It’s not exactly news that America’s long experiment in representative democracy has always faced enemies, working in darkness, who seek to undermine it by sabotaging elections...most frequently via voter suppression. The faces change (once it was southern Democrats, now it’s midwest Republicans and Russians), but the song remains the same. Here’s what is news: cheaper, better, faster technology is now empowering grassroots activists to man the ramparts — citizens filling some critical breaches in election integrity that our governments have too long ignored.
I’ve written elsewhere about one such tool empowering democracy’s happy warriors: NC-GoVote’s Reg Watch service, which works like a credit report monitoring service, but for voter registration records. Now let me tell you what else we’re doing to defend the right to vote.
MIGHTY OAKS FROM LITTLE ACORNS GROW
As Reg Watch has grown to serve ever more North Carolina voters, the grassroots technologists who created it have come to realize that the infrastructure we built also has the power to expand, rather easily, to do much, much more: to catch and reveal organized voter suppression activities in real time, before they throw an election, in service to the entire North Carolina electorate — not just for voters who sign up for Reg Watch.
The principle is simple. Voter suppression efforts involve barring ‘the wrong sort’ of voters from the polls. Whether that is accomplished by preventing would-be voters from registering in the first place (as achieved in the Jim Crow era through poll taxes and literacy tests, or today’s needless voter ID laws), or whether instead it is accomplished by more illicit means such as 2016’s voter caging scheme run by North Carolina’s notorious Voter Integrity Project, voter suppression is all about racking up big numbers. Preventing one individual from voting doesn’t move the needle for democracy’s foes; they need to suppress tens or hundreds of thousands of voters at a blow to make the considerable effort that voter suppression entails worthwhile. And the same is equally true for democracy’s foreign enemies, such as the state-sponsored Russian hackers who intensively probed dozens of state voter registration systems in 2016 (and who should be expected to be back again in force this year).
But the thing about moving the needle via a massive voter suppression effort targeting a state’s poll book is that it necessarily leaves a trail of odd statistics in its wake. And rooting through mountains of data to turn up curious statistical anomalies is a solved problem, thanks to modern data science and cheap computing power.