One Person, No Vote (YA edition): How Not All Voters Are Treated Equally

by Carol Anderson

First, at the time, Georgia was under the preclearance provision of the VRA and hadn’t bothered to ask the Department of Justice for approval. Yet because the counsel to the head of the Civil Rights Division, Hans von Spakovsky (appointed by Republican president George W. Bush) had, over the strenuous objections of the career attorneys at the DOJ, already approved Georgia’s voter ID law, the state assumed that it had little to fear when it came to employing Exact Match. Second, the databases of the DMV and secretary of state’s offices were fraught with errors—a missing “e” in the name Carole, a hyphen where one was not supposed to be, an errant “y” instead of an “i” in Nicki, or any of the other numerous typographical errors that can happen when two large bureaucracies are processing millions of applications.