A sign directing early voters sits in a hallway Tuesday in the Porter County Administration Building, set up at the start of early voting for the county’s municipal primaries in 2019. (Amy Lavalley / Post-Tribune)
Democratic House members have been proposing bills or amendments to increase voter turnout in the current legislative session, but a vast majority have been voted down by the Republican supermajority in the house.
Election officials and political scientists say that the recent inaction of voting legislation adds to the trend of voter suppression in the state and across the nation by Republicans who they say use efforts to hold back voting to ensure their candidates win election.
“They can’t win without it,” Lake County Democratic Party Chairman James Wieser said. “The demographics of the United States is changing. The Democratic Party is consistent with a society that’s made up of the demographics that we are.”
Lake County Republican Party Chairman Dan Dernulc said he “respectfully disagrees with (his) good friend” about voter suppression.
“There is no voter suppression. It’s all in their head,” Dernulc said.
Rep. Vernon Smith, D-Gary, has drafted a bill to allow for same-day voter registration, which would allow people to register to vote on election day and then cast their ballot.
The bill has been assigned to the house Elections and Apportionment committee, but hasn’t been discussed. Smith is the only author of the bill and bills that typically move forward have at least one author from each party.
Rep. Tonya Pfaff, D-Terre Haute, proposed an amendment to a various election matters bill that would have allowed voters to cast an absentee ballot without an excuse.
“Last June, Indiana showed that we could conduct an election with no-excuse absentee voting without any incidents of fraud. The change resulted in more people voting in the primary election,” Pfaff said.
The amendment was voted down 66-28.
Rep. Cherrish Pryor, D-Indianapolis, proposed an amendment an election bill that would add a voting location for every 5,000 active voters in counties that have at least 25,000 active voters.
The amendment is a shift in current state law, which requires a voting center for every 10,000 active voters — and it would only affect three counties that would need to add voting center, according to a news release.
“Voting should be accessible, and it’s as simple as that,” Pryor said. “More locations encourage turnout and it also reduces long lines, which are a deterrent.”
The amendment failed in a 61-29 vote.
Marjorie Hershey, professor emerita of political science at Indiana University Bloomington, said because the legislature is dominated by Republicans makes it challenging for Democrats “to get their views through.”
The issue of voter suppression in Indiana became apparent in the early 2000s when the current Attorney General Todd Rokita was secretary of state and “convinced” the legislature to adopt the photo identification law, Wieser said.
At that time, Wieser, the attorney for the Lake County Election and Voter Registration Board, said he sat on a committee with Rokita to craft election laws and recalls that Rokita was “just laser focused on having to have” a photo identification law.
Wieser said Rokita, a Munster native, and the Republican legislators supported the law because they believed it would prevent fraud.
“Once again, as so often happens in this state with the Republican super majority, they always provide a solution in search of a problem,” Wieser said.
There is no history of voter fraud at the polls, Wieser said, and very limited incidents of voter fraud when voting by mail. But, the idea of voter identification was important to Rokita, he said.
The photo identification law went further to limit the type of identification that could be used, Wieser said, which directly affects marginalized groups and older residents who may no longer have a driver’s license.
“The direct impact of it was to make it substantially more difficult for certain folks, primarily minorities and folks of lesser economic needs, to be able to vote, who didn’t have the type of ID that the state required,” Wieser said. “That was the first time and it’s just gone on from there.”
Dernulc said the voter ID law was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, which means it is a sensible law.
Hershey said she was part of that lawsuit, and while the voter ID law was sustained, many judges “later turned around and said they had been mistaken.” There is a trend of states with Republican majorities having a variation of photo ID laws, she said.
The majority of photo ID laws state a driver’s license is valid, but that eliminates people without a car, Hershey said. In Indiana, 10% of eligible voters lack a driver’s license because they don’t have cars, she said.
In some instances, the photo ID law allows for an alternate identification if a voter doesn’t have a driver’s license, but getting an alternate ID requires documents that some voters may not have access to, such as a birth certificate, Hershey said.
“It’s clear that a lot of these are partisan in their intent,” Hershey said. “Voter fraud is not a major problem in American elections. There have been studies after studies that have shown that in-person voter fraud at the polls, which is what these ID requirements are designed to get away from, is so minuscule that you can find only handfuls of cases among literally billions of votes cast.”
Voter suppression has taken on many forms since the voter ID law, Wieser said, from limiting absentee by mail voting to people who fit certain criteria to not allowing voter registration on election day.
Lake County felt the impact of voter suppression when in 2018 the state “singled out Lake County out of 92 counties” to consolidate precincts, which reduced precincts and reduced the number of people involved with the process, he said.
The consolidation plan hit Gary, Hammond and East Chicago the hardest with those cities losing nearly half of their voting precincts, Wieser said.
The Lake County Democratic Party fought the precinct consolidation “from several different approaches,” from filing two lawsuits and delaying implementation of the law, but ultimately the party wasn’t successful in stopping the consolidation, Wieser said.
“We kind of modified it, but we weren’t able to prevent it. It does disproportionately impact the minority population because, we know and everybody understands that, the demographics have shifted in Lake County, and we adjusted for that,” Wieser said.
In fact, because the demographics have been shifting, Wieser said that the county’s election board had already adjusted precincts to reflect that. But it wasn’t enough for the state, which issued the precinct consolidation for the county, Wieser said.
“We think that polling places should be in the neighborhood and should be in the community,” Wieser said.
Dernulc said Indiana’s election laws are fair and that voters need to take initiative in the voting process.
“The rules and law are simple. People need to take ownership. If they really want to vote they can do that within the guidelines,” Dernulc said.
On a national level, Republicans “know they can’t compete without engaging in this kind of conduct,” Wieser said.
“ (Voter suppression) is constant. They never give up on it,” Wieser said. “It’s simply wrong in a country founded on democratic principles. You get warn down by trying to consistently and constantly have to oppose this type of legislation.”
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