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

by Carol Anderson

The devices the Republicans used are variations on a theme going back more than 150 years.

Mississippi, for instance, required receipts for two years of poll taxes in order to vote.

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.

Yet, from the tattered cloths of bureaucratic snafus, administrative incompetency, and typographical errors, the lie of rampant voter fraud hung there, dangling, as the senator kept fashioning democracy’s noose.

In fact, a subsequent study found that in Indiana, “white citizens were 11.5 percentage points more likely than black citizens to have the accepted credentials to vote.”

Republican legislators, therefore, gathered the data on the types of identification blacks had and didn’t have, then tailored the list of vote-worthy IDs to favor whites.

The question, therefore, was never how do we open up this democracy and make it as vibrant, responsive, and inclusive as we can, but rather, how do we maximize the frustration of millions of citizens to minimize their participation in the electoral process?

In 2017, “99 bills to limit access to the ballot have been introduced in 31 states … and more states have enacted new voting restrictions in 2017 than in 2016 and 2015 combined.”

It is clear that far too many policymakers believe that the right to vote is something to be earned—after, perhaps, paying a modern-day poll tax, or walking miles to the nearest polling station, or standing in line for hours to cast a ballot.