How the election results were rigged by voter suppression

Brad Blog - While many Americans may be familiar with the surprise of Tuesday's reported results, not nearly as many are aware of the problems that plagued voters across the country. Here are just a few examples of those problems where not all, but most, seemed to skew the election and its results away from Democratic voters and towards the GOP:

• Polling place Photo ID and other voter ID voting restrictions have been shown, over and over again, in study after study and court case after court case, to adversely and disproportionately disadvantage Democratic-leaning voters. Wendy Weiser of NYU Law School's Brennan Center for Justice released a report on Wednesday, asking "how much of a difference did new voting restrictions", making it "harder to vote in 21 states" this year, have on the reported outcome of the elections?

Weiser rounds up up summaries of data in four states suggesting that "in several key races, the margin of victory came very close to the likely margin of disenfranchisement."

In the Kansas gubernatorial race, Weiser explains, Gov. Sam Brownback (R) beat challenger Paul Davis (D) by "less than 33,000 votes". ... "We know from the Kansas secretary of state that more than 24,000 Kansans tried to register this year but their registrations were held in 'suspense' because they failed to present the documentary proof of citizenship now required by state law."

... Weiser goes on to cite the Senate race in Virginia, where Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Warner, who had been pegged by pre-election polls to win by 8.5 points, beat Republican challenger Ed Gillespie by just .6, or "just over 12,000 votes". That, despite the state's new Photo ID law, enacted last year, which, according to the Virginia Board of Elections, means that "198,000 'active Virginia voters' did not have acceptable ID this year." Moreover, as Silver himself estimated when he worked for the New York Times (he now works for ESPN), such restrictive voting laws reduce turnout by about 2.4%, meaning, according to Weiser, "a reduction in turnout by more than 52,000 voters" in Virginia.

In Alabama, on the Friday before the election, the state Attorney General quietly issued an edict that Public Housing IDs would no longer be allowable for use in voting there under that state's Photo ID voting law. How many lost their right to vote on Tuesday?

In Arkansas, though the state's Photo ID restriction was struck down by the state Supreme Court after being found a violation of the state's constitution, poll workers were reportedly asking voters for Photo ID anyway, leading the Arkansas Times to declare there were "voter suppression reports from all over" on Election Day and a "steady stream of complaints...from voters who say election officials around Arkansas demanded a photo ID before they could vote today."

In that state, pre-election polls predicted that Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor was likely to lose to Republican Tom Cotton by 4.7 points. The results show him as having lost by 17.

In Texas, reportedly, "the number of provisional ballots cast more than doubled since the last mid-term election in 2010." That, after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a strict polling place Photo ID law to be implemented this year, and despite a U.S. District Court finding, after a full trial, that the GOP law was "purposefully discriminatory", an "unconstitutional poll tax" and could disenfranchise as many as 600,000 disproportionately minority and poor registered voters.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in a study earlier this year that polling place Photo ID restrictions in Kansas and Tennessee had decreased voter turnout in those states by 2 to 3% after they were enacted in 2012, and at even higher rates for minority and young voters.

• The Electronic Voter ID system went down for still unknown reasons in Florida in the Democratic stronghold of Broward County, resulting in voters who were unable to vote on Election Day. Gov. Rick Scott (R) is said to have defeated former Gov. Charlie Crist (D) there by just over 1%. Moreover, as Weiser notes, a host of new voting restrictions enacted by Florida Republicans over the last several years, included "a decision by Scott and his clemency board to make it virtually impossible for the more than 1.3 million Floridians who were formerly convicted of crimes but have done their time and paid their debt to society to have their voting rights restored." Might any of that had an adverse effect on the Democrats' results in the Sunshine State Tuesday night, an effect that wasn't picked up on in pre-election polls?

• Mysterious robocalls over the weekend before the election resulted in 2,000 election judges failing to show up for work at all in Illinois' Democratic stronghold of Chicago on Tuesday morning. The failure of one-fifth of the city's judges to show up resulted in many polls being short-handed during the morning rush or unable to open at all. Might that have affected the reported results in the Illinois Governor's race where the incumbent Democrat Pat Quinn was expected to win by .3, according to Silver's aggregated poll averages, but ended up losing instead by almost 5 points?

• Touchscreen votes were reported as flipping Democratic to Republican in Texas, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Virginia and elsewhere, including in North Carolina where 100% unverifiable touch-screen votes reportedly flipped from incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan (D) to her challenger Thom Tillis (R). She was predicted to win by a small margin in the pre-election poll average --- and even, reportedly, according to Election Day exit polls late in the day --- but she ended up reportedly losing by almost 2 points or about 48,000 votes.

• Registration issues plagued voters in a number of states. I've already mentioned the thousands of Kansas voters unable to vote in state elections this year, but what of those 50,000 voter registrations collected during a progressive registration drive in the state that were said to have never been entered into the system by the state's Republican Sec. of State? Might that have had an impact on the perceived "Democratic bias" in the polls compared to the results collected on the state's 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting system in the race for the open U.S. Senate seat between Democrat Michelle Nunn and Republican David Perdue. In that contest, the pre-election poll average projected a 6.4% better result for the Democrat than the one ultimately reported by the computer tabulators.

In New Mexico and in Louisiana, where there were important races for Governor and the U.S. Senate respectively, the GOP-controlled states are accused of undermining voter registration by failing to properly implement National Voter Registration Act requirements to offer voter registration opportunities to residents via social services outlets, such as those applying for drivers licenses or medicaid or food stamps.

Across the nation, as Greg Palast reported at Al-Jazeera last week, millions of voters were threatened with disenfranchisement in some 20 states, thanks to an "Interstate Crosscheck" database created by Kansas' Kobach with a number of other GOP-run states. The database, while secretly implemented, is supposed to check for possible multiple registrations by voters in those states. Palast reports, however, that the system is plagued with errors, disproportionately targets minority voters, and might have resulted in unknown numbers of voters inappropriately removed from the voting rolls entirely and/or challenged at the polls on Election Day.

• Not enough paper ballots left voters unable to vote verifiably in Ferguson, MO and elsewhere in St. Louis County, as well as the city of St. Louis. The jurisdictions scrambled to print and deliver new ballots throughout the day, but many voters were effected, particularly during the morning rush and late in the day, when lines grew long and polls had to stay open to accommodate those who could afford to wait. At one polling place in Florissant, a town just adjacent to Ferguson, a poll supervisor reported that when they opened the polling place in the morning "they only had five of one of the paper ballots when they typically need about 300 of that version."

Could the difficulty voters had casting a vote in the predominantly African-American areas of St. Louis served to skew final results in favor of Republicans there?

We could go on. And on. And on. And on. There were many more problems across the country, and undoubtedly others yet to come to light, but you get the idea. And, of course, none of that takes into account whether any of the reported results themselves were accurately tabulated by the oft-failed computer systems which tabulate almost all our nation's ballots.

How much impact did all of those factors --- and more we haven't mentioned and more still rolling in --- have on the results? We don't yet know. But to simply presume the independent pre-election polls by dozens of different pollsters, each using their own unique methodology, were all simply wrong (skewed towards Democrats) seems presumptuous at best, at this hour, and recklessly misleading.