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

by Carol Anderson

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.