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

by Carol Anderson

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