CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — The casting of a ballot is the most fundamentally American act that any of us takes. It connects us to the Enlightenment ideals of the country’s founding — the once-radical notion that human beings should think for themselves, rather than merely obey kings and priests. “Dare to know!” Immanuel Kant wrote, offering a motto for the Enlightenment. “Have the courage to use your own understanding!”
These ideals have a stirring power, even in a year as uninspiring as 2016. And their power makes it all the more outrageous that a significant number of Americans find their right of self-determination under attack.
Thousands of citizens have needed intervention from federal judges in the last several weeks in order to vote. Even more remarkably, a few million adult Americans will be denied the right to vote this year.
When you cast your ballot on Tuesday — and make sure that you do — or watch others go to the polls, I encourage you to keep in mind your disenfranchised fellow citizens.
In Ohio, residents who make a minor error filling out personal information will have their votes discarded. It already happened to Roland Gilbert, a legally blind retired lawyer who in 2014 put the date in the wrong place on his ballot, as Reuters reported. “Thousands of indisputably registered and eligible voters,” said Subodh Chandra, a lawyer suing the state, “are going to be disenfranchised solely because they made trivial, immaterial errors and omissions.”
In Texas, people have posted photographs to social media showing signs at polling places that claim voters need photo identification. They do not, thanks to a judge’s ruling, but the signs remain.
In Wisconsin, some state employees have made it difficult to obtain voter-identification cards, defying a court order. The same has happened here in North Carolina, with perfectly eligible voters receiving the runaround.
North Carolina has also closed polling places in some areas and changed early-voting hours. At a library in Charlotte on Saturday, the early-voting line stretched for hours. The changes have most likely contributed to the 9 percent decline — equaling 65,000 votes — in African-American early voting here, versus 2012. In Florida, which hasn’t had the same suppression, African-American voting is up.
Then there is the largest form of disenfranchisement: the combination of the imprisonment boom and state laws barring former prisoners from voting. As a result, 6.1 million Americans, and one in every 13 African-Americans, lack the ballot.
The stated rationale for making voting harder — fears of widespread voter fraud — has been thoroughly debunked. Only a minuscule number of people vote illegally. When they do, as with an Iowa woman who apparently voted twice for Donald Trump last month, they are often caught.
In reality, the suppression efforts are just a campaign tactic, by Republicans trying to prevent heavily Democratic-leaning groups — racial minorities and younger adults — from voting.
In North Carolina, a local party chairman emailed election officials to remind them that limited early voting was “in the best interest of the Republican Party.” In Green Bay, Wis., the Republican city clerk declined to put a polling place on a university campus because “students lean more toward the Democrats,” according to an email uncovered by Ari Berman, author of “Give Us the Ballot.”
Fortunately, the evidence suggests the tactic alters the outcome only in the very closest elections. (Not all of the disenfranchised end up voting for Democrats.) But no one should take much comfort from this. For one thing, some elections — potentially, this year’s races for president, governor and senator in North Carolina — are extremely close. And results aside, are we actually fighting over whether Americans have the right to vote?
Come Wednesday morning, the country will probably have avoided electing a dangerous authoritarian president. But this campaign’s demoralizing slog will still leave us in need of a program of national recovery. Restoring the right of universal suffrage should be part of that recovery.
Congress could set minimum standards for each state — requiring automatic voter registration, for example. I realize that most congressional Republicans now have little interest in voting rights. But I’d urge them to consider their party’s long-term interests: Opposing basic rights for large and growing groups is not so smart.
If Congress won’t act, the Supreme Court can. The court can acknowledge that its 2013 dismantling of a key part of the Voting Rights Act hinged on an overly rosy view of the aftermath. The Equal Protection Clause offers one solution, as the scholar Richard Hasen has argued: The justices could interpret it to overturn state laws making it harder to register and vote.
The Enlightenment ideas of our country’s founding have turned out to be pretty wise ones. Governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” as the Declaration of Independence says, and all Americans have “certain unalienable rights.” Voting, surely, is one of them.
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