navigate the path to citizenship.
• Groups such as Democracia U.S.A. and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) have trained cadres of local voting rights activists in low-income Latino communities. The Educational Fund of the Los Angeles-based National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials has launched a major campaign to encourage naturalized Latino immigrants to vote. Executive director Arturo Vargas says his group hopes to break the cycle of political non-involvement.
• The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) has begun organizing immigrants around minimum-wage battles and has built up voter registration based on these campaigns. AALDEF estimates that twice as many Asian-Americans voted in 2004 as in 2000 and that Asian-American registration has increased still further this year.

The CCC's evaluations indicate that these campaigns together have helped to increase overall voter registration by 6 to 7 percent since 2004.

Politics as a Way of Life
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, based in London, Ky., hopes to make politics a way of life for people too often removed from the country's decision-making processes. "One of our goals is to help people participate," says Burt Lauderdale, executive director of the group, which conducts door-to-door registration drives and signs up voters at local grocery stores. "The other is to foster democratic values." The coalition organizes local political education workshops and encourages its volunteers to travel to Frankfort, the state capital, to learn about the political process.

For other organizations, getting states to adopt Election Day registration remains a priority that could truly open the system to all citizens. Currently, eight states—Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Wyoming—offer Election Day registration. North Carolina allows same-day voter registration at early polling stations, but not on Election Day itself.

States with such registration average 10 to 12 percent higher turnout in every election, with up to 6 percent accounted for by the Election Day registration, says Stuart Comstock-Gay, director of the Democracy Program at Demos.

"It helps to change the rules of voting from a privilege to a right that you have," he says. "Everything ought to be done to allow people to vote."

And perhaps that is the crux of the matter. As Jill Lepore recently wrote in her brief history of the American voting system in The New Yorker, there really is no system as such: "It's patches all the way down."

Today, some reformers are promoting federal legislation or even a constitutional amendment to guarantee U.S. citizens the right to vote.

Yet no matter how evident the need for fundamental structural reform, the odds of constitutional remedy are long. How much higher voter turnout can go—and whether America's political participation rate can rise to the levels of other advanced democracies—will depend largely on how the battles between restriction and open access are resolved at the state level. What emerges at present is a picture of a system that is so decentralized that every step taken toward greater access to the polls is eventually countered by a step back.

Opening Access to Democracy
In a broader sense, however, the issue beyond 2008 is not whether more people will vote in presidential elections. Indications are that they will.

The real question for the health of our democracy is whether people will continue to take part in the innumerable smaller matters of governance that have such an impact on our day-to-day interests as citizens. The public schools, the state budget, local zoning and environmental codes—these and many more topics of debate and decision are the true test of democratic participation.

The surest path toward involving people in democratic government may actually start somewhere else entirely: with the U.S. Census. Organizations like Southern Echo have made the link between the Census and Congressional, state and local redistricting, and between redistricting and increasing the opportunities for marginalized populations to gain more voice and play a greater role in electoral affairs. With the next full national census taking place in 2010, citizen groups have an opportunity to examine how the census is conducted, how it can be improved to allow a full counting of all Americans, and how its results can be harnessed to ensure a growing and diversifying electorate is fully represented when electoral districts are redrawn.

"Getting people actively involved in an organized way and electing community people in whom they have more trust is part of the process of generally opening access [to democracy]," says Mike Sayer of Southern Echo. "[If] we help people understand the connectivity between fair districting, elected officials, and substantive policy change, that can be transformational."