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

by Carol Anderson

Of the original and alleged thirteen “victims,” the only one who remained steadfast in insisting that her vote was stolen was Sophie Spann, who just happened, wrote one journalist, to have “reared the sheriff’s deputy and son-in-law” and who was brought lunch by the sheriff personally before she took the stand. Based on Spann’s testimony alone, Julia Wilder and Maggie Bozeman were found guilty by an all-white jury. The verdict was upheld by the appeals court. In January 1982, Bozeman, then fifty-one, received a four-year prison sentence. Wilder, sixty-nine, got hit with the maximum, five years. “The sentences are believed to be the stiffest ever given in an Alabama voting fraud case,” reported the Washington Post.

For many in the black community, the district attorney going after Bozeman and Wilder was nothing but retribution “for trying to make democracy work.” The sheriff disagreed vigorously. There was no need for what Wilder and Bozeman did. Blacks 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.”

Three years after Wilder and Bozeman began serving their sentences, in 1985, then–US attorney for the Southern District of Alabama Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III slapped three civil rights workers with a twenty-nine-count indictment for forging or changing and then mailing bogus absentee ballots. His primary target was Albert Turner Sr., a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr. Albert Turner Sr. entered the voting rights battle in the early 1960s after he, a college-educated man, failed Alabama’s literacy test. Infuriated, Turner threw himself into grassroots organizing. He was knee-deep in the battles in Selma. He formed the Perry County Civic League to register more black men and women to vote and change what democracy looked like in Alabama.

Turner noticed that despite the VRA, and despite the large number of black people in Alabama’s Black Belt counties (so-called because of the region’s rich, dark soil), white people consistently won every election. As Turner dug deeper, he learned that the difference was the sheer volume of absentee ballots from whites who were landowners in Perry, Lowndes, and other counties but lived in Birmingham, Chicago, and elsewhere.

Almost one-third of Perry County’s black adults worked in another county. What’s more, 15 percent of its black residents were over sixty-five years old. In short, 48 percent of the black vote was already in jeopardy because of employment obligations and a lack of mobility. And there was this: the polls were open for only four hours in the afternoon on Election Day. The absentee ballot would be a godsend for black people who could not vote because of their work schedule, distance to the polls, or limited mobility during that narrow four-hour window.

The Perry County district attorney cried foul! He was convinced that Turner and company had committed fraud. The DA quickly informed US attorney Jeff Sessions, who hated the VRA, considering it a meddling piece of legislation. When the next primary rolled around in 1984, Sessions had the FBI tail the Turners and Stephen Hogue. After the trio mailed hundreds of absentee ballots they had collected, the agents seized the ballots, and, after picking through them, believed they had identified seventy-five that had been tampered with. Sessions then identified the victims of the alleged voter fraud, moved them south to Mobile, and interviewed them there. Note that in his investigations, Sessions targeted only counties where blacks had won office.

And so in Perry County, he rounded up some twenty elderly black people and had state troopers drive them 160 miles away, to a predominately white area, to be fingerprinted, photographed, and grilled before a grand jury.

“Ninety-two-year-old Willie Bright was so frightened of ‘the law’ that he wouldn’t even admit he’d voted,” reported Ari Berman in a 2016 piece for The Nation magazine, “Jeff Sessions, Trump’s Pick for Attorney General, Is a Fierce Opponent of Civil Rights.” In the end, after a grand jury indictment, then a trial, Albert Turner, Evelyn Turner, and Stephen Hogue were found not guilty of any wrongdoing. There had been no voter fraud. That trial, like Bozeman and Wilder’s, signaled how to use “the criminal processes . . . ​to slow down the development of progressive black leadership.”

On the night of November 7, 2000, forty-nine states had tallied their ballots. Bush and Gore were in a virtual tie as the world waited for the count from Florida. Whoever won its twenty-five Electoral College votes would become the forty-third US president. Florida 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 Latinos, from the voter rolls. In polling stations in Jacksonville’s black neighborhoods, police officers stationed themselves conspicuously around the buildings and at entry points as if this were Mississippi in the 1950s all over again. In other cases, voters who knew they were registered learned on Election Day that their names were nowhere to be found on the registrar’s list. Poll workers could not get in touch with election officials to do any kind of verification because the phone lines were jammed. There was a more effective method of verification using laptop computers, but those were placed in predominately white, Republican precincts.

Long an opponent of the Voting Rights Act, Roberts had clerked under Justice William Rehnquist, whose initial foray into voting rights prior to his ascent to the Supreme Court included a project to purge as many people of color as possible from voting rolls in Phoenix, Arizona. Rehnquist’s appointment to the bench only strengthened his opposition. In one case, the US Supreme Court had overturned a multiyear scheme in Rome, Georgia, that, without gaining preclearance approval, repeatedly annexed white areas to the city to reduce the electoral potential of black voters. Rehnquist was unfazed by the city’s (illegal) actions and instead depicted the VRA as simply black peoples’ way to get revenge on the heirs of slaveholders. “The enforcement provisions of the Civil War Amendments [Fourteenth and Fifteenth],” he wrote in his dissent, “were not premised on the notion that Congress could empower a later generation of blacks to ‘get even’ for wrongs inflicted on their forebears.”

“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.”

Note that the word used is “giving” instead of simply recognizing that people of color have rights.

“John seemed like he always had it in for the Voting Rights Act,” remembered J. Gerald Hebert, one of the chief litigators for the DOJ on voting. “I remember him being a zealot when it came to having fundamental suspicions about the Voting Rights Act’s utility.”

That decision said that prima facie evidence of discrimination was not enough, even when staring right at a city like Mobile, Alabama, which was 35 percent black and had never—even after the VRA—elected any black person as a city commissioner.

“In a lot of cases . . . ​there were no blacks elected,” said civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner. “We were trying to get from none to some.” Roberts didn’t see the virtual shutout in many municipalities and counties; instead he focused on districts such as Atlanta and Houston, which had elected blacks and Latinos, and, therefore, to him it was unfair that Georgia and Texas remained under the preclearance provisions.

“Since 1982,” Roberts wrote in his decision, “only 17 jurisdictions—out of the more than 12,000 covered political subdivisions—have successfully bailed out of the Act.” That only seventeen had been able to prove they no longer discriminated against their minority populations’ voting rights and thus no longer needed federal oversight seemed absurd to Roberts. He, of course, did not reckon with the fact that places in Georgia and Alabama such as Pickens County, Perry County, and Rome had repeatedly tried to disenfranchise American citizens despite the Fifteenth Amendment, and that is the reason only seventeen jurisdictions had been released from scrutiny in more than four decades. Instead, came the court’s warning shot: seventeen was not enough. “It is unlikely that Congress intended the provision to have such limited effect.”

This was not the first time that the Supreme Court had dealt with the redrawing of a city’s boundaries designed to dilute the voting strength of a town’s black population. In the late 1950s, black people in Tuskegee, Alabama, had begun, against all odds, to amass some semblance of voting strength. The state legislature quickly countered by annexing plot after plot of land surrounding Tuskegee until the town’s perfectly symmetrical square boundaries had been horribly disfigured into a twenty-eight-sided blob. This is what it took to remove all but four or five of the four hundred voting-age eligible black people from the city and ensure that no white voter was excluded. Alabama argued that it had the authority to change its city boundaries whenever and however it chose and it didn’t need a reason.

The court decided that the VRA was unfair because it singled out and punished the South (which obviously meant whites in the South), unfair because the 2006 reauthorization included the same states and counties as in the original bill, unfair because blacks had won multiple elections and were voting in record numbers, and unfair because the racism of the past, which had led to the creation of the VRA, obviously no longer determined access to the polls. The Shelby County v. Holder decision gutted Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which determined which locales came under federal oversight.

George W. Bush, although losing the nationwide popular vote, carried Florida by 537 votes, won the Electoral College, and, with a very key assist by the US Supreme Court, became the forty-third president of the United States. Lesson #3: Lie. Lie often, loudly, boldly, unashamedly, and consistently. Lie until it drowns out the truth. Lie until no amount of evidence could prove otherwise. Lie until there was no other reigning narrative. Just lie.

(Don’t do this)

Bond eventually found a dead person on the voter registration rolls: a former city alderman. But there was no evidence that the deceased or anyone with his name voted in the 2000 election. 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 rampant voter fraud. And it was also obvious that “none of these problems could have been resolved by requiring photo ID at the polls.”

Thor Hearne gave it his all. In hearing after hearing, press conference after press conference, op-ed after op-ed, he filled the ether with tales of people impersonating someone else to destroy the integrity of America’s elections. As for those supposed “hot spots” of systemic voter fraud, there were five: each with a black or at least nonwhite population that made up 32 to 95 percent of the city’s residents: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Milwaukee, Wisconsin Seattle, Washington St. Louis, Missouri/East St. Louis, Illinois Cleveland, Ohio

Some federal prosecutors dug in and refused to bring charges and give credence to the GOP’s voter fraud claims right before the 2006 midterm election because there was little to no evidence of wrongdoing. David Iglesias, the US attorney in New Mexico, for example, saw no reason to file charges in an instance where someone registered a thirteen-year-old boy to vote unbeknownst to him and his parents. For that and similar acts of integrity, Iglesias and seven other federal prosecutors were fired.

As the attorneys dug deeper into the data, they uncovered that 17.7 percent of black households did not have access to a vehicle as opposed to 4.4 percent of white households. Even more troubling were the statistics in the two counties that Atlanta spread across—Fulton and DeKalb. In Fulton, almost three-fourths of those without a vehicle were black people. In DeKalb, the figure was 63.5 percent. Similar analysis on poverty rates, access to birth certificates, and unemployment rates (given that government work IDs were acceptable) resulted in the same pattern of racial inequality that would easily impact the ability to vote. On August 25, 2005, DOJ attorneys recommended that HB 244 be rejected “on the ground that the state has failed to meet its burden of proof to demonstrate that it does not have the effect of retrogressing minority voting strength.”

All that hope for change, though, dissipated in the midst of a recession—one like no other since the Great Depression of the 1930s—which had begun under President George W. Bush. It had already destroyed twenty-two trillion dollars of wealth, fueled and entrenched double-digit unemployment for black people, and led to economic stimulus packages that were targeted at banks and other financial institutions whose greed and recklessness had put the global economy in a tailspin.

As the Washington Post reported on November 13, 2010, “before the midterm elections, Democrats controlled 27 state legislatures outright. Republicans were in charge in 14 states, and eight states were split. (Nebraska, which has a single legislative chamber, is officially nonpartisan.) Today, Republicans control 26 state legislatures, Democrats 17, and five states have split control. In New York officials are still determining who is in charge of the state senate.” It was, without question, a political bloodbath. (As for the New York senate, Republicans came away with a 32–30 majority.)

The group behind this well-coordinated effort was the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), founded back in the 1970s by a man who once declared that he didn’t want “everybody to vote.” In 2009, ALEC began to draft model voter ID legislation. With the GOP in control of more than half the nation’s state governments after the 2010 midterm elections, these bills arose like dragon’s teeth out of the soil of racism and disenfranchisement—out of a Republican vision of democracy that views most citizens as unworthy.

Two key US Supreme Court decisions greased the path. One was the Shelby County v. Holder decision (2013), which gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Prior to this ruling, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent noted, “between 1982 and 2006, DOJ objections blocked over 700 voting changes based on a determination that the changes were discriminatory.” The DOJ’s findings were reinforced during congressional hearings on the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA. There it became apparent that those proposed changes that the DOJ had denied were actually the preclearance states’ “calculated decisions to keep minority voters from fully participating in the political process.” And now that protection was gone.

The other key US Supreme Court decision was Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010). Here the High Court ruled that the laws that limited corporate donations to political campaigns actually violated businesses’ right to free speech.

This was no one-off. In a series of April 6, 2011, emails where Republicans were concerned that their candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Judge David Prosser, just might lose, GOP operatives, as one outlet reported, began plotting: Steve Baas, a lobbyist for the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce and former Republican legislative staffer, floated an idea on the email thread: “Do we need to start messaging ‘widespread reports of election fraud’ so we are positively set up for the recount regardless of the final number? I obviously think we should.” Scott Jensen—the former GOP Assembly Speaker turned lobbyist for American Federation for Children, a private school voucher advocacy group—quickly responded: “Yes. Anything fishy should be highlighted. Stories should be solicited by talk radio hosts.” In another email, Jensen writes that [ Judge] Prosser “needs to be on talk radio in the morning saying he is confident he won and talk radio needs to scream the Dems are trying to steal the race.”

Number 1: From the very beginning, the dog whistle target has been “urban” areas with large populations of people of color. Kit Bond railed against electoral corruption in St. Louis. ACVR identified a rogue’s gallery of cities where millions of black Americans lived, including some where they were the majority population. Representative Burmeister singled out blacks in Augusta who were supposedly willing to sell their votes. Psychologically, the word association of “crime,” “urban,” and “African Americans” made the connection of “stealing” an election via fraud cognitively palpable to the broader population, which had linked crime and blackness together for ages.

Number 2: Supposedly respectable members of society leveled the charges. US senators, attorneys with law degrees from Ivy League schools, governors, and others fervently and doggedly warned the nation about voter fraud, voter fraud, voter fraud. The credibility of those accusations was amplified by newscasts that did not question the assertions of voter fraud but simply reported them.

Number 3: For the broader public who didn’t question this threat, the response seemed measured, re...

For example, the state refused to accept public housing ID, although this clearly is government-issued. Because a greater percentage of black people live in public housing, this edict disproportionately affects them. Alabama is one of the poorest states in the nation, and nearly 34 percent of Latinos and 31 percent of blacks live below the poverty line, compared with 14 percent of whites.

As if reading from the ALEC playbook, North Carolina instituted what Ian Millhiser with the Center for American Progress called the nation’s “worst voter suppression law.” Driving that decision was the grim reality for the Republicans that in the twenty-first century, black voter registration had increased by 51.1 percent in the state and black people also had a higher voter turnout “rate than white registered voters in both the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections,” reported Brynna Quillin in a Kennedy School Review post.

The goal of all the GOP voter ID laws is to reduce significantly the demographic and political impact of a growing share of the American electorate, to diminish people’s ability to choose government representatives and the types of policies they support. Unfortunately, it’s working. In 2017 Newsweek reported that a study showed that “the turnout gaps between white and ethnic minority voters are far higher in states where people must show ID during or after voting.” There is a 4.9 percent gap between Latino and white voters in states that do not require an ID, but this “leaps to a 13.2 percent” difference in states like Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, and Wisconsin. For African Americans, the gap “rises from 2.9 percent to 5.1 percent; among Asians, the gap increases from 6.5 percent to 11.5 percent.” In Wisconsin, 8.3 percent of white voters who were surveyed said they were “deterred” from voting in the 2016 election because of voter ID laws; that number more than tripled for African Americans (27.5 percent).

The results of the confusion and defiance of a federal court order were predictable: a precipitous decline in voter turnout in 2016, especially in the overwhelmingly black, Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee.

VIRGINIA: 41,637 PURGED SHORTLY BEFORE ELEC-tion Day 2014. Indiana: 481,235 purged between Election Day 2016 and April 2017. Georgia: 591,548 purged over a weekend in late July 2017. Ohio: two million purged between 2011 and 2016. Millions of Americans—veterans, congressional representatives, judges, county officials, and most decidedly people of color—were erased from the voting rolls.

The NVRA mandates that election officials update the voter rolls regularly. But there are strict guidelines about who is removed, how that is accomplished, and why. The NVRA outlines that officials can remove someone from the roll of eligible voters if . . . •he or she requests it; •he or she has had a name change and didn’t notify authorities within ninety days; •he or she dies; •he or she is convicted of a felony that under state law renders them ineligible to vote; •he or she “has moved outside the county of registration or has registered to vote in another jurisdiction”; and •he or she fails to respond to a follow-up inquiry, usually a mailing, from election officials concerning a change in status. Then, and only then, is the process of purging supposed to begin. In other words, the NVRA mandates a two-step process triggered (1) by a change in status of the voter (name change, felony conviction, move) and (2) by an inquiry from a state election official about his or her continued eligibility to vote in that jurisdiction.

Non-voting is not among the above bullet points. What’s more, to purge someone from the voter rolls solely for not voting is expressly forbidden in the NVRA. The point of this illegal tactic is to cull the electorate of millions of citizens, most of whom are young, poor, and/or people of color, who statistically do not vote for Republicans and whose voting activities are often sporadic.

It turns out that in 1994, Ohio had “updated its elections law to add what is known as a “ ‘supplemental process’” to the NVRA, explained Leigh Chapman, senior policy advisor at Let America Vote. “Simply put, voters may be purged from the rolls after six years just because they didn’t vote—even if they are otherwise eligible.” Ohio, in other words, had flipped federal law on its head.

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,” wrote investigative journalist Greg Palast in a 2016 article for Rolling Stone, “The GOP’s Stealth War Against Voters.”

Take Cleveland. In 2016, whites made up 34.5 percent of its residents, while 49.1 percent were black and 11 percent Latino. Moreover, nearly 60 percent of homes in the city are occupied by renters. It is also a town where 69 percent of the voters went for Obama in 2012. By 2016, however, the percentage of voters for the Democratic candidate had dropped to 66 percent, while the Republican share stayed virtually the same. That little bit of magic might be explained by the fact that, as Reuters reported, “voters in neighborhoods that backed Obama by more than 60 percent in 2012” had more than twice as many registered voters purged “for inactivity” than “neighborhoods where Obama got less than 40 percent of the vote.” 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.

During his time as secretary of state, Kemp led a crusade against voter fraud, including “investigat[ing] voter-registration drives by Asian American and predominately black groups,” wrote Michael Wines in a July 2016 New York Times article. Kemp actually launched a criminal inquiry into the registration of 85,000 new voters, “many of them minorities,” continued Wines, but “found problems with only 25 of the registrants.” And here’s the kicker. After all the time, money, and publicity, “no charges were filed.” Yet the intimidation was real—too real and too familiar for black folks.

And Kemp saw dead people. The charge that waves of folks impersonate the dead to cast ballots in Georgia has been disproved repeatedly. 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.”

Kemp argued that he was merely following state law and that the criterion for removal was simply that the voter had had no contact with election officials over a span of seven years, not, as his critics charged, because of non-voting. The hocus-pocus in that statement is obvious. 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 address or even name changes; it’s realizing that people of color, the poor, and the young are less likely to vote than affluent whites are.

First, at the time, Georgia was under the preclearance provision of the VRA and hadn’t bothered to ask the Department of Justice for approval. Yet because the counsel to the head of the Civil Rights Division, Hans von Spakovsky (appointed by Republican president George W. Bush) had, over the strenuous objections of the career attorneys at the DOJ, already approved Georgia’s voter ID law, the state assumed that it had little to fear when it came to employing Exact Match. Second, the databases of the DMV and secretary of state’s offices were fraught with errors—a missing “e” in the name Carole, a hyphen where one was not supposed to be, an errant “y” instead of an “i” in Nicki, or any of the other numerous typographical errors that can happen when two large bureaucracies are processing millions of applications.

Added to that, “Asian-Americans and Latinos were more than six times as likely as white voters to have their applications halted.” The devastation of Georgia’s Exact Match was amplified in nearly thirty states by the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck program, commonly called simply Crosscheck.

Kris Kobach, a Harvard, University of Oxford, and Yale Law School grad, exuded certainty that America was under attack from brown immigrants and black voters. There was, as a result, a zealotry to all of Kobach’s work. He “has been a key architect behind many of the nation’s anti-voter and anti-immigration policies,” observed Tomas Lopez and Jennifer L. Clark in a Brennan Center for Justice post. Back in 2001 when Kobach was at the DOJ, he developed a database screening program to identify Muslims as terrorist threats. Though thousands were deported, no terrorists were ever found. But Kobach called the program a “great success.” After he left the DOJ, he eventually moved on to Arizona to help bolster the infamous “Driving While Brown” anti-immigrant law that made Maricopa County’s sheriff Joe Arpaio so notorious.

Once he was elected secretary of state, Kobach’s first battle cry was a menacing thrust at the voter fraud that had purportedly engulfed Kansas. As “Exhibit A,” he pointed to a case where a man named Albert Brewer, who had been dead for years, showed up and voted in the previous primary election. Kobach held up this instance as one of thousands lurking in the voter rolls, skewing elections and canceling out legitimate votes from hardworking, honest Americans. It was vintage Kobach, vintage GOP. It was also not true. Yes, there was an Albert Brewer who had died. And there was one who voted. But they were not one and the same person. The Albert Brewer who voted—Albert Brewer Jr.—was the son of the man who had died. Kobach hadn’t even bothered to check before he started slinging accusations. That kind of deliberate sloppiness would, however, be his trademark.

“Kobach uses every trick that he can to make it as hard as possible for eligible voters to cast a ballot—whether it’s unconstitutional legislation, targeting immigrants or forcing more eligible voters to use provisional ballots.”