The Test to Democracy MARTHA SANCHEZ
60
“Voting should not be a question of trust on the part of the voters, [but] whether they can trust the system,” Stacey Abrams, current Democratic nominee for Governor of Georgia, said in an interview with CNN (“Georgia,” 2018). Abrams is one of many politicians fighting for equality in voting across the United States. Voting is a constitutional right, but the trust that Abrams speaks of - the faith that citizens should have in their government - is diminishing. Abrams claims the imposition of Voter ID laws, regulations that require documents such as photo ID to vote, have become means for discrimination and political advancement used by those in power to ensure their continued authority. In Georgia, 53,000 voter registrations were put on hold due to inconsistencies with the information stated on registrations (“Georgia,” 2018). Georgia’s government also held back registrations of citizens who didn’t vote in the last election (“107,000,” 2018). Seventy percent of these registrations were from African American citizens (“Georgia,” 2018). As little as a missed apostrophe or dash can trigger the system to place voter registrations on hold, making it easy to target common African American cultural names on registration forms (“Georgia,” 2018). Apparent biases, such as those Abrams points out, call into question the equality in voting. Equality in voting also can be directly influenced by polling locations. In Georgia’s Randolph County,
seven of the nine polling stations were recently closed (“Your right,” 2018). These closings mean that to exercise their right to vote, some citizens would need to walk over three hours to reach their nearest polling station (“Your right,” 2018). Whether or not discrimination influenced poll closings, the voting system has been effective in making voting harder for some Georgians. If new obstacles limit, for example, the African American vote in Georgia, Republican leaders would benefit, especially in a close election. Polling suggests the governor’s race in Georgia is at a near tie, indicating that the influx of 53,000 new voters could drastically change the election’s course (“Poll,” 2018). Recently, a federal judge stated that she would temporarily stop election officials from using the exact match protocol, meaning that, temporarily, Georgia can no longer put a hold on registrations of inactive voters or registrations with inconsistent name spelling (“Judge,” 2018). The earliest concerns about voting rights erupted with the Civil Rights movement because voting had been designed to keep African Americans away from the polls. That discrimination spread to other minority groups and led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The act declared that in states with a history of voter discrimination, any proposed changes to voting laws would have to be approved by the federal government. In the early 2000s, however, that practice changed. The Supreme Court ruled that states could