It was a roller coaster of a year in the area of election reform and voting rights. Yet hopes are high for better times in the year to come for the cause of advancing political participation.

The Best:

New Leadership Elected in the States

Although it is often remarked upon how state partisan control can impact the fortunes of presidential candidates in the states, few think about how important who is determining the rules of the game of getting elected is. Election administration and election law are largely matters of state control. The governors and state legislatures determine the statutory rules of the voting process, while secretaries of state control the regulatory rules. These rules have huge potential impacts on who can and cannot vote and thus election outcomes.

There are several examples of where changes in leadership may make the right to vote the primary goal of election rules again, but Ohio is the obvious stand out. Reciting the egregious manipulation and abuse of the rules of the electoral system by former Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell would require far more space than allowed here. Suffice to say that over the past three years, Secretary Blackwell, through a series of misguided directives and regulatory edicts seemed to take every action under his power to make it harder for Ohioans to register, vote with relative ease and free from intimidation, and have their vote counted. (See this among numerous other reports detailing Blackwell’s actions). The Secretary was at constant loggerheads with the communities of interest, rather than seeking to work with them to ensure a smooth and fair election process. Moreover, under his leadership and with the cooperation of the governor and legislature, a new voter identification law was passed that created multiple problems for voters on election day 2006, leading to wide disenfranchisement

The potential contrast with a new Governor and new Secretary of State could not be starker. For example, new Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner plans on setting up a Voting Rights Institute within the Secretary of State’s office. The mission statement of the Institute says, in part, “The Voting Rights Institute will work with communities, partner with organizations and implement programs that will ensure a safe, reliable and trustworthy process that fosters and enhances access to voting by all of its eligible citizens.” In her plan, Secretary-elect Brunner states, “Every person who is eligible to vote and who wants to vote should be able to do so in a process that is free, fair, open and honest.” She also pledges to “encourage the highest level of participation in our democracy.” Highlights of her campaign platform, according to the Secretary of State Project, included ensuring equal distribution of voting machines, increased voter education efforts, and proactive measures to reduce voter intimidation at the polls. She was also one of the state’s foremost opponents of Ohio’s ill-advised voter identification law and will hopefully work to offset its most disenfranchising potential effects.

There is also the notable case of Wisconsin. Just one chamber of the state legislature changed hands and yet that may be the difference between thousands of Wisconsin voters being disenfranchised or not.

Over the last two years, the Republican-led state legislature in Wisconsin has passed a requirement that all voters present government issued voter identification at the polls three times. Three times Democratic Governor Jim Doyle vetoed those bills. In an effort to sidestep the legislative process, in the last session the legislature passed a bill to amend the Constitution to require such identifications. However, under Wisconsin law, such a measure must be passed by two consecutive legislatures in order to get on the ballot. With one house of the legislature now taken over by Democrats, it is unlikely this proposal for a constitutional amendment will see the light of day anytime soon.

Victorious Voting Rights Litigators

Lawyers at the various civil rights organizations, such as the Brennan Center, the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights, the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Advancement Project and others, have been absolute heroes this year. In case after case, these litigators have beaten down those who would suppress the right to vote and ensured the voting rights of Americans all across the country. Notable victories include defeat of the Missouri voter identification law; the defeat of an “exact match” policy for the statewide database in Washington State that threatened to keep thousands off the voting rolls; the defeat of preposterous rules that would have put unconstitutional restraints on civic organizations engaged in voter registration drives, and the beating down of a provision in Ohio law that required naturalized citizens to provide documentary proof of citizenship but made no such requirement for native-born citizens.

Prohibitions on Deceptive Practices

Both the states and the Congress are finally paying attention to the problem of groups that disseminate false information, through flyers and phone calls, about the right to vote and/or the voting process. For example, Senator Barak Obama proposes a plan for criminalizing such behavior and ensuring that remedial action is taken to get corrected information out to the public through a collaboration of election administrators and community organizations. Missouri also passed a stronger law to crack down on such behavior designed to suppress the vote in largely minority and poor communities

Election Protection

Once again this year, the coalition known as “Election Protection” played a vital role in protecting the right to vote and documenting problems that occurred on election day.

Through volunteers on the ground in several states and a voter hotline at 1-866-OURVOTE, groups like People for the American Way, the Lawyers Committee, and the NAACP were able to help voters exercise their rights on the spot and document where the biggest problems in the system lay.

The Worst:

Predictable Problems Occurring at the Polls on Election Day

In October of 2006, The Century Foundation, Common Cause and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights released a report assessing how much – or little – progress states had made in addressing the problems and inequities that occurred in the 2004 election. Since so many issues had been left unaddressed, a number of problems were predicted to occur on Election Day. Sadly, despite the forewarnings of our groups and many others, a number of these problems did indeed come to pass.

As documented here and here, voters encountered unacceptably long lines, confusion and outright disenfranchisement because of voter identification requirements, problems with the voting machines, overt intimidation, and poll books that did not have the names of registered voters on them.

The Performance of the EAC

Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002. One of the major provisions of that law was the establishment of the Election Assistance Commission. A major part of the EAC’s statutory mandate reads as follows:

The Commission shall conduct and make available to the public studies regarding the election administration issues described in subsection (b), with the goal of promoting methods of voting and administering elections which--

(1) will be the most convenient, accessible, and easy to use for voters, including members of the uniformed services and overseas voters, individuals with disabilities, including the blind and visually impaired, and voters with limited proficiency in the English language;

(2) will yield the most accurate, secure, and expeditious system for voting and tabulating election results;

(3) will be nondiscriminatory and afford each registered and eligible voter an equal opportunity to vote and to have that vote counted; and

(4) will be efficient and cost-effective for use.

For a variety of reasons, both practical and evidently political, the EAC has failed to meet these prescribed goals in many areas of research the statute requires the EAC to spend taxpayer dollars on.

The Georgia State Legislature

In 2005, Georgia passed a law requiring government issued photo identification from every voter at the polls in order to vote. Several times, in both federal and state court, this law, no matter how they have tinkered with it, has been held unconstitutional. The federal court said it was an unconstitutional poll tax. Yet the Georgia legislature, in its zeal to deny certain voters their right to vote, just will not give up. Now, legislators are proposing to amend the state constitution in order to impose their disenfranchising tactic on the citizens of Georgia.

Senator Mitch McConnell, Representative Henry Hyde and Representative Vernon Ehlers and Voter Identification/Citizenship Requirements

These three members of the U.S. Congress, individually and collectively, tried to single-handedly deny voting rights to more voters through a measure that is as bad as any seen since the days of Jim Crow.

Senator Mitch McConnell, long an enemy of increasing and encouraging voter participation, got the ball rolling during the debate over immigration reform. Seeking to capitalize on the rancor of the immigration debate, Senator McConnell, introduced an amendment to the legislation that would have required all voters to present government issued photo identification that indicated proof of citizenship at the polls. Congressmen Hyde and Ehlers proposed similar measures as stand-alone bills and the Ehlers bill actually passed the House of Representatives. See Ehlers, Hyde, and McConnell.

Tova Wang is a Democracy Fellow at The Century Foundation.