Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

by Stacey Abrams

Following the tumult of the Bush v. Gore election of 2000, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002. Federal lawmakers wanted to limit the ways voting processes differed from state to state, and they picked high-profile problems to address, like replacing the infamous punch-card and lever-based voting systems, establishing the Election Assistance Commission, and setting minimum standards for voting across the country. One of those standards was mandating the provisional ballot, which required states to allow eligible voters who might be rejected to cast ballots anyway, especially in light of administrative errors. Prior to HAVA, a voter might be turned away from a precinct if his name didn’t appear on the rolls or if her address had changed but not been updated in the state’s records. Intended as a fail-safe for voters, like most other election laws, the process for handling and counting provisional ballots differs by state. In the hands of vote suppression masters, the provisional ballot provides not safety but a guarantee against full democratic rights. In 2018, states with a history of voter suppression had high rejection rates of provisional ballots. Arizona rejected 14,902 provisional ballots. Florida canceled the votes of 8,345 provisional voters and Georgia refused 9,699 provisional ballots. North Carolina rejected 17,578 ballots, and Texas tossed out 40,834 votes. The rejection rate ranged from a low of 28.64 percent in Arizona to a high of 75.37 pe...