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Trump win in 2016 may have been due to voter suppression December 8, 2018
Voter suppression may have given Donald Trump wins in states that otherwise would have gone to Hillary Clinton, and the Electoral College votes from those states would have given Clinton the presidency.
Hillary needed 39 more votes to turn around Trump’s 304 to 227 victory in the Electoral College. Trump won by small margins in these four states (source)
Florida had 29 electoral votes, Pennsylvania 20, Michigan 16 and Wisconsin 10, so Florida and one other state would have flipped it to Hillary.
There was plenty of voter suppression in Florida - way more than enough to produce Trump's 112,911 victory margin:
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have voter ID laws, even though voter fraud in the U.S. is virtually non-existent. In 2014, "three hundred thousand registered voters in Wisconsin lacked the forms of identification that Republican legislators deemed necessary to cast their ballots . . . In Milwaukee County, which has a large African-American population, sixty thousand fewer votes were cast in 2016 than in 2012." (source) "Wisconsin’s [overall] voter turnout [in 2016] was at its lowest level in two decades." (source)
Michigan has laws that make voting difficult for college students. One requires matching addresses for voter registration and driver’s licenses. "It effectively prevents college students from voting at school unless they change their permanent address on their license." Another "requires residents to vote in person for the first time if they registered by mail or third-party registration drive. This . . . can prevent college students from voting by absentee ballot in their first election." (source)
"Poll workers in Michigan incorrectly told voters that they needed to show identification to vote. While Michigan does have a voter ID law, it does not require an ID to vote; instead, voters have the option of filling out an affidavit swearing to their identity. There are no hard data on how many Michigan voters were improperly turned away for lacking an ID." (source)
Although Trump won by large margins in southern states like Alabama, Mississippi and Texas, it is not because residents are predominantly Republican. It is because those states are very accomplished when it comes to voter suppression. In her new book One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy, Carol Anderson tells of the huge effort made to get people registered and to the polls for the special state-wide election in Alabama to replace Senator Jeff Sessions. The effort succeeded. Republican Roy Moore was defeated by Democrat Doug Jones. This shows that, even in the old Confederate states, when all who wish to vote are allowed to do so, there is no sure win for Republican candidates.
On the bright side, steps are being taken at the federal level to make the voting process inclusive, efficient and secure. House Democrats are working on a bill that (source)
Sadly, the bill has no chance of passage as long as Republicans control the Senate or Trump is president. (See Republicans are a bigger threat to democracy than Russia.) That, God willing, will change in two years.
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