Voter suppression
Voter suppression refers to a variety of tactics aimed at lowering or suppressing the number of voters who might otherwise vote in a particular election. The term is generally used pejoratively, in the sense that some acts of disenfranchisement have at times been defended for one reason or another as leading to a public good (such as various reasons for disenfranchising felons), whereas when the term "voter suppression" is applied, the person using the phrase generally means to wholeheartedly condemn the act or to imply that it can have no legitimate justification.[1]
Types of vote suppression
Contemporary partisan or organizational behavior that is generally seen as constituting deliberate acts of voter suppression include:[2]
- Voter caging and purging
- Phone jamming
- False information intended to prevent voters from voting
- Illegal third-party registration conduct
- Intimidation of voters
There are also situations that may in fact suppress some votes but may or may not be intended to do so. These include:[2]
- Insufficient or unequal resources devoted to election administration
- Legislation that creates clerical burdens that make it more difficult to register and vote
Legislation that may make it more difficult, in practice, to vote includes Voter ID laws, laws regarding absentee voting and burdensome laws about provisional ballot voting.[3]
Older voter suppression methods
Voter suppression news
This section links to a Google news search for the term Voter + Suppression
See also
External links
- Mother Jones, "Timeline: The Long History of Voter Suppression"
- Mother Jones, "10 Dirty Ways to Swing an Election"
- People for the American Way, "The New Face of Jim Crow: Voter Suppression in America"
- Fair Election Network, "Spreading Suppression: Restrictive Voting Laws Across the United States"
- New York Times, "Voter Suppression’s New Pretext"
- ACLU, "Fighting Voter Suppression"
Additional reading
Footnotes
