Sunday, November 02, 2008
News, Politics

Does your vote count?

“I couldn’t believe this sort of thing really happened. It seems to be legal, but it’s wrong.”—Kyla Berry

An absentee voter ballot from Virginia
>SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

 

By Josh Clark

Kyla Berry, a 21-year-old creative writing student at Spelman College, wasn’t expecting the letter she received a couple of weeks ago from the Fulton County Elections Board. It informed her that she would be required to present proof of her citizenship in person at the Fulton County Registrar’s office if she planned on voting.

       Berry did indeed plan on voting. Last winter, she applied for voter registration for the first time in her life. Last May she became a registered voter. And this fall she planned on voting early.

But the county registrar informed her that she had one week from the letter’s date of Oct. 2 to prove her citizenship and if she missed the deadline, she would not be allowed to vote. The envelope indicated the letter had been mailed on Oct. 9—the last day Berry could appear at the county offices and still be allowed to vote. She received the letter on Oct. 10.

     Berry is, in fact, a U.S. citizen. She was born in Boston; both of her parents were also born in America. On the surface, the whole episode seems to be the result of a clumsy, bureaucratic gaffe, but Berry takes a decidedly grimmer view. Berry’s black, she attends a historically black women’s college, and she’s pretty sure that she’s fallen victim to a systematic effort to purge Georgia’s voter roll of likely Democratic voters.

       “I remember welling with anger,” she says. “I couldn’t believe this sort of thing really happened. It seems to be legal, but it’s wrong.”

       After reading the letter, Berry sought advice from Jelani Cobb, an American history professor at Spelman and a delegate to the Democratic National Convention for presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.

“My first reaction was surprise,” Cobb says. “I didn’t think that if there was going to be a voter suppression maneuver, that it would be this obvious.”

       Jose Morales, a Cherokee County man who became a U.S. citizen in November 2007 and a registered voter this fall, filed suit after he received letters requiring him to prove his citizenship before he’d be allowed to vote. Most voters who received such letters were told to verify their status within a week of the date of the letter. And although Berry registered last winter, she didn’t receive her letter from Fulton County until October. Both Berry’s and Morales’ letters, as well as many others, appeared to have been sent out only after a reminder was issued by the Georgia Secretary of State’s office in mid-September. As many as 100,000 voters’ applications remained to be processed just four weeks before Election Day.

       At about that time, the Department of Justice—the Bush Administration’s DOJ no less—asked Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel, a Republican, why the Social Security Administration had received 2 million requests for citizenship verification from Georgia, nearly half of the state’s entire voting population and almost double the number that Alabama, the next most-verifying state, had requested.

Handel eventually pointed to a clerical error at the Department of Driver Services, which files the requests to the SSA on behalf of the state after a check against the database shows a mismatch between an applicant’s driver’s license number and the last four digits of the Social Security number, or if the applicant has previously self-reported as a non-citizen. After some review, Handel’s office determined it had intended to ask for verification of only around 747,000 Georgia voters. The rest were accidental duplicates filed by day shift and night shift workers who apparently didn’t pry overly much into each other’s work.

A “challenged” ballot

       The legality of Georgia’s verification process was questioned in federal court in Atlanta in October. At issue was Georgia’s right to carry out the verification process without first getting approval from the Justice Department. Most states may verify at will, but the Voting Rights Act of 1965 mandates that states with a history of voter disenfranchisement—and Georgia is one of them—must get Justice Department approval before implementing any new voting requirements or procedures.

The Morales case challenged Georgia’s right to carry out the new policy without prior DOJ approval. Ultimately, the District Court agreed with the DOJ; Georgia should, in fact, have sought approval before instituting the verification process. But the court also upheld Georgia’s procedure and allowed it to stand, pending Justice Department approval.
 
            The court ruling allows those voters whose citizenship is in question to cast a “challenged” ballot. Challenged ballots—those contested by an elections official like Handel—are treated similarly to provisional ballots; they’re generally only counted in the event of a full recount.

Such ballots could have an impact on the outcome of the 2008 election in Georgia, which has recently become a potential swing state. An Oct. 28 Politico.com poll found presidential candidates Obama and Sen. John McCain separated by one percentage point in Georgia, with Libertarian Bob Barr holding a point of his own. Which means whether Georgia goes red or blue on Nov. 4 may be decided by a razor-thin margin of votes—maybe even the number contested by Handel.

Handel's media director, Matt Carrothers, points out that while the system may have proven controversial, that fact that it's flagged more than 4,500 potentially ineligible voters before they showed up at the polls proves the database is doing what it's intended to. 

"Clearly, it's working," he says. 

But voting rights advocates have long pointed to policies like citizenship verification as undue burdens that will disproportionately keep the working poor, the disabled, and the elderly from voting because they would have more difficulty taking time off from work or finding transportation to go to a government office and address the matter.
      
Not everyone’s convinced that if ID requirements and verification programs were suspended, that ineligible voters would throng to the polls. Handel’s predecessor, Kathy Cox, said after leaving office that she couldn’t recall any case of voter fraud through impersonation during her 10-year tenure as secretary of state. 

“As it stands, we have no record of voter fraud,” says Spelman’s Cobb. “We do have a long history of people being kept out of the voting booth, however.” SP