Time March 2–9, 2020INEQUALITY| VOTING
The winner of The 2020 presidenTial elecTion
will depend not only on who votes but also on who doesn’t.
Four years after 77,744 ballots in three states gave the White
House to Donald Trump, state lawmakers are battling over
voting rules that will determine whether millions of Ameri-
cans get a chance to cast a ballot in November.
So far this year, 29 states have introduced at least 188
bills to expand voting rights by making registration and
absentee voting easier, and by restoring the vote to former
felons. At the same time, legislators in 15 mostly Republican
states have introduced at least 35 bills that would make it
harder to vote, according to an analysis by the non partisan
Brennan Center for Justice, often by imposing stricter
voter- identification requirements.
Key Electoral College states like Florida and Virginia
are among those still grappling with questions about bal-
lot access. With the presidency and control of Congress
on the line, “This could make or break the election,” says
Paul Smith, vice president of the Campaign Legal Center.
In 2018, Florida voters approved an amendment to re-
store the vote to 1.4 million people with felony convictions,
a move celebrated by backers as the biggest voting- rights
win in recent U.S. history. But more than a year later, its
implementation remains mired in partisan legal battles
over the Florida supreme court’s ruling that felons have to
pay back all fines and fees related to their convictions be-
fore being granted the right to vote. While a clause in the
law allows those fees to be waived, it is mainly being used
in Democratic- leaning counties. And as Florida’s March 17
presidential primary gets closer, local election officials say
they still have not received guidance on how to handle ex-
felons’ registrations.
Even so, voting-rights activists in the state say they’re
optimistic the recent changes Floridians voted for will make
a difference in 2020. “This is the largest expansion of de-
mocracy in 50 years,” says Neil Volz, deputy director of the
Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, who himself recently
regained his voting rights through Amendment 4.
In Kentucky, Democratic Governor Andy Beshear re-
stored voting rights to 140,000 people with felony convic-
tions immediately after taking office last fall. Weeks later,
Battle for the ballot
VOTER-ACCESS LAWS MAY DETERMINE ELECTIONS IN 2020 AND BEYOND
BY VERA BERGENGRUEN
GOP lawmakers introduced a bill mandat-
ing that voters carry a photo ID card with
an expiration date, nominally to guard
against voter fraud. Kentucky already re-
quires ID to cast a ballot, and while the bill
was slightly watered down, the GOP move
would have largely impacted minorities,
students at the state’s largest universities
whose ID cards lack expiration dates, and
voters like the ex-felons who recently had
their rights restored, experts say.
Voting-rights lawyers are also con-
cerned about efforts to purge supposed
non citizens from voter rolls in states in-
cluding Texas, New Jersey and Florida. In
one effort led by Texas’ then secretary of
state David Whitley, state officials ques-
tioned the citizenship of about 98,000 vot-
ers in a review of rolls that relied on flawed
data. A federal judge reprimanded state of-
ficials for having “created this mess” that
unfairly targeted naturalized U.S. citizens,
and ordered Texas counties to stop purg-
ing suspected non citizens from the rolls.
In Virginia, Democrats took full con-
trol of state government for the first time
in a generation last year, and have com-
mitted to voting-rights reform. They have
introduced bills that would allow auto-
matic registration as well as same-day
registration, and are debating inserting
an anti gerrymandering amendment into
the state constitution. Another proposal
would allow early, excuse-free absentee
voting in the 45 days leading up to an
election. “It is a sea change,” says Claire
Guthrie Gastañaga, executive director of
the American Civil Liberties Union of Vir-
ginia. “We’re about to open up the ballot
box in our state in a way that it never was
since Jim Crow.” □