More than 200,000 voters in Florida didn’t cast a ballot in the 2012 election, not because of a personal choice, but because they “gave up in frustration” when the wait to vote exceeded five hours. The experience of mostly African American voters in Florida continues a long history of what Democrats describe as unequal and discriminatory conditions that prevent voters from exercising a fundamental right of citizenship.
Decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eliminated poll taxes, literacy tests and other discriminatory measures, African-Americans and other marginalized groups still face obstacles when casting ballots in local, state and national elections.
In response to the ongoing problem, President Obama signed an executive order Thursday establishing a bipartisan panel that will analyze the long lines at polling stations and other voter irregularities.
“When any Americans – no matter where they live or what their party – are denied that right simply because they can’t wait for five, six, seven hours just to cast their ballot, we are betraying our ideals,” Obama said during the State of the Union last month. “We can fix this, and we will. The American people demand it. And so does our democracy.”
The initiative comes in response to years of voting irregularities and fraudulent activity, most recently during the November 2012 national elections. On the night of the election, early reports by a team of 5,000 lawyers and 3,000 grassroots poll watchers from the nonprofit machine-watchdog group Verified Voting documented scores of malfunctioning e-voting machines.
Many of the problems occurred in swing states like Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania and Colorado where citizens still use Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) machines. DRE machines are controversial because they lack any paper backups that would allow voters to verify the accuracy of their ballots. These machines also prevent an accurate, transparent recount by elections officials.
The newly-appointed Obama commission can only make recommendations and has no power to actually change laws, a power reserved to the states. Because the focus of the study is the length of time spent voters spend waiting in lines, the issue of malfunctioning voting machines, like DRE machines, remains beyond the scope of the commission.
For many, the spate of inconsistencies, including broken or malfunctioning equipment in majority African-American districts, is too big to ignore.
In the 2004 Presidential election, voters in Ohio reported waits as long as 10 hours in majority democratic areas, including Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo, and on college campuses.
In Franklin county, voters in majority African-American precincts reported waits of four hours or more. Many gave up, leaving in disgust when they were unable to cast their votes in a timely fashion. Across town, in majority White precincts, wait times were a mere 15 minutes.
The list of problems continues — nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad during the 2004 election never received their ballots, or received them too late to vote.
“A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004 — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes,” wrote Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 2006.