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

by Carol Anderson

The GOP had put in place these suppression techniques, both low-tech and high-tech, to stop the tide of voters—“all these liberal folks”—who knew democracy was on the line in the November midterms and weren’t going to sit idly by and let it disappear. There were, in fact, more than 150 citizen-led ballot initiatives in 2018.164 There was automatic felony re-enfranchisement in Florida that would give 1.4 million returning citizens their voting rights.165 Nonpartisan redistricting commissions were created in Michigan, Utah, and Missouri to do away with extreme partisan gerrymandering and the stranglehold that had choked “one person, one vote” out of existence in those states.166 And automatic voter registration in Michigan and Nevada was initiated to lower the barriers to the ballot box for hardworking Americans.167 All of these were designed to bring some semblance of democracy back to the system. To breathe life back into a democracy that was gasping for air, however, required that voters, regardless of the barriers, show up.