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

by Carol Anderson

The VRA identified jurisdictions that had a long, documented history of racial discrimination in voting, and required that the Department of Justice or the federal court in Washington, D.C., approve any change to the voting laws or requirements that those districts wanted to make before it was enacted.

As might have been expected, that potential for an actual thriving, viable democracy was the threat that set the stage for a backlash that would gain momentum and velocity in the ensuing decades, all the way to 2013, when the act would be largely gutted.

In the 1966 state election, those who were illiterate tried to use labels and stickers to indicate their preference only to have those votes be discarded and uncounted according to the new rule requiring the names be handwritten. This latest iteration was as “race-neutral” as the literacy test. After the Brown decision, Virginia led the effort to make the Supreme Court decision to end segregation in the schools unenforceable and untenable. So determined were state lawmakers to resist Brown that they shut down school districts throughout Virginia, funneled tax dollars into all-white private academies so that white children could continue their education, and provided no educational opportunities whatsoever for black students. This went on for years. In short, Virginia ensured that there would be schooling for whites but not blacks; and after that, the state changed its laws so that those who were illiterate would not be able to vote.

The U.S. Supreme Court strongly disagreed. Voting is not just the act itself, Warren chided, but includes “all action necessary to make a vote effective.” Then, to ensure that the range of activities subject to the VRA was clear, he insisted that the Voting Rights Act “was aimed at the subtle, as well as the obvious, state regulations which have the effect of denying citizens their right to vote because of race.”

States and reluctant presidential administrations, Richard Nixon’s and Ronald Reagan’s in particular, were less than enthusiastic about securing the right to vote for those previously denied access to the polls.

What remedy, then, was available to the federal government for those who mocked the Fifteenth Amendment, skewed and skewered elections, and placed in power those who held the Constitution in contempt? The Supreme Court admitted that the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and 1960 simply did not work: Litigation has been exceedingly slow, in part because of the ample opportunities for delay … Even when favorable decisions have finally been obtained, some of the States … merely switched to discriminatory devices not covered by the federal decrees, or … enacted difficult new tests designed to prolong the existing disparity between white and Negro registration. Alternatively, certain local officials have defied and evaded court orders or have simply closed their registration offices to freeze the voting rolls.

The impact of the VRA on African Americans was immediate: In Mississippi, black registration went from less than 10% in 1964 to almost 60% in 1968; in Alabama, the figure rose from 24% to 57%. In the region as a whole, roughly a million new voters were registered within a few years after the bill became law, bringing African American registration to a record 62%.

What was left unsaid, of course, was that the reason the Voting Rights Act worked was the advent of vigorous federal intervention, not because the racism that required the law in the first place had stopped.

The Solid Democratic South dissolved as, ironically enough, Texan Lyndon Johnson lobbied for and signed acts that legally acknowledged the citizenship rights of African Americans. He lamented that his advocacy for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, while the right thing to do, meant that “the Democrats have lost the South for a generation.”121 It would actually turn out to be much, much longer.

In 1970, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, one of the most powerful members of Congress and a former presidential candidate for the Dixiecrat Party, insisted that “this act is nothing more than a device created to inflict political punishment upon one section of the country.”123 That haze of victimhood and innocence diffused the hard edges of decades of Election Day terror, literacy tests, poll taxes, and white primaries.

Yet five years later, the senator still complained about the very existence of the law. The “so-called voting rights act,” he railed, “should be allowed to expire unceremoniously.” He then added that the VRA was “unconstitutional” because its supporters “were guilty of discrimination” against the South. The sense that Dixie had changed, had stopped encouraging sheriffs to beat down African Americans who wanted to register to vote, meant that there was no need for this “unfortunate” law.126 The Old South was still there, of course—just in a new dress.

The fourth element, then, was an especially pernicious lie that hovered like a storm cloud over the VRA and became darker and more threatening as black political power grew. Key segments in the criminal justice and political system, especially as the nation made a right turn during the Reagan years, insisted that the real violators were not the states at all but actually African Americans who committed outright voter fraud.

Hank Sanders had witnessed this vicious scenario play out. Whenever blacks won political office or started to assert their voting rights, he remarked, the prosecutor’s office would launch an extensive investigation. This move had but one purpose: intimidation. “Every time people start investigating you,” he explained, “you start drawing back and decide no matter how right you are to leave that alone,” because if you don’t, the criminal justice system will rip you apart for simply exercising your voting rights.

But as far as the white power structure in Pickens County was concerned, these women had gotten just what they deserved. Bozeman and Wilder, community leaders who insisted that African Americans had rights, including the right to vote, had “guts” and “nerve.” And that, remarked the newspaper editor, “brought out the worst in white people.” “If they could get out and march at their ages,” sneered one deputy, “they could have done just fine in jail.” Robert Kirksey, a county commissioner, complained, “They constantly harassed public officials … they were always creating disturbances” by showing up at every county commission and school board meeting and having the audacity to ask questions of elected officials. The two activists had pushed for and won better wages for sanitation workers and to have the roads paved “on the black side of town.” But they weren’t done.

Community self-respect, she taught, was inextricably tied to the vote. And that sense of political awareness and backbone led Bozeman to declare and warn, “If you teach black people to stand up for their rights in Pickens County, white folks will starve you out, or suffer you so until you move out of town.” She knew it and African Americans knew it, too.

sheriff disagreed vigorously. There was no need for what “those women” did. African Americans had it good in Pickens County. “We have a policy of not beating ’em,” he bragged, “We treat ’em right. We don’t run over ’em just because they are black.” But the message was also clear: If they’re black and, as one African American woman pointed out, “promote better living for colored” people, the full force of the state’s legal machinery would hound, harass, and imprison them for helping the disfranchised vote.

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.

Florida in 2000 was, without question, a perfect storm of incompetence and Election Day treachery. Unfortunately, there was a presidency hanging in the balance and the final tally, even with the massive disfranchisement effort to keep blacks and Hispanics from voting, was still too close to call. The voting machines, unable to get an accurate count, not least because of the ballots with imperfect chad punches, were blamed. Gore therefore requested a hand recount. And that’s when the momentum swung, as Bush’s margin of victory began to shrink rapidly, from 1,784 votes to 327, then to 154.153

Five conservative justices, who often denounced what they called an activist judiciary, and federal overreach in general, now ruled that Florida did not have the right to count the ballots in the election held in its own state.154 In fact, no entity could tally those votes. The recount violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, the justices contended, because the process was for those counties with numerous electoral failures and, therefore, some people, somehow, somewhere (that would be in those counties where the polling machines actually worked) weren’t going to have their votes counted again. The inanity of the argument was “so brazen a departure for the conservatives and so ferocious an assault on … conventional … doctrinal understandings” about federalism and originalist constitutional philosophy that it defied logic.

The election, and particularly how it was won, had driven home how racially polarized and divided the electorate was.157 George W. Bush, however, didn’t believe the situation was hopeless. While only 9 percent of African Americans voted for him, 35 percent of Hispanics had cast their ballot for Bush.158 His strategist, therefore, argued that the Republicans could broaden their appeal to minorities and thus avert the demographic apocalypse that awaited a party that was nearly 90 percent white. In addition to immigration reform, one of his key strategies was to have full White House and bipartisan support for the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.

This was the man who served as an ideological light for John Roberts. “Rehnquist reinforced John’s preexisting philosophies,” observed a colleague clerking for another justice. “John was not a believer in the courts giving rights to minorities and the downtrodden. That was the basic Rehnquist philosophy.” The framing of the Rehnquist-Roberts philosophy is key. Note that the word used is “giving” instead of simply recognizing that minorities have rights.

Fifty-three years later, Chief Justice John Roberts looked directly at a similar situation where county commissioners in Alabama had annexed plot after plot, redrew boundaries, diluted the voting strength of black voters, and, this time, did so in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Unlike before, however, the Supreme Court, in a 5–4, decision, ignored all the evidence and drew instead upon the arguments hurled against the VRA since 1966. Refrains about states’ rights, black electoral success, regional discrimination, the end of racism, and the seeming calcification of the VRA became the key elements in the decision penned by Chief Justice Roberts in Shelby County v. Holder.

The Shelby County v. Holder decision thus gutted Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which determined which locales came under federal oversight. With that, GOP-led states, as if this were Alabama in the early 1980s, asserted that it was actually voter fraud, not voter suppression, that required the full machinery of government to eradicate.173 Therefore, 2016 was the first federal election in fifty years held without the protection of the Voting Rights Act.

In Wisconsin, for example, black voting rates plummeted from a high of 78 percent in 2012 to less than 50 percent in 2016. In Milwaukee County, which is overwhelmingly African American, fifty thousand fewer votes were cast in a state that Donald Trump won by only twenty-seven thousand ballots.

The final, and perhaps most important, lesson, was to lie. Lie often, loudly, boldly, unashamedly, and consistently. Lie until it drowned out the truth. Lie until no amount of evidence could prove otherwise. Lie until there was no other reigning narrative. Just lie. Senator Bond learned the lesson well. He claimed that scores of Democrats were using the names of dead people and dogs to vote repeatedly. He insisted that others were basically stuffing the ballot box by creating fictitious addresses where there were only vacant lots.29 Just as the best lies hold a kernel of truth, Bond chose well. Some prankster had, indeed, registered a thirteen-year-old springer spaniel, Ritzy Mekler, to vote.30 Yet there is no record anywhere of Fido, Rover, Lassie, or even the infamous Ritzy casting a ballot.

And, just as with Ritzy the dog, Bond did eventually find a dead person on the voter registration rolls, a former city alderman, but, again, there was no evidence that the deceased or anyone with his name voted in the 2000 election. In fact, by the time every one of Bond’s three hundred plus claims was investigated, it was clear that out of 2.3 million voters in Missouri, the four people who committed some type of malfeasance at the polls hardly constituted the “brazen, shocking, astonishing, and stunning voter fraud” that he claimed. And it was also obvious that “none of these problems could have been resolved by requiring photo ID at the polls.”

The requirement for ID was supposed to be limited, however, to voters who had originally registered by mail. It was also supposed to allow a range of documents by which a citizen could verify his or her identity, including employee IDs, student IDs, and paychecks, as well as driver’s licenses. What it actually did, though, was give federal credence, in law, to the lie of rampant voter fraud. Thus, a dangerous false equivalency emerged. There was the hard-core reality of voter suppression in Florida and St. Louis (purged rolls, faulty machines, and more) that had disfranchised tens of thousands of American citizens. And then there was Kit Bond’s fantasy of stuffed ballot boxes. With HAVA, the lie had become the truth.

Richard G. Frohling, the assistant U.S. attorney in Milwaukee, conceded, “There was nothing that we uncovered that suggested some sort of concerted effort to tilt the election.”49 But all this activity, all this searching, gave the illusion of widespread voter fraud that needed to be ferreted out and stopped. And that was the point.

“Back in 2001 and 2002, election integrity was a huge issue … The problem was that people were losing confidence in the system … there was a fear of votes being stolen. Even,” he added, “if the fear didn’t pan out to be true, … the fear was still there.”

It’s as if white people don’t want to lose what they themselves have stolen

The Supreme Court didn’t see it that way. The majority of justices had imbibed the tonic of voter fraud and saw before them the hallucination of ne’er-do-wells in the cities stealing elections and undermining democracy. The court recognized, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, that the “only kind of voter fraud that SEA 483 addresses is in-person voter impersonation at polling places.” And, he was forced to admit, that the “record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history.” That easily should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t. Instead, he continued, “flagrant examples of such fraud in other parts of the country … have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists.” He then pulled out the story of New York City’s William “Boss” Tweed from an 1868 election. That was followed by a swan dive into the fictional swamp of St. Louis’s canine and dead voters.59 Not only did the court swallow whole the myth of rampant voter fraud, but equally important, the justices could not fathom that something as simple as needing an ID constituted any type of overwhelming burden—especially because Indiana offered to provide the driver’s license or state ID for free.

Worse yet, Stevens chided, neither the NAACP, the ACLU, nor the Democratic Party could provide hard numbers about the “magnitude of the burden … or the portion of the burden imposed” on those who ostensibly would be disfranchised by SEA 483. “Much of the argument about numbers of such voters,” Stevens scoffed, “comes from extrarecord, postjudgement studies, the accuracy of which has not been tested in the trial court.” The court, therefore, ruled that the state’s needs were compelling and there was no concomitant evidence that SEA 483 placed any substantive burden on voters to block their access to the polls. Indiana’s voter ID law was, under this reasoning, constitutional.

The staff attorneys in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division had actually rejected H.B. 244 because of its disparate impact on black voters. Their investigation found that only one-third of the state’s counties actually had a Department of Drivers Services (DDS) and that there was not a single driver’s license bureau in the entire city of Atlanta. Moreover, of the fifty-six DDS locations throughout the state, only five were “accessible via public transportation.” In short, H.B. 244 required a personal vehicle and a license to be able to get to the DDS. As the attorneys dug deeper into the data, they uncovered that 17.7 percent of black households did not have access to a vehicle, while only 4.4 percent of white households had no motorized form of personal transportation.

When the attorneys then overlaid the map of where the DDS offices were located with the information on the lack of personal vehicles, it soon became clear that racial disparity and disparate impact were embedded in H.B. 244. Indeed, “census data show that five times more black households in counties without DDS offices lack access to a motor vehicle compared to white households.”

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency increased the GOP pressure at the state level for this very effective tool of disfranchisement. Obama had managed to bring fifteen million new voters to the polls in 2008. They were overwhelmingly African American, Hispanic, Asian American, and poor. Moreover, 69 percent of these new participants in democracy voted for him and, as a result, put a black man in the White House.67 All that hope for change, though, dissipated in the midst of a recession that had begun under George W. Bush and which had already destroyed twenty-two trillion dollars of wealth, fueled and entrenched double-digit unemployment for African Americans, and led to economic stimulus packages that were targeted at those whose greed and recklessness had put the global economy in a tailspin. There was also an obstructionist and extremist Republican-led Congress whose sole mission was to “make Obama a one-term president.”

The point was to eliminate the voters who were resistant to right-wing policies and, thereby, have a much smoother road to re-create the civil rights order of the early 1950s and the economic environment of unregulated capitalism of the 1920s.

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.

The story was the same across the United States. Law professor Justin Levitt conducted an extensive study and uncovered that from 2000 to 2014, there were thirty-one voter impersonation cases out of one billion votes nationwide.

Citizens, however, were now going to have to run an obstacle course to acquire the appropriate identification to vote. Alabama, for example, refused to accept public housing ID, although this clearly is government-issued and, as the LDF explained, “for many people of color [it] is their only form of ID.”88 This refusal is despite—or, rather, because of—the racialized poverty that has made Alabama one of the poorest states in the nation. Nearly 34 percent of Hispanics and 31 percent of blacks live below the poverty line, compared with 14 percent of whites in the state. Moreover, in nine of the Black Belt counties, those in poverty exceeded the state average and echoed the impoverished conditions found during the Great Depression: Barbour (32 percent), Macon (32.2 percent), Sumter (33.2 percent), Wilcox (33.2 percent), Dallas (34.6 percent), Lowndes (35.2 percent), Greene (37.7 percent), Bullock (39.6 percent), and Perry (40 percent).

Congress, therefore, passed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), also known as the Motor Voter law, in 1993.12 The statute’s opening preamble is clear. The right to vote “is a fundamental right.” And, it is “the duty of the Federal, State, and local government to promote the exercise of that right.” This obligation requires paying particular attention to “discriminatory and unfair registration laws and procedures” that “disproportionately harm voter participation by various groups, including racial minorities.”13 As a result, the NVRA expanded the venues for and standardized the process of registration. Now citizens could register at the Department of Motor Vehicles and public assistance and disability offices, as well as through the mail with a brand-new standardized federal form.

During the negotiations, Republicans at first stalled, and then demanded a quid pro quo for increasing access to the ballot box. They insisted that the law had to require routine maintenance, scrubbing even, of the voter rolls. This would ensure that people who had moved out of the district or state and those who had died were no longer listed as eligible voters. It all sounded so reasonable and so mundane. Except it wasn’t. That innocuous language—just like Kit Bond’s demand to insert a requirement for voter IDs into the Help America Vote Act—became yet another weapon in the Republicans’ arsenal to disfranchise as many citizens as possible.

Unfortunately, far too many secretaries of state have bypassed this carefully laid-out two-step process, ignored a change in status, and, instead, used one specific criterion (non-voting) that is expressly forbidden in the NVRA to wipe out otherwise eligible voters.

Despite the targeting of key demographic groups, this wide-scale purging remains virtually undercover. It is effective, “powerful,” and “dangerous precisely because it is easy to justify to the public in the name of ‘keeping our voter rolls up to date.’

Jon Husted argued that his office met its statutory obligations and mailed postcards to Harmon and millions like him alerting them that if they did not respond within thirty days, the process of removal would begin. “If this is really [an] important thing to you in your life, voting,” the secretary of state chided, “you probably would have done so within a six-year period.”22 That argument, however, misses the basic point: failure to vote is not a legal, viable reason to purge someone from the voter rolls.

The Census Bureau, for example, uncovered that when it sends out mail, “white voters are 21 percent more likely than blacks or Hispanics to respond to their official requests; homeowners are 32 percent more likely to respond than renters; and the young are 74 percent less likely than the old to respond.”23 Thus, the differential response rates for Husted’s mailings translate into disproportionate purges in key neighborhoods of Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati—areas that are overwhelmingly minority and composed of renters and young adults. In Cleveland, for example, whites make up only 34.5 percent of the residents while 50.1 percent of the city’s residents are black and 10.5 percent are Hispanic.24 Moreover, nearly 60 percent of homes in the city are rented, not owned.25 It is also a town where 69 percent of the voters went for Obama in 2012.

Indeed, more than one-fourth of the two hundred thousand Ohioans Husted purged from the voter rolls in 2015 were in Cuyahoga County alone, where Cleveland is located.

Secretary of State Husted and his Republican predecessor Kenneth Blackwell have, for example, limited the number of polling stations for early voting in urban areas, thus creating untenable four-to-five-hour wait times in cities. These election officials have also tossed tens of thousands of absentee ballots, supposedly because they were cast on incorrect paper stock or had a spelling error.29 And, in a deposition, Husted’s top aide admitted that these so-called enforcement activities were actually targeted at the cities, while “white rural areas went nearly untouched.”30 In essence, the state has set up the equivalence of the old literacy tests, in which those Jim Crow states ensured that many of their citizens could not get a decent education and then turned around and required literacy to vote. Similarly, Ohio has set up a system whereby it blocks American citizens from voting and then purges them from the rolls … for not voting.

While Jim Crow Georgia had implemented a potent disfranchisement cocktail of literacy tests, poll taxes, and terrorism to keep the voting booth as white as possible, now, in the twenty-first century, James Crow Georgia has concocted its own witch’s brew of feigned innocence, the elimination of a million citizens for the sheer act of not voting, and a highly unreliable and therefore effective program called Exact Match. Georgia’s perfidy has not gone unnoticed and has resulted in an onslaught of lawsuits from the NAACP, the ACLU, and the League of Women Voters.

Candice Broce, a spokeswoman for Kemp’s office, took umbrage at the charge and explained that the “secretary of state’s office does not ‘purge’ any voters.” That’s just not a word that his office was willing to use. Instead, his staff explained, in language that the public would find reassuring, the elimination of more than one million citizens from the rolls was nothing more than “voter list maintenance … to safeguard … the integrity of the ballot box … and prevent fraud and ensure that all votes are cast by eligible Georgia voters.”

Political scientists M. V. Hood III from the University of Georgia and William Gillespie from Kennesaw State University concluded that “after examining approximately 2.1 million votes cast during the 2006 general election in Georgia, we find no evidence that election fraud was committed under the auspices of deceased registrants.”36 A decade later, as the Washington Post reported, despite all the baying at the moon, there were no cases prosecuted in Georgia for voter impersonation fraud.37 Kemp, however, did not hesitate to raise the bogeyman of voter fraud to mask the state’s voter suppression efforts.

If a citizen doesn’t move and doesn’t change his or her name, there is absolutely no reason to contact the secretary of state’s office. None. It is not about changes of addresses or even name changes; it’s realizing that minorities, the poor, and the young are less likely to vote than affluent whites are.38 Just as the Mississippi Plan in the 1890s used the poll tax to identify the characteristics of those the state did not want to vote, Georgia’s twist of the law does something similar.