Are there cases of Democrats engaging in voter suppression?

Question

Modern Republicans are often accused of trying to suppress the right to vote for minorities.

Are there cases where the modern Democratic party (ie post Jim Crow) is accused of suppressing the right to vote for demographics that are less likely to vote for them? Do they use the same tactics as Republicans are accused of, or are they different?

Examples:

• closing of specific polling places not likely to vote for their party
• requiring specific IDs less likely to be owned by minorities
• purging voter registrations of specific demographics
• keeping voter registrations of specific demographics on hold
• misinforming specific demographics about voting location or time.

Answer 1

As far as I know, there are no reported cases of Democrats suppressing votes in the same manner as Republicans are seen to be doing, however there are still some accusations of voter suppression that have been leveled at the party.

Scheduling Off-Cycle Elections

Democrats have, in general, stood against attempts to bring local election schedules in line with one another. It is thought by some that this is because having these elections at unusual times leads to only the most motivated voters bothering to show up at the polls. Often, these are the workers directly affected by the election. For more information, take a look at this article.

Primary Elections

There have been accusations that Democrats deliberately make it difficult to switch your party affiliation to vote for an inspiring candidate in an attempt to ensure that mainstream, establishment candidates get the democratic nomination. For more information on the phenomenon, take a look here.

In general, however, these cases seem more isolated than the Republican attempts, and to generally be isolated to elections with somewhat lower stakes. This is likely why they are less reported on, and not seen as such an intense issue.

Answer 2

Note: this answers an earlier broader version of the Q. that was not limited to modern Democrats.

---

If historical answers are acceptable, then Democrats wrote the book on racist voter suppression. Wikipedia's article Disenfranchisement after the Reconstruction Era covers the Southern Democrat's foul tricks such as:

• Poll taxes.
• Literacy tests with grandfather clauses so that whites who were illiterate could vote while blacks who were illiterate could not.
• White primaries
• Requiring freedmen to prove they were over 21, while knowing that former slaves had no birth certificates.
• Impunity for murderous white racist paramilitary violence and tyranny.

In those days it was the Radical Republicans who fought against voter suppression.

The two parties virtually traded places on racism in the mid-20th century, which can lead to brand confusion. Sometimes modern racist Republicans exploit this brand confusion by calling themselves "The Party of Lincoln" whilst advocating policies Lincoln would not have admired.

So there's a vile history of racist voter suppression on both sides. Voter suppression is not one party's problem, it's everyone's (or at least everyone who's not trying to promote racism), and should properly be regarded as a general bipartisan reform issue.

---

Note:

In a comment, (since deleted by the moderator), commentator T.E.D. argued that modern political parties should bear no discredit for the wrongs done in their name by "wings" or factions that have since departed and joined other parties. The argument seems similar to the merely feasible legalistic reasoning that the disingenuous descendants of a criminal made wealthy by terrible unpunished crimes are therefore free of any moral taint or responsibility to redress crimes they did not commit but enjoyed and inherited the rewards of, while the pauperized families of the deceased wealthy criminal's victims are considered solely responsible for their lot.

Answer 3

If you're not making a distinction between vote suppression organized by the Democratic Party itself and vote suppression organized by its supporters, then you might find the Texas Attorney General's website interesting. The Texas AG has been aggressively prosecuting numerous cases of vote fraud, including at least one case involving what the AG's office describes as an "organized vote fraud ring" operating in Fort Worth. According to the AG,

Vote harvesting is accomplished generally in two phases: seeding and harvesting. In the seeding phase, applications for mail ballot are proliferated in order to blanket targeted precincts with mail ballots. Then, when ballots are mailed out by the election offices, harvesters attempt either to intercept the ballots outright, or to “assist” elderly voters in voting their ballots while ensuring that the votes are cast for the candidates of the harvesters’ choice. In most cases, the voters do not even know their votes have been stolen.

An article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram identifies the Democratic Party as the beneficiary of the scheme.

Answer 4

TalkingPointsMemo is hosting several articles in a series about voter suppression. The series covers a lot of history about suppression and outright fraud, and most of the cases are at the hands of (surprise!) the GOP, targeting minority voters. But there is a notable exception in the series, which discusses Chicago around the middle of the 20th century (timeline isn't too clear) in which fraud, coercion, and suppression are used to favor Democrat candidates.

This is citing Don Rose as the source of the info, who was a leftist political activist beginning in the 40's, followed by many decades of civil rights activism and similar work.

Cheating at elections had long been a Chicago tradition. According to Don Rose, a longtime liberal Chicago campaign consultant, the old paper ballots had offered all sorts of opportunities for trickery. But even after the city switched to voting machines there were ways to rig the system. If a voter tried to pull down one of the machine’s small levers, registering a Republican exception to a straight Democratic ticket, a strategically placed rubber band could bounce it back up again. The party bought votes with turkeys and nylon hosiery, and threatened public housing residents with eviction if they didn’t toe the line. Using laws designed to help people with disabilities, election judges “assisted” voters who were actually able-bodied. This required the presence of both a Republican and a Democratic election judge, but, Rose said, “you have to remember that in a tremendous number of precincts, usually in the black neighborhoods, the alleged Republican judges were really Democrats.” Judges could also simply call in the wrong totals. At least once, Rose said, that happened at gunpoint.

The story about dead people voting in Chicago isn’t wrong, Rose said, but it was never the most common method, making up “10 or 15 percent of the total steal.”

- Rick Perlstein And Livia Gershon | August 16, 2018

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/feature/stolen-elections-voting-dogs-and-other-fantastic-fables-from-the-gop-voter-fraud-mythology

Note: There is a bit longer version of the above in another article by one of the authors at https://washingtonspectator.org/gop-voting-fraud-election-2016/

Answer 5

The primary way that the Democratic party suppresses the vote is by clumping. For example, in Massachusetts, there is roughly one Republican for every three Democrats by voter registration. Yet there are no Republican members of Congress from Massachusetts. If Republicans had as much representation as their share of the two-party registration, they would have two or three Representatives. Even if Republicans only had as much share as their overall percentage of registrations, that would be still be at least one. And of course, Democrats would be reduce from nine to three. Because unaffiliated voters make up a majority of the voters in Massachusetts.

This also has an effect because it makes elections uncompetitive in Democratic areas. Much has been made of California's huge lean towards Democrats. But again, Republicans get about a third of the vote but only a quarter of the seats. And in many elections, like Senate, governor, and president, California is completely noncompetitive. So there is little incentive for Republicans to vote. Lopsided elections reduce turnout.

It's true that these effects cut both ways. In places where Republicans clump, it's Democrats whose vote is suppressed. But the truth is that the most partisan areas are controlled by Democrats. And with Democrats, there are usually Democrat enclaves within the Republican areas. For example, Texas is a Republican state. But Houston, Dallas, and Austin all have Democrat mayors and Representatives. Fort Worth, San Antonio, and El Paso may not have Democratic mayors but still have Democratic Representatives.

Of the fourteen Representatives from New York City, only one is a Republican. Republicans who live in other districts don't have the same opportunity to cast votes that count.

Both Democrats and Republicans benefit from the two-party system, but the Democrats benefit more. The two-party system forces people to pick one side or the other. We can again see this by looking at Massachusetts. There, a majority of voters are unaffiliated. They should have four or five Representatives but actually have none. Democrats get all of the seats despite only making up a third of registrations.

Democrats also apportion and district seats by total population rather than voter eligible population. So someone who lives in a district with many children and disenfranchised felons has a vote that counts more than those in older, less criminal districts.

One could say that these are demographic problems. That's true. But they remain addressable. If we adopted proportionality, then seats would be distributed based on the number of people who vote. We could get rid of the census, redistricting, and taxpayer financed primaries altogether. There would just be one big election via proportional means (e.g. single transferable vote). Candidates could continue to be limited to states, but apportionment would happen as part of the election. That would incent all groups to participate.

Instead, Democrats came up with efficiency gap analysis, which suppresses third party votes, doesn't fix Massachusetts, California, and other partisan Democrat states, but does help Democrats in Republican states.

Proportional voting would make it easier for minorities and women to win as well. Because they could clump together to vote for their candidates. As is, Massachusetts is represented by seven white men and two white women. Under proportionality, that might be more even by gender with two or three minority Representatives.

Clumping combines with partisan primaries to increase polarization also. Because electability doesn't matter in a clumped district. Even an obviously unqualified candidate can expect to win the general election after winning the correct primary. And it's much easier to win a primary than a general election. Because primaries only include a partisan group of voters, they tend to produce candidates who are ideologically in the middle of that subset rather than the population as a whole. Meanwhile, if offered the choice, the voters excluded from the primary would prefer the more moderate candidate.

Answer 6

"In 2009, The Department of Justice sued members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (a group unaffiliated with the Black Panther Party of the 1960s) for brandishing a "police-style baton" to intimidate voters outside a Philadelphia polling station during the 2008 presidential election" (source: http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2009/January/09-crt-014.html)

I live in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and this type of voter intimidation continues to occur at my polling place. During the 2016 election I had to navigate quite a gauntlet to submit my vote. Although there was no evidence of batons or other weapons present, the seemingly organized group appeared to apply intimidation tactics solely on racial rather than political party affiliation.

Answer 7

One specific case is Louisiana. This page shows that Democrats controlled all levels of government from roughly 1878 - 1980.

During that time, the state enforced many Jim Crow voter suppression tactics.

A specific example is the Lousiana Literacy Test from the 1960s. That test asked questions that were designed to give the white registrar assessing the test wide latitude in passing or failing anyone. It was used primarily to fail blacks trying to register to vote. More on that test here.

Some example questions:

1. Draw a line around the number or letter of this sentence.
2. Draw a line under the last word in this line.
3. Cross out the longest word in this line.
4. Draw a triangle with a blackened circle that overlaps only its left corner.