Gender + Politics Podcast

This podcast episode discusses the gendered impact of voter ID laws in Texas and India. In Texas, recent legal cases have challenged the constitutionality of voter ID laws, arguing that they discriminate against minority women and impose financial burdens. In India, traditional patriarchal family structures and limited access to digital registration have hindered women's political participation. Efforts to educate and mobilize women voters have shown positive results. Overall, voter ID laws disproportionately affect women, particularly those in marginalized communities, and addressing these barriers is crucial for achieving electoral integrity. Hello and welcome to this podcast episode entitled Voter ID Laws, Neutral Policy or Patriarchal Reinforcers. In this episode, I will explore the gendered impact of voter ID laws via case study style analysis of voter ID laws in Texas and India. I selected Texas and India as my geographical areas of research and analysis due to the prevalence of conventional patriarchal family structures that permeate social and political life in both respective areas and, particularly in the case of Texas, the number of recent high-profile legal cases disputing voter ID laws in the state. Texas occupies a unique conservative position in the United States. Texas is the second largest state in the U.S. by land area, is allotted a large number of electoral votes per its sizable population, has a history of socioculturally holding traditional conservative family values, and is home to a sizable Latinx population that continues to grow. VZV Abbott and Texas Democratic Party v. Abbott are relatively recent legal cases in Texas that underscore bias within the state's voter ID laws and highlight the varied impact of identification laws on individuals seeking representation in the country by casting their vote, particularly minority women who are arguably subaltern in this political instance. The Constitutional Accountability Center outlines VZV Abbott as a case where Texas Senate Bill 14's constitutionality per the Voting Rights Act is challenged. SB 14 was challenged by VZ on the grounds that the bill was arbitrary and unduly impacted minority voters, particularly minority women, in contradiction to Section 2 of VRA. The arbitrary and discriminatory measures at issue were specifications about voter ID photo identification, which VZ held had a statistically significant impact on minority voters by limiting their ability and ease of registration and voting. VZ also held that SB 14 placed an undue financial burden on voters. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported for 2022 that women in Texas, on average, earned 83 percent of what their male counterparts earned. In light of the state's gender pay gap and VZ's holding that SB 14 placed an undue financial burden on the voter ID process, we can reasonably conclude that SB 14 places a specific burden on women seeking a voter ID in comparison to the burden of men seeking to register via the same means. In 2020, Texas Democratic Party v. Abbott took issue with a Texas law that required voters younger than 65 to provide an appropriate excuse in order to vote by mail. SCOTUSblog outlines the case and notes that the ruling was particularly relevant in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which a significant number of voters worked from home, some of whom continue to do so. SCOTUSblog notes that Texas's 5th District upheld the law, but perhaps the case would have played out differently if the case had been argued as an issue of equal protection and not an age discrimination case. While not strictly a voter ID case, I believe Texas's law on mail-in voting underscores the multifaceted ways that women are undermined in the political voting process. Women are more likely to be caregivers in the home, more likely to be the partners who quit their jobs to take care of children during the pandemic, and more likely to earn a lower medium wage, which results in less quote-unquote free time for them to seek out mailing in person. Mail-in voting is not only convenient for older citizens with limited mobility, but also for mothers and women in the workplace who are working harder for their dollar and contributing more work after they're 9 to 5 in a household context where men are not, on average, doing the same. With this understanding of Texas, let's move on to India. India is the largest democracy in the world. It has a long history of patriarchal and rigid family structures that explicitly and implicitly restrict women's mobility, and in recent years India has instituted voter ID laws around things such as digital registration in a society where more women than men are without digital access. In a journal article entitled Electoral Participation of Women in India, Key Determinants and Barriers, Praveen Rai asserts that the gendered nature of citizenship in India is a key factor in women's low political representation. For Rai, the differing socialization of women is to blame, and he notes that motherhood, marriage, and property ownership are key impediments within India's voter ID law system. Women's ability and expectation of registration are directly tied to her status as a wife and a mother, where in both pursuits her husband sociopolitically is favored. While laws are shifting, women in India historically had to have proof of property to register to vote, and since most property was owned by men, women were directly politically disadvantaged. As voter ID laws are shifting, India is on the cusp of an era dominated by digitized systems of voter identification. While cutting edge, these digital systems will place burden on women to prove their names through marital changes and require photo identification documents, which due to sociocultural norms, Indian women are less likely to have access to in relation to their male counterparts. In the piece entitled How Did Women Vote in Lok Sabha Elections in 2009 and the piece How Gendered Was Women's Political Participation, political writer and analyst Rajeshwari Deshpande finds that the national election study of 2009 demonstrates that as money and effort went into voter education and female mobilization between 2004 and 2009, women with voter IDs and women actively casting a vote increased between five and ten percent depending on the state. Deshpande's analysis reminds me of our class discussion about how women more so than men require direct motivation to take political action, and I feel this is a valuable statistic in light of efforts to make voter ID laws and voting generally more equitable. The Election Commission of India has a page on their website that is a direct call to women to register to vote. It explicates the nation's voter ID laws and offers up resources for registration and questions. This approach directly combats one of the biggest factors shaping women's ability to information. The cases of Texas and India demonstrate that while at first glance voter ID laws aim to organize and ensure the key democratic process of voting, these neutral laws in practice disproportionately impact women, namely women in marginalized communities due to conventionally women-specific conditions like changing one's last name after marriage and differential access to identification documents required for voter registration, and also gender pay gaps and household norms centered around a female caretaker. A 2017 nationwide survey conducted by Pew Research Center found that 84 percent of Democrats and 35 percent of Republicans in the United States favored making the voting process easier. This means that a 59 percent majority of the population at the time favored easier voting processes, which implicates more user-friendly and just voter ID laws. Exploring how voter ID laws create barriers for women to political participation emphasizes structural issues of electoral integrity and establishes a powerful incentive for lawmakers to engineer such laws with gender conditions and consequences at the forefront. In the electoral landscape, as with a multitude of other spaces, keeping gender in mind during the lawmaking process inherently implicates that we simultaneously reckon with socioeconomic dynamics in various historical contexts.