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

by Carol Anderson

his 2005 confirmation hearings to serve as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Roberts said that the right to vote “is preservative … of all the other rights.” His new black robe was barely wrinkled eight years later when, in the Shelby County v. Holder case, he cast the deciding vote to overturn a key provision of the Voting Rights Act requiring preclearance of new election laws in states with a history of voter discrimination.

recent study found that in the 2016 election, Wisconsin’s voter ID law deterred nearly 17,000—and perhaps as many as 23,000—eligible voters in two counties from casting ballots. President Trump’s margin of victory in Wisconsin was only 22,748 votes.

Minority voters did not just refuse to show up; Republican legislatures and governors systematically blocked African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans from the polls.

Deliberate underfunding of black schools was critical to the literacy test’s disfranchising success.

And second, in 1921 the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in Newberry v. United States that the federal government, and, thus, the U.S. Constitution itself, had no authority over the conduct of primary elections in the states.

In the original confined districts, African Americans’ numbers were large enough to carry enormous electoral weight. Yet literacy tests, poll taxes, and Election Day terror had nullified that power and reduced black voter registration to the single digits. Therefore, there was no possibility of an African American candidate, or even a candidate openly attuned to the black community’s concerns, winning an election. So long as disfranchisement shut down the black vote, white Mississippi felt safe. After the Voting Rights Act, however, those districts could easily produce African American elected officials. Mississippi opted, therefore, to diffuse or dilute the black vote among a sea of whites by erasing the district boundaries and requiring candidates to run and succeed in a much wider geographical (and demographic) area. These supposedly race-neutral changes, one Mississippi legislator candidly admitted, would “preserve our way of doing business.”109

Sessions was “someone who thinks that the VRA ought not to have ever been in existence” because, for him, it was an “intrusive piece of legislation.”145 Thus, in a move that flipped the Voting Rights Act on its head, his investigation targeted only counties where African Americans had won office.

Even years after her ordeal with Jeff Sessions, Evelyn Turner declared, “I’ll never forget, as long as I stay black.”150

Five conservative justices, who often denounced what they called an activist judiciary, and federal overreach in general, now ruled that Florida did not have the right to count the ballots in the election held in its own state.154 In fact, no entity could tally those votes. The recount violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, the justices contended, because the process was for those counties with numerous electoral failures and, therefore, some people, somehow, somewhere (that would be in those counties where the polling machines actually worked) weren’t going to have their votes counted again.

George W. Bush, however, didn’t believe the situation was hopeless. While only 9 percent of African Americans voted for him, 35 percent of Hispanics had cast their ballot for Bush.158 His strategist, therefore, argued that the Republicans could broaden their appeal to minorities and thus avert the demographic apocalypse that awaited a party that was nearly 90 percent white. In addition to immigration reform, one of his key strategies was to have full White House and bipartisan support for the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.159

Intent, of course, was nearly an impossible threshold of proof, requiring racially explicit memos or taped conversations, especially in an era that was so consciously colorblind but race-aware.166

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.

Quotable.

Just as in Florida, Election Day 2000 in St. Louis was a “chaotic mess.”13 The St. Louis City Board of Elections had not only illegally purged nearly fifty thousand names from the voter rolls in key Democratic precincts but had also failed, as the law required, to notify the people the board had just disfranchised.

Paul Weyrich, a conservative activist and founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which eventually crafted voter suppression legislation that spread like a cancer throughout the United States, was brutally clear: “I don’t want everybody to vote.”

The requirement for ID was supposed to be limited, however, to voters who had originally registered by mail. It was also supposed to allow a range of documents by which a citizen could verify his or her identity, including employee IDs, student IDs, and paychecks, as well as driver’s licenses. What it actually did, though, was give federal credence, in law, to the lie of rampant voter fraud.

Rokita and Indiana’s Republican legislators, therefore, set out to add a powerful barrier to the polls while, he said, “making sure we were balanced and honest in our approach to prove it was not politically motivated,” although every Democrat voted against the bill, Senate Enrolled Act (SEA) 483, and every Republican supported it.51 The 2006 law required government-issued photo ID to vote; defined what types of identification were acceptable; offered to provide, at state expense, an identification card to those who could not afford it; and secured an off-ramp of a provisional ballot for those who did not have the ID at the time of the election but, in order to have their vote count, could supply the identification or an affidavit to the appropriate authorities within a limited number of days.52

The chief policy adviser to the Georgia House of Representatives admitted that the legislature “did not conduct any statistical analysis of the effect of the photo ID requirement on minority voters.” In fact, when asked about the need for this law, Representative Sue Burmeister from Augusta explained that it was to prevent fraud and if that meant “there are fewer black voters because of the voter ID law it will be because there is less opportunity for fraud.” She then clarified: “When black voters in her black precincts are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls.”63

The goal of all the GOP voter ID laws is to reduce significantly the demographic and political impact of a growing share of the American electorate. To diminish the ability of blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as well as the poor and students to choose government representatives and the types of policies they support. Unfortunately, it’s working. A recent study shows that “the turnout gaps between white and ethnic minority voters are far higher in states where people must show ID during or after voting.”

Wisconsin, in fact, used a federal court’s ruling that upended the state’s ID law to sow even greater confusion about what the revised guidelines, post–court decision, actually were. The flat-out refusal to train the staff at the Department of Motor Vehicles on the new court-ordered requirements left Wisconsinites “at the mercy” of DMV employees who had no idea about the necessary documents and IDs required to vote.

The story read like something straight out of Stalinist Russia. But this casualty list was in the United States in the twenty-first century. Virginia: 41,637 purged.1 Florida: 182,000 purged.2 Indiana: 481,235 purged.3 Georgia: 591,549 purged.4 Ohio: two million purged.5 With the flick of a bureaucratic wrist, millions of Americans—veterans, congressional representatives, judges, county officials, and most decidedly minorities—were erased.6 To

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

It turns out that in 1994, Ohio had “updated its elections law to add what is known as a ‘supplemental process’ ” to the NVRA. That means that “voters may be purged from the rolls after six years just because they didn’t vote—even if they are otherwise eligible.” Ohio, in other words, had flipped federal law on its head.

Jon Husted argued that his office met its statutory obligations and mailed postcards to Harmon and millions like him alerting them that if they did not respond within thirty days, the process of removal would begin. “If this is really [an] important thing to you in your life, voting,” the secretary of state chided, “you probably would have done so within a six-year period.”22 That argument, however, misses the basic point: failure to vote is not a legal, viable reason to purge someone from the voter rolls.

Indeed, more than one-fourth of the two hundred thousand Ohioans Husted purged from the voter rolls in 2015 were in Cuyahoga County alone, where Cleveland is located.28

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.”

Ohio has set up a system whereby it blocks American citizens from voting and then purges them from the rolls … for not voting.

Yes, there was an Albert Brewer who had died. And there was one who voted. But they were not one and the same. The Albert Brewer who voted, Albert Brewer Jr., was the son of the man who had died. Kobach hadn’t even bothered to check before he started slinging accusations.45 That kind of deliberate sloppiness would, however, be his trademark; it’s the way he garners the support necessary to wipe thousands off the rolls in Kansas and millions throughout the United States.

In the 2016 election, Kobach’s office, for instance, rejected more ballots than even Florida did, despite Florida’s population being seven times larger. That sledgehammer approach makes clear that Kobach’s goal is not to get it right. The goal is to tilt the electorate to the right.

Not all states require the same information that Crosscheck uses to purge the rolls. Social security numbers, for example, are rarely used. Ohio doesn’t bother with a person’s middle name either. Suffixes rarely make it in, as well. As a result, it believes that James Willie Brown is the same voter as James Arthur Brown, as James Clifford Brown, as James Lynn Brown. The possibility for error is exponential.

He found “exactly zero double voters from the Crosscheck list.” In fact, researchers at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania discovered that Crosscheck has an error rate of more than 99 percent.63

The fears were heightened further by Trump’s fantastical claim that he would have won the popular vote if it hadn’t been for three million to five million illegal voters.74 Concern mounted as the president, who was determined to prove his lie was the truth, signed an executive order creating the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity and appointed as its chair Vice President Mike Pence, who as governor of Indiana had the state police raid and destabilize an organization registering African Americans to vote, and Kris Kobach as its vice chair.

Similar to Kobach, Adams was also in Bush’s Department of Justice. There he flipped the Voting Rights Act on its head and went after African Americans for supposedly violating whites’ right to vote.79

I need to read more about this one!

Republican governor Rick Scott has made that task doubly difficult. The Florida Office of Executive Clemency, which he leads, meets only four times a year and has more than ten thousand applications waiting to be heard. An ex-offender cannot even apply to have his or her voting rights restored until fourteen years after all the sentencing requirements have been met. The process is therefore daunting enough as it is, but Scott has slowed it down considerably.112 His predecessor, a moderate Republican turned Democrat, “restored rights to 155,315 ex-offenders” over a four-year span. Since 2011, however, Scott has approved only 2,340 cases.113 As a result, the state is able to gain the extra representatives in Congress that its population—including the prison population—warrants, while, similar to the Constitution’s Three-Fifths Compromise, politically silencing millions of citizens who give the state its additional clout and power in Washington, D.C.

the Electoral Integrity Project, using a number of benchmarks and measurements, was stunned to find that when it applied those same calculations in the United States as it had in Egypt, Yemen, and Sudan, North Carolina was “no longer considered to be a fully functioning democracy.” Indeed, if it were an independent nation, the state would rank somewhere between Iran and Venezuela.