POLS 125 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Donald Trump Presidential Campaign, 2016, Voter Registration In The United States, Voter Suppression

• School: University of Vermont
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POLS 125
• Professor: Deborah Lynn Guber

Document Summary

With a narrow margin of victory and electorate split down the middle, political parties increasingly battle over turnout. Low propensity voters: people who are unlikely to vote and or haven"t voted in the past: trump focused on these voters in 2016. Do something strategies are fraught with political pitfalls, as accusations of playing favorites, rigging elections, or suppressing the vote often fly. Literacy tests and poll taxes were used for years to systematically disenfranchise black men in the south and grandfather clauses protected whites from these: used in addition to intimidation and physical violence. Voter suppression of blacks has forms still today: disinformation campaigns, targeted ads and micro targeting that other groups can"t see, voter id laws. Fraud used as the justification for voter id laws: people argue these are new form of a poll tax. The issue is the difference between different groups from accessing required ids: voting fraud is extremely rare with only 2000 cases since 2000.