The Struggle Continues: Voting Rights Victories and Ongoing Challenges
Lisa Bornstein
The high-stakes struggle between the civil and human rights community and politicians who set out to restrict the ability of millions of Americans to vote was one of the most important stories of 2012.
The good news is that the energetic efforts of voting rights activists were frequently successful in encouraging voter turnout, and the most diverse electorate in history went to the polls on Election Day.
The bad news is that voter suppression tactics continued up to and beyond Election Day. More than a week after polls closed, advocates for Latino voters were protesting in Arizona to make sure that all eligible votes were counted, and the fate of thousands of provisional ballots cast in Ohio and other states was still unknown.
And only days after the election, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would reconsider the constitutionality of a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act, which had just proven to be an essential voter protection tool for the U.S. Department of Justice and civil rights advocates.
Given that new restrictive voting laws are scheduled to go into effect in several states before the next election, and that some politicians are prepared to redouble their efforts to impede voting, the victories in this election cycle should be studied as well as celebrated as civil and human rights organizations continue to advocate for policies that move the country toward truly universal voter participation.
The big picture context of 2012 was America’s changing demographics. According to the U.S. Census, people of color accounted for 92 percent of the U.S. population growth between 2000 and 2010. Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) were the nation’s fastest growing racial group. There were 22 percent more Latinos eligible to vote in 2012 than there were in 2008. There were about 16 million more potential young voters in 2012 than there were four years earlier.
For years, activists have worked to engage people of color and new Americans to participate fully as citizens and voters. In 2008, record numbers of young people, African Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos joined their fellow citizens to engage in the most basic right and responsibility of citizenship. The 2008 election represented the most diverse electorate ever up to that point—a high point of American democracy and a milestone on the path toward the goal of a truly universal franchise where every voting-age American citizen has the right, opportunity, and ability to vote freely and fairly.
That is why it was so distressing to see some politicians and interests going to work to create new restrictions on the ability to register and vote. The concerted assault on voting took the form of unfair laws and restrictive procedures that politicians used to target groups of voters who had turned out in greater numbers in 2008—particularly young voters and people of color. These included restrictive voter ID laws and residency requirements, illegal purges of voting rolls, cutbacks in early voting, and restrictions on voter registration drives. The Colorado secretary of s tate ordered county election officials not to send ballot information to people who voted in 2008 but not in 2010. Intimidating billboards and deceptive robocalls targeted minority communities. A tea party offshoot called True the Vote recruited volunteer “poll watchers” to challenge voters’ eligibility and force more voters into using provisional ballots, which are less likely to be counted.
Civil and human rights groups mounted a massive legal, political, and grassroots organizing response. In Ohio, a coalition of labor and civil rights organizations mobilized against H.B. 194, a shameful anti-voting law that would make it harder to vote in Ohio and harder for Ohioans’ votes to be counted. The groups gathered enough signatures to challenge the law by a ballot initiative, which appeared likely to pass. Faced with an embarrassing rejection, the Ohio legislature and governor repealed most of their own law to keep it from a vote by the electorate. In Michigan, a fierce organizing campaign that included religious leaders convinced the governor to veto a restrictive voting bill.
Legal advocates, including the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, Project Vote, the League of Women Voters, the Advancement Project, and others fought many voting restrictions in court, as did the U.S. Department of Justice. Major legal victories protected millions of voters in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin and elsewhere.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and several partner organizations in the nonpartisan Election Protection coalition—which is led by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law—including Common Cause, United Steel Workers, and the National Education Association—invested in pro-voting billboards to support the efforts of local activists who successfully pressured billboard companies into dismantling anonymously funded billboards in Ohio and Wisconsin placed in poor and minority neighborhoods and meant to intimidate voters.
The Leadership Conference Education Fund launched the Every Voter Counts campaign to work with state and local partners to counter anti-voting schemes, distribute pro-voting materials, and run nonpartisan voter turnout campaigns. An Every Voter Counts video featuring activists from Ohio, Wisconsin, and Colorado was the centerpiece of a social media campaign that reached more than half a million people with a powerful voter participation message. The Leadership Conference called on leaders of the major political parties to repu-diate anti-voting tactics and take action to protect the rights of all voters, and met with officials from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, an international organization that has monitored elections throughout the world, to provide information about these voter suppression efforts.
In the end, most of the worst voter suppression laws were at least temporarily held at bay for the 2012 election. This was a stunning accomplishment given earlier estimates that the wave of antivoting tactics had the potential to disenfranchise up to five million voters.
In fact, not only did antivoting initiatives largely fail, but their efforts may have actually strengthened the determination of the very people they sought to silence. Some journalists have argued that the war on voting backfired. As Matt Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decisions, told The Nation, “There were huge organizing efforts in the Black, Hispanic and Asian community, more than there would’ve been, as a direct result of the voter suppression efforts.” Ari Berman, the article’s author, added: “Groups like the NAACP, National Council of La Raza, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, and the Asian American Legal Defense Fund worked overtime to make sure their constituencies knew their voting rights.” Rev. Tony Minor, Ohio coordinator of the African American Ministers Leadership Council, said, “When they went after Big Mama’s voting rights, they made all of us mad.”
These observations were backed by strong turnout numbers. Contrary to many pundits’ predictions, racial and ethnic minorities made up 28 percent of the electorate in 2012, up from 26 percent in 2008, according to Pew Research Center. Voters aged 18-29 boosted their share of turnout, from 18 percent to 19 percent. In Ohio, where Secretary of State Jon Husted was relentless in his brazenly partisan efforts to restrict voting, Black voters’ share of the overall electorate increased from 11 percent in 2008 to 15 percent in 2012. In Milwaukee, where African-American organizations like the League of Young Voters mounted a major voter participation effort, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the turnout rate this year was a remarkable 87 percent of registered voters, a big jump from 80 percent four years ago and 70 percent in 2004.
Latino turnout was also strong and influential. According to The Nation, “In the last two decades the Latino population has doubled. And more significantly, it has become more geographically diverse. Long gone are the days of equating the Latino electorate with only Los Angeles, Miami or Houston. To talk about Latinos today, we need to talk about Macon, Georgia, and Boise, Idaho.” Latinos made up 10 percent of the national electorate, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, up from 9 percent in 2008 and 8 percent in 2004.
This is a proud moment for the civil and human rights communities, and also for millions of individual voters who simply refused to be discouraged from voting. As Andrew Cohen of The Atlantic wrote:
“If there is one thing this election has proven, if there is one thing I have come to know, it is that Americans don’t like it when their right to vote is threatened. (. . .) In places like Akron and Orlando and Denver and Milwaukee, they came. They waited in long lines and endured the indignities of poll workers. Yet they were not cowed. Today is their day. A day when they can look at one another and appreciate that they are truly a part of the history of civil rights in this country.”
There is clearly still work to be done. Some politicians may respond to the 2012 election results with redoubled anti-voting efforts. Some unreasonably restrictive voter ID laws that were suspended by court order for this election may yet go into effect. And the nation must find a way to deal with the systemic failures reflected in the fact that so many voters had to stand in lines of four, six, even seven hours to cast a vote. As President Obama said in his remarks on election night, referring to those long lines, “We have to fix that.”
Lisa Bornstein is a senior counsel for The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and The Leadership Conference Education Fund and specializes in voting rights and criminal justice issues.
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