Does increasing election security amount to voter suppression?

[AgnosticBoy]

I've heard arguments from some on other forums and in the mainstream media that increasing election security leads to voter suppression. I've even heard this view come up in response to requiring voters to show ID. Ever since Trump lost his campaign, some state governments controlled by Republicans have pushed for additional voting laws, like Florida's SB 90 bill,

From Wiki:

The coronavirus pandemic meant that the 2020 United States elections had seen high levels of mail-in voting, with up to 46% of voters saying they voted by mail.[1] In Florida, 4.8 million voters chose to vote by mail, with more Democrats voting absentee than Republicans for the first time in several election cycles.[2][3]

After Joe Biden's election to presidency, Trump supporters unsuccessfully attempted to overturn the election results.[4] SB 90 is seen to be part of Republican efforts to restrict voting rights following the election.[5][6]

SB 90 restricts access to mail-in voting as well as limiting the ability of independent organisations to be involved with elections,[7] leading to the Brennan Center for Justice and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to describe it as a voter suppression measure.[8][9]

Supporters argue that the law is a preventative measure in order to "restore faith and confidence in elections".[10]

There are different arguments offered for not increasing election security and I'll list two common points from that side:
1. There is little fraud being committed in elections. Here's brief info. on that from vox.com...

The legislation is an odd about-face — but not a wholly unexpected one — for a state and governor who praised Florida’s election security and integrity gains. While DeSantis said in a statement last week that the new law is necessary to “do more to ensure our elections remain secure” and that “bad actors are held accountable,” investigations into the voter and election fraud that he and other Republicans allege repeatedly show that fraud is rare. One New York Times investigation, in which reporters called election officials in every state, found no evidence of substantial voter fraud. A separate Associated Press analysis found fewer than 475 possible claims of fraud out of 25.5 million votes cast in six battleground states. Florida’s secretary of state reported receiving 262 fraud complaints in 2020, with just 75 of them referred to law enforcement. The Trump administration’s own Homeland Security officials declared 2020 America’s most secure election in history.

2. Adding more security makes it harder to vote and suppresses voter turnout. The below info. is in reference to Florida bill SB90 which is talked about above in the Wiki article...

“The people who supported this bill have really demonstrated that what they’re interested in is, simply, making it harder to vote,” Scoon said. “Especially since they’ve brought nothing forward to suggest that election problems are happening at any scale at all in the state.”
...
“This bill doubles down on voter intimidation and barriers to voting, totally moving Florida in the wrong direction,” Kanter Cohen said. “The state should, after what was broadly considered to be a successful 2020 election, be moving toward increasing access to the ballot for Floridians.”

- Vox

For Debate:
1. Does increasing voter/election security amount to voter suppression?
2. Are the two views against election security valid? Do we not need an increase in security from what we have now because voter fraud rarely happens?

 

[Multicolored Lemur]

It’s accident history, but the whole thing with Florida in the year 2000 election.

Florida Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris hired some outside company to match up list of voters with lists of felons from other states.

Apparently, they didn’t pay attention to listed age or Social Security number, but they sure paid attention to race. And not sure how this worked, because if I were a black guy in Florida and my name matches up to some white person in North Carolina, for example, it seems like that would protect me as much as it would potentially hurt me.

But the whole thing was outrageous, that if I have a relatively common name, like “Lawrence Jackson” for example [not my real name, not even close!] . . . but if my common name gets matched up with that of a felon from another state, I get purged from Florida’s voter rolls? ! ? Apparently so.

So dicey that even the company hired didn’t want to do the last step of actually removing people from the rolls, so they just submitted the lists to the Florida Secretary of State’s office who did the dirty deed.

 

[AgnosticBoy]

It’s accident history, but the whole thing with Florida in the year 2000 election.

Florida Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris hired some outside company to match up list of voters with lists of felons from other states.

Apparently, they didn’t pay attention to listed age or Social Security number, but they sure paid attention to race. And not sure how this worked, because if I were a black guy in Florida and my name matches up to some white person in North Carolina, for example, it seems like that would protect me as much as it would potentially hurt me.

But the whole thing was outrageous, that if I have a relatively common name, like “Lawrence Jackson” for example [not my real name, not even close!] . . . but if my common name gets matched up with that of a felon from another state, I get purged from Florida’s voter rolls? ! ? Apparently so.

So dicey that even the company hired didn’t want to do the last step of actually removing people from the rolls, so they just submitted the lists to the Florida Secretary of State’s office who did the dirty deed.

That definitely shows how security measures can be very bad.

I'm very skeptical of third parties being brought in by a political party or a political candidate because there could be pushed to look for errors, esp. when it's the losing party that's paying for their services. There's that issue and the fact that these third parties probably are lacking knowledge of the voter process and laws. Take the Cyber Ninjas firm that was hired by Trump to audit the 2020 votes for president in Maricopa County, Arizona.

The much-delayed report from Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based firm whose owner had spread pro-Trump conspiracies, had been repeatedly hyped up by Trump himself.

Rather than finding that Trump defeated President Joe Biden in the competitive swing state’s most populous county, Cyber Ninjas tallied 99 additional votes for Biden and 261 fewer votes for Trump than previously counted, according to The New York Times, which obtained a copy of the draft.

“That should be the end of the story. Everything else is just noise,” Jack Sellers, chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, said in a statement.

“But I’m sure it won’t be,” he added, predicting that his board will be accused in the report of failing to cooperate with Cyber Ninjas. “How could we cooperate with an inquiry that was led by people who have no idea how to run any election, let alone one in the second largest voting district in the United States?”

Source: CNBC

Enough said!

 

[Multicolored Lemur]

“That should be the end of the story. Everything else is just noise,” Jack Sellers, chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, said in a statement.

I don’t want to make too much of this, because it’s certainly possible that the next outside group will come back and said, Oh, yes, massive fraud.

Look, it’s become an article of faith among the Always Trumpers [my term] that there was large-scale fraud.

And this has big doses of prejudice against African-American persons. For example, when Trump was saying Philadelphia was very corrupt, in his repetitive way as if he’s a stand-up comic building to a punch line,

well, not-coincidentally Philly has a lot of black citizens. Plus, it’s a rust belt city which reminds many small town and rural Americans of everything they oppose. At least the caricature of Philly.

Chicago is even better at this. Again, the caricature that is.

If Trump had actually been successful at bringing back manufacturing jobs [which no one can do, instead we need to bend the path as we go forward], you might see both Philly and Chicago becoming vibrant cities once again.