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

by Carol Anderson

The decisions to purposely disfranchise African Americans, in particular, can be best understood by going back to the close of the Civil War.

Indeed, by 1940, shortly before the United States entered the war against the Nazis, only 3 percent of age-eligible blacks were registered to vote in the South.

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

In addition, for most of the twentieth century, many Jim Crow school systems did not have high schools for African Americans. That set the stage for states such as Alabama—where more than 54 percent of black adults had fewer than five years of formal education—to require those who came through resource-deprived school systems and who wanted to register to vote to wrangle with the intricacies of constitutional law.

And then there was the poll tax, which all eleven states of the former Confederacy had adopted. Initially, after the Civil War, the poll tax “was intended not so much to disenfranchise the Negro as to place him again under the white man’s domination, since failure to pay the tax was made prima facie evidence of vagrancy,” which was the catchall term to criminalize, jail, and auction off African Americans. The “Negro who desired to stay off the chain gang was … forced to place himself under the protection of a white man who would pay the tax for him.”29 It was only years later, during the rise of Jim Crow, that the deliberate intent to choke off the black vote came into play when the states required all age-eligible males to pay an annual fee in order to vote.

Ridding this nation of the white primary now looked impossible but a subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1940 finally “pierced the façade … which had shielded primaries from the reach of Federal laws regulating the conduct of elections.”57 This landmark case, United States v. Classic (1941), erased much of the ambiguity about how far the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments could reach into the election process. “If a state law made the primary an integral part of the election machinery and if the primary did effectively control the choice of the elected official then Congress had the right and the duty to regulate and control such primaries.”58 That clarity created a legal basis for the fourth white primary case, Smith v. Allwright (1944).59 A black Texan wrote, “One thing is certain, as a result of the Classic case … the tables are turned … now the Negroes are on top.”60 In an 8–1 decision, the Supreme Court affirmed that sentiment when it ruled that the white primary, although supposedly a private affair, was central to the election process and, therefore, fell under the domain of federal law and the U.S. Constitution. Marshall was overjoyed that the justices had finally “looked behind the law and ferreted out the trickery.”

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.

Intimidation and violence simply prevented access to the polls for African Americans. Over and over those who tried to register to vote would be photographed by the police and harassed and threatened by gun-toting, pickup-driving toughs. Blacks who dared register had a virtual target on their backs. They would soon receive a visit from the sheriff, endure arrest on some trumped-up charge, and face jail time or an exorbitant fine.

The Civil Rights Act (1957), while seemingly a landmark piece of legislation, was actually a paper tiger that had no ability to protect the right to vote.

The act did create the Civil Rights Commission, upgrade the Department of Justice’s section on civil rights to a division, and authorize the U.S. attorney general to sue those violating the voting rights of American citizens.91 But it was—by design and implementation—no match for the entrenched resistance to black citizenship.

The core of the act gave the U.S. Department of Justice the authority to sue jurisdictions that blocked citizens ...

finally gave a remedy it could have given in 1960.”102 The VRA was nevertheless a seismic shift in thought, action, and execution for the U.S. government when compared with the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and its equally enfeebled companion legislation of 1960. Rather than passively waiting for locales to violate the rights of American citizens and then sitting still until those who had been routinely brutalized by this system made a formal complaint, the VRA put the responsibility for adhering to the Constitution onto state and local governments.

The Voting Rights Act “thrust the federal government into the role of supervising voting in large parts of the country to protect African Americans’ right to vote, a duty it had not assumed since Reconstruction.”

The VRA identified jurisdictions that had a long, documented history of racial discrimination in voting, and required that the Department of Justice or the federal court in Washington, D.C., approve any change to the voting laws or requirements that those districts wanted to make before it was enacted.104 The preventative thrust of the VRA was landmark.

After the advent of Brown and the VRA, positions such as school superintendent suddenly became appointed rather than elected offices.

These supposedly race-neutral changes, one Mississippi legislator candidly admitted, would “preserve our way of doing business.”

What was left unsaid, of course, was that the reason the Voting Rights Act worked was the advent of vigorous federal intervention, not because the racism that required the law in the first place had stopped.

One of the key vestiges of that racism transformed the demographic and geographic composition of the two major parties. The Solid Democratic South dissolved as, ironically enough, Texan Lyndon Johnson lobbied for and signed acts that legally acknowledged the citizenship rights of African Americans. He lamented that his advocacy for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, while the right thing to do, meant that “the Democrats have lost the South for a generation.”121 It would actually turn out to be much, much longer.

That haze of victimhood and innocence diffused the hard edges of decades of Election Day terror, literacy tests, poll taxes, and white primaries. And the resultant fog blurred the reality of the systematic disfranchisement of African Americans

Key segments in the criminal justice and political system, especially as the nation made a right turn during the Reagan years, insisted that the real violators were not the states at all but actually African Americans who committed outright voter fraud.131 Hank Sanders had witnessed this vicious scenario play out. Whenever blacks won political office or started to assert their voting rights, he remarked, the prosecutor’s office would launch an extensive investigation. This move had but one purpose: intimidation. “Every time people start investigating you,” he explained, “you start drawing back and decide no matter how right you are to leave that alone,” because if you don’t, the criminal justice system will rip you apart for simply exercising your voting rights.

Therefore, 2016 was the first federal election in fifty years held without the protection of the Voting Rights Act.

Nevertheless, inordinate pressure from Republican U.S. senators and Department of Justice officials continued. Some federal prosecutors dug in and refused to bring charges and give credence to the GOP’s voter fraud claims right before the 2006 midterm election because there was little to no evidence of wrongdoing.

In other words, based on a perception that had been carefully crafted, cultivated, and stoked by the GOP, state governments believed they had a mandate, a calling even, to wrestle this virtually nonexistent voter impersonation fraud to the ground.

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.

Now that the Republicans controlled most of the states’ electoral machinery, as well as Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court, they continued to saturate the air with the lie of massive voter fraud until “nearly half of Americans believe voter fraud happens at least somewhat often, and 70 percent think it happens at least occasionally.”

While many Americans came to accept the lie as truth, there was no evidence that it was the scourge of democracy that Republicans had portrayed. The real threat, in fact, was the damage this lie did to governance and to the sanctity of the right to vote.

But the lie of voter fraud remains a salient part of the American political landscape; indeed, it continues to be a powerful and effective “political weapon” wielded against minorities, youths, and the poor.

Georgia and its secretary of state, Brian Kemp, have also mastered the art of the purge. Georgia has been so good at it, in fact, that even as its population climbed, its number of registered voters since 2012 has actually dropped.

Kemp’s specter of waves of people impersonating the dead to cast ballots in Georgia has been disproved repeatedly.

Whether it was reconfiguring congressional district boundaries, removing polling stations from minority neighborhoods, reducing the dates for early voting, or ratcheting up the standards for those conducting voter registration drives, all those little, virtually unnoticeable-until-it’s-too-late bureaucratic tricks had major consequences. They inflated congressional representation to create an impregnable majority that was also impervious to the will of the voters.

In 2016, the Economist Intelligence Unit, which had evaluated 167 nations on sixty different indicators, reported that the United States had slipped into the category of a “flawed democracy,” where, frankly, it had been “teetering for years.”5 Similarly, 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.”

The basic problem in North Carolina was that, despite the overt performance of ballots, precincts, and vote tallies, legislators and congressional representatives were actually selected for office rather than elected.6 The deft art of gerrymandering, “the nastiest form of politics that there is,” is key to understanding the decline of democracy in America.

In 1810, when Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry drew a district in the shape of a salamander to corral his rivals and neutralize their influence, the term “gerrymander” became a descriptive and ongoing part of the American political lexicon and life. By the late nineteenth century, gerrymandering was so pervasive and disruptive that President Benjamin Harrison called it nothing but “political robbery.”

Two distinct types of gerrymandering emerged on the American landscape. One was racial; the other, partisan.

As the Brennan Center for Justice noted, “Citizens can’t just vote the gerrymandering party out of office, because the maps are too heavily skewed. In fact, that’s the whole point of extreme partisan gerrymanders; to insulate the legislative majority from the will of the voters.”

Those in competitive districts are more likely to vote; those in safe, uncompetitive districts stay home more often on Election Day. Just as Ginsburg surmised, there appears to be no “incentive to vote.”

The damage to democracy is exacerbated by another feature of partisan gerrymandering: there are deliberately fewer competitive districts.

Minority neighborhoods, despite their population density, have been allocated significantly fewer resources by election officials.90 There are fewer poll workers. Fewer operable machines. And fewer opportunities to vote,

Early voting had, in previous elections, been one of the key ways to take the economic burden off a generally working-class population that had been forced to choose between voting on Tuesday and missing hours at the job, or going to work and not participating in electing the officials and policies that affect one’s life.

Each redrawn boundary, each closed polling place, each understaffed, barely equipped polling station, each long line, and each ID requirement all negatively affected voter turnout.

And yet the key government-issued photo identification for those who lived in public housing was not on the “approved” list for voter IDs.

In 1901, Alabama stripped voting rights from those convicted of crimes of “moral turpitude.” For more than one hundred years, though, the state refused to lay out what crimes actually fell under that broad, amorphous definition. In fact, some registrars interpreted it to mean misdemeanors, such as vagrancy, and other charges that law enforcement liked to reserve for black people. By the twenty-first century, 15 percent of African American adults in the state were, therefore, disfranchised by this 1901 Jim Crow statute specifically designed to limit black voters and, as the U.S. Supreme Court had observed, “ ‘to establish white supremacy in this State.’

Finally, in addition to all the other methods of voter suppression, the state had gerrymandered districts that were so obviously racially biased that the federal courts eventually slapped them down.

It was clear almost immediately how Alabama had withheld, obfuscated, elided, and contradicted so much basic information about eligibility, polling places, and ID availability that confusion could easily create frustration and lead to anemic voter turnout rates.

As insidious as all this was, the Russians, frankly, were merely piggybacking on the years of work done by the GOP to stigmatize, disfranchise, and suppress the votes of African Americans and other minorities.

The Republicans, as we’ve seen, have consistently claimed there is rampant voter fraud, especially in cities and states that have sizable minority communities.

Obama’s election had been a catalyst for the most recent version of massive disfranchisement.11 And the resulting efforts to strip millions of citizens of their voting rights indicated how easily the electoral system could be manipulated.