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Concept
Voter suppression
Summary
Voter suppression is a strategy used to influence the outcome of an election by discouraging or preventing specific groups of people from voting. It is distinguished from political campaigning in that campaigning attempts to change likely voting behavior by changing the opinions of potential voters through persuasion and organization, activating otherwise inactive voters, or registering new supporters. Voter suppression, instead, attempts to gain an advantage by reducing the turnout of certain voters. Suppression is an anti-democratic tactic associated with authoritarianism. Some argue the term 'voter suppression' downplays the harm done when voices aren't reflected in an election, calling for terms like 'vote destruction' that accounts for the permanence of each vote not being cast.
The tactics of voter suppression range from changes that make voting more confusing or time-intensive, to intimidating or harming prospective voters.
Making it harder to vote for people who have been given the right, skewing the electorate. This leads to worse outcomes as the wisdom of the crowd generally leads to better decision-making. Suppression does not require intent. Analyzing the turnout of eligible voters provides a common way to study cumulative voter suppression impacts under a particular set of conditions, though other avenues such as election subversion, gerrymandering, and corruption, can't always be captured by voter turnout metrics. Additionally, some of the rules that work to suppress votes can also be used as a pretext for throwing them out, regardless of how trivial or cynical the initial rule is. A 5-year U.S. Justice Department initiative to find voter fraud convicted less than 100 individuals in a country with over 150 million voters (or less than 1 in a million voters).
A half-million Americans had their votes disqualified in 2008 and 2010 due to ballot design issues, including confusing instructions.
Official source
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