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

by Carol Anderson

Under the specious banner of combating “voter fraud,” the Republican Party has launched a nationwide voter suppression effort. Using voter ID laws, reduced voting opportunities, gerrymandering, and even the national census, Republicans clearly believe their future success depends more on constricting rather than convincing the electorate.

a 2014 analysis by Professor Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, found only thirty-one incidents of voter fraud out of hundreds of millions of votes cast since 2000.

Minority voters did not just refuse to show up; Republican legislatures and governors systematically blocked African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans from the polls.

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

Throughout the South after the widespread adoption of the Mississippi Plan, voter turnout plummeted to less than half of age-eligible whites, after it had peaked in 1896 at 79.6 percent.13 In Texas, for example, only 27 percent of age-eligible whites voted in the 1956 election (the national rate was 60 percent).

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.

Deliberate underfunding of black schools was critical to the literacy test’s disfranchising success.

The process was, by design, simultaneously mundane and pernicious.

Not only did literacy tests appear nondiscriminatory; they also carried the aura of plausibility. Voters, everyone could agree, ought to be able to understand their state’s laws. Yet when that device was made operational, it had nothing to do with the law, of course, nothing to do with an engaged citizenry, and precisely everything to do with eliminating as many age-eligible African Americans from the voter rolls as possible.

The economics of disfranchisement were brutally simple. In the mid-1940s, the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax estimated that 10 million Americans were denied the right to vote because they simply could not pay.39 Many poor blacks were sharecroppers, living on credit until the harvest came in. Without cash throughout most of the year, they had no ability to pay the poll tax.

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.

With no federal interference and a hermetically sealed party system, the white primary became a masterful way to “emasculate politically the entire body of Negro voters,” especially those who had successfully defied the other methods of disfranchisement, such as poll taxes and literacy tests.

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.

Intimidation and violence simply prevented access to the polls for African Americans. Over and over those who tried to register to vote would be photographed by the police and harassed and threatened by gun-toting, pickup-driving toughs. Blacks who dared register had a virtual target on their backs.

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.

The Civil Rights Act (1957), while seemingly a landmark piece of legislation, was actually a paper tiger that had no ability to protect the right to vote.

The VRA identified jurisdictions that had a long, documented history of racial discrimination in voting, and required that the Department of Justice or the federal court in Washington, D.C., approve any change to the voting laws or requirements that those districts wanted to make before it was enacted.104 The preventative thrust of the VRA was landmark.

After the Voting Rights Act, however, those districts could easily produce African American elected officials. Mississippi opted, therefore, to diffuse or dilute the black vote among a sea of whites by erasing the district boundaries and requiring candidates to run and succeed in a much wider geographical (and demographic) area. These supposedly race-neutral changes, one Mississippi legislator candidly admitted, would “preserve our way of doing business.”

“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.

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. The key was to pitch the GOP’s message and policies as designed to short-circuit the civil rights gains of African Americans and, equally important, to cast conservative whites as victims besieged by liberalism, minorities, and the Democrats’ big, intrusive government.

2016 was the first federal election in fifty years held without the protection of the Voting Rights Act.

Voter suppression had now gone nationwide as it became a Republican-fueled chimera that by 2017 had gripped thirty-three states and cast a pall over more than half the American voting-age population.

by the time every one of Bond’s three hundred plus claims was investigated, it was clear that out of 2.3 million voters in Missouri, the four people who committed some type of malfeasance at the polls hardly constituted the “brazen, shocking, astonishing, and stunning voter fraud” that he claimed. And it was also obvious that “none of these problems could have been resolved by requiring photo ID at the polls.”

alone their precinct, some form of identification is needed.”37 The requirement for ID was supposed to be limited, however, to voters who had originally registered by mail. It was also supposed to allow a range of documents by which a citizen could verify his or her identity, including employee IDs, student IDs, and paychecks, as well as driver’s licenses. What it actually did, though, was give federal credence, in law, to the lie of rampant voter fraud.

the Carter-Ford Commission had estimated that “as many as 19 million potential voters nationwide did not possess either a driver’s license or a state issued photo ID” and those “most likely to be adversely affected … were disproportionately young, elderly, poor, and African American.”

the state’s offer of “free ID” was a brilliant smokescreen that masked that the actual documents required to obtain an Indiana driver’s license or state identification were not so easy to get and often came with costs borne solely by the would-be voter.

African Americans had, to no avail, raised the need for voter education on the new requirements, voiced concern about the maldistribution of the driver’s license bureaus throughout the state, and explained the difficulty for those not born in hospitals to get a birth certificate that would allow them to get a license.

“nearly half of Americans believe voter fraud happens at least somewhat often, and 70 percent think it happens at least occasionally.”

The effectiveness of voter ID laws is based on three key features. First, from the very beginning the dog whistle target has been “urban” areas.

Psychologically, the word association of “crime,” “urban,” and “African Americans” made the connection of “stealing” an election via fraud cognitively palpable to the broader population, which had linked crime and blackness together for more than a century.

Conversely, and this is the second key factor, respectable members of society leveled the charges—U.S. senators, attorneys with law degrees from the Ivy League, governors, and others—fervently and doggedly warning the nation about voter fraud, voter fraud, voter fraud.

And, finally, the third factor is that the response, given the depth of the threat, seemed measured, reasonable, and commonsensical.

Those factors of assumed criminality, presumed respectability, and commonsense reasonableness provided ample cover for state after state after state to systematically target and disfranchise millions of American citizens.

Texas’s answer was S.B. 14, passed a mere two hours after the Shelby County v. Holder decision came down. The law skewed acceptable government-issued photo IDs to those “which white people are more likely to carry,” such as gun licenses. It made driver’s licenses the virtual holy grail of IDs because nearly one-third of the state’s counties, including some of those that are heavily minority, do not have DMVs.

The goal of all the GOP voter ID laws is to reduce significantly the demographic and political impact of a growing share of the American electorate. To diminish the ability of blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as well as the poor and students to choose government representatives and the types of policies they support. Unfortunately, it’s working.

They had been eliminated by a GOP deftly wielding a law that had actually been designed to broaden access to the polls. The modern-day version of voter purging began in the aftermath of a dismal election.

During the negotiations, Republicans at first stalled, and then demanded a quid pro quo for increasing access to the ballot box. They insisted that the law had to require routine maintenance, scrubbing even, of the voter rolls. This would ensure that people who had moved out of the district or state and those who had died were no longer listed as eligible voters. It all sounded so reasonable and so mundane. Except it wasn’t.

the trip wire is a two-step process triggered first by a change in status of the voter (name change, felony conviction, move) and then by an inquiry from a state election official about his or her continued eligibility to vote in that jurisdiction. Unfortunately, far too many secretaries of state have bypassed this carefully laid-out two-step process,

Ohio has set up a system whereby it blocks American citizens from voting and then purges them from the rolls … for not voting.

In March 2007, using the specter of voter fraud and the cover of the NVRA’s requirement for voter roll maintenance, Georgia insisted that the names in its voter registration database match those in the Department of Motor Vehicles in every way.

the databases of the DMV and secretary of state’s offices were fraught with errors

African Americans, who were one-third of the applicants, accounted for 64 percent of the tens of thousands of voter registrations that Georgia’s secretary of state canceled or “placed in ‘pending status’ for data mismatches between 2013 and 2016.

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.

researchers at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania discovered that Crosscheck has an error rate of more than 99 percent.

Crosscheck’s overreliance on a handful of selective data points, therefore, feeds into the second major problem: it is a program “infected with racial and ethnic bias.”

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’.”

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,” where, frankly, it had been “teetering for years.”

Two distinct types of gerrymandering emerged on the American landscape. One was racial; the other, partisan.