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

by Carol Anderson

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.64 As states encouraged or winked at the murders, as killers stepped over the bodies and gobbled up the stolen land and property, black political power evaporated in a hail of gunfire and flames.

What Talmadge had done was to give his blessing to waves of anti-black violence.67 A World War II veteran, Maceo Snipes, was one of the first to get caught in the tide of state-sponsored lynching. This was no surprise. Black veterans were particular targets throughout the South because their sense of rights and racial justice had grown especially acute during the battles to defeat the Nazis.68 Snipes knew that he had already put his life on the line for democracy. He was willing to do it again. But what World War II didn’t kill, Georgia most certainly did. The 1946 primary was the first since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Smith v. Allwright decision, and Snipes, as an American citizen, believed that he actually had the right to participate in his state’s election. He was mistaken. Whites had already posted a sign on the black church in Taylor County, Georgia: “The first Negro to vote will never vote again.”69 Snipes was not deterred. In July 1946, he cast his ballot in Taylor County’s primary. In fact, he was the only black person to do so; and with that act of democratic bravery, Maceo Snipes signed his death warrant. A few days later four white men showed up at Snipes’s house and demanded that he step outside. As he stood on the porch, they pointed their guns at him and began firing. Snipes staggered and fell to the ground. They just walked away. His mother ran out of the house and got him to the hospital, but in Jim Crow America, black patients did not have the right to heal...

Thus, when NAMUDNO v. Holder was decided in 2009, years of doubt about the Voting Rights Act, years of questioning whether racism existed anymore, came to a boil. “Since 1982,” Roberts wrote in his decision, “only 17 jurisdictions—out of the more than 12,000 covered political subdivisions—have successfully bailed out of the Act.” That only seventeen had been able to prove they no longer discriminated against their minority populations’ voting rights and thus no longer needed federal oversight seemed absurd to Roberts. He, of course, did not reckon with the fact that places in Georgia and Alabama such as Pickens County, Perry County, Rome, and others had repeatedly tried to disfranchise American citizens despite the Fifteenth Amendment, and that is the reason only seventeen jurisdictions had been released from scrutiny in more than four decades. Instead, came the court’s warning shot: seventeen was not enough. “It is unlikely that Congress intended the provision to have such limited effect.”

Thus, when the commissioners in Shelby County, Alabama, challenged the Voting Rights Act by outright defying it, the U.S. Supreme Court was already primed and just waiting for a test case. Calera City, Alabama, had a city council that included one African American councilman. His district was 65 percent black, in a city that was over 30 percent African American. Then the commissioners in Shelby County began annexing land surrounding Calera City, and with each annexation they began to redraw the electoral districts, so much so that the black councilman’s district population shrank from 65 percent African American to 29 percent. Running now in a predominately white district, where more than three-fourths of the electorate voted against Barack Obama, the lone black councilman lost the next election.171 This was not the first time that the Supreme Court had dealt with the redrawing of a city’s boundaries designed to dilute the voting strength of a town’s black population. In the late 1950s, African Americans in Tuskegee, Alabama, had begun, against all odds, to amass some semblance of voting strength. The state legislature quickly countered by annexing plot after plot of land surrounding Tuskegee until the town’s perfectly symmetrical square boundaries had been horribly disfigured into a twenty-eight-sided blob. But this is exactly what it took to remove all but four or five of the four hundred voting-age eligible African Americans from the city and ensure that no white voter ...

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.175 Meanwhile, Republican officials in North Carolina congratulated themselves that “African American Early Voting is down 8.5% from this time [four years earlier] in 2012.”

Hearne gave it his all. In hearing after hearing, press conference after press conference, op-ed after op-ed, he was there filling the ether with tales of people impersonating someone else to destroy the integrity of America’s elections. In 2004, Fox News reported on a study completed by ACVR that actually cited as its marching orders the 1941 Classic decision that opened the door for ending the white primary. In this upside-down world, though, the language used to end disfranchisement now became the tool to reemploy it with ruthless efficiency. ACVR identified five “hot spots” of systemic voter fraud, each with a black or at least nonwhite population that made up 32 to 95 percent of the city’s residents. As if it were an FBI Most Wanted list, ACVR trotted out a rogues’ gallery of voter fraud: Philadelphia, PA Milwaukee, WI Seattle, WA St. Louis/East St. Louis, MO/IL Cleveland, OH The report served up old canards and false anecdotes dressed as fact, providing new, tantalizing, and wholly erroneous reports of the NAACP paying for votes with crack cocaine, and, therefore, providing excellent, digestible fodder for Fox News and other broadcasts.42 The disinformation program was malevolently brilliant and effective. In 2005, “Hearne was pushing allegations about voter fraud in St. Louis from 2000 that had been thoroughly debunked in 2002. It didn’t matter. Republican voters came to believe there was a vote fraud epidemic.”

Todd Allbaugh, an aide to a Republican state senator in Wisconsin, recoiled when he saw how “GOP Senators were giddy” about the way a proposed voter ID bill “literally singled out the prospects of suppressing minority and college voters. Think about that for a minute,” he wrote. “Elected officials planning and happy to deny a fellow American’s constitutional right to vote in order to increase their own chances to hang onto power.”

As if reading from the ALEC playbook, North Carolina instituted “America’s worst voter suppression law.”94 Driving that decision was the grim reality for the Republicans that in the twenty-first century, African American voter registration had increased by 51.1 percent in the state and blacks also had a higher voter turnout “rate than white registered voters in both the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.”95 Republican legislators, therefore, gathered the data on the types of identification blacks had and didn’t have, then tailored the list of vote-worthy IDs to favor whites. Their actions were so brazen that the federal court ruled that the law was targeted at African Americans “with almost surgical precision.” The Fourth Circuit also blasted North Carolina’s voter identification legislation as designed to “impose cures for problems that did not exist.” Indeed, Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote that all North Carolina’s claims about the dangers of voter fraud “cannot and do not conceal the state’s true motivation.” The law not only has a discriminatory impact; it has “a discriminatory intent.”

The NVRA mandates that election officials update the voter rolls regularly. There are, however, strict guidelines about who is removed, how that is accomplished, and why.16 And on each of these parameters, the GOP has violated not only the spirit of the law but the letter as well. The NVRA outlines that officials can remove someone from the roll of eligible voters if he or she requests it; has had a name change and didn’t notify authorities within ninety days; dies; is convicted of a felony that under state law renders them ineligible to vote; “has moved outside the county of registration or has registered to vote in another jurisdiction”; and after that does not respond to a follow-up inquiry, usually a mailing, from election officials concerning a change in status. Then, and only then, is the process of purging supposed to begin.

In other words, 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, ignored a change in status, and, instead, used one specific criterion (non-voting) that is expressly forbidden in the NVRA to wipe out otherwise eligible voters. The point of this illegal tactic is to cull the electorate of millions of citizens, most of whom are young, poor, and/or minorities, who statistically do not vote for Republicans and whose voting activities are often sporadic.

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.”65 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’.”

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.”5 Similarly, the Electoral Integrity Project, using a number of benchmarks and measurements, was stunned to find that when it applied those same calculations in the United States as it had in Egypt, Yemen, and Sudan, North Carolina was “no longer considered to be a fully functioning democracy.” Indeed, if it were an independent nation, the state would rank somewhere between Iran and Venezuela. The basic problem in North Carolina was that, despite the overt performance of ballots, precincts, and vote tallies, legislators and congressional representatives were actually selected for office rather than elected.

Despite the judicial distinction between the partisan gerrymandering that Scalia asserted was beyond the pale of the Supreme Court’s authority and racial gerrymandering that requires the highest level of judicial review, known as strict scrutiny, partisan gerrymandering is also about race. As U.S. district judges Xavier Rodriguez and Orlando Garcia observed, this seemingly colorblind method of drawing districts is, instead, all about a “party’s willingness to use race for partisan advantage.”44 The demographic composition of the parties almost dictates it. The Pew Research Center notes that in 2016, while 86 percent of Republican voters were white, those who were African American had stayed at 2 percent since 1992. Meanwhile, Democratic voters were much more diverse: 57 percent were white, 21 percent were black, 12 percent were Hispanic, 3 percent were Asian, and 5 percent described themselves as mixed race or their race as “other.”

As endemic as long lines have become, however, they are not a fixture in most communities. The conditions that bring about five-hour wait times, or thousands standing in line, or only forty people able to get through and cast their ballots after three hours, are concentrated overwhelmingly in minority precincts.88 In short, this is a burden that is disproportionately borne in order to exercise that fundamental right to vote. In 2012, on average, blacks had to wait in line twice as long as whites. In the “10 Florida precincts with the longest delays … almost 70 percent of voters were Latino or black.” Nationwide, in the 2012 election, whites who lived in white neighborhoods had the shortest wait times of all citizens—just seven minutes.

Other ploys to strip election resources from minority communities abound. By the time the 2016 election was held, for example, there were 868 fewer polling places available in previous VRA preclearance counties.100 Scholars have found that “moving a polling place can affect”—and not for the better—“the decision to vote.”101 North Carolina, in a “subtler maneuver” than the gerrymandering and voter ID laws that landed the state in court, “moved the location of almost one-third of the state’s early voting sites,” which then “significantly increased the distance African Americans have to travel to vote early, while leaving white voters largely unaffected.” This was deliberate. An earlier study indicated that for every one-tenth of a mile increase to a polling place, voting by registered black voters declines by 0.5 percent. The ratio in that study suggests that “North Carolina’s changes might have kept nearly 19,000 black voters from the polls.”

In Florida and Texas, the legislatures changed the laws to make voter registration drives or assistance “a risky business” by requiring months of courses or sworn oaths under the penalty of felony criminal prosecution, short and unreasonable turnaround times to submit registration cards to election authorities, and unnatural county barriers on registration activities that ignored the growth of multicounty metropolises. The result in Florida was that the League of Women Voters, which had led voter registration drives for seven decades, ceased operations, pulled out of the state, and sued. In Texas, voter registration is so onerous, criminalized even, that there are more unregistered voters there than the total population of twenty states.

“Alabama has rejected even modest suggestions to lessen the photo ID law’s impact … Last year, for example, Alabama officials ruled that people could not vote using the photo IDs issued to them by public housing authorities.” In response, Secretary of State John Merrill did not address that issue head-on but used the cloak of protecting the ballot box from fraud to justify a law with both discriminatory intent and impact. This was his attempt to plant the state’s flag in something less toxic than overt racism. “The photo ID requirement was designed to preserve the credibility and the integrity of the electoral process,” he said. “I voted for and was a co-sponsor of House Bill 19 that became Act Number 2011-673 in 2011, and I will defend the rights and freedoms of all our eligible citizens to register to vote, obtain a qualified photo voter ID, and participate in the electoral process!”22 Those qualified voter IDs could be obtained at the Department of Motor Vehicles, but then Governor Robert Bentley closed the DMV locations in the six counties where African Americans made up more than 70 percent of the population, and he shuttered the DMVs in another eleven counties where blacks made up more than half of the residents.23 The impact was devastating. A Brennan Center report, in fact, showed that “almost a third of Alabama’s voting-age population lived more than 10 miles away from the nearest license-issuing office that was open more than two days per week.”

The Atlantic journalist Vann R. Newkirk II summed up how intentionally daunting the barricades to voting in 2017 were. “Voting has always been burdensome for black people in Alabama,” he noted. There were the standard obstacles of ID, limited polling places, purged voter rolls, and more, which had all been deployed, and meanwhile, the tried-and-true voter modernization techniques were simply not available. Newkirk explained, “Early voting, which has been a key factor for other states in increasing black turnout, is not permitted in Alabama. The state also doesn’t have no-fault absentee voting, preregistration for teens, or same-day registration. In all, it’s harder to vote in Alabama than just about anywhere else.”

The state, for example, had had no problem sending out mailers telling citizens “they were ineligible to vote because of a past conviction, when they were in fact eligible.” Yet, despite the May 2017 law that finally defined “moral turpitude,” John Merrill refused to “spend state resources” to correct the error or clarify the new law. Meanwhile, there was a dangerous double-dare in this manufactured ambiguity: the “Alabama voter registration form requires applicants to swear under penalty of perjury that they are a qualified voter, but it does not include a list of crimes that are disqualifying.” Merrill, however, said the notion that people would be “scared away from filling out voter applications” because they might get charged with a felony because their conviction was for a crime that actually constituted “moral turpitude” was nothing but a “well-laid excuse by liberal minions from around the world.”

After Obama surprisingly carried Indiana in 2008, the GOP-dominated state legislature and the governor identified the primary source of that supposed catastrophe: Marion County, home to Indianapolis and the lion’s share of African Americans in the state. The Republicans, therefore, passed a law—while Vice President Mike Pence was the governor—designed to prevent blacks from having that kind of influence at the ballot box ever again. The legislative device was simple: Counties with at least 325,000 residents could not have more than one early voting site unless there was unanimous agreement from the bipartisan county election board. Buried in that sanitized language was pure, uncut racial animus. Only three of the ninety-two counties in the state have populations that exceed that threshold—Marion (Indianapolis), Allen (Fort Wayne), and Lake (Gary), and, not surprisingly, 62 percent of the state’s African American population live in either Marion or Lake Counties.13 Meanwhile, smaller (and whiter) counties are not held to that same restriction. Therefore, suburban Hamilton County has had its number of early voting sites expanded to three and, as a result, has witnessed a 63 percent increase in early voting.

It’s no surprise, then, that attention soon turned to Dodge City, Kansas. The county clerk there, Debbie Cox, decided in October, with the election just a month away, to move the one and only polling place for thirteen thousand voters to a site beyond the city limits, a mile from public transportation, and not readily accessible by walking.43 Her office then sent newly registered voters the wrong address to cast their ballot.44 None of this suggested happenstance. Dodge City was 60 percent Hispanic. The city had only that one voting site, while the surrounding county, which was majority white, had three locations that remained untouched. And, as in Georgia, Kansas’s secretary of state, Kris Kobach, notorious for voter suppression and rabid nativism, was also running for governor and refused to step down from overseeing his own election.

As statisticians, political scientists, and computer scientists began scouring the data, no analysis could explain what had happened. Then, “just for kicks, they decided to run a statistical analysis by race.” There it was. The greater the number of African Americans in a precinct, the greater the drop-off in votes. Equally important, it wasn’t just the blacker the district, the more votes that disappeared. There was a strange twist. This phenomenon did not occur with absentee ballots from that area. It didn’t happen in districts that leaned just as heavily toward Democrats but were predominately white. It didn’t even happen in African American districts with early voting. It only happened when those who lived in predominately African American neighborhoods voted via the machines—the ones that were vulnerable and susceptible to hacking—on election day. Then their votes evaporated. All 127,000 of them. Just gone. Whereas the typical drop-off vote rate from governor to lieutenant governor is 0.8 percent, in these black neighborhoods it was a staggering 13 percent. Then, after that, the tallies on the other contests would go up to regular levels and show none of the statistical anomalies.160 In the face of this conundrum, the state—Brian Kemp and his elected successor as Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger—saw no need to investigate. Meanwhile, the Democrat, Sarah Riggs Amico, lost her election bid by 123,000 votes.