As Midterms Near, Rights Groups Help Voters Navigate Voting Barriers
As the Nov. 3 midterm elections approach, voting rights groups are mobilizing nationwide to help voters overcome an array of barriers, from registering to vote and reaching distant polling sites to navigating mail-in rules and obtaining government ID.
While nationwide turnout surged in 2024 to 64% — the second-highest rate since 1908, behind 2020 — retaining those gains may be harder this year due to a patchwork of barriers. These include a weakened Voting Rights Act, strict ID and registration requirements, limited drop boxes and polling places far from eligible voters without transportation or in remote areas.
These obstacles are particularly pronounced for minority and immigrant voters, many of whom are split by new redistricting maps and now face expanded federal data collection and rumors of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at polling sites.
Voters’ rights at the polls
John C. Yang, President and Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC, discusses the likelihood of ICE officers showing up at the polls and offers advice on what to do if you have an interaction with them.
“People should be able to vote without fear or intimidation at the polls,” said John C. Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, at a Sept. 25 American Community Media briefing. “This is your right.”
For voters who don’t know their rights or whether they’re registered, AAJC runs the assistance hotline 888-API-VOTE in English and nine Asian languages, where callers can check their registration, confirm voting methods in their area and get state-specific fact sheets on their rights.
Under the federal Voting Rights Act, one of those rights is language access: “Speaking English, reading or writing in English is not a requirement for participating in the election,” Yang explained. “You can bring an interpreter, a translator, to the polls with you, as long as they are not your employer or part of your union.”
Vote by mail
Mail voting also remains secure this November: A Sept. 14 Supreme Court order refused to lift a federal judge’s injunction against a new U.S. Postal Service rule for ballot mail, keeping the rule blocked through the midterms and allowing states to run mail voting as they have in past elections.
Nearly one-third of Americans, including roughly half of Asian American voters, cast mail ballots in the 2024 general election, representing more than 48 million total votes.
The rule — issued in August to implement President Trump’s March 31 executive order on “election integrity” — would have required every state and local jurisdiction to use USPS-approved ballot envelopes; upload the name, address and barcode of each mail voter to a new federal portal; and match that data exactly on each envelope, with ballots failing any of these checks going undelivered.
Rulings add to confusion
On Sept. 25, however, the Supreme Court separately allowed the Trump administration to resume using the Department of Homeland Security’s expanded SAVE database, which lets election officials use Social Security numbers to check voter rolls in bulk against federal citizenship and immigration records; the 6-3 order pauses a lower-court ruling that the expanded system violated Americans’ privacy.
Critics argue the SAVE system is deeply flawed and could result in millions of legal voters, including many naturalized citizens, being erroneously kicked off voter rolls.
Since federal law prohibits election officials from systematically unregistering voters within 90 days of an election, the order is projected to have little impact on the midterms as appeals continue.
“I think this decision leads to additional confusion,” Yang said. “Frankly, we know that federal databases are oftentimes inaccurate in what they say about voters, what they say about citizenship.”
While reports of ICE at polling sites are “at this point, just rumors,” he added, voters stopped by law enforcement have the right to ask: “‘Am I being detained?’ … and unless they give you a clear reason for being stopped, you can always ask, ‘Am I free to go?’ And they should allow you to leave.”
Voter ID barriers
Monica Spencer, Georgia state director for VoteRiders, explains why so many people don’t have an i.d., and discusses the challenges of getting a government-issued identification.
While ID is generally not required to register to vote, 38 states have laws requiring or requesting that voters show some form of ID at the polls.
“Voter ID laws undermine and distort democracy,” said Monica Spencer, Georgia state director at VoteRiders. “By creating unnecessary and expensive barriers to the voting booth, they block millions of voters from participating in the democratic process and make our country weaker, less representative and certainly less inclusive.”
For voters needing help, VoteRiders pays for state IDs and the documents needed to get them, such as birth and marriage certificates, and provides transportation to Social Security and Department of Driver Services offices, with help available in-person or online.
Overall, more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to proof of citizenship like a passport or birth certificate.
Roughly half of Americans don’t have a passport, including 55% of registered Republican voters; nearly 21 million voting-age U.S. citizens lack a current driver’s license; and another 29 million have licenses that do not reflect their current name or address.
In Georgia, where an ID costs anywhere from about $10 to more than $100 and there is often no available public transit, taxi or rideshare in rural areas, one young woman Spencer helped had gone to the Department of Driver Services five times; each time she was told to bring one more document. With VoteRiders’ help, she got her ID and voted.
About 76,000 adult citizens do not have documents they need to vote in Georgia under the state’s current voter ID law, according to VoteRiders — while Georgia’s 2020 presidential race was decided by just 11,779 votes.
Spencer recalled another woman living in a long-term recovery shelter who teared up after getting her ID: “She said ‘I feel human again.’ And unfortunately, our humanity is encased in a little plastic card or paper document, and without it, an individual is devalued, discriminated against, and — in the case of voting — is not allowed to vote.”
Helping voters on the ground
Across Texas in Houston, Dallas and the Rio Grande Valley, Mi Familia Vota canvassers are relying heavily on direct contact with voters to help them understand ID requirements and navigate registration, said Jesus Zamora, the organization’s field director.
Texas has no online voter registration. Forms can be printed from state or local government websites and completed at home, but they must be mailed to the right county elections office.
For people with limited transportation or language barriers, that step often becomes an hurdle, said Zamora, adding that while mail voting is available for limited categories of voters like the elderly and disabled, “even minor errors on an application can hinder someone from voting.”
In Tarrant County alone, which borders Dallas and includes Fort Worth, county commissioners voted Sept. 2 to reduce polling locations by nearly 100.
While canvassing and hosting phone banks, Mi Familia Vota volunteers and staff regularly meet and help voters whose nearest polling site is a 30-to-40-minute walk away, connecting them with rideshare groups and walking them through voting processes step by step.
While Latinos comprise more than 40% of Texas residents — the state’s largest ethnic group — “the demographics only translate into local representation when community members are registered and ready to participate,” Zamora said. “The biggest thing is building trust within community and ensuring that they just don’t see us during election season. They see us year-round.”
Native American voters ‘locked out’
Long distances to ballot boxes and a lack of opportunities to register to vote are among the barriers Native Americans face when trying to vote, says Jacqueline de Leon, staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund.
For Native American communities, one of the most salient barriers is physical access to the ballot, said Jacqueline De León, senior staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund.
On many reservations NARF serves nationwide, some residents must drive upwards of 100 miles roundtrip to obtain an ID, register to vote or cast a ballot, while lacking conventional residential addresses can “lead to outsized rejections of their registrations,” she continued.
Without home address delivery, voters must also travel to post offices and pay for P.O. boxes just to receive election-related mail.
“Native Americans are really structurally locked out of voting in many cases,” De León said. “Polling places on reservations, as well as registration opportunities on reservation, are very obvious solutions. It is incredibly frustrating to us that when we ask for straightforward and equitable services, we’re often denied.”
With approximately 9.7 million American Indian and Alaska Native people in the U.S., Native voters can swing major elections in states including Alaska, Arizona, Michigan and Montana.
Ahead of the midterms, NARF is deploying about 300 poll watchers across rural Indian Country. The organization also hopes to advance the bipartisan Native American Voting Rights Act — expanding on-reservation registration and polling sites, requiring acceptance of tribal IDs and ending residential address requirements — in the next session of Congress.
“It’s still too hard to vote in America for too many voters across the country, especially minority voters that are increasingly getting cut out of access,” De León said. “We’re here and ready to fight for every voter.”
SELEN OZTURK
ACoM editor and research director Selen Ozturk was born in Istanbul and raised in the Bay Area. She holds a philosophy degree from UC Berkeley. Her work has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, SFGATE, Bay City News, PopMatters, and Senses of Cinema, among many other outlets.
