Voting Is A Right, Not A Test

Every time we write about voting rights and giant purges of voter rolls in states like Georgia, and Ohio, and Wisconsin, we always get lots of responses along the lines of:

“Isn’t some simple pre-test of citizens’ ‘consciousness’ a means of improving democracy, rather than a means of undermining it?’’

(*actual quote)

But that’s not the way it works. Voting is not a test of how good a citizen you are, it’s a right every American of age has, or should have. In fact, you can’t be penalized for not voting. That’s the law. The Constitution guarantees the right to vote, but also does not make it mandatory.

It’s also the law for voter rolls to be updated. And of course they need to be updated because people die, and move. Yet many a County Clerk’s office or Board of Elections is notoriously inefficient at getting things up-to-date. That’s at least partly because in this day-and-age, people who die or move don’t tend to vote, especially with new photo ID requirements in many states where you have to prove you are who you say you are when you show up at the polls. Republicans in Kentucky, for instance, have just introduced new voter photo ID legislation which if passed would go into effect by this November, just in time for both the Presidential race, and the re-election bid of Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

So, if you’re an underfunded state government agency and are faced with implementing all kinds of new ID rules and combating all kinds of new cyber-challenges (including protecting voting machines from hacking, etc.), it’s somewhat understandable that updating rolls might not always be at the top of your list. Except it’s the law.

We recently found this excellent article in the Guardian. It too agrees that rolls must be updated. But it argues, basically, that you can do that updating carefully, or sloppy. And a lot of efforts — especially those led by Republicans — are being done deliberately sloppy. Which means many people — by design — wind up getting removed who shouldn’t be. According to the Brennan Center, almost 17-million Americans since the 2016 Presidential election, which is an historically huge number.