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

by Carol Anderson

Now that the Republicans controlled most of the states’ electoral machinery, as well as Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court, they continued to saturate the air with the lie of massive voter fraud until “nearly half of Americans believe voter fraud happens at least somewhat often, and 70 percent think it happens at least occasionally.”76 While many Americans came to accept the lie as truth, there was no evidence that it was the scourge of democracy that Republicans had portrayed. The real threat, in fact, was the damage this lie did to governance and to the sanctity of the right to vote. Todd Allbaugh, an aide to a Republican state senator in Wisconsin, recoiled when he saw how “GOP Senators were giddy” about the way a proposed voter ID bill “literally singled out the prospects of suppressing minority and college voters. Think about that for a minute,” he wrote. “Elected officials planning and happy to deny a fellow American’s constitutional right to vote in order to increase their own chances to hang onto power.”77 This was no fluke.