Voter access worries dominate final stretch before election

By Amy Gardner / The Washington Post

The debate over voter access has erupted as a contentious issue in campaigns across the country just two days before Tuesday’s elections, with candidates trading accusations about threats to ballot integrity and reports in multiple states about voting irregularities.

As Americans cast early ballots at historic rates for a nonpresidential year, voters are heading to the polls deeply suspicious about the opposing party’s commitment to fair elections, new polling shows, further polarizing the electorate.

Apprehension about ballot integrity this year is reminiscent of the presidential election of 2000, when a divided nation watched a painstaking recount unfold in Florida to determine the race between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, experts said.

“The environment that we’re in right now is particularly dangerous,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine who specializes in election law. “All of this ramped up since the 2000 election, when people realized that the rules of the game really matter.”

Raising the stakes are dozens of closely contested races for House, Senate and governor.

Worries about voter disenfranchisement have dominated the bitter race for governor in Georgia, where Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican who is a leading advocate of strict voting rules, is overseeing his own race against Democrat Stacey Abrams, who is vying to become the nation’s first black female governor.

On Sunday, Kemp’s office accused the state Democratic Party of “a failed attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system” and opened an investigation after voting rights advocates reported a potential vulnerability in the state election system. Rebecca DeHart, executive director of the state Democratic Party, called the move an “abuse of power by an unethical Secretary of State.”

The controversy threatened to further rattle voters caught up in disputes about the state’s handling of voter registration applications and absentee ballots.

“I have never questioned, before now, that my vote would count, and that anybody else who made a sincere effort to vote would have their vote counted,” said Whitney McGinniss, 35, a Democrat who works in public administration in suburban Atlanta, whose absentee ballot was challenged over a signature mismatch. “My opinion of that has really changed.”

In recent years, Republicans across the country have backed restrictive voting laws — such as limits on the kinds of identification that can be used to vote or requiring signatures on registration applications and ballots to match — as they have warned, without evidence, about the potential for widespread voting fraud. Litigation over voting rules has doubled in the years since 2000, Hasen said.

“All levels of government and Law Enforcement are watching carefully for VOTER FRAUD, including during EARLY VOTING,” President Donald Trump tweeted Oct. 20. “Cheat at your own peril. Violators will be subject to maximum penalties, both civil and criminal!”

There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the United States. Voting rights activists have said the laws disproportionately affect young Americans and voters of color, who tend to vote Democratic. In Georgia, the vast majority of voter registration applications suspended this year under a strict new law have been those of African Americans. In North Dakota, a restrictive voter ID law that requires voters to have a street address may make it harder for Native Americans, who are less likely to have the necessary identification, to cast ballots.

Voting rights advocates are monitoring several other issues across the country:

■ In several battleground states, including Georgia, Nevada, Indiana and Wisconsin, hundreds of thousands of inactive voters have been removed from the rolls since 2016. Election officials have said the “list maintenance” comes after voters had not cast ballots in at least two federal elections, had moved or did not respond to information requests to verify their registrations. Voting rights activists are calling some of the activity improper voter “purges.” A federal appeals panel ruled last week that Ohio must allow thousands of voters removed from the rolls between 2011 and 2015 to vote provisionally Tuesday.

■ In Texas, some voters casting their ballots early on electronic machines reported that after choosing a straight Democratic ticket, the screen switched their choice for Senate from Democrat Beto O’Rourke to Republican Ted Cruz. State election officials said they had received fewer than 20 reports of the glitch, which they blamed on old voting machines and did not expect it to influence the outcome. A small number of similar reports have emerged in North Carolina and Georgia.

■ In Dodge City, Kansas, where 60 percent of residents are Latino, Ford County Clerk Deborah Cox is under fire for moving the city’s only polling location from downtown to a location outside the city limits and a mile from the nearest bus stop, citing looming construction that has not yet started. A federal judge ruled Thursday that it is too close to Election Day to reopen the original location, but he also noted that he was “troubled” by an email in which Cox wrote “LOL” after the American Civil Liberties Union asked her to help publicize their voter information hotline.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican in a close race for governor, has been a leading proponent of stricter voting laws. His office weighed in on the Dodge City controversy by claiming that a second location could allow for double voting.

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All of it has primed an already polarized political environment in which both Democratic and Republican voters are deeply suspicious of the opposing party’s commitment to fair elections.

According to a new poll from the Pew Research Center, most Americans have confidence that local poll workers will do a good job running elections Tuesday — but majorities of both Democrats (64 percent) and Republicans (56 percent) say the opposing party has “little or no commitment to fair and accurate elections.”

Layered on top of those anxieties are widespread worries about whether the United States is prepared to fend off hacking efforts by foreign governments and concerns about the integrity of electronic voting systems.

According to the Pew poll, 85 percent of Americans favor requiring electronic voting machines to produce paper ballot backups. At least a dozen states do not have that system.

In Georgia, two regulations have caused worries: a new law demanding that voter information on registration applications exactly match existing government records — even down to a hyphen — and another requirement that a voter’s signature match on an absentee ballot application and the ballot itself.

Although the signature requirement is not new, a surge in absentee voting this year — and in rejected ballots — has led to scrutiny of its enforcement.

Voting rights groups sued after election officials rejected hundreds of absentee ballots and suspended more than 50,000 registration applications, the vast majority of them from African Americans.

Two federal judges sided with the plaintiffs in both cases, ordering state and local officials to stop rejecting absentee ballots over signature mismatches and to give voters a chance to verify their identity before tossing registrations.

McGinniss said she had to send nearly two dozen emails to county elections officials to confirm that her absentee ballot would count after she was told her signature didn’t match other records. County officials confirmed the exchange to The Washington Post and that her ballot had eventually been accepted.

Even after that, a state database continued to list McGinnis’ ballot as “challenged.” She said she cast a provisional ballot at an early-voting location in case her mail-in vote wasn’t counted upon the advice of local officials, despite the fact that a poll worker told her that voting twice was voter fraud.

“This is not the way the process is supposed to work,” she said.

The atmosphere was further inflamed Sunday, when Kemp’s office announced an investigation into the state Democratic Party, posting a headline about the case on the secretary of state’s government website — directly beneath a voter’s guide to polling locations.

Kemp’s office has not said when the alleged voter-registration hack attempt occurred or revealed any details.

But David Cross, a Washington, D.C.-based voting rights lawyer, told reporters that on Saturday he had informed Kemp’s lawyers, as well as the FBI, of a potential vulnerability in the state election system that could allow hackers to obtain and even alter private voter information. He said he learned of the issue from a Georgia voter who contacted the husband of one of his clients.

Cross said he was dismayed that Kemp had accused Democrats of a hack rather than committing to investigate the vulnerability.

“In an act of desperation, the Democrats tried to expose vulnerabilities in Georgia’s voter registration system,” Kemp’s campaign said in a statement. “This was a 4th quarter Hail Mary pass that was intercepted in the end zone… . These power-hungry radicals should be held accountable for their criminal behavior.”

In North Dakota, Native Americans have decried a strict requirement that voters show identification bearing their physical address. Many residents of tribal reservations don’t have a physical address. They live outside the service area of the U.S. Postal Service and use post office boxes for mail delivery.

Election officials have urged such voters to create physical addresses for themselves using a rural address database that serves 911 service providers. But some voters have found that the addresses these systems produce can be inaccurate — and they worry that they could be charged with voter fraud if they use an ID with an inaccurate address, advocates said.

Tribal leaders are deploying officials to as many as 40 precincts with laptops, printers and CB radios (there is no cell service at many locations) to help voters produce acceptable tribal IDs on the fly.

“The backbone of our democracy is being able to vote,” said Carla Fredericks, a lawyer and member of the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation, located in central North Dakota, who is helping the effort. “If people are not able to vote who are constitutionally allowed to vote, I don’t think that speaks well to the legitimacy of our elections.”

Fredericks said Native Americans, who tend to vote Democratic, are credited with Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp’s victory in 2012. It’s hard not to be suspicious, she said, that Republicans passed the law ahead of Heitkamp’s reelection effort this year to discourage Native American participation.

Al Jaeger, North Dakota’s Republican secretary of state, said the activists’ plan to position themselves outside of polling locations could cause even more confusion at the polls.

“Every North Dakotan, every voter on Election Day, will be provided a ballot to mark and cast, or be given a set-aside ballot to mark,” Jaeger said at a news conference Friday, according to the Bismark Tribune.

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All told, two dozen states have passed restrictive voting laws since 2010, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law, including new measures since 2017 in Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, New Hampshire, North Carolina and North Dakota.

Wane Hailes, publisher of a newspaper in Columbus, Georgia, aimed at African-American and Hispanic readers, said he and other black voters were initially discouraged by the headlines in Georgia about thousands of voters of color having their registrations suspended or their ballots tossed. But that frustration is driving people to the polls, he said.

“I think what has happened over the last few weeks, with all of the attention going on, we’re like, ‘No, we’re getting out to vote,’ ” said Hailes, who is 62 and also handles communications for the state chapter of the NAACP. “OK, now we’re not going to let this happen.”

Meanwhile, large armies of lawyers and other observers are being mobilized to monitor the polls Tuesday — and to be prepared for recounts and other legal action that could follow.

Political committees, individual campaigns and civil rights groups will all deploy monitors. Common Cause, the civil rights organization, for instance, helped recruit 6,500 monitors this year — double the number in 2016, a presidential election year.

That’s in part because of the expected boost in turnout. As of Saturday, the number of people voting early this year had outpaced that of the 2014 midterm elections in 28 states, according to data compiled by Michael McDonald, a political-science professor at the University of Florida. In two additional states, Texas and Nevada, early voting is on track to surpass the entire vote count four years ago, he said.

Ned Foley, a law professor and election-law expert at Ohio State University in Columbus, said it’s never a good thing for even a single voter to lose the right to vote. But he also noted that glitches are inevitable and they shouldn’t delegitimize an election unless they are so numerous as to have the power to change the outcome.

Is that possible Tuesday? Certainly, Foley said, given how many closely fought races are in play. But it’s also dangerous to be “overly alarmist,” he added.

“That can feed the cynicism,” he said. “It can feed the notion that it doesn’t matter.”

The Washington Post’s Vanessa Williams in Georgia, David Weigel in New Jersey, Annie Gowen in Wisconsin and Scott Clement and Avi Selk in Washington contributed to this report.