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

by Carol Anderson

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.