If you are planning on moving to another state anytime before the 2024 election, and you are concerned about your voting rights (and you should be), you had better read up on what your new home state requires or allows for voting. Our country is a patchwork of rules and laws that are so incoherent that it would probably take an app to figure it out and keep up with the changes. (There is an idea)
Here are a few examples of what I mean:
I live in Iowa where I can register to vote on election day, but if I move to Kansas, I have to register before election day.
Or, if I live in Kansas where I can do absentee voting without any reason given, but move to Indiana, I will have to supply a reason for asking for an absentee ballot.
How about this one:
If I lived in Illinois I don’t need to present an ID of any kind to vote so long as I’m registered, but if I move to Idaho, I would need to be sure to bring along my ID (specific types of ID).
If I live in Maryland, I can easily do mail-in voting, but if were to move to Michigan, voting by mail is not allowed.
Are you confused yet? Here is an interesting one:
If I live in Maine I can utilize “rank-choice” voting for all state offices and federal offices, including the President; but if I move to Minnesota, they only allow rank-choice voting in certain cities and it is up to you to find out.
This one is my favorite:
If I lived in Massachusetts, I would automatically be registered to vote if I have a state license or pay state taxes; but, if I moved to Louisiana I would have to register to vote even if I get a state license or pay state taxes…no automatic registration.
The point is that an American citizen could find themselves disenfranchised due to confusion as much as any other reason, nefarious or otherwise. Fifty states with fifty different sets of rules. It is nonsensical and maddening that a major, information-driven country like the United States doesn’t have uniform voting rules.
Voting rules are decided by each state which, depending on your perspective, is a wonderful thing that allows for federalism to continue to exist. But it is also a den of thievery if you are interested in manipulating who can vote and who can’t. United States history is a case study of a back-and-forth tug-of-war over voting rights. The forces of democratization pushed for expanding rights starting in the 1830s, and the forces of elitism have pushed for contracted voting rights ever since.
This tug-of-war is still happening. More restrictive laws were enacted in 2023 than any other year during the past decade. The majority of these states are Republican-controlled; one is led by Democrats, and two have divided governments.
Last year, a Center for Public Integrity investigation found unequal access to voting and political representation in all 50 states. Twenty-six states — all under Republican control — made access to voting less equal for people of color, younger voters, immigrants, people with disabilities, and others, following former President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election defeat. “Election integrity” was the given reason.
On the other hand, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, more bills expanding access to voting were introduced this year than any in the past decade — 606 overall, at least one in every state legislature in the country. This is good news, but the tug-of-war continues.
I want to make the case that voting rules, at least for national elections, need to be determined, standardized, and enforced at the federal level. We have a precedent for this in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which originally required states that historically restricted people of color from voting, had to seek federal government permission to change their voting laws. The 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling by the Supreme Court took away this requirement essentially gutting the enforcement power of that legislation. It is time to bring it back.
The “states' rights” argument for local voting requirements simply allows too much mischief and manipulation by bad actors. Let me highlight two extreme examples of how such a federal election law would work by comparing two states that have very opposite rules. Ohio and Oregon provide a study in contrasts and in short, examples of “what to do” and “what not to do” with voting rules and requirements.
Let’s start with the Buckeye State. Here is what “not to do.”
OHIO
Just for starters, Ohio is like many other states in terms of its voting rules. In Ohio, you cannot register on the same day as an election. You can register online, but there is no automatic voter registration. Ohio allows absentee voting without any excuse or reason given but you do need an ID to vote. There are drop boxes allowed and you can do ranked-choice voting in some cases. Finally, Ohio does allow mail-in ballots.
Seems fair enough!
However, in 2023, Governor Mike DeWine, along with the Republican-controlled state house, enacted some of the most restrictive and likely unconstitutional voter restrictions of any state. In January 2023, House Bill 458 instituted sweeping changes to how elections are administered in Ohio.
The bill mandated the use of photo IDs: passports, or driver’s licenses to vote, and limited counties to one ballot drop box. Think how this will impact Cleveland and other large cities. The law also mandated citizenship status on IDs and excluded county-issued veterans’ identification and college IDs from the list one can use to vote. The law also cut back early voting periods giving mail-in voters less time to get a ballot, fill it out, and return it in time to be counted.
Ohio’s Republican leaders insisted the new voting restrictions were necessary despite no evidence of significant voter fraud. The total possible voter fraud in the state in the 2020 election was a microscopic 0.0005%. But not to be dissuaded, Gov. DeWine retorted, “Election integrity is a significant concern to Americans on both sides of the aisle across the country.” Right Mike, only if you are trying to protect the “Big Lie.”
Ohio’s law is aimed at reducing voter participation, especially by certain groups. The new restrictions will make it harder for people to vote who tend to lack certain identification – elderly people, college students, the disabled, and the poor. Some of these groups are also over-represented by people of color.
The prior ID law allowed people to present a bank statement, paystub, or other document to prove their identity. The new law gets rid of that exception and only allows someone to vote if they provide certain forms of photo ID, which many poor people, seniors, students, handicapped people, and people of color do not have.
The purpose of these voting restrictions was to solidify Republican control of the state in the face of growing Democratic constituencies. Diluting the electorate is a typical Republican strategy along with gerrymandering to solidify their control as a minority party. This kind of mischief is being replicated in state after state where Republicans control state houses because Republicans can no longer rely on a majority of voters to support them.
Oregon:
Let’s take a look at what a national model might look like. Oregon has the easiest and least restrictive voting laws and also has a very low degree of voter fraud. According to the “Cost of Voting Index” published in 2022, Oregon has the most progressive automatic voter registration process and all-mail voting and maintains the first position in the country as the easiest state to vote in.
By contrast, my home state, Iowa dropped in the ease of voting index (19th to 23rd) by making it more difficult to vote than was the case in 2020. Neither Florida went from 28th to 33rd. Neither state has adopted an automatic voter registration process, something many states have been doing.
In Oregon, you are automatically registered to vote if you have a driver’s license or pay state taxes which presumes you have a social security number. There is nothing more you need to do. Additionally, all votes in Oregon are by mail. There are no lines on election day, and you don’t worry about getting your vote counted because every vote is mailed in. The only “drop box” is a mailbox and there is plenty of time to get your vote sent in by mail.
My Republican friends will respond to this information by arguing that Oregon must have a lot of voter fraud. I mean, with automatic registration and all-mail-in voting, the fraud must be rampant, right? They would be wrong.
Oregon and three other states with automatic registration received an “A” grade from a survey conducted in 2020. My state, Iowa, received a “B” grade while Florida earned a “B-”. Here is the dirty little secret…restrictive voting laws do not make elections more secure. The purpose of these restrictions is partisan attempts to manipulate who can vote and who can’t. There is no correlation between restrictive voting laws and election security…that is a myth.
In Oregon, voter fraud has been determined to be at .0025% out of millions of votes. This is statistically insignificant, and would never change the outcome of an election. The numbers are similar in other states with automatic voter registration and all mail-in voting. These states have layer upon layer of vote security that makes fraud almost impossible.
It is time to cut out the nonsense of state-driven election rules that are subject to partisan exploitation. We need to have a uniform and standardized way for citizens to register and vote in all 50 states. Oregon, and a few other states, provide the model. This isn’t a hard problem to solve…we should all be automatically registered to vote and use mail-in voting in all 50 states.
YIKES1