More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
A 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.
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.
That became most apparent in 1890 when the Magnolia State passed the Mississippi Plan, a dizzying array of poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, newfangled voter registration rules, and “good character” clauses—all intentionally racially discriminatory but dressed up in the genteel garb of bringing “integrity” to the voting booth. This feigned legal innocence was legislative evil genius.
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.19 That the states arranged
What ruined the U.S.’s credibility, the Soviets gleefully claimed, was that people who “dream of nooses and dynamite … who throw rocks at defenseless Negro children—these gentlemen have the audacity to talk about ‘democracy’ and speak as supporters of ‘freedom.’ ”86 Don’t be fooled, the Kremlin warned—the U.S. goal was to export Jim Crow, not democracy.
So determined were state lawmakers to resist Brown that they shut down school districts throughout Virginia, funneled tax dollars into all-white private academies so that white children could continue their education, and provided no educational opportunities whatsoever for black students.
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. The GOP quickly adopted the Southern Strategy to woo the white South into the Republican Party.
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.
The Republican Party’s “leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”26 That is to say, the GOP learned that voter suppression applied ruthlessly and relentlessly could deliver victory.
Republican-leaning counties received a much more expansive set of parameters and were advised that they could count overseas ballots that were completed—and not necessarily postmarked—on Election Day. Democratic counties, however, had been handed the opposite advice, which diminished greatly the number of eligible ballots. As a result, George W. Bush, although losing the nationwide popular vote, carried Florida by 537 votes, won the Electoral College, and, with a very key assist by the U.S. Supreme Court, became the forty-third president of the United States.28
The backlash
Hyper-policing in black communities has meant that while “African Americans represent 12.5% of illicit drug users,” they are “29% of those arrested for drug offenses and 33% of those incarcerated in state facilities for drug offenses.”104
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.
If felons can't vote they dhould not count in the population for representation
The United States is now at the tipping point where the concerted efforts at the state and federal level to purge American citizens and cull and homogenize the electorate is a clear and present danger to democracy.116
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,”
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.
By 1960, in fact, “roughly two-thirds of Tennessee’s representatives were being elected by one-third of the state’s population.”
Democrats would in some cases need to win almost 60% of the vote to have a fifty-fifty chance of having a majority of the state’s delegation to the House of Representatives.”33
the whole point of extreme partisan gerrymanders; to insulate the legislative majority from the will of the voters.”
That was the charge. It stops here. It stops
