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

by Carol Anderson

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.