How Many People Have Registered To Vote In Indiana
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About two dozen states have expanded mail-in voting to make it easier for people to vote during the COVID-nineteen pandemic. Indiana is not one of them.
The country is one of v, including Texas and Louisiana, that have fought public pressure to permit all registered voters to bandage a ballot by post. Under current rules, Indiana voters need an excuse to vote absentee, such as being out of town on Election Day.
Lawmakers in Indiana have been focused on making it harder, not easier, to vote. In 2019, the country passed a constabulary that gave voters fewer days to request an absentee ballot and a law that banned voters from asking a judge to keep polls open longer if a polling station was having problems. A federal approximate struck downwardly the latter constabulary in September.
Indiana was ane of the first states to crave voters to show a photo ID at polling places, a practice that depresses Black and Latino turnout. The land'due south strict photo ID law, passed in 2005, was upheld by the U.S Supreme Court in 2008, opening the door for other states to follow accommodate. Kansas and Tennessee were among half a dozen states that did.
Indiana also shuts off voter registration 29 days before Election Day — the earliest engagement immune under federal law.
Here are two other issues that risk disenfranchising voters in Indiana:
Aggressive voter registration purges
Ballot officials are supposed to proceed voter rolls "upwardly to appointment" under federal police force. But voting rights advocates say Indiana went a step farther than about states by letting local elections officials abolish the registrations of Indiana voters without telling them.
For years, the state checked to see if Indiana voters were registered to vote in another state through the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Plan, which was launched past former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. If there was a match, Indiana let counties throw out a voter's registration without alerting them starting in 2017.
Voting rights groups challenged the law by filing a lawsuit after that year, maxim the Crosscheck program was unreliable. The plan, they said, could atomic number 82 to the removal of voters whose names were similar to people in other states just who hadn't actually moved. It was also more likely to flag minority voters. For case, researchers at Stanford and Harvard institute that Crosscheck's automatic organisation incorrectly flagged people equally possible double voters more than 99% of the time. The program was shut down in 2018, but Indiana created a nearly identical programme under the new police.
The lawsuit argued that Indiana's constabulary violates the National Voter Registration Act, which requires a notice and waiting period before a state tin can remove a voter who changes addresses. That gives voters a take chances to respond before their registration is cancelled.
"Given the background that, historically, vote purges take been used in the past as one method for suppressing minority voters, this should cause serious concern," January Mensz, a staff attorney at the American Ceremonious Liberties Union of Indiana, said at a voting rights hearing in March before the U.Southward. Commission on Civil Rights.
In Baronial, the seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the ACLU and other voting rights groups, blocking the country from throwing out registrations without notifying voters.
Information technology'due south unclear how many registrations Indiana canceled without notifying voters. Betwixt the 2016 and 2018 elections, Indiana removed 28.seven% of voter registrations from its rolls — far more than than any other state, according to data from the U.South. Election Aid Committee.
About this series
Stateline and the Center for Public Integrity are exploring how changes to polling places and other election shifts affect Americans' ability to vote. Stateline is an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Become to vote.org for information on how to vote in 2020.
Cuts to early voting locations
In May of 2017, Common Cause Indiana and two branches of the NAACP challenged an early on voting police in Marion County, home to big Blackness and Latino communities.
President Barack Obama had narrowly carried Indiana in 2008, largely considering of African-American and Latino support in Marion County, which includes Indianapolis.
The Marion County Board of Elections then cutting the number of early voting sites in the following years.
Between 2000 and 2016, officials reduced the number of early voting stations in the county from three to one, resulting in a 26% decline in absentee votes in the 2016 presidential election (early voters use absentee ballots in Indiana).
At the same time, officials added two early voting stations to the neighboring Hamilton Canton, which is domicile to many White Republicans.
The U.Southward. Commission on Ceremonious Rights warned in July that these changes disenfranchised people of color and the elderly who live in Marion County.
"The resulting long lines likely produced hardships in voting based on work and childcare schedules and transportation availability" wrote the Indiana Advisory Commission to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in July.
The lawsuit reached the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which dismissed the instance subsequently Marion County changed its voting system. Instead of the traditional system of assigning voters to a neighborhood polling station, the county opened vote centers where any registered voter in the county tin cast a ballot. The canton also agreed to open six early voting centers for the general election.
Source: https://publicintegrity.org/politics/elections/us-polling-places/indiana-has-made-it-harder-for-people-to-vote/
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