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

by Carol Anderson

“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.”