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

by Carol Anderson

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.”