By Matthew Kredell
In the lead-up to the November elections, the USC Price School of Public Policy held a discussion as part of USC Price Conversations in New York, dealing with alarming voter suppression efforts at state and local levels. USC Price Professor William Resh moderated a discussion on some of the controversies surrounding the elections, including potential voting purges, hacking, gerrymandering, and legislative efforts to curtail voter registration or early voting.
“There is really no better time to have this evening’s conversation than now,” Resh said. “We have reached an inflection point regarding our democracy and the state of the franchise in the United States.”
Joining the discussion, which took place Oct. 22 at the Harvard Club of New York City, were Ari Berman, an author and journalist covering voter rights; Michael A. Hardy, executive vice president and general counsel for the National Action Network; and Mark Levine, a New York City Councilman.
Resh outlined some of the current issues and threats to democracy. Numerous jurisdictions — some of them critical to control of Congress and statehouses — are extremely gerrymandered, tilting electoral outcomes toward one party and unfairly diminishing the voices of many voters.
“If there’s anything bipartisan in this nation, it’s gerrymandering,” Hardy said. “Both parties are guilty for it.”
Levine lamented that gerrymandering is as bad in New York as in any state in the country.
“The old saying is that voters should pick their representatives, but, really, here representatives pick their voters,” Levine said. “It also happens at the City Council level.”
Levine attested that voting rates in New York are abysmal, contending that probably hundreds of thousands of legitimately registered people have been purged in the last few cycles, showing up to their poll site to find their names aren’t in the book; that citizens who want to change parties are required to do so 11 months prior to the election; and that New York doesn’t have early voting or same-day voter registration.
Resh noted that, in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated key provisions of the Voting Rights Act that ensured federal oversight of state changes in voting laws. This directly affected nine states that had historical records of suppressing minority voting rights. Voter ID laws appear to disproportionately affect minorities, the elderly and college-age voters, Resh said.
Levine said that the Supreme Court decision meant that the feds didn’t review the way district lines were drawn in New York for this election, to make sure they didn’t have negative impacts on communities of color.
“If it’s affecting New York, where we don’t at the moment, thank goodness, have a more overtly racist leadership, it scares me what’s happening in the southern states, and it’s a reminder of the vulnerability in this current climate,” Levine said.
Berman said that the Supreme Court decision allowed for a voter ID law in Texas that permits voting with a gun permit but not a student ID, also citing a North Carolina law that prohibits voting on Sundays, when the black community is more likely to vote than are other groups.
Guests continue the conversation after the panel
“Are we going to be a country where we allow voter suppression to become the new normal, where we say it’s okay that a person didn’t vote because they didn’t have the right ID or their polling place was closed or they were purged?” Berman asked.
He warned that a planned citizenship question for the 2020 U.S. Census — which is being challenged legally in 16 states, including California and New York — could have a significant impact on future elections. The fear is that non-citizens and people in mixed households will not participate in the census, which would mean that places with many immigrants would receive less federal funding, fewer representatives in the House and fewer electoral college seats, and that the inaccurate census would then be used for redistricting.
There were some encouraging developments surrounding this election. Election turnout was expected to be high — and in fact the 2018 midterm elections saw the largest percentage of the population to vote since 1914. A Florida ballot initiative restored voting rights to former felons. Seven states offered automatic voter registration.
“There is a great amount of public interest and effort toward positive change in voting rights and registration,” Resh said.
Berman added that the people can make a difference on these issues.
“I think we can get a lot of Republican voters to support early voting, election e-registration and ending gerrymandering,” Berman said. “If we can get the voters, that makes it easier to get the party.”
See more Price Conversations in New York photos on Flickr »
Associate Professor
C.C. Crawford Professor in Management and Performance