Okay, But Why Are There So Many New Voting Laws?

In this first episode of our limited series "Okay, But Why?", we're taking a deep dive into voting rights.

We all want free and fair elections where everyone who’s legally able to vote can make their voice heard. But every time the experts study voter fraud, they find almost zero evidence that undocumented immigrants or anyone else is voting illegally. So then… why are there so many new voting laws out there?

Today, we're examining the history of voting rights and taking a closer look at why politicians are trying so hard to keep some Americans from voting.

For a transcript of this episode, please email comms@redwine.blue.

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Transcript

Okay But Why E1: Why are there so many new voting laws?

CLIP: Emily Carter at Town Hall Meeting in Georgia
“On January 9th 2025, you joined as a sponsor of HR22 SAVE Act. This means that me and 69 million women like me who have taken their spouse’s last name will no longer be eligible to vote. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me why you’re trying to take away my right to vote.”

Narration: We all want free and fair elections where everyone who’s legally able to vote can make their voice heard. But every time the experts study voter fraud, they find almost zero evidence that undocumented immigrants or anyone else is voting illegally. So then… why are there so many new voting laws out there?

The SAVE Act could prevent millions of Americans from voting by enacting restrictive ID and in-person registration requirements, but it’s only the latest attempt to keep people from voting. So to understand what’s going on right now, let’s jump back for a moment to the founding of our nation.

Despite their passion for democracy, the Founding Fathers had no problem limiting voting rights. For decades, the only people who could vote were white men who owned property. Some states also included religious tests to make sure their voters were only Christian in addition to being white land-owning men.

In the early 1800s, some states began to ease up on the land-owning requirements so that white men without property could vote. Groundbreaking, I know. Then, in 1870, Congress passed the 15th Amendment, which said that nobody can be denied the right to vote based on their race. But for decades after that, states just used a lot of other tactics to keep Black men from voting. (Because remember, in most of America, women were not allowed to vote.)

Some of those tactics included literacy tests, many of which were intentionally confusing. There were poll taxes, which were a fee that you had to pay before you could register to vote. Not only were many Black Americans economically disadvantaged at that time, but poll tax laws often literally included a “grandfather clause” that meant any man whose father or grandfather had voted prior to the abolition of slavery could vote without paying the tax. They were not hiding their objective here. These laws were clearly designed to target Black people.

But voter disenfranchisement wasn’t limited to laws and taxes. In many cases, they used intimidation and violence. Members of the Ku Klux Klan often gathered around polling places to keep anyone who wasn’t white away from the ballot box.

And in some cases, states used even more absurd ways to prevent people from voting, like the infamous “jelly bean test,” where registrars would ask prospective Black voters to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. What that has to do with voting, your guess is as good as mine.
 
President Obama actually mentioned the jelly bean test in his eulogy at Congressman John Lewis’ funeral. John Lewis was a voting rights icon and worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr to secure voting rights for every American.

CLIP from Obama:
“We may no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot, but even as we sit here, there are those in power who are doing their darndest to discourage people from voting by closing polling locations and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision.”

Narration: Women, meanwhile, weren’t legally allowed to vote in every state until 1920 when Congress passed the 19th Amendment. That’s barely over a hundred years ago! Groups of women had begun to meet and discuss fighting for their right to vote throughout the 1800s but their efforts often splintered, unfortunately, because not all white women wanted Black women to have the right to vote. 

But with the 19th amendment, introduced in 1919 and ratified in August of 2020, suffragists finally prevailed. It’s worth noting that only 36 states were needed to ratify the 19th Amendment and Mississippi became the final state to acknowledge that yes, women deserve the right to vote… in March of 1984.

So, here we are. It’s 1920. Women can vote, people of color can vote, democracy’s thriving, everything’s great, right?

Well, not exactly. Native Americans weren’t given the right to vote until 1924 and Asian-Americans weren’t given the right to vote until the 1950s. And all of those racist tactics like poll taxes and intimidation were still going on across the country. The struggle for true equal voting rights came to a head in the 1960s with the Civil Rights movement. Men like John Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr., and women like Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer, organized protests and boycotts and gave inspirational speeches.

CLIP: MLK “Give us the ballot” speech
“And so our most urgent request to the president of the United States and every member of Congress is to give us the right to vote. Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights. Give us the ballot, and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law; we will by the power of our vote write the law on the statute books of the South and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence.”

Narration: Finally, in 1965, we got the landmark Voting Rights Act. It was signed by President Johnson and it outlawed literacy tests and any barriers to vote based on race. It ensured that the federal government, not individual states, had the ultimate say in voting rules. And it had an immediate impact: by the end of the year, a quarter of a million new Black voters had been registered.

So for a while, things were pretty good. Of course no system is perfect, but women could vote, the federal government was making sure there were no more racial barriers to voting…. democracy was working.

Then, almost 50 years later, in 2013, everything changed with the Supreme Court case of Shelby County vs. Holder.

NEWS CLIP: Gwen Ifill at PBS
“It’s considered one of the most important pieces of Civil Rights legislation ever passed. But by 5 to 4, the US Supreme Court today took the teeth out of a law enacted nearly 50 years ago.”

Narration: The Justices ruled that the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional. Conservative Justices like John Roberts declared that racial discrimination is no longer an issue in this country and that states like Texas could now be trusted to oversee their own voting laws. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg said that throwing out the Voting Rights Act is “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

So since 2013, states with a history of suppressing voting rights are no longer subject to review by the federal government. And immediately after the Shelby vs Holder decision came out, the Governor of Texas announced that they would be enacting some of the most restrictive voter ID laws in the country. Later that year, a federal judge struck down a Voter ID law in North Carolina, saying it targeted Black voters with “almost surgical precision.” A whopping 23 states created new obstacles to voting leading up to the 2018 elections.

Okay, but why are voter ID laws discriminatory? You need an ID to do practically anything in this country — to drive, to buy alcohol, to board an airplane, even, according to Trump, to buy groceries. 

CLIP of Trump:
“You know, if you want to go out and buy groceries, you need a picture on a card. You need ID.”

Narration: Here’s the thing. Flying and buying liquor are not fundamental rights enshrined by the Constitution. Voting is. There should be as few barriers to voting as possible, and getting photo IDs, taking off work, possible travel and fees to request documents are significant barriers for many minority groups and low-income voters. According to the Brennan Center, nearly 21 million American adults don’t have a driver’s license, and another 28 million have a driver’s license that doesn’t match their current address or name. And this disproportionately affects some groups more than others. 28 percent of Black adults don’t have a driver’s license with their current name and address, and 18 percent don’t have an ID at all - compared with 5 percent of white adults. People with a disability are also less likely to have a driver’s license, and young Americans are least likely of all to have an ID with their current name and address.

And the SAVE Act we mentioned at the beginning of this episode would be even more restrictive. It would require physical proof of citizenship—like a birth certificate or passport— every time someone registers to vote, or changes their voter registration (like when you move). A driver’s license or a Real ID doesn’t count. And even if you have a copy of your birth certificate just lying around, you could still have problems if your current name doesn’t match your birth name. That doesn’t just mean trans people, immigrants, or foster youth - it also means women who changed their last name when they got married. Even if you’re already registered to vote, it could still affect you if you ever have to re-register because you’ve changed your address or any number of other reasons.

And here’s the most important part. It’s solving a non-issue. So many bipartisan and nonpolitical groups have studied voter fraud and they’ve all independently come to the same conclusion: there is virtually no voter fraud happening in this country. In 2016, a Washington Post analysis was able to find only four documented cases of voter fraud in the 2016 election. Four cases out of 135 million ballots cast. President Trump has been obsessed with the idea of election fraud, even convening a “Presidential Commission on Election Integrity,” which was dissolved in January 2018 without presenting any evidence or findings. And yet this narrative that illegal voting is changing the results of our elections continues to be pushed by everyone from the President to podcasters. It simply isn’t true. 

Okay, so why are there so many new voting laws then? Unfortunately, it’s the same reasons that poll taxes and jelly beans were used a hundred years ago: to take away some Americans’ right to vote. Research has shown that Republican legislators in swing states and districts with sizable black, Latino, or immigrant populations have pushed the hardest for voter ID laws.

Royal Masset, the political director of the Republican Party of Texas, was unnervingly frank about their intentions in a 2007 interview. Here’s what he said. “Among Republicans, it is an ‘article of religious faith that voter fraud is causing us to lose elections.”. He didn’t agree with that, but what he did say was that “requiring photo IDs could cause enough of a drop-off in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3 percent to the Republican vote." These days, a lot of elections are won and lost by far less than 3 percent.

The bottom line is this. Voting rights shouldn’t be partisan. Every American should be able to vote, no matter their political party, their race, their gender, or the state they live in. But extremist Republicans are almost unilaterally the ones proposing these new voting laws. If they’re so sure that they represent the majority of the American people, and that President Trump’s election was a mandate for their policies… why are they trying so hard to keep people from voting?

So. What can you do? For starters, you can spread the word to everyone you know. Make sure your friends and neighbors know the truth about Voter ID laws like the SAVE Act. And reach out to your representatives. Call them, write to them, or better yet, show up in person to a town hall meeting. Whether your elected officials are Democrats or Republicans, make sure they know that their constituents do not support bills that make voting harder. Our vote is our voice, and we won’t be silenced.
Sources:
The Brennan Center - this this this and this
The Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement
The Carnegie Center
The Washington Post
The League of Women Voters
Fair.org