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

by Carol Anderson

racial gerrymandering is designed to create an all-white power structure virtually impervious to the rights, claims, and public policy needs of minorities.

In its decision, in pointing to the disparity in the weight of votes, the court, thus, defined “one person, one vote” as the standard benchmark for democracy. This was reaffirmed in two major subsequent decisions in the 1960s.

They hammered on the long history of partisan gerrymandering and how it eroded citizens’ confidence in the government, in the meaningfulness of voting, and in democracy. They warned that to continue down this road would entrench a one-party system in power whose only threat would be challengers from the extremist wing. They predicted that the rotten-borough districts would make these so-called representatives absolutely unrepresentative because they would be impervious to the will of voters. We are creating, they insisted, a system in which “elections do not matter.” As long as the system puts in power those who received the least number of votes, American democracy is imperiled.

The Supreme Court’s abdication—just as in Citizens United and Shelby County v. Holder—unleashed anti-democracy forces across the American political landscape.

after the high-powered gerrymandering, “more Americans lived in areas with uncontested elections than … before.” And when there is a competition, it usually isn’t much. Only 4.9 percent live in districts where the margin of difference between the winner and loser was 5 percent or less.

As the Brennan Center for Justice noted, “Citizens can’t just vote the gerrymandering party out of office, because the maps are too heavily skewed. In fact, that’s the whole point of extreme partisan gerrymanders; to insulate the legislative majority from the will of the voters.”

just as Mississippi in the 1960s exemplified the contortions a state was willing to undertake to politically silence its sizable minority population, Texas is the poster child for trying to accomplish something similar in the twenty-first century.

In the Lone Star State, whites are 45 percent of the state’s population but control 70 percent of the congressional districts. This disparity is even more obvious in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, where whites are only 20 percent of the population but have 80 percent of the congressional seats.

“gerrymander,” the research team explained, “is simply a district plan that results in one party wasting many more votes than its adversary.”

The lack of accountability to the public, therefore, creates another vicious dynamic. On one hand, there’s the calcification inherent in one-party rule. On the other, there’s the internal party catalyst that pushes the agenda further and further to the extreme in order for challengers to differentiate themselves from what is now orthodoxy.

In Texas, voter registration is so onerous, criminalized even, that there are more unregistered voters there than the total population of twenty states.104 Texas and Georgia have also interpreted laws about “assisting” at the polls to ensnare a young man helping his Bengali-speaking mother translate a ballot, and an African American second-generation civil rights warrior in southern Georgia, who, when asked, simply showed a young woman how to use the voting machine.

it can never be forgotten that the state that produced the Eugene “Bull” Connors, the Sheriff Jim Clarks, and the Judge Roy Moores also created the civil rights warriors who took down and defeated Bull and Jim, and now had Roy in their crosshairs.

What emerged on the electoral battlefield in 2017, in fact, was a modern-day version of resistance that drew upon the historical strengths and tactics of mobilizing against a state determined to quash the right to vote.

fewer than 18 percent of eligible citizens voted in the August 2017 primary.54 John Merrill, therefore, predicted that the subsequent race between Roy Moore and Doug Jones would require only enough resources for an arthritic 25 percent voter turnout rate.55 Democracy dies in that kind of darkness.

Jail, frankly, was how Alabama threatened the poor and minorities for daring to vote

Legal Services Alabama (LSA) and the local ACLU stepped in to do the hard work of citizenship education regarding “moral turpitude” and voting rights.

To take Roy Moore down would, in short, require fewer TV ads and more person-to-person interactions.

Obama’s election had been a catalyst for the most recent version of massive disfranchisement.

a key factor affecting the U.S.’s low ranking among developed democracies is the sheer magnitude of age-eligible adults who are not registered. Currently, seventy-seven million Americans aren’t on the voter rolls.

Years of gerrymandering, requiring IDs that only certain people have, illegally purging citizens from the voter rolls, and starving minority precincts of resources to create untenable conditions at the polls have exposed our electoral jugular and made the United States vulnerable to Russian attacks on our democracy.