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

by Carol Anderson

The staff attorneys in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division had actually rejected H.B. 244 because of its disparate impact on black voters. Their investigation found that only one-third of the state’s counties actually had a Department of Drivers Services (DDS) and that there was not a single driver’s license bureau in the entire city of Atlanta. Moreover, of the fifty-six DDS locations throughout the state, only five were “accessible via public transportation.” In short, H.B. 244 required a personal vehicle and a license to be able to get to the DDS. As the attorneys dug deeper into the data, they uncovered that 17.7 percent of black households did not have access to a vehicle, while only 4.4 percent of white households had no motorized form of personal transportation.