I’ve told you: the dirty little secret of American elections is that we don’t count all the ballots—and we sure as hell don’t allow every citizen to vote.
In total, no less than 5,872,857 ballots were cast and never counted in 2016. In addition, a minimum of 1,982,071 voters were blocked from casting their ballots.
That is a total of 7,854,928 votes and voters left uncounted.
Voting in America, especially for the young and voters of color, is an obstacle course: your registration is blocked; and if you’re registered you get purged; you can’t get a ballot because you brought the wrong student ID; or you get a provisional ballot that’s thrown away; or, lucky you, you get to vote on a real ballot and it’s not counted, “residual” or “spoiled”; or, mailed in, you left off the second stamp . . . and I could go on.
But what’s the bottom line? How many votes lost? How many registrations zapped? I can only give you these calculations based on 2016 data reported by the EAC, Census, Federal Elections Commission (FEC) and the quadrennial Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE).
Let’s do a quick walk-through of this voting casualty ward.
Provisional ballots. Those tranquilizer ballots are limited to states and counties that report to the EAC. It does include some “partially” counted ballots.
Ballots rejected. The votes of those “residual” voters, as in Michigan, where the 75,355 were not counted when the ballot scanners broke down in Detroit.
Mail-in ballots rejected. That includes both the 512,696 ballots received and rejected and the bigger sum of voters who did not receive their mail-in ballots on time or did not receive them at all.
Registrations purged. Given that 340,134 and more were wrongly purged in Georgia alone and another half million were wrongly purged in Ohio, and 170,008 were wrongly placed on the Wisconsin purge list, how come I’m only showing a million voters shafted in 2016? First, someone who’s lost their right to vote may not try or want to vote or take a provisional ballot. Finally, I chose the most conservative number I could find—those reporting to Census and SPAE that they could not vote because of registration problems.
And let me remind you, these numbers reflect the horror show of 2016. Since then, leading to 2020, the purges have accelerated at warp speed.
Long lines. I used the MIT SPAE data on folks discouraged by long lines, the lowest number I could find. I left out folks whose polling stations could not be located—not a small problem.
Wrong ID. This includes those who were told they could not vote at the polling station and those that did not try because they did not have the required ID. I’m also excluding well over a million more who thought they didn’t have the right ID. And some did receive provisional ballots.
I recognize that experts at the Brennan Center and elsewhere will find this estimate ridiculously low.
So argue with me. Experts will say I’m low, and the perpetrators of this anti-voting crime wave will say I’m way high (in both senses of the term). Whatever may be the necessary refinement of these numbers, this is an American tragedy, a democracy holocaust—a term no one in my family would use without careful forethought.
It is a metastasizing cancer on our democracy because the voters blocked and the votes uncounted are not anything close to random. It’s Jim Crow and José Crow and Kim Crow; and in 2020, the big, new target of aggression and suppression, younger voters.
While this entire tome has focused on bigotry in balloting, I must add a bit more to the mathematics of the bias.
VANISHING REGISTRATIONS
Professor Arnwine asked me to note,
The untold story is that 100,000 African-American registrations in North Carolina were not processed; 100,000 registrations in Florida were not processed, meaning that these people took the time to register to vote, and the state never put them on the voter registration rolls.
How many registrations were tossed? The total blows me away. An EAC press release proudly reports that states accepted 83.4% of the 77,516,596 registrations in the two years leading up to the 2016 election. But wait a minute: that means 16.6% were dumped. That’s 12,867,755 rejected.
Why? Minorities tend to register in voter drives on paper—an easy target for nitpickers with a partisan agenda to challenge such as a wrong signature on a cover sheet causing hundreds of registrations at a time to get the heave-ho. And voters don’t know it. There’s about a 6% error rate in clerks entering names off difficult-to-read forms. Who loses? According to Debra Bowen, former Secretary of State of California, where paper registration rejections hit 45%, especially for “unusual” names like Mohamed and names with hyphens and accents—look out, Mr. García-Márquez.
PROVISIONAL AMERICANS
In the Help America Vote Act of 2002, the Congressional Black Caucus won the right for voters with wrong ID or who were missing from the rolls to get a provisional ballot. But they lost the right to have that ballot counted.
The bipartisan Cooperative Congressional Election Study lays out the whole racial rainbow of vote suppression:
Your genitalia may also determine if you get shoved to the provisional ballot:
And whatever you do, don’t show up and try to vote young:
But those are the lucky ones. Any citizen showing up at the polls who encounters ID or registration problems is, by federal law, entitled to a provisional ballot. Nevertheless, at least a third of those voters are refused, or not offered the ballot. We tested this. Rachel Garbus of our legal team called several Georgia counties to ask about how they counted provisional ballots of those scrubbed by Brian Kemp. The answer in most cases: We don’t give out any ballot, provisional or otherwise, to scrubbed voters.
Here’s the breakdown of voters that waited in line to vote—but were sent away without any ballot at all. From the same Congressional study:
Get the picture?
DEMOCRACY SPOILED ROTTEN
There are a gazillion ways for your vote to simply not count—some call it “spoilage”—from broken scanners, hanging chads, funky computer touchscreens and the myriad gotchas of absentee balloting.
But if it were random, who cares? It’s anything but random. The US Civil Rights Commission looked at the un-count (residual or “spoiled” votes) in Florida in 2000 and found that . . .
The chance your vote will “spoil,” won’t get counted, is 900% higher if you’re Black than if you’re white.
Other studies show the Jim Crow factor has fallen to merely horrendous levels. And, whatever you do, if the ballot says,
don’t sign in Korean.