Voter Disorientation in New York
What happened in the New York primary may not be best described as voter suppression, but it was voter disorientation.
On the now-famous New York ballots for Tuesday’s presidential primary, voters were instructed to select six delegates.
But you didn’t have to select six. I knew that because I asked around beforehand if there were anything strange on the ballot that I should know about, and I was told that you can select a maximum of six delegates. The only thing that would disqualify your choices would be picking more than six delegates.
I voted, and so did many people. Our votes weren’t suppressed. But it was difficult. The people who designed those ballots definitely looked at the six delegates who were pledged to Clinton, and the five that were pledged to Sanders. They wrote, “Pick six delegates.” They thought of the likelihood that many people would see this ballot and believe that they needed to pick one Clinton delegate. And they decided that that was OK.
New York primary rules also dictate that you must be registered with a party six months in advance before participating in a primary. Someone thought of the prospect of independents and young voters deciding which party they want to vote with five, or four, or three months in advance, and then not being able to vote with that party. And they decided that that was OK.
They created a calendar that included the six month deadline. They decided not to post the calendar, and deadlines, on the NY Elections website. The most they did to make the information available was to post the calendar as a downloadable PDF, and they decided that was OK.
The people who voted for Sanders but voted for a Clinton delegate could have asked if the ballot’s instructions were correct and learned that the instructions were wrong, but it was a lot easier to not do that.
The people who registered five, four, or three months in advance could have registered six months in advance instead, but it was a lot easier to not do that.
I write instructions for a corporate IT department. I make enough money to be above the poverty line, but not enough to hear “Sanders and Trump supporters are frustrated white trash” without realizing that it refers to people with my wardrobe, my middle-salary job, and my state school degree.
Anyway, if thinking of how your instructions & procedures might disorient people, and then redoing them so that they orient people were a hard job, I’d be a wealthy man.
But I’m making about market rate, because asking yourself, “Is my goal to orient or disorient people?” and then asking yourself, “Are my instructions going to orient or disorient people” is not rocket science.
But asking those questions is not a priority of the city and state of New York, as their voting system indicates. They’re hiring people who aren’t good at the job, or they’re hiring people who are good at the job and encouraging them not to do it. They’re also definitively not hiring people who are good at the job and telling them to do it well.
The Clintonbros came out in full force to shame people for comparing this to voter suppression. And they’re about 40% right. This isn’t comparable to the massive shutdowns of polling places in Arizona. And it’s not comparable to the historic poll taxes and literacy tests.
So let’s not call it something that it’s arguably not. Let’s call it something that it definitely is: voter disorientation. Or call it voter deferment, as the supreme court did back in the sixties.
And if it’s your belief that voter disorientation makes for a better democracy, argue that.
And if it’s your belief that voter disorientation makes for less of a democracy, don’t let the argument get derailed with what is or isn’t “voter suppression.”
Bring it back to the basic, inoffensive question: when the people who write, publish, and disseminate voting information look at easily misconstrued instructions, and say “This is fine,” is that a good thing, or a bad thing?
