Voter Suppression Awareness
Voter Suppression Awareness
Voter suppression is a systemic issue that can manifest itself in many forms, from shutting down (“consolidation”) of precincts, which makes access to voting difficult; to long lines due to broken down machines, inadequate staffing and resources; to disparate treatment of absentee and provisional ballots county to county; to a lack of transparency when officials count and report votes. These injustices only serve to further disenfranchise already marginalized communities.
Systemic voter suppression, gross negligence, and erroneous administration from inadequately trained election officials prevented likely millions of eligible Americans all over the country from participating in the 2018 midterm elections, corrupting their individual rights to vote and eroding democracy as a whole.
There are three fundamental stages of voting: registration, access, and counting. With each passing stage and each successful voter suppression tactic, eligible voters are filtered out from the voting process, thereby reducing the number of people whose votes are counted.
In Georgia’s 2018 midterm elections alone, there are multiple examples of voters being denied their fundamental rights. For example:
During the course of Brian Kemp’s tenure as Secretary of State, more than 340,000 voters were improperly purged from the voter rolls in advance of the 2018 election.
Gwinnett county rejected nearly 1 in 10 absentee ballots, which accounted for more than a third of the total absentee-ballot rejections in the state. Gwinnett County accounts for only about 6% of absentee ballots submitted in Georgia.
A judge ordered absentee ballots be counted even if they were missing superfluous information such as birth dates, but it remains unclear whether those voters were in fact retroactively counted correctly.
Voter suppression is not new, but despite hard fought gains to expand access to the ballot box and ensure Americans’ their right to vote, efforts are underway across the country, and especially in Georgia, to undermine that progress and roll back those successes. Fair Fight is working to change the system by advocating for free and fair elections for all.