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

by Carol Anderson

The fifth element that laid the groundwork for gutting the Voting Rights Act was the ease with which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a federal election, ignoring blatant violations of the Fifteenth Amendment and swaddling it all in the language of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. It demonstrated how far the court’s slim majority would go to create a political outcome, despite all the evidence. This happened in 2000, of course, when the presidency hung by a chad. Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, with forty-nine states having tallied their ballots, were suddenly in a virtual tie, such that whoever won Florida’s twenty-five Electoral College votes would become president of the United States. Florida, however, was a festering election cesspool—as racially backward as it was bureaucratically inept. Secretary of State Katherine Harris had used faulty data to purge approximately twenty thousand names, mostly of blacks and Hispanics, from the voter rolls.