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

by Carol Anderson

In Florida and Texas, the legislatures changed the laws to make voter registration drives or assistance “a risky business” by requiring months of courses or sworn oaths under the penalty of felony criminal prosecution, short and unreasonable turnaround times to submit registration cards to election authorities, and unnatural county barriers on registration activities that ignored the growth of multicounty metropolises. The result in Florida was that the League of Women Voters, which had led voter registration drives for seven decades, ceased operations, pulled out of the state, and sued. In Texas, voter registration is so onerous, criminalized even, that there are more unregistered voters there than the total population of twenty states.