Sue Lani Madsen: Notion of voter suppression has been wielded as a political weapon

Voting isn’t hard, but it takes effort. Most elections officials and poll workers are honest and competent. Voter suppression and voter fraud are rare. And none of those statements makes an attention-grabbing headline.

Sowing seeds of distrust in our election system most recently started in 2016, when Hillary Clinton falsely claimed voter suppression cost her the election. President Trump responded with false claims of rampant voter fraud. It was irresistible catnip for pundits hyping partisan positions. And they were both wrong.

Voter suppression used to mean Jim Crow Democrats wielding torches in former Confederate states, or the heavy-handed tactics of Philadelphia members of the New Black Panther Party. Now there are claims of voter suppression if you merely suggest voters show the same ID they have to carry for every other aspect of modern life or if dropbox locations or polling places aren’t considered convenient enough.

Inconvenience is not voter suppression. Neither is expecting voters to be responsible adults. Voter suppression is an amorphous term and a politically useful weapon for the left. Its bloody past shuts off reasoned discussion.

Washington state makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to vote. Sign up for a driver’s license and you are automatically registered. Sixteen- and 17-year-olds can sign up as future voters in case they forget when they turn 18. Download a registration form in one of 23 languages from the Secretary of State’s website and mail it back on time. Register to vote online or in person up until eight days before Election Day. You can even register in person at your county elections office up until 8 p.m. on Election Day, although thankfully waiting to the literal last minute would leave no time to vote. Procrastination should not be rewarded.

Washington took a gradual path to an all vote-by-mail system starting in 1983. Many of the decisions along the way were cost-driven. Finding and staffing polling places became harder as schools ramped up security and workforce patterns changed. The cost of purchasing and operating fully accessible voting units was one of several last straws for many counties.

There were hopes greater convenience would equal higher voter turnout, and there has been improvement in off-year elections, according to Secretary of State Kim Wyman in an interview with NPR. Yet more than 2.5 million legally registered voters in Washington didn’t bother to participate in the August primary.

In the same interview, Wyman addressed the issue of fraud.

“No level of fraud is acceptable,” she said. “But you can build in security measures that keep it very low, and I think that’s what we’ve done successfully here in Washington.”

She noted voter ID has been required at time of registration since 2006, including registering online and by mail. Wyman reported only .004% of voters appeared to have cast fraudulent ballots in 2018 by voting twice or for someone who had died, a total of “142 people out of 3.2 million ballots cast.”

Absentee ballots only go to people who proactively request them, meaning they are alive and have a verified address. In an all-mail election, ballots are mailed to everyone in the database. Purging voter rolls regularly is essential for secure all-mail elections. Sending ballots to people who have died or moved is an invitation to fraud, and this is the major source of concern for states moving precipitously to an all-mail election without a decade to prepare. But when any state cleans up the voting rolls, especially just before an election, there will be immediate cries of voter suppression.

The misuse of the extreme language of fraud and suppression to describe ordinary administrative tasks feeds fear. There is a potential for fraud in any system, whether all-mail, requested-absentee or in-person at a polling place. Fraud is as rare as actual voter suppression, but apathy is rampant.

There is no excuse for any citizen in the United States not to register and vote. The website healthyvoting.org has links to the rules for casting your ballot in each state. Read them. Mark it as instructed, sign where it says sign. If your ballot is mailed to you, mail it back as quickly as possible or drop it off in an official dropbox. Don’t wait until the last minute of the last day.

The post office will do its job. Some elections offices will struggle to process mailed ballots and there may not be answers to satisfy talking news heads on election night, but the work will get done. The question is: Will voters do their job?