One Person, No Vote (YA edition): How Not All Voters Are Treated Equally

by Carol Anderson

At-large voting is particularly insidious in areas where black Americans are a sizable part but not a majority of the population. It works like this: In the original confined districts, black Americans’ numbers were large enough to carry enormous electoral weight. Yet literacy tests, poll taxes, and Election Day terror had nullified that power and reduced black voter registration to the single digits. So, there was little possibility of a black candidate—or a white candidate attuned to the black community’s concerns—winning an election. After the Voting Rights Act, however, those districts could easily produce progressive elected officials. So Mississippi opted to dilute the black vote among a sea of whites by erasing the district boundaries and requiring candidates to run and succeed in a much wider geographical (and demographic) area. These supposedly race-neutral changes, one Mississippi legislator candidly admitted, would “preserve our way of doing business.”