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

by Carol Anderson

Pushed by both the impending demographic collapse of the Republican Party, whose overwhelmingly white constituency is becoming an ever smaller share of the electorate, and the GOP’s extremist inability to craft policies that speak to an increasingly diverse nation, the Republicans opted to disfranchise rather than reform.

In short, while the poll tax may have read as race-neutral—seemingly applicable to all—its reality was anything but, as the disparities in wealth, education, and relations with law enforcement had everything to do with the disparities in access between blacks and whites. Moreover, the registrars’ discretion, as with the literacy test, inevitably undermined any sense of fairness or nondiscrimination, as they “thwarted black aspirants by not showing up at the office or by simply refusing to register blacks to vote when they did.”

The tools of Jim Crow disfranchisement worked all too well. In 1867, the percentage of African American adults registered to vote in Mississippi was 66.9 percent; by 1955, it was 4.3 percent.

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.

Although it came to the realization slowly, the U.S. government was now confronted with a nation-defining decision. America was paralyzed, on one hand, by the power of the Southern Democrats in Congress, whose inordinate political strength and control of key committees was based on their ability to win reelection after reelection because of massive disfranchisement and racial terror; and on the other, by the missionary-like belief that America was the champion of democracy and freedom in the battle against the Soviet Union, whose death grip on human rights had no limits.

Those successes, after decades of crushing, brutalizing disfranchisement, led “spokesmen for the white South” during the 1970 VRA reauthorization hearings to “claim … that the law had served its purpose and should be allowed to expire.”119 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.120

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.

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.

All that had to happen was for the GOP to reinforce the lie of voter fraud, create the public perception of democracy imperiled, increase the groundswell to “protect the integrity of the ballot box,” require exactly the type of identification that blacks, the poor, the young, and the elderly did not have, and, equally important, mask these acts of aggressive voter suppression behind the nobility of being “civic-minded.”

Like a twin-pincer motion in a two-front war on American democracy and its people, the flood of hundreds of millions of virtually untraceable dollars, so-called dark money, poured into the coffers of the GOP while the counterbalance of a majority of citizens who wanted a nation more vibrant, more inclusive, and less discriminatory came under vigorous assault by the rash of ALEC-drafted voter suppression bills.

Law professor Justin Levitt conducted an extensive study and uncovered that from 2000 to 2014, there were thirty-one voter impersonation cases out of one billion votes nationwide.80 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.

A Republican seizure of power based not on the strength of the party’s ideas but on massive disfranchisement denies citizens not only their rights, but also the “talisman” of humanity that voting represents.

Besides its sheer illegality, Ohio’s method had another fatal flaw: mailing postcards crammed with fine print is fraught with discriminatory impact. The Census Bureau, for example, uncovered that when it sends out mail, “white voters are 21 percent more likely than blacks or Hispanics to respond to their official requests; homeowners are 32 percent more likely to respond than renters; and the young are 74 percent less likely than the old to respond.”23 Thus, the differential response rates for Husted’s mailings translate into disproportionate purges in key neighborhoods of Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati—areas that are overwhelmingly minority and composed of renters and young adults.

Once he was at the helm, Kobach’s first electoral battle cry was a menacing thrust at the “massive” and “pervasive” voter fraud that had purportedly engulfed Kansas. As “Exhibit A,” he pointed to a case where a man named Albert Brewer, who had been dead for years, showed up and voted in the last primary election. Kobach held up this instance as one of thousands lurking in the voter rolls, skewing elections, canceling out the legitimate votes from hardworking, honest Americans. It was vintage Kobach, and vintage GOP. It was also not true. 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.

Minorities in America tend to have common or shared last names. If your last name is Washington, for example, there is an 89 percent chance that you’re African American; Hernandez, a 94 percent chance that you’re Hispanic; Kim, a 95 percent chance that you’re Asian.66 Similarly, Garcia, Lee, and Jackson all signal a strong probability of being a minority in the United States because “minorities are overrepresented in 85 of 100 of the most common last names.”67 As a result, when Crosscheck zeros in on name matches, whites are underrepresented by 8 percent on the purge lists, while African Americans are overrepresented by 45 percent; Asian Americans by 31 percent, and Hispanics by 24 percent.68 With Crosscheck perseverating on similar last names, it has blasted a hole through minority voting rights. Indeed, as The Root reported: “Roughly 14 percent of all black voters were purged from databases under the guise of preventing ‘double-voting’ and ‘fraud’.”69

In America, mass incarceration equals mass felony disfranchisement. With the launch of the War on Drugs, millions of African Americans were swept into the criminal justice system, many never to exercise their voting rights again.

The Sunshine State is actually an electorally dark place for 1.7 million citizens because “Florida is the national champion of voter disenfranchisement.”108 The state leads the way in racializing felony disfranchisement as well. “Nearly one-third of those who have lost the right to vote for life in Florida are black, although African Americans make up just 16 percent of the state’s population.” In fact, “Florida’s law disenfranchises 21 percent of its total African American voting-age population.”109

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.

Currently, seventy-seven million Americans aren’t on the voter rolls. To put this in perspective, there are so many unregistered voters in the United States that they exceed the total combined population of the largest one hundred cities in America—from New York City to Birmingham—by nearly sixteen million people.30