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

by Carol Anderson

As Carol Anderson makes clear in One Person, No Vote, the right to vote is under even greater assault today. For the sake of those who fought and died for it, it is up to all of us to insist that this most basic American right be protected. Reading this well-crafted book will arm you with the facts.

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.

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.

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.174 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.

was brutally clear: “I don’t want everybody to vote.” The Republican Party’s “leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”26

The bogeyman of voter fraud has also proven useful in North Carolina where Republican governor Pat McCrory insisted that the only way to keep the monster at bay was the draconian ID law that state instituted. But a systematic analysis by the North Carolina State Board of Elections of nearly 4.8 million votes in the 2016 election found only one vote that could have possibly been stopped by voter ID.79 The story was the same across the United States. 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.

The law skewed acceptable government-issued photo IDs to those “which white people are more likely to carry,” such as gun licenses.

Kemp, however, did not hesitate to raise the bogeyman of voter fraud to mask the state’s voter suppression efforts.

John Merrill and other Republican lawmakers claimed that they simply did not see the problem. The issue of access to the ballot box had nothing to do with Alabama rejecting government-issued public housing ID, closing the DMVs in the Black Belt counties, curtailing the hours at the courthouses, placing broken links and misleading and inconsistent information on the state’s website, offering the mirage of online registration for people without even the basic fiber optics (much less computers) in their rural areas, suggesting that Alabamians could ride nonexistent public transportation to other counties, or touting a mobile voter-ID-card unit that provided only 2 percent of the cards needed. The problem, John Merrill said, was the people. “If you’re too sorry or lazy to get up off of your rear and to go register to vote, or to register electronically, and then to go vote, then you don’t deserve that privilege,” he said, as he twisted not only state-constructed barriers into personal failings but also the Fifteenth Amendment into a “privilege” and not a right.

prosecutions, here, here