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

by Carol Anderson

The rationale for these laws has been repeatedly debunked. For example, a 2014 analysis by Professor Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, found only thirty-one incidents of voter fraud out of hundreds of millions of votes cast since 2000.

Indeed, by 1940, shortly before the United States entered the war against the Nazis, only 3 percent of age-eligible blacks were registered to vote in the South.

What ruined the U.S.’s credibility, the Soviets gleefully claimed, was that people who “dream of nooses and dynamite … who throw rocks at defenseless Negro children—these gentlemen have the audacity to talk about ‘democracy’ and speak as supporters of ‘freedom.’ ”86 Don’t be fooled, the Kremlin warned—the U.S. goal was to export Jim Crow, not democracy. “American racism and its savage practice of cruel persecution and abuse of minorities is … the true nature of the American ‘democracy’ which the United States is trying to foist on other countries and peoples.”

Alabama civil rights attorney Hank Sanders recognized the revolutionary, transformative impact that the preclearance provision could have. Section 5 of the VRA, he explained, “can complete something this country started 200 years ago. That something is not complete, it is called Democracy.”106

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. Entirely willing to dilute and weaken the VRA, these GOP presidents were supported in their efforts by states chafing against the restraints imposed by enforced federal law.111

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.120

Therefore, 2016 was the first federal election in fifty years held without the protection of the Voting Rights Act. As a result, the rash of voter ID laws, purged voting rolls, redrawn district boundaries, and closed and moved polling places were the quiet and barely detected fire that burned through the 2016 presidential election, evaporating millions of votes and searing those who hadn’t even been under the original VRA.174 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.175 Meanwhile, Republican officials in North Carolina congratulated themselves that “African American Early Voting is down 8.5% from this time [four years earlier] in 2012.”176

The latest iteration of this disfranchising beast had been born in Florida. Its genesis was the 2000 presidential election. Hanging chads, broken machines, police hovering around the polls, and purged voter rolls had “put great stress on the public’s faith in electoral integrity.”7 African Americans certainly didn’t trust the state’s election officials. Blacks “found themselves in the position of having to complain to the people they were complaining about—filling out a police report about alleged police intimidation or filing a formal complaint about poll workers with canvassing boards.” Seeing the futility, most African Americans bypassed Florida’s severely compromised machinery and went directly to a trusted ally, the NAACP, with their concerns and affidavits.8 With the electoral chaos in Florida and the inability to get an accurate tally, it soon began to dawn on many that democracy in the United States was not the well-oiled machine it purported to be. Instead, it became all too apparent that “racial discrimination may have persisted despite the VRA” and that even “the nation’s ability to correctly count votes was in question.”9 As law professor Richard Hasen noted, “Belief in the integrity of elections is essential to any democracy,” but in Florida in 2000, that belief was shaken to its core.10

The big takeaway for the GOP from Florida and St. Louis therefore was the imperative of blocking members of those groups from the polls by virtually any means necessary. Paul Weyrich, a conservative activist and founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which eventually crafted voter suppression legislation that spread like a cancer throughout the United States, was brutally clear: “I don’t want everybody to vote.” The Republican Party’s “leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”26 That is to say, the GOP learned that voter suppression applied ruthlessly and relentlessly could deliver victory.

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.

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.”34

What made the law even more problematic was that the Carter-Ford Commission had estimated that “as many as 19 million potential voters nationwide did not possess either a driver’s license or a state issued photo ID” and those “most likely to be adversely affected … were disproportionately young, elderly, poor, and African American.”38 That was key. All that had to happen was for the GOP to reinforce the lie of voter fraud, create the public perception of democracy imperiled, increase the groundswell to “protect the integrity of the ballot box,” require exactly the type of identification that blacks, the poor, the young, and the elderly did not have, and, equally important, mask these acts of aggressive voter suppression behind the nobility of being “civic-minded.”

The NAACP and ACLU countered that the state’s numbers, study, and analysis were inaccurate and full-blown misrepresentations. For example, the fact that supposedly 1 percent did not have an ID was “hardly negligible” because that was 43,000 citizens. But, it was much worse than that, they argued. A recent survey of Indiana voters “found that approximately 16% of all voting eligible residents did not have either a current license or state identification card and 13% of current registered voters did not have licenses or identification cards.” In fact, a subsequent study found that in Indiana, “white citizens were 11.5 percentage points more likely than black citizens to have the accepted credentials to vote.” The situation was exacerbated by the state’s “Byzantine requirements imposed on persons attempting to obtain identification from the BMV [Bureau of Motor Vehicles] … In a given week 60% of applicants for licenses or state identification cards are turned away because they fail to have the appropriate documents mandated by the BMV.” In other words, the state’s offer of “free ID” was a brilliant smokescreen that masked that the actual documents required to obtain an Indiana driver’s license or state identification were not so easy to get and often came with costs borne solely by the would-be voter. The NAACP and ACLU noted, for example, that a birth certificate was necessary to get a driver’s license, but in an obvious “Catch-22 of classic proportions” in Marion County, wh...

The bogeyman of voter fraud has also proven useful in North Carolina where Republican governor Pat McCrory insisted that the only way to keep the monster at bay was the draconian ID law that state instituted. But a systematic analysis by the North Carolina State Board of Elections of nearly 4.8 million votes in the 2016 election found only one vote that could have possibly been stopped by voter ID.79 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.80 But the lie of voter fraud remains a salient part of the American political landscape; indeed, it continues to be a powerful and effective “political weapon” wielded against minorities, youths, and the poor.81

The law skewed acceptable government-issued photo IDs to those “which white people are more likely to carry,” such as gun licenses. It made driver’s licenses the virtual holy grail of IDs because nearly one-third of the state’s counties, including some of those that are heavily minority, do not have DMVs. Republican legislators recognized that it would require some citizens to travel up to 250 miles round-trip to obtain a license, but the lawmakers decided to remove language from S.B. 14 that would have reimbursed those who had to make that poll tax–like trip. In fact, one of the state’s lawyers “brushed aside geographical obstacles as the ‘reality to life of choosing to live in that part of Texas.’ ”

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.

Kobach, therefore, suspended the right to vote of 35,314 Kansans because they could not produce “proof of U.S. citizenship.” More than 12,000 of those he simply purged outright because the disparate access to citizenship documents played right into Kobach’s belief about who is American and who is not, and thus who has the right to vote. He “associated minority voters with ‘ethnic cleansing’ … [in] a conspiracy to ‘replace American voters with illegal aliens.’ ” The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights rightfully concluded that the SAFE Act “may disparately impact voters on the basis of age, sex, disability, race, income level and affiliation.” And, the commission continued, what it costs, especially for the poor, to obtain a passport or a birth certificate is a “barrier” that amounts to “an unconstitutional poll tax.” A contemptuous Kobach sneered that the commission’s report “is not worth the paper that it was written on.”52 Yet a study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that “7 percent of Americans, mostly minorities, do not have these [citizenship] documents readily available.” Moreover, as scholar Chelsie Bright explained, “it is unclear that proof of citizenship requirements actually add any real value to the integrity of the election process. Federal law already requires that individuals registering to vote affirm in writing that they are a U.S. citizen. Lying carries serious criminal penalties. Further, research consistently finds that voting by noncitizens is extre...

But up close, neither the lists nor the database could withstand scrutiny. The problem is twofold. First, despite the hype and the marketing, the program does not actually match on every parameter. Not all states require the same information that Crosscheck uses to purge the rolls. Social security numbers, for example, are rarely used. Ohio doesn’t bother with a person’s middle name either. Suffixes rarely make it in, as well. As a result, it believes that James Willie Brown is the same voter as James Arthur Brown, as James Clifford Brown, as James Lynn Brown. The possibility for error is exponential. In Georgia alone there are nearly four hundred James Browns. And in North Carolina, the supposedly more than thirty-five thousand illegal voters simply evaporated when the state hired an ex-FBI agent to ferret them out and bring them to justice. He found “exactly zero double voters from the Crosscheck list.” In fact, researchers at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania discovered that Crosscheck has an error rate of more than 99 percent.63 The lack of consistency, rigor, and accuracy led a “shocked” Mark Swedlund, a database expert whose clients include several Fortune 500 companies, to dismiss Crosscheck’s “childish methodology.” It’s too error-prone. “God forbid,” he noted, if “your name is Garcia, of which there are 858,000 in the U.S. and your name is Joseph or Jose. You’re probably suspected of voting in 27 states.”64

The depth of disfranchisement, of wringing the right to vote out of American citizens, led award-winning columnist Charles P. Pierce to conclude that “Kobach is Jim Crow walking.”70 Investigative journalist Greg Palast, after surveying the racial casualties in Ohio, knew that it wasn’t just Kansas’s secretary of state but an entire GOP apparatus that decided the “only way” to win an election was “by stealing American citizens’ votes.” “It’s a brand-new Jim Crow. Today, on Election Day, they’re not going to use white sheets to keep away black voters. Today they’re using spreadsheets.”

The majority are in Florida. The Sunshine State is actually an electorally dark place for 1.7 million citizens because “Florida is the national champion of voter disenfranchisement.”108 The state leads the way in racializing felony disfranchisement as well. “Nearly one-third of those who have lost the right to vote for life in Florida are black, although African Americans make up just 16 percent of the state’s population.” In fact, “Florida’s law disenfranchises 21 percent of its total African American voting-age population.”109

The point was to make the outcome of elections a foregone conclusion; to have the winner decided before the first vote was ever cast. The question, therefore, was never how do we open up this democracy and make it as vibrant, responsive, and inclusive as we can, but rather, how do we maximize the frustration of millions of citizens to minimize their participation in the electoral process? How do we let candidates identify and choose their voters instead of the other way around? And how do we make all this look legitimate?

In 2016, the Economist Intelligence Unit, which had evaluated 167 nations on sixty different indicators, reported that the United States had slipped into the category of a “flawed democracy,” where, frankly, it had been “teetering for years.”5 Similarly, the Electoral Integrity Project, using a number of benchmarks and measurements, was stunned to find that when it applied those same calculations in the United States as it had in Egypt, Yemen, and Sudan, North Carolina was “no longer considered to be a fully functioning democracy.” Indeed, if it were an independent nation, the state would rank somewhere between Iran and Venezuela. The basic problem in North Carolina was that, despite the overt performance of ballots, precincts, and vote tallies, legislators and congressional representatives were actually selected for office rather than elected.6

The deft art of gerrymandering, “the nastiest form of politics that there is,” is key to understanding the decline of democracy in America.

its decision, in pointing to the disparity in the weight of votes, the court, thus, defined “one person, one vote” as the standard benchmark for democracy. This was reaffirmed in two major subsequent decisions in the 1960s.17

They warned that to continue down this road would entrench a one-party system in power whose only threat would be challengers from the extremist wing. They predicted that the rotten-borough districts would make these so-called representatives absolutely unrepresentative because they would be impervious to the will of voters. We are creating, they insisted, a system in which “elections do not matter.” As long as the system puts in power those who received the least number of votes, American democracy is imperiled.24

In the 2016 election, for example, Democrats running for seats in the House of Representatives received 1.4 million more votes than their opponents, but Republicans secured thirty-three more seats.42 And those meticulously crafted districts provided another important benefit as well: they inflated the number of Republican districts and provided an additional sixteen to twenty-six representatives in Congress, which was more than enough to pass the extremely unpopular tax bill.

The consequences of that brutality, of that way of governing, have permeated the state long beyond the Civil Rights Movement and well into the twenty-first century.2 Although its form of oppression is now much subtler, it is equally devastating. Alabama ranks dead last in the nation in public health.3 The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty found extensive pools of human fecal matter in the woods behind homes because there is no waste-disposal infrastructure for large swaths of the state’s Black Belt counties and, equally important, the government refuses to build any. State officials, however, are fully aware of the need. According to the Alabama Department of Public Health, “The number of households in Lowndes County with inadequate or no septic systems range from 40 to 90 per cent; … 50 per cent of the conventional, onsite septic systems are currently failing or are expected to fail in the future.” As a result, fecal-contaminated water has made E. coli and hookworm, indicative of extreme systemic poverty, prevalent throughout the Black Belt counties.4 Not surprisingly, the state is next to last in infant health. In fact, the “death rate for African American infants is more than two times higher than the rate for white infants, a stubborn trend that has persisted for the last several years.”5 Alabama is also ranked forty-seventh in education, forty-fifth in low poverty rate, forty-sixth in low unemployment rate, and forty-second in quality of government.

John Merrill and other Republican lawmakers claimed that they simply did not see the problem. The issue of access to the ballot box had nothing to do with Alabama rejecting government-issued public housing ID, closing the DMVs in the Black Belt counties, curtailing the hours at the courthouses, placing broken links and misleading and inconsistent information on the state’s website, offering the mirage of online registration for people without even the basic fiber optics (much less computers) in their rural areas, suggesting that Alabamians could ride nonexistent public transportation to other counties, or touting a mobile voter-ID-card unit that provided only 2 percent of the cards needed. The problem, John Merrill said, was the people. “If you’re too sorry or lazy to get up off of your rear and to go register to vote, or to register electronically, and then to go vote, then you don’t deserve that privilege,” he said, as he twisted not only state-constructed barriers into personal failings but also the Fifteenth Amendment into a “privilege” and not a right. “As long as I’m secretary of state of Alabama,” he boasted, “you’re going to have to show some initiative to become a registered voter in this state.”

And, unfortunately, in the twenty-first century, there were people who had to overcome every barrier that Alabama put in their way. And they did. But let’s be clear, they shouldn’t have had to. Voting is neither an obstacle course nor a privilege. It’s a right.

A study by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed that after Shelby, “53 of Georgia’s 159 counties have fewer polling sites now than in 2012.” In addition, “thirty-nine of those 53 counties have higher poverty rates than the rest of the state and 30 of them have large African-American populations.”33 One activist explained, “Closing polling places in Black areas is a transparently racist tactic in line with literacy tests, poll taxes, and intimidation and harassment by law enforcement agents during the Jim Crow era.”

Nationwide, since the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, “more than 1,000 polling sites have been closed in nine Republican-run states alone.”

It’s no surprise, then, that attention soon turned to Dodge City, Kansas. The county clerk there, Debbie Cox, decided in October, with the election just a month away, to move the one and only polling place for thirteen thousand voters to a site beyond the city limits, a mile from public transportation, and not readily accessible by walking.43 Her office then sent newly registered voters the wrong address to cast their ballot.44

As an editorial in the Washington Post noted, the Republicans “have spent the past decade crying wolf over voter fraud as a pretext for imposing needlessly complicated ID requirements.”132 Yet they refused to acknowledge what happened right in front of them: election fraud, when “a candidate’s campaign sets out to manipulate vote tallies to steal an election.”