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

by Carol Anderson

The 2018 midterms not only exposed the quiet burn through voting rights that shuttering, moving, and restricting access to polling stations kindled, but also turned the spotlight on yet another stealth mode of destroying American citizens’ ability to cast ballots: voter roll purges. As the Brennan Center reported, in the two years before the 2016 presidential election, sixteen million voters were wiped off the rolls. This wasn’t routine or normal. The eliminations, it turns out, were at a substantially higher rate than they were before the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision. In fact, the “increase in purged voters was most significant in parts of the country with a history of racial discrimination” and that were previously under the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Georgia, for example, under Brian Kemp, “purged twice as many voters—1.5 million—between the 2012 and 2016 elections as it did between 2008 and 2012.”

“This was the line that got me,” she sneered: “ ‘You have not voted or updated your registration in at least three years.’ ” How could that be, she asked. “I. Just. Voted!” Hopkins exclaimed. In fact, not only had she voted in the 2018 primary elections, she had also been a registered voter since 1992.

Kemp had used a standard conservative “enemies list” to justify his office’s scorched-earth policy through the voter rolls. He claimed he was about defending the integrity of the vote against the “radical leftists,” “outside agitators,” and “criminal illegals” who were pouring into the state to take democracy away from its rightful owners. At a campaign rally where Donald Trump continued to stoke the baseless fears about “illegals” overrunning the state, Kemp had already tilled the ground with the lie that his opponent, Stacey Abrams, was encouraging “illegals”—documented and undocumented—to build the blue wave and vote for her.

As the incident exploded over traditional and social media, the commissioners insisted that race had nothing to do with it. Rather, they claimed, the center was nonpartisan and “this was a prohibited political activity.”87 Yet, that rationale crumbled beneath the Jefferson County Leisure Center Facebook post that same day announcing an upcoming talk by a Republican running for reelection.88 The commissioners also stressed that they didn’t know who this “third party”—Black Voters Matter—was, despite the organization already having been vetted and approved by the center. Nonetheless, they remained “uncomfortable” with this group taking senior citizens off the center’s grounds. Atlanta-based music producer Isaac Hayes III scoffed at that: “These are grown adults that went to go vote.” But, the county commissioners “made them get off the bus like they were being kidnapped … That’s a textbook example of voter suppression itself.”

ICE ripped asylum-seeking families apart, separating children from their parents and deliberately not documenting familial relationships as the agency deported the adults and locked the children in cages.97 ICE also terrorized communities by showing up at courthouses and workplaces and seizing people who had been brought to the United States as children decades earlier, deporting them to lands unfamiliar and far, far away.98 ICE simply brought terror. Terror as policy.99 And now it was coming to North Carolina.

ICE and the justice department wanted “poll books, voting records, voting authorization documents, and executed ballots for the last five years.” A revised subpoena expanded the request to all hundred counties for dates going back to January 1, 2010.101

ICE and the Justice Department also demanded “registration application forms, postcard applications, federal write-in absentee ballots, early voting application forms, provisional voting forms, absentee ballot request forms, any record of voter cancellations and any form in which someone admits or denies being a non-citizen.”

At first the county boards couldn’t believe it; they thought the subpoenas were “fake” and perhaps “a Russian plot to get the ballots.” The information requested looked like a dark web phishing expedition: “dates of birth, Social Security numbers and even the actual voted ballots of millions of people.”

The implications were a democracy’s nightmare. Gunther Peck, an associate professor of public policy at Duke University, explained, “There is a genuine fear that by linking voting to ICE, legal citizens might be anxious about voting because ICE has detained and rounded up people that are [U.S.] citizens.”

The question was whether the bipartisan North Carolina Board of Elections would cave to the enormous pressure from two behemoth federal bureaucracies. Would the board abandon its citizens? The answer was resounding.

The board “stands ready to assist any federal, state, or local investigation into illegal activity.” They refused, however, to be part of any scheme “if the purpose of the investigation is to advance a false narrative of voter fraud, if it’s to propagandize a voter ID amendment [that was on the state’s midterm ballot], if it’s to suppress African-American votes, [or] if it’s to intimidate Hispanic voters.”112 The board members, therefore, questioned ICE about the “political motivation behind this unprecedented request.” They brought up how “President Trump has continually repeated false claims regarding widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election.”

As the Republicans made their case before the board, they got names wrong, had incorrect data, made “sloppy errors,” and presented Dowless, who was a candidate for Soil and Water Conservation District supervisor, as a victim of voter fraud, while he was, in fact, a perpetrator of election fraud. He actually sat there listening to testimony presented by the Republican-backed attorneys about how crooked and scandalous the BCIA’s actions were, when the evidence and affidavits were actually detailing bit by bit what Dowless’s operation had done to steal an election.120 The board knew it.

The board was so desperate they not only went to the U.S. attorney’s office but also to the local district attorney, and the FBI. Nothing. No movement whatsoever. The board’s concerns and pleas simply went unanswered. One of the women whose vote had been jeopardized by Dowless’s operation was livid. “Whoever … is supposed to be following up on crooked elections, is not doing their job,” she railed.

His workers would routinely gather blank or incomplete ballots, fill them in voting a straight Republican ticket, then witness the form as if the actual voter had made all the selections for candidates. Dowless trained his team to use “the same color ink as the voter who filled out other parts of the ballot,” put the completed forms in mailboxes close to the homes of the voters, and place the stamps in a certain way so as not to raise the suspicions of the county election boards. Meanwhile, other ballots were dumped at his office for special handling. In fact, there were “stacks of them on his desk.” In return his ballot workers received cash for the number of absentee ballots they distributed and collected.125 It was a smooth, effective operation that helped Mark Harris win the Ninth Congressional District by 905 votes. It was also illegal. The red flags were many.

Dowless’s operation alone had turned in 592 of the “684 absentee ballots ultimately cast in [Bladen] county.” There were other anomalies as well. Harris won 61 percent of the absentee vote in the county. But only “19 percent of Bladen County’s accepted mail-in absentee ballots were cast by registered Republicans.” Which means “that along with the almost 20% of loyal registered Republicans who voted that method, Harris would have also received almost all the registered unaffiliated voters and/or some Democratic registered voters to make it to 62% [sic] of the vote.”

The North Carolina Republican Party simply dismissed the magnitude of what Dowless did on Harris’s behalf and offered, instead, that the “reality is that there aren’t enough ballots in question to change the outcome of this election.” That statement required the GOP to ignore the 1,675 unreturned absentee ballots, the hundreds completed by Dowless’s operatives and not the voters, and North Carolina law stating that if “irregularities or improprieties … taint the results of the entire election and cast doubt on its fairness” the state elections board can order a new election. Instead, the party brushed that aside and “urged the elections board to certify the results,” so that Harris with his 905-vote “victory” could take his seat in the U.S. Congress.134 Harris, of course, agreed. “There is absolutely no public evidence,” he had tweeted, “that there are enough ballots in question to affect the outcome of this race.” Nate Silver, an expert on election polling and statistics, retorted: “This is simply not true; there ARE enough ballots in question in NC-9 to potentially affect the outcome.”135 The North Carolina GOP didn’t care and threatened to sue if Harris wasn’t seated.

Dowless clearly ran an illegal ballot snatch-and-grab operation. But Mark Harris tried to shield himself from the taint behind a wall of innocence—he had no idea there were any red flags about the campaign operative. He didn’t know what was going on.

Then the Republican’s son, an assistant U.S. attorney, took the stand and knocked it down with a sledgehammer of documents that detailed his numerous warnings to his father about Dowless’s “shady” reputation and ethical lapses. In other words, Mark Harris knew exactly with whom he was dealing and had hired. And, as the son sat on the stand and testified, the father, a Baptist minister, sat there across from him in tears, exposed as a liar and an election thief.

As Georgia prepared for the midterm elections, then, all was not well. There was a secretary of state running for governor, one who held onto his current job while striving for a higher elected office, creating an ethical conflict of interest that he flat-out refused to resolve. There was a high-profile, statistical dead-heat governor’s race that promised to drive record voter turnout in the midst of widespread efforts at voter suppression. There were voting machines that were easily hackable with no auditable paper trail. Then, there was Kemp’s office, which was tasked with ensuring election integrity but was lax on cybersecurity and so dismissive of expert testimony that U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg admonished Kemp that “the Defendants and State election officials had buried their heads in the sand” and left the state’s election machinery vulnerable.150 There was also a refusal by Kemp’s office to use any of the ten million dollars from the federal government to buy new machines to replace those embargoed.151 And, an unwillingness to contact the court to release into use some of the seven hundred machines sequestered in Fulton County because of lawsuits. Altogether, a perfect electoral storm blew through Georgia. It was as chaotic, mismanaged, and frustrating as expected. Predictably, because of Kemp’s machinations, precincts “with particularly long lines [were] in African American neighborhoods.”

As statisticians, political scientists, and computer scientists began scouring the data, no analysis could explain what had happened. Then, “just for kicks, they decided to run a statistical analysis by race.” There it was. The greater the number of African Americans in a precinct, the greater the drop-off in votes. Equally important, it wasn’t just the blacker the district, the more votes that disappeared. There was a strange twist. This phenomenon did not occur with absentee ballots from that area. It didn’t happen in districts that leaned just as heavily toward Democrats but were predominately white. It didn’t even happen in African American districts with early voting. It only happened when those who lived in predominately African American neighborhoods voted via the machines—the ones that were vulnerable and susceptible to hacking—on election day.

In the face of this conundrum, the state—Brian Kemp and his elected successor as Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger—saw no need to investigate. Meanwhile, the Democrat, Sarah Riggs Amico, lost her election bid by 123,000 votes.

“today, 44% of Georgians believe that people of color and poor Georgians had their votes INTENTIONALLY suppressed in the 2018 election. There is a crisis of faith in the system, because this system is broken, and Georgians know it.”

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.

Americans mobilized and fought so hard for this democracy in 2018 that they saw the highest voter turnout rate for the midterm elections since 1914.170 That tsunami of voters had an impact that hit the blue states, as well. The New York state legislature finally had a majority that passed landmark voting rights legislation.171 When a cabal of New Jersey Democrats tried to sneak through legislation for extreme partisan gerrymandering, other Democrats and progressive activists beat it down. They were clear: Democracy and extreme partisan gerrymandering are incompatible.

Democrats flipped forty seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and brought the most diverse group of congresspeople ever to D.C. One of the first actions of this new House was H.R. 1—an omnibus bill designed to restore the Voting Rights Act, weaken Citizens United, and bring transparency and accountability to American democracy.

The Empire, of course, struck back. Lame duck legislative sessions in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, and Wisconsin worked to undermine or undo election results.

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.”

The rationale for the state’s hunt for rampant voter fraud just did not match up with the facts. As clearly, as plainly, and as precisely as he could, Biery wrote that “there is no widespread voter fraud.” And this subsequent mad scramble over ninety-five thousand supposed noncitizens voting “forces officials to figure out ‘how to ferret the infinitesimal needles out of the haystack.’ ” Based on the lie of rampant voter fraud, “perfectly legal naturalized Americans were burdened with what the Court finds to be ham-handed and threatening correspondence from the state which … exemplifies the power of government to strike fear and anxiety and to intimidate the least powerful among us.”

It’s also clear that, with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, a major legal and political paradigm shift has taken place. The responsibility for upholding the right to vote has moved off the broad shoulders of the state and been placed squarely on the backs of the individual citizen. States apparently don’t have the time to find an accessible polling site, yet Native Americans were given just a few weeks to establish a physical street address if they wanted to vote. Georgia can use a racially discriminatory registration system to put citizens in electoral limbo, but it’s the American who must drag a treasure trove of documents to the polling station hoping that one will prove their right to cast a ballot. In 2018, the people and civil society, therefore, had to “warrior up” and fight an arguably wealthier, entrenched, and more powerful opponent. If they hadn’t, if they hadn’t exclaimed that “we are the defenders,” there wouldn’t even be a hope of a United States of America in 2020.

How to even acknowledge the straight, unflinching “I’m going to tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear” friendship?