This Is What Voter Suppression Looks Like

Even though voting fraud is extremely rare, some politicians use it as justification for enforcing strict ID requirements at the polls. Thirty-six states have such laws. (You can find state-by-state laws here.) However, this disproportionately affects minority communities, disabled voters, and voters who live in rural areas, where there are few transportation options.

And these laws affect voter turnout. More than 21 million U.S. citizens do not have government-issued photo identification, so mandating this leads to an unrepresentative electorate. The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates that tens of thousands of votes could be lost in a single state.

The American Civil Liberties Union says a common form of voter suppression is when just registering to vote requires excess information, like documents proving citizenship. In Georgia, for example, there's an “exact-match law,” which mandates that voters' registrations exactly mirror their information on state records — with no room for marginal errors. Missing hyphens or apostrophes have been cause to throw out registrations. According to the Associated Press, 53,000 Georgia registrations from their 2018 election were cancelled for this reason, 70% of which belonged to Black voters.

More than 1,200 polling locations have been shut down in southern states in recent years, which many voting rights experts, such as Abrams, view as voter suppression. For rural voters, or voters without transportation, this can make showing up nearly impossible.

Voter purges are a way for states to remove names from their voter rolls list for a variety of reasons, like if a person is moving to another state, or has passed away. But people are sometimes accidentally removed from rolls, and since not all states allow voter registration on Election Day, people could show up to vote and find out they’re no longer allowed. In Wisconsin, the state's Supreme Court is currently deciding a case about whether 130,000 voters will be removed from rolls.

In states like Kentucky and Virginia, anyone who’s been convicted of a felony-level offense will permanently lose their right to vote. In other states, felony disenfranchisement can affect people in prison, people on parole, people on probation, and even people post-sentence.

In most states, apparel and accessories that endorse a candidate are explicitly banned from polling places. However, a poll worker in Memphis, Tenn., was fired for turning away voters who were wearing masks and shirts with "Black Lives Matter" on them. And in Cummings, Ga., a man named Zack Arias recorded a video of a poll worker telling him he would have to take off his Black Lives Matter shirt to vote. He told USA Today, "I don’t take [Black Lives Matter] as a political issue. It’s a human rights issue; it’s a human equality issue.”

On Oct. 18 and Oct. 25 in Los Angeles, residents set ballot drop boxes on fire. The Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis said in a statement that it had “all the signs of an attempt to disenfranchise voters," and labelled the crime as arson. The FBI is also investigating a similar fire in Boston, which election officials say was a "deliberate attack."