In recent years, the disenfranchisement has been most importantly done by the Republican Party, and by computer. As investigative reporter Greg Palast has shown in his book/movie The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (www.gregpalast.com) in 2000 Florida Governor Jeb Bush used a program called ChoicePoint to strip more than 90,000 predominantly black and Hispanic citizens from the voter registration rolls in an election decided by 537 votes. The pretext was alleged felony convictions. The selection was "won" by Bush's brother George W although a full recount (which was stopped by the US Supreme Court by one vote) would have given Al Gore the majority in Florida, and in the Electoral College.
As we have reported from Columbus, in 2004 more than 300,000 predominantly urban citizens were stripped from the voter registration rolls in an election the GOP won by 118,775. A quarter of all voters in heavily Democratic Cleveland were de-registered. Ohio's ill-got electoral votes gave George W. Bush a second term. This became the only time in US history an entire state's Electoral College delegation was challenged on the floor of the US Congress.
This year, Palast has reported that a new program called Crosscheck has been used by some 30 GOP Secretaries of State to strip more than 1.1 million predominantly black, Hispanic, Islamic and Asian-American citizens from the voter rolls.
Originating with far-right Republican Kris Kobach, Kansas's Secretary of State, Crosscheck eliminated more than enough minority voters in at least three swing states to flip the entire presidential election.
Palast has reported Ohio's GOP Secretary of State Jon Husted also used Crosscheck to eliminate some 497,000 mostly black, Latino and African-American citizens from the voter rolls in Ohio, falsely accusing them of registering in more than one state. Such eliminations went on throughout the US and may have involved more than a million legitimate voters.
According to Reuters, over the past five years Husted himself stripped some two million citizens from the voter rolls in Ohio without Crosscheck, with Democratic areas twice as likely to be striped as Republicans. Reuters points out that the neighborhoods that most heavily backed President Obama lost the most voters. (JUNE 2, 2016, USE IT OR LOSE IT; OCCASIONAL OHIO VOTERS MAY BE SHUT OUT IN NOVEMBER, Reuters, June 2, 2016).
The mass disenfranchisement also impacted races for the US Senate. At least four Democrats would likely have won seats (in Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Missouri) that they officially lost (www.tdmsresearch.com. Similar results are evident from 2014 Senate races in North Carolina, Colorado and Alaska. Thus in the past two years, mass disenfranchisement and computerized vote stripping may well have stripped seven Upper House seats from the Democrats to the GOP.
Thus the electronic race-based stripping of voter rolls in the GOP's favor has probably on its own taken to the far right the presidency, control of the US Senate and ultimately the US Supreme Court.
It should be noted that out of disgust with Donald Trump, the GOP multi-billionaire Koch Brothers shifted much of their massive financial weight from the presidential race to Congressional and other "down-ballot contests," where these key Senate seats and others in the US House and state governments were almost certainly impacted.
Traditional Jim Crow Stripping of Voter Registration Rolls
Alongside computerized techniques, the Republicans have effectively deployed still more traditional Jim Crow tactics to strip black/Hispanic/Asian-American citizens of their ability to vote. In part these include: demands for photo ID, elimination of polling places, narrowing time frames in which citizens can vote, deliberate distribution of misinformation about voting requirements, non-counting of provisional ballots, failure to send out absentee ballots, intimidation and widespread confusion at polling places [Google voting map] and much more.
In its 2013 Shelby County vs. Holder decision, the US Supreme Court gutted protections provided by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, opening the floodgates for Jim Crow abuse throughout the electoral system.
Numerous reports indicate that citizens were often confronted with photo ID requirements even where they were voided by the courts. As in Ohio 2004, reports indicate many citizens were directed by official websites to polling places that did not actually exist. This year Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted failed to distribute more than 1,050,000 absentee ballot applications to citizens entitled to them.
On Election Day, media throughout the US reported the kinds of mass delays and confusion that defined the elections of 2000 and 2004. Said the New York Times: "Voters nationwide endured long waits in line, malfunctioning voting machines, ill-informed poll workers and a litany of lesser annoyances on Tuesday with scattered reports that some voters gave up trying to cast ballots."
David Becker, the Executive Director of the Center for Election Innovation, told the Times, "There are scattered indications of machine breakdowns that are being addressed."
In an editorial the day after the election, the Times lamented that in North Carolina "The state's Republican Party issued a news release boasting that cutbacks in early voting hours reduced black turnout by 8.5% below 2012 levels, even as the numbers of white early voters increased by 22.5%." Fourteen states put in new voting restrictions including some states that were never under federal supervision like Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin.
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