Подавление избирателей: практика "очистки" списков и ее последствия.

voter suppression

Voter caging involves challenging the registration status of voters and calling into question the legality of allowing them to vote. Usually it involves sending mail directly to registered voters and compiling a list from mail returned undelivered. Undeliverable mail is seen as proof that the person no longer resides at the address on their voter registration. The resultant list is then used by election officials to purge names from the voter registration rolls or to challenge voters' eligibility to vote on the grounds that the voters no longer reside at their registered addresses. In the United States, the practice of purging voter rolls has been challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union, Fair Fight Action, and other voting rights advocates in the courts for perceived racial bias when minority neighborhoods are targeted, and some courts have declared such purging illegal under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. However, the practice remains legal in many states, and the U. S. Supreme Court rejected a 2018 legal challenge to Ohio's list maintenance process.

Voter caging typically refers to the practice of sending mail to addresses on the voter rolls, compiling a list of the mail that is returned undelivered, and using that list to purge or challenge voters' registrations and votes on the grounds that the voters on the roll do not legally reside at their registered addresses. The party uses caging lists created by themselves or by the Board of Elections to challenge the registration status of voters and potentially purge them from the voting rolls under state laws that allow voters whose registrations are suspect to be challenged. When voters turn out to vote, they may be challenged and required to cast a provisional ballot. If investigation of the provisional ballot demonstrates that the voter has just moved or there is an error in the address and the voter is legally registered, the vote should be counted. Voter caging is an unreliable method of determining if a voter is ineligible to vote and is usually used with partisan aims to target members of the opposing party. According to the Brennan Center, "Voter caging is closely related to other techniques that use unreliable data to draw undue conclusions concerning voters eligibility and then seek to use those conclusions to justify blunt and sweeping purges and challenges." Some reasons that voter caging is unreliable include typos in voter addresses or streets having been renamed, mail incorrectly delivered, voters not receiving mail at a particular address or refusing mail delivery, temporary addresses used by homeless persons, voter away from their residence or voters moving permanently but otherwise still eligible to vote. Voter caging may thus be legal if the primary purpose is to identify those who are not properly registered to vote and to prevent them from voting illegally but not if the primary purpose is to disenfranchise legitimately registered voters on the basis of a technicality. In January 2018, the U. S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Husted v. Randolph Institute, a legal challenge to Ohio voter caging laws. The Court upheld Ohio's list maintenance practice in a 5–4 decision issued in June 2018. The RNC sent letters to predominantly black neighborhoods in New Jersey in 1981. When 45,000 letters were returned as undeliverable, the committee compiled a challenge list to remove those voters from the rolls. The RNC then sent off duty law enforcement officials to the polls and hung posters in heavily black neighborhoods warning that violating election laws is a crime. The effect was to suppress or intimidate black voters. In Louisiana in 1986, the RNC tried to have 31,000 voters, mostly black, removed from the rolls when a party mailer was returned. Again, the action was challenged and dismissed. The consent decrees that resulted prohibited the party from engaging in anti fraud initiatives that target minorities or from conducting mail campaigns to "compile voter challenge lists."

In the years since the original 1982 consent decree on voter caging, a series of suits and countersuits between the RNC and the DNC as well as civil rights groups and labor unions ensued. The RNC would attempt to have the consent decree lifted and other parties would attempt to have the decree enforced in specific cases in which the plaintiffs would allege the RNC was in violation of the decree. In November 2008, the RNC sought to have the consent decree lifted in the U. S. District Court in Newark (Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee). Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise rejected the effort, and his ruling was upheld by the Third US Circuit Court of Appeals. The Third Circuit ruling found, "It is not in the public interest to vacate the decree." It also stated, "If the RNC does not hope to engage in conduct that would violate the Decree, it is puzzling that the RNC is pursuing vacatur so vigorously notwithstanding the District Court's significant modifications to the Decree."

"On October 26, 2016, the DNC filed a motion asking that the court find the RNC had violated the decree. On November 5, after abbreviated discovery, the district court denied the DNC’s request, ruling that the DNC had not provided sufficient evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and the RNC on ballot security operations, but will allow the DNC to offer further evidence after the election," according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

In 2016, Indiana came under lawsuit for using software to purge voters that was described as "99% inaccurate".

On January 8, 2018, the US District Court for the District of New Jersey refused to extend the consent decree beyond its previous December 1, 2017, expiration date, because, “the DNC did not prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, a violation of the [1982] Consent Decree before December 1, 2017”. Harvard Law Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos suggested this decision was at least partially influenced by a general decline in the willingness of courts to intervene in election law issues, as witnessed by several moderately recent decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States, especially in Shelby County v. Holder. He wrote, “the half century in which federal courts have decided redistricting cases can be divided into two periods: one lasting from the 1960s to the 1980s, in which voters and politicians were both comparatively nonpartisan; and another reaching from the 1990s to the present day, which amounts to perhaps the most hyperpartisan era in our country’s history.”