One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

by Carol Anderson

They target the socioeconomic characteristics of a people (poverty, lack of mobility, illiteracy, etc.) and then soak the new laws in “racially neutral justifications—such as administrative efficiency” or “fiscal responsibility”—to cover the discriminatory intent.

What the states could not accomplish by law, they were more than willing to achieve by violence. The wholesale slaughter of African Americans in Colfax, Louisiana (1873), Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), and Ocoee, Florida (1920) resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives simply because whites were enraged that black people had voted.

Denying the vote to millions of American citizens was so deeply rooted in the fabric of the nation, twisted into the mechanics of government, and embedded in the political strategy and thinking of powerful government officials that this clear affront to democracy was not going to change on its own. Fortunately, local resistance and global condemnation combined to take America to the brink of democracy.

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) passed with overwhelming majorities in the House of Representatives (328–74) and the Senate (79–18). Johnson signed the bill into law on August 6, 1965.101 Clarence Mitchell, the chief Washington lobbyist for the NAACP, said, “After five years of shameful events that increased tensions at home and caused embarrassment abroad, Congress finally gave a remedy it could have given in 1960.”102

That’s when the trouble began. Later that year, Sophie Spann, an African American woman, went down to the local grocery store to cast her vote in the election and was turned away because, the election official said, she had already voted absentee. That set off an investigation by the Pickens County district attorney followed by a tumultuous, haphazard trial that was so riddled with holes and contradictions that the appeals court labeled the key witnesses’ testimony “confusing,” “conflicting,” and an indecipherable “hodgepodge.” Of the thirteen “victims,” the only one who remained steadfast in insisting that her vote was stolen was Sophie Spann, who just happened to have “reared the sheriff’s deputy and son-in-law” and who was brought lunch by the sheriff personally before she took the stand. Based on Spann’s testimony alone, both women were found guilty by an all-white jury, whose verdict was upheld by the appeals court. Bozeman received a four-year prison sentence, and Wilder got hit with the maximum, five years, which for a sixty-nine-year-old could easily be a life sentence. These were “the stiffest [sentences] ever given in an Alabama voting fraud case.”133 The SCLC president, the Reverend Joseph Lowery, wailed that Bozeman and Wilder were “politically lynched.”

Long an opponent of the Voting Rights Act, Roberts had clerked under Justice William Rehnquist, whose initial foray into voting rights prior to his ascent to the Supreme Court included a project to purge as many minorities as possible from voting rolls in Phoenix.

Fifty-three years later, Chief Justice John Roberts looked directly at a similar situation where county commissioners in Alabama had annexed plot after plot, redrew boundaries, diluted the voting strength of black voters, and, this time, did so in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Unlike before, however, the Supreme Court, in a 5–4, decision, ignored all the evidence and drew instead upon the arguments hurled against the VRA since 1966. Refrains about states’ rights, black electoral success, regional discrimination, the end of racism, and the seeming calcification of the VRA became the key elements in the decision penned by Chief Justice Roberts in Shelby County v. Holder.

The Shelby County v. Holder decision thus gutted Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which determined which locales came under federal oversight. With that, GOP-led states, as if this were Alabama in the early 1980s, asserted that it was actually voter fraud, not voter suppression,

Therefore, 2016 was the first federal election in fifty years held without the protection of the Voting Rights Act. As a result, the rash of voter ID laws, purged voting rolls, redrawn district boundaries, and closed and moved polling places were the quiet and barely detected fire that burned through the 2016 presidential election, evaporating millions of votes and searing those who hadn’t even been under the original VRA.174 In Wisconsin, for example, black voting rates plummeted from a high of 78 percent in 2012 to less than 50 percent in 2016. In Milwaukee County, which is overwhelmingly African American, fifty thousand fewer votes were cast in a state that Donald Trump won by only twenty-seven thousand ballots.175 Meanwhile, Republican officials in North Carolina congratulated themselves that “African American Early Voting is down 8.5% from this time [four years earlier] in 2012.”

the state level for this very effective tool of disfranchisement. Obama had managed to bring fifteen million new voters to the polls in 2008.

In 2011 and 2012, therefore, the floodgates for voter ID laws opened and “180 bills to restrict who could vote and how” simultaneously appeared in forty-one states. This proposed legislation, which “seemed aimed at low-income voters, particularly minority voters, and at young people and the less mobile elderly” was something that “hadn’t been seen … since the end of Reconstruction, when every southern state placed severe limits on the franchise.”70 Paul Weyrich’s ALEC was behind this well-coordinated effort. In 2009, the group, which was founded in the 1970s and views itself as advancing “free market and limited government principles” by linking state legislators with corporate lobbyists, began to draft model voter ID legislation. With the GOP control of more than half the nation’s state governments,

Ohio has been in the forefront with this lethal maneuver. In fact, no state has been more aggressive or more consistent in attacking the heart of the NVRA. From 2011 to 2016, Secretary of State Jon Husted has wiped two million people from the state’s list of registered voters. Most important, 1.2 million of those have been eliminated solely because they voted infrequently.19 Yet the NVRA is crystal clear: people cannot be struck from the registration rolls simply because they did not vote in a few federal elections.20

For years, Ohio has taken an active role in culling the electorate and dissuading citizens from voting (or even having those votes count). Secretary of State Husted and his Republican predecessor Kenneth Blackwell have, for example, limited the number of polling stations for early voting in urban areas, thus creating untenable four-to-five-hour wait times in cities. These election officials have also tossed tens of thousands of absentee ballots, supposedly because they were cast on incorrect paper stock or had a spelling error.29 And, in a deposition, Husted’s top aide admitted that these so-called enforcement activities were actually targeted at the cities, while “white rural areas went nearly untouched.”30 In essence, the state has set up the equivalence of the old literacy tests, in which those Jim Crow states ensured that many of their citizens could not get a decent education and then turned around and required literacy to vote. Similarly, Ohio has set up a system whereby it blocks American citizens from voting and then purges them from the rolls … for not voting.

The deft art of gerrymandering, “the nastiest form of politics that there is,” is key to understanding the decline of democracy in America.

Two distinct types of gerrymandering emerged on the American landscape. One was racial; the other, partisan. Both were lethal. Racial gerrymandering, especially after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, would lead the courts on a circuitous path of trying to discern how to ensure that minorities had the chance to elect representatives whose interest aligned with theirs while guarding against the “packing” of African Americans or Latinos in one or two isolated districts, which meant those congressional representatives were mere tokens who would have absolutely no influence in the larger halls of power.10 That is to say, racial gerrymandering is designed to create an all-white power structure virtually impervious to the rights, claims, and public policy needs of minorities.