Stacey Abrams is fighting voter suppression – but how widespread is it?

The former lawmaker Stacey Abrams – who energized Democrats in Georgia with her near-miss run for governor there – said this week that she would not enter the Democrats’ race to be the party’s 2020 presidential candidate.

Instead she will be focussing on a new initiative aiming to protect voters in battleground states around the country, although she added she is open to being a running mate in a presidential bid.

Abrams, who accused her ultimately successful Republican opponent Brian Kemp of voter suppression in Georgia’s gubernatorial race last year, launched the Fair Fight 2020 campaign, saying: “There are only two things stopping us in 2020: making sure people have a reason to vote and that they have the right to vote.”

Andrew Gillum, a former gubernatorial candidate for the Democrats in Florida, similarly earlier this year launched a big voter mobilization campaign in the crucial state, Bring it Home Florida.

But what is the size of the challenge to tackle voter suppression?

‘17 million voters purged’

At least 17 million voters were purged nationwide between 2016 and 2018, according to a recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice.

The report, released earlier this month, found that US election jurisdictions with histories of egregious voter discrimination have been purging voter rolls at a rate 40% beyond the national average.

Some states have made it harder to vote by aggressively purging voters because their names in voter rolls do not exactly match other state records, or owing to voter inactivity. Georgia removed 107,000 voters from rolls in July 2017 for non-voting, and 53,000 voter registrations – 70% of them for African American voters – were flagged for review under the state’s “exact match” rule.

Strict voter ID laws

Research has shown that strict voter identification laws suppress voter turnout and favor Republican candidates. As of 2018, 10 states – all with Republican-controlled legislatures – have strict voter ID laws in place, meaning voters without acceptable identification must vote on a provisional ballot and also take additional steps after Election Day for it to be counted, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. An additional 10 states request a photo identification for citizens to vote, and 35 states total request some form of voter identification at the ballot box.

Restrictive voter ID laws disproportionately affect Native American voters, especially those who live on reservations and do not have standard residential addresses. And states with such laws may not accept tribal IDs as a valid form of identification. Ahead of the 2018 elections, communities in North Dakota mobilized to overcome any hurdles imposed by the state’s voter ID law.

Polling station closures

To make it more difficult to vote, some states have closed polling stations, limited early voting or reduced polling hours. States once required under the Voting Rights Act to obtain federal preclearance for changes in voting procedures – a requirement that was dropped after a 2013 supreme court decision – have closed almost 20% more polling stations per capita than jurisdictions in the rest of the country, a Vice News investigation found.

The trend has resulted in confusion and long wait times at polling locations on Election Day.

‘Only 31 cases of voter fraud’

This week Donald Trump repeated his warnings of voter fraud – which has long been a Republican talking point, and criticized by many experts as a cover for voter suppression moves by the party.

Trump tweeted:

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) No debate on Election Security should go forward without first agreeing that Voter ID (Identification) must play a very strong part in any final agreement. Without Voter ID, it is all so meaningless!

In a piece for the Guardian last year Carol Anderson pointed out: “As the law professor Justin Levitt has documented, between 2000 and 2014, there have only been 31 cases of voter identification fraud out of one billion votes.”

• This article has been corrected to make clear Abrams ran in the election for Georgia’s governor in 2018