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

by Carol Anderson

The pushback was, therefore, coming fast and furiously. A phalanx of civil rights organizations—the MOVE Texas Civic Fund, the Jolt Initiative, the League of Women Voters of Texas and the Texas NAACP represented in court by the ACLU of Texas, the national American Civil Liberties Union, the Texas Civil Rights Project, Demos, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law—hit Texas hard. In a flurry of lawsuits, they argued that the Fourteenth Amendment had been savaged by the interim secretary of state. U.S.-born citizens weren’t on Whitley’s list; they didn’t get hit with “prove your citizenship or lose your voting rights” notices; and they weren’t turned over to the state’s attorney general’s office for investigation into criminal activity that carried stiff prison sentences. Only those who were naturalized citizens were subjected to that treatment, which was in clear violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection under the law.”