OK, just for those who have decided that speaking about Voter Suppression is a Joke. read below

[Igel]

10. You have to have your wits about you when talking voter suppression.

It's not always what it seems.

A lot of minority areas are heavily (D) and have (D) voting boards that make the decisions that lead to long lines. Is this voter suppression? No, they're doing the best they can. They have limited budgets and experience or are constrained to follow historical trends. Then polls are swamped by an influx of new voters and we see lines. It's called a "fundamental attribution error" and is a minor kind of fallacy--we assume that what a person does or did reflects something essential to their personality and being instead of being forced by circumstances or lack of time.

A lot of low education areas have always had increased numbers of spoiled ballots. I used to live in such an area and twice in 4 years followed some voter who couldn't figure out how to cast their ballots. I'd go to the voting machine that was next empty and find that choices had been made but no vote cast. Once the woman had gotten to the confirmation or review page, and in the other the person had gotten through about 10 races and walked away. We don't have paper ballots, so these weren't "spoiled".

There's also another correlation between some of the "suppression" and education. You can intelligently vote for just the races that interest you. Or you can vote for all the races, because they all interest you and you know things about them or you can vote unintelligently. A lot of low-ed voters will vote almost randomly (they're mocked by the the "I like to vote" option you see in some DU polls). A lot will vote just for some races. Both sets of data have been claimed to be supression--ignoring votes that "must" have been cast or "flipping" votes that were randomly cast. Then there *are* the cases of actually flipped votes or missed votes and you can't tell the difference. Except that these kinds of things happened with paper ballots under close supervision, so we know that this happens.

Voter turnout was suppressed in Houston by the new voter ID laws. Except that the one published, peer reviewed paper that checked into this found that most of those voters "suppressed" by the laws actually did have the ID necessary to vote. They'd been told that it was highly unlikely they had the ID because the nasty (R) were out to get them, and didn't try to vote. Their vote was suppressed more by progressive claims and voter ignorance about the law than the law itself.

My high school has a reasonably high student turnover rate, kids who transfer in and out during the school year--some transfer in and then out during the same year. Map that against demographics and you see the wealthier or whiter populations are more stable. Many have lived in the same house for their entire lives, or at least many years. In some cases their great-grandfather owned the land and it's been lived on by that family since the 1880s. Look at poor or minority students and they have a much higher turnover rate. When a black kid transfers in in October there's a decent chance he'll transfer out in March. I lost as many black kids as white kids during the last school year, but blacks were 15% of my class. People who move a lot are those that are targeted for being purged, because when they move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction they may not re-register, and they certainly don't unregister in their old voting place (seriously, who does?). That's going to mostly hit poor, meaning disproportionately minority, areas. And given a finite error rate, the poor and minorities will have greater numbers affected.

I almost had my vote "suppressed" once. I was a new voter in California and we used punch cards. Paper trail and all that. Except that the machines had been cleaned out in the morning, voter turnout preferred a few candidates, and some wells that would catch the chads were full. You had to push really hard to produce a readable hole. If you didn't catch this fact, you'd fake vote but not actually vote.

While working polls in NY state I saw people go into voting machine booths (the lever kind of machine) and leave without casting their vote. Somebody else could have come along and changed the settings and cast their own vote or vote twice. One way would leave a mismatch between voter count and votes cast and raised a red flag. The other would have been voter fraud.

I saw poll workers give instructions that voided ballots. I saw poll workers have voters sign in the wrong places so that others would show up and see that they already signed in and presumably voted. I've seen poll workers challenge voters and require that they get ID before voting. I've seen poll workers create a disruption that caused people who had signed the poll book to leave without voting--and having no option to vote later--and people go and vote without having signed in, so they could, in principle, vote twice. I've seen poll workers put out the polling place sign too close to the station in order to leave their party's publicity materials outside the zone and poll workers try to put the polling place sign too far from the station to make sure that their opponent party's publicity materials were inside the zone. This was (almost) always fixed.

The only serious problems that involved ideology were the (most of) the voided ballots, where the (D) precinct chair carefully (mis)instructed (D) voters how to fill out provisional ballots. He'd been local party chair, so it wasn't a false-flag thing. Just arrogance. And the disruption(s) were also (D)-led because we were in a mostly (R) area and the workers either started to argue with (R) voters about their choices out of frustration or just get up and yell that she couldn't believe how stupid Republicans were.

Challenging voters also involved ideology, but it was spread evenly. A (R) might challenge a voter, and the (D) poll worker or observer would balance it. Some voters left and returned. Some never returned. Why was it clearly ideology? Because in a case or two the poll worker *knew* the person he was challenging, and that he was in the opposite party. "Dan, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you to show appropriate ID." "But you've known me for 20 years." (Grin.) "Sorry. Get along, now."

In other words, there are lots of "suppression" that are just built in. Poll worker stupidity or emotion, voter stupidity or impatience, BOE limits on funding or equipment or experience, error rates in purging records, public advocates who want to stress the injustice of laws and who accidentally convince some voters that there's point in trying to vote against such injustice. Many of these have partisan skews, but they're neither new nor surprising. They can be fixed, though, but as long as we need to focus on a mis-generalized understanding of the causes for outrage purposes we won't see the problems we can fix.