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

by Carol Anderson

Similar to Kobach, Adams was also in Bush’s Department of Justice. There he flipped the Voting Rights Act on its head and went after African Americans for supposedly violating whites’ right to vote.79 He also made it clear that he deplored the NVRA because, in his view, “voter registration takes forethought and initiative, something lacking in large segments of the Democrat base.”80 Under the cover of his organizations, the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU) and the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), he bullied and targeted minority and poor districts, and threatened lawsuit after lawsuit unless they purged their voter rolls, forcing many to capitulate because they simply didn’t have the resources to fight him in court.81 He argued, in his own Huntington-like version of The Clash of Civilizations, that the “Obama Administration was attempting to ‘import populations with cultural and legal traditions foreign to American traditions,’ and that ‘noncitizen voting helps the left win elections’—statements,” as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund chair Sherrilyn Ifill notes, “with no factual basis whatsoever.”