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

by Carol Anderson

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.”